Youth is not a period of life. It’s a state of the spirit, it’s the product of a will. A quality of the imagination and an emotional intensity, it’s the victory of courage over shyness, of adventure over comfort. One doesn’t grow older for having lived a number of years. One gets older for having deserted an ideal. Continue reading Being young
It is interesting to see, how journals are trying to increase their market visibility – Nature has becoming famous for their investment in Second Life? Just recently I received an email that JACI – the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology – has now opened an account at Facebook. Continue reading Do we need scientific journals at social networks?
As the Time Machine harddisk (that I am using for my Macbook Air) turned out to be read only for unknown reasons, I decided to buy a new 500 GB unit with 2.5” for 60 € and format it for dual use. Continue reading (Happy) New Year Backup
It took me some time to figure out that the most recent update produced several problems – either the blog is unreachable or some pages like “edit post” do not work anymore. In my setup this concerns the following plugins here Continue reading WordPress 2.9.1 hangs with several standard plugins
We did not anticipate that the first 1,000 human genomes could be such quickly browsed ;-) but this is what the project website says. By today 4 individuals are on display and I wonder how it will look like with 996 more lines?? Continue reading 1000 genomes quick browser
— a quote of a new FM article entitled “Looking for you” that sees blogs as a form fo self-presentation on the internet (blogs btw show a dramatic increase of 1,4 new blogs every second worldwide). I haven’t seen blogging activity so much as Continue reading People are, in a sense, on stage
Having been approached by a GP about a rising interest of high dose vitamin D therapy (that a German website praises as a panacea for all kind of diseases) it took me some time to recall a recent IARC monograph.
Sure, it’s all about the correct dose, while excess vitamin supplementation may even kill people. Here is what the IARC says about 100,000 IU vitamin D daily: Continue reading High doses of vitamin D may induce cancer
It’s an exceptional good science book – Cancer, The evolutionary legacy – by Mel Greaves. Having written last year a grant application about resequencing of lung specimens (and more recently a correspondence letter about the lung cancer genome that updates our earlier 31 events to 22,910) Continue reading Evolutionary legacy
A new allergy study published last month
hypothesized that prenatal vitamin D supplementation could induce tolerogenic DC at birth. To evaluate this hypothesis in an epidemiological setting, we quantiï¬ed the gene expression levels of ILT3 and ILT4 in cord blood (CB) samples of a population-based birth cohort of farm and reference children.
ILT3/IL4 as a marker of tolerogenic DCs may be justified by data published by Chang but not by newer data Continue reading Tolerogenic effects of vitamin D?
igc.otago.ac.nz has a nice list of all imprinted human loci. I have reworked that list and found that most (150) do not have any disease association. Diseases influenced by imprinted marks are Continue reading 279 cases of imprinted human loci
How did epigenetic research start? Thanks to KP I learned about the biography of Paul Kammerer “Der Krötenküsser” by Arthur Köstler. Wikipedia summarizes the rather long (and sad) story Continue reading Lamarck and fixation of epigenetic marks
This is just a material collection for a forthcoming review. I am collecting links to studies showing an increased mutation rate in CpG islands that may possibly fix gene activation status. Continue reading How we inherit acquired traits – all about non random mutations in the human genome
Having done lung function testing on hundreds, even thousands of children, I believe that this is not an easy task – it’s not only about abdominal mechanics and airway diameter but also about physical fitness – and let’s be cruel – also about intelligence. Even worse, I remember a long discussion how to adjust lung function parameter appropriately – should we use standing or sitting height? Two new papers large ignore these questions. But read first what the Charge consortium writes Continue reading On the tasseography of lung function genes
This may be an unusual post before Christmas – about the hell on earth for women – our world however, is not a peaceful world. A new study in PLoS Medicine shows this new pathologic behaviour from Panzi Hospital, Bukavu, South Kivu, Congo where doctor Mukwege is working Continue reading Rape with extreme violence
A new editorial talks about the dirty little secret of mouse immunology
the striking difference between human and murine sensitivity to LPS toxicity
where humans are 100,000–fold more likely to die of an intravenous dose of LPS. And of course to cite another review on mice and (not) men Continue reading The dirty little secret