Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Dropping science: neuroscientists throw down epic / excruciating rap battle on Twitter. Bring the line noise.
The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the neuroscientific legacy of the Vietnam War. In neuroscience terms, it was America’s World War One.
The latest edition of Nature NeuroPod is particularly good: psychosis, detecting animacy, network theory for brains.
Livescience covers an interesting study finding that the uncanny valley effect is affected by loneliness.
The US Government spend $300 million on BRAIN initiative projects and the news coverage is remarkably poor. Here’s the best of a bad bunch: reporting from MIT Tech Review.
Nautilus has some postcards from the edge of consciousness. On the science of sensory deprivation.
Guy breaks captcha on Silk Road 2.0 and scrapes the site for trends in the dark net drug trade.
Slate covers ‘Sluggish cognitive tempo’ – another in a long-line of vague and unhelpful psychiatric disorder-hopefuls to sell medication for.
A peculiar prevalence of p-values below p=.05 in Psych Science? Not so fast. Great piece from Daniel Lakens blog.
Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It: Why Is This Widely Denied? Excellent piece in Substance.
This week in bad neuroscience reporting: beer and curry ‘heal the brain’. Next week: wanking and funfairs cure Parkinson’s disease.
Mind Hacks 
“The US Government spend $300 million on BRAIN initiative projects and the news coverage is remarkably poor.”
Quite. The live NIH tweetup yesterday wasn’t any more enlightening.
I took my own stab at reviewing the human imaging proposals: http://practicalfmri.blogspot.com/2014/10/i-fmri-my-initial-thoughts-on-brain.html
One interesting conversation stimulated so far, hoping for others!
I understand the silliness about beer, but what’s the problem with curry? I’ve heard reputable sources recommending that for years.
Matthew: The “curry” study was done in rodents, who were injected with a chemical found in curry directly into their brains.
Curry is mainly overhyped because of curcumin, which although may have interesting effects on the brain, has a very poor bioavailability.
I think BBC is confusing anti-inflammatory effects on stem cells as a way to prevent a “short” and damage from the bone marrow to the cell’s destination that may lead to cancer.
Fun Register article. How many drinkers do we think would switch to a beer tablet when given the opportunity?