Upgrade U

I'm still nursing this sore throat - my voice has that distinctively pubescent squeak to it - and I don't feel like I have much to contribute at the moment. So in lieu of my thoughts: here are a few items that are marginally more interesting than anything I have to say right now.

#1 An article in the American Journal of Epidemiology about how Cuba's economic crisis of the 1990's has led to dramatic country-wide decreases in cardiovascular disease and diabetes. More good analysis can be found here. One of the the less obvious corollarys of this article is that if we are to believe the papers' conclusions, we must also accept that obesity is not only a genetic condition. Instead, weight is the consequence of environmental and genetic interactions, and that environment - including diet and exercise - play large roles.

#2 There are some bad-ass surgeons living in Melborne, apparently. Five Australian surgeons at the Royal Melbourne Hospital removed this metal chair leg from a 20 year-old patient's eye socket, saving both the man's life and, miraculously, his eye - which had, I guess, been pushed aside at impact. The procedure was more than four hours long - including the reconstructive plastic surgery - and the guy walked out of the hospital 19 days later with 95% vision in the damaged eye. While I would still recommend not getting into brawls outside of nightclubs, it's pretty miraculous to think that modern medicine has developed the tools to repair such catastrophic injuries to the human body.

Isn't this a haunting image? Huh, I wonder if the radiologist saw the pathos.

#3 Gβ5-RGS complexes co-localize with mGluR6 in retinal ON-bipolar cells. Morgans C, Bearnot BI, et al. Coming soon to a copy of the European Journal of Neuroscience near you. Oh, you don't get that one? Neither does anybody. This was basic science research I did out at the Neurological Sciences Institute at OHSU in 2004 - but I'm really glad that they're finally getting around to publishing it. I feel like I did some mean confocal microscopy work that summer.