1. Circumcision protects men from HIV, slashing the chance they will catch it by 50 to 60 percent. Now it seems it also reduces herpes virus infections by 25 percent and human papilloma virus infections by 35 percent. Stay tuned for more on circumcision.
The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 360, p1298
2. News of big pharma company merging seems to be the big news in most of the drugs journals recently. Pfizer’s takeover of Wyeth and, Merck proposes to acquire Schering-Plough. Lack of R&D productivity and patent expirations are the reason of these mega-acquisition. Pfizer and Merck are trying to make up for their loss of exclusivity and to refill their pipeline.
3. DNA and the much needed protection from ‘genome hackers’. NewScientist magazine has shown that a genome hacker could take someone’s DNA (those on coffee cups, discarded tissues etc) and obtain scans that reveal their risked of certain diseases fairly easy.
4. Déjà vu revisited. Having blog about this last time here, so here is more to add to it.
- Déjà vu can occur in blind people and thus, two sensory signals that went out of sync hypothesis is not the best way to explain déjà vu.
–Familiarity and recall are dissociable. You can have a sense of familiarity without actually having any prior experience or something.
-Mood and emotions are also important contributors to the sensation of déjà vu. We need the right combination of signals, not just the layout of a scene but how we feel at the time, to believe something is familiar when really it is not. Emotions also play a role in generating the sense of weirdness that accompanies déjà vu.
-The sense of Déjà vu is impossible probably comes from the reasoning part of our brain. When our rational knowledge tells us one thing but our emotional instincts tells us another it can feel very wrong.
-People who think a lot about Déjà vu are more prone to it.
5.Fish from five U.S. rivers were found to be tainted with traces of medications and common chemicals. Read more about that here and you will get to read about Charlie, the fish too.
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