Voice recognition has been on the forefront for many years; genetic fingerprinting is standard use while now nearly all surfaces of common products can be recognized by a phenomenon called laser speckle. Continue reading May I introduce to you
The fate of an individual cell in the human body is a mystery. A new Nature paper now provides a follow up of single cells of the epithelial cell layer. It is certainly a paper that will rank among the top 10 this year, Continue reading Where do I come from, where will I go
I attended today a seminar organized by Illumina here at Mariott in Munich covering their new sequencing technology after the recent acquistion of Solexa. Maybe it is easy to impress me but it seems that also the rest of the audience shared my amazement. Continue reading Illumina 1G Solexa roadshow
There was a funny comment by Friedemann Schrenk in a recent radio duo podcast [link to br online] that the human head sits with a wrong orientation on the human body as the pipelines for food and air cross over. Continue reading Human head with wrong orientation?
There is now a lot of hype around the usefulness of vitamin D in the treatment of tuberculosis (scienceblog:doi:10.1164/rccm.200701-007OC ). The authors mention even their previous review (scienceblog:doi:10.1016/j.jsbmb.2006.12.052:) summarizing 13 studies between 1947 and 1998. Continue reading Vitamin D as a treatment of tuberculosis
Nature magazine has an interesting essay how science works: “The security of knowing nothing” is basically arguing that we need to trust other scientists. Continue reading Landing on the moon
It sounds unbelievable – not only to me but also to the editors of Nature who needed half a year to publish a paper of (probably the first true) genetic treatment. Two high-throughput screens comprising ~800,000 low molecular weight compounds were needed to identify 3-[5-(2-fluorophenyl)-[1,2,4]oxadiazol-3-yl]-benzoic acid Continue reading Ending decay (and suffering)
A Spiegel Science article reports
And how are unconscious (intuitive?) decisions made? Another mapping attempt at scienceblog:doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.12.2077
The NEJM has an article about “A National Survey of Physician’s Industry Relationships” – a topic that I did not expect in the NEJM at least from what I have read during the recent change at the editorial office. That’s life – always a surprise. Continue reading Physician’s industry dependency
This now post no. 3 in a rather short time period about location of a behavioural trait to a certain brain region Continue reading Is utilitarian moral judgment hosted by the prefrontal cortex?
There is an ongoing discussion if 25-OH-D3 serum values can be used to diagnose vitamin D insufficiency. At least for rickets outcome there are now quantitatitive data that allow a comparison of clinical symptoms, radiological findings, cholecalciferol and alkaline phosphatase levels. I have rearranged the values of a new paper into the following figure Continue reading Dont look at serum values alone
What is a random figure? Computer may be biased when true random numbers are needed (for example for cryptography). Here is a truly random generator, use it at your own risk…
The last R newsletter (volume 7/1, April 2007) has a solution to a long standing problem. The new package mratios can deal now with ratios of means of normally distributed random variables and ratios of regression coefficients arise in a variety of ways. For two-sample problems, the package is capable of constructing confidence
intervals and performing the related tests when the group variances are assumed homogeneous or heterogeneous.
Here comes the reference to a first molecular system biology paper on asthma – something on my to-do list for 3 years. The authors constructed a biological interaction network using a database of curated molecular interactions. Continue reading Hubs and superhubs in asthma: low activity
seems to be the motto of many bloggers although it goes probably back to Pliny.
“Kein Tag ohne Präparat” (no day without taxidermy) was also the motto of Rudolf Virchow that I found last week in the Medizinhistorische Museum at Charité Berlin. More on this fascinating collection can be found at taz. No day without DNA is being the modern translation…
