Dead Salmon Spirit: Can You Not Tell Cats from Covid-19?

[NOTE: The paper was retracted, as described below—here is an updated link to a copy of it.] In the spirit of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning dead salmon study (and subsequent studies that went looking for fishy things) comes this new study about Covid-19, cat images, and some limitations of technology: “Can Your AI Differentiate Cats […]

fMRI of the Brains of People Eating High and Low Quality Steak

A further innovation in the study of the brain, and/or in the study of people eating cooked meat: “Neural connectivity of the right and left nucleus accumbens after eating high and low quality steak,” W.N. Tapp, T.H. Davis, D. Paniukov, and Markus F. Miller [pictured below], Meat Science, vol. 112, February 2016, p. 113. The authors, […]

Falling Snowflakes: vertical or horizontal?

In 2009, researchers at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, of the University of North Dakota, US,  presented (in association with the Instrumentation Sciences Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) details of their Snowflake Video Imager (SVI). It was fully described in a paper for the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. The imager, which linked […]

Childish: 2nd-hand looks at brain activity

Some brain scientists use their brains to explain how they think other people’s brains are used. They also use (in addition to their brains) fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging], a technique in which complex equipment measures some of the things that happen inside a brain while a person is using that brain. (NOTE: the technique has […]

Why brain extraction is not as bad as it sounds

Scientists marvel at how other scientists – the ones who study something other than what they themselves study – give strange meanings to common words. Evan Shellshear, at Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre in Gothenburg, sent me an example, a study called Fast Robust Automated Brain Extraction. Shellshear said: “I stumbled across this article somehow [whilst] looking for […]