simulated brains

The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. BBC news link

Manny

Waiting for Manny is in this week's issue of the New Yorker. Here's a choice excerpt:
He is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary professional sports to a folk hero, an unpredictable public figure about whom relatively little is actually known but whose exploits, on and off the field, are recounted endlessly, with each addition punctuated by a shrug and the observation that it's just "Manny being Manny." When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, "As a crazy motherfucker." Then he pointed at my notebook and said, "You can write it down just like that: 'David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.'

I heard acerbic sceptic Richard Dawkins dropping the "universal ancestor" on Fresh Air the other day so I figured I should take a closer look at what people say about it. He seemed totally convinced, and so did his counterpoint Christian Francis Collins. Anyway, here's a free PNAS review from 1998.

Collies in Central Park

I'm so predictable. Link

The delayed rise of present-day mammals

The NYT summarizes the recent meta-study revealing the surprisingly deep roots of modern mammals, "The mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and other life 65 million years ago apparently did not, contrary to conventional wisdom, immediately clear the way for the rise of today’s mammals." Here's the Nature paper.