Welcome to our Memorial Day picnic … I mean, blog carnival! I guess I’ve just got food on the mind. In any case, the neuro- and psycho-blogosphere has been serving up delicious treats for you all month. Try a bite of some of these, and let me know how they suit you:

Ariel casts out Caliban – Eric Michael Johnson takes a look at the history of anthropological ideas surrounding human aggression, exploring the hypothesis that humans are special because we love to kill; we “naturally [enjoy] the destruction of other creatures.”

Hegarty on the Rorschach & Sexuality – Over at Advances in the History of Psychology, Jacy Young comments on a video by Dr. Peter Hegarty discussing the use of Rorschach test during what a “dark time in the history of psychology” – the period when clinical psychologists regarded homosexuality as a disorder (officially, this lasted until 1975, when the American Psychological Association declared that they did not consider homosexuality a disease anymore.)

Supertouch – Zen Faulkes discusses research exploring the truth of something we all thought we knew – when somebody loses one sense, do their other senses become more sensitive to compensate for it? Read on and find out!

Dodging the one-sided approach to neuromarketing – Thomas Ramsøy takes on the negativity that faces neuromarketing (the use of neurological tests and information to design and implement marketing) in popular discussion, pointing out the positive side of the field – especially its applications to research on the brain.

When the Microscope Goes Digital – Khalil Cassimally runs down the history of microscopy, an important tool for understanding the brain, and explains why traditional microscopy is pretty much dead as well as what killed it.

Knowing spontaneity when you hear it – Janet Kwasniak explores how we can tell whether somebody is reading or if they are coming up with speech spontaneously – something we all do that psychologists are trying to understand.

Thanks for reading! Next month’s edition will be hosted over at Cognoculture, so don’t forget to send your submissions to Taylor Burns at cognoculture (at) gmail (dot) com, or on twitter @teaburns .

Though I love to write about cephalopods, my wife and I will be moving to Detroit over the next two weeks, and so I almost certainly won’t have time to post much.

In the meantime, don’t forget to send me your submissions for the Encephalon Blog Carnival – it’ll be hosted here at the end of May. Send me URLs on twitter (@Cephalover), leave them as a comment on this post, or email me at mike (dot) lisieski (at) gmail (dot) com .

I’ll see you in a few weeks!

Ok, ok, it’s really more about my busy lifestyle. I’ve no time for a proper post today (I’ve got a Hindi exam tonight, and a pharmacology exam to study for,) so I thought I’d at least bring you some ceph-related Monday reading. There’s a bunch of cephalopod-ey topics getting talked about on the web these days:

You may have heard about some recent research on how noise can damage cephalopods’ statocysts (organs they use for balance and possibly hearing.) In case you weren’t convinced that oil harvesting was killing the ocean, this research has now been cited to argue that seismic surveying (the use of noises reflected off of the sea floor to figure out what is on/in the sea floor) by oil companies kills sea life.

In Detroit (where my wife and I will soon be living,) it is a tradition to throw (dead) octopuses onto the hockey rink whenever the local team, the Redwings, plays. The NHL doesn’t like this practice (citing variously danger to players from debris on the ice, a lack of professionalism, and other reasons.) Last Tuesday, a dude was arrested and fined for disorderly conduct for chucking a ceph at a Redwings game and (more interestingly), is ready to fight for what he sees as his cultural heritage:

“I pleaded not guilty, of course,” Graves said. “I’m going to fight for this tradition. And so, I have to come back in July for a trial, and I’ll be lawyered up.”

(As an aside, can you guess what fans of the San Jose Sharks throw on the ice? You guessed it.)

A lot of the recent interest in cephalopods is due to their skin; the US military (naturally) would love to figure out how to mimic its ability to change color at will. Towards this end, they’ve given a $6 million dollar grant to a group of researchers (including Roger Hanlon, a long-time cephalopod researcher) to figure out how cephalopods work their color-changing magic and then figure out how to mimic it. Besides the obvious military applications, though, there are other possible spin-offs, Hanlon said in an interview

“Some (of the applications) are as simple as heating and cooling things by absorbing or reflecting radiation,” he said. “Detroit can make cars that change color; fashion designers can make dresses that change pattern — highlight of the cocktail party!”

(Danna Staaf has a great piece up about squid skin; it’s well worth your time to check out.)

A movie about a giant squid is one of six science-based films to receive funding at the Tribeca Film Festival.

On the trail of science-based management of commercial squid fishing, scientist Teresa Johnson talks about how scientists and fishermen should work together.

Finally, there will be live squids aboard the last flight of the space shuttle Endeavor. Read Danna’s great write-up of this story over at Squid-a-Day.

Man, all that reading was hard. Let’s look at something cute:

(This digging behavior, by the way, seems to one of the few fixed action pattern-like behaviors seen in cephalopods – source)

Thanks for reading!