Somebody send me a direct message via Twitter, asking me if he had missed any posts. Sorting his Google Reader feeds, he saw this blog was last updated October.
And he is right :(.
Just to assure you that this blog is not dead, but hibernating*, I would like to link to perhaps the BEST 404 message ever.
This 404 message aptly shows where you can turn to when you“Lost your sense of direction”at the ASRM (American Society for Reproductive Medicine) website.
Epidemiologists, people working in the EBM field and, above all, statisticians are said to have no sense of humor.*
Hilda Bastian is a clear exception to this rule.
I met Hilda a few years ago at a Cochrane colloquium. At that time she was working as a consumer advocate in Australia. Nowadays she is editor and curator of PubMed Health. According to her Twitter Bio (she tweets as @hildabast) she is (still) “Interested in effective communication as well as effective health care”. She also writes important articles, like “Seventy-Five Trials and Eleven Systematic Reviews a Day: How Will We Ever Keep Up? (PLOS 2010), reviewed at this blog.
Today I learned she also has a great creative talent in cartoon drawing, in the field of … yeah… EBM, epidemiology & statistics.
“Finding and aggressively treating non-symptomatic disease that would never have made people sick, inventing new conditions and re-defining the thresholds for old ones: will there be anyone healthy left at all?”
I invite you to go and visit Hilda’s blog “Statistically funny“(Commenting on the science of unbiased health research with cartoons) and to enjoy her cartoons, that are often inspired by recent publications in the field.
Bastian, H., Glasziou, P., & Chalmers, I. (2010). Seventy-Five Trials and Eleven Systematic Reviews a Day: How Will We Ever Keep Up? PLoS Medicine, 7 (9) DOI:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000326
Foursquare (4square) is a web and mobile application that allows registered users to connect with friends and update their location. Points are awarded for “checking in” at venues. The user with the most number of *days* with check-ins at a specific place within the past 60 days qualifies to become the mayor of that place.
To foster brand loyalty some businesses are offering specials for the mayor of the venues. Recently I received a USB-stick for becoming the major of a computer shop.
Today at Department X of our hospital, I saw this Special offer:
The World Cup Soccer 2010 started 2 weeks ago. For now I only follow the Dutch team live. But indirectly I follow many other matches via Twitter. It is very entertaining, especially if things go awry, like the way the English were crushed by the Germans today (1:4). This was partly due to the referee who ruled out a legitimate goal by Frank Lampard when it was still 1 : 1.
Below are some of the tweets in my timeline. I especially like @precordialthump’s comparison of the English knock-out with apoptosis.
@Precordialthump opens with the best Faulty Tower fragment: “Don’t mention the War”. I can’t resist to show the fragment here.
mariawoltersat least #eng will be spared the excruciating penalty shootout this time #brightside #schlaaaaand #fb27 Jun 2010 from mobile web
Herring1967I blame our 12th invisible player. Everyone keeps passing to him and then he fucks it up.27 Jun 2010 from web
TW_AdornoYour team qualified with ease under a Labour Govt and have struggled in every game under the Conservatives. How could this be?27 Jun 2010 from twidroid
thestephmerrittIs this happening because they’ve cut the defence budget? #ididafootballjoke27 Jun 2010 from web
precordialthumpThe England team’s performance turned out to be the World Cup football equivalent of apoptosis… well done, Germany.27 Jun 2010 from Echofon
You probably know the periodic table of elements. The table contains 118 confirmed elements, from 1 (H, hydrogen) to 118 (Uuo, Ununoctium).
In Wikipedia. you have a nice large periodic table with chemical symbols, that link to the Wikipedia pages on the individual elements (left).
As a chemist, David Bradley at Sciencebase must have been bored with it, because he designed an unusual version of the periodic table, where the chemical symbols will take you to his various accounts online rather than information about a given chemical. Quite a few elements remained and he invited other research bloggers to claim an element if your or your blog’s name fit in terms of initial letters. David started this morning and in about a few hours almost the entire table was filled.
I claimed Li (my surname), but that was already taken by David’s Linkedin account and he suggested that I should take La of Laikas. La is Lathanum.
Of course this can be hilarious. I tweeted to Andrew Spong that he would surely fit As (Arsenicum) -poisonous as you may know- and he replied he would rather choose absinth, which unfortunately isn’t an element.
There are still a few elements left. Thus if you would like your site highlighted as an element, let David know via Twitter, give him the link to your blog and an appropriate element.
This is how the table looks. You can go to the table here (with real links).
The original post is here
And if you don’t particularly care about this table, perhaps the following adaptation suits you better. It is still available via Amazon (click on the Figure).
This table was also found on David’s blog ( see here)
Ever had that? You ‘re giving a scientific lecture and you mispronounce one or a few words. Sometimes you know a word is hard to pronounce, but, knowing that, it even gets harder to pronounce the word correctly. For instance, I find it hard to pronounce certain gynecological and dermatological diseases.
Sometimes you don’t know that you mispronounce certain words. Perhaps because you never spoke the words out loud, just read the text. These words need not be very exotic.
Once it was my turn to lead the journal club at the genetics department. Afterwards the Professor, Gert Jan van Ommen, came to me and said: “It was a nice talk, but please never say “mature” in the way you say “nature” again!
Benchfly is a resource, initiated by the chemist Alan Marnett in 2009, dedicated to providing researchers with current protocols to support their lives both in and out of the lab. For instance by instructive videos.
One such video protocol is “how to send DNA”. Ingenious, but I wonder if it is legally permitted to send it abroad (customs). But who ever tried to send DNA samples styrofoam box hunts via FedEx will welcome this tip. Pity it doesn’t work with cell cultures….
For Friday Foolery a picked up this fragment from the science comedianBrian Malow. He performed in the session Science Laughs at Wonderfest 2009, The San Francisco Bay Area Festival of Science. The complete video can be viewed at Fora.tv (2009/11/08).
I like the virus/bacteria part, but it took a while for me to understand that ‘staff’ should be spelled as ‘staph’.
Apparently it is, at least according to a study published in the BMJ in 1993 [1].
This retrospective study comparing driving and shopping patterns and accidents shows that Friday 13th is unlucky for some. Despite that there were consistently and significantly fewer vehicles on the southern section of the M25 on Friday the 13th compared with Friday the 6th, the admissions due to transport accidents were significantly increased on Friday 13th (total 65 v 45; p < 0.05). Since the risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52%, staying at home is recommended by the authors.
In a related article (PubMed) in the Am J Psychiatry (2002), deaths from Finnish traffic accidents on Friday the 13th were compared with those on other Fridays. Here a difference was found between men and women. In men, the adjusted risk ratio for dying on Friday the 13th, compared with other Fridays, was 1.02, (no difference) but for women, it was 1.63. An estimated 38% of traffic deaths involving women on this day were attributable to Friday the 13th itself.
Therefore again this author concludes that Friday the 13th may be a dangerous day, but only for women. The author thinks this is largely because of anxiety from superstition. Although the risk of traffic deaths on this date could be reduced by one-third, the absolute gain would remain very small: only one death per 5 million person-days.
Other Finnish researchers reinvestigated this finding, but they also looked at the injury accident database, because this database contains much more data than the fatality database. They reasoned that if there was a Friday-the-13th effect by impaired psychic and psychomotor functioning due to more frequent anxiety among women, it should also appear in the number of injury crashes. They found no consistent evidence for females having more road traffic crashes on Fridays the 13th, based on deaths or road accident statistics. Still, since an effect of superstition related anxiety on accident risk can not be excluded, the authors conclude that people who are anxious of “Black Friday” may stay home, or at least avoid driving a car.
Well at least you now know what scientific research says about Friday the 13th, or uuh don’t you?
At least, females suffering from Paraskevidekatriaphobia or even Triskaidekaphobia should better stay at home. You know, just in case…
“X-rays” were in the news this week, at least there was an illuminating exposure on Twitter. Here are 6 stories, half serious and half not so serious.
[1] First, voters have picked the X-ray machine as the most important scientificinvention (objects in science, engineering, technology and medicine), in a poll to celebrate the centenary of the ScienceMuseum in London. As a matter of fact medical inventions were in the top three places in the poll (1. X-ray machines 2. Penicillin and 3. DNA double helix), ahead of the Apollo 10 capsule (no. 4) and the steam engine (8).
[2] Margaret Daalman came to hospital complaining of stomach ache – and one glance at her X-ray showed why: the 52-year-old woman’s stomach contained an entire canteen of cutlery. She had to go under the knife to remove the (78!) forks and spoons. (see fotos here) The woman told the doctors: ‘I don’t know why but I felt an urge to eat the silverware – I could not help myself.’ She was somewhat picky however, as she never ate knives.
The images were actually taken over 30 years ago, but they were published for the first time this week in a Dutch medical magazine. Yes the woman was Dutch. At least according to the Daily Mail…….
However, the actual story published as a case in Medisch Contact is somewhat different.They actually state below the article:
Mededeling redactie
Over deze casus is in de populaire media foutieve berichtgeving gaande. De in andere media opgevoerde ‘mw Daalmans’ heeft niets te maken met deze casus. Het betreft, in tegenstelling tot wat elders wordt beweerd ook geen casus van 30 jaar geleden.
Which means something like: in contrary to what has been stated by the popular press this case has nothing to do with Mrs Daalmans, nor did it happen 30 years ago.
In effect, the Daily Mail mentions both (?) Rotterdam and Sittard as towns where this should have taken place, but in Medisch Contact only Helmond was mentioned. The towns are far apart.
One wonders why, because the story is extraordinary enough.
[3] An obese man died after refusing an X-ray taken in a machine for zoo animals because he was too large for the hospital’s X-ray machine, the maximum capacity of most hospital machines being around 200 kilo. Later his wife told that the man felt too humiliated to go to the zoo.
Seen at the Loomof Carl Zimmer: using Play Doh, Sophia Tintori and Cassandra Extavour talk about multicellularity and the specialization of reproductive cells.
The video, made by the evolutionary biologist Casey Dunn, is from Creature Cast, a collaborative blog produced by members of the Dunn Lab at Brown University. The Dunn Lab investigates how evolution has produced a diversity of life. On this newly evoluted “Creature Cast” you can find short, original and good quality posts on zoology in the broad sense often with beautiful photos or videos. You can now subscribe to the CreatureCast video podcast through Brown University at iTunes U.
Work provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
Another example of a great post on Creature Cast is the Tale of two holes about why some animals have one hole and others two. Does the single hole in one-holed animals correspond to the mouth or anus of animals with two holes? Apparently the same sets of genes appear in many different contexts within and across species. In this case there are two distinct modules for mouth and blastopore (the first hole developed in animals during their development) and they can be decoupled. Again there is a terrific photo made by Dunn showing a sea anemone with a single hole for eating, excreting, and shedding eggs and sperm, and an annelid worm with two holes.
This is a Friday Foolery post, thus permit me to show me something completely different: a successful Play-Doh ad-campaign started in Singapore (what a coincidence, the city I left 26 h ago). These ads talk to parents directly, reminding them about the thousand of possible things you can make with the product, but even more so about how safe it is to play with it. (although someone commented: “what if kids eat those pills? Although Play-Doh is non-toxic…)
In the previous post I showed a map of the world made in 1689.
Here only half of North America was represented, because the world was “Europe-centered”.
The map was made in Amsterdam, Europe.
How different is the world according to Americans (source: Neil Bonginkosi Lawrence Taverner of the blog Other things amanzi on Facebook).
The Netherlands have even been submerged into the sea 😉
Countries and continents can also be extremely “big” or extremely “small” in real life. See the sometimes confronting representation “of the world as you never saw it at worldmapper.org. See for instance the world worldmapper age of death animation (CC).
At breathingearth.net you get a real life picture of CO2 emissions, birth rate & death rate simulation (no Figure, it is an animation).
This real-time simulation displays the CO2 emissions of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates.
Please remember that this real time simulation is just that: a simulation. Although the CO2 emission, birth rate and death rate data used in Breathing Earth comes from reputable sources, data that measures things on such a massive scale can never be 100% accurate. Please note however that the CO2 emission levels shown here are much more likely to be too low than they are to be too high.
I always found it difficult to think abstract. It was not until physics class at college, that I started to understand physics formulas, because our professor gave practical examples from real life, i.e. he made me understand why the sky was blue. Mathematics was all right as long as we stayed in two dimensions, but stereometry was already one dimension too much. Molecules, chemical bonds and atomic structure were also vague especially when wave-particle duality came into play. It was even hard to imagine what DNA really looks like. At one stage I even tried to make a DNA structure at home from matches and colored clay. But the model was so fragile, that it crashed before the first minor groove was finished.
Nowadays, students are so lucky: a computer, the internet, beautiful graphs, videos, 3D-animations.
Below a mixture of recent and some old animations and 3D representations, that highlight our understanding of numbers and dimensions, the infinite small and the infinite large.
First 3D image of an individual molecule and its bonds!
A real breakthrough was the visualization of the atomic backbone of an individual molecule (pentacene) and its atomic bonds. As reported in the August 28 issue of Science magazine, IBM Research Zurich scientists (in collaboration with Peter Liljeroth of Utrecht University), accomplished this by using an atomic force microsope (ATM) operated in an ultrahigh vacuum and at very low temperatures ( 268oC or 451oF). According to the researchers this is reminiscent of X-rays that pass through soft tissue to enable clear images of bones.
Below you see:
the chemical structure of pentacene with 22 carbon atoms (Wikipedia).
the force map image of pentacene (IBM).
a video-interview with the researchers explaining their research (IBM-Labs).
Now quite the opposite infinity: the universe: “what 100,000 nearby large (i.e., Milky Way sized and larger) galaxies, look like reduced each reduced to a point” (translation by @dreamingspires) or “will give you an idea how totally insignificant we are” (@scanman). These tweople referred to Etann Siegel’s blog “It starts with a bang”.
The astronomers came from all over the world (Australia, the UK, USA, South Africa, France and Japan). Their survey “will reveal not only where the galaxies are but also where they’re heading, how fast, and why. “It’s like taking a snapshot of wildebeest on the African plain. We can tell which waterholes they’re heading to, and how fast they’re travelling,” said D. Heath Jones of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO), lead scientist for the Six-Degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS)”
Dimensions
1, 2, 3 ….no here are 10 dimensions explained
but the 4th dimensions will do for me
Powers of 10
A classical video: the powers of ten. It dates from 1977. I have seen it during college and it made a lasting impression.
Powers of Ten explores the relative size of things from the microscopic to the cosmic. The 1977 film travels from an aerial view of a man in a Chicago park to the outer limits of the universe directly above him and back down into the microscopic world contained in the man’s hand.
There is even a website “powers of ten”. At the right you can click on a power of ten. Like 10 ¹³ and 10 -¹³
13
Measuring in meters, this power of ten is equal to 10 billion kilometers. We see the outer planets as they circulate counterclockwise, all in nearly the same plane.
Measuring in seconds, this power of ten equals
Space 10 billion kilometers
317, 097 years.
Unmanned Space Probes
Johannes Keppler
Space First Images Of Jupiter through Time
-13
Measuring in meters, this power of ten is equal to .1 picometer or 100 fermis. We see the kernel of a carbon atom, bound by six neutrons and six protons. This nucleus is dubbed carbon-12.
Measuring in seconds, this power of ten equals 100 femtoseconds.
Do you still need some help in mathematics? Here is a tip from a Dutch educator @trendmatcher: your free online 24/7 math help, meant to help high school students with their homework. (There is also non-free material)
And a Twitter visualization tool that shows about 11,000 “good morning” tweets over a 24 hour period, between August 20th and 21st. All tweets are color-coded: green blocks are early tweets, orange ones are around 9am, and red tweets are later in the morning. Black blocks are ‘out of time’ tweets which said “good morning” (or a non-english equivalent) at a strange time in the day. Seen at the blog of @zbdigitaal (Edwin) The original post and the video can be found here
Leo Gross, Fabian Mohn, Nikolaj Moll, Peter Liljeroth, and Gerhard Meyer. “The Chemical Structure of a Molecule Resolved by Atomic Force Microscopy.” Science, 28 August 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5944, pp. 1110 – 1114. DOI: 10.1126/science.1176210.
The 6dF Galaxy Survey: Final Data Release (DR3) and Southern Large Scale Structures
Jones D Heath., Read Mike A., Saunders Will., Colless Matthew., Jarrett Tom., Parker Quentin., Fairall Anthony., Mauch Thomas., Sadler Elaine., Watson Fred., Burton Donna., Campbell Lachlan., Cass Paul., Croom Scott., Dawe John., Fiegert Kristin., Frankcombe Leela., Hartley Malcolm., Huchra John., James Dionne., Kirby Emma., Lahav Ofer., Lucey John., Mamon Gary., Moore Lesa., Peterson Bruce., Prior Sayuri., Proust Dominique., Russell Ken., Safouris Vicky., Wakamatsu Ken-ichi., Westra Eduard., Williams Mary: 2009, submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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