Could falling in love be a panacea for the chronic pain that is often associated with aging? The thought has certainly crossed the mind of Faculty Member Felix Viana, whose latest evaluation is of a very popular article in PLoS ONE, “Viewing pictures of a romantic partner reduces experimental pain: involvement of neural reward systems.”1…
Here’s a handy list of all the free evaluations this week: Odorant reception in the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae Light pollution in the sea Evaluation of antineoplastic drug exposure of health care workers at three university-based US cancer centers From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data And some bonus links for you:…
Put away the DEET. A big Nature paper back in March attracted a further evaluation this week. David Triggle of SUNY at Buffalo, asks Have you ever wondered how that pesky mosquito finds you in the middle of the night? The answer lies in the ‘chemical space’ mapped out by insects, revealed by the characterization…
Robie Macdonald of the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences points out that when it comes to ocean pollution, most of us have been blind to night-time contamination by light. The (very short) paper touches on the potential and real effects of light pollution on wildlife, and points out that a comparable (chemical) pollutant would not…
Healthcare workers face a number of occupational hazards, including physical injuries from lifting heavy items (patients!) and infectious diseases from needleprick injuries and the like. But the tools of the trade also carry a risk—and a report from J Occup Environ Med highlights the danger of anti-cancer agents to nurses, pharmacists, and people not directly…
Do you receive more than a million dollars in consulting fees? Did you declare it when you published that paper? Probably not, according to a paper in Arch Intern Med, From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data1. The study is the first to definitively document under-reporting of author financial relationships in the…
In this week’s F1000 roundup (your primary source of free F1000 evaluations) we have the genetic basis of height, a handle on the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, the effects of discrimination on lesbian, gay and bisexual adults, a new diagnostic for leptospirosis, and, I promise, no structural biology…
A breathalyser for diagnosing disease sounds like something we’d expect to see on Star Trek. But work published in the British Journal of Cancer and evaluated by Christopher Janetopoulos suggests that such a thing might become not just possible, but affordable too. The ‘electronic nose’ detects volatile organic compounds1 arising from the peroxidation of membrane…
What do we know about molecular interactions, and what can they tell us about rational drug design? A medicinal chemist’s guide to molecular interactions1 summarizes the state of the art in a lengthy but fascinating account. Combining literature data and searches of structural databases, the authors conclude (among other things) that ‘holistic’ models are required…
Do trees get old? This is not a trivial question: indeterminate growth distinguishes plants from many (if not most) animals, and so while they obviously get older, they do not necessarily age, or senesce. But it turns out that accumulation of mutations in very old Aspens affects pollen quality1, which means that clonal trees do…
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