Category Archives: Science

Science

Daily Work Log 2006-07-12

In an effort to increase my blogging, I’m going to start making daily logs before I leave work.

I spent most of today reading journal articles to prep for writing the discussion and introduction of my paper. The methods and results have been coalescing for a while, and I think are nearing completion. I received some helpful comments from my coauthor via trans-Atlantic fax this morning, and addressing those comments is next on the agenda for that project.

In other news, I’ve begun work on my prospectus. It needs to be defended before I leave for Baltimore, and that doesn’t give me very long. Luckily a lot of the groundwork has already been done for other reasons, so it should be mostly synthesis. The department does require that I write it up in NIH format in addition to the standard format required by the Dean’s office, so I get to join the wonderful world of people who’ve filled out all of that stuff. I hope it’s simpler than my AHA fellowship application was.

Tomorrow I have to take the day off to go to Mandeville, so I’ll follow my first day of daily posts with a day of no posting. My apologies!

One last note before I go home. Last night I found a great meditation timer for Palm OS, PocketDoan. It’s good for much, much more than meditation, though. People have siezed on it for use in work “dashes” particularly the (10+2)*5 method discussed at 43 Folders. I used it for that today and it was fantastic! I only got 3 dashes in today, and I only managed to finish one of the three without an interruption (though pausing is easy). I’m going to keep trying this and try to squeeze more 1-hour periods in per day. My ideal goal would be 7-8 per day.

The most important issues in scientific publishing

I’m in a bit of a pickle with a paper I’ve been writing for a while, and this post (which I had bookmarked because I thought it would have good writing tips — and it did, but not the kind I wanted) gave me a little bit of comic relief.

Actually, a lot of comic relief. If you’ve ever done research, applied for a grant, or tried to write a scientific paper, I’m 90+/-5% sure that you’ll get a kick out of this guy’s writeup.  I give an except below to give you some idea about how it reads:

Improbable Research

3. Scientific Writing
You have spent years on a project and have finally discovered that you cannot solve the problem you set out to solve. Nonetheless, you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific community (Schulman et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just as important as positive results, and also that if you don’t publish enough you will never be able to stay in science. While writing a scientific paper, the most important thing to remember is that the word “which” should almost never be used. Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e. 12 hours a day) typesetting the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman & Bregman 1992).

Atrial Natriuretic Peptide

A little while ago I made a note to myself to look up the effects of atrial natriuretic peptide. We’re having an air conditioning / server issue so I took care of this while waiting. Wikipedia, as usual, had the answer:

Atrial natriuretic peptide – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The overall effects of ANP release are a reduction in blood volume and therefore central venous pressure, cardiac output, and arterial blood pressure. It also increases renal sodium secretion and excretion. The overall effect of which is to counter the blood pressure-raising effects of the renin-angiotensin system.

I got the AHA Pre-Doctoral Fellowship!

The AHA pre-doctoral fellowship I applied for in early January (remember?) has been approved for funding! I include a copy of the project lay summary, which the AHA will also post on its site, below:

A heart attack can only be stopped by application of a strong electric field (i.e. electrical defibrillation). While this treatment is currently used, and works, it also requires very strong shocks to ensure success. This is both painful and damaging to the body.

The way such shocks work is not entirely understood. Previous research has improved understanding of the mechanism, which has led to improvements in medical devices and quality of life. However, defibrillation shocks from implantable devices are still so strong that they cause people to lose consciousness. This study aims to further the understanding of electrical defibrillation in order to reduce the energy needed for defibrillation.

When a defibrillation shock is applied, there is sometimes a period when there is no activity in the heart, followed by more fibrillation (which means that defibrillation failed). The heart wall has different properties within its thickness depending on the distance to the heart’s surface. One goal of this study is to examine how those differences contribute to the period of no activity and the following continuation of the heart attack. We will use a computational model of the heart to simulate these differences in the wall and examine in detail how they affect defibrillation.

The inner wall of the heart is composed of a web of tissue, which is thought to interact with shocks and make defibrillation more difficult. In order to determine whether these effects are relevant to defibrillation, we will make a very detailed computer model of the inner wall of the heart, and simulate the application of a defibrillation shock. We will then be able to look closely at what happens on the inner wall of the heart during such a shock.

The long-term significance of this work is that it furthers understanding of the very complex phenomenon known as a heart attack, or fibrillation, and the methods by which heart attacks are treated. The current treatment is painful and incapacitating. The more that is understood about how defibrillation shocks work, the more those shocks can be improved and hopefully reduced in strength, leading to an improvement in quality-of-life for people susceptible to heart attacks.