health
bioephemera | May 19, 2010Der Mensch als Industriepalast [Man as Industrial Palace] from Henning Lederer on Vimeo.
So awesome! Fritz Kahn's poster reimagined as an animation by Henning Lederer. Via Bora.
gregladen | May 19, 2010SciCurious has written a review of an interesting paper suggesting a correlation between obesity and city vs. non-city life. As usual, the review by Sci is excellent, but I have a comment or two to add.
Having read the review and then the paper, I had to ask if it might be possible to conclude based on the data presentation that "race" (and thus "genetics") underlies the observed effect. This is because of this graph:
The results as depicted here divides the population into black vs white, making it appear that skin color is a major factor. The paper does not make that specific argument…
bioephemera | May 16, 2010
Cornelia Hesse-Honegger's beautiful book Heteroptera is one of my most treasured natural illustration collections. Unfortunately, it seems to be out of print now, but Wired recently compiled a gallery of her work, and I highly recommend a visit.
The subtle and not-so-subtle asymmetries on Hesse-Honegger's specimens, like the cyst-eyed cicada above, are latently sinister: these are insects collected near Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, nuclear plants, and sites downwind of nuclear test grounds. Are the defects Hesse-Honegger catalogs a telltale sign of environmental contamination? Or is she…
gregladen | April 28, 2010If you do not enjoy medical photographs, do not look below the fold.
As some of you will recall, a couple of weeks into this knee-damage shtick, I was munching on a dried prune and a molar came clean off it's root on my lower left mandible. It turned out to be a crown that had lost its nail, as it were, and was deposed. Following this, there was a period of uncertainty and confusion which finally led to today, when Dr. Spanish, Amanda's family dentist, started the process of tooth implantation. The roots of this tooth were too far gone to allow a new crown, and the choices were between…
gregladen | April 25, 2010First, let's get this straight. I'm all for anti-science anti-vaxer right wingers not being vaccinated, as long as a) we take their children away from them (and vaccinate the poor dears) and b) isolate the adult anti-vaxers from the rest of the species, perhaps in Texas. But in the meantime, let's look at the latest bit of (mis)information from the utterly insane side of our society. If nothing else, this story may serve to remind us all what we are fighting about.... not the attitude of this or that skeptics, or which movements should or should not be engaged in chopping the pope down to…
gregladen | April 24, 2010Men circumcised at birth saying that they prefer being circumcised makes as much sense as a man deaf in one ear extolling the virtues of monophonic sound.
That is a quote from one of many interesting comments on the equally interesting article Is male circumcision a humanitarian act? by Jesse Bering. Worth a look.
Bering concludes on the basis of a couple of very preliminary studies that show large effects in terms of percentage but small effects in terms of hazard, in a dynamically changing situation, supporting circumcision to mitigate against HIV infection risks. Bering has…
pronald | April 20, 2010For a short 5 minute tour of Bill Gates tackling the controversy of GE crops, please see the blog ERV. Thanks for the plug ERV
If you have 45 minutes, watch the entire video here. Bill is serious, sincere and a good speaker with important concepts to convey:
The video starts about 11 minutes in.
bioephemera | April 20, 2010That's what I said - you can print skin. Not print on skin, print the skin itself, cell layer by layer. Bioprinting custom skin grafts means you can customize a graft's depth to treat severe burns - using the patient's own cells to avoid rejection.
Kudos to whomever came up with this idea. Seriously: this is bio-DIY to the max. Wow!
Via Armed With Science.
Update: Jason at the Thoughtful Animal just sent me a 2008 minireview on this process by Henmi et al, "New approaches for tissue engineering: three dimensional cell patterning using inkjet technology." It appears to have been sponsored…
gregladen | April 19, 2010Are you going to be finishing all of that mastodon meat?
Cost of Modern Medicine, Insurance Reform, and Death in the Paleolithic
Two months ago, I fell on the ice, was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, got emergency surgery, and two/three days later was released from the hospital. The paperwork I waas handed on my release indicated that the costs to that point were $20,000 US (all covered). I estimate that this injury will cost, medically speaking only, about another ten grand, so the total cost of this injury is going to be, let's say, $30,000.
A few weeks later, a tooth crown that I…
gregladen | April 18, 2010It has long been thought that there are linkages between certain viruses and the weather. The flu season is winter (in whichever hemisphere it happens to be winter in) for reasons having to do with the seasons. One early theory posited that the practices of East Asian farmers, as they tended their animals, caused waterfowl and swine and humans to share space closely enough that nasty new influenzas would emerge and spread around the world. Although that explanation for the annual seasonal flu has been dropped (if it ever really had wings... or hooves, or whatever) it is still possible…
bioephemera | April 10, 2010Skeptvet has created a pithy, albeit cynical, table summarizing what scientists write, what it really means, and what the public thinks it means. I've clipped a little bit of it here, but go to Skeptvet for the whole thing. Nice work!
bioephemera | April 9, 2010
A very cool addition to the NLM "Turning the Pages" virtual library, which I blogged about back in December: the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus. You literally click and drag to unroll the papyrus, and then toggle the annotations on or off. While it doesn't have the pretty pictures that some of their other virtual manuscripts do (like Robert Hooke's Micrographia), it's pretty cool to unroll the world's oldest surviving surgical text, written in Egyptian script circa the 17th century BC.
(Alas, while my first instinct was "This would look so cool on the iPad," the website's in flash. Boo.)
bioephemera | April 8, 2010
While I was guest-posting over at Collective Imagination last month, I suggested that while better public access to peer reviewed research articles is a priority for the scientific community, knocking down firewalls may not be sufficient to help many patients, who lack the scientific background to plow through a Nature article. To get there, we may need efforts to provide plain language, accessible, searchable summaries of the research that clearly signpost the articles' relevance to patient needs. In addition to many interesting comments on the post, I got an email from the people behind…
bioephemera | April 4, 2010Here's a pretty little visualization by Hybrid Medical Animation: a demo reel of clips portraying various physiological processes and medical devices in action, in various styles of animation:
hybrid 2010 reel from hybrid medical animation on Vimeo.
One of my frustrations with medical animations is that they're a Disneyfied look at the body. Real biology is dirty, sticky, unpredictable, and a little dangerous - kind of like Times Square used to be. But in medical animations the body is always a minimalist, sterile Kubrickian utopia, usually in Pottery Barn colors, where pretty little…
grrlscientist | April 1, 2010tags: marshmallow peeps, Optometry Peeps, eyecare, easter, humor, funny, silly, health, streaming video
This is an amusing and creative video of Marshmallow Peeps Bunnies having an eye exam.
bioephemera | March 28, 2010Doesn't that title sound weird - like an experimental film? It may help to know that House of Sweden is Sweden's embassy in Washington, DC - a lovely glass building on the Potomac. If you're in the DC area, you should get on their mailing list, because they host interesting science-related panel discussions and receptions. Yesterday, they opened a new exhibit - the Virtual Autopsy Table. It's a touch-screen tabletop that lets you slice into, rotate, and magnify an MRI-based 3D representation of the human body, all with a brush of a hand:
The Virtual Autopsy Table from Norrkö…
bioephemera | March 22, 2010
Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments: Cystic Acne, Back
Lauren Kalman, 2009
Metalsmith and mixed-media artist Lauren Kalman explores the nexus of body, adornment, and disease in her remarkable series "Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments". Yes, those faux-diseases are actually piercing the skin - but only temporarily: they're gold acupuncture wires modified into jewelry by the artist. The temporary/permanent nature of the piercings echoes the temporary visibility of the diseases she depicts, like syphilis and herpes, which eventually clear…
pjaniszewski | March 19, 2010
That's right - contrary to what many religiously believe, it is the inability to grow more fat during times of energy surpluss, rather than the excess of fat which appears to directly contribute to the metabolic consequence often associated with obesity.
A recent article in the New Scientist shines some light on this issue;
Obesity kills, everyone knows that. But is it possible that we've been looking at the problem in the wrong way? It seems getting fatter may be part of your body's defense against the worst effects of unhealthy eating, rather than their direct cause.
While the article…
bioephemera | March 18, 2010Hi everyone,
I'm officially back from blogcation this week, so thanks for hanging in there while I was (mostly) off the grid! For the next couple of weeks, I'll be slowly wading through the emails and links I got during over the last few weeks.
Plus, I'll not only be posting at BioE, I'll also be contributing over at Collective Imagination, which is focusing this month on technology and personal health, including data visualization and e-health. (These are big interests of mine that I occasionally touch on here at BioE, but are a squarer fit over at CI.) Please pop over and see what you…
omnibrain | March 16, 2010It seems that if you eat on a full brain you are more likely to make poor eating decisions.
So here's the schtick via Weighty Matters:
Simple experimental design. Take 165 undergraduate students and enroll them in a study you tell them is about memory and where as part of their reward for inclusion, they'll be given a snack. Ask half of them to memorize a 2 digit number and the other half a 7 digit number and once they've memorized their numbers ask them to go into a second room where they are faced with their snack choice - either a piece of chocolate cake or a cup of fruit salad. Track…