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Picture of the Week: How Genetics Work

(Via Why Evolution is True)

Co-dominance?

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Female Surgeon Propositioned By Patient Via Facebook

There is an interesting article in E-Health Europe about how patients try to contact doctors on Facebook, the popular social networking site, and how doctors shouldn’t respond to them. In my “Medicine and Web 2.0” university credit course, we cover this important issue several times and I try to provide students with useful pieces of advice about how to avoid such problems.

The Medical Defence Union said it was aware of a number of cases where patients have attempted to proposition doctors by sending them an unsolicited message on Facebook or similar sites.

The medical defence body said it would be “wholly inappropriate” to respond to a patient making an advance in such a way. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Best Science Visualization & Music Videos Of 2009

Wired Magazine always publishes some interesting videos dedicated to science and, let’s say, fun. Here are the entries and a few sample videos.

Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009

Volume rendering is a technique used to display two-dimensional data in three-dimensional space. ImageVis3D is a new volume-rendering program developed by the NIH/NCRR Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing, designed to be simpler, faster and more interactive than standard volume-rendering programs. This video demonstrates some of the key features of ImageVis3D and gives examples of the type of data it can render in three dimensions.

Top 10 Scientific Music Videos

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

MRI Scanner Made Of Lego

The picture of the day award goes to the Voxel123 Flickr user who posted images of a Lego MRI scan.

lego

And the original one:

lego1

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Google Social Search: Track Your Online Persona

Do you remember Personas that visualizes the map of your online presence? Here is a better solution. From one point of view, it’s great to have such a useful tool as Google Social Search. A short video about what it is and how it works.

Social Search taps into a user’s social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user’s own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.

Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Cartoon

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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