The new Scientia Pro Publica at Southern Fried Science or science for the masses is up. The best round up with the best science, nature and medical writing published in the blogosphere. Posts focus on communicating science to the public. I especially liked: No more alpha male If you have heard of a concept of "alpha-male" it is because of ideas from an old book of L. David Mech, about social structure of wolf societies. "Alpha" implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating .....read more »

Ohio State University Medical Center developed programs on the iphone and ipod touch for medical students and physicians. Used for education of med students as well as patient care. iMurmur: your guide to heart sounds, lectures as pod casts, access to online databases such as pubmed are a few examples of utilization of these devices. Have a look at the video to see some examples. Good wifi connection in the hospital ensures quick delivery of searches like a wireless laptop. Thanks David Rothman who also co authored a very interesting book: Internet Cool Tools for Physicians, reviewed on this blog. For medical apps .....read more »

The first E-Mental Health Summit will be held in The Netherlands in Amsterdam. You can find the programme on the E-Mental Health website. The 4th ISRII Meeting will be held specially for members of the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions. This meeting will be chaired by Prof Dr Pim Cuijpers. His name might be familiar to you because I often discuss his work on my blog. Some suitable examples: Self-Help Treatment for Depressive symptoms, which is the best? and Screening Adolescents for Depression on the Internet. Besides this meeting, the results of the most recent evidence-based developments, research studies .....read more »

Recommended reading is a weekly summary of interesting posts and selected links I posted on Twitter [recreading]Related posts: Recommended Reading This Week Recommended Reading from This Week Recommended Reading This Week: Empathy and Neurostimulation ..read more »

There is a significant decline in empathy occurs during the third year of medical school. This decline occurs during a time when the curriculum is shifting toward patient-care activities. There is a significant decline in empathy during third year of medical school, regardless of gender or specialty interest. Every year women scored significantly higher than men.This seems to be regardless of population studied. It also appeared in Italian Physicians and Japanese medical students. Except for scores at baseline, students interested in people-oriented specialties scored significantly higher than students interested in tech-oriented specialties. The magnitude of the decline (effects) was much smaller for women and .....read more »

Based on two psychiatric assessment procedures, a computer program investigating the presence of a psychotic disorder and a personality questionnaire, Salvador Dali was found to have a personality disorder for DSM Cluster A and B. He was also found to meet the diagnostic criteria for psychotic illnesses. You can't diagnose psychiatric illness without doing a face to face psychiatric examination. Usually personality diagnosis takes even more than one diagnostic interview. Distributing psychiatric diagnoses solely based on "circumstantial evidence", hear say or news stories is obsolete. Nevertheless these authors from `oxford digested a lot of information on which they based the above .....read more »

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo. Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating. I sent the music to the photographer, Paulo Pinto, who I Googled on the internet. He told his editor, who told a reporter and the story ended up as an interview in the very .....read more »

let yourself feel. from Esteban Diácono on Vimeo. This is a video created by Esteban Diácono to the music of Olafur Arnalds' Ljósið using "Adobe After Effects, particular v2, soundkeys and a little starglow". It's basically a bunch of smoke dancing around. Liked the music, see it in full screen mode, thanks Geekologie Related posts: Making Music with Only Windows 98 & XP Sounds Incredible Collaborative Music Video Birds on a Wire Made Into A Song and Video ..read more »

Tales of a Borderline is an exhibition of artwork by artists with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This disorder affects a persons emotions, causing emotional instability. For further information on BPD, see the ‘What is BPD?’ page. A few examples of their artwork. The four artists now have an exhibition in the beautiful Renaissance Castle of Hartheim situated close to Upper Austria’s capital city Linz. This castle has a long and troubled history. It was there that Hitler carried out large parts of his National Socialist Euthanasia project on people suffering from mental diseases. A new artistic programm called “KunstFormenHartheim” started .....read more »

Chocolate consumption was associated with lower cardiac mortality in a dose dependent manner in patients free of diabetes surviving their first Acute Myocardial Infarction. In contrast, intake of other sweets was not associated with cardiac or total mortality. Now be aware that Dr Shock is extremely biased when it comes to chocolate but this conclusion is based on a study done in Sweden and recently published in the Journal of Internal Medicine. This was an observational study, in need of confirmation by more scientifically superior designs such as a study with a large scale, long-term, controlled randomized trials. Having said all .....read more »