Bullmore et al 1 mount a defence of neuroscience in psychiatry, invoking history, a dawning golden age, Reil and Freud. Although ensuring that the curriculum for undergraduates and trainees should accurately reflect what is valuable for doctors wishing to understand and treat mental disorders, they do not fulfil the ambitions of their manifesto. Their argument against neuro-scepticism is weak. ...

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF FISHES. Volume 2, BEHAVIOR. Margaret E. Brown, Ed. New York, Academic Press Inc., 1957. xi, 526 pp. $14.00. The second volume of the series Physiology of Fishes deals with a wide variety of subjects under the common heading of Behavior. This misleading title is unfortunate, but the contents are a very pleasant surprise. Included are chapters dealing with: nerve system (central...

Recently, WHO has decided to launch an annual “World Pneumonia Day” on November 2, 2009(1). The day will mobilize efforts to fight pneumonia, rightly called a ‘neglected’ or a ‘forgotten’ disease, that kills more than two million children under the age of five each year worldwide(2). The sudden shift of focus on pneumonia has raised many eyebrows and brought forward few issues that need clarifi...

way to the United States to sign the INF Treaty in December 1987. The stop, made on Gorbachev's initiative, had both a practical and symbolic purpose. He had no aspiration to detach Thatcher from Reagan. Gorbachev knew that was impossible, and it would not have suited his purpose anyway. It was her closeness to Reagan that made her so helpful as an interlocutor. But Gorbachev would have looked ...

Desmosomes in a tangle ntermediate filament–associated desmosomes—like their actin-associated counterparts, adherens junctions—link neighboring epithelial cells through cadherin connections. Crystal structure analyses of adherens junction cadherins suggested that these proteins interact at their NH 2 -terminal tips. A recent model shows that the most distal of five extracellular domains, called...

www.stormh2o.com Mosquitoes are annoying. No joke. A single mosquito flying around your bedroom when you are trying to sleep can literally test your mental and emotional limits. While one is bad enough, a swarm of mosquitoes can lead to outright panic. What’s more, many species have embraced the urban lifestyle, using sources of standing water we’ve intentionally or unintentionally created as n...

We apply reinforcement learning to the problem of finding good policies for a fighting agent in a commercial computer game. The learning agent is trained using the SARSA algorithm for on-policy learning of an action-value function represented by linear and neural network function approximators. We discuss the selection and construction of features, actions, and rewards as well as other design c...

Within the species Astyanax mexicanus, there are several inter-fertile populations of river-dwelling sighted fish and cave-dwelling blind fish which have evolved morphological and behavioral adaptations. We have recently reported a developmental and neurophysiological basis for the loss of aggressive behavior in the blind cavefish morph of Astyanax. Using an appropriate behavioral assay, we hav...

Researchers are building their response to the attack by creationism on evolution as interest in Darwin memorabilia continues to grow.

Lamellipodia fight back formin T he actin-organizing activities in a reaching lamellipod fi ght back the trailing lamella, say Sarmiento et al. The feedback might coordinate inchworm-like migration in normal and cancerous cells. Tumor cells such as breast cancer carcinomas become dangerously motile because they have hyperactive actin-poly-merizing pathways that respond to epidermal growth facto...