Right or wrong, the word "dopamine" always conjures up images in my head of rats pushing levers over and over again, working desperately hard to send shots of dopamine into their tiny little rodent brains. Dopamine, like many other neurotransmitters ( chemicals that send signals in the brain), works by ...
Many of you might take this for granted, and I know it seems amazing today, but I when first started teaching, our access to scientific literature was pretty limited. I could go to the UW and use Grateful Med to search Medline, but we didn't have anything like it at ...
In last week's episode, your assignment was to think of an interesting plant trait and find a description about a gene, related to that trait, by searching PubMed. Since coming up with an interesting trait might be a challenge for some people, let's think about how to approach this step ...
PubMed is an on-line database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) that contains information from scientific literature. Most of the information is related to medical research. To search PubMed, you use a program called Entrez. You go to the NCBI, select PubMed from the menu, type words into ...
tags: I meant for this to be a three part series, but in part II, I learned that one more experiment had to be done. I had to know if the articles I found in PubMed Central were the same articles that I found in PubMed. Part I and part ...
tags: This three part series covers the problem of finding scientific articles, compares results from a few different methods, and presents instructions for the best method. A day in the life of an English physician In April, I had the great fortune to attend (and speak at) a conference on ...
tags: This is the second part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician Today, we do an experiment with PubMed and PubMed Central to determine the best way to ...
tags: This is the third, and last part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician and the second part, where I compare different methods, here. Today, I will show ...
I never thought that writing a blog would provide such a wonderful chance to learn from the community. In these past few days, I have learned so much from readers about finding and accessing information. Now, I want to share their knowledge with those of you who might not be ...
The Backstory: As it stands today,when one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides the funding for a scientific research project, and those results are published, they must be made freely available to public, within a set period of time. The reasoning behind this requirement is that taxpayers funded ...
I found it in the MeSH database. Really! Looking for a quick answer? Don't ask a scientist It doesn't take long to realize that scientists can spend countless hours debating the meaning of words. Our very own ScienceBlogs is a great example, just look at the many ways we can ...
Bertalan Meskó shares his strategies for keeping up and gives instructions so you can do the same. He shows how you can save your favorite PubMed searches and have NCBI send you e-mails about new papers. He describes some third party PubMed tools that make pretty graphs. Last, he discusses ...
This morning, I learned that congress wants to reverse the advances made by NIH and go back to restricting access to scientific publications. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (New York) and Congressman Darrell Issa (California) are co-sponsoring a bill to restore the limits on public access to NIH-funded research. I've written many ...
Evolution! Wow! A jolt of electricity went down my spine. I feel like Harry Potter saying " Voldemort." Apparently, in biomedical journals, drug resistance and other phenomena can " emerge," " arise," or " spread." It can " appear", " develop", " become common", or " be acquired." As long ...
Mumps was a common childhood disease when I was a child. We grew up learning that it was better to get mumps as a child because getting it as an adult would make you sterile. No doubt that idea arose from symptoms like swollen glands, swollen testicles, etc. When I ...
When finding a female scientists' data turns into an archeological treasure hunt. A few months ago, I decided it would be interesting to celebrate various scientific contributions by making images of chemical / molecular structures in the Molecule World iPad app and posting them on Twitter ( @MoleculeWorld). Whenever I ...
