Research Updates

Highlights of research papers that I recently read: 

9 August 2020
The Biology of Physiological Health

For most of the history of modern biomedical research, scientists have been focussing on disease genes in order to find out what causes diseases and how we can treat them. However, as even every lay person knows, not every individual has the same susceptibility to fall ill from certain conditions. For instance, people who exercise regularly tend to be more healthy and generally less likely to fall ill. People who take cold showers tend to be less susceptible to infectious diseases. The exposure to exercise or cold somehow makes individuals able to fight back diseases more efficiently.

In her recent very insightful article “The Biology of Physiological Health”, Janelle Ayres highlights different mechanisms that could be at play to promote human health. According to her article, physiological health mechanisms can be either defensive or homeostatic in nature.
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In the most fascinating video about creative thinking that I have watched, Scott Berkun talks (among many other things) about one of the creative techniques called inversion. This means that when trying to be creative, we take the opposite approach from what we want to achieve. For instance, instead of trying to come up with new features of a mobile phone, we come up with a list of the worst features a mobile phone could have (Scott Berkun’s example). And this often helps to have NEW ideas. This technique is what some researchers used in an amazing new paper that I read recently.
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14 June 2020
Why is loss of sleep harmful – “Sleep Loss Can Cause Death through Accumulation of Reactive Oxygen Species in the Gut”

This week I read a very interesting research paper on why sleep deprivation is harmful to organisms. More precisely, the paper investigated why prolonged sleep deprivation ultimately leads to death by using fruit flies and mice.
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