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Latest Posts

Pollen As Microscopic Art

Martin Oeggerli, a Swiss scientific photographer, has turned his talents to the bane of seasonal allergy sufferers and produced a pretty impressive gallery of colorized electron microscope images of pollen grains. The color isn’t true to life in all of the images, but it’s altered to better show the textures in the pollen grains:

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Micronaut: Image Gallery – Spectacular Pollen

(Via BoingBoing)

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

The Ph.D. Illustrated

I started my Ph.D. in clinical genomics last year and sometimes it really feels like what is shown in this figure. Click HERE for the full series of pictures.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

When Cosmetic Surgery Isn’t Pretty

Hat tip to Berci who shared this article from Power of Data Visualization about Crazy Facts About Plastic Surgery:

Medical Coding
[Via: Medical Coding]

*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*

Opera And Rap, MRI-Style

The Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge Group at the University of Southern California (USC) works on very interesting projects. If you’ve ever wondered what an MRI of vocal performance might look like, this is it. From USC:

This video illustrates real-time MRI of vocal performance. It includes examples from a soprano and an emcee/beatboxer. This video was featured at the Sounds and Visions Session of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Scientific Sessions, May 2006, Seattle.

the diva and the emcee from Krishna Nayak on Vimeo.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

When Art Imitates Life: Urine Sediment & Blogging

I love my new blog web designer. She is incredibly talented, and has the uncanny ability to capture concepts with images. In fact, if you’d like to comment on this post to offer her a “high five” for this website design, I’m sure she’d appreciate it. Her name is Beata.

When Beata and I sat down to try to figure out how to express my “style” she asked me what kind of visuals I was drawn to. I showed her the Medi-mation website since I have a soft spot for 3-D science animation. She said she’d like to start with some microscopic images and stylize them for me so that they were suggestive of medical images, but not too literal.

Beata offered me a series of background patterns to choose from for my landing page. I did an abrupt halt over this one though: Read more »

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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