PopTech 2009: Michael Pollan from PopTech on Vimeo. Author and activist Michael Pollan is a passionate advocate for sustainable food. In his compelling talk at PopTech, he explores how our industrial food system is keeping us overly dependent on fossil fuels, destroying our environment, and making us sick. Breaking this cycle requires fundamentally changing our relationship to food - and eating more meals together. This presentation was made in collaboration with Duarte Design. You can read about the making of this presentation on their blog here. Amazing presentation on an important topic. For his speaking agenda and giving the Sun Food Agenda presentation .....read more »

Should you eat organic meat or tofu, should you run marathons? Watch this video how to become older than 100 years of age. Be prepared to be disappointed about how much you can influence this aging thing. Just enjoy yourself. To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner and team study the world's "Blue Zones," communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age. At TEDxTC, he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100. Related posts: Exceptional longevity does not result in excessive levels of disability I Hope They Had .....read more »

Often I explain to my residents and medical students that in the end they will arrive at the same diagnosis as I do, it only takes them somewhat more time. Medical education is mainly about seeing many patients and recognizing illness patterns. Experts have seen many patients and developed illness scripts, a kind of algorithm. Expert physicians are constantly moving through a series of learning cycles throughout their career. From Medical Education, a great blog You can assist learners in a clinical setting to develop their own patterns by asking them to graph common illnesses as they progress through their training. .....read more »

A recent meta-analysis examined the relationship between various Internet uses and well being. The studies published until know is mostly about the discussion whether using Internet for communication with e-mail replaces other forms of communication such as using the phone, chat or face to face contact. Contact through e-mail, facebook, twitter and such replaces real life contact and this is believed to be a bad thing. It reduces the quality of contact, make it more unpersonalized with lack of feelings and commitment. The other hypothesis is that use of Internet with e-mail, facebook, and twitter facilitates the use of the .....read more »

Mirror Neurons are important for imitation and emulation but also empathy. Watch this video. They also explains the enthusiasm for social networks. Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.Related posts: Were do Mirror Neurons Come From? Mirror Mirror on the Wall: What Tie Should I wear? A light switch for neurons ..read more »

I am very pleased to host this month's edition of the Medlib's round at it's almost first birthday. The Medlib's round was started by Jacqueline of Laika’s Medliblog in January 2009 and first published in February 2009. It's a blog carnival of “excellent blog posts in the field of medical librarianship”. I've included the submitted posts and some posts from MedLiblogs I frequenty visit, here it goes at random: Mesh terms as used in PubMed for medical literature searches are a kind of tags. MeSH terms will tell you how a particular issue is talked about and labeled. If there .....read more »

The threats of the popular social network Facebook are: Identity theft Threats to personal safety such as stalking or threatening either online or in real life Social risks through participating in minority groups or stigmatized groups How do people differ in self-disclosure and what kind or how much of information has a high risk for these treats? In a recent study the researchers developed a tool to score the information disclosed on Facebook. This instrument can determine in Facebook profiles what personal information is disclosed and what is not. Next this scoring tool for personal information was used to explore means for examining identity threat. .....read more »

A good demonstration of google wave and a terrific overview of some of the highlights of 2009. Thanks SmarterwareRelated posts: Google Wave and Twitter Gina Trapani on Google Wave Rivalry for Google Wave: PBWorks ..read more »

Again in 2009 the most popular post on Dr Shock was Sex, Video Games and the Brain, probably due to the title. Than why use sex in your title? Because this was about the biological difference between men and women instead of other possible differences such as roles. The term about all possible differences besides the biological part is gender. One of my own favorites scored second: The Neurobiology of Falling in Love . Two other posts I liked around this subject are not in the top ten favorite posts of this blog: The Neurbiology of Love and Love is Great .....read more »

Discovered a new blog carnival. This one is about healthy living. The owner of this blog and two others is Deb Bixler Deb Bixler is a frequent contributor to the online community in the area of whole food recipes, wellness and weight loss education. The healthy blogs listed here are her favorite blog carnivals and frequently visited wellness and health related blogs This carnival is about Healthy Living New Year Tips on Healthy Blogs – Business Blogs – Blog Carnivals for the Best Blog Review. Related posts: Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival Edition #37 Encephalon 60, A Neuroscience Blog Carnival Can Living Healthy Kill You? ..read more »