The right temporo-parietal lobe junction is well known as the language integration area. The article states these people had this region of their brain, known otherwise as Wernicke's area, altered by magnetic fields, and then READ A STORY and were asked to make a moral judgment on it. This sounds a lot more like auditory processing to me, and I'll give more reason. Individuals with an infarction in this region of the brain are classically unable to note emotional changes in individuals based on speech cues.

It seems most likely (Occam's Razor) to me, that these individuals had their auditory association areas monkeyed with, and ended up being less able to pick-up emotional cues in the reader's voice, which have remarkable amounts of data in regard to the transmission of information. To these people in the experiment, the reader might have sounded like a drab and boring reader, and to the controls the same reading may have been filled with emotional information. These emotional cues are powerful motivators to come to a consensus opinion even among people of disparate moral backgrounds.

I did not read any more of the article than that, it is feasible to control for some of these aspects or to use a different experimental design to confirm the hypothesis, but I would be very careful in claiming that this is some sort of moral core of the brain. It's also been shown that magnetic fields caused agitation, and agitated people are less likely to be compassionate. I suffer from relatively constant pain from migraines and some other things, and I know most people think I'm a jerk when they first encounter me, but I am just less tolerant of people complaining (I'm actually fairly empathic and empathetic, which makes it even worse to have lousy people near me).

Why not design roads to be safe at high speeds instead of intentionally unsafe? This idea is kind of idiotic, and opens up government to liability. "Here's an idea, let's make roads intentionally dangerous! Screw people!" That's like saying, "Hey, let's hire someone to rape people that go down a dark alley, to teach other people that it's bad to walk down a dark alley!" Not rational.

She dated one of the guys for literally 2 days, and never dated his friend.

This was not cyberbullying, although it may have involved it. These teenagers raped that girl, physically assaulted her in broad daylight with school teachers around and no one did anything.

This is a ridiculous law. It's like putting an additional tax on every piece of cutlery because someone might use a knife to kill someone at some point. It's not my responsibility when I want to buy a knife to cut my steak.

I know in Canada the assumption is guilty until proven innocent, so obviously this is a democratic way of saying "we're all guilty". Maybe the labels should actually get enough evidence together to show that they make less money because of piracy and actually go through the judicial system ... oh wait, because they can't get any evidence of the sort!

At one point when I was very young and Napster was first released, I may or may not have downloaded some songs and listened to them, having no inclination whatsoever to spend money on them. I am older now, and I have no inclination to pirate music over the internet or otherwise, and I still do not spend any money on CDs. If I want music, I go to Pandora and listen to all of my favorite, thumbs-up songs for free. Limited to 40 hours of listening a month per channel? So what, I've got 12 different channels that all play the same songs.

This is all bullshit. Maybe if you didn't have so many lawyers on retainer, record labels, you'd end up with more profits. I don't "not buy" CDs because I can pirate them. I don't buy CDs because music is a luxury that I can get for free legally elsewhere, and that I can more often than not do without, especially if the only way I can get it is to sell my soul. People still buy Elvis or Beatles CDs because Elvis and the Beatles were interesting. Taylor Swift and Rhianna are not interesting. That's why you have to show so many boobs on CD covers ... otherwise no one would care. No one cares that you have a studio pitch-match their sucky vocals to some guitar player, and for people that actually have more money than hormones (i.e. what your demographic should be), boobs are free.

This call to find bugs in Toyota's ECUs is like finding WMDs in Iraq ... good luck with that. As the trite saying goes, "you can't prove a negative," and that's really bad for PR.

Statistically, Toyotas are still the safest cars, and there are a larger percentage of complaints to the NHTSA of unintended acceleration in Fords than there are in Toyotas.

Climate Change Argument Summary:
1) Straw man, 2) Defer to expert opinion, 3) ad hominem, 4) ad hominem, 5) red herring, 6) straw man, 7) misinterpretation, 8) ad hominem ... 9) ??? (form political action committee?) ... 10) PROFIT!!!

Simply, there's no data. It's all correlative, and "green" energy (i.e. nuclear) are better for the economy and national security so we should be utilizing them anyway.

I choose to purchase health insurance for my self and my family individually, not through my work, because that way I know that I will still have my own medical insurance wherever I go, whatever happens to my job (and I have a stable job in academia, so odds are not high that I have to worry). But I wanted to have more options than my institution provides me, so I went out on my own to get it.

I would say there's nothing to worry about, just know what you're buying. You have to be your own advocate, no one is going to do things for you. If you don't have any preexisting conditions, then there's really nothing to worry about, but if you do be sure to ask about that to figure out what you can do about it. There might be a more expensive policy they can offer you that covers it (this is a profit driven system, it's not some Grocery store Discount Card that gives you free stuff for no reason), or they might simply have a probationary period before your preexisting conditions will be covered (in which case you can just ask your doctor to load you up on your insulin or whatever before you switch policies ... or mail order some from Canada, it's not as pure due to less stringent quality control (I know for a fact, I'm in the industry), but it will get you through, for instance. At any rate, I highly doubt you have anything to fear, but you should request quotes from various companies at once, get the best deal or even use one company against another to bargain on price.

This is all well and good, but where do you think these single payer systems gain the medical advances they need to efficiently and effectively treat people? Canada doesn't invent the new, low cost high tech medical procedure that drive down the costs of medical treatment, and they can't, because no pharmaceutical or medical company in Canada (there are a total of around 20 according to a search, none that I've heard of producing anything other than generics, and I'm in the industry) will make a profit by investing in research and development. They wait until the United States invents an amazing new technique or drug and then they cop it, try to get a tax-free licensing deal, or just wait until they figured out how to reverse engineer it after any kind of international patent expires in seven years.

If I thought a single-payer system, or government involvement in healthcare would help more people get cheaper care and live healthier lives, I would be entirely for it! Unfortunately, innovation is what drives down cost, providing newer cost effective techniques to the masses, and healthcare innovation does not come out of countries with government involved healthcare.

I graduated a year early from highschool and went straight to college with enough dual-enrollment/AP credits to be considered a junior. That didn't work out, and I ended up taking the second semester off. I just didn't have the maturity, experience, or sense of who I was to live on my own and make healthy decisions. That gave me time to figure out what I wanted to do, so I reapplied to a different program and got right back on track.

My sister-in-law also went to college a year ahead of schedule. She stayed with it, but she still hasn't quite gotten her feet on the ground six years later.

Sure, some kids, like 2 entire kids out of 6 billion. would be mature enough to be great at 16 out and on their own. I don't think that's very many, though. At that age, they barely have experience enough to know how to navigate a four-way stop. I think that the parents would have to be very involved in teaching their child how to live on their own and be responsible for that to work. It takes good parenting more than a smart kid for this to work.

Wikipedia is not a source.

Could be wrong, but I think the martial meteorites (not asteroids, wiktionary that if you don't know why), were fossilized bacterial cells that were fossilized within the martian rock, which has a different composition than any rock on earth (due to its distance from the primordial sun during planet formation).

This article claims complex organic molecules that they do not name, which means they might not have a common chemical name and no one cares about IUPAC nomenclature. I would assume the chemicals were similarly embedded. I doubt someone would put their career on the line saying they found extraterrestrial organic chemicals unless they could not easily be refuted (but that's just my trusting nature) ... I have no reason to discredit the claim, at least.

I'm a Biologist, and you're somewhat mistaken. Antibodies are so infinitesimally tiny that no light microscope can possibly see them, even compared to virii which are also fairly invisible under a microscope. Antibodies are easy to detect, however, because they have a constant region on their tail end, which we know how to identify. We have compounds that bind to that constant tail end and as a result tag the antibody and what it is binding to. It's like the antibody is a flag pole, and biologists can run a colorful flag up that pole when we want to see what piece of the ground the flag pole is attached to.

Engineering antibodies is a simple matter, it's the basis of immunization/vaccination. Traditionally, we give chopped up bacteria and virii to a patient and their immune system detects those and creates more antibodies to put into the blood stream to stave off future infection. With this approach, instead we feed immune cells in a Petri dish an antigen, and they produce antibodies specific to that antigen. We can separate out these antibodies and purify them because they have that constant tail region that we can detect. We can then inject these into a person and these antibodies will cling to whatever thing they've been engineered to detect and attract the native immune system to it.

We can also use genetic engineering tricks to produce en masse a single specific kind of antibody. The technology has been there for research labs for decades. Either method will work fairly similarly, but in my opinion the former seems "easier", because we let the cells sort out what specific antibody to make. If we genetically engineer immune cells, we have to know exactly what gene sequence will produce an antibody targetting exactly what we want targetted ... which is good if we know what the antibody gene sequence is already, but difficult to figure out on our own. Nature is much more efficient (and cost effective) at that kind of thing. Once we let nature figure out what's best, we can just figure out the gene sequence from there to mass produce the antibody.

I do neurobiology for a living ... why would anyone do this for FUN?!