Seeing Hungry, Mood & Money, Bad Belly Fat

Saw these three interesting science news. Enjoy.

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Seeing Hungry

“Why does food look more appealing when you are hungry? Scientists are finding that the same chemical in your stomach that causes hunger also changes how your brain perceives food, as this ScienCentral News video explains.“

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Mood and Money

“Feeling sad and bad about ourselves is not only unpleasant — it can also be hard on our wallets. Psychology researchers have found that these emotions can cost you three times more for the same item than being in a better mood, as this ScienCentral News video reports.“

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Bad Belly Fat

“Scientists are finding more about how that bulge around your belly is more harmful than the pounds you may have elsewhere on your body. As this ScienCentral News video reports, belly fat may cause blockages in the arteries, and the finding could lead to better drugs to protect against heart disease.“

Dr. Randy Pausch’s Congressional testimony

Dr. Randy Pausch’s Congressional testimony [via Randy]

Links: 2008-03-07

1. What Are the Lessons of the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Battle?
2. A challenge from the New York Times?
3. Patent Office Will Now Require Biological Deposits Before Publication
4. The Best Defense is a Breast Defense - Too funny to ignore (smile)
5. News of two Canadian companies got picked up and some entrepreneurial insights
6. $100,000 for your thoughts - Bill Gates foundation seeking ‘unorthodox’ health ideas - interesting way to start 60 projects that can lead to ideas to prevent HIV infection or help protect against infectious diseases

Cancer Chip

From ScienCentral (with video),

Thanks to new microfluidics and nanotechnology, cancer doctors may be able to design custom therapies for patients by analyzing just a teaspoon of their blood. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Engineering Medicine and its Cancer Center have now shown that they can capture the rare cancer cells shed by tumors into the bloodstream using a new high-tech chip the size of a credit card. Counting and analyzing these wandering tumor cells could mean better early cancer detection and an improved method for monitoring whether treatments are working.

Links: 2008-02-10 - Delete your Facebook, Fate of Penny, Isaac, Cancer, AIDS

1. Hitting the Delete key on social networking site like Facebook - not as easy as you like
2. A Penny for Your Thoughts? What an Insult! - More on 60 minutes this Sunday Feb 10th (unless the show gets preempted by something else)
3. Thank Goodness for Isaac
4. Cancer Control - Why Do Some Tumors Spread?
5. Disarming AIDS - nasty but needy

Links: 2008-02-07 - RFID, Patent Troll, Poetic Justice, Myspace platform, Josh Lederberg

1. Ford truck with RFID tool tracker - good and bad (see post & comments)
2. The best offense…is a good defense. - a good piece about Patent Troll
3. Buffett Sees ‘Poetic Justice’ in Banks’ Woes - Love this quote quote: “What has happened is a repricing of risk and an unavailability of what I might call ‘dumb money,’ of which there was plenty around a year ago.“
4. The MySpace Developer Platform
5. We have lost a Giant - Vint Cerf remembers Josh Lederberg

What have you changed your mind about? Why?

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s blog entry, I started looking at the long list of people and their answers to the 2008 questions from Edge,

“What have you changed your mind about? Why?“

Here are links to the top 27 of my ranked favourites (out of a list of 160+),

1. Alison Gopnik - Imagination is Real. (I find this piece unexpectedly insightful even it may seem a bit abstract. And Gopnik just bumped Dyson off the top of my list!)
2. Freeman Dyson - when he speaks, I listen and think. And here, Dyson tries to demolish the myth that “the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end” in order to take the “useful first step toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons“. I will find some time to check out “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima” from International Security.
3. Daniel Gilbert - “The willingness to change one’s mind is a sign of intelligence, but the freedom to do so comes at a cost.” (Check out his master class videos - session 1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6)
4. Frank Wilczek - The science formerly known as religion
5. Howard Gardner - view about Jean Piaget. I love Piaget’s study of children (including his own).
   
6. Kevin Kelly - How Wikipedia changed his mind
7. Esther Dyson - “What have I changed my mind about? Online privacy.” Interesting discussion re: Facebook Beacon. I had similar thoughts. And yes, Esther is daughter of Freeman Dyson. I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to her once in Bruce Mau’s Massive Change conference. And I should also mention we have one of the best and smartest privacy commissioner (with a blog) in the world!
8. Terrence Sejnowski - “I have changed my mind about cortical neurons and now think that they are far more capable than we ever imagined.“
9. Nassim Taleb - The Irrelevance of “Probability” (author of The Black Swan)
10. Daniel Engber - It’s hard to perform ethical research on animals
11. Alan Kay - Vacuums Don’t Suck.
12. Leo Chalupa - Brain Plasticity and more
13. Marti Hearst - Natural Language processing
14. Helena Cronin - Why men are at the top - More dumbbells but more Nobels. A pretty good read.
15. James Geary - Neuroeconomics really explains human economic behavior
16. Bart Kosko - The Sample Mean vs. the Sample Median. (Quite statistical but very insightful.)
17. Karl Sabbagh - the views of the experts vs non-experts. quite a good read.
18. Irene Pepperberg - the fallacy of hypothesis testing. a bit technical but insightful
19. Tim O’Reilly - “social software”
20. David G. Myers - on psychological science
21. Robert Sapolsky - Adult brain making new neurons
22. John McCarthy - (AI pioneer, LISP inventor) Attitudes trump facts
23. Xeni Jardin - co-editor Boing Boing about online community
24. Linda Stone - on healthy breathing patterns
25. Daniel Kahneman - the sad tale of the aspiration treadmill
26. Danny Hillis - (He is just neat. not a great entry though.)
27. David Gelernter - (I just want to tag and remember David as people I think are smart (Bill Joy, Danny Hillis, Cliff Stoll) think David is smart.)