Category: Medicine

  • academia.edu

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    Sam
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    A database of all the academics in the world? I think that’s the aim of this website: academia.edu

  • Paracetamol & asthma?

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    Sam
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    Beasley et al. are reporting in the Lancet a link between paracetamol use and the onset of asthma after studying 205,487 children aged 6–7. Use of paracetamol for fever in babies was linked to a dose-dependent increase in the risk of developing asthma symptoms by the age of 6-7. The link doesn’t necessarily mean that…

  • Don’t Die Young

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    Sam
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    I’ve been watching a little of Alice Roberts’ BBC TV series, “Don’t Die Young”. Dr Roberts is an anatomist based at the University of Bristol, and has been heavily involved in publicising science. (Is that a term I just imagined? I mean to engage the public in science). You’ll have seen her on the Coast…

  • Could water really have a memory?

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    Sam
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    The BBC have written an article on their webpages reminding us why we have to be careful scientists when we interpret our data, and why we use double blind testing. The article talks about a scientist named Jacques Benveniste, who was trying to understand homeopathy in the late 80’s. His data was published in Nature,…

  • Apple’s App Store for iPhone & iPod Touch

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    Sam
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    The App Store in Apple’s iTunes application has gone live today, and there are lots of very nice things in there. The free remote application is very nice, allowing you to control your computer or Apple TV from a distance. This might be something else I can fox students with in lectures. One application we’ve…

  • Podcasts

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    Sam
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    The server space I use to host my podcasts is being flaky again, so you’ve probably been having difficulties playing them directly from this website or with downloading using iTunes. The server is a free service that is much abused by the large numbers of you that download gigabytes of audio and video data every…

  • Evolution caught in the act?

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    Sam
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    A 20 year experiment appears to have observed the chance development of an evolutionary innovation. 12 populations of E. Coli, derived from a single bacterium, have been cultured separately and observed. Sometime around the 31,500th generation of just one population the bacteria became able to metabolise the citrate in their culture medium. E. coli cannot…

  • Video podcast

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    Sam
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    Rhi and I are adding video podcasts to the embryology stream on iTunes. They’re teaching core bits of anatomy, instead of embryology, and we start off going over some of the anatomical triangles of the neck in paint. They’re in .m4v format at the moment (MPEG4). I haven’t decided how to put them on this…

  • The future of prosthetics?

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    Sam
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    Take a look at Dean Kamen’s new prosthetic arm he and his team have invented. It’s a robot arm that replicates the movements allowed by the shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand, and is controlled via the user’s muscles elsewhere in the body. Guess why it was nicknamed “Luke”. Wired article.

  • Scientists image a single HIV particle being born

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    Sam
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    Freakin’ wow. Scientists from Rockerfeller University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center have imaged, in real time, molecules coming together to form an HIV particle. As a cell biologist used to working with bright-field and dark-field microscopes that is trying to get his head around the idea of nanomedicine, that’s just freakin’ wow. From…