Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk

The story is at the NY Times. It's all observational though; no guarantees.

Parachute Use

Here is a sarcastic little article that one of my classmates pointed out from the British Medical Journal analyzing the benefits of parachute use if you fall out of a plane. The idea is to make fun of some of the criticism of using observational data to make medical decisions. Here is a little clip from the conclusion of the abstract:

As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

Neutrophil Attack!

Check out this cool video of a neutrophil chasing down and phagocytosing a bacterium. This is another video we watched in class. It looks like an old computer game, or maybe a cellular-level COPS televison episode:

The Inner Life of a Cell

Really cool video. Wish I had my very excited professor narrating for you, but at least you've got an entertaining soundtrack: