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A little bit late to the game, but glad they’ve arrived… The world’s largest exporter of meat products, Brazil’s JBS-Frisboi has pledged to no longer buy cattle raised from areas of the deforested Amazon which were cleared after September 23rd of this year, Greenpeace reports. Additionally, they will not work with any farms found to be using slave labor (what year is it again?!?) or raising cattle in designated protected areas or on indigenous lands: [ more ]

Two years ago I was interviewed about the future of the green kitchen, and suggested it might look much like Donald Chong’s design , saying:

Local food, fresh ingredients, the slow food movement; these are all the rage these days. A green kitchen will have big work areas and sinks for preserving, tons of storage to keep it in, but will not have a four foot wide fridge or a six burner Viking range. It will open to outdoors to vent the heat in summer, to the rest of the house to retain the heat in winter. The dining area will be integrated into it, perhaps right in the middle. A green kitchen will be like grandma’s farm kitchen- big, open, the focus of the house and no energy from the appliances will be wasted in winter or kept inside in summer.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there have been a lot of new ideas in how you design a kitchen, what you put in it, where it goes when you are not using it. We look at some of the sliding, changing reinventions of the kitchen. [ more ]

Meet the forgotten 90 percent of your brain: glial cells, which outnumber your neurons ten to one. And no one really knows what they do.

Some of the common words we use are frozen mistakes. The term influenza comes from the Italian word meaning “influence”—an allusion to the influence the stars were once believed to have on our health. European explorers searching for an alternate route to India ended up in the New World and uncomprehendingly dubbed its inhabitants indios, or Indians. Neuroscientists have a frozen mistake of their own, and it is a spectacular blunder. In the mid-1800s researchers discovered cells in the brain that are not like neurons (the presumed active players of the brain) and called them glia, the Greek word for “glue.” Even though the brain contains about a trillion glia—10 times as many as there are neurons—the assumption was that those cells were nothing more than a passive support system. Today we know the name could not be more wrong. [ more ]

Neuroscientists explore the mind’s sexual side and discover that desire is not quite what we thought it was.

On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays. [ more ]

The U.S. Military has been after a vomit-inducing weapon for years. The idea is to use flashing lights that can make an enemy so dizzy, he hurls (and thereby becomes disoriented and unable to fight).

But while the government has sunk millions into creating the perfect spew-ray gun, a couple of hardware hackers recently slapped one together for around $250. [ more ]

A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including smoking and hypertension. [ more ]

Fish that use electric fields to sense their environments dim their signals to save energy during the day when they are resting.

Sternopygus macrurus, a South American river fish, is a natural practitioner of energy efficiency. It can reshape the charged-molecule channels in its electricity-producing cells to tone down its electrical signature within a matter of minutes. [ more ]

By genetically modifying the brains of songbirds for the first time, scientists may have a devised useful new tool for studying neurological growth and healing in humans.

“Songbirds have become a classic tool for studying vocal learning and neuron replacement. This will bring those two topics into the molecular age,” said neuroscientist Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University, author of a study published September 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [ more ]

Champions of free will, take heart. A landmark 1980s experiment that purported to show free will doesn’t exist is being challenged.

In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet asked volunteers wearing scalp electrodes to flex a finger or wrist. When they did, the movements were preceded by a dip in the signals being recorded, called the “readiness potential”. Libet interpreted this RP as the brain preparing for movement. [ more ]