j7uy5 | April 24, 2010The article describes a technique
that it said to show a priori which patients are at risk for
developing
suicidal thoughts after starting an antidepressant. Of course the
usual
interpretive caveats apply: it is a small study, needs to be
replicated, etc.
href="http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25171/?a=f">Brain
Waves Predict Suicide RiskA new technique might help doctors foresee suicidal thoughts
before a patient even has them.
Over the past five years, an increasing number of studies have pointed
to the rare but serious risk of suicidal thoughts that can accompany
new…
j7uy5 | April 19, 2010Yes, this is old news. I've written about it before, as have
numerous other progressive scientifically-oriented bloggers. But
now that there is an opinion piece featured prominently in the New York
Times, perhaps the issue is gaining momentum.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/opinion/18kennedy.html?hp">Cows
on Drugs
By DONALD KENNEDY
Published: April 17, 2010
NOW that Congress has pushed through its complicated legislation to
reform the health insurance system, it could take one more simple step
to protect the health of all Americans. This one wouldn't raise any
taxes or make any…
j7uy5 | April 12, 2010This is a pretty neat idea. This technology, still under
development, promises to enable the printing of skin grafts. It
uses a technology similar to inkjet printers:
href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/cell-fabricator-prinks-healing-flesh-burn-victims">Inkjet
Cell Fabricator Prints Healing Flesh Directly Onto Wounds
Popular Science
By Stuart Fox
04.09.2010
As if fabricating a new heart from scratch wasn't impressive enough,
the doctors at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine have
come up with another astounding breakthrough. This time, they've
designed…
j7uy5 | April 4, 2010This is a nice little study in PNAS. It is nice for a few
reasons. For one, it is the sort of thing that drives
conservatives crazy, for it seems to be a highly detailed study of
something useless. Two, it could turn out to be pretty
useful. Three, when I searched ScienceBlogs for "karrikin," I got
zero hits. Fourth, when I search Wikipedia for "karrikin," I got
zero hits. So it is about time someone started talking about
these chemicals. Plus, "karrikin" is a cool word.
"Karrikin" is the
href="http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/20090219889/biomedical-biomolecular-and-chemical-sciences/a-…
j7uy5 | April 4, 2010Well, it is not the traditional flower, but it happens to be what is
blooming right now. The crocuses and daffodils are pretty much
spent;
the lilies and allium haven't blossomed yet.
title="IMG_2414.JPG by Joseph j7uy5, on Flickr">
src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4048/4491077180_73260f0c80.jpg"
alt="IMG_2414.JPG" height="375" width="500">
These are blossoms on a claretcup cactus (Echinocereus
triglochidiatus).
j7uy5 | March 26, 2010I guess Fox News is starting a series of vignettes, hoping to show that
stimulus money is being wasted. In an early attempt, Hannity and
Carlson track
down an entomologist, at Michigan State University, who got a $200,000
grant from stimulus funds. The scientist is
href="http://www.ent.msu.edu/Directory/Facultypages/Cognato/tabid/135/Default.aspx">Dr.
Anthony Cognato, Associate Professor in the Department of
Entomology.
I will let the viewers judge for themselves if the Fox crew managed to
demonstrate anything at all. One thing that is clear: they do not
understand basic science, or…
j7uy5 | March 23, 2010I've
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/08/it_wont_be_the_bhut_of_many_jo.php">written
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/08/bhut_jolokia_update.php">before
about the world's hotter chle pepper: the bhut jolokia, rated at over 1
million scoville units. (
href="http://www.chilepepperinstitute.org/holy_jolokia.php">Sauce
available here.) Now, India has a new use for the infernal
things: combatting terrorism.
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/23/india-chilli-bhut-jolokia-terrorism">India
deploys world's hottest chilli to fight…
j7uy5 | March 15, 2010At first, I was going to title this post WSJ: Incompetent Ranting. Then
I decided that was too strong. Then I read the article again, and
went back to the original title. Mind you, this is not intended
to be an ad hominem attack. The author,
href="http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/history/faculty/facultyprofiles/shorter.html">Edward
Shorter,
has been the Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine since 1991,
and in 1996 was cross-appointed as Professor of Psychiatry (at the
University of Toronto). He has written some good books, includingA History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum…
j7uy5 | March 8, 2010A few days ago, there was a minor ripple in the political world, when a
media person tried to get John McCain to say that Obama is a
socialist. Even though McCain had hinted at that several times
during the campaign, he would never state directly that Obama is a
socialist. Well,
href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,587772,00.html">he still
won't (as reported by Fox):
DAVID GREGORY, HOST, "MEET THE PRESS": Do you think that
goes too far? Is it a socialist agenda from the president?
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN, R-ARIZ.: There is no doubt in my mind America's a
right-of-center nation, and this…
j7uy5 | March 7, 2010We had little squall clouds today, such that there was interesting
light and shadow in the yard. This made for a nice opportunity to
photograph the nectarine tree blossoms.
Emotionally uplifting, I would say. The only problem is that we
now have to watch for frost warnings, then run out and cover the tree
if it might freeze.
j7uy5 | March 2, 2010The January 2010 American Journal of Psychiatry has two
articles pertaining to the relationship between dietary practices and
mental health. One article presents the results of a study; the
other is an editorial.
href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/ajp;167/3/305">Association
of Western and Traditional Diets With Depression and Anxiety in Women
Jacka et al.
Am J Psychiatry 2010; 167:305-311 (published online January 4, 2010;
doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09060881) © 2010 American Psychiatric
Association
Objective: Key biological factors that influence the…
j7uy5 | February 21, 2010James Gunn, the director for the movie
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slither_%282006_film%29">Slither,
seems to be enthralled by creepy crawly things. He also has a
blog-like website, on which he posted
href="http://www.jamesgunn.com/2009/07/02/evolution-fucked-your-shit-up-the-worlds-50-freakiest-animals/">Evolution
Fucked Your Shit Up: The World's 50 Freakiest Animals. (HT:
href="http://charlierb3.blogspot.com/2010/02/friday-lists_19.html">Interesting
Pile.)The creature pictured above, by the way, is
an ajolote. The term ajolote can refer to either the
href="http://…
j7uy5 | February 14, 2010Sometimes I see sad-looking plants on clearance, buy them, and try to
heal them. This activity provides me with a gratification that is
similar to that which comes from healing sad-looking people, but
without the tribulations that occur if it does not work as well as we
had hoped.
I even have some of these plants in my office (although none of the
worse cases go there). At stressful times, I may go and look at
the parts of the plants that are growing well: apical meristems, leaf
primodia, and axillary buds -- or green shoots, in the vernacular of
our time. I just look at them. I don't…
j7uy5 | February 10, 2010The American Psychiatric Association has
href="http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx">gone public with the
details
of their proposed revisions to their Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual. As expected, most of this is bland and not worthy of
attention from the general public.
Unfortunately, as
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/health/10psych.html?hp">Benedict
Carey points out, the book often is used for purposes other than
those for which it is intended, which can lead to unintended
consequences. It remains to be seen what these will be.
I'm just going to make some quick,…
j7uy5 | February 1, 2010
href="http://www.researchblogging.org">
src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png"
style="border: 0pt none ;">Objective diagnosis is in some
ways the holy grail of medicine. It has been maddeningly elusive
in psychiatry. Now comes a paper in which the authors suggest
that they may have found this treasure.
The paper details a method of using magnetoencephalography to assess
human brain function. They claim that, in a select population, it
can correctly identify patients with PTSD with 90% accuracy.
href="http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1741-2552…
j7uy5 | January 30, 2010I decided to try using Google Chrome as a web browser. The reason is that it is supposed to be faster, particularly for sites that make heavy use of Flash. It turns out that installing it is a hassle if you do it the obvious way, because Flash does not work without fiddling around. That sort of defeats the purpose.
The easier way is to use the one-click install at:http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/ope...2/chromium.ymp.
This adds the necessary repositories, downloads the application, and configures it so that flash works right away.
It seems to work pretty well. It remains to be seen,…
j7uy5 | January 25, 2010I saw this headline on Google Fast Flip, and had to read it. I'm
always game for an anti-big-pharma story: even though I appreciate
their efforts to relieve suffering, I do like to take notice of their
shadier practices.
href="http://business.theatlantic.com/2010/01/is_glaxos_charity_really_theft.php">Is
Glaxo's Charity Really Theft?
Jan 20 2010, 5:30 pm
by Daniel Indiviglio
Is there a fine line? Corporations have a duty to shareholders to
maximize profits. But when they donate to charity -- which is regularly
done these days, often through foundations -- this takes money out of…
j7uy5 | January 19, 2010Susanne Sternthal, a writer based in Moscow, has published an article
about the ecology of stray dogs. The article is in Financial
Times, of all places. Why is that?
href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628a8500-ff1c-11de-a677-00144feab49a.html">Moscow's
stray dogs
By Susanne Sternthal
January 16 2010 00:04
...They also acted differently. Every so often, you would
see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog
would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the
carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a
website dedicated…
j7uy5 | January 18, 2010I've been mulling this over for a few days, finally deciding to write
about it. There was an article in the NYT on 13 January 2010
about an NEJM article:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/research/14morphine.html">
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/research/14morphine.html">Morphine
May Help Traumatic Stress
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: January 13, 2010
Doctors have long hoped to discover a "morning-after pill"
to blunt the often disabling emotional fallout from traumatic
experiences. Now it appears that they have had one on hand all along:
morphine...In a…
j7uy5 | January 15, 2010The earthquake in Haiti is only the most recent in a series of
catastrophes stretching back over two centuries. It was not
always like this. Haiti, in fact, was once the most prosperous
colony in the New World. When it was a French colony, known as
class="bc_2">St. Domingue (
also called The Pearl of the Antilles), it
href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/71/71_robinson_haiti.html">generated
more wealth that the 13 British colonies that were to become the
United States.
Foreign Policy magazine has a timeline of the modern-day disasters that
set the stage for the
href="http://…