Ever wonder:

1. Why do I say so many stupid things when I am drunk?

2. Why do I make myself sick, instead of just strangling my boss?

3. Why can I remember exactly what I was doing the morning of September 11, 2001 (or the day that JFK was assassinated)?

4 What's the connection between the Big Bang and a brilliant chess move?

Well, who hasn't?

Now you can find out the answers to these questions and so much more at the Brain from Top to Bottom guided tours. And more brain tours may be found here.

Seeing music? Food tasting pointy? Is the letter e green?

Maybe you're a synesthete. What is Synesthesia?

Synesthesia is a perceptual condition of mixed sensations: a stimulus in one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another modality (e.g. vision). Likewise, perception of a form (e.g., a letter) may induce an unusual perception in the same modality (e.g. a color).

Synethesia is a hot area of study these days. There are even arguments about whether certain musicians and artists were synesthetes and this explains their work or whether they were trying to use their art to achieve the effects of synesthesia. You can read a paper on this debate here. Links to more scholarly articles and lectures are here.

Think you might be a synesthete?

At Synesthete.org you can take the Synesthesia Battery and find out. There is also a synthesia discussion group.

Wonderful Life, Not So Wonderful Life

For kids and adults.

Discover Life provides free on-line tools to identify species, share ways to teach and study nature's wonders, report findings, build maps, process images, and contribute to and learn from an encyclopedia of life that now contains 279,165 species. The Polistes Foundation and its scientific partners plan to add high-quality identification guides, maps, images, and webpages for a million species by 2012. Please join us and help provide everyone with the information we need to reduce disease, increase food production, stop destructive species, protect endangered ones, and enjoy rather than struggle with nature.

There are many projects on the website. Here you will find links for projects involving invasive species.

• science
• education