Neuroscientist Bevil Conway thinks about color for a living. An artist since youth, Conway now spends much of his time studying vision and perception at Wellesley College and Harvard Medical School. His science remains strongly linked to art–in 2004 he and Margaret Livingstone famously reported that Rembrandt may have suffered from flawed vision–and in recent years Conway has focused his research almost entirely on the neural machinery behind color.

“I think it’s a very powerful system,” he tells Co.Design, “and it’s completely underexploited.”

Conway’s research into the brain’s color systems has clear value for designers and artists like himself. It stands to reason, after all, that someone who understands how the brain processes color will be able to present it to others in a more effective way. But the neuroscience of color carries larger implications for the rest of us. In fact, Conway thinks his insights into color processing may ultimately shed light on some fundamental questions about human cognition.

Step back for a moment to one of Conway’s biggest findings, which came while examining how monkeys process color. Using a brain scanner, he and some collaborators found “globs” of specialized cells that detect distinct hues–suggesting that some areas of the primate brain […]

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Two new studies confirm that warming-driven climate change is already drying the U.S. Southwest and other parts of the globe. More worrisome, nearly a third of the world’s land faces drying from rising greenhouse gases – including two of the world’s greatest agricultural centers, ‘the U.S. Great Plains and a swath of southeastern China.”

These studies add fuel to the growing bonfire of concerns about climate change and food security. As I wrote in the article on Dust-Bowlification I did for the journal Nature in 2011, ‘Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

The fact that global warming is already drying out large parts of the planet – and that it is on track to get much, much worse – is well understood by climate scientists. Because this drying may be the single most consequential climate impact, confusionists try to blow smoke on it.

The first study is ‘Atmosphere and Ocean Origins of North American Droughts,” by Columbia’s Richard Seager and NOAA’s Martin Hoerling, in the Journal of Climate (subs. required, full text here). It concludes:

Long-term changes caused by […]

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Vaginas grown in a lab from the recipients’ own cells have been successfully transferred to the body for the first time.

The surgery was carried out on four women who were born without vaginal canals because of a rare condition. The women, who were teenagers at the time of the operation, now have fully functioning sexual organs.

“After the operation they were able to function normally. They had normal levels of desire, arousal, satisfaction and orgasm,” says Anthony Atala at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina, who led the research. He published the results only after four to eight years had elapsed following surgery, enough time for him to be sure there were no long-term complications.

The four women had undeveloped vaginas because they all have a severe form of a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MKRH), which affects about 1 in 5000 women. They also had some abnormal development of the uterus, although they did have a vulva – the external part of the sex organ which includes the labia and the clitoris. They were not able to have penetrative sex or menstruate. One of the women was diagnosed after her menstrual blood had collected in her abdomen.

As well as having […]

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Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.” Teddy Roosevelt

What is the fundamentalist Christian version of the American Taliban up to in these heady days nearing November’s mid-term elections? The answer is a lot, an awful lot (with an emphasis on the word ‘awful”).

The lying, deceitful nature of fundamentalist Christian supremacy truly knows no bounds. This constitutionally derelict cabal isn’t even remotely content with having a massive media empire, a monolithic fundraising base, swelling and dominant hegemony within the ranks of the U.S. Armed Forces, and supreme political sway within civilian legislatures across the United States. These dangerous dominionists have now set themselves towards rewriting American history in a manner that opportunistically advances their anti-Constitutional agenda. For those who’ve been following the advocacy of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), this isn’t necessarily breaking news. It has been the direct mission of MRFF to aggressively fight these fanatical Christian religious zealots and the perverse poison of their theocratic bigotry and prejudice at each and every opportunity provided.

And, my friends, a new one just materialized.

The misleadingly named ‘Restore Military Religious Freedom Coalition (RMRF),” a lie-generating rats’ nest comprised of numerous Christian fundamentalist Taliban-style entities, has sponsored a […]

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During the 2012 presidential election, voters reportedly waited on line for upwards of six hours. That wait alone is enough to deter would-be voters from going to the polls. But now residents in Florida’s most populous county will have another disincentive: they won’t be able to go to the bathroom.

Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in ‘direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities.

‘I was expecting them to say either yes we have or yes we will,” Dubin said.

Instead, he received a written response announcing that the county would close all restrooms at polling places ‘to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not treated unfairly,” a January email stated. ‘[T]he Department’s policy is not to permit access to restrooms at polling sites on election days,” Assistant County Attorney Shanika Graves said in a Feb. 14 email. Elections Department officials did not immediately respond to ThinkProgress inquiries.

Dubin said he was ‘shocked” at this response, and not just because it […]

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