Over the last number of years, I have had the honor to work with a group of excellent graduate students. The everyday interactions with the students have sharpened my understanding on what it takes to be successful in graduate study and how to make most out of it. I summarize what I see as important pieces that put together a successful graduate school endeavor.

Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn't due to these signals. The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. This region helped to produce the intention to move, and predicted what the movement would feel like, all before you twitched a single muscle.

Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman's Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.

Joshua Schachter (of del.icio.us fame) recently ran a simple study around expected value, and got about 2100 responses in an hour for the low low price of around $30 on Mechanical Turk -- enough to get some interesting results really in just one night, and be able to at least make some interesting observations about human decision making.

With Mechanical Turk, it's possible to do in one shot a study that would otherwise require a meta-analysis of several studies across particular locations or demographics. With more consistent data and larger populations, data can be reusable.

Clearly, cyclists are easily influenced by their surroundings.

Medical practitioners have a relatively high rate of suicide. Death entry data for doctors who died by suicide or undetermined cause between 1979 and 1995 in England and Wales were used to compare methods used for suicide by doctors with those used by the general population. Methods used were analysed according to gender, occupational status and speciality, to assess the extent to which access to dangerous means influences the pattern of suicide.

In a scientific study of healthy, older adults ages 59 to 83, Harvard medical scientists found that study participants who regularly drank a cocoa flavanol-rich beverage made using the Mars, Incorporated Cocoapro® process had an eight percent increase in brain blood flow after one week, and 10 percent increase after two weeks.

the paper by Evans et al. suggests that antidepressant treatment may have positive effects on natural killer cell activity in cells isolated from individuals infected with HIV with and without depression. (linked via http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_si

The data showed that when the cell phone was transmitting, the power of a characteristic brain-wave pattern called alpha waves in the person's brain was boosted significantly. The increased alpha wave activity was greatest in brain tissue directly beneat

A new study shows that brewed coffee contains soluble fiber, the roughage found in oatmeal and apples that aids digestion, helps the body absorb vital nutrients and keeps a lid on cholesterol.

A list of reasons to smoke marijuana.

New research findings now appearing online in the "Journal of Experimental Social Psychology" began with a professor's desire to understand why her husband often seemed to ignore her requests for help around the house.

The Johns Hopkins University researchers say human nerve stem cells they transplanted into damaged spinal cords of rats have survived, grown and in some cases connected with the rats' own spinal cord cells.

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

A guide for large project planning.

An excellent time calculator that kind of blew my mind.

A study has found that marijuana use does not indicate future drug and alcohol abuse.

Researchers compared 48 women competitive cyclists to 22 women runners. The bicyclists consistently rode at least 10 miles per week, and the runners logged at least five miles a week. The runners were used as a control group of active women not exposed

An article about the counter-intuitive properties of the Ultimatum game.

A great article on the Cornell Method of note taking.