wilwheaton:

(via HijiNKS ENSUE – A Geek Comic - Make It So / As You Wish)

doctorwho:

Madame Vastra and Jenny

There are a bunch of new promo images that we’ll be posting to this blog over the next couple of days. In the meantime, you can check them all out now in a gallery on BBC AMERICA’s Doctor Who website.

I am the last air bender.

neurolove:

Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting 2012 (October 13-17, 2012)

Guess who has two thumbs, speaks limited French, and is going to the SfN meeting in New Orleans? This moi! (Yeah, I’m also a 30 Rock fan.) I also upgraded for the first time to a smart phone! (I’m also a little behind on the times, I admit. My flip phone was looking pretty old.)

Why am I bringing it up?  Well, these factors have all combined into the fact that I will be live tweeting from the conference.  I’ll try to send out a few tweets a day at least, and will take any questions you might have.  You can prepare for this by following me on twitter (@NeuroLoveBlog).  My twitter has not been largely used up until now, but I am hoping to change that- it would be a great way to interact with all of you! So I’ll start by tweeting from the conference in New Orleans (hopefully with some pictures and cool things I learn from it)!

Is anyone else planning to go to SfN this year?

Woot neuroscience! I shall also be there, though smartphone-less.
It will be my first time, so I’m irrationally excited by all the brainish things that there will be.

neurolove:

Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting 2012 (October 13-17, 2012)

Guess who has two thumbs, speaks limited French, and is going to the SfN meeting in New Orleans? This moi! (Yeah, I’m also a 30 Rock fan.) I also upgraded for the first time to a smart phone! (I’m also a little behind on the times, I admit. My flip phone was looking pretty old.)

Why am I bringing it up?  Well, these factors have all combined into the fact that I will be live tweeting from the conference.  I’ll try to send out a few tweets a day at least, and will take any questions you might have.  You can prepare for this by following me on twitter (@NeuroLoveBlog).  My twitter has not been largely used up until now, but I am hoping to change that- it would be a great way to interact with all of you! So I’ll start by tweeting from the conference in New Orleans (hopefully with some pictures and cool things I learn from it)!

Is anyone else planning to go to SfN this year?

free-parking:

Yoan Capote, Open Mind

(via englishredhead)

silverstains:

Prosopagnosia And The Neural Basis For Facial Recognition

What is actually happening in the brain when one person looks at another? 

For people with prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces, information processing - the stages that our brains go through to recognize a face - is breaking down. 

“We refer to prosopagnosia as a ‘selective’ deficit of face recognition, in that other cognitive process do not seem to be affected,” explains Bradley Duchaine, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. “[People with the condition] might be able to recognize voices perfectly, which demonstrates that it is really a visual problem. In what we call pure cases, people can recognize cars perfectly, and they can recognize houses perfectly. It is just faces that are a problem.”

The condition may be acquired as the result of a stroke, for example. But in a recent Brain study, they focused on developmental prosopagnosia, in which a person fails to develop facial recognition abilities. “Other parts of the brain develop apparently normally,” Duchaine says. “These are intelligent people who have good jobs and get along fine but they can’t recognize faces.”

 Famous and non-famous faces used in the prosopagnosia experiment. Paired famous and non-famous faces are shown in corresponding positions. Credit: Bradley Duchaine

The temporal lobe contains a number of face processing areas, so you can imagine there are many different ways that this system can malfunction. Not only can an area not work, connections between areas might not work yielding probably dozens of these different variants of this condition.

(http://www.science20.com/news_articles/prosopagnosia_and_neural_basis_facial_recognition-86633)

This picture is terrifying. Bush is the only one I recognize. I think it’s also worse when there are lots of people because I sort of just get freaked out and overwhelmed and shut down. Because faces are scary.

(Source: silverstains2, via lolprosopagnosia)

mprnews:

This seal is one of two that escaped from the Lake Superior Zoo in Duluth during last night’s floods. It was photographed on Grand Avenue. Zoo officials say the seals were returned safely. (Photo courtesy of Kelli Latuska)

See more photos from the flooding in NE Minnesota.

And the polar bear got loose, too, but don’t think too hard about that.

(via npr)