retrospectacle | July 23, 2006Interesting. Many in the medical community are outraged that a doctor and two nurses are being charge in the mercy killings during Hurricane Katrina.
Dr. Ben deBoisblanc, director of critical care at Charity Hospital, said he and others are angry at the accusations against a doctor and nurses who risked their own safety, and provided care in a chaotic and frightening situation.
"This doctor and these nurses were heroes. They stayed behind of their own volition to care for desperately ill people. They had an opportunity to leave and chose not to," he said.
I certainly wondered how the medical…
retrospectacle | July 22, 2006This is a repost from my old blog, about a famous scientist, Dr. George Augustine, who came to UM to give a talk about LTP and LTD. Tho occasion was "NeuroDay," a seminar series where us Neurokids get to invite our favorite scientists to come talk to us about brain stuff. :)
The third and last speaker at NeuroDay was Dr. George Augustine, of Duke University Neurobiology in Durham, NC. His research is focused on how calcium ions regulate the release of neurotransmitters at synapses. The lab works in identifying vesicular proteins important for neurotransmitter release and the physiological…
retrospectacle | July 21, 2006
Alex is a 28-year-old African Grey parrot who lives in the lab of Irene Pepperberg, in Brandeis University, and is the eqivalent of a superstar in the bird world. Long ago, Dr. Pepperberg chose Alex at a pet store as neither an exceptional nor sub-par bird. Through the years, Dr. Pepperberg has engaged Alex in a complex form of communication, where, much like a parent teaching a child, Alex is taught the proper "name" for an object. Now, he can label more than 100 items, including seven colors, five shapes, counting up to six, and three categories (color, shape, material of an object). This…
retrospectacle | July 20, 2006This little app shows you, in graphical form, the time periods when your name was the most popular. If your name is Poindexter, prepare to be disappointed.
(Hat tip to darkman).
retrospectacle | July 20, 2006When Pepper (my African Grey parrot) was just a wee bird, I talked to him constantly. I was told by the bird breeder that not all Greys talked; even though their mimicry is famed, there's no guarantee that the bird will ever mutter a word. But, to my delight, at about one year old, Pepper began making sounds. These sounds were strange because they kinda sounded like the things that I was saying to him, but just barely. He was playing with the word, the syllables------he was babbling! This phase lasted about 2 months, after which he became much more proficient at repeating sounds and words.…
retrospectacle | July 20, 2006When Money Magazine releases its "Best Places to Live" issue, it usually makes for interesting reading. Ann Arbor made the top 25 (it was 25), although I'm feeling less than happy to be in Ann Arbor during this godforsaken Art Fair. But really, Tree Town is a great place to live and work.
The Top 10
1. Fort Collins, CO
2. Naperville, IL
3. Sugar Land, TX
4. Columbia/Ellicott City, MD
5. Cary, NC
6. Overland Park, KS
7. Scottsdale, AZ
8. Boise, ID
9. Fairfield, CT
10. Eden Prairie, MN
Also check out the skinniest cities, youngest cities, safest cities, and the cities with the best job growth.
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006"These boys and girls are not spare parts," he said of the children in the audience. "They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research. They remind us that we all begin our lives as a small collection of cells."
Yeah, so what? So does a tumor.
Bush said, "If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers would, for the first time in our history, be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos, and I'm not going to allow it."
We're already compelled to fund a war that has killed over 3,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. These are…
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006One veto, as promised.
I'm too disgusted to write anything else right now.
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006Imagine this:
You are a doctor at a hospital in New Orleans, and you've just heard that the worst hurricane to hit New Orleans in centuries is headed your way. Your hospital is completely unprepared for this event, and nurses, doctors, and staff are leaving in droves. The wind and rain whip the hospital, tree branches are breaking through the windows. The power goes out; those on life supporting machines are now supported by a generator. Then, the generator goes out. You watch patients suffocate and die, as the hospital halls are filled with panicked, frantic patients, family, and staff. As…
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006Recently the topic of Parkinson's has come up both here (in regards to more young people getting the disease) and at Neurotopia (who gave a great summary of a paper which suggested that chemicals in pesticides can contribute to Parkinson's symptoms). I want to keep the ball rolling on the topic by offering a silver lining: a promising new therapy for Parkinson's via neurogenesis (replacing or regenerating lost neurons). This post (beginning below the fold) was written by an expert on the dopaminergic system and a fellow Neuroscience PhD student here at the University of Michigan. We'll call…
retrospectacle | July 18, 2006The Senate voted in favor (63-37) of increasing federal funding to embryonic stem cell research, and the vote is now to Bush.
"The simple answer is he thinks murder's wrong," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "The president is not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something living and making it dead for the purposes of scientific research."
My opinion is this: holding up life-saving therapies is more "murderous" than deciding utilize fetal tissue that would be discarded anyway. I believe that Bush, and people who follow this line, are actually much more immoral than those who…
retrospectacle | July 18, 2006Phenomenal timing, seeing as the FDA recently decreed that smoked marijuana held no medical benefits, and was hazardous. This is just one more neon sign making me wonder why cigarettes, proven to cause cancer, are legal while marijuana, which has no cancer link, is stubbornly prosecuted.
CNN reports on a study conducted by UCLA which examined the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles lung cancer patients, 601 head and neck cancer patients, and 1040 people without cancer. They found no elevated risk of cancer, even in the heaviest of pot smokers. A 20-fold increase of lung cancer was found in people…
retrospectacle | July 17, 2006Yah know, maybe if he wasn't threatening to veto science iniatitives I might have given him a pass. But, things being what they are, I just had to let out a collective HA! for the entire blogosphere, at dear old Dubya's expense.
I would be referring to his recent little "slip-up" whilst conversing with Tony Blair regarding the Middle East at the G8 Conference, when he didn't think the microphone was on.
"See, the irony is what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit," Bush told Blair in a discussion before the Group of Eight leaders began their lunch.…
retrospectacle | July 17, 2006So, I was very intrigued by the little puzzle going on at the World's Fair. I was quite dubious that I would be able to crack it, but I'd like to propose a theory that may be atleast partially correct. If not, there's a lot of good coincidences.
Unifying theme? Things that occured in 1962.
The fish: In 1962 the US Toro (which is a name used for cowfish) made it's 11,000th dive while off Long Island
The cow: The 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was to John Cowdry Kendrew
Elvis: The movie depicted the Seattle World Fair which occured in 1962
The novel exerpt: The child suffered from polio---the…
retrospectacle | July 17, 2006
Physicians are beginning to use a novel therapy for treating aneurysms: the use of a platinum coil, which is threaded to the site of concern and seals off the potential rupture. (More, with pictures and info about aneurysms, under the fold.)
What is an Aneurysm?
Aneurysms among Americans are both quite prevalent and quite deadly. It describes a local dilation (ballooning or distortion) of a blood vessel, which is usually cause by a build up in pressure due to blockage. When this pressure builds up, the wall of the blood vessel is progressively weakened and the liklihood of bursting increases…
retrospectacle | July 17, 2006A short communication in the International Journal of Obesity caught my eye this morning. A research group from Cornell explored some seemingly-obvious questions: Do people eat food just because its there, and will they eat more if the food is close in proximity and unlimited in supply? And one not so obvious: Do we underestimate how much we eat when the food is closer (the idle munching effect)? (More below the fold!)
The team recorded the chocolate consuption of 40 adult secretaries for 4 weeks. They manipulated proximity by placing the chocolates on the desk of the participant or 2 meters…
retrospectacle | July 16, 2006I received my PADI certification when i was 14, although I haven't had much oppertunity to use it. I've dived a little off the coast of South Carolina and in the Florida Keys, and it was fantastic! Although, I've always wondered whether the repeated use of pressurized artificial air was a risk factor for increased lung disfunction.
But, a study by the German Naval Insitute has concluded that scuba divers, who breathe a mix of "artificial air" while underwater, do not have increased lung deterioation. Changes in lung function had been previously reported with repeated scuba diving, but…
retrospectacle | July 16, 2006University of Michigan geophysicist Shaopeng Huang has found that even layers deep in the Earth have felt the increased heat from global warming, terming the change "rocky fever."
"Not to feel global warming, one would need to hide beneath 600 feet of rocks," Huang said. "Although its causes are debatable, recent global warming is indisputable."
Huang was part of a 2000 study, cited in the National Research Council report on global warming, which showed that the 20th century was the warmest of the last five centuries. Now, the temperature increase has been found to permeate subsurface rock…
retrospectacle | July 15, 2006So, according to this CNN story, some European scientists found 400,000 year old DNA in a bear tooth which was found in a cave in Northern Spain.
Apparantly, is not too uncommon to be able to extract DNA from fossils, but older than 100,000 years hasn't yet been done, until now.
He said the find "pushed back the frontier" concerning the age of DNA that scientists could work with. "It means that it will be possible to subject a large number of extinct animals to DNA analysis," he said.
And then sequence it and clone us some prehistoric bears riiiiight??? Perhaps we could have Ancient Bear Vs…