By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham
Subscription Center
See Inside
| March 21, 2011 | 10
By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham
See what we're tweeting about
notscientific Latest bird flu strain easily transferrable between ferrets, but not swine http://t.co/6ozayfC6rs
Dhunterauthor Nuevo Verdad: We Have Special Geologist Vision: Sometimes, science feels like you’ve been given a superpower, ... http://t.co/CiifD0lPrY
kahoakes You Didn't Have Any Lions to Run From, So You Clicked on This http://t.co/1g3BXRGCVr
Deadline: Jul 30 2013
Reward: $100,000 USD
The Seeker desires a method for producing pseudoephedrine products in such a way that it will be extremely difficult for clandestine che
Deadline: Jun 29 2013
Reward: $7,000 USD
The Seeker for this Challenge desires proposals for chemical methods that could rapidly degrade a dilute aqueous solution
Powered By: 
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
10 Comments
Add CommentLa course du soleil.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisL'oreiller me
donne la poésie
d'un moment
silencieux et
plein d'harmonie,
comme le
chant du matin
quand le vent
disparaît....
Francesco Sinibaldi
fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. If a reader isn't used to neuroimaging techniques and lingos, I don't think the name would have meant any more than an actual explanation that the writer gave.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNonsense, it makes a lot more sense than FMRI. Everyone is familiar with MRI these days.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTHINKING ABOUT IT
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-- James Ph. Kotsybar
We prove our own existence to ourselves
by pointing to the fact (?) that we can think,
but looking through all the libraries’ shelves,
we find no definition down in ink
of how it’s accomplished or even what
thought is, and thus we fool ourselves. Of course,
we assume we know the terms we use, but
we’ve put Descartes before the horse.
Cogito cogito, but there’s no proof.
Quod erat demonstrandum is unknown.
The very thought of thought’s some sort of spoof;
there’s nothing about thought that can be shown.
I doubt Descartes’ dictum will stand time’s test;
thought as a premise is absurd at best.
Wow, someone got out on the wrong side of the bed! They say a picture paints a thousand words and the cartoon was perfectly self explanatory and a delightful bit of humour!Stop taking life so seriously :-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree completely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe dead salmon really threw me, does this mean, gulp, that brain activity continues long after death (until decay of course)? Of course the salmon could have been pretending. Lets try it with a cadaver (rubs hands in glee whilst running to the morgue).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen is the next episode of the comic strip due?
If I recall correctly, the dead salmon was used to demonstrate that literally any signal can be made to appear like statistically significant "activation" if researchers play around with statistical thresholds enough. The idea was to point out that a lot of people were finding spurious correlations in meaningless data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo be honest, this objection is nonsense. The cartoon was funny. If you don't know what fMRI abbreviates then it's really not very useful for someone to spell it out for you. "Functional" is a pretty meaningless word if you haven't any exposure to what the concept refers to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this