Category: Follies of the Human Condition

White coats are gross

White coat. Image courtesy of Samir via Wikimedia Commons.
White coat. Image courtesy of Samir via Wikimedia Commons.

For physicians, the white coat that comes with their profession is a badge of honor. At the beginning of medical school, new students receive their first white coat, albeit a short one, in a special ceremony. It’s a momentous occasion when at the end of medical school they receive their full length white coats. The coats represent their status and position at a glance to anyone in the hospital. They should also ring an alarm bell in anyone about to see a physician because those coats are often TEEMING with all sorts of gross things.

Continue reading “White coats are gross”

So THAT’s why you get the munchies…

Chowing down. Image courtesy of Joel Telling under a creative commons license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Chowing down. Image courtesy of Joel Telling under a creative commons license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

While not the actual title or tag-line on a recent Nature Neuroscience paper, it is certainly a punchline that first comes to mind upon reading the title “The endocannabinoid system controls food intake via olfactory processes”. The endocannabinoid system responds to the active components in marijuana among other signaling molecules in the body including endocannabinoids made by the body. However, even if you’re not partaking of marijuana, this system is active in regulating how your body responds when it begins to get hungry.

Continue reading “So THAT’s why you get the munchies…”

What he said…

This has been making the rounds, but Dale Hansen GETS IT. That’s something I almost never say about sports journalists, including when they are opining about the sport on which they are supposed to be an expert.


The fact that Michael Sam’s sexuality has been this newsworthy – that we haven’t had an active, openly non-heterosexual NFL player until 2014 – is quite damning of NFL culture and American culture in general.

*Hat tip to Jen Hayden at The Daily Kos.

I’ll Trade You an Evolutionary Theory for Your Creationism [Repost]

Originally posted on 31 December 2010, we thought this post was relevant to the social context of the Ham-Nye debate on evolution versus creationism, in particular the value of being “right” on the evidence.

Mixed emotions over PZ Myers’ condescending response to a 12-year-old child‘s email supporting creationism[1], reminded of a very interesting conversation I had with my father at a dinner this holiday season. Lemons and lemonade, people.

During our conversational meanderings, we touched on the debate between creationism[2] and evolution. We did not directly discuss the political/social issues surrounding the teaching of evolution in schools[3].  Rather, we discussed the difficulty of convincing individuals that evolution is right and creationism is wrong. Continue reading “I’ll Trade You an Evolutionary Theory for Your Creationism [Repost]”

Textbooks aren’t always boring

This passage about the discovery of the Spemann organizer from Developmental Biology, 6th Ed by Scott F. Gilbert (2000) not only nails it, but nails it with inspirational style*:

But this research has found levels of complexity far deeper than Spemann would have conceived, and just as Spemann’s experiments told us how much we didn’t know, so today, we are faced with a whole new set of problems generated by our solutions to older ones.

Surveying the field in 1927, Spemann remarked:

We still stand in the presence of riddles, but not without hope of solving them. And riddles with the hope of solution – what more can a scientist desire?”

The challenge still remains.

*…and, admittedly, tortured sentence structure.

UPDATE: Hat tip to my human genetics research partner, Dr. Jennifer Taylor.