Software

Crantastic

As I am currently in London, here comes only a quick link for all R users. It goes to crantastic, a community site for R packages where you can search for, review and tag CRAN packages.
screenshot
Yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Philosophy, Software, Video

Vanish

Finally, here is a technical solution to a proposal that I made here earlier

Ok, we are aware that recovery is always possible with cut & paste into other applications or printing a text -so we may better think about some watermarked graphics. “Don’t ever say anything on e-mail or text messaging that you don’t want to come back and bite you.”

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Allergy, Philosophy

Attention grabbing headlines

NI has an editorial on hyping research

Although these attention-grabbing headlines might help sell papers and increase traffic to newspaper websites, such reporting is irresponsible to the public and to science in general. Even if the article itself is more balanced, it must be remembered that many readers never get much beyond the headline. The net result is the public comes away with much misinformation.

Continue reading Attention grabbing headlines →

 

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Genetics

Selfish gene – bad weeds grow tall

None of us, I think, in the mid-’70s, when “The Selfish Gene” was published, would have thought we’d be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed

is a commentary from Edge 294. Although even more British colleagues were dedicating chapters to that Dawkins meme I always found it stupid difficult to materialize a DNA regulatory unit by a personality trait – introducing another “Darwinian fairytale” (Stove). Continue reading Selfish gene – bad weeds grow tall →

 

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Software

Do computer games lead to aggression?

We had a lunch discussion on that topic this week – of course, investigating the computer of a person running amok will reveal some (Counterstrike type) games due to his isolation. But such games are also on million of othercomputers who do not run riot and who get relaxed by playing games.
Nevertheless I read this week about the aggressive behaviour of teens who were not allowed to play the whole night World of Warcraft. So, there seems to be clear links Continue reading Do computer games lead to aggression? →

 

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Genetics

DNA sudoku

I am a great fan of DNA pooling (mainly for cost reasons). During our recent experiments we have lost the identity of a single DNA source by pooling. Then we found that the source DNA may be tagged with a unique oligo allowing the assembler to reconstruct the DNA source from the pool. He comes another variation of The Sequencing Game

The pooling of DNA sequencing samples is not new, but current protocols rely on bar coding each sample with a short oligonucleotide, which is then used to associate a read to the correct sample. This approach is laborious, however, as a unique tag has to be created for each sample. The new method creates pools of samples, and then associates a bar code to each pool, rather than to each individual sequence.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Allergy, Genetics

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.

 

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Philosophy, Theology

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/

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Philosophy, Video

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“.

 

 

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Genetics

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) →

 

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Philosophy

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?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025