All posts by admin

Hunting down the obesity gene

Although the authors of a previous paper still desperately try to rescue their claim another gene has made the race: FTO described by Freyling, Scott and Dina. I have heard that obese people may not see their toes anymore but I haven´t heard of any fused toes, did you?

Turning pale

Humans have always been attracted by white animals, tigers, elephants and crocodiles (BTW great melanosome pictures can be found at PLOS.
There seem to be also some evidence that light skin developed only recently as reported in a meeting report in Science by April, 20 based on sweeps around SLC24A5. This is somewhat in contrast to findings published more or less at the same time by the same group (but not mentioned in the meetings report) that a highly complex network is influencing skin color. Continue reading Turning pale

The fourth major problem in epidemiology

Moblog: Madrid, Parque del Retiro. Epidemiology ist always a cost intensive enterprise. Only those epidemiologists have enough funds for doing research who are spending most of their time on fund raising, speaking into every microphone and smiling into every camera. Continue reading The fourth major problem in epidemiology

NetVibes, Protopage, iGoogle and my own dashboard

Having tried some of these nice web services, I would like to run it now on my own server for obvious reasons. Even after spending considerable time, I didn´t find so much useful out there. eyeOS or other web based OS produce a large amount of overhead while allowing for only one RSS reader window at a time. From the 23 or so widget management systems the only Open Source piece that I found was Posh from Portaneo who deposited at Sourceforge. I wonder why it has only 2,095 downloads so far as all other candidates (Cesar, Viewport, MuseStorm Desktop…) are demo applications only. Widgets for Posh are quite limited so far while the (most important) RSS feed widgets already work.

posh.png

More useful pages are at gnetvibes.rubyforge.org.rubyforge.org, dev.netvibes.com, reblog.org.

Addendum

Dropthings: another Open Source core engine

Allergy immigrant studies

I am starting here a thread of immigrant studies – seems that there are now ~100 available in the medical literature. This could be the nice question for a meta-analysis: Does the move to a high prevalence country lead to more allergy, e.g. do your peers matter? Continue reading Allergy immigrant studies

How doctors think

I attended yesterday a video talk by Jerome Groopman as he had become too ill to travel from Boston to San Francisco. His speech was one of the highlights of this year’s ATS conference – basically a summary of his new book “How doctors think“. It tells you about MDs and how they make up their diagnosis. Mostly everything goes right but sometimes everything goes wrong. According to empirical research a working diagnosis is already being made within 18 seconds Continue reading How doctors think

The third largest problem in epidemiology

-moblog- In my view, epidemiology is not very flexible to adjust to new methods and new techniques. Following some discussion that I had today with STW about eQTLs (quantitative traits derived by RNA microarrays or metabolome profiles) and JMA about system biology, it is likely that we are facing huge changes. Phenotypes may no more called intermediary and we may soon forget old controversies of disease definition. We will instead use new system-terms like NonImm076Trig31Ste0098 or TLR9-096321-Auto5337. Yea, yea.

Lactase variants in Europe – any connection to allergy?

I will present this poster next Monday in San Francisco at the Annual Conference of the American Thoracic Society. Continue reading Lactase variants in Europe – any connection to allergy?