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…
Faculty meetings can be a fun crucible in which to observe people’s attitudes about almost anything. Today, let’s look at the attitude that some people have about grant writing (and how that attitude may thwart them from accomplishing what they want). Some time ago at a faculty meeting, the subject of having students do an exercise…
We’re pleased to welcome Stephen Brimijoin to the Faculty. Steve is at the Mayo Clinic and has come up with a method of—hopefully—preventing former drug users from relapsing. He’s now received a ‘substantial’ grant to transfer the method from a rat model into humans. Cocaine-destroying engines
It’s not all fun and games in science, you know. There’s serious stuff too. Like this report from Professor Saeed Thabet in Cairo, “Reality of the G-spot and its relation to female circumcision and vaginal surgery”1: The G-spot is functional reality in 82.3% of women, an anatomical reality in 54.3% and a histological reality in…
Last week I raised the issue of a retraction epidemic, pointing to an editorial in Nature and wondering about the question of publicity for retractions, an issue brought to my attention by Ivan Oransky.
Professor David Nutt was famously sacked from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by the UK’s Labour Government at the time, apparently for being rational about scientific evidence. He now chairs the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, and is head of the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Molecular Imaging, Imperial College London. He is…
Is your life like a stuck emergency brake in your car, slowing you down and generating useless heat in the process? Many of our lives are like that, because we lack awareness of something going on in our minds: friction. Friction is caused by a battle between what we want and what we expect. Unfortunately,…
Last week we published an evaluation by Gabriele Sorci of the Université de Bourgogne, on a paper in The American Naturalist titled “Hidden consequences of living in a wormy world: nematode-induced immune suppression facilitates tuberculosis invasion in African buffalo.” African buffalo can be infected by nematodes and tuberculosis. The nematodes suppress the host Th1-type immune…
Nature ran an editorial last week on what might to appear to be a retraction epidemic. There do seem to be more retractions recently, due to a number of potential reasons: More awareness of misconduct by journals and the community, an increased ability to create and to detect unduly manipulated images, and greater willingness by…
It’s not that I “don’t really care for music”—I do, very much—it’s more that I have a serious lack of talent, or indeed understanding. I can read music, and at a push tune up my lovely (but seriously underused) Tanglewood and crank out a recognizable tune, given some sheet music and a following wind. Music…
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