Category: Brains and minds
The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. ... As many have noted, that antidepressants barely best placebo is not big big news; other studies have found that the drugs barely best placebo. But the starkness of Kirsch's "no effect" finding -- and the paper's assertion that there seems no reason to prescribe except for the deeply, dangerously depressed -- seems to have sparked a deeper examination of this issue than previous studies have. The anguish you see in many posts and comments, especially by doctors and depression sufferers, is that of an entire discipline and patient base having to confront the profound ambivalence of the data and the plain wierdness of the way in which psychiatric drugs work.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:01 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
The Kirsch study I wrote about a couple days ago, which found that antidepressants seem to have no more effect...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 12:04 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:21 PM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Environment/nature
The amazing counting mosquitofish. Image courtesy Wikipedia Eight years ago I published a book about a fight over how...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 8:33 AM • 1 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Public health
[This is a revised, expanded version of the original heads-up I put up last night.] A large new meta-analysis of...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:24 AM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Public health
I've not had time to thoroughly read this yet. But on the heels of another study published a few weeks...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:47 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Nota Bene
Yesterday's NY Times Magazine carried one of the best stories I've seen yet on our military efforts in Afghanistan...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neuroimage of the day:
Rat hippocampus neurons:
... From Dissociated culture of rat hippocampal neurons on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
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Posted by David Dobbs at 7:20 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Nota Bene
The fibres, covered with 'hairs' of zinc oxide, can be wired up for power.
...One day you might be able to make a few vigorous arm movements while wearing a nanowire electricity-generating shirt to keep the battery going.
...Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have made a yarn out of nanofibres that produce charge when they are rubbed against one another.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 2:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Interesting if true...
And this: Japan scientists make paper planes for space (Reuters)Reuters - A spacecraft made of folded paper zooming through the...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:43 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find 
