Archive by date | March 2008

Ten years of Viagra

Ten years of Viagra

Today is the 10th anniversary of the FDA’s approval of sildenafil nitrate for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. A decade and over 30 million users later, there’s very little left to say about Viagra that hasn’t been said before. Maybe that’s why the media coverage of the anniversary has been somewhat modest. I nevertheless found this pretty neat graphic in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. It’s, of course, in Spanish, but I hope you get the gist of it.  Read more

Scientific discrimination

I’m in the middle of preparing a talk that I’m scheduled to give in Madrid in a few days. The talk is called “Myths and realities of publishing in the Nature journals”, and its goal, at least in part, is to dispel the myth that our journals discriminate against, say, Spanish-speaking countries or developing nations, and that we favor countries like the USA and Britain.  Read more

Thin and happy

Thin and happy

A lot has been said about the link between calorie restriction and aging — eat less, live longer. But if that wasn’t enough, there seems to be a new reason to do away with snacking: calorie restriction has an anti-depressant effect in mice, which depends on orexin-mediated signaling.  Read more

Gene associations galore

Gene associations galore

This week’s issue of JAMA struck me as pretty interesting. They normally publish stuff that’s too clinical or epidemiological for my taste and in comparison to what we publish, but this time they had a themed issue on genomics with four articles reporting associations between gene variants and diseases of different systems.  Read more