Medicine:
OK, I posted a lot of pictures of Belgrade and my Mom's food so far, but the real business was on Tuesday, when I gave two talks about Open Access, PLoS, Science 2.0, the future of the scientific paper, Open...
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Posted on April 24, 2008 4:07 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Internets are interesting places. One finds all sorts of strange things people post on there. But I hope that Abel's vasectomy liveblogging will make many more men realize that the operation is quick, easy and painless. Perhaps more guys will...
Posted on February 21, 2008 8:37 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
World Health Organization announced a $350 million initiative as a five-year plan to control seven major tropical diseases in Africa: Statement by WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan I warmly welcome the initiative, announced today by United States President George W....
Posted on February 21, 2008 9:24 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In my daily interviews I always ask: what new blogs did you discover at the Conference? If anyone asked me that question - and you know it's hard to surprise me! - one I'd pick would be the INFO Project...
Posted on February 19, 2008 5:05 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Yes and No. But the article is not from the 'Onion', it's from the Hot Medical News. It's about an onion, in a strange place.......
Posted on February 17, 2008 9:25 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From Russ Williams, director of the N.C. Zoo Society....
Posted on January 30, 2008 8:54 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From SCONC: On Thursday, February 7, SCONCs will migrate to the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill. MPSC will open its exhibits to SCONC members for a special viewing at 6:00 p.m. in the NASA Digital Theater, followed...
Posted on January 29, 2008 9:27 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Duke Medical Center News Office is seeking a Sr. Science News Writer to be responsible for planning, developing, implementing and analyzing strategic comprehensive and diversified media relations programs and tactics. Through direct support of Duke Medicine strategic objectives...
Posted on January 23, 2008 11:00 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Why isn't there a birth control pill for men?" is the latest "Ask A ScienceBlogger" question. I am sure my SciBlings will rise to the occasion and explain both the biological and social barriers to the development, production and marketing...
Posted on January 10, 2008 9:55 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Tomorrow is the World AIDS Day: The WAC's slogan for their work is "Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise". This is an appeal to governments, policy makers and regional health authorities to ensure that they meet the many targets that have...
Posted on November 30, 2007 9:46 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Shift Work May Be Cancer Risk: In an announcement to be published Saturday in the journal Lancet Oncology, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, will label shift work as a "probable cause" of...
Posted on November 30, 2007 9:18 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As we are trying to help gather some funding to help the Tasmanian Devil from extinction due to the nasty infectious cancer, I thought it would be of interest to you to read more about it in this article: To...
Posted on November 19, 2007 10:06 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Tasmanian Devils are suffering from a strange form of cancer, one that is infectious, i.e., it can be transmitted from one animal to another through contact. The disease is devastating the population of this already endangered species and if some...
Posted on November 18, 2007 10:35 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My friend Franz, who runs a delightful blog Mikrob(io)log (in Slovenian) alerted me that the team of undergraduates from the University of Ljubljana won the iGEM 2007 at MIT the other day. They did it for the second year in...
Posted on November 5, 2007 11:31 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
These last couple of days were very exciting here at PLoS. After months of preparation and hard work, PLoS presents the latest addition to its collection of top-notch scientific journals. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases went live yesterday at 6:42pm EDT....
Posted on October 31, 2007 2:59 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Rockridge Institute published a set of articles (and a video ad) that I found quite interesting about the way to frame health care. See for yourself: Introduction to Rockridge's Health Care Campaign: Framing for Rockridge is about the honest expression...
Posted on October 30, 2007 10:46 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
No Girrafes On Unicycles Beyond This Point...
Posted on October 28, 2007 1:15 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Triangle Malaria Symposium will be on Thursday, November 15, 2007, at 1-7 pm at the Duke University Searle Center. At first I thought it was this week, but now I see it is the week after, so perhaps...
Posted on October 28, 2007 1:10 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Since I was gone to two meetings and nobody else can walk the dog as regularly as I can, the dog spent the week at Grandma's in Raleigh. Today I went to pick her up (the dog, that is) which...
Posted on October 27, 2007 9:54 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development (which I mentioned a few days ago here) was a great success. You can see all the articles associated with it here. PLoS has collected all the poverty-related articles from its Journals...
Posted on October 24, 2007 8:42 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
More than 234 journals throughout the world will simultaneously publish articles devoted to the topic of poverty and human development tomorrow, on October 22nd, 2007. You can get more information, including the links to all the participating journals at The...
Posted on October 21, 2007 9:42 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Just watching someone give a talk is often not enough to remember it later. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And certainly, seeing is believing. But, this presentation is impossible to forget, even if one would...
Posted on October 15, 2007 9:40 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Of course they fight against Open Access Publishing - too much sunshine scares them and would make them scurry away in panic...
Posted on October 11, 2007 12:46 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
That is one very interesting idea! This provision is usually used for getting medicines to 3rd world countries in times of emergency. So, why not research papers if the emergency warrants it? Gavin writes: Imagine a scenario in which a...
Posted on October 6, 2007 11:54 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Before two papers passed the peer-review and got published, WHO (which was given the data) made its own interpretation of the findings and included it in its press kit, including the errors they made in that interpretation. A complex story...
Posted on October 3, 2007 2:12 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Based in part on this study, lethal injection has been ruled (at least for now) unconstitutional in the state of Tennessee. The executions by lethal injection have been on hold for several months now in North Carolina as well, until...
Posted on September 20, 2007 9:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Drug rep creates stir with details on tricks of his trade Drug reps are carefully trained to target a physician with tactics suitable to his or her personality, according to a recently published article co-authored by a former Eli Lilly...
Posted on September 3, 2007 5:49 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In a commentary and a blog post, the editors of PLoS Medicine ask: ....is there still a reluctance to accept that anything useful can be learned from research without numbers? An old question that tends to generate a lot of...
Posted on August 31, 2007 9:59 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you are a bird, yes. If you are a human, perhaps. Stay tuned....
Posted on August 21, 2007 6:48 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My Scibling Tara Smith together with Steven Novella, published an article in PLoS Medicine last week that all frequent readers of science blogs will find interesting: HIV Denial in the Internet Era: Because these denialist assertions are made in books...
Posted on August 21, 2007 5:14 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sarah Wallace is interviewing some amazing people while doing her research in the Ukraine: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Obligatory Readings of the Day...
Posted on August 13, 2007 1:29 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have linked to and posted pictures of Eva Vertes from SciFoo before and you may ask: "Who is she? Why was she invited there?" The Wikipedia page I linked to earlier is a short stub and full of errors....
Posted on August 11, 2007 4:19 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You can now register for the third ConvergeSouth conference in Greensboro, NC, October 19-20, 2007. Among many others, you will be able to meet me there. Keep and eye on the blog for new developments....
Posted on July 27, 2007 5:56 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mo is really spoiling us with exciting, well-researched posts from the history of science and medicine (remember the trepination post from a month ago?). And here he does it again: The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy, the most...
Posted on July 26, 2007 11:59 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week. As I am at work and unable to...
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Posted on July 9, 2007 8:59 AM • • 0 TrackBacks
Everyone always blogs about Bush... After all, Bush is such an easy target - there is not a day that he or some of his buddies do not do something outrageously bad. And with the Media covering it as if...
Posted on June 27, 2007 11:51 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My friend (and the driving force behind all bloggy events in the Triangle area) Anton Zuiker has a new job! And not just any job - but a perfect job: In August, I will take a new job at Duke...
Posted on June 27, 2007 4:49 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Circumcision is always one of the topics with the most spirited discussions on science blogs. Here, a brand new paper on PLoS-ONE will likely stir up the conversation yet again (hopefully on the annotations and discussions attached to the paper...
Posted on June 20, 2007 6:00 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
For medical reasons, if nothing else....
Posted on June 19, 2007 11:45 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here is an example of perfect science blogging. It starts seemingly innocuously, with a quiz: Monday's Molecule #30, where you are supposed to figure out what the compound is. Then, after a couple of days, there is a post that...
Posted on June 17, 2007 10:05 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I often blog about malaria because it is a fascinating disease which has to be studied in a highly integrative manner, is a great teaching topic and I could tie it in with my own field. If you share my...
Posted on June 8, 2007 3:02 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A guy 'jebo jeza', ahem, literally fucked a hedgehog in Serbia and ended up in the ER. Do kids there these days don't even know their slang? 'Jebo jeza' means something along the lines of 'being in big trouble' or...
Posted on May 1, 2007 8:25 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It is the malaria week right now, isn't it? Check out this nifty website about the efforts to fight malaria in Kangaba, Mali. Just click and drag on each picture and you can swing it around full 360 degrees. Hat-tip:...
Posted on April 25, 2007 11:05 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you have a moment, this is a useful study to participate in: Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library...
Posted on April 25, 2007 2:47 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I made only a brief mention of the study when the press release first came out, but the actual paper (which is excellent) is out now. It is on PLoS so it is free for all to see: Mania-like behavior...
Posted on April 12, 2007 9:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Bodies Exhibition is coming to The Streets at Southpoint in Durham. My wife saw it last year in NYC. My daughter will probably be too squeamish for it, but I'll try to get my son to come with me....
Posted on April 7, 2007 10:24 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On Thursday night, I posted a large linkfest about the press-conference by John and Elizabeth Edwards and the revelation that her cancer has returned. Those were mostly first responses. There have been literally thousands of blog posts written since then,...
Posted on March 24, 2007 8:23 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The first four books in the Cherry Ames series are back in print, published by Springer Publishing Company. Apparently, many people, upon reading them, decided to join the nursing profession. Mind you, that was between 1943 and 1968. when these...
Posted on March 20, 2007 8:44 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It has been known for quite a while now that bipolar disorder is essentially a circadian clock disorder. However, there was a problem in that there was no known animal model for the bipolar disorder. Apparently that has changed, if...
Posted on March 20, 2007 2:29 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Matt found a conference paper that shows that the risk of pre-term birth is the lowest in spring, rising through summer and fall and the greatest in winter. The paper, IMHO erroneously, focuses on the time of conception (because it...
Posted on February 6, 2007 4:35 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A good reason not to de-blogroll blogs on hiatus - they may come back as much as TWO YEARS later. Like the I Love Colonoscopies blog just did. I know you want to click on that link and explore the...
Posted on February 5, 2007 2:27 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you discover a brain chemical which, when missing or malfunctioning (due to a mutation in its receptor) abruptly puts people and animals to sleep when they don't want to - a condition called narcolepsy - then you can work...
Posted on January 29, 2007 12:28 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Which of the two I am interested in for entirely scientific reasons and which one for more personal reasons, you guess: Spray Could Offer New Front-line Treatment For Men With Premature Ejaculation: Patients with premature ejaculation who used a topical...
Posted on January 25, 2007 2:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Praying Online Helps Cancer Patients, Study Suggests Breast cancer patients who pray in online support groups can obtain mental health benefits, according to a new study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research that...
Posted on January 4, 2007 9:06 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Polls are open. Go and vote....
Posted on January 4, 2007 8:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you do not know who Roper is, read this, this and this. A total fundie wingnut in charge of a large teaching hospital! Oy vey! I did not know that fact when I originally wrote this post, but this...
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Posted on January 3, 2007 10:51 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Just for the holidays, you get two for the price of one - two simultaneous editions of the Pediatric Grand Rounds: the reverent version and the irreverent version. And no, not all the entries can be found on both. Beware...
Posted on December 20, 2006 1:32 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor were found guilty earlier today, against all the scientific evidence of their innocence. I second PZ's sentiment about this....
Posted on December 19, 2006 8:38 AM • 8 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Just How Useful Are Animal Studies To Human Health?: Animal studies are of limited usefulness to human health because they are of poor quality and their results often conflict with human trials, argue researchers in a study online in the...
Posted on December 18, 2006 8:32 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Fluid Displacement From Legs To Neck Can Lead To Obstructive Sleep Apnea: When a person lies down, a small amount of fluid displaced from the legs to the base of the neck can narrow soft tissue around the throat and...
Posted on December 17, 2006 10:44 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sensory Nerve Discovery In Diabetes Opens Door To New Treatment Strategies: Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), the University of Calgary and The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine have found that diabetes is controlled by abnormalities in the...
Posted on December 17, 2006 9:38 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Abortion Pill Could Prevent Cancer: In women with BRCA-1, the naturally occurring female hormone progesterone speeds the proliferation of mammary cells. "If we block the progesterone pathway using an antiprogesterone, it could prevent breast cancer," says Eva Lee, lead...
Posted on December 15, 2006 6:05 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Identification Of Carbon Dioxide Receptors In Insects May Help Fight Infectious Disease: Mosquitoes don't mind morning breath. They use the carbon dioxide people exhale as a way to identify a potential food source. But when they bite, they can pass...
Posted on December 15, 2006 12:39 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Change of Shift, Vol. 1, No. 13, now up on Protect the Airway...
Posted on December 14, 2006 12:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Scientists building a better mosquito: Without mosquitoes, epidemics of dengue fever and malaria could not plague this planet. The skin-piercing insects infect one person after another while dining on a favorite meal: human blood. Eliminating the pests appears impossible. But...
Posted on December 12, 2006 1:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A paper in CMAJ on the medical ethics of muggles just came out: Duty of care to the undiagnosed patient: Ethical imperative, or just a load of Hogwarts? Here is the abstract - the entire paper is freely available: With...
Posted on December 12, 2006 11:43 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You can post your nominations in the comments here. There is no Nursing category, though, which makes me quite mad....
Posted on December 12, 2006 8:40 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The protist and the virus appear to be helpful to each other: HIV cripples the infected person's immune system which allows malaria to thrive. Similarly, individuals with malaria have recurrent feverish periods during which the viral load increases by a...
Posted on December 9, 2006 9:47 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The supply in the USA is apparently not very safe....
Posted on December 8, 2006 12:30 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
