Archive | September 2011
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A Gateway Activity? From Slot Machines to Speed
A visit to any casino will quickly demonstrate how vices clump together. At any hour of the day or night, many of the customers sitting intently in front of a slot machine will also be smoking cigarettes or drinking a cocktail. Sadly, addictions to these pursuits also tend to go hand in hand, with higher […]
A Fickle Pump and its Protons
Like a basement in a flood plain, a cell needs a good pump. Cells must maintain a particular mix of ions inside their membrane walls, with low concentrations of sodium and high concentrations of potassium. The only problem is that cells are leaky, and sodium constantly rushes into the cell while potassium rushes out. To […]
Rebuilding the Doctor-Patient Relationship
Medical students spend the first half of their education learning anatomy and physiology, and the second half applying that knowledge in the hospital. But where in that process do they learn the very important skill of listening and talking to their patients? In the panel discussion that followed yesterday’s announcement of The Bucksbaum Institute for […]
A Generous Gift to Improve Patient-Doctor Communication
In the physician’s office, the communication between doctor and patient can be just as important as any medical exam or test. To set a patient on a healthy path, a doctor must explain diseases and treatments in a manner that is accessible and relevant to each individual. The conversation must also be a two-way street, […]
Building a Better OCD Mouse
How do you know an animal model of a disease is really working? Researchers can create diseases such as cancer in a rat or mouse, but a tumor in a rodent may not behave the same way as a tumor in a human being. The challenge is even more difficult when scientists try to model […]
Lactose Tolerance in the Indian Dairyland
The ability to drink animal milk into adulthood is something that most of us take for granted. But lactose tolerance is a genetic marvel, an exclusive human trait facilitated by a genetic mutation that only appeared in the last 10,000 years. In fact, the persistent production of the enzyme lactase (which digests lactose) has been […]
Breast Cancer in Isolation
Loneliness can be deadly. In humans, there is a statistical relationship between social interaction and mortality – the more isolated you are, the lower your chances of living a long life. Rats kept in social isolation their entire life die at a younger age than littermates who lived in groups closer to their natural social […]
Machine Gunning the Cell’s Legos
Actin is the Lego of the cell. The small proteins can be assembled into many different forms for a wide variety of uses: serving as a scaffold to keep the cell’s shape, a railroad for shipping packages, or a powerful motor to propel the cell or tear it in half. But actin itself is a […]
Linkage 9/2: Counting Species, Ancient Drug Resistance, Sleep & Hypertension
Writing about science means looking up a lot of numbers. Trying to find a figure for the number of cells in the body or the protein-encoding genes in human DNA or patients diagnosed with ovarian cancer from 1980 through 1995 can eat up a lot of time and internet bandwidth. For some of these oft-cited […]
