Tagged With "Origin of Life"

Elleen Xue is inviting you to join AAMS' Medical Forum Topic: AAMS Medical Forum Aug 21 8:30AM - 10:30AM-Beijing Time Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/9907...YkhNN1QveVdieE9TQT09 Meeting ID: 990 762 1376 Passcode: 123456 Guest Speaker: Professor Lei Xue: A Drosophila Ad Model And Its Applications (Tongji University, School of Life Science) Professor Zhang Li: What It’s Like in Interventional Cardiology (Professor of Medicine and Chief of Department of Cardiology at Xinhua Hospital）

May 2021 by Elleen Xue Perusing the pages of my digital MIT Technology Review, my eyes became arrested by a photo of what seemed like a paradox: an image that looked as if an IKEA store had married a hospital, and I grew both puzzled and transfixed. For an Italian photo, this one was the least polychromatic I had ever seen. It was mostly black and white, with splashes of bold color only here and there, unlike the live Italy I was accustomed to on holidays with my parents. But what...

August 2020 by Elleen Xue “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein, misattributed to Charles Darwin Perhaps one of the greatest intellectual challenges for me as budding scientist and aspiring physician was understanding the concept of “natural selection,” a term I feel perpetrates a great deal of misunderstanding in science, specifically the concept of evolution. I suspect this is the case because the idea of “selection” quite naturally conjures...

Feb 2021 by Elleen Xue “Life without art is torture.” – Caravaggio As the once in a century Coronavirus pandemic set it, I was essentially shut in. How would I pass the time? And luckily for me, I had some literature to help me get through it. The first book I turned to was a small, pocket book green hardcover of Albert Camus’s The Plague. Camus set the plight in Algeria around the turn of the 20th century and presaged many phenomenon I saw here. Beyond the emotions of panic and despair...

2021.6 by Elleen Xue Today I decided to spook myself and take a break off the beaten track while hiking through nearby Grove Street Cemetery, where many local and university luminaries are buried. And there, in the furthest northwest corner, was a tract of plain-looking graves of renowned Yale professors, many of who died childless and never married. Then, as I stared down at the flickering and tremulous shadow of an elm leaf hovering over a name, I had a eureka moment. The grave was that of...

April 2020 by Elleen Xue As a teenager who has grown up exposed to both Eastern and Western hemispheres, I’m usually caught in betwixt and in between the predominant sentiments expressed therein, and most recently found myself at odds with my family over the issue of the coronavirus. But more than just finding myself at odds with my them, I found myself at odds with China. Paying attention, of course, to the early days of the pandemic, one could not help but notice the extent to which China...

Nov 2019 by Elleen Xue Beware the dreaded Mei ban fa in Chinese, whose mere utterance is experienced like a punch in the stomach, and is among the most dreaded of expressions in the Mandarin language. But the saying is more than just words; it expresses a requisite lack of emotion and learned helplessness, or acceptance of fate that my parent’s generation seems to have embraced from their parents, and an attitude my generation abhors, but can understand. Mei ban fa roughly translates to...

Regular fasting is associated with lower rates of heart failure and a longer life span, according to two new studies. Researchers sought to shed new light on the centuries-old debate about how fasting affects health. Recent studies have shown it contributes to reductions in blood pressure, "bad" LDL cholesterol and insulin resistance, a condition that can raise blood sugar. A 2017 study showed alternate-day fasting was as effective as daily calorie restriction for losing weight and keeping...

Whether intermittent fasting is called the 5:2 diet or the 16/8 method, celebrities swear that these eating regimens are a great way to lose weight. Fasting is now trendy, but real science backs up claims that fasting two days a week or restricting eating to an eight-hour window each day leads to weight loss. And scientists have found intermittent fasting has even more health benefits that are not related to weight: Studies in mice and other animals show that intermittent fasting also...

The organ donation system should be based on the form of expressed consent, because the expressed consent policy respects patients’ bodily autonomy. Competent patients give expressed consent by signing authorization which allows the doctors to proceed with a certain medical treatment. The applying of this consent to organ donation makes organ donation a voluntary act. More specifically, individuals will not become organ donors without clear statements. It respects a human’s right in making...

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein, misattributed to Charles Darwin Perhaps one of the greatest intellectual challenges for me as budding scientist and aspiring physician was understanding the concept of “natural selection,” a term I feel perpetrates a great deal of misunderstanding in science, specifically the concept of evolution. I suspect this is the case because the idea of “selection” quite naturally conjures to mind a selector as the...

Much has been made of the use of “contact tracing” to document and inform people who have been in close contact with someone who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Close contact is defined as a close, physical or proximate and sustained contact with a person for 15 minutes or more. And this definition in itself is problematic because the virus doesn’t always abide by exact distances and wrist watches. But for now those will be the metrics used to attempt to locate, talk with and...