Сохраняйте спокойствие и просите про цитирование в рецензируемом издании :)

Жизненно.

С новым годом, ага

Да, наивные ученые ещё существуют. Они верят в гранты на исследования. :)

Электростимуляция от мигрени!

Показан ещё один интересный способ борьбы с мигренями! Оказывается, особые виды электрической стимуляции могут снижать приступы мигрени. И этот метод получил разрешение от FDA, что реально непросто. надо будет попробовать.


источник и детали - Electrical Stimulator to Prevent Migraines Receives FDA Approval - IEEE Spectrum

Вечный цикл у ученых

Либо есть идеи, но нет мотивации, либо наоборот

Кант и Валентин

И нечего добавить

О накоплении ошибочных и непроверенных данных в науке

Вот ведь, наконец, этот вопрос забеспокоил не только нас с шефом. :) Столько всего делается в мире в фундаментальных областях, но столько взаимоисключающих результатов, что нормальный человек не может разобраться в этой массе данных сам. А надеяться исключительно на авторитет учёных - тоже опасно...
 Актуальнейшая статейка на http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/14/us-science-replication-service-idUSBRE87D0I820120814

By Sharon Begley
NEW YORK | Tue Aug 14, 2012 9:25am EDT
(Reuters) - So many scientific studies are making incorrect claims that a new service has sprung up to fact-check reported findings by repeating the experiments.
A year-old Palo Alto, California, company, Science Exchange, announced on Tuesday its "Reproducibility Initiative," aimed at improving the trustworthiness of published papers. Scientists who want to validate their findings will be able to apply to the initiative, which will choose a lab to redo the study and determine whether the results match.
The project sprang from the growing realization that the scientific literature - from social psychology to basic cancer biology - is riddled with false findings and erroneous conclusions, raising questions about whether such studies can be trusted. Not only are erroneous studies a waste of money, often taxpayers', but they also can cause companies to misspend time and resources as they try to invent drugs based on false discoveries.
"‘Published' and ‘true' are not synonyms," said Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and a member of the initiative's advisory board.
Last year, Bayer Healthcare reported that its scientists could not reproduce some 75 percent of published findings in cardiovascular disease, cancer and women's health.
In March, Lee Ellis of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and C. Glenn Begley, the former head of global cancer research at Amgen, reported that when the company's scientists tried to replicate 53 prominent studies in basic cancer biology, hoping to build on them for drug discovery, they were able to confirm the results of only six.
The new initiative, said Begley, senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, "recognizes that the problem of non-reproducibility exists and is taking the right steps to address it."
The initiative's 10-member board of prominent scientists will match investigators with a lab qualified to test their results, said Elizabeth Iorns, Science Exchange's co-founder and chief executive officer. The original lab would pay the second for its work. How much depends on the experiment's complexity and the cost of study materials, but should not exceed 20 percent of the original research study's costs. Iorns hopes government and private funding agencies will eventually fund replication to improve the integrity of scientific literature.
The two labs would jointly write a paper, to be published in the journal PLoS One, describing the outcome. Science Exchange will issue a certificate if the original result is confirmed.
Founded in 2011, Science Exchange serves as a clearinghouse that connects researchers who want to outsource parts of experiments, from DNA sequencing ($2.50 per sample) to bioinformatics ($50 per hour). It is funded largely by venture capitalists and angel investors.
INCENTIVES FOR INTEGRITY
It may not be obvious why scientists would subject their work to a test that might overturn its results, and pay for the privilege, but Iorns is optimistic. "It would show you are a high-quality lab generating reproducible data," he said. "Funders will look at that and be more likely to support you in the future."
If results are reproduced, "it will increase the value of any technology the researcher might try to license," she said, adding that it would also provide assurance to, say, a pharmaceutical company that the result is sound and might lead to a new drug.
Experts not affiliated with Science Exchange noted that if science were working as it should, the initiative would not be necessary. "Science is supposed to be self-correcting," said Begley. "What has surprised me is how long it takes science to self-correct." There are too many incentives to publish flashy, but not necessarily correct, results, he added.
Virginia's Nosek experienced the temptation firsthand. He and his colleagues recently ran a study in which 1,979 volunteers looked at words printed in different shades of gray and chose which hue on a color chart - from nearly black to almost white - matched that of the printed words. Self-described political moderates perceived the grays more accurately than liberals or conservatives, who literally saw the world in black and white, Nosek said.
Rather than publishing the study, Nosek and his colleagues redid it, with 1,300 people. The ideology/shades-of-gray effect vanished. They decided not to publish, figuring the first result was a false positive.
Typically, scientists must show that results have only a 5 percent chance of having occurred randomly. By that measure, one in 20 studies will make a claim about reality that actually occurred by chance alone, said John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who has long criticized the profusion of false results.
With some 1.5 million scientific studies published each year, by chance alone some 75,000 are probably wrong.
In addition, Ioannidis said, "people start playing with how they handle missing data, outliers, and other statistics," which can make a result look real when it's not.
"People are willing to cut corners" to get published in a top journal, he said.
There are numerous ways to do that. Researchers can stop collecting data as soon as they obtain the desired result rather than gather more as originally planned. Conversely, they can continue to gather data until they get the desired result.
How common might such sleights of hand be? In a 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, Ioannidis used statistical and other methods to show that "most published research results are wrong." It remains the most-viewed paper in the journal's eight-year history.
"Until recently, people thought you could trust what's published," Ioannidis said. "But for whatever reason, we now see that we can't."
(Note: Amgen researcher C. Glenn Begley is not related to the author of this story, Sharon Begley.)
(Reporting by Sharon Begley; editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Douglas Royalty)

Опять результаты исследований эффектов экстази

Ну, в общем, читайте: экстази и память, некоторые новые данные.

Though ecstasy is known to cause health risks such as depression, sleep problems, severe anxiety and increasing other drug cravings, there has been a considerable amount of debate questioning whether or not government officials have over-reacted to ecstasy.

Как достать всех в лабе

Гениальная статья о том, как стать "звездой" в лабе. Цитирую:

We all know them. You might even be one. The Lab Bastard is the one who considers himself (or herself!) superior to all other mere mortals in the lab. He would never degrade his talent by doing communal jobs in the lab, but swans around, absolutely sure that his experiments are most important and his results will be the most groundbreaking.
Above all, The Lab Bastard never misses an opportunity to claw his way to the top and doesn’t mind who he tramples on along the way.
I hope you don’t want to be The Lab Bastard. But in case you do, here are some useful tips:
When starting in a new lab, establish your superior credentials:
1) Never miss an opportunity to say how thing were done much better in your previous lab/your country.
2) Do a bit of namedropping; it always helps to impress the poor no-hopers you work with.
3) Declare equipment, supplies and methods that your colleagues use as outdated and insufficient for your needs. Order a lot of new stuff immediately, or even better, tell a technician do it for you.
Ensure that your talents are not wasted on menial tasks. Put technicians and your other colleagues in their rightful place as servants who are lucky to have a bit part to play in your journey to brilliance:
4) Make a point of never ordering ANYTHING. Ensure that no matter how small the order is, you pass it off to someone else to do it for you.
5) Never do any lab jobs – defrosting the freezer, cleaning the water bath, etc. It distracts you from doing experiments and there is always a backup freezer/another water bath, when they break because of the lack of maintenance.
6) If you finish a communal solution, be happy that there was enough left for you. You either won’t need it for a while, or, if it is widely used, somebody else will have to make it very soon.
7) Feel free to take stuff from other people’s benches. They have plenty of it or are not using it at the moment and you are working so much, you don’t have time to prepare or order this in advance.
Help No-one
8) Never volunteer to help anybody and never share your things, this will diminish your resources in exchange for a hazy possibility that people will pay you back in kind. They never do, you know, because you don’t.
Claim your rightful credit
9) Always ensure that you talk loudest in lab meetings – if you can talk over others, then so much the better. When you are making your razor sharp observations, be sure to keep eye contact with the boss at all times to ensure that your brilliance is noted.
10) A caveat to number 8: There is a time to volunteer to help people, and that is when they are close to publishing. At this point, use all of your skills and influence to secure the opportunity to do a (preferably very small) piece of work for the prospective author, then push like hell to be added as a co-author.

Спасибо http://bitesizebio.com/articles/how-to-be-the-lab-bastard/ 
Самое смешное - что такие везде находятся :) 

Хроническая боль - в голове!

О хронической боли. Новости: 

When people have similar injuries, why do some end up with chronic pain while others recover and are pain free? The first longitudinal brain imaging study to track participants with a new back injury has found the chronic pain is all in their heads –- quite literally.
A new Northwestern Medicine study shows for the first time that chronic pain develops the more two sections of the brain --- related to emotional and motivational behavior --- talk to each other. The more they communicate, the greater the chance a patient will develop chronic pain.
The finding provides a new direction for developing therapies to treat intractable pain, which affects 30 to 40 million adults in the United States.
Researchers were able to predict, with 85 percent accuracy at the beginning of the study, which participants would go on to develop chronic pain based on the level of interaction between the frontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens.
The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"For the first time we can explain why people who may have the exact same initial pain either go on to recover or develop chronic pain," said A. Vania Apakarian, senior author of the paper and professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
"The injury by itself is not enough to explain the ongoing pain. It has to do with the injury combined with the state of the brain. This finding is the culmination of 10 years of our research."
The more emotionally the brain reacts to the initial injury, the more likely the pain will persist after the injury has healed. "It may be that these sections of the brain are more excited to begin with in certain individuals, or there may be genetic and environmental influences that predispose these brain regions to interact at an excitable level," Apkarian said.
The nucleus accumbens is an important center for teaching the rest of the brain how to evaluate and react to the outside world, Apkarian noted, and this brain region may use the pain signal to teach the rest of the brain to develop chronic pain.
"Now we hope to develop new therapies for treatment based on this finding," Apkarian added.
Chronic pain participants in the study also lost gray matter density, which is likely linked to fewer synaptic connections or neuronal and glial shrinkage, Apkarian said. Brain synapses are essential for communication between neurons.
"Chronic pain is one of the most expensive health care conditions in the U. S. yet there still is not a scientifically validated therapy for this condition," Apkarian said. Chronic pain costs an estimated $600 billion a year, according to a 2011 National Academy of Sciences report. Back pain is the most prevalent chronic pain condition.
A total of 40 participants who had an episode of back pain that lasted four to 16 weeks --- but with no prior history of back pain --- were studied. All subjects were diagnosed with back pain by a clinician. Brain scans were conducted on each participant at study entry and for three more visits during one year.
###
Northwestern University: http://www.northwestern.edu

Ты нужен науке, бро)

Спасибо http://madamy.deviantart.com/

Две дофаминовых новости

Дофаминушка опять в новостях. Первое сообщение - о трудоголизме и распределении дофамина в разных участках мозга, а второе - о влиянии этого нейромедиатора на процессы запоминания и забывания информации. 

Наслаждайтесь.

Вот так мы слышим

Люблю такие образовательные штуки. В данном видео описывается процесс восприятия информации органом слуха. Наслаждайтесь! 

Бог никогда бы не стал кандидатом наук

Боян, но ужасно милый. :) Из фейсбучика.

Юмористическое обращение авторов к рецензентам научной статьи

Это развеселило меня на несколько часов. С учётом того, что сейчас моя статья тоже находится на очередной рецензии, всё звучит достаточно остро. :) Наслаждайтесь:

by Roy F. Baumeister

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:
Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # 85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.
I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.
Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.
One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.
We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.
Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it without your input.
Sincerely,

http://astro.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/referee_funny.html 

Паразит мозг не съест, но химию его изменит...

Сто лет не обновляла этот бложик, пардон.
Вот вам забавная новость. На английском, ага, как обычно.
Некоторые паразиты (токсоплазма, например) в мозгу могут феерически изменять выработку допамина.

Brain parasite directly alters brain chemistry

A research group from the University of Leeds has shown that infection by the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii, found in 10-20 per cent of the UK's population, directly affects the production of dopamine, a key chemical messenger in the brain.

Their findings are the first to demonstrate that a parasite found in the brain of mammals can affect dopamine levels.

Whilst the work has been carried out with rodents, lead investigator Dr Glenn McConkey of the University's Faculty of Biological Sciences, believes that the findings could ultimately shed new light on treating human neurological disorders that are dopamine-related such as schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Parkinson's disease.

This research may explain how these parasites, remarkably, manipulate rodents' behaviour for their own advantage. Infected mice and rats lose their innate fear of cats, increasing the chances of being caught and eaten, which enables the parasite to return to its main host to complete its life cycle.

In this study, funded by the Stanley Medical Research Institute and Dunhill Medical Trust, the research team found that the parasite causes production and release of many times the normal amount of dopamine in infected brain cells.

Dopamine is a natural chemical which relays messages in the brain controlling aspects of movement, cognition and behaviour. It helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centres and regulates emotional responses such as fear. The presence of a certain kind of dopamine receptor is also associated with sensation-seeking, whereas dopamine deficiency in humans results in Parkinson's disease.

These findings build on earlier studies in which Dr McConkey's group found that the parasite actually encodes the enzyme for producing dopamine in its genome.

"Based on these analyses, it was clear that T. gondii can orchestrate a significant increase in dopamine production in neural cells," says Dr McConkey.

"Humans are accidental hosts to T. gondii and the parasite could end up anywhere in the brain, so human symptoms of toxoplasmosis infection may depend on where parasite ends up. This may explain the observed statistical link between incidences of schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis infection."

Dr McConkey says his next experiments will investigate how the parasite enzyme triggers dopamine production and how this may change behaviour.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uol-bpd110411.php

Комикс про Кюри

Мария Кюри очень знает толк в гениальности!
Картинка кликабельна.

У жестоких людей сильнее развита мезолимбическая область

Век живи - век учись. Оказывается, различия в поведении людей (например, степень жестокости) может выражаться в банальных морфофизиологических параметрах. Так, у жестоких людей, согласно результатам сканирования мозга, оказались значительно сильнее развиты мезолимбические участи головного мозга. Также, более жестокие люди, по статистике, имеют больше серого вещества. Читаем:

Brain Scans Show Violent People Have Bigger Mesolimbic Areas

Заставь голову варить лучше!

Советики - как заставить мозг работать эффективней:

1. Time it right
Most older people think more clearly in the morning; most younger people, in the afternoon. Work out when your own best 'thinking time' is and set it aside it for your most challenging brain work.

2. Get a good education - but don't overdo it
Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton says that too much specialised higher education can damage your ability to think creatively. 'You don't become a great novelist by getting a PhD in creative writing.'

3. Listen to Confucius
Writing things down is the number one memory aid used by memory researchers themselves. As the Chinese proverb puts it, the weakest ink lasts longer than the best memory.

4. Kick start your day
Research shows that the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee can help you concentrate. But if you're prone to anxiety, you're probably better off avoiding it.

5. Anchor new memories to established ones
'Think of your existing memory as a scaffold upon which to fit new information,' says cognitive researcher Denise Park. 'Don't isolate new information. Always relate it to something.'

6. Practise, practise, practise
Learning and repeatedly practising new skills appears to change the brain's internal organisation. A study showed that periodic training sessions helped volunteers in their 70s perform better in cognitive and memory tasks than they had when they were seven years younger. 'Practice really helps,' says psychologist Len Giambra. 'A well-practised older person will be faster than an unpractised younger person.'

7. Give your ideas a chance
Many of us are rewarded for our abilities to rapidly evaluate facts and make quick decisions. Creativity demands a much more leisurely and playful approach - a willingness to give 'absurd' ideas a chance.

8. Pick a stimulating profession and an intelligent partner
Intriguing studies from Poland suggest that people whose careers demand they exercise their intellect are more likely to sustain high levels of mental performance during their lives. Marrying someone intelligent may also provide you with ongoing stimulation.

9. Expose yourself to multiple experiences
Creativity often boils down to the ability to adapt solutions from one aspect of life to another. Velcro for instance, was inspired by burrs that stick to your clothing. The 'ring-pull' top on cans was originally based on the way a banana is peeled.

10. Learn from Leonardo
In his book, How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb offers several brain-enriching strategies that worked for the ultimate Renaissance man. Among them: learning to juggle and drawing with your non-writing hand.

Найдено у http://silabus-rpp.blogspot.com/2010/07/10-ways-to-think-better.html

by: Mendim

Юмороват с функциями

Баян, да. Но хороший: