News

The Economist has an article about "Health 2.0". They discuss online forums for discussion of health issues.

Talk about a cure for head-nodding and auditorium slobber. How many people do you know that need to add a little Pecha Kucha to their presentations? I challenge all of you out there, next time you are up for a 45-min presentation, pull the "PK" card and then spend the remaining 38:20 minutes trying to actually have a little meaningful discussion.

A great new data visualization java-based web tool has been developed (parntership between IBM and Lenovo) called many eyes. It has a very user friendly interface and can produce some spectacular "visualizations." It is free but what do they ask in return? This is the best part, they require all datasets to be "publicly viewable by everyone." Of course, they obviously have commercial ambitions, but this open source data concept is leading by example. Who knows, maybe sites like these will ulitmately morph into scientific journals. I would propose that Jeffsbench add manyeyes-like functio

Zotero is a new extension for Firefox that looks like a great new challenger to EndNote. It is a free, open-source, platform-independent reference mananger that looks like it has a lot of great features. I haven't played around with it much yet, but when I do I will post a review in the blog section. I'd be interested to hear an opinion from anyone who has tried it.

Student finds 5000 year old chewing gum that may have been just the thing for those rotting, festering, purulent gums that come with never brushing your teeth. A little phenol probably did the trick and quite possibly came with bonus buzz. Nice field work.

Big tech players are starting a big push into healthcare. It may take some time, but overall this is a very good outcome for patients.

Funny blog post about people "borrowing" reagents in the lab during grad school. My favorite experience with this was discovering that the "lab stock" of protease inhibitors was actually a post doc's private stock. This was discovered after I asked her if I could borrow some since the lab stock was gone. She promptly went to the same box I had been looking in (and taking from) and found that it was gone. My famous last words were, "Oops, I thought that was the lab stock......."

This is an interesting editorial in Nature about performance enhancing drugs in sports. They basically comment that maybe it would be better if they just let athletes use performance enhancing drugs. I have brought this up a few times as well just to get a rise out of people, but the author makes some valid points. The idea does bring to mind the old Saturday Night Live sketch, the All Drug Olympics.

This link references quite a few studies about intelligence and sex. In short, smart and dumb people have less sex. The article discusses the possible reasons, both obvious and not so obvious.

On another note, the NY Times has an article about 237 reasons to have sex.

This is great news! I don't need to diet, I can just hang out with skinny people. Curtis has volunteered for anyone in need of skinny friends.