Archive | January 2011
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The Bank Account for Childhood Sleep
It’s a fight all parents are familiar with: the nightly battle to get their children to bed. Kids will try almost any tactic to avoid being tucked in for the night, and even then have long found ways to delay sleep with under-the-cover flashlights. But the deficit of sleep for today’s children and the degree […]
Linkage 1/28: Dinosaurs, Nabokov’s Butterflies, and Virtual Surgery
While ScienceLife was away at the Science Online 2011 meeting two weeks ago, our friends in the University of Chicago News Office tried to sneak a dinosaur story past us. Eodromaeus, the “dawn runner,” is the latest edition to the dinosaur discovery menagerie of Paul Sereno, professor of organismal biology and anatomy, discovered in the […]
Measuring Discrimination…with 9/11
It is widely acknowledged that racial or ethnic discrimination can negatively affect a person’s health. But how can a scientist measure this impact? The treatment that a person encounters due to the color of their skin, their language, or their country of origin is likely a chronic stimulus, encountered over their entire life rather than […]
MacLean Center Ethics Seminar Videos: The First Batch
Since late September, ScienceLife has been posting near-weekly recaps of the annual Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series. The topic for this academic year, “Health Disparities: Local, National, Global” (pdf), has brought together an all-star cast of physicians, biologists, economists, social scientists and other experts to present research on some of the biggest […]
Rockin’ Ears to Reconstruct Them
When you think of a medical instrument, you usually think of a scalpel or forceps. But nine employees of the Medical Center are also proficient in instruments of a musical nature, and are putting those side talents to use for a good cause this weekend. For the last 11 years, plastic surgeon David Song has […]
How Soccer Explains the NICU
At many levels of medicine, it’s important for physicians to make predictions about their patient’s future. Will their disease or condition worsen? Will this treatment or that treatment be more effective in curing them? How much longer does a patient have to live? Such decisions are especially important for pediatricians in the NICU, the neonatal […]
Linkage 1/21: Science Online, Kinect Surgery, & More
Last weekend, I was one of the fortunate 300 who gathered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina for the 2011 edition of Science Online. The simplest way to describe Science Online is as a science blogging conference, but the real topic on the table was the broad future of science communication, be it through blogs, […]
The Off-Label Antipsychotic Surge
If you watch enough football games, you might come away with the impression that today’s most profitable drugs are for erectile dysfunction, cholesterol, and allergies. But far less public attention is paid to one of the most expensive classes of drugs : the antipsychotics, drugs designed to treat certain mental disorders. From 1995 to 2006, […]
Using Fear to Flirt: The “Scary Movie Effect”
The Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies aren’t typically thought of as mating strategies. But putting on a scary movie is a trick as old as drive-in theaters for encouraging one’s date to jump in fright and snuggle in just a little bit closer. Birds, so far as we know, aren’t into […]
Sickle Cell on the Football Field
In 2006, Rice University football player Dale Lloyd II collapsed during a practice and later died. The cause of death was acute exertional rhabdomyolysis, a sudden breakdown of muscle tissue into the blood brought on by strenuous exercise. But the trigger for Lloyd’s death may have been sickle cell trait, the name for when a […]
