Anisotropic Perspectives

Disturbing report from the NYT: Top Psychiatrist Didn’t Report Drug Makers’ Pay

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Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOid4jrCeFE

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Cool.
Philadelphia’s Monell Center sampled the air directly above basal cell carcinomas [using GC-MS -ed] and found it was different to similar samples from healthy skin.
…
[Another group -ed] has trained dogs to detect subtle changes in the odour of urine which could indicate bladder cancer, and is hoping to detect prostate and skin cancers the same [...]

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These are the three major reasons Olivia Judson gives for not trivializing evolution as an optional component of introductory biology.  It’s a great article, and I’d like to emphasize an additional point: it’s a powerful idea that just works.  Hence the excitement over comparative genomics.  By studying the process of evolution by natural selection on [...]

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Michael Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, prepared some disturbing remarks on the (not so bright) future of Medicare.
When I was born, [health care] was four percent of the economy. When my son was born it had doubled to eight percent, when my first Grandson was born two years ago, it had doubled again [...]

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From the NYT:
Increasing use of the scans, formally known as CT angiograms, is part of a much larger trend in American medicine. A faith in innovation, often driven by financial incentives, encourages American doctors and hospitals to adopt new technologies even without proof that they work better than older techniques. Patient advocacy groups and some [...]

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From the National Human Genome Research Institute, reported in the NYT…
Dr. Segre and colleagues report their discovery of the six tribes in a paper being published online on Friday in Genome Research. The research is part of the human microbiome project, microbiome meaning the entourage of all microbes that live in people.
The project is an [...]

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Some of the books are a little dated (in relative terms - the vast majority are from the last decade), but there’s an edition of Stryer Biochemistry, Genomes 2, Molecular Biology of the Cell, and Koonin’s Sequence-Evolution-Function.  Find these and more (complete with figures!) at the NCBI Bookshelf.

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VS Ramachandran discusses “imposter” mothers, paralyzed phantom limbs, and creative colorful crosswiring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2LwnaUA-k

 
Christopher deCharms demonstrates advances in real-time functional MRI.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdFJOcaVDYU

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Doctors are flooding into the Lone Star State after dramatic tort reform earlier this decade.  From the WSJ…

The result is an influx of doctors so great that recently the State Board of Medical Examiners couldn’t process all the new medical-license applications quickly enough. The board faced a backlog of 3,000 applications. To handle the extra [...]

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