My Perspective

I attended a few sessions on Tree Identification during different seasons organised by Natural History Society of Northumbria ( NHSN ). These were guided walks lasting a couple of hours led by tree experts. These were amazing sessions where the enthusiasm of the guides were matched by us inquisitive participants. We covered basic aspects of tree identification, their ecological niche, interconnections in the ecosystem, utility to humans over time. Here are the visual guides to tree identification for summer and

There are two variants of pneumonia vaccination - Pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPV or PPSV) and Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV). There are some key differences between them in terms of effectiveness, number of strains vaccinated against, apart from cost which I summarise below.

Our brain needs to perceive the world around us by hearing and recreating it in our mind. This requires that our brain has a way of identifying any new sound as it appears, separating it from other sounds that are present and finally representing it as a distinct object in our mind. An important question in understanding how the brain recreates an 'auditory scene' is therefore: how does the brain detects appearance of new sounds?

To celebrate their 50 years, BNA has a huge number of reviews covering 'past, present, future' of many topics in neuroscience. Here is the link to a webpage with list of all published reviews. Link:  https://journals.sagepub.com/bna/past-present-future There are three reviews on psychiatric drugs and disorders. I list them below

Johnson & Johnson marketed 'Risperdal' (tradename for Risperidone) using a strategy that downplayed the drug's side-effects, and provided kickback payments to nursing homes, but more importantly encouraged off-label use in children for behavioural disorders/autism and in elderly for dementia/sleeping against the explicit instructions from FDA. Ultimately, the fines for this conduct cost J&J $2.2 billion but they made $18 billion in profits from this drug alone and it enabled the then Risperidal sales manager, Alex Gorsky, to become current CEO of J&J but escaping individual culpability for devising such a strategy! Please watch the above (edited) video that covers Dr. John Rengen Virapen, Ex Director of Eli Lilly, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. This comes after his retirement, after working for 35 Years in that company. He now speaks out on the many crimes Big Pharma was and is responsible for (and he himself also participated ...

Do you know what is the ancestral origin of modern day Indians? Is it Arya(ns) or Dravidians? Did prehistoric Indians emigrate in large-scale towards the West spreading culture and language? Or did they immigrate and bring their language and traditions to the subcontinent? Are you curious to know the latest scientific findings on these questions? A recent paper [1] published in Science journal used ancient DNA to address these questions. Key findings :

Graduate Record Examination (GRE) score is essential aspect of graduate application for admission into postgraduate and doctoral programs in United States, and Canada. However, a pertinent question arises as to whether the GRE score can predict ability of the applicant to succeed in their doctoral studies? I recently came across a systematic study [1] which tried to answer this question. The summary of their key findings are below