I had already a thread here about asthma and iatrogenic factors last month including estrogens, vaccines, antibiotics, vitamin D, paracetamol, and Caesarean section. There may be even another kid on the block: folate. At least in mice in utero supplementation with methyl donors enhances allergic airway disease Continue reading Asthma: a iatrogenic disease cont’d
Local newspapers just report a suicide – where the corpse had to be identified in the forensic department. Skin cells turned out to be male, blood cells to be female. The solution to this paradox was quite simple Continue reading A man with a female DNA
We already discussed here “how doctors think?k” while a new essay in the Lancet now even asks “Can doctors think“?
Disease can be recognised by the doctor and the patient (mumps), by the doctor but not the patient (schizophrenia), by some doctors but not others (social phobia), by doctors in some times but not others (melancholy …), and by doctors in some places but not others (embedded incisor tooth because an ancestor’s ghost is angry).
marvelous, yea, yea.
I am currently working on a literature survey on the genetics of ageing when I came across a series of nice monographs at the Max Planck Institute in Rostock.
… the Deluge swept away the pluricentenarians. Ernest (1938) mentioned that the semi-divine persons of the Hindu Sagas lived hundred of thousands of years, and that on average each of ten rulers of Ancient Babylon lived about 43,000 years. Continue reading Would you like to be a centenarian?
A small luxurious law here in Germany – we may further offer limited documents to limited participants according to Heise news Continue reading Intranet exception
After a long time (to be exact: 27 years of Microsoft and 12 years of Linux use) I decided to switch to a Macbook Air. That may be an aesthetic decision (as buying an A4, a Nomos, a Bose or whatelse) :-) but may be heavily influenced of my obsession for lightweight and durable equipment. Continue reading Alt – Command – Escape
A scintillatingly witty reply to one of my recent letters say that Continue reading Münchhausen Trilemma
As our government now even pays us to write applications for European collaborations instead of putting this money directly into grants – here comes another quick post on what a Nobel says:
There is a notion favored by some that individual scientists need to be corralled to work together under a more rigid, directed framework to solve important problems. We disagree. Real innovation comes from the bottom up, and good science policy requires promoting the free market of ideas rather than central planning.
BTW the postdog is sitting at the Kornberg site.
“Endotyping asthma” is a thoughtful review of the complex risk factors and mechanisms involved in asthma pathogenesis. It marks a new direction – away from Th2 immunity towards a bunch of novel disease pathways. The author also touches briefly asthma candidate genes, grouping them into 7 areas Continue reading Endotyping asthma
I have no idea how 23andme got its name but the business model of this company seems to rely on a rather haploid view of the world.
I had the pleasure this weekend to listen to a talk by Joanna Mountain(senior research director at 23andMe, the company that was founded by Googles Sergey Brin‘ s wife Anne Wojcicki). For whatever reasons Brin Continue reading 46andyou
Truthiness was the 2005 neologism in the large country somewhere over/under our horizon (depending on what horizon you are looking). Continue reading Truthiness in science
A paper by Young / Ioannidis / Al-Ubaydli attacks the oligopoly of biomedical journals (just as I have done here many times including also the idea of a winner’s curse). From the press release
The current system of publishing medical and scientific research provides “a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic,” says a team of researchers in this week’s PLoS Medicine […]
There is an “extreme imbalance,” they say, between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact). Continue reading The price we have to pay for better science
It seems that there are two numbering systems in humans – a general sense of numbers for some quick and dirty estimates and some more genuine computation skills of showing the result of (2327)^2. At least the first capacity seems to be inborn (and an important survival skill). According a recent SZ article (29th Sept 2008) a host of new studies now show that
the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education
and as I believe – for science in general as most science fields are being dominated by the Fermi problem. Continue reading Basic instinct for math?
Under the headline â€Journals under Threat: A Joint Response from HSTM Editors†the editors of some of the leading international journals for history and philosophy of science and social studies of science have issued a joint declaration that I received by email and that I am reprinting here to give it a larger audience.
We live in an age of metrics. All around us, things are being standardized,
quantified, measured. Scholars concerned with the work of science and
technology must regard this as a fascinating and crucial practical, Continue reading Journals under Threat
Nature magazine has a collection of interesting opinions about future developments of science. My favorite contribution is open content management Continue reading Invention is the mother of necessity