This now post no. 3 in a rather short time period about location of a behavioural trait to a certain brain region Continue reading Is utilitarian moral judgment hosted by the prefrontal cortex?
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Dont look at serum values alone
There is an ongoing discussion if 25-OH-D3 serum values can be used to diagnose vitamin D insufficiency. At least for rickets outcome there are now quantitatitive data that allow a comparison of clinical symptoms, radiological findings, cholecalciferol and alkaline phosphatase levels. I have rearranged the values of a new paper into the following figure Continue reading Dont look at serum values alone
Random
What is a random figure? Computer may be biased when true random numbers are needed (for example for cryptography). Here is a truly random generator, use it at your own risk…
Inferences for ratios of normal means
The last R newsletter (volume 7/1, April 2007) has a solution to a long standing problem. The new package mratios can deal now with ratios of means of normally distributed random variables and ratios of regression coefficients arise in a variety of ways. For two-sample problems, the package is capable of constructing confidence
intervals and performing the related tests when the group variances are assumed homogeneous or heterogeneous.
Hubs and superhubs in asthma: low activity
Here comes the reference to a first molecular system biology paper on asthma – something on my to-do list for 3 years. The authors constructed a biological interaction network using a database of curated molecular interactions. Continue reading Hubs and superhubs in asthma: low activity
No day without a line
seems to be the motto of many bloggers although it goes probably back to Pliny.
“Kein Tag ohne Präparat” (no day without taxidermy) was also the motto of Rudolf Virchow that I found last week in the Medizinhistorische Museum at Charité Berlin. More on this fascinating collection can be found at taz. No day without DNA is being the modern translation…
Open call to the science blog community for using a DOI in all posts
Science blogs usually refer to a scientific paper. To increase the visibility of science blogs, e.g. for a reverse lookup by search engines like “find all science blogs to a particular paper” it would be useful if science blogs would include a defined tag to which paper they relate. A http link will only partially work as single articles may be found at duplicate sites (journal or the publishers site or even through agencies like OVID and PUBMED CENTRAL). Using the DOI identifier is an alternative. To recognize any source document I therefore propose the following (unofficial) IANA scheme to be included somewhere in the body of your post
scienceblog:doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040072:
If there is no DOI available, I propose to use the link instead
scienceblog:http:www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS014067360209654X: Please note that there should be an extra “:” at the end of the string; alternatively you may use a white space.
Addendum
05.05.2007 Automatic DOI number extraction from blogs following this convention is now available at the Science Blog Finder page – just enter you rss feed address to get your blog indexed every 24 hours.
U-P-S-I-D-E – data sharing policy
A paper (that I found only recently) summarizes the responsibility of authorship in the life sciences. Sharing publication- related data is a key element of the life sciences and there is concern that in practice materials are not always readily available to the research community. U-P-S-I-D-E stands for “uniform principles for sharing integral data and materials expeditiously”. The authors come from major U.S. universities and companies and have developed 10 recommendations that should be in the curriculum of every PhD program – go to the executive summary at www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/doi/10.1104/pp.900068
Do it yourself epidemiology
Low cost biobanking
Not all biobanks will need daily access to samples. Here comes a cost effect alternative – storage in permafrost regions. ZEIT magazine has an article about “Mine 3“, a former coal mine in the Arctic. Already the first 10,000 samples have been stored there at -3,5 degree Celsius. BBC and Wikipedia have also information about Svalbard Global Seed Vault Continue reading Low cost biobanking
Wormy world
Allergy (or at least an associated trait) may have its roots somewhere in Africa – where helminth infections are frequent. A new Nature Immunol Review has an overview but I am quite disappointed. From the abstract Continue reading Wormy world
Allergy research in Germany 1935
During my visit last week in Berlin, I found a remarkable letter, that corrects some misbeliefs about the allergy prevalence at that time. Here is my transcript – use Babelfish to translate it. Continue reading Allergy research in Germany 1935
Random number
The second largest problem in epidemiology
Having identified earlier the largest problem in epidemiology I trying now to identify the second most relevant problem. Hopefully I can do it by just one sentence: Continue reading The second largest problem in epidemiology
3,93 mutations / Mb
1 MB is 1 Megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes and 1 Mb is 1 Megabase is 1,000,000 nucleotides. Although a new nature paper doesn’t make any fuss about it, there are 3,93 mutations / Mb in cancer tissues (in total they found 1,007 mutations by scanning 274 Mb from 210 cancer tissues). Continue reading 3,93 mutations / Mb