10 February 2011

Workout notes AM: yoga class. I admit that I didn’t try that hard. After class, my yoga buddy and I exchanged kisses on the cheek and shocked each other with static electricity (yes, my buddy is a “she”).

PM: after my 11 am class, I went to our university gym. I stretched, got on the treadmill and started to jog; I just didn’t like it. So I switched to walking at a 13:20 pace and increased the incline gradually (.5 every .25 miles) until I was at 4, where I stayed for 1.25 miles. Then I went down and walked the last mile in 12:30 for 1:06 (5 miles total; 540 feet elevation gain). It was a very uninspired effort, though I enjoyed moving. Then sit ups (100), rotator cuff stuff, hip hikes for the pirformis, stretches, etc.

Good news: the back and piriformis weren’t issues.

Posts
Science: here is a collection of interesting news on evolution. Highlights: a certain type of frog has been found to have “re-evolved teeth” which is an exception to a law (thumb-rule?) that says that once a feature is lost, it doesn’t re-evolve in its original manner. Also, a snake fossil was found that revealed the vestiges of a “lost leg”; the idea is that snakes evolved from a lizard type reptile.

Sexuality: a study (a detailed study) suggests a strong link between sex and anger…in male mice:

Sex and violence are intertwined in mice. A tiny patch of cells buried deep within a male’s brain determines whether it fights or mates, and there is good reason to believe humans possess a similar circuit.

The study, published February 9 in Nature, shows that when these neurons are quieted, mice ignore intruding males they would otherwise attack. Yet when the cells are activated, mice assault inanimate objects, and even females they ought to court.

The cells lie within an area of the hypothalamus with known links to violent behavior. An electrical jolt to this vicinity causes cats and rats to turn violent, but neurophysiological experiments conducted decades ago stimulated too big an area to identify the specific brain circuits, let alone the individual neurons, involved in aggression.

More recently, scientists studying mice engineered to lack specific genes have found that some of them act more aggressively than normal mice. “We really don’t know which part of the brain went wrong in those mice. Consequently it’s tough to make sense of that behavior,” says Dayu Lin, a neuroscientist now at New York University and an author of the study, who began searching for the seat of aggression in mice while working with David Anderson at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. [...]

Surf to the link to read the story in Scientific American.

Politics Remember all of that impressive party discipline that the Republicans had when they were in the minority? Well, it isn’t that easy when one is in the majority, is it?

Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority.

For the second consecutive day, House Republicans on Wednesday lost a floor vote due to a mini-revolt, this time over a plan to demand a repayment from the United Nations. Earlier in the day, members of the party’s conservative bloc used a closed-door party meeting to push the leadership to go well beyond its plans to trim about $40 billion from domestic spending and foreign aid this year, demanding $100 billion or more.

The spending rebellion came after the House on Tuesday rejected what was expected to be a routine temporary extension of anti-terrorism Patriot Act provisions when Democrats and about two dozen conservative Republicans balked at a fast-track procedure. Republicans, still searching for their footing after assuming control in January, were also forced to pull a trade assistance bill from the floor after conservatives raised objections. They found themselves mediating other internal fights as well.

Speaker John A. Boehner conceded that the fledgling majority was encountering turbulence. “We have been in the majority four weeks,” Mr. Boehner said. “We are not going to be perfect every day.”

Well, what do you know?

I don’t wanna go outside…

*^%$#@!!!!

Listen Canada, you can take your &*^%$ arctic air mass back anytime you’d like to….

Education: Gap Between Rich and Poor Toddlers

This study showed some things that surprised me:

A new study in Psychological Science found that at 10 months old, children from poor families performed just as well as children from wealthier families, but by the time they turned 2, children from wealthier families were scoring consistently higher than those from poorer ones.

“Poor kids aren’t even doing as well in terms of school readiness, sounding out letters and doing other things that you would expect to be relevant to early learning,” Elliot M. Tucker-Drob of the University of Texas at Austin, lead author of the study, said in a press release.

I am encouraged that there is little difference in 10 months though, of course, that might mean that there is little VISIBLE difference in 10 months. But then:

Researchers attempted to disprove a genetic explanation by comparing the aptitude tests of each set of twins. Among the 2-year-olds from wealthier families, identical twins had much more similar test scores than fraternal twins, who share only half of their genes.

However, among 2-year-olds from poorer families, identical twins scored no more similar to one another than did fraternal twins.

The implication is that children’s genetic potential is subdued by poverty, though the study stopped short of drawing a scientific conclusion as to what specifically was causing the achievement gaps. Researchers did postulate that, generally speaking, poorer parents may not have the time or resources to spend playing with their children in stimulating ways.

What I’d like to know is: among poor kids, was there more variance between identical twins than there was between identical twins of the rich kids, or was there simply less variance between fraternal twins in poor kids than there was in rich ones? I’ll have to dig a bit deeper.