Brain
A warm welcome to Tej Nishtala whose new blog, Forscher’s perspective, began on Nature Network this week. Tej is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Greifswald, Germany and his scientific pursuits include proteomics, cardiovascular research and, though not at a professional level, he has an interest in brain research. His first post, Who are You? looks at the unusual Capgras syndrome where the sufferer loses the ability to recognise people such as parents, spouse or friends:
The patient refuses to believe its his father or mother. As Dr Ramachandran explains in the book, this happens due to loss of connectivity between the visual centers of the brain and the emotional center. As a result the patient does not experience the usual warmth and affection when he sees his mother or somebody close.
In his follow up post, Capgras syndrome, he links to the episode series Phantoms in the Brain which aims to shed more light on this unusual syndrome.
This week The Spoonful of Medicine blog has considered another debilitating neurodegenerative disorder – Parkinson’s disease – and revealed that an independent team has validated the link between exposure to pesticides and agricultural chemicals with Parkinson’s. You can find out more about this in their post, Bug and weed killers kick Parkinson’s disease in gear.
Dangerous driving
In David Johnson’s latest post, Drugging and Driving he reveals that the users of many prescription medications are at increased risk of car accidents. He dissects the results of two different meta-studies, revealing some shocking results:
A new review from Australian researchers provides another reason to hop on the bus or train rather than get behind the wheel. The study looked at the association between dangerous driving and taking prescription medications. And the results were not very promising, finding that users of many prescription medications are at increased risk of car accidents.
Summer
Focusing on another dangerous topic, Paige Brown warns that, as the hot weather continues, the risk of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCCa), one of the most common types of human malignancies, rises. In her post, Curcumin and the Big ‘C’ she explains why we need to be concerned, considering the ways we can prevent it and the risk factors:
Risk factors for the development of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma include chronic UV radiation exposure, i.e. day after long day spent in the sun or frequent trips to tanning beds, and genetic predisposition. Other factors include chronic inflammatory skin lesions (Phillips et al). Despite the bad news, especially for us sun-lovers, treatments for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma do exist, typically consisting of topical drug treatments or surgery.
Happy Science
This week’s guest blogger is Dr Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthavee, a behavioural economist in the Department of Economics at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and the author of The Happiness Equation: The Surprising Economics of Our Most Valuable Asset. His guest post, A Happy Revolution, looks at the scientific study of happiness and why it is currently one of the hottest topics in world’s politics and economic research:
The British Prime Minister David Cameron has set out a plan to measure and improve people’s happiness – or in his compound term “general well-being”. The French president Nicholas Sarkozy has already launched an inquiry into happiness, commissioning Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to look at how policies on Gross Domestic Products (GDP) sometimes trampled over the government’s other goals, such as sustainability and work-life balance.
Moving on to another topic that is sure to make you happy. This week Eva Amsen has been asking if there are science-themed covers of all of Lady Gaga’s songs? Her post links to some of the funniest science-Lady Gaga mix ups around:
I assume you’re familiar with “Bad Project”, the cover of “Bad Romance”? You must be. It’s had millions of views. Millions!
In her post you can watch videos such as “Poster Face”, which debuted at last year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting.
Habitat observations
This week NPG’s News Blog and the Scientific American blog have been asking some interesting penguin-related questions. With thousands of Emperor penguins huddled close together for warmth on the ice sheets of Antarctica, there seems bound to be some competition for a toasty spot near the middle? But these enormous clusters manage to bring each penguin in for a chance to warm up — all without causing a dangerous crush. How do they do it? Their post tries to answer these questions with a time-lapse camera to capture movements of one penguin pack near the Neumayer Antarctic Research Station. You can watch this remarkable video and learn more about these penguins’ habitats in their blog post.
In a different post about habitats, this week Bob O’Hara has been discussing with his journal club a recent paper in Nature which caused a bit of a stir. Bob explains in his post, Species-area relationships don’t overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss, that this paper suggests the reason we don’t see as many extinctions due to habitat loss as we’d expect from empirical relationships is because we’re using the wrong ones. Bob tries to dispute this statement in his post and thanks to his new white board, works out what was wrong with it. You can find out how Bob tackled this in his write-up.
Jobs
Nature Jobs blogger, Rachel Bowden, has been considering the Trends in the wording of job adverts:
Karin Helgesson, who studied the wording of job adverts for her doctoral thesis at the University of Gothenburg, found that being driven, able to cooperate and able to work independently have been the three most frequently cited requirements for the majority of the 50-year period, with personal drive taking the top spot since 2000.
Rachel asks: “Have you noticed any other trends in recruitment adverts over the past 10 years?” She encourages you to share your thoughts in her comment thread.
Technology
Pream Neote, in her latest updates, Science needs to join the e-learning phenomenon and upgrade to the realm of web 2.0 is looking at how the web is ever-evolving and stresses that educational and scientific websites must keep up the pace:
Similar to how Darwin elegantly theorised the origin of species and the tree of life, the web also has an origin and is evolving – fast. In the natural world, there is the survival of the fittest among species which accounts for the extinction of the famous dodo. If educational and informative websites don’t make the quick and vital migration to web 2.0, then it will not survive the fast paced information driven world we live in and like the dodo, will also become extinct.
Scitable’s blogger, Nick Morris, has also been discussing technology, revealing in his latest post, Why don’t people get computers? Get your computer to work for you that most people think that all you can do with a computer is: surf the web, write documents with Word, make presentations with PowerPoint, send some emails, update your status on Facebook, and pretend you using a database. Nick explains that these tasks are passive use of computers and that computers can do much more. He reveals a number of ways in his post how you can get your computer to be your very own robot:
Yep, it is. Why not get the computer to work for you, instead of you working for the computer? That is, get the computer to take some of the load off!
Congratulations
Last month we announced the details of our new recognition system for Nature Network bloggers and as of May 2011 we have been providing 3-month online subscriptions to Nature for regular bloggers. Congratulations to the additional bloggers who have qualified this month:
For those bloggers who haven’t qualified this month, don’t be disheartened as there’s always next month. Keep up the great blogging!
We would also like to congratulate Paige Brown, who has successfully landed the job of managing Scitable’s Student Voices blog. We are looking forward to your future posts.
One for the geeks
For a sciency end to this week Tom Webb has been sharing a fabulous emporium of all things statsy-mathsy-geeky. Surely everyone needs a statistics propaganda poster?
