I have no answer on that question – the differentiation between qualified science, parascience and quack is not easy. Nature medicine, however, knows
The recent controversy kicked off when The Australian newspaper and The Scientist magazine reported on the existence of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine … Continue reading What is a fake journal?
Too many “7” digits were found for candidate A in a study of the presidential election results.
This method is closely related to Benford’s Law. A highly significant (p ~ 0.0007) excess of vote counts for candidate K that start with the digit 7 is found (41 observed, 21.2–22 expected).
I have to admit that I heard for the first time of the Newcomb-Benford’s Law (NBL)…
There is a new review on vitamin D and allergy.
Reading that piece carefully, I fear that expertise in one area does not guarantee Continue reading More heat than light
A recent opinion article in Nature may serve as my diving board here. Althoug texts are much better edited by professional journalists, the content isn’t better (driven mainly by press release). And of course, journalists must write about topics outside of their knowledge zone. Funny, they resemble
more that of a priest, taking information from a source of authority and communicating it to the congregation.
Journalists don’t have enough time for the details while bloggers can restrict themselves to their main expertise ;-) raising also a large amount of public awareness.
We are equipped with senses to react to sudden environmental changes but we do not even have any reflex to react to slow and gradual environmental changes. Wikibooks has a nice entry about Peter Senge that covers in more detail his “5th sense”. I found this entry by the beer game(while reasoning about logistics of science factories).
as it is rather time consuming to type in all appointments.
Appointments can be exported from outlook (win XP) abd ical (Mac OS X) just by drag and drop to your favorite mail program. It is just one click here on the attachment to import the date here (Lufthansa already knows that but you may use this hint in your company to get the inventor award). BTW The screenshot shows another neat idea of integrating dynamic Doodle feeds.
A welcome initative of the Golden Path Genome Browser:
Users often send us notes and hints about how we might better curate and annotate the genome. These contributions are valuable but it isn’t feasible for us to update our annotations on a per-user basis. Continue reading Genome browser introduces error lane
this is at least what Alexa tells me about you – what a nonsense giving averages of so different visitors ;-)
although the profile isn’t so bad at al l…
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Continue reading Encased in darkness
Yes, we know “slow virus is good for your lab as it keeps your lab running” with similiar mechanisms are being found in many research areas. Best of all – declare everybody as diseased (or at least at risk) like seen Continue reading Pandemy of vitamin D deficiency
www.cell.com/current-biology shows humour
Human emotional expressions, such as laughter, are argued to have their origins in ancestral nonhuman primate displays. To test this hypothesis, the current work examined the acoustics of tickle-induced vocalizations from infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, as well as tickle-induced laughter produced by human infants.
Thenew book by Gibson “It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick” raises some interesting points (from the Amazon review)
Our genome is out of equilibrium, both with itself and its environment. Simply put, our genes aren’t coping well with modern culture. Continue reading Clash between our genes & environment
was an earlier title of a BBC documentation about gene methylation. While running today an analysis of segregating methylation marks, I have major difficulties to find out the status of the human epigenome map. The Sanger site seems to be down for a long time, there aren’t any updates of the AHEAD consortium, the site of the Epigenetics Society is largely uniformative, methDB gives me “information about the research situation in France and why French scientists are in conflict with the current government”, an EU network excellence has only a fashionable website while another EU project is even not fashionable. Or do I miss something??
A new study of 5 year old children relates their current allergy symptoms to LOW maternal intake of vitamin D from food (which is strange within the context of current cohort studies that show a INCREASED risk by vitamin D supplement use).
As this is a diabetes study, the sample is highly biased Continue reading Neverending story – vitamin D in pregnancy
It would be interesting to follow up this historical (1571x cited) paper on mechanisms of consumer choice. Are there similar mechanisms in science consumation e.g. the price we are willing to pay after having read an abstract?