http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =101334645
Lehrer also has a fascinating and cool blog:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/
Just to make me even more jealous, he is ridiculous young, too.

¸ã¿ÆÑÐµÄ¶Ô¸ã¿ÆÆÕµÄ¾³£ÊÇÕâ¸ö̬¶È£ºÓÖ¿´²»ÉÏÓÖ¼µ¶Ê¡£Lehrer's report on "Making Connections" is colorful, interesting and informative. However, quite a few statements and interpretations, ranging from philosophy to detail, seem implausible. Fundamental progress in molecular biology did not require complete genome sequencing, although it enabled it. Similarly, it seems unlikely that fundamental breakthroughs in neuroscience will require determination of complete brain connectivity. The ?connectome? is even more complex than the genome, but the key question in both cases is not ?what? but ?how? ? what are the biological principles leading to such complexity? To a large extent such principles were already established well before genomes were sequenced (by Darwin, Mendel, Fisher, Crick and others). These scientists did not ?induce? their insights from a scrutiny of complete sequences! The fundamental question in neuroscience is not what the connections are but how they are formed, and it seems likely that there are equivalent underlying principles (such as ?Hebbian? spike-pairing), which operate with an overall specificity at least equal to that underlying DNA replication (i.e. base-pairing). Lehrer quotes Lichtman as concluding that since at a neuromuscular junction strong connections can be displaced by weak inputs, the underlying mechanism is not Hebbian, but these beautiful results instead seem to address the issue of the nature of competition (post- or pre-synaptic). Colorful data can be expensive as well as beautiful, and perhaps the apparent dearth of good ideas in neuroscience to which Lichtman refers reflects the way we prioritize funding as much as it does the infertility of neuroscientists. The remarkable complexity of the brain?s connections constitutes a challenge for the new techniques profiled in the report, but above all a logical challenge ? how can extraordinarily rich and specific connections be made using synapses that are constrained by biophysics to be noisy and interdependent? Similar challenges confronted understanding the evolution of complex organisms by relatively low specificity chemical processes. Perhaps neuroscience needs not more color, but more thought.
13 Feb, 2009 Posted by: Paul Adams
真理代言人的派头。
我举的这个例子是抨击错论文,不是错科普啊。tiffany wrote:错,凡事一旦有了第一印象,基本上很难翻身。例如蚕博以前说过一个转基因作物对某蝴蝶的影响,发了,给引了,给普罗大众印象了,结果后来多少个科学家作出来试验证明那个结论有问题,有什么用呢?该文还是给拿出来做不能转基因的宣传。
另外,给高科技、新能源、教育、科研等方面的钱,大头也会流进加州。The beneficiaries of taxpayer charity will be highly concentrated in just five states - California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Michigan. That is not because the subsidized homeowners are poor Californians with $700,000 mortgages are not poor, but because they took on too much debt, often by refinancing in risky ways to “cash out” thousands more than the original loan. Nearly all subprime loans were for refinancing, not buying a home.