purepedantry | February 19, 2007Just a brief reminder, Grand Rounds will be hosted here tomorrow.
Submit your medicine-related posts to me no later than 7 pm this evening if you would like them to be included.
purepedantry | February 16, 2007Lazy Middlebury students have lost a valuable resource:
Middlebury College history students are no longer allowed to use Wikipedia in preparing class papers.
The school's history department recently adopted a policy that says it's OK to consult the popular online encyclopedia, but that it can't be cited as an authoritative source by students.
The policy says, in part, "Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source."
History professor Neil Waters says Wikipedia is an ideal place to start research but an unacceptable way to end it.
Here is my thing. I…
purepedantry | February 16, 2007I know that a bunch of other people covered this story, but I managed to find a video of it so I thought I would post it anyway.
Researchers working in Ivory Coast have found remnants of a chimpanzee habitation from over 4,000 years ago, and these remnants include tools that chimps use to break open nuts:
Researchers have found evidence that chimpanzees from West Africa were cracking nuts with stone tools before the advent of agriculture, thousands of years ago. The result suggests chimpanzees developed this behaviour on their own, or even that stone tool use was a trait inherited from our…
purepedantry | February 16, 2007Dr. Henry Miller, writing in TCS, argues that the FDA has over-reacted to problems with drug safety by excessive regulation:
In spite of increasingly more powerful and precise technologies for drug discovery, purification and production, during the past twenty years development costs have skyrocketed. The trends are ominous: The length of clinical testing for the average drug is increasing, fewer drugs are being approved, and the number of applications to FDA by industry for marketing approval has been decreasing for more than a decade.
In January, the FDA announced new initiatives directed…
purepedantry | February 15, 2007Not to be catty, but what the hell is up with that hat? Did Britney Spears skin Santa and send him to a furrier?
Hat-tip: WWTDD.
purepedantry | February 15, 2007In light of the Lisa Nowak love triangle/kidnapping/nutness NASA is re-evaluating how it...well...evaluates astronauts for psychological fitness for space flights.
Part of the problem is one of sex frankly; astronauts are not allowed to have it while on duty.
NASA has been intransigent about the idea of the astronauts have intimate relations, justifying this policy because they would rather not deal with any of the associated problems on manned missions. On the other hand, for particularly long flights -- such as trips to Mars -- sex could be a stabilizing force. Anyway, an interesting…
purepedantry | February 15, 2007I guess they are really serious:
The organizers of Spain's top annual fashion show on Sunday rejected five out of 69 fashion models as being too thin to appear in this year's event, acting on a decision to bar underweight women from the catwalk.
The show, known as the Pasarela Cibeles, decided in September 2005 not to allow women below a body mass to height ratio of 18 to take part.
One of the rejected models had only reached a ratio of 16, the equivalent of being 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing less than 110 pounds, said Dr. Susana Monereo, of Madrid Getafe hospital's endocrinology and…
purepedantry | February 14, 2007Restless Legs Syndrome is a neurological disorder, in spite of what you might think from the ridiculous ads on television. RLS is a syndrome where the individual has weird sensations in their legs while they are trying to relax. These sensations can be just unpleasant, or they can be quite painful. The result is that the individual has trouble sleeping -- leading to a marked reduction in their quality of life and ability to function.
RLS is treated with drugs similar to Parkinson's drugs -- drugs that function as dopamine agonists. It is known that a rare side effect of Parkinson's…
purepedantry | February 14, 2007Cathy Young has an interesting column on the tension among libertarians between the desire to be tolerant about other people's lifestyles and personal convictions about those issues:
Within the libertarian milieu, there is a tension between political libertarians, whose chief concern is limiting and reversing the expansion of the state and its powers, and social or cultural libertarians, whose central interest is maximizing individual opportunities and freedom of choice.
For some political libertarians, the centralized government is so unquestionably the greatest enemy that they not only…
purepedantry | February 13, 2007Hi everyone.
Grand Rounds is up at Chronic Babe.
Grand Rounds is being hosted here next week on Tuesday. The theme will be Oscars-related, but I won't be giving preference to any particular type of medical piece. Just send me your very best stuff.
To submit, please send me an email with your post link and the name of your blog. Due to the typical volume of submissions, I cannot guarantee that everyone that is sent will end up in the final carnival but I will do my best.
Please get the submissions to me no later than 7 pm EST on Monday, February 19th.
My email address is jamesjyoung (at…
purepedantry | February 13, 2007I am not really that into online poker; I lack the patience to be truly great at poker.
However, I have several friends that swear by it, and we were all quite annoyed when Congress decided to attach a ban on transfers to online gambling companies in a rider to a port security bill last year. That was annoying government paternalism about something that is really none of their business. (Furthermore, the only reason online gambling was banned was because they don't have as good lobbyists as the brick-and-mortar gambling companies. Inadequately organized lobbyists shouldn't be a reason to…
purepedantry | February 13, 2007I'm sorry, but parents like this should be shot:
Helicopter parents -- so named because they hover over their children -- have reached the workplace. The same generation that turned parenting into a competitive sport, prepping 3-year-olds for preschool, then replacing the umbilical cord with a cellphone once they reached college, are pulling up their virtual Aeron chairs and "helping" them at the office.
Yes, we are still talking about a minority of parents. But a survey last year of 400 respondents by the career Web site Experience Inc. found that 25 percent said that their parents were…
purepedantry | February 12, 2007Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker was on the Colbert Report. Priceless. Videos under the fold:
Part 1
Part 2
purepedantry | February 12, 2007Take that PZ, I'm Magneto. What kind of supervillain are you?
Your results:You are Magneto
Magneto
64%
The Joker
63%
Apocalypse
63%
Mr. Freeze
56%
Dr. Doom
55%
Lex Luthor
50%
Riddler
49%
Green Goblin
44%
Venom
42%
Poison Ivy
35%
Kingpin
34%
Dark Phoenix
32%
Mystique
32%
Catwoman
31%
Two-Face
28%
Juggernaut
16%
You fear the persecution of those that are different or underprivileged so much that you are willing to fight and hurt others for your cause.
Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test
purepedantry | February 12, 2007Oh wow.
Oh wow.
This press release is simply astonishing. Maybe it is because it has been a long time -- and as a consequence I have a mind for dirty press releases. Maybe it is just because I quite generally have a dirty mind. However, this is the singularly most amazing press release ever to be released in the history of science. This is not hyperbole. Read for yourself:
In the context of sexual reproduction, natural selection is generally thought of as a pre-copulation mechanism. We are drawn to features of the human body that tell us our partner is healthy and will provide us a…
purepedantry | February 12, 2007In Memory of Sigmund Freud
by W.H. Auden
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,
of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.
Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
so many plausible young futures
with threats or flattery ask obedience,
but his wish was denied him: he…
purepedantry | February 8, 2007We have been talking about this paper in PNAS around the lab, so I thought I would share.
Hassabis et al, publishing in PNAS, have shown that patients with hippocampal damage lack the ability to imagine novel situations. This is a truly interesting finding, but it isn't why I want to talk about this paper. Actually, I want to talk about this paper because of how they explain this finding.
To tip my hand a little, Hassabis et al attribute this lack of novel mental imagery to a deficit in spatial context provided by the hippocampus. This would fit squarely in the body of thought that…
purepedantry | February 7, 2007"So I am a Libra. I enjoy science and blogging. I dislike dogs, people who talk in movies, and other people's children. I am looking for a woman who breathes regularly and is at least partially heterosexual." -- so speaketh the Speed-dater. (Actually, I have never been speed dating, but I have been on an insane number of first dates.)
Speed dating -- aside from being an absolutely ridiculous situation that you should laugh about with your friends when you get home -- offers an interesting experimental model for why people are attracted to one another. Researchers at Northwestern have…