Journal DzugZug's Journal: Bad Neuroscience Reporting
Now this story:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/12/2050257&mode=nested&tid=134&tid=191&tid=164
Is the worst kind of reporting there is. The scientist has a project (a really cool project) but just a project -- no results. The Slashdot teaser for the New Scientist article makes it sound like they are about to test these things in humans. In fact, they are just going to try them on rat brain slices -- they are not even implanting them into rats yet. This will be really cool if it works, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/12/2050257&mode=nested&tid=134&tid=191&tid=164
Is the worst kind of reporting there is. The scientist has a project (a really cool project) but just a project -- no results. The Slashdot teaser for the New Scientist article makes it sound like they are about to test these things in humans. In fact, they are just going to try them on rat brain slices -- they are not even implanting them into rats yet. This will be really cool if it works, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.
Oh and another thing -- I happen to work in a Neuroscience lab and so I feel the need to break the following to a lot of Slashdot posters: Just because you know something about neural networks (in the Comp Sci sense) doesn't mean you know something about the brain. There are a lot of highly rated authoritatively stated posts that are just plain wrong.