Sabermetrics for Scientists
This post originally ran on the Computation Institute website. The last decade has seen a statistical revolution in sports, where new, smarter measures of player performance in baseball, football, or soccer are replacing more traditional stats. Often known as “sabermetrics” in tribute to the Society for American Baseball Research, advanced statistics such as VORP, BABIP, and […]
A Glassful of Grapefruit Juice Helps the Medicine
Like so many promising partnerships, it began with a mixed drink. In 1989, some pharmacists wanted to study the effects of alcohol consumption on a calcium-channel blocker. To mask the flavor of alcohol, they mixed it with grapefruit juice. The alcohol, they discovered, made no difference. Yet blood pressures plummeted and drug levels increased dramatically, […]
Artificial Sweetener: Tastes Great, But Unfulfilling
Modern life is a junk food paradise, with a multitude of options for sweet or salty satisfaction available at the corner store. But humans haven’t always lived in such resource-rich environments, and our brains evolved at a time when finding sufficient food was the preeminent struggle in life. That has led some scientists to propose […]
A Stem Cell Trojan Horse Against Brain Tumors
The medical playbook against tumors is typically a three-pronged approach: cut as much of the tumor out as possible, then attack it with radiation and chemotherapy drugs. But some tumors don’t make it easy. Brain tumors, for example, are difficult to extract without causing serious and permanent damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Whole brain radiation […]
LabBook July 27, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. The […]
The Organizational Clout to Fight Health Disparities
When it comes to the hard work of narrowing health disparities in the United States, the heavy lifting is most often done by those at the front lines of medicine. Clinics that treat underserved populations, researchers with ideas about how to improve health care access, or hospitals that support such programs are the primary forces […]
LabBook July 20, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THE […]
A New Dial on the Neuronal Mixing Board
On the cartoon version of a neuron, the dendrites are the bad hair day, the tentacles that sprout in every direction from the cell body or soma. Surrounding neurons make their connections onto these projections, releasing neurotransmitters that travel across the synapse to the receiving dendrites where they produce excitation or inhibition. Thousands of these […]
Building a New Marcus Welby To Cut Costs
Marcus Welby, M.D. was a popular TV drama that ran from 1969 to 1976. The titular character was a symbol of a traditional physician archetype that was already fading from reality — the cradle-to-grave general practitioner that took care of patients in the clinic, in the hospital and at their homes. In the very first […]
LabBook July 6, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
