Wellcome Image Awards 2009 « Richmondschoolbiology’s Weblog

The Wellcome Trust have anounced the winners of their Image Awards for this year. There are 19 winning images showcasing varying subject matter. You can view them here, or at the Wellcome Collection in London until Spring 2010.

NHS Choices: Behind the Headlines

A healthy row at work? November 24, 2009

A blazing row with your boss “may be good for your heart”, according to the Daily Mail. The newspaper also said that male workers who do not complain about unfair treatment double their risk of a heart attack. The news is based on Swedish research that suggests there is a link between passive behaviour during workplace conflict and a risk of heart disease. H […]

MS progression and pregnancy November 24, 2009

“Having children could slow down the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS),” The Independent reported. It said researchers have found that, compared to women with MS who have never had children, those who had children after the onset of the disease were 39% less likely to have progressed to a stage where they needed assistance when walking 100m. This resear […]

Bad Science

Oh, that was quick November 21, 2009

Ben Goldacre, Saturday 21 November 2009, The Guardian Once your medicines regulator decides it should change the side effects warnings on the patient information of a drug taken by millions of people, how long do you think it would take for that change to be implemented? In February 2008 the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory [...]

wtf? November 14, 2009

Ben Goldacre, Saturday 14 November 2009, The Guardian It’s always interesting when people take pseudoscience out of its natural habitat – Islington – and off into a place where the stakes are quite high. Like the polio vaccine scare in Nigeria. Or Aids denialism in South Africa. Or detecting bombs in Iraq, where the New York [...]

The Naked Scientists

Tripping over Psychoactive Toads October 13, 2009

For anyone fresh out of frogs and tempted to kiss a toad instead, this article has a word of warning. Although certain species of toads do make hallucinogenic chemicals linked to a lively "trip", many produce a lethal cocktail of cardiotoxic compounds that could turn such a trip into a once in a lifetime experience, en-route to the mortuary. So whi […]

Deconstructing Chomsky - Re-writing the Innate Rules of Grammar October 1, 2009

Noam Chomsky, a rookie professor at MIT, published a ground-breaking book called Syntactic Structures, which set out a theory of Generative Grammar. He suggested that a Universal Grammar (UG) of basic linguistic principles and a Transformational Grammar of rules responsible for putting sentences together was hard wired into all of us. Some don't agree i […]

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