The sunshine cure

Nature medicine news has a short text about the sunshine cure.

The strongest evidence available is perhaps for the vitamin’s protective role in MS. Several studies have documented a dramatic ‘sunshine belt’ […] Latitude also seems to play a role in the incidence of hormone-dependent cancers. […] The effect is almost certainly because of vitamin D, Feldman says. “People tend to think it can’t do all these things when it’s a vitamin,” notes Feldman. “It’s not a vitamin, it’s a hormone.”

As always there seems no fun without risk. We could add links to arteriosclerosis and allergy.

Science and religion

Wikiquote has already a large collection:

* “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” – Albert Einstein

* “The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me purely factitious, fabricated on the one hand by short-sighted religious people, who confound […] theology with religion; and on the other by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension.” – Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), “The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature” (1885)

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Global awareness layer

The United States Holocaust Museum has just released “Crisis in Darfur” an online mapping project together with Google Earth. If you zoom in on Africa, you will find a lot of flames that may be clicked for more information.

In 2004 the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum declared a genocide emergency for Darfur, Sudan. To date about 2,500,000 civilians, targeted because of their ethnic or racial identity, have been driven from their homes, more than 300,000 people killed, and more than 1,600 villages destroyed by Sudanese government soldiers and government-backed militias, known as the “Janjaweed.” More than 200,000 Sudanese are refugees in neighboring Chad. The crisis continues as thousands more die each month from the effects of inadequate food, water, health care, and shelter in a harsh desert environment.

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Waiting to exhale

Waiting to exhale was a book in 1992 (“Right now I am supposed to be all geeked up”). Waiting to exhale then was a movie in 1995 (“Friends are the people who let you be yourself… and never let you forget it”). And finally Waiting to exhale was the title of a meeting report 1995 Continue reading Waiting to exhale

Hypomania

The Lancet has a comprehensive review of bipolar disorders- finally I learned about the distinction between type I (includes mania) and type II (hypomania). BTW the author thinks that there is no sound evidence for the DSM-IV priority for mood changes; Kraepelin had no priority for mood, thinking or activity altering changes after all). Continue reading Hypomania

Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 RC1

A new major release of my favorite software is definitely worth another entry here. Besides many other features there is now a new function to add tags to emails – quite important if you need to assign emails to different projects. Furthermore (virtual) search folder are now cached for speed, many thanks, yea, yea.

Research on totalitarism

Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that the Hanna-Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarism has dismissed its director as three quarter of the scientific staff now voted against him. This seems to be a quite unusual case that the scientific staff has such a strong voice – I can’t renember so many other cases in the hierarchical academic system.

La grande salle

Karfreitag / Good Friday 2007. When digitizing old slides, I found these interesting ones – they show the large ward at the hospital at Beaune in the Bourgogne. The hospices de Beaune were founded in 1442 by Nicolas Rolin. A M.A. thesis at the university of Tübingen has more details – charity as part of the social status (page 26) and a reason why the initials of Nicolas Rolin (and his third wife) Continue reading La grande salle