There have been many anecdotes to suggest that observations or thoughts of itchiness make people feel itchy themselves. For instance, it can be quite hard for medical students to sit through dermatology classes without engaging in scratching at some point! However a new study published in PNAS this month explores this systematically for the first time and provides the first evidence for the neural basis of socially contagious itch. It also considers why some people may be more prone to it than others.
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Moumita Chaki (inset and standing top left with her UMMS group) says postdocs must look out for robust funding while choosing a lab.
Life at University of Michigan Medical School
The best thing about my lab is the funding and the easy availability of resources. This is considered as a highly favourable situation anywhere in USA, as here funding is the key. Being in a premier university, we get introduced to new products are services readily after they launch and our central core facility is also very diverse and rich.
However, if one is looking for independent funding as a postdoctoral trainee, being an international candidate limits the availability of the funding sources. In our university, being a visa-holder, we can’t apply for Institutional funding since that is limited to the US citizens and permanent residents.
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Nutrition researcher censured over serial misconduct
But zooming in on two blots from one figure in a 2002 paper (pictured below) from the Journal of Biological Chemstry, volume 277, pages 4925-31, reveals tell-tale noise patterns that may well betray the images’ common origin.
It is just one of 45 figures that the ORI says was fabricated by Smart in 10 papers, 7 grant applications, 1 submitted manuscript and 4 grant progress reports he prepared while on the faculty at the University of Kentucky(UKY) in Lexington. The office has recommended the papers be corrected or retracted.
Continue to Eugenie’s post to find out more.
Particle physicists confirm arrow of time — for B mesons
{credit}SLAC NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY{/credit}
Theoretical physicists at the University of Valencia in Spain worked with researchers on BaBar to exploit the fact that the experiment had generated entangled quantum states of the meson B-zero and its antimatter counterpart B-zero-bar, which then evolved through several different decay chains. By comparing the rates of decay in chains in which one type of decay happened before another with others in which the order was reversed, the researchers were able to compare processes that were effectively time reversed versions of each other. They report in Physical Review Letters today that they see a violation of time reversal at an extremely high level of statistical significance.
“It was important to measure time reversal independently of charge-parity violation because there was always the possibility something was wrong with the full picture,” says Fabio Anulli of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Rome, who is physics coordinator for BaBar.
More details can be found in the post and in the growing comment thread.
The Disposable Dilemma
Scitable blogger, Whitney Campbell talks about the “The Disposable Dilemma” and looks at the future impact disposable goods may have:
Now, we have medically important single-use products, such as surgical scissors and nitrile gloves, that eliminate exposures and save lives. But we also have things like disposable sunglasses, cutting boards, and French-press coffee lids, which may make some daily tasks easier, but which also exert an increased pressure on waste management systems. Last month, Paige Brown and other bloggers at Student Voices addressed these issues during their #30DayGreen challenge, in which they chronicled their commitment to recycling and green consumerism. In addition to their insights, I would like to mention a group of objects that sometimes may seem disposable, but should never be treated as such: electronic and digital devices.
You can continue to her post to find out more.
Motor Neuron Disease
So why did my Dad also inspire an irrational hatred of neurons? Because fourteen years ago today, on a freezing, dark, miserable day in November, my Dad died, two years after being diagnosed with a form of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) called Progressive Muscular Atrophy. MND is an odd sort of disease, because although it is (thankfully) relatively rare (with an incidence of about 2 in every 100,000 people), because of people like Professor Stephen Hawking, the American baseball player Lou Gehrig, or the book Tuesdays with Morrie, quite a large proportion of people have probably heard of it. Progressive Muscular Atrophy (PMA) is a very rare variant of the disease, accounting for about 4% of the total number of MND diagnoses. It’s important to get the diagnosis right with different sorts of MND, because the prognosis is better in some cases than in others – for example, the 5-year survival rate for PMA is 33%, compared with 20% for the more common form called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).
