usually i don't see ads when browsing because i use firefox adblock, but now that i'm using someone else's computer i finally noticed the ads on the right hand side of google mail.. and if you happened to be writing about ex-related issues - wouldn't it creep you out to see an ad such as this one:
Dumped?
Instant Relief From Break Up Pain
& Fastest Plan To Get Your Ex Back.
GetYourExBackNow.com
google advises you that no humans read your mail to generate these ads. - oh, you don't say? but whatever technique of scanning ones emails for keywords adsense uses, could they maybe make it not as openly intrusive? just give us some illusion of privacy alright?
right now i'm really having trouble to decide what's creepier, google ads or mister salad fingers here.
May 18, 2008
sunday night oddities
May 17, 2008
iPlant seminar online
chris held a talk about the iPlant at sussex uni last tuesday, explaining his idea and the research background in considerably more detail than in his first video, and there's a Q&A part in the end. the seminar is online at youtube now. go have a look:
part two, three, four
Q&A one, two, three, four, five.
May 16, 2008
good ol'abstracts again
actually they're all fresh from 2008 as per usual...
neurodegeneration in aging:
- bartels et al: blood-brain barrier P-glycoprotein function decreases in specific brain regions with aging - a possible role in progressive neurodegeneration. +++
- pocock & kettenmann: neurotransmitter receptors on microglia. +++
- is et al: age-related changes in the rat hippocampus. ++
synaptic transmission & plasticity in the elderly:
- artola: diabetes-, stress and aging-related changes in synaptic plasticity in hippocampus & neocortex - the same metaplastic process? +++
- canas et al: modification upon aging of the density of presynaptic modulation systems in the hippocampus. +++
alzheimer's disease (AD)
- laferla: amyloid-beta and tau in AD (nature reviews neuroscience poster). ++
- maes et al: a glutathione S-transferase Mu 3 polymorphism associated with an etiopathogenic mechanism in AD. ++
- wang et al: regionally specific atrophy of the corpus callosum in AD, MCI and cognitive complaints. ++
- liu et al: proteasome inhibition increases tau accumulation independant of phosphorylation. +
- belbin et al: presenilin polymorphisms alter the rate of cognitive decline in sporadic AD patients. +
- ray et al: classification & prediction of clinical AD diagnosis based on plasma signaling proteins. +++
- sotthibundhu et al: beta-amyloid induces neuronal death through the p75 neurotrophin receptor. ++
- lloret et al: gender and age-dependent differences in the mitochondrial apoptogenic pathway in AD.
oxidative stress and (neuro)protection:
- papadia et al: synaptic NMDA receptor activity boosts intrinsic antioxidant defenses. ++
- lópez-torres & barja: lowered methionine ingestion as responsible for the decrease in rodent mitochondrial oxidative stress in protein and dietary restriction - possible implications for humans. +++
- dlasková et al: oxidative stress caused by blocking of mitochondrial complex I H+ pumping as a link in aging/disease vicious cycle. +
aging psychology:
May 8, 2008
Introduction to Parkinson's Disease
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease affecting approximately 1% of the population above the age of 65, and up to 5% of the people 85 or older. Hence the majority of patients are quite old, however 5-10% of patients are struck with parkinsonian symptoms before the age of 45. With its debilitating motor symptoms such as tremor, bradykinesia, and abnormal gait (the severity of which is rather poorly appreciated until you actually see a patient...) as well as cognitive decline, and only symptomatic treatments of limited efficacy available, we are pressed for a better understanding of the causes of and mechanisms underlying PD.
Although the majority of patients suffer from a sporadic form of the disease, with no known genetic causes, there are also a vast number of mutations in several genes that have been strongly implicated with PD. Understanding the functions of the corresponding proteins could shed light on the mechanisms underlying the initiation of PD, and maybe neurodegenerative processes in the elderly population in general, and hence provide information about potential new drug targets or other means of intervention. In addition, discovery of individual genetic variations such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or copy number variants (CNVs) and how these variations change the body's response to environmental influences could explain some of the idiopathic incidents of PD and possibly provide means for assessing an individual's risk of developing the disease.
In the following months I will attempt to provide brief summaries of what is known about the most prominent genetic players in PD and disease mechanisms, as well as symptoms and treatments. Bear with me if you've heard it all before as this will be an exercise primarily for my own brain's sake in preparation for September (although obviously it would be great if you find it interesting/useful too), when I'll be starting my PhD in Cardiff. Due to the nature of my project and my academic background, I will probably mainly concentrate on genetics and mol.bio/biochem, less so on clinical and pharmacological topics. I might still come back to my other favourite issues in neuroscience every now and then, but you can expect a general shift in focus of this blog away from psychiatric disorders, addiction or synaptic plasticity and a whole lot more, well... parkinson's, neurodegeneration, and aging instead.
References/Starting material:
Ramsden et al: The aetiology of idiopathic PD/2001.
Thomas & Beal: Parkinson's Disease/2007.
Scott et al: Complete genomic screen in PD - evidence for multiple genes/2001.
Moore et al: Molecular Pathophysiology of PD/2005.
May 6, 2008
the social web - too much of a good thing?
/rant warning
meh. so, i get an invitation to twitter in the mail this morning and being the sheep that i am i sign up right away. but now, after three coffees, my brain is slowly starting to function again and it's beginning to wonder what's the point? - a way to keep up to date with your friends, you say? a way to publicize your online persona? or just a way to get over the perpetual feeling of isolation and waste a whole lot of time?
for one, the whole web 2.0 friendship business is a bit odd. how many people are you friends with on any given site? do you actually know them or do you share common goals and interests? have you actually met them or engaged in some form of discourse with them (eg email or blog commenting or a forum)? 8 years ago when a friend met her boyfriend via an internet forum she didn't even tell most people, because it would have seemed odd to hook up online, only perverts and nerds did that. while i'm glad that getting to know people online and maintaining online friendships is no longer a taboo because i've benefitted from meeting someone online several times myself, i wonder if it doesn't go too far sometimes. if you're following 100+ people on twitter for example or have several hundred friends on facebook - how much of that is actually genuine? is it really necessary to know what that guy you met at a party or the girl who favourited your blog is doing all the time? how many people that are your 'friends' would you actually contact on msn, email or let alone call to ask what they've been up to if you hadn't heard from them in a while? i can't claim that all the people i'm connected to via any given social networking site are real friends myself. some contacts rather fall in the business category: people i wouldn't want to tell that i broke my leg, but people i would want to tell if i lost my job - because maybe they could recommend new avenues. others i like to share art or videos with, but not much else. i admit i find sites like FB rather useful when it comes to keeping in touch with people i met when living somewhere else as i've lived in 5 different places in the last 7 years and a lot of friends have been moving around the world in a similar fashion. but in most cases this "keeping in touch" restricts itself to checking X's status every now and then, or maybe taking a glance at Y's photos from their last vacation, or wishing Z a happy birthday - it might feel personal but if you think about it, it's really not.
the second point is, why do we (myself included) seem to think that other people care where we are and what we do all the goddamn time? personally, i excuse my rather frequent use of the 'share' button in google reader by thinking that with a little bit of luck i can draw attention to what i find newsworthy (and i know that i would certainly check my friends' shared items regularly if they had any), after all, we would drown in information if it wasn't for recommendations we receive and filters we apply. but twitter is not about recommendations, it's about "what you're doing" at any given moment. and i just don't buy that most people care to know whether you are suffering from a headache/happy/dying from boredom/in work up to your nostrils/going to the mall - and it seems i'm not alone in this.. in that respect twitter just seems disproportionally egocentric. (although you can also get very egocentric with FB and blogs, and i admit being guilty of that myself, though that doesn't mean i like it).
you may say: "but i do care to know about X and Y, i check their blog/FB/bebo/tweets all the time." but how much of that is because we've somehow become obsessed with staying up to date, because checking out the latest status changes or who said what to whom on twitter prevents us from reading that boring article or doing the laundry or being alone with our own thoughts for a few minutes? isn't all this social networking business an awful waste of time sometimes? especially as there's not one site for all your contacts and all your networking needs, but there's dozens. some friends are on FB, others on myspace or studiVZ, there's linkedin for business or naturenetwork for scientists and many more. - and it's not just the 'classical' social networking sites that let you 'connect' to other users.. there's technorati or bloglines, flickr or snapfish, youtube, lastFM, ... .. . and keeping up with all these contacts can be just a little bit time consuming.
not saying all of this is bad, but rather: is all of this really necessary? obviously the sites i find useful or necessary may be very different from the ones you frequent and swear by. or we might be signed up at the same sites for different purposes, and that's cool. but how does one figure out what's really useful and what is nothing but procrastination or egomania? how can one bring some order into the ever-growing jungle of social sites and services? twitter is my 12th (i think...) connection to the social web, and while i'm not actually using at least half of the sites i'm registered with, it just seems a bit much. i could just delete my account again but then there's this nagging feeling i might be missing out on something, after all, even obama and CNN are 'on there', after all "twitter is huge". but why?
/rant over
how do you choose between joining one social site and not another? what do you share and who do you want to keep up to date with? how do you know where to draw the line?
update: flocking together on the web... (social network site aggregating browser?)
May 4, 2008
(neuro)science resources and tutorials
neurotransmitter.net - IS HUGE! there's news as well as original research abstracts, drug reference pages for a given conditions, metadatabases, pubmed hacks and more. however, the layout can be a bit confusing.
athabasca university psychology demonstrations and tutorials - big collection of psychology and neuroscience resources. some are for beginners, others are not. but generally aimed at students.
role of the ribosome - university of texas, cell bio graduate tutorial.
foundations of neurobiology - great starting material, this site is dedicated to links and resources matched according to chapters of the book bearing the same title, by fred delcomyn. the only drawback: the site hasn't been updated in years.
university of warwick psychology resources - links to a few psychology related sites.
introduction to enzyme structure and function - online course material by professor crout from the university of warwick. this particular course was run in the chemistry department, however it's very similar to our 2nd year enzymology module in biochemistry.
electron microscopy for dummies - explaining sample preparation, image analysis and everything inbetween.
introduction to fMRI - from the university of oxford FMRIB centre.
neuroscience tutorial - "an illustrated guide to the essential basics of clinical neuroscience" from the university of washington medical school.
protocol online - from animal techniques over histology to plant biology - bio lab protocols for all sorts of stuff.
fluorescence tutorials - invitrogen presents 5 tutorials about fluorescence-based techniques.
national institute of drug abuse teaching packets - these are 5 downloadable powerpoint presentations about the mode of action of drugs and the neurobiology of drug addiction. generally pretty basic stuff (eg including slides á la "what does a neuron look like") but maybe still useful.
scienceHack - the youtube of science videos. a couple of neurosci videos can be found in the biology section.
jove - journal of visualized experiments (much cooler than scienceHack)
interactive concepts in biochemistry - this site is supposed to accompany a biochem book by rodney boyer, but you can use it without the book as well. there are animations, lots of weblinks, overviews of key concepts, quizzes for biochem students, structure tutorials and more. the material is presented in an easily understandable fashion.
mind & machine - tutorials ranging from the biology of the brain over neural networks to AI. maintained by syracuse university this could be nice basic intro to all these things but it hasn't been updated since 1998, which might limit its usefullness.
neuroscience for kids - big up-to-date site with all sorts of resources (Q&A or experiments you can try for yourself for example) for children from kindergarten to high school age.
recommended links - a long list of websites, societies, conference, databases etc provided by nature reviews neuroscience.
NARSAD - the mental health charity provides short intros to various conditions, press releases and more.
last but not least, the UCL neuroscience homepage and cardiff neuroscience centre site provide info about neuroscientific research at these universities.
let me know if there's more stuff of similar difficulty that could be added to the list.
did these come for men also?
thanks to sociological images.
"8. Give every guy an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for male psychology. A guy is more confident and efficient if he can keep up to date with football, apply fresh snuff and clean his pipe several times a day."
