Archive | September 2009
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An Award for Your Inner Fish
Whenever I see a drawing of Tiktaalik like the one above, I always think “Man, that walking fish sure looks snooty.” But Tiktaalik roseae, discovered in 2004 by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin and his team in the Canadian Arctic, is worthy of its haughty air. For one thing, the “fishapod” had a […]
Stubbing Out Cigarettes at the Hospital
Convincing people to stop smoking is no easy task, as family members or friends of smokers know all too well. But consider a situation where roughly three-quarters of active smokers find themselves ready to quit, willing to make that all-important first step of deciding to go smoke-free. When is this short window of vulnerability and […]
Shaving Your Head for Science
A researcher will do a lot for grant money, the fuel necessary to power a laboratory’s work. Sam Volchenboum, a pediatric oncologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center, took that adage to its follicular extreme last week, volunteering to go bald for funds from the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. St. Baldrick’s, a California-based organization which […]
Linkage 9/25: Good News, Full Moons and Butterfly GPS
Rare Encouraging News in HIV and Parkinson’s Disease HIV/AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease are two areas of medical research where good news is hard to come by, as researchers encounter countless setbacks in trying to translate promising laboratory findings into clinical practice. Both diseases have seen progress in the past decade in ex post facto treatments […]
Breast Cancer & “The Good Life”
On Monday we previewed Dr. Funmi Olopade’s public lecture at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago titled “Nature, Nurture and Breast Cancer.” For that post, I talked about some recent work from Olopade’s research group that compared the types of breast tumors found in West African women with the tumors seen most often in […]
Late Linkage: Futurity
I apologize for the lack of a Linkage post last Friday – instead of blogging, your editors were learning about Chicago’s downtown architecture as we floated along the green if not Green Chicago River on one of summer’s final days. But like the reversed flow of that waterway, the science never stops, and last week […]
A Transatlantic Breast Cancer Mystery
A fact often lost in the charity walks and commercials that have dramatically raised awareness of breast cancer over the past two decades is that beneath the diagnostic umbrella of “breast cancer” are numerous types of tumors. Other than the fact that all of these tumors are found in breast tissue, different forms of breast […]
Better Health Through Soda Pop Tax
Whether you call it pop, soda, a soft drink or lower-case coke, sugary, carbonated beverages have become a staple of the American diet. And as we all know, the American diet is not exactly the healthiest. So with obesity racking up an estimated $150 billion a year in health care costs – which, as you […]
Nature Modeled by Google, Not Facebook
Ecologists drifted long ago from the simplistic model of the food chain to food webs, intricate, multi-tendril interactions between species that paint a more accurate picture of an ecosystem’s network. But, as with most sciences, as the models become more complex, so too does the analysis required to answer questions about the role each animal […]
Why Patrick Swayze’s Cancer Was So Hard to Treat
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, actor Patrick Swayze died yesterday at age 57 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. In March, blog founder Jeremy Manier interviewed University of Chicago Medical Center physician Dr. Irving Waxman about pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest and hardest to treat cancers. The challenge, as Waxman explains, is […]
