There is a new website showing the history of some memes. I wish we would have something similiar at Pubmed. The vitamin hypothesis at least seems to take off (with the data for 2009 being a projection).
The asthma and glaucoma island
Dr. Zamel, one of the PIs of the Tristan da Cunha study pointed me today to the interesting 30 min BBC documentation online at Allergy Canada
Allergy Island is an exclusive documentary on the history of asthma in Tristan da Cunha and the discovery of the gene related to asthma in that highly inbred community by the expedition that I did in 1993. I went in May 2008 to Tristan da Cunha with the BBC crew to film both parts for the entire month.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
I have just discovered that the book of Helmut Kiene”Komplementäre Methodenlehre der klinischen Forschung. Cognition-based Medicine. Berlin – Heidelberg – New York: Springer; 2001, 193 S. ISBN 3-540-41022-8 is now being online available as PDF – a must read for all clinical researchers.
Addendum 26 Feb 2021
Sorry for the title that involuntarily replicated a title from paper published already 14 years before https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7647644/
Rejection hurts. Why everybody needs somebody
515 citations of an article in 5 years – it is timely to revisit “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion” by Eisenberger in Science magazine. I was refered to that study by “Lob der Schule” (an excellent book).
Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion.
These are bad news for all victims of workplace bullying or university harassment – their brains will react like under stimulation of physical harm leading to aggression as found in many studies
A wide variety of studies with animal as well as human subjects demonstrate that pain often gives rise to an inclination to hurt an available target, and also, at the human level, that people in pain are apt to be angry.
So, the final aggression of the victim is used to further isolate it – a vicious circle.
Rolling Stones
Blues Brothers
10.1.2019 revisited
The facts seem to be now largely accepted, see an article in Psychology Today: Is Social Pain Real Pain? and the 2012 review by Eisenberger. More recently some authors even think that “The salience of self, not social pain, is encoded by dorsal anterior cingulate and insula“.
Can’t believe in a TCRA association (at the moment)
Nature genetics published recently an association paper of an of an autism researcher researcher writing here on narcolepsy
Using genome-wide association (GWA) in Caucasians with replication in three ethnic groups, we found association between narcolepsy and polymorphisms in the TRA@ (T-cell receptor alpha) locus, with highest significance at rs1154155 (average allelic odds ratio 1.69, genotypic odds ratios 1.94 and 2.55, P < 10-21, 1,830 cases, 2,164 controls). This is the first documented genetic involvement of the TRA@ locus, encoding the major receptor for HLA-peptide presentation, in any disease.
I am always cautious of these “first ever” claims Continue reading Can’t believe in a TCRA association (at the moment)
How to increase blogging?
Nature has a headline about “how to stop blogging”
Is the scientific conference in its death throes? Researchers have long anguished about the hyper-competitive culture that leads attendees to suppress their most interesting unpublished results. Such protectiveness can only be worsened by the increasing dissemination of results beyond the conference hall by bloggers.
Oh, do they really ask if scientific conferences are in its death throes? Big scientific conferences that have deadlines 1 year in advance? Big scientific conferences where I take notes for 6 or 8 hours and discover in the evening that there is nothing, definitely nothing new?
What is a fake journal?
I have no answer on that question – the differentiation between qualified science, parascience and quack is not easy. Nature medicine, however, knows
The recent controversy kicked off when The Australian newspaper and The Scientist magazine reported on the existence of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine … Continue reading What is a fake journal?
P≤0.0069 in election results
Too many “7” digits were found for candidate A in a study of the presidential election results.
This method is closely related to Benford’s Law. A highly significant (p ~ 0.0007) excess of vote counts for candidate K that start with the digit 7 is found (41 observed, 21.2–22 expected).
I have to admit that I heard for the first time of the Newcomb-Benford’s Law (NBL)…
More heat than light
There is a new review on vitamin D and allergy.
Reading that piece carefully, I fear that expertise in one area does not guarantee Continue reading More heat than light
What discriminates science journalists and science bloggers?
A recent opinion article in Nature may serve as my diving board here. Althoug texts are much better edited by professional journalists, the content isn’t better (driven mainly by press release). And of course, journalists must write about topics outside of their knowledge zone. Funny, they resemble
more that of a priest, taking information from a source of authority and communicating it to the congregation.
Journalists don’t have enough time for the details while bloggers can restrict themselves to their main expertise ;-) raising also a large amount of public awareness.
My 5th sense
We are equipped with senses to react to sudden environmental changes but we do not even have any reflex to react to slow and gradual environmental changes. Wikibooks has a nice entry about Peter Senge that covers in more detail his “5th sense”. I found this entry by the beer game(while reasoning about logistics of science factories).
Please, send always an ics file in the attachment
as it is rather time consuming to type in all appointments.
Appointments can be exported from outlook (win XP) abd ical (Mac OS X) just by drag and drop to your favorite mail program. It is just one click here on the attachment to import the date here (Lufthansa already knows that but you may use this hint in your company to get the inventor award). BTW The screenshot shows another neat idea of integrating dynamic Doodle feeds.
Genome browser introduces error lane
A welcome initative of the Golden Path Genome Browser:
Users often send us notes and hints about how we might better curate and annotate the genome. These contributions are valuable but it isn’t feasible for us to update our annotations on a per-user basis. Continue reading Genome browser introduces error lane
If it wasn’t actually you
this is at least what Alexa tells me about you – what a nonsense giving averages of so different visitors ;-)
although the profile isn’t so bad at al l…
Encased in darkness
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Continue reading Encased in darkness