This week it goes top, placebo, neuro, anthro, and Colombia.

Top

Mo Costandi, Evolutionary Origins of the Nervous System
Starting with one common worm ancestor 600 million years ago

Colleen Morgan, The Utility of Various Social Networking Tools for Archaeology
Middle Savagery’s comprehensive coverage and tips applies to whatever field you’re involved in

Owen Wiltshire, Ethnographic Blogging
See what people have to say and join the discussion over at the Open Anthropology Cooperative

Greg Laden, The Synaptic Cleft Rap
B. Bobby Voltage and the Glut-Tang Clan lay it out!

Eugene Raikhel, Somatosphere: Our First Year and Greatest Hits
The medical anthropology blog outlines the best of its first year

Placebo

Sharon Begley, How Placebos Really Work
Newsweek article on placebo effects. Nice update on recent research, but I disagree with this line, “it is possible to think yourself out of pain.” Not really – the procedure itself matters, not just the resultant thinking.

Dr. Shock, The Placebo Response of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
But the magnets are so big! Some good considerations of the placebo effect and approaches to new treatments

David Dobbs, Do ADHD Drugs Give Caretakers a Placebo Effect?
A great question – drugs as a meta-placebo. Hmm, cultural beliefs anyone? Also, for this discussion, important to have the reference for the paper and the press release

Mariana Soffer, Placebo Effect
Some history to our understanding, and a consideration of mechanism, in this case that interactions reduce stress.

Neuro

POV – Point of View, Life. Support. Music.
PBS documentary on Jason Crigler, an excellent young guitarist who suffered a near-fatal brain hemorrhage and the story of his recovery amidst some wonderful family support

Kathryn Levy Feldman, A Life Worth Living
UPenn neuroscientist Scott Mackler has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), and continues his work on the genetics of addiction using a brain-computer interface

Jamshed Bharucha, The Syncronization of Brains
A psychologists answers Edge’s query about big questions by pointing to how individual brains make up in-groups and out-groups

Eric Michael Johnson, The Feeling of What Happens
Phantom limbs, belief and skepticism – Primate Diaries on Francis Collins’ The Language of God

Edmund Blair Bolles, Speech Circuitry
Babel’s Dawn on speech circuitry, auditory pathways, gesturing, and the evolution of language

Jonah Lehrer, Where Am I?
NY Times book review of behavioral neuroscientists Colin Ellard’s new book, You Are Here/Where Am I? which covers human and animal spatial intelligence

BPS Research Digest, Unleash the Crowd Within
You yourself can make better predictions and give better answers by sampling your own changing opinions and estimates

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – Biological Sciences, Special Issue: The experience of time: neural mechanisms and the interplay of emotion, cognition and embodiment’
Get the table of contents for this fascinating special issue that covers the latest on our perception and understanding of time

Anthro

The Guardian, Charles Darwin
The British newspaper has put together a good quite interactive guide about the man behind The Origin of Species

Trudi Lynn Smith
Some wonderful photos and reflections from Trudi, who describes her project examining national parks in Canada as follows: “The project is part of an ongoing hybrid art and social science undertaking in which I investigate the intensely imagined places of Canadian national parks. This imagination is held in visual images of parks, which form a deeply embedded lexicon of nature, built into views found in postcards, tourist snaps, Group of Seven paintings, and scientific photographs. I have found that over a century of making such images has shaped ways of seeing and being in parks, and as such, visual documents provide a compelling way to track mythical and multiple forms that nature takes in Canada.”

Alun Salt, Archaeoastronomy on YouTube
See the 2009 Southwest conference in action. For more, see Alun’s brief review of Anthony Aveni’s new book, The People and the Sky

Colleen Morgan, Call for Contributions – Archaeological Photographers
The writer behind Middle Savagery is putting together a volume

Edge: Svante Paabo – Mapping the Neanderthal Genome
The latest science and its implications for thinking about ourselves

Adam Bohanon, 2010 Job Posting: Professional Reader
Really a discussion about the future of journalism, including a video discussing the impact of the death of Neda, the Iranian woman shot during recent protests

John Horgan, Winning the Ultimate Battle: How Humans Could End War
New Scientist feature on anthropologists struggling to change the view that the causes of war are biological

Shannon Chapla, The Intimate Study of “Terrorism”
Profile of Cynthia Mahmood who studies militant extremists

Rhesus Monkeys Canto & Owen
Photo of Canto, aged 29 and healthy, and Own, age 27 and in decline, that vividly demonstrates recent research on how calorie restriction might extend lifespan

Colombia

Escuela Audiovisual Infantil
The blog/website of this school in Caqueta, where anthropologist Gabriela Aguero is doing fieldwork

The Buses of Bogotá
NY Times video of the Transmilenio

Elisabeth Rosenthal, Buses May Aid Climate Battle in Poor Cities
Bogotá’s buses get featured as environment-helping mass transport

Jon Pareles, Latin Alternative Music’s Movers and Shakers Meet
And Colombian singer Liliana Saumet of Bomba Estéreo is the feature photo in the NY Times

Martin Roberts, Colombian Writer Restrepo Caught Up in Politics
Laura Restrepo reflects on the region’s turbulent history and her latest novel, Demasiados Heroes

Simon Romero/Moises Saman, Colombia’s Indians Displaced
A photoessay with narration on the displaced indigenous people in Colombia who face threats of violence on many fronts

Associated Press, 21,000 Murders in Colombia
And the paramilitaries are just getting started with their confessions of killings over 20 years

Maria Victoria Llorente, Las Farc despues de ‘Jaque’
Cambio feature on how the FARC and the government are approaching their conflict since the dramatic rescue of hostages last year

Infolatam, Colombia: las FARC renuevan su táctica para sobrevivir
The guerrillas change tactics, including urban assaults, greater reliance on minors, and a return to smaller guerrilla combat action