This months edition of MedLib’s Round, a blog carnival of “excellent blog posts in the field of medical information” is about Peer Review, Impact Factors & Conflict of Interest, Social Media, Blogs & Web 2.0 tools and Electronic Health Records and the clinical librarian. Nice read on Laika's MedLibLogRelated posts: Social Media in Health and Medicine: Medlibs Round 2.7 Finding Credible Health Information Online: MedLibs Round 1.8 Medlib’s Round 1.6 is up at Laika’s ..read more »

An experimental plane, powered only by rays from the sun, has landed safely in Switzerland after successfully completing its first 24-hour test flight. The "Solar Impulse" took off on Wednesday from Payerne airfield shortly after dawn and touched down a day later having proved that overnight solar-powered flight is possible. Clear blue skies meant that the prototype aircraft was able to soak up plenty of solar energy as it made a gradual ascent to a final altitude to 27,900 feet or 8,500 metres and then flew in darkness using energy stored up during the day. Pilot Andre Borschberg endured freezing conditions overnight and .....read more »

ScienceBlogs is a collection of blog covering topics such as Life Science, Medicine, Politics to name just a few. I read these blogs often, do have a lot of them in my RSS Feed reader and in my blogroll. In short very well written blogs with great impact on the blogosphere and other media. On july 6th, ScienceBlogs launched Food Frontiers, a blog sponsored by PepsiCo. They've received a lot of criticism about it as explained in a recent blogpost: Transparency regarding Food Frontiers by Evan Lerner the editor of ScienceBlogs . It's the announcement of the correction of the profile on .....read more »

Women process threats and aggressive stimuli different than men, differences in the activation of brain regions participating in the fear circuitry. This might be an important factor contributing to the increased likelihood of women to develop panic disorder compared to men. If in women activation differs in parts of the fear circuitry, this could explain the gender difference in prevalence of the panic disorder. Fear Circuitry in the Brain dysfunctional fear network centered in the amygdala and projecting to the thalamus, hypothalamus, brainstem, and prefrontal cortical areas in Panic Disorder patients In a recent study 20 patients with panic disorder (12 women and .....read more »

Although 50% of women receive graduate degrees in biology in the US only 27% of faculty members is female. In Europe conditions are far worse on academic careers for women, especially in the medical academic workforce. Only 1 in 10 medical clinical professors are women in the United Kingdom (UK). No female professor was employed in 6 medical schools. The newer medical schools had a better gender balance than some of the more established schools. For the lower ranks in medical academia these numbers are somewhat higher but still much lower than for men. In FTEs lecturers in 2005: 36% were women, senior .....read more »

At first Dr Shock was baffled. Mixing precious chocolate with chemicals? What a waste. Apparently cocoa has about 52 mg of GABA per 100 gram cacao. GABA is the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain and it has been shown to have an acute psychological stress-reducing effect in humans and a tranquilizing effect on sleeplessness, depression and autonomic disorder observed during the menopausal or presenile period. Because cacao is mixed with milk, sugar and some other ingredients the quantity if GABA in chocolate is less than in cacao, possibly reducing the stress reducing effects in human. In a recent study, they .....read more »

For the last 12 years, Carter Emmart has been coordinating the efforts of scientists, artists and programmers to build a complete 3D visualization of our known universe. He demos this stunning tour and explains how it's being shared with facilities around the world. Related posts: Sharing the Love for the Universe Photos of The Universe in 3D Online Neuroscience Photography Gallery ..read more »

Young adults tend to post videos and images of themselves while using alcohol or marijuana on social media websites such as MySpace, and YouTube. In a recent study a content analysis was done on these videos. This study revealed that alcohol use was mostly in videos with females in social gatherings, while marijuana use on video depicted mostly solitary men. Moreover, they were viewed frequently and the videos with alcohol consumption were evaluated positively and seen as a matter of individual choice while videos with marijuana use were viewed more negatively. Placing images of videos and images on social media websites .....read more »