Reading this blog will improve your academic skills

Aren’t hat good news being published by Science this week?

Process-specific training can improve performance on untrained tasks, but the magnitude of gain is variable and often there is no transfer at all. We demonstrate transfer to a 3-back test of working memory after 5 weeks of training in updating. The transfer effect was based on a joint training-related activity increase for the criterion (letter memory) and transfer tasks in a striatal region that also was recruited pretraining.

Continue reading Reading this blog will improve your academic skills

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025

The many problems of GWAs

genetic-future has an excellent article why the recent genome scans failed (i) alleles with small effects? (ii) population differences? (iii) epistatic interactions? (iv) cnvs more relevant than snps? (v) epigenetic inheritance? (vi) disease heterogeneity? It is a thorough review better than everything Continue reading The many problems of GWAs

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025

Vitamin D: A 18%! reduction in early infant mortality

A study published earlier this year in the Lancet found a 18% reduction in mortality when women obtained supplements during pregnancy until 90 days post partum including additional 800 ug retinol, 200 IU vitamin D, 10 mg vitamin E, 70 mg ascorbic acid, 1.4 mg vitamin B1, 18 mg niacin, 1.9 mg vitamin B6, 2.6 ug vitamin B12, 15 mg zinc, 2 mg copper, 65 ug selenium and 150 ug iodine. Much of the effect will be due to the vitamin D supplementation Continue reading Vitamin D: A 18%! reduction in early infant mortality

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025

PDF Pubmed Finder

As announced earlier this week, here is a first version of the PDF Pubmed Finder.The Finder helps to identify an unknown paper within seconds and rename it within milliseconds. Although the Finder consists of a single page only it uses several areas to update the data. I have written the code for my local installation but you may try it also online with your own PDFs either by uploading them with the available form or by appending the PDF URL to the Finder address http://wjst.de/pubmed/finder.php?http://medicine.plosjournals.org/test.pdf
The last method is certainly better as it can be used within a scripting environment; note that my domain may not retrieve a PDFs that you can see at your local computer. PDFs also need to have some inline text (run an OCR on scans before submitting them).

zotero_c2.png
Here are some usage instructions: After selecting any article on the left (1.), clicking on relevant keywords (2., 3.) will lead to an immediate Pubmed search (4). Finish by clicking on “rename” or “Pubmed/Zotero” import of the correct reference. If your search doesn’t retrieve any useful hits, keywords will be automatically reset.
What I would like to know all from the AJAX experts who can inspect the sourcecode: I ran into deep problems described earlier with the prototype oncomplete function used in the links of the div2 container. They are checking how the div4 container was being updated. As you see it works, but I failed to clean up the code by having only one Javascript function in the beginning of the page with the div2 links calling this function. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025

CF and PHP at the same time

For a clinical research project I need a fast webserver that understands both COLD FUSION (for the existing database stuff) and PHP (for dokuwiki). As this is a non-commercial project, I decided for the RAILO 2.0 community version that works right out of the box as it includes the Resin webserver and the H2 database as well. Following some recommendations found on the net, php is running now with with the fastcgi option showing good acceptable performance with eAccelerator.

php.cmd
|wj_php.cmd|

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025

CD 14 now also on the vitamin+allergy list

Just for curiosity I am collecting a list of allergy genes that are vitamin D dependent. The list is already rather long but now there is a prominent addition: CD14. Known as asthma gene for many years the vitamin D dependency isn’t such clear. A clever analysis, however, now shows that there is an intermediate step involved Continue reading CD 14 now also on the vitamin+allergy list

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025

Placebo for placebo

or “Do placebo responders exist?” is a remarkable new review by researcher from the Harvard Medical School. I always wondered about the sheer size of the placebo effect (and its perception as nuisance parameter). The authors simply ask the question

… this paper also examines the evidence for the existence of a consistent placebo responder, i.e. a person who responds to placebo in one situation will respond in another condition or using a different type of placebo ritual….

Suggestibility is a human trait, yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025

Vitamin D as an adjuvans to specific immunotherapy

Despite the known allergy promoting effect of vitamin D in early childhood, there is mounting evidence that it may have beneficial effects during specific immunotherapy. A paper on “IL-10-inducing adjuvants enhance sublingual immunotherapy efficacy in a murine asthma model” by researchers from a French allergen company Continue reading Vitamin D as an adjuvans to specific immunotherapy

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025