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“I did once come across a case of ‘cello scrotum’ caused by irritation from the body of the cello. The patient in question was a professional musician and played in rehearsal, practice, or concert for several hours each day.”
-British Medical Journal, 11 May 1974
In 1974, British doctor Elaine Murphy and her husband, John, sent the first-ever description of ‘cello scrotum’ to the elite British Medical Journal. The journal accepted the letter, and published it in the 11 May issue of that year. Just one problem: the Murphys totally made it up! LOLZ!
From The Scientist:
Murphy’s letter was written in response to a letter published months earlier in the BMJ reporting cases of “guitar nipple,” a skin condition seen in three young girls learning to play classical guitar.
“Perhaps after 34 years it’s time for us to confess that we invented cello scrotum,” wrote Murphy and her husband, in the latest edition of the BMJ. “We thought [guitar nipple] highly likely to be a spoof, and decided to go one further by submitting a similar phenomenon in cellists. Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realise the physical impossibility of our claim.”
At the height of his presidential campaign against Senator John McCain last July, Barack Obama declined the advocacy group Autism Society of America’s invitation to discuss health reform at a town hall meeting. But in a written response, the then-Senator promised to increase federal funding for autism research and treatment to $1 billion each year by the end of his first term in office.
Less than two weeks after Obama took the presidential oath, autism researchers are pleased with his outspoken focus on science including, notably, an economic stimulus package that, if accepted by Congress, would dole out $2.5 billion for research at the National Science Foundation and $3.5 billion for research and building maintenance at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Autism is the only disease or disorder specifically mentioned in the presidential agenda published on the new White House website.
“I think that the attitude towards science, and the importance of getting evidence and doing research, will be more valued [under Obama],” says Cathy Lord, director of the University of Michigan Autism & Communication Disorders Center.
“The focus may shift somewhat to say to the scientists, ‘What do you think is important?’ And then, ‘How do we accumulate knowledge that’s going to specifically affect health and autism?’” Lord adds.
On his official campaign website, Obama had promised to appoint an ‘autism czar’ who would oversee research on autism, eliminate bureaucracy, and coordinate autism-related agencies at state and local levels. The website added that Obama would fully fund the 2006 Combating Autism Act, which earmarked nearly $1 billion in autism-related federal funding over five years.
The new president has not yet chosen a new director of the NIH, nor addressed any of these campaign promises. Still, scientists are hopeful he will keep his word.
“I’m very optimistic, just like most of America is,” says Dan Geschwind, professor of neurology and psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. “I’m sure there’s going to be some influx of money over the next few years to support health initiatives, and that will hopefully extend to mental health.”
Kelly Gifford’s heart sank on a Friday morning in August 2006 when she checked her e-mail and no message popped up from her older sister, Linda. For decades, Linda, 42, had suffered from bipolar disorder, depression, and eating disorders, and had checked in and out of several rehabilitation clinics. Although she lived alone in Denver, 1,800 miles from Kelly and the rest of their family in Arlington, Virginia, the two sisters were close. On the previous Friday, Linda had admitted to Kelly that she had called a suicide hot line. Kelly talked to her constantly that weekend, begging her to call a doctor. When last they had spoken on Monday, Linda had assured Kelly that she was feeling much better. But now there was no word.
During the next four days, Kelly called and e-mailed Linda repeatedly — with no response. Friday morning, Kelly finally called the Denver police and asked them to check on her sister. Two hours later, the police confirmed her suspicions: Linda was dead in her apartment from an overdose of prescription drugs. “It was always in the back of my mind, but I didn’t think it would actually happen,” Gifford says. “It was absolutely devastating.”
This week, SFARI published a profile I wrote about Rebecca Saxe, an MIT cognitive neuroscientist who studies how the brain behaves when we think about other people thinking.
To measure brain activity, Saxe uses functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In a typical fMRI experiment, the participant lies confined in a coffin-like machine that measures magnetic changes in blood flow across the brain. Because active neurons use more blood than inactive neurons, this picture gives scientists an approximation of which brain regions are more active than others during specific tasks.
But brain blood flow doesn’t always mean there’s neuron activity, according to a report by Yevgeniy Sirotin and Aniruddha Das from Columbia University published in last week’s Nature. On his blog, Ed Yong gracefully described the researchers’ experiments, performed on monkeys while they were watching spots on a computer screen, both in the light and in the dark:
How small are they? Just 1.5 nanometers (that’s right, 1.5 billionths of a meter) tall!
From New Scientist:
The researchers wrote a computer program that works out how to arrange the carbon monoxide molecules such that they scatter electrons into waves of a particular shape. The software also demonstrated how varying the energy of the electrons could produce different shapes from the same pattern of molecules.
(Hat tip: SciencePunk)
Saxe packed her talk with “super-cool things about the brain,” she recalls. She told the judges how the brain folds precisely the same way in every human; and how most of the stuff inside of our brains is not the brain cells, called grey matter, but the connections between the cells, or white matter.
Saxe, 29, is not much taller than 5 feet. Exceedingly unpretentious and usually shy, she becomes quite animated when she delves into the mysteries of the human brain. Alas, the judges did not share her enthusiasm. “Their reaction was, ‘Mmm, that’s nice’,” she recalls with a laugh. “I just totally miscalled it.”
The incident is rendered ironic by Saxe’s research focus: the ability to divine what others are thinking.
Every time I go to the gym, I wonder about the fitness tips and nutritional trivia printed on fliers plastering every wall of the place. They claim to explain the science behind carbohydrates, say, or building muscle. But something about their tone (and, er, creative grammar) makes me skeptical that they’ve actually consulted real science.
So, today begins a series of posts in which I attempt to do just that: check out the real science behind the many claims about food and fitness that I come across every day—not just on the gym fliers, but on food labels, in the newspaper, or even from my friends’ mouths. These posts will be quite a bit more work than my usual bits, but I’m aiming to do one installment every couple of weeks. (And BTW, I’ll always list scientific references at the bottom of the post.)
So, without further ado…
Claim: Exercise reduces the risk of developing breast cancer.
Source: Flier distributed at my local gym (Queens, NY)
Bullshit rating (from 0, undeniably true; to 10, undeniably bull): 3
Above is a video demonstration of ‘BeatBearing’, the invention of Peter Bennett, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast. It’s part of his bigger thesis project of using ‘interaction design’—the discipline of defining the behavior of products and systems that a user can interact with, says Wikipedia—to make digital musical instruments.
The idea for BeatBearing came to Bennett one day when one of his colleagues left some ball bearings lying around the lab.
Perri Klass
Nobody teaches you this in medical school. What do you do when fixing something small just costs a little bit of money? Do you do your job and shut your mouth, do you call in social services and try to make the system work, do you open your wallet and solve the immediate problem, then and there, even though it doesn’t really solve anything?
That passage comes from an extremely poignant essay published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. In it, Perri Klass, a New York pediatrician (and journalism professor and knitter), describes a relationship with three patients, a mother and her two teen-aged sons, who had no money and a messy domestic situation. At one appointment years ago, after one of the boys told Klass that he was hungry, she slipped his mother a $20 bill. The gift became a regular, awkward part of their appointments for the next two years. Every time, Klass grappled with the obvious ethical dilemma:
Read the rest of this entry »
This claim is based on results from a new study that showed that higher levels of testosterone in the amniotic fluid are associated with the baby later developing autistic traits, such as poor social skills and a lack of empathy. The testosterone level can be measured by amniocentesis, a procedure that’s routinely done on pregnant women over the age of 35 to screen for Down’s syndrome and other genetic abnormalities.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, led the new study, which is based on 235 children. Last week, I reported on Baron-Cohen’s ‘fetal androgen theory’, and the idea that autism is the result of an extreme male brain.
But as provocative as the theory and the results from the new study are, the media’s hysterical reaction is a bit premature. Baron-Cohen himself is not an advocate of prenatal screening.
Both screening for and treatment of autism are “ethically controversial,” he told me in a September interview. “We’re looking at individual differences in eye contact or social skills, and it’s not clear that those things need treatment,” he said. “They’re simply part of normal variation in any population.”
