But let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil

Change location

Here is another tech tip to overcome a frequent task – resetting printers and mailers when moving a Macbook around the world: Location X is a perfect solution with a built in autolocate function (depending on airport network! which is superior to IP detection)

Unfortunately (Show me more…)

Sunday, January 31st

Adding books to an Endnote library

Being tired from entering several books into an Endnote library, I found a better way – just enter “GKV” as the remote library where you can select ISBN search…

Saturday, January 30th

True, false, true, false, true, false, false

While some of my earlier co-workers continue to praise the achievements of GWAs, some other earlier co-authors now show that the common variants thrown on the current GWA chips are leading to false assocations (called politely “synthetic” associations)

We propose as an alternative explanation that variants much less common than the associated one may create “synthetic associations” by occurring, stochastically, more often in association with one of the alleles at the common site versus the other allele. Although synthetic associations are an obvious theoretical possibility, they have never been systematically explored as a possible explanation for GWAS findings. Here, we use simple computer simulations to show the conditions under which such synthetic associations will arise and how they may be recognized. We show that they are not only possible, but inevitable…

The proof comes with a sickle cell anemia study (Show me more…)

Friday, January 29th

Tear Down the Walls

What happens when looking at that video?

The neuroanatomy view this week in Nature

we predict[...] a macroscopic signal visible to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans. We then looked for this signal as participants explored a virtual reality environment, mimicking the rats’ foraging task: fMRI activation and adaptation showing a speed-modulated six-fold rotational symmetry in running direction. The signal was found in a network of entorhinal/subicular, posterior and medial parietal, lateral temporal and medial prefrontal areas. (Show me more…)

Sunday, January 24th

There is something wrong in this world

or should I write “there is no absolute barrier between good and evil”?

One has to realize that there’s no absolute barrier between good and evil. There’s no absolute polarization between the wonderfully good and the horribly evil, and that people who see themselves as trying to do good can inadvertently enter into evil.

I had the opportunity yesterday to watch a documentation about the Lifton interviews of the Nazi doctors by Wolfgang Richter “Wenn Ärzte töten” (SZ , trailer). Richter was accompanied by Christiane Clemm who did all the translations more than 30 years ago. There were moving moments both during the calm narration of the documentation but also afterwards when we could ask Richter and Clemm for more details. (Show me more…)

Friday, January 22nd

Allergic sensitization by a food fortifier?

This week the journal “Allergy” printed a report of three cases where allergic sensitization in preterm infants is attributed to the human milk fortifier Similac.

The product contains: Nonfat milk, corn syrup solids, whey protein concentrate, and MCT oil (fractionated coconut or palm kernel oil) as sources of proteins, fat, and carbohydrate (Abbott Laboratories Pediatric Nutritional Products Guide, DIR/98A08, 2008, Mississauga, Canada).

Not listed above but in the Products Guide are 120 IU/100 ml D3 which may indeed function as a sensitizer.

Friday, January 22nd
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