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July 02, 2012

12:00 PM | The Life Engineers: Prometheus asks, is a culture as stupid as ours ready to create new life?

Pinning down exactly what Ridley Scott’s larger-than-life Prometheus means may be impossible. But it’s safe to say that the movie – the 3-D quasi-prequel to Scott’s seminal technoscience-horror fable, Alien – is self-consciously a myth for our scientific era. Prometheus opens over the shoulder of an alabaster figure on the edge of a prehistoric waterfall. [...]

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Should you worry about vitamin D deficiency? Maybe. Or maybe not.

Since my last blog post, where I shared my thoughts on BRCA1, BRCA2, and preventive mastectomies, I've been asked what else can a woman do to reduce her risk of breast cancer. I've heard a big deal about vitamin D, so I did a bit of research on the matter. As a disclaimer, I should tell you up front that, though many correlations between vitamin D deficiency and cancer risk have been found, just as many have been refuted or found inconclusive. You can read more about it on the wikipedia […]

Crew, K. (2013). Vitamin D: Are We Ready to Supplement for Breast Cancer Prevention and Treatment?, ISRN Oncology, 2013 1-22. DOI: 10.1155/2013/483687

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It’s great to be a woman scientist; it’s challenging to be a woman scientist

I recently volunteered to help organise an event run by the Canadian Science Policy Centre that looked at the status of women in science and technology. To be frank, I was mightily fearful about participating in such an event. I … Continue reading →

Wenneras C & Wold A (1997). Nepotism and sexism in peer-review., Nature, 387 (6631) 341-3. PMID: 9163412

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Big data for autism and the promise of newborn bloodspots

An episode of the BBC program Horizon on 'Big Data' recently caught my attention. The content was a fascinating insight into how we are living in a data-rich age and how trawling/mining/dredging such data has the ability to advance medicine, predict crime and even make someone a few quid/dollars/euros on the stock market.Gone (data) fishing @ Wikipedia I'm a big believer in big data. In particular how, with the right sources, technology, techniques and people, big data might be able […]

Mizejewski GJ, Lindau-Shepard B & Pass KA (2013). Newborn screening for autism: in search of candidate biomarkers., Biomarkers in medicine, 7 (2) 247-60. PMID: 23547820

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The mindbus technique for resisting chocolate - should we climb aboard?

Imagine you are the driver & your chocolate cravings are unruly passengers If someone gave you a bag of 14 chocolates to carry around for five days, would you be able to resist eating them and any other chocolate? That was challenge faced by 135 undergrads in a new study that compared the effectiveness of two different "mindfulness" resistance techniques. To help them, Kim Jenkins and Katy Tapper taught 45 of their participants "cognitive diffusion", the essence being that "you are not […]

Jenkins, K. & Tapper, K. (2013). Resisting chocolate temptation using a brief mindfulness strategy, British Journal of Health Psychology, DOI: 10.1111/bjhp.12050

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Quasi-delusions and inequality aversion

Patient M: It’s impossible —- no one could urinate into that bottle -— at least no woman could. I’m furious with her [these are the patient's emphases] and I’m damned if I am going to do it unless she gives me another kind of bottle. It’s just impossible to use that little thing. Analyst: It […]

Fehr, E. & Schmidt, K. (1999). A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114 (3) 817-868. DOI: 10.1162/003355399556151

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July 02, 2012

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