The latest edition of Encephalon is out over at Neuroscientifically Challenged. Fifty five times the mind/brain carnival has done its fortnightly thing. Oh rapture. So I found some cool emerald-colored neurons to celebrate the occasion!

Marc leads off with a video game post, and that’s got me hooked! It’s about the gaming professors Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner, who have written the book Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. Using research, not accusations, the couple present a balanced view of the good and the bad of video games, and come down mostly on the good. So go to Sharp Brains for a great overview of their work.

Cognitive Daily has a post on condoms and teenage sexual behavior. As it happens, what matters here is not good intentions but having the damn thing at hand. Ah, the old anthropological dictum, what people say and what people do are often very different things…

Ever wondered what computational neuroscience is? Neuronism gives us the overview of this modeling approach.

And Mouse Trap gives us eight basic adaptive problems that animals face. They are: predators, eating the right food, forming relationships, helping children, helping kin, reading other people’s minds, and communication.

These eight come from two evolutionary psychologists, and are not the only way to parse evolutionary problems. Life history theory might focus on growth and the timing of reproduction and the importance of disease and immune function, all of which involve lots of brain/body interactions. An evolutionary-inclined neuroscientist might take a page from computational neuroscience above, and say that just getting accurate brain function (say, useful perceptions of the world) is a much more significant adaptive problem. Just more food for thought… Uh oh, that’s non-adaptive, shouldn’t food go into reproducing? And what about those condoms?

Anyway, head over to Neuroscientifically Challenged for these and more!

Most of you are probably aware of the weekly round up or “Spike Activity” appearing every Friday at Mind Hacks. But for those of you who don’t, today’s version was really a great one.

First up, no pun intended, is the study over at Cognitive Daily on condoms: “Cognitive Daily covers a sobering study on sex education that found ‘among sexually active teens, actual condom use bears no relationship to intention to use a condom or belief that using condoms is a good idea. The only factors in their study that correlate with using condoms are buying and carrying condoms’.”

Probably not a big suprise to most anthropologists, where the difference between what people say versus what people do is ground into aspiring ethnographers. It also reminded me of my work with teenage drug users – carrying drugs around was always a good indicator of a real problem, despite many teens’ assertions to the contrary.

Channel N is featuring a video on how obesity spreads through social networks. For those of you looking for research on this topic, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler published a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine on “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years” (full text).

PLoS Biology has an important article just out entitled “On Mice and Men, and Chandelier Neurons” (full text) aiming at what makes human brains different, with a focus on short-axon neurons in the frontal cortex.

Then we have cognitive neuroscience in relation to freewill and in relation to philosophy of the mind, as well as Newsweek’s recent article on cognitive neuroscience itself.

Plus even more, so hack into this spike or even those in the past.

John Ptak runs an interesting blog where he explores the “History of Ideas–unusual connections in the history of science and mathematics with the arts and social history.” His musings and reflections, his use of striking imagery, and his grounded historical approach make for some enjoyable online reading.

I ran across it while looking for an image of Darwin’s “branching tree” diagram, which he handily included in this post The Wrong Stuff, Righted–the Attack on Darwin’s Descent, 1871.

Ptak Science Books features in the same month of March this striking image of Albrecht Durer’s Geometrical Man, a creation that astounded me for dating to the 1500s.

More recently he’s explored the building and use of the atomic bomb, the hidden geography in old prints, and historical breakthroughs in astronomy.

The 50th edition of the anthropology carnival is up at the Yann Klimentidis blog. If you dig Neanderthals, there is plenty for you this week! Yes, a lot, too much for me to link to…. Plus remote central on evolutionary processes and an abundance of archaeology. And more besides… I also found this photo which I hope captures the Four Stone Spirit.