Medicine
drorzel | October 28, 2009Some time back, commenter HI won a guest post by predicting the Nobel laureates in Medicine. He sent me the text a little while ago, and I've finally gotten around to posting it (things have been crazy around here):
Since Chad gave me the right to guest blog as a prize for correctly predicting the Nobel Prize winners, I thought it would be appropriate to write a post about the Nobel Prize. (It would have been more timely if I had written this sooner. This is why I'm not a real blogger.)
It was fun to be able to predict some of the Nobel Prize winners this year and last year. It is more…
drorzel | October 5, 2009The Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." Who's HI, you ask? HI is the commenter who picked Blackburn and Greider in the official Uncertain Principles betting pool.
Congratulations to Blackburn, Greider, and Szostak, who get to split about a million dollars. And Congratulations to HI, who gets the right to author two! guest posts on this blog. Send me an email from the address you left in the comment form, HI, and we'll get this set up.
drorzel | August 17, 2009Via I-no-longer-remember-who (the tab's been open for several days), there's a list of What You Might Not Know About Scientific Journals, outlining some of the facts about scientific publication. There's some good stuff, but as you can tell from my title, a lot of it is fairly specific to biomedical journals, and doesn't really apply in my usual context of physics. For example:
The most popular articles in a journal are reviews, editorials, letters, etc. and not research papers. Consequently, journals contain more narrative reviews than genuine research. It's what keeps them in business.
The…
drorzel | August 12, 2009Tobias Buckell had some heart issues a while back, and the stress of Worldcon aggravated things a bit:
By Sunday morning, I was feeling completely sapped, and not getting enough sleep. I tried to nap before the pre-Hugo ceremony, but felt like I'd hit a brick wall by the time I'd walked over. I had to duck out of the Hugo ceremony briefly to lay down. By the end of the night my pulse was racing a bit, so I went back to the hotel to sleep. When I woke up my pulse was even higher.
After checking it several times, I decided it was high enough that I would follow standing orders to check into an…
drorzel | August 7, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Alric, a veterinary pathologist at a drug company)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am toxicologic veterinary pathologist and work at a contract research organization. We use animal models to evaluate the…
drorzel | May 11, 2009A former student asks about water contamination:
My mother went and had
our water tested and discovered that we have high uranium and radon
levels. Radon is not a big deal, its a gas, and as I have read you would
need to take a shower for somewhere around 4 hours to suffer damage from
it. The Uranium is a different story. They are no government set minimums
set for Uranium, what is an appropriate amount of radiation for a year?
Also wouldn't Uranium pass through our bodies before it decayed? Also how
would I calculate how much Uranium would be dangerous, in a how many parts
per water?
I…
drorzel | May 11, 2009Everybody I know who has back problems swears up and down that sleeping on a really firm mattress is key. My father used to have a big plywood board under his side of the mattress, so that his side of the bed would be less soft (I think they have since bought a new mattress that is uniformly hard).
So, why is it that every time I sleep on a mattress that's firmer than the one we have here, my lower back locks up so badly that it's an hour before I can walk comfortably? And when I get back to our relatively soft bed, my back feels fine in the morning?
I suppose this could be some sort of grand…
drorzel | May 6, 2009I'm waiting for the toaster when the dog trots into the kitchen. "You should give me some bacon!" she says.
"Why is that?" I ask.
"To prevent swine flu!"
"Look, there's no chance that I'm going to get swine flu from eating pork products. I know you saw some people on the Internet saying that they're not eating pork because of the flu, but those people are idiots."
"Not you, silly," she says. "You should give me bacon so that I don't get swine flu."
"What are you talking about?" It's much too early in the morning for this sort of thing.
"It's like with the shots, at the Bad Place." She really…
drorzel | March 12, 2009There's a really good article from Martin Rees in the latest issue of Seed, on the scientific challenges that won't be affected by the LHC:
The LHC hasn't yet provided its first results, the much-anticipated answers to questions we've been asking for so long. But they should surely come in 2009, bringing us closer to understanding the bedrock nature of particles, space, and timeâ--âtoward a unified theory of the basic forces. This would push forward a program that started with Newton (who showed that the force that made the apple fall was same one holding the planets in orbit), and continued…
drorzel | March 12, 2009Inside Higher Ed has an article on grade inflation this morning, which reminds me of my improbable research theory.
Academic scolds are always talking about grade inflation, saying that the average grade years ago used to be lower than it is now. Medical scolds are always talking about the obesity epidemic, saying that average weights used to be lower than they are now.
Has anyone ever considered that the two might be related? That is, might it be that the grade points per pound has remained constant over the years?
Using some government reports on weight, and totally bias free GPA trends…
drorzel | February 20, 2009Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald has a response to the anti-vaccination movement, taking his cue from the Navy:
There's a manual that every Navy gunnery officer is required to read or re-read every year: OP 1014; Ordnance Safety Precautions: Their Origin and Necessity. It's a collection of stories about, and photographs of, spectacular accidents involving big guns and ammunition. Gun turrets that have fired on other gun turrets on the same ship. Holes in the coral where ammunition ships were formerly anchored. That sort of thing. It's simultaneously grim and fascinating.
Nowadays there's…
drorzel | January 22, 2009SteelyKid is now in day care five days a week. This is good for us, in that it lets Kate and I both go back to work full-time, and good for her, in that she gets to meet new people, and spend the whole day playing with interesting toys.
Of course, it has its bad sides, too. The norovirus that laid me and Kate out two weekends ago was something that is going around the day care center. And as I type this, I can hear SteelyKid upstairs coughing, with the cold virus that's also going around the day care center.
Whee!
drorzel | January 20, 2009SteelyKid was delivered by Caesarean section (MacDuff won't stand a chance...). They let me in to the operating room just before the moment of delivery, and I stuck around while they cleaned her up and did the early tests that they do on newborns, before they brought her over for me and Kate to see.
While we were waiting (and quietly rejoicing), the surgeons were going about the business of closing things up. I have an unholy aversion to all things medical, so I tried not to pay too much attention to what they were doing, but I gradually became aware of a pattern: one of the nurses would…
drorzel | November 7, 2008Looking over my scheduled posts for today, I see that there isn't anything stridently political. Not wanting to shock the systems of readers still coming down off the election, let me add my voice to the chorus of ScienceBloggers expressing concern over the idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
This is not a knock on his qualifications, or him as a person. As I understand it, he has done great work, and he spoke here a few years ago, and was very generous with his time considering he had a cold that made him sound like a duck.
The problem is, his…
drorzel | October 6, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was split three ways, with half going to Harald zur Hausen for the discovery that Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer. The other half is split between Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for the discovery of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV, and won't this make the denialists' heads explode?).
Clearly, finding a three-letter-acronym for your work is the key to Nobel glory.
Nobody had any of these names in this year's Nobel betting pool. The Physics prize announcement is tomorrow, so this is your last chance to claim…
drorzel | September 30, 2008The New York Times today has an article on scientific studies of "alternative" medicine. Quack-bashing isn't my usual line, but it seemed to me like there was a good bit of stuff that will torque Orac off. I couldn't help laughing at the final paragraph, though:
"In tight funding times, that's going to get worse," said Dr. Khalsa of Harvard, who is doing a clinical trial on whether yoga can fight insomnia. "It's a big problem. These grants are still very hard to get and the emphasis is still on conventional medicine, on the magic pill or procedure that's going to take away all these diseases…
drorzel | September 15, 2008As you might have guessed from yesterday's tease, the folks at ScienceDebate 2008 have now managed to get answers from the McCain campaign (to go with Obama's froma few weeks ago). Which means that while you may never see them answering science questions on a stage together, you can put them head-to-head on the Web, and see which you like better.
Of course, the key question regarding McCain's answers is "How long does it take him to mention elements of his biography?" The answer: There are 186 words before you get to:
I am uniquely qualified to lead our nation during this technological…
drorzel | August 19, 2008The New York Times today has an article about obesity, showcasing new studies that find weight isn't that important as an indicator of health:
Despite concerns about an obesity epidemic, there is growing evidence that our obsession about weight as a primary measure of health may be misguided.
Last week a report in The Archives of Internal Medicine compared weight and cardiovascular risk factors among a representative sample of more than 5,400 adults. The data suggest that half of overweight people and one-third of obese people are "metabolically healthy." That means that despite their excess…
drorzel | August 19, 2008Via a comment to an earlier post, here's an example of a journalist doing science right: NPR's Sarah Varney looks at "cleansing" foot pads, and finds them wanting.
She took a set of the pads, tried them out, and then brought used and new pads to a laboratory at Berkeley, where chemists studied the composition to see if the greyish black goo on the pad contained heavy metal toxins, as the ads claim. They didn't.
Then she tested an alternative hypothesis, that moisture and warmth cause the color change, by holding a clean pad over a pot of hot water. The pad turned black.
What she did wouldn't…
drorzel | July 14, 2008In a comment on the FutureBaby betting thread, Rivka writes:
(I'm laughing at all these people who are predicting early. The average gestation for a first time mother is 41 weeks, 1 day.)
Of course, as a physical scientist, my immediate reaction to that is "If they know that, then shouldn't that be figured into the projected delivery date?" It's not, though-- we can count up the weeks, and the projected date is at exactly forty weeks.
So why doesn't the projected delivery date reflect the average gestation time for a first-time mother? As someone who has taught pre-med physics, I have an…