Today in Overselling the #microbiome: Lick-hiker's guide to Inner Strength
Well, thanks, I think to Christie Aschwanden https://christieaschwanden.com for pointing me to this.Valio unveils Lick-hiker’s Guide to Inner Strength with travel presenter Ian Wright - hasan & partnersValio - Gefilus Trailer from hasan & partners on Vimeo.From the Press ReleaseInternational travel presenter Ian Wright is on a mission to seek out and lick the dirtiest locations in Europe for The Lick-hiker’s Guide to Inner Strength, a campaign that promotes the virtues of Gefilus, a good bacteria product range by dairy giant, Valio.Simultaneously almost certainly over-promoting the benefits of this on...
Source: The Tree of Life - July 9, 2016 Category: Microbiology Authors: Jonathan Eisen Source Type: blogs
Deliberating Over Ending Two Species When We Are Bringing Tens of Thousands to the Brink of Extinction
by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.
One of the first news articles I ever wrote in journalism was as an intern at Stanford Magazine. This piece was on research into a human vaccine that would do nothing for us, but would kill any mosquito who happened to bite an inoculated person. The researcher’s ethical question at the time was whether anyone would consent to getting a vaccine that does nothing for her or his personal health.
Twenty-five years later, and this month Smithsonian Magazine published an article on CRISPR-9 gene-editing techniques that will allow for the eradication of mosquitoes. … (Source: blog.bioethics.net)
Source: blog.bioethics.net - June 1, 2016 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Craig Klugman Tags: Environmental Ethics Featured Posts Genetics Public Health mosquitos smallpox Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 11th 2016
In this study we expanded the study by investigating associations of the rest blood parameters with age, and associations between generations, aiming to seek candidate factors associated with familial longevity. Associations of blood parameters in centenarians (CEN) with their first generation of offspring (F1) and F1 spouses (F1SP) were analyzed.
In this study, using association and further comparison analyses we identified several blood parameters that may contribute to longevity. First, total cholesterol (TC) and triglyceride (TG) increased with age until 80 years, but decreased in centenarians, indicating that l...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 10, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
A Few Recent Omics Studies in Extremely Old Individuals
Below you'll find linked a few papers on the biochemistry of extremely old individuals, those who are in the portion of life in which they are heavily damaged by the processes of aging, most of their former peers are dead, and genetic variations become significant in determining quality of life and remaining life expectancy. A great deal of data is arriving on the biochemistry of the aged. The capacity of the research community to accumulate data on molecular biochemistry, in genetics, in epigenetics, and in the growing diversity of "omics" fields, of which genomics was only the first and least specialized, has for years g...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 7, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Considering Genetic Variants and Superlongevity
Some very few humans live for decades longer than the average, and the available evidence suggests that at very late age - and ever increasing frailty - genetic variation becomes an increasingly important determinant of longevity. To be clear, almost everyone with a superior genome dies before reaching a century of age: the odds of making it that far are tiny regardless of your genes. But all it takes is a small increase in those tiny odds to ensure that the present population of very old people is weighted in favor of those who are slightly more resilient. So don't imagine that this is something worth recapturing in a the...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 17, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
We Create Technology to Remove Suffering and Death
Right from the outset, the spur for the creation of new technology was the desire to reduce the personal impact of suffering and death. In this I agree with author Stephen Cave that to a large degree the rise to civilization was driven by the day to day minutiae of the quest for immortality: don't starve, don't be cold, don't get injured, don't be conquered, cure sickness, heal wounds, preserve life and health in the moment so as to see another dawn. We're still building the medical aspects of that edifice one small brick at a time, most of the way through dealing with infectious disease, and now turning our view to aging....
Source: Fight Aging! - February 15, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
“Late last night our Exhibitions Manager put the final...
"Late last night our Exhibitions Manager put the final touches on our new exhibit #OurFinestClothing. If you're attending the #patattooconvention your wristband will get you a discount to our museum all weekend. #Repost @evi.numen with @repostapp. ・・・ Night at the #museum. Long hours working at the @muttermuseum but mission accomplished! Our new #skin #exhibition is up and looks beautiful! full of #syphilis, #smallpox, #cancer and the most umm striking #carbuncle #waxmodel you 've ever seen. We even have early #20thcent #tattoo #specimens just in time for the #philatattooconvention!" By muttermuseum on Instagram. ...
Source: Kidney Notes - February 12, 2016 Category: Urology & Nephrology Authors: Joshua Schwimmer Source Type: blogs
A behind the scenes peek at BioMed Central publishing roles
What is your science background?
Ben: My main research interest has always been viruses, which started during my undergraduate degree in virology at the University of Warwick. I then spent four years researching influenza virus for my doctoral research at the University of Reading. After this I moved on to a postdoc position at Imperial College London to test safer smallpox vaccines.
Ripu: I have a PhD in human genetics specializing in human diversity and evolution in sub-Saharan African. I also have a Master’s degree in Medical Parasitology and a Diploma in infectious diseases, and while studying for these two degrees, ...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - February 11, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Dana Berry Tags: Biology Health Medicine #moretoscience careers early career researchers PhD Science>Careers Source Type: blogs
The Wilyman PhD
Our first child took a cruel week in dyin’
I’ve pulled three through, and buried two
Since then- and I’m past carin’
Henry Lawson 1899
I would like to make an a priori apology: I am about to make a good number of you feel very old. I am currently one rotation away from becoming an emergency physician, yet in all my years of training I have never shepherded a drooling, toxic child, nestled in a parent’s arms, for a gaseous induction in theatre. My lack of airway experience in the setting of paediatric bacterial epiglottitis is an unanticipated but quite delightful side effect of the introduction of the HiB vaccin...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - January 19, 2016 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Kristin Boyle Tags: Arcanum Veritas Education Soapbox anti-vaccination antivaccination Dunning-Kruger immunisation Judy Wilyman Petousis-Harris Wilyman PhD Source Type: blogs
Virologists, start your poliovirus destruction!
Poliovirus by Jason Roberts
I have worked on poliovirus for over thirty-six years, first as a posdoctoral fellow with David Baltimore in 1979, and then in my laboratory at Columbia University. The end of that research commences this year with the destruction of my stocks of polioviruses.
In 2015 there were 70 reported cases of poliomyelitis caused by wild type 1 poliovirus, and 26 cases of poliomyelitis caused by circulating vaccine derived polioviruses (cVDPV) types 1 and 2. The last case of type 2 poliovirus occurred in India in 1999, and the virus was declared eradicated in 2015. Consequently the World Health Organizat...
Source: virology blog - January 8, 2016 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Commentary Information containment cVDPV eradication IPV OPV poliovirus smallpox vaccine-derived poliovirus viral viruses WHO Source Type: blogs
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 130
Just when you thought your brain could unwind on a Friday, you realise that it would rather be challenged with some good old fashioned medical trivia…introducing Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 130
Question 1
Lady Windermere Syndrome (named after Oscar Wilde’s play) refers to infection of the right middle lobe of the lung (or lingula) with Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) in elderly women. What predisposing activity does this eponym allude to?
+ Reveal the Funtabulous Answer
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Voluntary cough suppressio...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - December 19, 2015 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Niall Hamilton Tags: Frivolous Friday Five Tocoloshe MAC exanthems heroin Rinderpest Mycobacterium avium complex Lady Windermere Syndrome Source Type: blogs
The first thanksgiving
It's not the story you learned in school. This is an excellent piece of historiography by Charles C. Mann, much of which I am ashamed to say I did not know. But the main point that's most relevant to this blog is that the reason the Pilgrims were able to establish a settlement on the Massachusetts shore where no Europeans had done so before was that the area had been depopulated by a terrible plague. In fact it killed 90% of the Wampanoag who until then had a sophisticated, densely populated and prosperous kingdom. They knew from experience not to tolerate European settlers, but after the catastrophe their chief Massasoit ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 28, 2015 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Longevity Versus Frailty
In the most simplistic view, aging is little more than a matter of damage accumulation. The more damage you have, the worse your health, and eventually it kills you. At a very high level, this is in fact the way things are, but living organisms are extremely complex systems, and "damage" is made up of numerous primary causes, direct results of the normal operation of cellular metabolism. These spiral out into hundreds or thousands of secondary and later consequences: further damage, evolved reactions to damage, and so forth. The middle portion of the intricate web of biochemistry that links damage at one side to specific a...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 30, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Senator Sanders and the Fixed Pie Fallacy
“The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” Senator Bernie Sanders first said those words in 1974 and has been repeating them ever since. Senator Sanders is not alone in his belief. Three out of four Americans agree with the statement, “Today it’s really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.”
Senator Sanders is half right: the rich are getting richer. However, his assertion that the poor are becoming poorer is incorrect. The poor are becoming richer as well.
Economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institute showed that between 1979 and 2010, the real (inflation-adjusted...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 15, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Chelsea German Source Type: blogs
October 1, 2015: A day that will live in health care infamy
October 1, 2015 is a huge day to the medical community. It is a day that will live in infamy. It is the object of dread, of diaphoresis, of doom. October 1 is ICD-10 day. This view was further bolstered when I went to the CMS (Government Medicare) website; there was actually a doomsday countdown timer at the top of the page.
For those still unaware, ICD-10 is the 10th iteration of the coding taxonomy used for diagnosis in our lovely health care system. This system replaces ICD-9, which one would expect from a numerological standpoint (although the folks at Microsoft jumped from Windows 8 to Windows 10, so anythi...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - October 1, 2015 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Rob Lamberts, MD Tags: Physician Primary care Source Type: blogs
