If you didn’t guess I vote no, then you don’t know me. Even if a politician has a science background, they should not interfere with peer review.
#ScienceSunday
Originally shared by ScienceSunday
Should politicians be involved with reviewing research proposals?
Bill McGarvey is very familiar with the grant proposal review process for the National Institutes of Health in the USA. The NIH funds the majority of biomedical research in the US. Bill shares an interesting article discussing politicians getting involved in the review process for the National Science Foundation, who fund a lot of basic science research in the US. Because basic science research has minimal immediate impact but often a huge impact long term, it frequently comes under scrutiny by short sighted politicians.
Politics and the National Science Foundation (NSF)
Extracting DNA from a 50,000 years ago, that suggests inbreeding among hominins is pretty fascinating. Progress in genomics reminds me of computer technology. The technology keeps getting smaller and faster.
I’ll have to go through Mark Bruce’s SciSun digests to see which news article is my favorite for 2013.
#ScienceSunday
Originally shared by ScienceSunday
Top 10 Science Stories of 2013
Here’s Scientific American’s top ten science stories of 2013.
Prosopagnosia, or Face Blindness, is a largely unrecognized disorder. (Yes, yes, I know…) Various estimates hold that between 2% and 10% of the population exhibit some degree of this inability to recognize familiar faces, yet few people have even heard of it, and as a result many sufferers are hesitant to even mention they have difficulty for fear of embarrassment or discrimination.
Dr. Sarah Bate of the Centre for Face Processing Disorders at Bournemouth University is leading a campaign to raise greater awareness of Prosopagnosia in the U.K. House of Commons. She has an online petition available through www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org which I highly encourage U.K. readers to go sign. The attached article has further information.
For U.S. readers who wish to know more about prosopagnosia, the Prosopagnosia Research Centers at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and University College London have excellent information at www.faceblind.org including their biannual Face to Face newsletter.
As a prosopagnosic myself, I am always interested in the current state of research and I hope to enlighten others about this condition. So many people don’t even know this disorder exists, even those suffering from it in many cases. Greater awareness can help out both by increasing research and reducing any perceived stigma in admitting to having prosopagnosia.
The first figure below is from:
The anatomic basis of the right face-selective N170 IN acquired prosopagnosia: A combined ERP/fMRI study
fMRI and ERP were used to gain insight into a region of the brain associated with the acquired form of prosopagnosia. Event-related potentials (ERP) are measured with electroencephalography (EEG). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-related_potential
ScienceSunday co-curator Chad Haney has posted about fMRI frequently, and most recently here: http://goo.gl/xhc6T
An interesting point of the first figure is that the location of the lesion isn’t necessarily where the investigators are looking in terms of the functional image and as mention by Chad before, the figure demonstrates the variability in BOLD MRI (fMRI).
The remaining three figures are from
Congenital prosopagnosia: multistage anatomical and functional deficits in face processing circuitry.
V Dinkelacker et al
J Neurol. 2011 May;258(5):770-82. doi: 10.1007/s00415-010-5828-5. Epub 2010 Dec 1.
The interesting finding there is that facial recognition is not as impaired when it comes to negative faces. The images also show that unlike the first study linked here, the congenital prosopagnosia patients lack any lesion. They hypothesize that congenital prosopagnosia is due to a network dysfunction and that the lingual gyrus plays a substantial role. The lingual gyrus has to do with visual processing, especially letters. The name is due to its physical apperance as it looks like a tongue. It is not associated with speech.
