Posts
May 22, 2013
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¿Cuál es la naturaleza de un trastorno generalizado del desarrollo? Yo les digo a mis residentes y estudiantes que “generalizado” en el contexto de un diagnóstico hace incapie en que […]
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What does terror smell like? Well, if you're a mouse, terror smells like something that's going to eat you. Maybe a cat, a fox, or a large bird. As prey animals, mice need all the help they can get in avoiding potential predators. And they get a lot of help from smell. Most predators produce [...]
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I’m in Toronto Canada, bringing you the highlights from the Canadian Association of Neuroscience Annual Meeting! Stay tuned for the coolest, funnest and craziest neuroscience research from Canada! (There IS NO boring research ;P) Think back to your time as a baby. Remember your mother’s warm hugs, soft kisses and gentle caresses? You probably don’t, but […]
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Extended use of the common antibiotic azithromycin may prolong the time between hospitalizations for patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a post-hoc analysis of a multicenter study which compared the hospitalization rates of patients treated with a 12-month course of azithromycin to the rates of those treated with placebo.
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coketalk:
coverjunkie:
Libertine (UK)
There’s a new mag in town. Libertine Magazine: “For Interested Women”
Founder and editor Debbi Evans explains:
“to redefine the ‘women’s interest’ category. In addition to luxury lifestyle content we cover tech, science and business, and celebrate high achieving maverick women for the contents of their brains, not their beds. There is no fashion or beauty content in issue 1, unless you count a piece on the semiotics of handbags. There’s
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May 21, 2013
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11:48 PM | My Next Book: The Remedy
Just a quick note about my next book, The Remedy, which will be out in early 2014, published by Penguin/Gotham. It’s a tremendously exciting true story that takes place in the last decades of the 19th century. It’s about the invention of modern medicine, the pursuit of scientific glory, and the attempt to cure the [...]
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11:16 PM | Science In My Fiction!
Great news! The good people of Science In My Fiction, for some mysterious reason, have accepted yours truly as a contributor! No, I did not dream it, look here! The tentative date for my “inagural post” is June 3rd. Stay tuned! What-have-they-done? Picture credit: http://voices.yahoo.com/captain-picards-facepalm-internet-trends-started-5330311.html Filed under: Biology Tagged: Science fiction, Science Writing
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Yesterday, a monster tornado almost 2-miles wide tore through Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, wiping out entire blocks and killing 24 people.
The National Weather Service upgraded its calculation of the storm's strength today, declaring it was a rare EF5, the most powerful ranking on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, and had winds exceeding 200 miles per hour and left a trail of destruction measuring about 17 miles long. Debris from the tornado fell as far as 100 miles away, reaching
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Neurologist Professor Bruce Miller is director of the University of California San Francisco Department of Neurology Memory and Aging Centre. There are a series of educational videos about Dementia on the USCSF Memory and Aging YouTube Channel. In the video above, Professor Miller talks about how emotions can be affected in Frontotemporal Dementia with reference […]
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9:49 PM | Nature, Not Nurture?
Proteins may be more of a factor in shaping regulatory patterns than environment, according to a new study that looks at how cells' protein networks relate to a bacteria's genome.
The lab of computer scientist Luay Nakhleh ar Rice University reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that when environmental factors are eliminated from an evolutionary model, mutations and genetic drift can give rise to the patterns that appear. They studied changes that show up in
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9:47 PM | El papel de la histamina en la memoria
Cuando escuchamos la palabra "histamina", seguramente la asociamos inmediatamente con las alergias. Sin embargo, la histamina es un importante neurotransmisor que permite múltiples funciones cerebrales. La memoria es una de tales funciones. Por eso, a continuación veremos una cuidadosa presentación acerca del papel de la histamina en la memoria. Esperamos sea de su interés y agrado. ¡No olviden
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8:43 PM | Wrapping MapleSim C code for Python
Previously, I worked through a simple inverse kinematics example with at three link arm. The arm, however, was uninteresting, and in fact had no dynamics of its own. I’ve also previously (but not in a blog post) built up a number of arm models using MapleSim that were interesting, and ported them into C. From […]
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A novel approach to obstructing the runaway inflammatory response implicated in some types of asthma has shown promise in a Phase IIa clinical trial, according to researchers.
The randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial tested the efficacy and safety of the monoclonal antibody, dupilumab, in patients with "persistent, moderate-to-severe asthma" and elevated eosinophils, which are immune cells that mobilize in response to allergens and infections and are commonly seen in
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7:22 PM | Chinese Bionic Head Progress
There are currently a number of research teams worldwide working towards the implementation of bionic heads and faces which can attempt
to express human emotions, however “… most of them can not express
continuous changing expressions effectively, and they just express
limited pre-existing emotional state.” explain the developers of a new
Chinese Bionic Head.
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7:18 PM | On paid parental leave
I have argued before that it would be nice if post-docs would get paid maternity leave. I didn't realize then that this should be the case for the entire workforce. I didn't know that actually the US is one out of 8 countries in the world that do not have paid parental leave. Here is an interesting infographic on all the benefits that paid parental leave has for both mom, dad and baby:Source
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A new analysis shows that America could produce almost 9% of its annual energy needs - 25 billion gallons of fuel - using algae.
But it will take a lot of water.
Algae are plump with oil and various research teams and companies are pursuing ways to improve the creation of biofuels based on algae – growing algae composed of more oil, creating algae that live longer and thrive in cooler temperatures, or devising new ways to separate out the useful oil from the rest of the algae.
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5:43 PM | Unrelated to all that, 05/21 edition
But I thought the second mouse got the cheese? The loudest mouse pup gets the most attention, thanks to FOXP2. Why are unproductive firms still around? Worth it mostly for how hard it is to get people to boil water; the diffusion of cultural innovation is harder than you’d think. Under da sea sign language. These […]
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Basic C interfacing example OK, so this code is taken straight from an example here, I’m just going to explicitly work through all the steps so that when I try to do this again later I don’t have to look everything up again. Let’s say we have some c code that we want to work […]
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3:42 PM | ASPET 4th GPCR Colloquium roundup
I had the pleasure of attending the last month’s two day GPCR seminar series held in Boston as...
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As May is Better Hearing and Speech Month, we though that we would highlight some of the other ways in which we are promoting better communication. As you are no doubt already aware, our focus here on the Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss (SICHL) blog is generally on our …
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2:40 PM | The Trust Issues That Netflix Creates
Are you among the 60% of UK television viewers who admit to a Television Tryst behind your partner's back?
A survey of Netflix customers found that the freedom to watch what we want, when we want can be a romantic minefield. Netflix has 36 million members in 40 countries so the pool of people is obviously there.
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Tiotropium delivered by the Respimat(R) Soft Mist(TM) Inhaler (SMI) increases time to first severe exacerbation and first episode of asthma worsening across a broad spectrum of patients who remain symptomatic despite at least inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) / long-acting beta2-agonists (LABA) therapy.
The results are from pre-planned subgroup analyses of data from the PrimoTinA-asthma(TM) Phase III studies being presented for the first time today at the 2013 American Thoracic Society (ATS)
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12:14 PM | The Genetics of Mental Illness
The new Diagnostics and Statistical Manual, DSM-V, is out. Not surprisingly, it has sparked some controversy. Psychiatry deniers are proclaiming that this is the collapse of the mental-illness fraud (I believe reports of the death of psychiatry are exaggerated). What the DSM-V does represent, to some degree, is an attempt to advance psychiatry to the [...]
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12:00 PM | Changizi News
Cognitive scientist and author Mark Changizi's recent writings, arrayed for easy access here.
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12:00 PM | Tuesday Crustie: Burtonesque
Quick! What does this make you think of?
David Legg looked at these, and immediately thought of this:
And thus the stage was set for the fossil to be named Kooteninchela deppi. Here is a reconstruction:
(Okay, yes, strictly speaking this is an arthropod and not necessarily a crustacean, but the press is reporting it as a lobster, so I’m going to let it ride.)
Reference
Legg D. 2013. Multi-Segmented Arthropods from the Middle Cambrian of British Columbia (Canada). Journal of […]
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What is going on in the brain of someone who has the deluded belief that they are brain dead? A team of researchers led by neuropsychologist Vanessa Charland-Varville at CHU Sart-Tilman Hospital and the University of Liege has attempted to find out by scanning the brain of a depressed patient who held this very belief.
The researchers used a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner, which is the first time this scanning technology has been used on a patient with this kind of delusion […]
Citation
May 20, 2013
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You may not think of private gardens as wildlife refugia, but an
increasing body of scientific evidence suggests that these habitats can
host a variety of species and act as stepping stones across landscapes
that are otherwise dominated by human structures. To increase the
effectiveness of gardens as havens for wildlife, many researchers have
touted a management technique variously known as "wildlife gardening,"
"ecological gardening," and "naturalistic gardening." Whatever you call
it,
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8:23 PM | Organism : Genes :: Forest : Trees
Decades of focus on genes may have led the scientific community away from a balanced exploration of the organisms that those genes define - whether they be plants, animals or microorganisms - and more toward gene-focused directions: inward, toward the world of cellular and molecular biology, and outward, toward the broad-scale evolutionary issues of population and quantitative genetics. We've become too genetic variation heavy.
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Ne xt month, the US and Europe would like to make some progress in tearing down trade barriers, an archaic notion left over from the Colonial period in history.(1)Special trade agreements with blocs, like The Hanseatic League of the 12th century, were always common, but restrictions enjoyed a popularity boom after the collapse of the East India Trade Company in 1799 became the poster child for the perils of free trade - 18th century globalization hysteria.
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tumblr: bellapaige88On average, 9.5/1000 population has epilepsy in Low and Middle Income Countries (LAMIC). A research which has resulted in the global campaign against epilepsy has shown, the gap between treatment need and the treatment provision worldwide is approximately 70% [1]. This large ‘treatment gap’, i.e., lack of appropriate treatment for a large number of patients with epilepsy, due to a number of causes including inability to identify cases, inability to deliver adequate
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Mbuba CK, Ngugi AK, Newton CR & Carter JA (2008). The epilepsy treatment gap in developing countries: a systematic review of the magnitude, causes, and intervention strategies., Epilepsia, 49 (9) 1491-503. PMID: 18557778
Pal, D., Das, T. & Sengupta, S. (2000). Case-control and qualitative study of attrition in a community epilepsy programme in rural India, Seizure, 9 (2) 119-123. DOI: 10.1053/seiz.1999.0357
Mani KS, Rangan G, Srinivas HV, Srindharan VS & Subbakrishna DK (2001). Epilepsy control with phenobarbital or phenytoin in rural south India: the Yelandur study., Lancet, 357 (9265) 1316-20. PMID: 11343735
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