badscience.net writes about at a formal review of a smoke associated effect that

found 43 [studies] in total, and overall, smoking significantly increases your risk of Alzheimers … 11 of the studies were written by people with affiliations to the tobacco industry. This wasn’t always declared, so to double check, the researchers searched on the University of California’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, a vast collection of scanned material which has been gathered over decades of legal action.

I didn’t know of this collection (Show me more…)

This is just a material collection for a forthcoming review. I am collecting links to studies showing an increased mutation rate in CpG islands that may possibly fix gene activation status. (Show me more…)

I was searching quite long for a review on that – but only to discover in the print version of a QRB article a reference to an online table. In homo sapiens, the author reports an increased cardiovascular mortality slash diabetes susceptibility (INS-IGF2-H19) through male germline and Angelman/Prader/Willi syndrome (from paternal grandmother). So there are only limited human examples so far, which is certainly due to the lack of appropriate sample collections yea, yea.

Addendum 29-Dec-2009

Video Link to an interview with Lars Olov Bygren.
I am still not sure about Angelman/Prader/Willi (as this is more with imprinting) – otherwise the updated list consists of

• Prenatal exposure to the Dutch famine and disease in later life: An overview (2005)
• Sex-specific, male-line transgenerational responses in humans (2006)
• Transgenerational response to nutrition, early life circumstances and longevity (2007)
• Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal exposure to famine in humans (2008)

Only recently I learned about the “mere exposure” effect (author’s website) / paper)

Participants named landmarks shown on photographs. In two experimental conditions, the photographs also unobtrusively showed posters depicting the logo of either a lemon candy or a peppermint candy; in a control condition, no posters were shown. Later participants could choose between the two products as a reward. Participants who had been exposed to the lemon logo and control participants chose the lemon candy more frequently, whereas for participants who had been exposed to the peppermint logo, this preference reversed: they chose the peppermint candy more frequently.

I think that’s a great study. I am wondering, however, about the impact on current science. (Show me more…)

PLoS medicine publishes today a piece that we wrote already last summer. As we have removed the narrative abstract (PLoS uses keypoints instead of an abstract) here is it – pleading for an update of traditional informed consent. (Show me more…)