Tale of Love and Illness Ends in Deaths

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Published: March 30, 2012

His was a love story, Charles D. Snelling wrote — a tale of a shiftless dreamer and the woman who saved him, of the life they built over six decades and the disease that stood no chance of erasing it. By the end, he said, their time together had become a case study in reciprocity.

“She took care of me in every possible way she could for 55 years,” Mr. Snelling wrote of his wife, Adrienne, months before the two were to celebrate their 61st wedding anniversary. “The last six years have been my turn, and certainly I have had the best of the bargain.”

On Thursday, months after contributing a poignant essay to The New York Times about navigating a six-decade marriage upended by his spouse’s Alzheimer’s disease, Mr. Snelling killed his wife and himself, the Snelling family said in a statement released to The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa.. They were found Thursday in their home in Lehigh County in eastern Pennsylvania, the police said. Mr. Snelling shot himself, the coroner said. The ruling on Ms. Snelling’s death was pending. Both were 81. (Photo: Cedar Crest College, via Associated Press)/../

Brain & Ethics

How Does the Brain Secrete Morality?

Pondering the neuroscience of moral platitudes, free will, and sacred values.

Ronald Bailey | March 21, 2012

“The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,” asserted 18th century French physiologist Pierre Cabanis. Last week, the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies convened a conference of neuroscientists and philosophers to ponder how our brains secrete thoughts about ethics and morality. The first presenter was neuroeconomist Gregory Berns from Emory University whose work peers into brains to see in which creases of gray matter those values we hold sacred lodge. The study, “The Price of Your Soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values,” was just published in thePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

3D Brain Structure

The brain is wired in a 3D grid structure, landmark study finds

March 30, 2012

(Vejam video da Science ao final)

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Neighborhood structure of cerebral pathways. A curved sheet of interwoven orthogonal pathways (Credit: Van J. Wedeen, et al./Science)

The brain appears to be wired in a rectangular 3D grid structure, suggests a new brain imaging study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain’s connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School.

“This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate species.”/.../

New Genetic Discovery

New layer of genetic information discovered

March 30, 2012

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The structure of a ribosome (credit: Dale Muzzey/UCSF)

A hidden, never-before-recognized layer of information in the genetic code has been uncovered by a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) thanks to a technique developed at UCSF called ribosome profiling, which enables the measurement of gene activity inside living cells — including the speed with which proteins are made.

By measuring the rate of protein production in bacteria, the team discovered that slight genetic alterations could have a dramatic effect. This was true even for seemingly insignificant genetic changes known as “silent mutations,” which swap out a single DNA letter without changing the ultimate gene product.

To their surprise, the scientists found these changes can slow the protein production process to one-tenth of its normal speed or less./.../

Contaminantes Ambientais

Boletim  ALERTA DO VIGIAR/RS do dia 28/03/2012, com
alterações na Qualidade do Ar da Grande Porto Alegre.
*Contaminantes* *Ambientais*
Núcleo de Vigilância dos Riscos e Agravos Ambientais não Biológicos
Centro Estadual de Vigilância em Saúde / SES - RS
Fone:             (51) 3901-1081      
Objetivo do Boletim
Informar/alertar a comunidade gaúcha sobre as condições atmosféricas atuais no RS, disponibilizar informações do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais – INPE e recomendar ações para a proteção/promoção da saúde e prevenção de agravos e doenças ocasionadas ou agravadas por impactos atmosféricos, além de veicular, outras notícias de interesse à Vigilância em Saúde.

Billion of Planets

Life on Billions of Planets? Could Be

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK Friday, Mar. 30, 2012

This artist's impression shows a sunset seen from the super-Earth Gliese 667 Cc.

"The Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles," the early 20th-century biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said. "He made so many of them." If Haldane had been an astronomer, he might have said the same about the nondescript red stars known as M-dwarfs. As the name implies, they're small, no more than half the size of our Sun at most. They're so dim that not a single one, not even the closest, is visible to the naked eye. And they vastly outnumber any other type of star in the Milky Way: our galaxy has maybe ten or 20 billion Sun-like G stars, but is home to 150 billion M-dwarfs, and maybe more, adding up to some 80% of the galaxy's stellar population./.../

Pharmageddon

Q&A: Psychiatrist Dr. David Healy Defines ‘Pharmageddon’

A Q&A with the author of Pharmageddon about how the pharmaceutical industry has co-opted medicine.

By MAIA SZALAVITZ | @maiasz | March 28, 2012 

PHIL ASHLEY / GETTY IMAGES

Dr. David Healy has spent decades delving into the dark corners of the pharmaceutical industry, where, for instance, drug companies have tried to hide the worrisome connection between antidepressant drugs and suicide. In the psychiatrist’s best-known previous books, The Antidepressant Era and Let Them Eat Prozac, Healy explored the often vexing history of the mental health field and its troubled relationship with Big Pharma. In his latest book, Pharmageddon, he presents an even bleaker picture of the way industry has co-opted medicine in general — not just mental health. Healthland spoke with Healy about his findings./.../

Diferenças de Gênero

Jornal Mente Corpo Março

Diferenças de Gênero - Aloyzio Achutti

As diferenças de gênero sempre despertam curiosidade, provavelmente, desde a descoberta de ostensivas diferenças anatômicas: a existência de apêndices externos em uns, inexistentes em outros. Se estas características não nos fossem desde logo escondidas, não haveria necessidade de colocar cores distintivas em fitinhas no cabelo, roupinhas, sapatinhos: cor de rosa uns; outros, azuis.

19/03/2012

Saiba mais.

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Saúde - Urbana / Observatório das Metrópoles / Georgetown University

Em 19 março p.p. aconteceu a apresentação do nosso grupo Saúde - Urbana  /  Observatório das Metrópoles para os representantes da Georgetown University - Washington, interessados particularmente nas Desigualdades em Saúde.

Medicine & Humanity

"US health system reform--what's missing?" Humanity

POSTED MAR 25, 2012 AT 05:44 PM, EDT BY MELISSA WALTON-SHIRLEY

I don't know the identity of the physician that stood at the microphone at the end of this presentation, but he hit the nail on the head. "Healthcare is a basic human right," he said; which raises the question, "If the right to healthcare is so basic, why is it so problematic?" When there's trouble in any country, it most usually has to do with the age-old struggle to balance the supply of cash with the demand for services, but that is a woefully inadequate summation. Like any complicated and dying patient whose symptom complex is driven by not just one, but two or even three different disease processes, so are the maladies of healthcare reform in our country. Following suit like a successfully metastatic cancer, those who seek to destroy the good things about our system are attacking simultaneously, at every vulnerable site, repeatedly and efficiently. Make no mistake, as a group of individuals, we as healthcare providers are vulnerable.

I read every page of the healthcare reform bill and posted on that issue a few years ago. I lamented that the word "cardiologist," the gatekeeper of the our country's most expensive DRGs, congestive heart failure the most damning, was never mentioned one single time in the entire diatribe. Congestive heart failure was never mentioned as an entity, period. Although trauma networks were addressed, PCI networking, a smoke-free America, and effective strategies for heart-failure prevention and readmissions were never mentioned. Behind what door were we all sleeping? Or more precisely, who was holding the door shut?/.../

Viação Férrea: Fotos LEAchutti

Exposição de Fotos em Rio Grande.
Tema Viação Férrea Fotógrafo: Luiz Eduardo Robinson Achutti
(nosso filho)

Digital Data & Human Brain

All the Digital Data In the World Is Equivalent to One Human Brain

Supercomputer An IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer rack. Wikimedia Commons

By Rebecca BoylePosted 02.11.2011 at 6:05 pm13 Comments

If you could put all the data in the world onto CDs and stack them up, the pile would stretch from the Earth to beyond the moon, according to a new study. The world’s technological infrastructure has a staggering capacity to store and process information, reaching 295 exabytes in 2007, a reflection of the world’s almost complete transition into the digital realm. That's a number with 20 zeroes behind it, in case you're wondering.

Martin Hilbert and Priscila López took on the unenviable task of figuring out how much information is out there, and how its storage and processing have changed over time. Some of their findings seem obvious, like the fact that Internet and phone networks have grown at quite a clip (28 percent per year), while TV and radio grew much more slowly. But others are more surprising, like the nugget that 75 percent of the world’s stored information was still in analog format in 2000, mostly in the form of video cassettes. By 2007, 94 percent of the world’s info was digital./.../

FLU

Study: Why Flu Hits Some People Harder than Others

By ALEXANDRA SIFFERLIN | @acsifferlin | March 26, 2012 | +

TOM GRILL / GETTY IMAGES

During the 2009-10 H1N1 or “swine flu” pandemic, the same virus that caused mild coughing and sneezing in some patients proved fatal for others. It highlighted a medical mystery: why are some people more fit to handle the flu than others?

British and American researchers think they have a clue. Reporting on Sunday in the journal Nature, researchers say they’ve found a gene that influences our susceptibility to flu illness. The gene, called IFITM3, is the “crucial first line of defense” against the flu, researcher Paul Kellam of Britain’s Sanger Institute toldReuters.