Category Archives: Joke
Show me your desk
Anglia English bookshop, München, Schellinstrasse
more desks … and 10 tips for keeping your desk clean…
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
A patch of the patch of the patch of the …
Following the last Microsoft patch day, my laptop started with this quite unusual error message Continue reading A patch of the patch of the patch of the …
Ransom note
More statistics
indexed.blogspot.com has many interesting data visualizations – I like them!
A more serious approach for interpreting health statistics can be found in the Lancet. Continue reading More statistics
Science dresscode
Sciencesque has noticed it first: T shirts at Biomed Central for sale. Do your really want that shirt?
Falling asleep
A new study in Science now finds that facts and experiences were better recalled from memory when subjects were cued with a scent during the memorization process and again during slow wave sleep.
Re-exposure to the odor during slow-wave sleep (SWS) improved the retention of hippocampus-dependent declarative memories but not of hippocampus-independent procedural memories. Odor re-exposure was ineffective during rapid eye movement sleep or wakefulness or when the odor had been omitted during prior learning. Concurring with these findings, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed significant hippocampal activation in response to odor re-exposure during SWS.
I wonder how this could be used for preparing presentations, situations where a persons typically fall asleep during or after the session ;-)
Face recognition, face value
With a new child, people are always asking if the baby looks like the father or the mother – probably a prehistoric social reflex to confirm that this is your offspring that you are caring about.
Face recognition clearly is a science of its own – a lot of heuristics and Bayesian computing – more at face-rec.org – and even a big business if you think of automatic passport control or age determination for goods that are only allowed for adults.
Face recognition works quite robust as I found in the advanced online demo at betaface.com. A new browser plugin from polar rose will even allows to annotate web pictures – Orwell meets Flickr.
What is DANN sequencing?
Did you ever came across DANN sequencing or plasmid DANN?
Here is my explanation: Native German MS WORD always corrects DNA to DANN (“then”). So if you don’t check your text, and your editor doesn’t check your text, and your reviewer doesn’t check your text – you will get an immortal entry in PUBMED like the guys below:
You may even earn money with typos …
Para alergia
Conservapedia “gene” entry
Computer names, sequencer names, freezer names
Creativity in science – look how computer are being named (seemed there are many da Vinicis and Picassos in bioinformatics). The MDC microsatellite center in Berlin named their sequencers by volcanos (even before pyrosequencing became in vogue), we use European cities for our freezers. Famous chess players would be another idea or use car brands …
Something in the air
New studies further question the hygiene hypothesis of allergy induction. One study shows that a household bacterial elimination strategy does not lead to more — it even leads to less asthma.
Children living in a house regularly cleaned with bleach were less likely to have asthma (OR, 0.10; CI, 0.02-0.51), eczema (OR, 0.22; CI, 0.06-0.79) and of being sensitized to indoor aeroallergens (OR, 0.53; CI, 0.27-1.02)
Another study, by designing a 16S rRNA chip, examined a snapshot of urban air in San Antonio — the aerosol harbored at least 1,800 diverse bacterial types
a richness approaching that of some soil bacterial communities
You probably know the joke that before taking a deep breath think where the air has been before…
Addendum
The ecology of human skin has now been also reported – highly diverse, well conserved but low-level interpersonal consensus: scienceblog:doi:10.1073/pnas.0607077104
Random news, oxymorons and paper generator
–Day 6 of Just Science Week–
No idea, what to write in your next scientific paper? Use the random medical news for some ideas. Here are also some expressions ready for cut & paste. Or you may want to go directly to SCIGEN (thanks to Christine for that link).
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