In the infographic below, they bust the myth about chloroform being used for nefarious activity. Chloroform takes about 5 minutes to have an effect. That’s not what’s portrayed in the movies.
Maybe Compound Chemistry will inspire posts by our resident chemist, Siromi Samarasinghe.
Clearly #Sacks4Science needs to be a thing to support testicular cancer research and fight sexism in science. Since I don’t have a post about testicular cancer, I’m re-sharing this post about prostate cancer. Let me explain where the #Sacks4Science hashtag is coming from.
There’s a post about a group in Italy that want to promote science by showing pictures of breasts with a sign about science.
That is almost as bad as the #HUGS4JUGS “campaign”. The only time that breasts should be mentioned in a conversation about science, is if the science is about breasts.
Some pedantic arguing ensued on that thread, so I turned my attention back to science. I’m working on data to see if a new imaging agent can detect if a tissue is positive for the progesterone receptor, which would guide therapy choices without invasive biopsies.
In a conversation about the boobs for science post, Rachel Blum said
Clearly: ask for guys to do a shot of their penis untying at an important section in a scientific paper. Share a few shopped ones with the MOAR BOOBS crowd.
“Oh, that makes you uncomfortable? But it’s FOR SCIENCE”.
I mention it should be for prostate cancer awareness or show your balls for testicular cancer awareness. I bet a lot of bros will jump on that bandwagon.
Then Buddhini Samarasinghe said, we should call the campaign “Sacks for Science”. We all agreed that #Sacks4Science needs to be a thing. So support #Movember and prostate cancer awareness. Support science, without sensationalizing it. And if you’re ready to jump on the bandwagon, help us support #Sacks4Science to support testicular cancer research and fight sexism in STEM.
#ScienceEveryday
Originally shared by Chad Haney
The real #Movember for #ScienceSunday .
Most of you probably know that the pink ribbon in October means, breast cancer awareness month. I disagree with the commercialization of the pink ribbon and attempts to trademark it, but that’s another story. I want to talk about Movember. You’ve seen the mustaches and the hashtag. How many of you know it is for men’s health awareness? Specifically prostate and testicular cancer. I’m going to focus on prostate cancer.
PSA about PSA
Public service announcement about prostate-specific antigen screening: For many years, PSA testing was suggested to start at age 40. The current recommendation:
The American Cancer Society recommends that men discuss the possible risks and benefits of prostate cancer screening with their doctor before deciding whether to be screened. The discussion about screening should take place starting at age 50 for men who are at average risk of prostate cancer and expect to live at least 10 more years. It should take place at age 45 for men who are at higher risk, including African-American men and men who have a father or brother diagnosed with prostate cancer, and at age 40 for men at even higher risk.
For many years researchers in the trenches were finding that PSA screening often led to false positives. There’s too much variability in the PSA screening method.
Ex vivo MRI
The purpose of the study that I’m presenting was to take advantage of higher resolution MRI, using ex vivo samples in a pre-clinical high field MRI scanner (9.4T vs. 1.5T clinical MRI). Histology is orders of magnitude higher resolution even compared to the pre-clinical scanner. The idea was that better MRI images could be correlated with histology. Ultimately decisions are made based on histology, typically via biopsy. Identifying which features in MRI correlate with histology could set up a feed back loop to improve the in vivo MRI images. What’s shown below is an early proof of concept study.
I don’t know the PSA scores for the patients in the study below, but I’m sure they were high enough to justify biopsies. We were blinded to patient names and a lot of their health records for both privacy reasons and to remove bias. There are risks and side effects associated with getting a prostate biopsy. That’s part of the reason for changing the PSA screening recommendations. If you are curious what a human prostate looks like, there’s one pictured below. It’s about the size of the palm of your hand (at least my hand).
The other two figures show what the prostate looks like using MRI (panel A, C, and D) and histology (panel B). Panel A is a T2-weighted spin echo image. Panel C is a T2 map, i.e. a display of the actual T2 values. Panel D is an apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map. You can review the MRI terminology in the link below.
The first figure, which outlines the cancer with a dotted line in the histology image is from a 71-year-old patient. The second is from a 63-year-old patient without malignant cancer. In the examples below it isn’t obvious which MRI parameter best correlates with cancer. In the 71-year-old patient, the low T2 values along with low ADC values appears to correlate well with the tumor outlined in the histology slide. However, the 63-year-old patient also displays low ADC values, whereas the T2 values are higher. Overall, with 9 patients, the T2 values were about 10 msec longer (P < 0.03) and the average ADC values were about 1.4 times larger (P < 0.002) when comparing normal peripheral zones vs. cancerous peripheral zones. With a larger sample size we hope to improve the correlation between both the in vivo and ex vivo MRI with histology.
References:
Medical Imaging 101 pt 3: MRI from my #CHMedicalImagingSeries
Science Friday host Ira Flatow joins Sound Opinions hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot to discuss music and science. Then Jim and Greg dissect The Wall by Pink Floyd. The Wall (album) was released on 30 November 1979 almost 35 years ago. The movie followed in 1982. I have to agree with Jim and Greg’s statement that Waters had the creative genius that Gilmour lacked and Waters was nothing without Gilmour’s unique musical talent. In other words, they needed each other and Pink Floyd wasn’t as good after the split. They also discuss Wright and Mason’s contributions, just so you don’t think it’s all Waters and Gilmour. So have a listen. You might want to download the podcast.
References:
Your Brain on Jazz
Dr. Charles Limb from Johns Hopkins University discusses how jazz improvisation is like wordless communication, i.e., it uses the part of the brain for language. (see the PLoS One link within).
Ira Flatow mentioned a study where twins were used to determine how much practice plays a role in learning to play an instrument vs. the genetic influence.
I missed posting for Ada Lovelace Day this year. A lot of G+ friends have recently shared posts about gender bias in science and I decided to list them here along with my re-share of my Alice Kober post.
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world’s first computer programmer.
Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.
Deeksha Tare ‘s post about inventions by women (http://goo.gl/TLl3Z4) reminded me of a segment on The World on NPR. It was yet another story of an important breakthrough by a woman being overlooked. Alice Kober did a lot of the major analysis in deciphering Linear B but Michael Ventris received much of the credit, at least initially. Part of the lack of credit could be due to the fact that she worked on Linear B in private, i.e., in her “spare time”. She unfortunately died at the age of 43.
Linear B
So what is linear B? Linear B is a syllabic script from Knossos, Crete around 1450 BC. You can think of it as unlocking hieroglyps, without the Rosetta Stone. British archeologist, Arthur Evans found a series of clay tablets in ruins thought to be the home of King Minos. Linear B descended from Linear A which is an undeciphered earlier script for writing the Minoan language. Linear B consists of approximately 87 syllabic signs and over 100 ideographic signs.
Linear B had been known for about 30 years before Alice Kober began working on deciphering it. That’s 30 years with no breakthroughs. One of Alice’s breakthroughs was understanding that Linear B is syllabic, like Japanese where characters stand for a sound. The other two types of written language systems are alphabet, which we know, and logographic, like Chinese where a symbol represents a whole word. Part of the reason Linear B was not identified as syllabic earlier on is due to a few pictographs (like Chinese) that represented objects, e.g. horeses and pots.
Database
Instead of trying to guess meaning or speculate on sound values of symbols, Alice recorded the frequency of every symbol, in general and then in a particular position, which lead to the idea of Linear B being syllabic and an inflected language (having suffixes and prefixes). Keep in mind this was in the 40s and 50s with no computer aid. She handmade index cards for her database because of the limited supplies during WWII. From the database, Alice was able to build a grid showing the relationships between symbols but died before she could add sound.
It’s all Greek to me
Michael Ventris was able to add sound to the grid as he guessed that some repeated symbols might be towns in Crete. So Knosso in Linear B was “ko-no-so”. With a few city names figured out, he could add sound to the grid. No one had guessed that Linear B was a form of Greek because they didn’t know Greek was spoken that far back. Since Greek using the alphabet system, it wouldn’t have helped much, knowing that Linear B was a form of Greek. So the end story is that the Greeks colonized Crete and used the local writing system to record their own language.
Sources:
How American Linguist Alice Kober Helped Unlock the Secrets of Linear B
If you didn’t guess I vote no, then you don’t know me. Even if a politician has a science background, they should not interfere with peer review.
#ScienceSunday
Originally shared by ScienceSunday
Should politicians be involved with reviewing research proposals?
Bill McGarvey is very familiar with the grant proposal review process for the National Institutes of Health in the USA. The NIH funds the majority of biomedical research in the US. Bill shares an interesting article discussing politicians getting involved in the review process for the National Science Foundation, who fund a lot of basic science research in the US. Because basic science research has minimal immediate impact but often a huge impact long term, it frequently comes under scrutiny by short sighted politicians.
Politics and the National Science Foundation (NSF)
