Archive | August 2009
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Living-Donor Liver Transplant Pt. 1
(See parts Two and Three) Twenty years ago this November, the first living-donor liver transplant was performed at the University of Chicago Hospital, transferring a portion of the organ from Teresa Smith to her 9-month-old daughter, Alyssa. In October, the team of surgeons (led by Dr. Christopher Broelsch), pediatricians and ethicists who collaborated on that […]
Linkage: Financial Hormones, Sugar Pill Therapy and a Suicidal Planet
Hormones: The New Economy Fall Guy It might be just a coincidence, but as the market has reeled over the last few years there have been more and more scientific studies looking at one potential source of blame for dangerously risky financial behavior: our hormones. A study published in 2008 (that I wrote about with […]
Nano-Treatment for Brain Tumors
(Note: This article was corrected on 12/9/09 – previously, it said that the nanoparticles were activated by UV light, but the TiO2 particles are actually modified to be activated using normal, visible light. Also, the light exposure time was only 5 minutes, not 6 hours as previously reported in the text.) As reported everywhere today, […]
Ecstasy and the Neurobiology of Social Behavior
Have you heard of 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine? Maybe its acronym MDMA? Or perhaps its more common street name, ecstasy? Though it’s a drug that has been used recreationally for decades, long enough to be the inspiration for books and songs, ecstasy remains scientifically mysterious, with most of the research focusing on harmful long-term effects to users’ brains. […]
Linkage 8.21: Track Science, Swine Flu Priorites, and Dark Brain Matter
Track Meet Becomes Scientific Conference The World Track & Field Championships being held this week in Berlin has been in the headlines a lot in the United States, which is unusual for a non-Olympics year. But there’s been a mix of the awesome and the odd from the meet which has generated a slew of […]
Nail-gun narcolepsy nabbed by neuroscience
First of all: OUCH. The rather painful X-ray to the left was taken from a 48-year-old patient who, it should be said immediately, survived his unfortunate encounter with a nail-gun and its 6-inch long projectile. But it’s what happened after the nail’s removal that merited the publication of this photograph in the medical journal The […]
Last Night a Bee Gee Saved My Life
The committee members who make up the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine each year might want to start listing an unlikely trio of medical researchers: The Brothers Gibb, otherwise known as The Bee Gees. Last fall, David Matlock, a medical resident with the University of Illinois School of Medicine presented a […]
Lilly’s Law: A Diabetes Registry for Illinois
Three years ago, University of Chicago Medical Center physicians spotted an unusual genetic mutation in 6-year-old Lilly Jaffe – a finding that meant the girl could switch from painful insulin injections to pills as a means of controlling her Type I diabetes. Last Friday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a state bill bearing Lilly’s name, […]
Hockey, Language and the Brain
If you had to pick a group of researchers who would be interested in hockey, you’d probably first think of dentists, not psychologists. Certainly you wouldn’t consider hockey players an ideal subject pool for mapping the brain’s language pathways, unless you were uniquely interested in the comprehension of French-Canadian slurs. But hockey players and their […]
Linkage 8.13: Particle Raps, Lucky Mutants and Twitter Psychology
Our weekly roundup of interesting science from around the web: Where the Higgs At? A Particle Accelerator Rap Battle CERN’s gigantic new Large Hadron Collider had a somewhat tough week, with New York Times reporter James Glantz comparing the $4 billion particle accelerator to an unfinished Mayan pyramid, “another grandiose structure with cosmic aspirations and […]
