Following many strange gene association studies now a 3rd study of genes and genius appeared: WashU on IQ and CHRM2 believe it or not as part of a study on the genetics of alcoholism…

A quick link to an open letter – I do not endorse the opinions expressed there…

Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. They’re not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all.

Looks like “Research 2.0″ need to be installed there.

Micro- and macroclimate factors certainly have more influence on our health than being reflected by current research. A new PLOS study now finds that

facilities built more than 50 years ago, characterised by large windows and high ceilings, had greater ventilation than modern naturally ventilated rooms (40 versus 17 air changes per hour) … Old-fashioned clinical areas with high ceilings and large windows provide greatest protection. Natural ventilation costs little and is maintenance free.

Do you know the Barker hypothesis? It says that early life events may induce later disease. A new study in the Eur J Clin Nutr now reports

Children whose mothers had a 25(OH)-vitamin D concentration in pregnancy >75 nmol/l had an increased risk of eczema on examination at 9 months (OR 3.26, 95% CI 1.15–9.29, P=0.025) and asthma at age 9 years (OR 5.40, 95% CI, 1.09–26.65, P=0.038) compared to children whose mothers had a concentration of <30 nmol/l.

These are quite remarkable results. I wonder only why two forthcoming studies click + click using food frequency questionnaires will describe only a reduction of respiratory infection rates (which is not too bad in the context of the hygiene hypothesis) with no effects on allergy.

Food intake measures are probably not good enough for internal dose estimates as main source of vitamin D production is sunlight, isn´t it?

Addendum

12 March 2007 – the long awaited AJCN paper is now out. I have already feared that stratification by FFQ is only partially relevant. Indeed, the authors could have used also college graduate level which increased with intake catgeories 1-2-3-4 from 53-74-80-82% with all the problems by SES dependency (and not corrected for in model 2+3 in table 2 or model A…D in table 3). The discussion seems to be also far away from being an objective report on the immunology of vitamin D actions…

I have just found our most recent PLOS paper about asthma in Africa being published online

As of the 1980s, there was an overall conviction that asthma had an anthropogenic origin with indoor and outdoor air pollution as the main culprits. Following some overinterpreted epidemiological findings of the “hygienic” phase, there is now evidence accumulating that the asthma epidemic might have an iatrogenic origin. There might not only be indirect effects of improved living standards and better medical care, there are even direct effects under discussion, for example by oestrogens, vitamin D, antibiotics, and paracetamol. Infant formula (which contains vitamin D) has already entered the food chain in Africa; paracetamol is the most common drug bought over the counter in Ghana. Do African countries offer any unique observations where singular effects of these drugs can be delineated?

An independent review (that I did not know at time of writing) arrived at similar conclusions. We all, however, forgot to mention sensational news as Gambian president Yahya Jammeh can heal asthma click – click – a more serious appraisal click.

My childhood favorites

For documenting a research project I want to insert quick links to previous emails. Clicking a link should kickstart Thunderbird and go directly to a known message. Mozilla.org says

Athough Google desktop is able to do it, there is no clear API to instruct Thunderbird to display a given email stored in its mail box (knowing the folder & message ID)

Here is how Google Desktop Search (GDS) links to an email

What I have found out so far by comparing different links

(1) is the fixed parameter relating to my hard disk??
(2) is a variable parameter relating to the physical location of my \daten\Mail\thunderbird\imap\INBOX file??
(3) is the unique Message-ID that may be seen in Thunderbird with the View Header plugin
(4) the variable salt/seed value that is stored in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Google\\CustomSearch\\Google Desktop Search\\Url which may be retrieved with a 2 line perl script.

So I am ready to construct URLs that link to an email by using GDS. This is, however, not very elegant. Isn’t there any other way (maybe by a Thunderbird extension) to construct and follow links directly to emails? Can somebody trace with Sysinternals Process Explorer what GDS spits out and follow it up at XUL planet ?