Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting is now hosting a contest for their icon. Winners of the contest receive free subscription to Seed Magazine, a ScienceBlogs coffee mug, and a copy of Natalie Angier’s The Canon.

If you have artistic skills, check out the contest. Details regarding the dimensions and design can be found at the contest page.

After the 11 hour drive and associated unfortunate events (blown tire, among other things), I am now back at college. Which means I now have access to all the for-pay online journals. I’ve been bookmarking interesting abstracts from PubMed all summer but been unable to read the full study. Prepare for an onslaught of reports!

I swear, walking into my local Half-Price Bookstore is like giving a kid $1000 and sending them into a toystore. I always walk in with intention to browse or purchase one book, but end up walking out with a huge pile and considerably less money in my wallet. Oh well. I am going to be away for the rest of the weekend as I’m driving back up to college. The 11 hour drive just begged for some additional reading material.

Details after the jump.
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Dave from Cognitive Daily has been working hard to getting BPR³ off the ground. It was decided a community designed icon would be the best way to go. So, without further ado, here is my contribution (obviously rough around the edges, but it only took a few minutes).

This would be the main icon, shown at the top of articles. I liked the idea of having “peers” integrated in the graphic, hence the tiny people. The image is 55×47 and weighs in at 786 bytes.

A commenter at BPR³ mentioned it would be nice to have a small icon that could go next to links, incase there were non-peer reviewed links present in the same article. So there is this little guy (15×12, 524 bytes): which can go next to links, like so:

Distributed Neuron

The tiny people in the icon were taken from the Silk Icon Set, under the Creative Commons License

While this isn’t strictly neuroscience related, I thought it was interesting and relevant to my earlier post regarding implantable devices. And it was developed at my college.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created a battery on paper. More specifically, the paper is the battery. The new battery works in a huge range of temperatures (-100 all the way to 300 degrees Fahrenheit), contains no toxic chemicals and is primarily made out of cellulose. It can also double as a high-power supercapacitor. Carbon nanotubes are integrated in the paper, which is soaked in an ionic solution. The paper is completely flexible and loses no efficiency. Furthermore, the paper sheets can be stacked like a ream of paper to boost output.

The truly important value comes from the battery’s friendly attitude towards the human body.

Paper is also extremely biocompatible and these new hybrid battery/supercapcitors have potential as power supplies for devices implanted in the body. The team printed paper batteries without adding any electrolytes, and demonstrated that naturally occurring electrolytes in human sweat, blood, and urine can be used to activate the battery device.

“It’s a way to power a small device such as a pacemaker without introducing any harsh chemicals – such as the kind that are typically found in batteries – into the body,” Pushparaj said.

The team says that the batteries are made of very cheap materials. The process to create them, however, is still too expensive to mass produce. They are working on ways to decrease the production cost. Once it becomes inexpensive to mass produce they expect it to be used in everything from cell phones to pacemakers.

You are an aggregate collection of billions and billions of cells, enzymes, hormones, and various other organic substances. In a moment of clarity, you realize that each of these things is neither more or less than a physical object, obeying entirely knowable rules. You enjoy no more a privileged existence than any other machine. You are more than the sum of your parts, yes: you are their product. Now contemplate free-will. Does the fact that a decision is based on the complex interplay of neurotransmitters, that it - in theory - is predictable with certainty negate the fact that a decision is made? No. We are machines. And that’s beatiful.

I stumbled on this quote and quite like it.