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The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by a suburban, reality-based, slightly-left-of-center guy, who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times. Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news. Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.
Corpus Callosum is written by a psychiatrist at a small community hospital somewhere in the USA. Email to cc.scienceblogger at gmail dot com.
Category: Medicine
National Geographic reports: A new strain of hypervirulent, deadly Cryptococcus gattii fungus has been discovered in the United States, a new study says. The outbreak has already killed six people in Oregon, and it will likely creep into northern California...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:17 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
This is a pretty neat idea. This technology, still under development, promises to enable the printing of skin grafts. It uses a technology similar to inkjet printers: Inkjet Cell Fabricator Prints Healing Flesh Directly Onto Wounds Popular Science By Stuart...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:50 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Issues
I saw this headline on Google Fast Flip, and had to read it. I'm always game for an anti-big-pharma story: even though I appreciate their efforts to relieve suffering, I do like to take notice of their shadier practices. Is...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:23 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
Those of us who watch the drug development pipeline have been pining for a nonaddictive anti-anxiety drug. Occasionally there are glimmers of hope. One candidate is emapunil, aka XBD-173 or AC-5216. In 2004, there was an article in the British...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:41 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Public Health
One of the more enlightening and worrisome articles I read recently was The Perils of Efficiency, by James Surowiecki. The article was a discussion of the practical effects of the mathematical concept, that you can only optimize one variable in...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:49 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
Actually, this is only good news for coffee drinkers who also have late-stage hepatitis C. A recent study in Hepatology showed a possible benefit to coffee consumption in patients with hepatitis C, First I will show the treatment of the...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 2:40 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science News
This is about chronic fatigue syndrome and the association with XMRV. I apologize in advance for the provocative title, and the subsequent gratuitous references to the Nobel Prize, but there is a point to this. Take a look at this...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:04 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bioethics
The topic of neural enhancement has created controversy. This came to wide attention in late 2007, upon the publication of various articles in Nature, as noted by Shelley Batts, Janet Stemwedel, David Dobbs, Daniel MacArthur, Scicurious and others. But so...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:41 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
This is from an open-access article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry: an article featuring a debate about the relevance of randomized, controlled trials to clinical practice. It is mostly about research on psychotherapy, but with some treatment of psychopharmacology....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:52 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Environment
This is an odd one. A study of 5191 adults showed an association between air pollution and attacks of acute appendicitis. Effect of ambient air pollution on the incidence of appendicitis CMAJ 10.1503/cmaj.082068 Published online ahead of print October 5,...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 3:31 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
