I sleep like a champ – or at least, I’d like to think I do. But frequent bouts of temporary restlessness and insomnia have left me questioning whether I’m doing something wrong.
In a recent interview with 7 Live Online, Clete Kushida, MD, PhD, director of sleep medicine at Stanford, provides sleeping tips for people like me. As you’ll see in the video above, he discusses the recent time change as well as ways to establish a healthy pattern of behavior for better sleep.
This (moving) video, featuring edited narrative elements from Neil deGrasse Tyson, isn’t explicitly about medicine. But the point it makes is as true for biomedicine as it is for space: Public support for the sciences dares us to dream about the future and empowers us to invent it.
Take five minutes and watch the video. It’s worth your time.
Previous research has suggested that making healthy lifestyle changes may improve our health and potentially prevent cancer, stave off Alzheimer’s, lower blood pressure and improve mental health. But, as many of us can attest, adopting healthier habits can be a challenge.
To be more successful at making behavior changes, says New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, you need to understand the science and psychology of how habits work. In this video, Duhigg discusses why habits can be so powerful and what it takes to make behavioral changes. Duhigg draws on a example from his own life, his afternoon cookie cravings, and in the process makes the task of breaking bad habits less daunting.
Past research has suggested that human placentas are a rich source of stem cells that may prove useful in treating leukemia, heart disease and multiple sclerosis. In this TEDMED 2011 talk, Robert Hariri, MD, PhD, chief executive officer of Cellular Therapeutics Division at Celgene, discusses the challenges and potential benefits of transforming stem cells harvested from the placenta into novel medical therapies for a variety of conditions.
Diagnosed early in childhood with cystic fibrosis, Emma Greene and Tiffany Senter were for several years able to lead relatively normal lives by managing their disease with medication and machines to help them breathe. But both were eventually sidelined by their condition, which can result in life-threatening lung infections and serious digestion problems. The California teens, who at the time didn’t know each other, sought treatment at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and, as the above KGO-TV segment explains, their time there led to a strong friendship.
The number of male eating disorder cases is on the rise. This NBC Nightly News segment takes a closer look at increasing prevalence of anorexia among boys and how the disorder differs between genders. In the video, James Lock, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, explains why anorexia is generally more advanced among boys by the time they seek treatment.
Engineers at Stanford have developed a tiny wireless chip, driven by magnetic currents, that is small enough to travel inside the human body. In the above video, Ada Poon, PhD, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, and colleagues describe how the device can propel itself though the bloodstream. They also discuss its wide range of potential biomedical applications, including delivering drugs and cleaning arteries.
Gilbert Khalil’s exemplary fitness did not protect him against prostate cancer – after age 60, the risk rises for every man. Khalil, a project manager from Danville, took a very orderly approach to decide how to proceed after his diagnosis. He had watched his mother and brother endure the side effects of their cancer treatments, so he and his wife Stacee read everything they could. “They all had consequences,” he told me. “We decided we wanted to get a second or even a third opinion.” The couple ended up at Stanford, talking with Mark Gonzalgo, MD, PhD, director of robotic-assisted urologic cancer surgery. This video tells their story.
In this interesting TED Talk, Lucien Engelen, the founder and curator of TEDxMaastrict, discusses several emerging technologies that he thinks have the potential to change health care, including a crowd-sourced map of defibrillators.
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, quarterly DVD magazine Wholphin has released a short film documenting an experiment by Stanford neuroscientists to determine if it’s possible for one person to love more than another person can.
In the film, titled The Love Competition, researchers at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of seven people as they ponder love. Bob Dougherty, PhD, research director at the center, helped develop the love test and Stanford psychology postdoctoral fellow Melina Uncapher, PhD, served as scientific director for the film.
Wired reports:
It turns out — based on the levels of activity in the dopamine, serotonin and ocytocin/vasopressin pathways — it is possible for one person to exhibit that they can love someone more deeply than another person can. But what’s amazing about The Love Competition is seeing the participants talk about their loves and the effects the fMRI tests had on them. Many come out almost giddy when the test is complete, and one woman tearily explains that she just feels lucky for the love she’s had in her life.
The film is definitely worth watching. Personally, my favorite contestant is 10-year-old Milo.
Stanford psychology researchers are using imaging techniques to learn more about what happens in the brains of young girls at risk of depression and, as recently described here, they’re exploring a novel way to train brains away from negative situations. Ian Gotlib, PhD, discusses the work, which represents a “critical step in learning how to prevent the onset of a depressive episode,” in a Stanford Reportarticle and the video above.
And for more on the topic, my colleague recently reported on adolescent depression and efforts to prevent it in Stanford Medicine.
Yesterday, Nikon Instruments announced the winners of its inaugural Small World in Motion Photomicrography Competition. From a selection of more than 200 submissions, judges deemed 13 stunning videos to be the most visually outstanding as well as high-caliber depictions of the intersection of science and art.
This time-lapse movie showing the movement of mitochondria in sensory neurons in the tail of a zebra fish larva took second place. MSNBC reports:
Mitochondria are the energy-producing powerhouses of the cell, and play a vital role in sparking neural activity. This movie was created in the course of [postdoctoral fellow Dominik Paquet's] research into the molecular and cellular pathologies associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Paquet and his team at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease in Munich were studying how problems with the transport of cellular components can affect nerve cells. Paquet says this video may represent the first-ever example of live imaging of mitochondrial transport in the nerve cells of an intact, unmodified vertebrate.
Paquet discusses additional details about the video in this brief Q&A. Additional winning videos can be viewed here.
Today, President Obama welcomed more than 100 students from across the country for the second annual White House Science Fair, an opportunity that gave the students a chance to show off their research projects. Angela Zhang, a local high school senior who took the top prize at the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology back in December, was among the participants. Zhang, who was mentored by Stanford radiologist Zhen Cheng, PhD, won a $100,000 scholarship for what one scientist called “a Swiss army knife for cancer treatment” — a multifunctional nanoparticle that combines treatment and imaging in a single unit. In the video above, she describes her work to CBS News.
Here’s an interesting video from Stefani Bardin, a TEDxManhattan 2011 fellow, and Braden Kuo, MD, a gastroenterology instructor at Harvard. According to their description, the video uses “the M2A and SmartPill devices to look at how the human body responds to processed versus whole foods.” While I’m by no means an expert on this subject, the video makes for some interesting watching.
For your Friday afternoon enjoyment, Wired Science ran an interesting slide show yesterday showing their picks for the 16 best science visualizations of 2011. This video is one of the visualizations, taken from the game “Powers of Minus Ten,” that allows:
…players to zoom into a person’s hand, explore the world at different magnifications and learn about the human body (in the screenshot above, a cellular-level magnification shows dividing cells).
So, if you’re up for some pretty pictures, I recommend heading over to Wired Science and taking a look.
As previously reported on Scope, Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder, PhD, and colleagues conducted an unprecedented analysis of Snyder's genome using a newly ...
