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Gout is a painful rheumatic condition. It occurs when uric acid, a bodily waste product, crystallizes in joints and soft tissues. Gout is often associated with the big toe, but that turns out to be unfair; patients at highest risk of further flare-ups are those whose gout first involved other joints, such as a knee or elbow, according to new research.
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Deciding who gets a lung transplant - and thereby who doesn’t - is not easy. Lungs can only be transplanted from people who are organ donors, who are brain dead, and who died in such a way that their organs remain intact. Problem is, there are not enough people marking the “organ donor” box on their driver’s license to give everyone on the transplant list a chance to live.
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From EyeWire : All hail Ketta, EyeWire’s new top scoring player of all time! Coming in with an astonishing 1.8 Million points, ketta is now 120,000 points in front of our #2 top scoring player, the venerable @jamiexq. How high is the top when it comes to points in EyeWire? Well, there …The post New Top Score of All Time: Ketta appeared first on EyeWire.
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The problem of classifying elements of a data set as belonging to one class or another, depending on their characteristics, is a very, very well-studied one, and one which is particularly important in particle physics. Imagine, for instance, that you collect events with four high-transverse-momentum leptons (electrons or muons) with the ATLAS or CMS detector, and you wish to sort out which of these fit better to the hypothesis of being originated by Higgs boson decay into two Z bosons (with […]
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Donald S. Napoli, Architects
of Adjustment:The History of the Psychological Profession in the United States
(London: Kennikat Press, 1981) is an interesting book. While I was reading it,
I took substantial notes. Some of these may be of interest to regular readers.
Applied psychology
can be said to have begun in the United States in 1890, the year that James McKeen Cattell published the results of the first psychological testing
program. Cattell had come out of the so-called
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In a previous post, I reviewed a recently clinical trial studying the effect of an orexin receptor blocking agent in the treatment of insomnia.Orexin appears to be a neurochemical involved in arousability and motor activity. Preliminary studies suggest the orexin receptor may provide a novel target for hypnotics in the treatment of insomnia.An important question in the effects of orexin is whether the hypnotic effect of orexin simulates the same sleep effects as seen by the more studied
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Researchers using magnetic imaging to assess memory have shown that soccer players who frequently head the ball have brain abnormalities resembling those found in patients with concussion (mild traumatic brain injury).
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“Converging evidence indicates that blirtatiousness
is unique in its ability to amplify people’s qualities, making these
qualities more readily observable to perceivers.”
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Charles Sherrington, The brain and its mechanism (Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 21-22.
We have seen the brain as an input-output signalling system. The signals entering it are not mental, nor are the executant signals which issue. But signalling which travels certain ways in the brain for instance through the great new nerve-net seems to get, so to say, mental existence, though losing it again before even the penultimate exit-path. No microscopical, no physical or chemical means
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This is the sort of thing that most people learn when they are very young. In fact, you don’t necessarily have to learn this – light that is bright enough to damage the retina is also painful and will cause you to close your eyes or look away. So telling people not to stare into [...]
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I often hesitate to make broad, sweeping claims about the nature, cause, and experience of eating disorders and disordered eating. However, if there is one thing I feel absolutely certain saying about these disorders, it is that they are incredibly complex and multifaceted with no “one-size fits all” solution. So, I was quite excited when I came across a recent article by Michael Strober and Craig Johnson (2012) that explores the complexity of eating disorders and their treatment. Both
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Fiddler crabs’ eyestalks let them get a peek above the waterline.
Photo by hankplank on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
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Neurodiversity is a movement that offers a perspective about autism that differs from that espoused by the medical profession. The ideology seems rooted in the anti-psychiatry movement ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry […]
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Every year research scientists from all over the world descend upon a
conventio...
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We’re taught from childhood how important it is to explain how we feel and to always justify our actions. But does giving reasons always make things clearer, or could it sometimes distract us from our true feelings? One answer came from a study led by psychology professor Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, which […]
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Nevermind increasingly violent video games or the ever-present danger of an uncensored internet, a far more insidious and unexpected change is afoot that could be affecting our children's emotional development. Researchers have discovered that the faces on LEGO Minifigures are becoming increasingly angry and less happy. Combined with a trend towards more combat-related LEGO themes, a team led by Christoph Bartneck at the University of Canterbury said "we cannot help but wonder how ... this […]
C Bartneck, M Obaid & K Zawieska (2013). Agents with faces - What can we learn from LEGO Minifigures?, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (iHAI 2013), Sappor, Japan,
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The evidence that sexual minorities (e.g., lesbians, gay males, bisexuals, and those questioning their sexuality: LGBQ) are at increased risk of suicide is fairly robust. This study (anonymous, online survey, N = 1,016), as several others, found LGBQ participants were more likely to meet standardized assessment criteria for suicide-risk.
Knowing which groups are at increased risk of suicide provides great help for outreach, treatment and prevention. Unfortunately, some may view at-risk
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Harris, K. (2013). Sexuality and Suicidality: Matched-Pairs Analyses Reveal Unique Characteristics in Non-Heterosexual Suicidal Behaviors, Archives of Sexual Behavior, DOI: 10.1007/s10508-013-0112-2
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I recently returned from the first meeting of the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium, hosted by Joan Chiao at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. As a cultural neuroscientist myself, I was incredibly excited to be attending one of the …
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Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That, New York Times In The Popular Press Oxytocin, the Love Hormone, Also Keeps People Apart, Scientific American WWII Drug: The German Granddaddy of Crystal Meth, Spiegel Online...
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claimtoken-51b7bcc1b16be “Sleep is… a seizure of the primary sense-organ, rendering it unable to actualize its powers; arising of necessity… for the sake of its conservation.” – Aristotle, 350 B.C. Statue of Sleeping Eros. Photo credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ahhh sleep, beautiful sleep. It’s the blissful state of inactivity that renews the body and […]
Ngo H.V., Martinetz T., Born J. & Mölle M. (2013). Auditory Closed-Loop Stimulation of the Sleep Slow Oscillation Enhances Memory, Neuron, 78 (3) 545-553. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2013.03.006
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By outsourcing manufacturing to China - sending jobs Americans don't want, according to immigration experts - America is also outsourcing carbon dioxide emissions.
China is now doing the same thing, but to themselves. Coastal provinces are outsourcing emissions to poorer provinces in the interior, according to U.C. Irvine scholar Steve Davis and colleagues in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.
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