Bilingual Secret Shame

Pharmacy | Right | April 20, 2009


Customer: “Excuse me, what are diaper couches?”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Customer: “Diaper couches.”

Me: “Ma’am, I’m not sure what you mean.”

Customer: *points to the boxes of diapers* “That box! It says ‘diaper couches’.”

Me: *suddenly understanding* “Ma’am, that box says diapers, and then it says ‘couches’. That’s the French word for diapers.”

Customer: *looks around, then whispers* “Don’t tell anyone!” *leaves*

Rip Van Winkle To The Extreme

Crazy Requests, Pharmacy | Right | April 2, 2009


Customer: “Hi, I have a rather simple question to ask you.”

Me: “Sure thing. What can I help you with?”

Customer: “Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to make someone sleep for a really long time, what would I use?”

Me: “Um, just how long are you talking?”

Customer: “Well, I was thinking somewhere around forever.”

Me: “…”

Ăn Để Chết - Chu Thập







“Ăn để chết” là tựa đề của một bài báo trong nước về điều thường được gọi là “văn hóa ẩm thực” tại Việt Nam thời xã hội chủ nghĩa.




Ngoài tựa đề ra, bài viết chẳng có gì mới mẻ. Chuyện ăn uống của người Việt Nam trong nước hiện nay là một đề tài không bao giờ cạn.


Thoạt đọc qua tựa đề, tôi không thể không liên tưởng đến bữa ăn cuối cùng của các tử tội trước khi bị đem đi hành quyết. Mà suy cho cùng, dường như cái lối ăn uống của nhiều người Việt Nam trong nước hiện nay chẳng khác bao nhiêu với bữa ăn cuối cùng của các tử tội.

Bài viết nói đến trường hợp của một bệnh nhân tại quận Đống Đa, Hà nội: “Bệnh nhân 54 tuổi này đã rời xa các bàn nhậu từ khoảng gần một năm nay vì bệnh tiểu đường. Trước đây, trong các cuộc nhậu của bạn bè, gần như ông không bao giờ vắng mặt. Bác sĩ trưởng khoa Tim mạch tại Bệnh viện Hữu Nghị Hà Nội cho biết ông đã gặp nhiều người (nói không ngoa) chết vì ăn, chết vì uống.




Ông bác sĩ này kể lại: “Một bệnh nhân mới 45 tuổi, khi còn nghèo khó thì làm việc cật lực, chí thú kiếm tiền và tiết kiệm. Đến khi có nhiều tiền, anh quay ra ăn uống nhậu nhẹt vô biên, ngày nào cũng nhậu, có ngày nhậu mấy cuộc. Ở tuổi 45, anh chết vì xơ gan sau một thời gian dài phải “đeo ba lô ngược” (bụng quá phệ).


Cũng theo bài viết, có nhiều bệnh nhân ăn uống vô độ, chỉ cao khoảng 1m63, nhưng nặng đến gần một tạ. Gia đình bệnh nhân này lại có tiền sử mấy đời cao huyết áp. Khi được bác sĩ khuyên cần phải giảm cân bằng cách giảm ăn, tăng vận động, bệnh nhân từ chối hợp tác vì nhịn ăn là chuyện không thể.


Bác sĩ trưởng khoa Tim mạch, bệnh viện Hữu Nghị Hà Nội nhận định: “Nếu cứ như vậy thì anh ta không phải ăn để sống, mà là ăn để chết. Tôi thấy xã hội chúng ta giờ trọng chuyện ăn uống quá. Làm việc gì cũng phải có tiệc chiêu đãi toàn món ngon, bổ béo”.


Bác sĩ này cũng cho biết: đa số những người “ăn để chết” đều là những người giàu có và các bệnh phổ biến hơn cả vẫn là tim mạch, huyết áp, gan, thận, tiểu đường.



Dĩ nhiên, nếu có những người giàu “ăn để chết” thì cũng không thiếu người nghèo bị buộc phải ăn thực phẩm rẻ tiền, không hợp vệ sinh, không an toàn do đó cũng bị mang bản án “ăn để chết”. Tựu trung, người giàu chết vì béo phì, còn người nghèo chết vì thiếu vệ sinh.


Phải nói chẳng có nơi nào trên thế giới, người ta ăn nhậu tưng bừng như ở Việt Nam. Sáng sớm, mới mở mắt đã thấy có người gánh hàng đi ngang trước nhà. Tối đến, khuya lơ khuya lắc, không chỉ các nhà hàng sang trọng, mà các hàng quán rẻ tiền cửa vẫn mở. Tiệc vui, người ta ăn nhậu đã đành, mà ma chay, người ta cũng nâng ly “dzô” tới bến

Không biết có phải vì điếc mà người ta không sợ súng chăng? Người Pháp thường nói “bụng đói không có tai”. Đây là kinh nghiệm của cá nhân tôi.






Sau năm 1975, cái bụng đói của tôi hầu như không còn tai nữa. Cà phê được pha chế cỡ nào, tôi cũng nốc. Thuốc lá có tẩm thuốc độc cỡ nào tôi cũng rít. Rượu thì khỏi nói. Biết người ta bỏ thêm thuốc rầy Mitox vào để tăng nồng độ rượu, tôi cũng chẳng chê. Còn thịt mỡ có thèm “nhỏ rãi” cũng chẳng có mà ăn, hơi đâu mà quan tâm đến “Cholesterol”, tức mỡ trong máu. Cũng nhờ “được” sống trong thiên đàng xã hội chủ nghĩa mà hầu như thịt gì tôi cũng nếm. Đúng là hễ con gì cựa quậy, nhúc nhích là xơi được ráo!


Người Việt Nam nào đã từng sống dưới chế độ cộng sản có lẽ cũng đều đã trải qua những cảnh phải tranh đấu với thiên nhiên để sống còn chẳng khác gì Bear Gryllss trong chương trình truyền hình “Man vs Wild” (người chống chọi với thiên nhiên).


Ngày nay, sau gần nửa đời người sống ở xứ người, ý thức hơn về những đòi hỏi của phép vệ sinh, nhất là vệ sinh trong ẩm thực, học được đôi chút về nếp sống văn minh, tôi không thể hiểu được tại sao mình đã có thời ăn uống bừa bãi như thế trong 5 năm sống dưới chế độ cộng sản.


Tôi hiểu được phần nào phản ứng, cách suy nghĩ và ngay cả phán đoán gay gắt của ông Joel Brinkley, giáo sư chuyên ngành báo chí thuộc trường đại học Stanford, Hoa kỳ, về cách ăn uống hiện nay của người Việt Nam trong nước. Theo ông giáo sư đã từng đoạt giải Pulitzer này, sở dĩ người Việt Nam “hung hăng, hiếu chiến” là vì ăn nhiều thịt.





Giáo sư Brinkley đã đưa ra nhận xét trên đây sau một chuyến du lịch 10 ngày xuyên qua nhiều nơi tại Việt Nam. Viết trên báo The Chicago Tribune, ông Brinkley cho rằng du khách đến Việt Nam hầu như chẳng còn thấy bóng dáng thú nuôi hay động vật hoang dã nữa bởi vì đa số đều đã bị người Việt Nam hiện nay săn tìm để xơi tái.


Ông viện dẫn những cuộc chiến của Việt Nam Cộng Sản với Trung Quốc và Campuchia để kết luận rằng vì thường xuyên ăn thịt cho nên người Việt Nam hung hăng hơn nhiều so với người dân các nước lân bang.



Dĩ nhiên, bài viết của ông giáo sư của trường đại học danh tiếng Stanford trên đây đã tạo ra một làn sóng phản đối mạnh mẽ từ người Việt khắp nơi trên thế giới, khiến báo The Chicago Tribune phải chính thức lên tiếng xin lỗi.


Không phải quơ đũa cá nắm, nhưng bất cứ người Việt hải ngoại nào về thăm Việt Nam một lần cũng đều nhận thấy người Việt Nam sống dưới chế độ cộng sản hiện nay “khác” với người Việt Nam trước năm 1975.






Khác nhiều thứ lắm. Khác nhất là cách ăn uống. Như ông bác sĩ ở Bệnh viện Hữu Nghị Hà Nội trên đây đã nói, nhiều người Việt Nam trong nước hiện nay “ăn để chết”. Nghe như một nghịch lý. Nhưng thực tế là như vậy. Không chết dần chết mòn trong thân xác, thì cũng chết từ từ trong nhân cách.

Người Tây Phương có lý để nói rằng “we are what we eat” (tạm dịch: ăn cái gì thì người như vậy). Tính khí của người ăn chay trường chắc chắn khác với kẻ nhậu nhẹt quanh năm ngày tháng. Người ăn uống điều độ hẳn cũng có tư cách khác với kẻ ăn uống bừa bãi, vô độ.


Người Việt Nam chúng ta thường nói: “miếng ăn là miếng tồi tàn”. Kỳ thực, tự nó, miếng ăn là điều tốt. Miếng ăn nuôi thân xác, tạo sự gặp gỡ, giúp thể hiện tình liên đới và chia sẻ. Có tồi tàn chăng là trong tư cách của con người mà thôi. Chỉ biết tới cái bụng của mình, chỉ biết ăn cho sướng cái lỗ miệng mà chẳng màng đến sức khỏe, bệnh tật và những hệ lụy đối với người thân và xã hội, ăn như thế đúng là ăn để chết và chết tồi tàn.





Trong một bài viết về cái ăn, tiến sĩ Nguyễn Hưng Quốc cho rằng dân tộc Việt Nam bị “ám ảnh” bởi cái ăn. Chuyện gì cũng quy về cái ăn. Từ nào cũng có thể được ghép với chữ ăn. Thật ra, ông bà ta không hẳn theo triết lý hiện sinh, nhưng đã có lý để xem cái ăn như chuyện quan trọng nhất trong đời người, cho nên mới xếp việc “học ăn” lên đầu của mọi thứ học. Cứ như “học ăn” được thì chuyện gì cũng học được hết!



Chúa Nhật vừa qua, trong giờ Thánh lễ, tôi đã bị “thu hút” bởi cái miệng của một bé gái khoảng một tuổi, ngồi với cha mẹ ở băng ghế phía trước. Trong các nhà thờ Úc, người ta thường thiết kế một chỗ đặc biệt ở phía cuối dành riêng cho thơ nhi đi cùng cha mẹ. Ngồi trong một “lồng kiếng” như thế, trẻ con tha hồ la hét. Nhưng cũng có nhiều bậc cha mẹ phá lệ, mang trẻ thơ đến ngồi hòa đồng trong đám đông. Gặp lúc muốn nghe bài giảng của vị linh mục thì trẻ thơ, dù có dễ thương cách mấy, cũng làm cho mình khó chịu.



Nhưng khi vị linh mục giảng mà mình có chăm chú cách mấy cũng chẳng hiểu gì thì trẻ thơ, dù có quậy phá cỡ nào, cũng vẫn là “thiên thần” cứu nguy khỏi cơn…ngủ gục. Vị thiên thần ở trước mặt tôi quả đã mang lại cho tôi nhiều giây phút “thoải mái” trong giờ lễ. Cô bé có cái miệng thật xinh. Có lúc cô nói bi bô. Có lúc cô quay xuống cười với vợ chồng tôi. Nhưng động tác chính của cô vẫn là cầm bất cứ món gì cũng cho vào miệng, không riêng miệng mình mà còn nhét vô miệng cha mẹ nữa một cách thật dễ thương.


Tan lễ, khi bàn đến cái miệng của cô bé thiên thần trong nhà thờ, nhà tôi nhắc lại hai điểm nổi bật trong tư tưởng của cha đẻ phân tâm học Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Theo ông, đời người có hai giai đoạn: giai đoạn tuổi thơ tập trung vào cái miệng; cái gì cũng đưa vào miệng. Giai đoạn trưởng thành lại xoay quanh tính dục; bản năng tính dục chi phối mọi sinh hoạt của con người; động lực đàng sau mọi hoạt động của con người luôn là tính dục.


Vai trò của tính dục trong cuộc sống con người, theo quan niệm của Freud, có thể còn trong vòng tranh cãi. Nhưng về vai trò của cái miệng ở tuổi thơ và ngay cả trong tuổi trưởng thành, thì quả thật tôi thấy khó chối cãi được. Trong thân thể con người, miệng không phải là cơ phận quan trọng nhất sao? Và trong các chức năng của miệng, ăn không phải là sinh hoạt chính sao?


Đâu phải chỉ có người Việt Nam mới xem “chuyện ăn” là điều quan trọng nhất trong cuộc sống con người. Tôi nghĩ đến câu chuyện ông bà nguyên tổ loài người Adam và Eva bị cám dỗ trong vườn địa đàng. Cơn cám dỗ đầu tiên của hai ông bà này, dù có giải thích như thế nào đi nữa, vẫn xoay quanh chuyện ăn. Điều này cho thấy cám dỗ lớn nhất trong đời người có lẽ vẫn là chuyện ăn uống.


Cũng trong Kinh Thánh, tôi đọc được rằng cơn cám dỗ đầu tiên mà Chúa Giêsu phải trải qua sau 40 đêm ngày chay tịnh cũng chính là về cái ăn. Ma quỉ dụ dỗ Ngài: hãy biến những hòn đá trước mặt thành bánh mà ăn!


Tôi không biết Chúa Giêsu có phải là một người thích ăn uống nhậu nhẹt không. Nhưng rất nhiều những sinh hoạt chính của Ngài được ghi lại trong Kinh Thánh lại liên quan đến chuyện ăn uống. Hẳn Ngài cũng đã nhiều lần ngồi vào bàn nhậu để chén thù chén tạc với phường thu thuế cho nên những kẻ chống đối Ngài rêu rao rằng Ngài là một tên “bợm nhậu”. Chắc chắn Chúa Giêsu phải xem chuyện ăn uống là điều quan trọng trong cuộc sống con người cho nên trong rất nhiều bài giảng, Ngài thường xử dụng hình ảnh của bữa tiệc hay tiệc cưới. Rõ ràng nhất là trước khi chết, nghi thức mà Ngài muốn trối lại cho các môn đệ để cử hành và tưởng nhớ đến Ngài cũng chính là một bữa tiệc (thường gọi là Tiệc Ly).


Ngày nay, mỗi lần gặp nhau trong các thánh lễ Chúa Nhật, các tín hữu Kitô cũng lập lại nghi thức “ăn uống” ấy. Đỉnh điểm của đời sống tôn giáo của họ là một bữa ăn. Họ lập lại bữa ăn ấy không chỉ để tưởng niệm Đấng Cứu Độ, mà còn để tự nhắc nhở rằng cuộc sống tự nó phải là một bàn ăn trong đó mọi người đều được mời gọi ngồi bên nhau và chia sẻ cho nhau. Cuộc sống vẫn mãi mãi là một trường dạy “học ăn”.



Trong lúc trà dư tửu hậu, khi chia sẻ với bạn bè thân quen, tôi thường nói rằng, với tôi, trong các thứ học thì học làm người là điều khó nhất. Người, theo một định nghĩa mà tôi vẫn cho là xác đáng nhất, là “một con vật có lý trí”. Xét dưới nhiều phương diện, con người chẳng khác con thú bao nhiêu.


Có khác chăng là bởi con người có lý trí và luôn phải hành động theo lý trí. Vứt cái lý trí đi thì con người sẽ hành động chẳng khác gì thú vật. Cụ thể là chuyện ăn uống. Hãy thử tưởng tượng: khi ta tạm nghỉ chơi với lý trí để được tự do ăn uống như súc vật, chuyện gì xảy ra nếu không phải là: con người chỉ còn biết “ăn để chết”.





Có lẽ vì học làm người là chuyện khó nhất trong cuộc sống và trong học làm người thì ăn lại là chuyện phải học suốt cả một đời, cho nên trong tôn giáo nào cũng có chuyện ăn chay. “Ăn chay” chính là “học ăn”. Ăn như thế nào để “ăn không phải để chết” mà là để sống và sống sung mãn trong nhân cách vậy.

MacGyver Becomes a Dad

Great Stuff, Medication, Parents/Guardians, Pharmacy | Right | March 26, 2009


(A man is picking up a prescription for his infant child.)

Customer: “How much did you say the prescription was?”

Me: “$49.99.”

Customer: “What’s the difference between this and what I can get over the counter?”

Me: “There’s no cough medicine you can give your eight-month-old, sir, other than this.”

Customer: “Well, what’s in it?”

(He picks up the prescription papers and starts rustling through them.)

Customer: “If I can buy everything that’s in it over the counter, I’ll just make it myself.”

Me: “…excuse me?”

Perhaps Multiple Choice Might Be Easier

Pharmacy | Right | February 20, 2009


Customer: “I’m after some cold and flu medication.”

Me: “Sure, do you take any other medication?”

Customer: “Um… no… I don’t thi-… wait, yes, but it’s… actually no, no, I don’t.”

Me: “Okay then, and are you allergic to anything?”

Customer: “God, this is too hard!” *storms out*

Surely, One Missed Anatomy Class Can’t Hurt…

Pharmacy | Right | February 19, 2009


(A woman walks in with her daughter one afternoon.)

Me: “Hello, how can I help you?”

Customer: “There’s something wrong with my daughter.”

Me: “Oh?”

Customer: “Her eyes keep closing on their own!”

Me: “…ma’am, that’s called blinking.”

An Inconvenient List of Truths

Hospital, Pharmacy | Right | February 5, 2009


Me: “Hello?”

Caller: “Yeah, I need you guys to fill a prescription for me.”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but we are a hospital pharmacy. We only prepare medications for patients of the hospital.”

Caller: “Well, that’s simply discrimination. You ought to fill for everyone.”

Me: “You see, sir, we’re very different from a retail store. We issue individual, bubble-packed pills in one-day supplies to the nurses to give to their patients. We don’t have bottles, and we don’t do 30-day supplies like a store does. We don’t have a cash register, or any kind of means to ring up customers. We’re also located in an employees-only area of the hospital, near the morgue. You can’t really get to us that easily.”

Caller: “Well, those are all excuses.” *hangs up*

That’s Commitment

Pharmacy, Retail, Time | Right | January 15, 2009


Me: “Thank you for calling your local 24-hour pharmacy. How may I help you?”

Customer: “Yeah, what time do you close?”

Me: “Sir, we never close. We’re open 24 hours.”

Customer: “Well, that’s just ridiculous. How can you put up with that?”

Me: “Sir?”

Customer: “So if I show up at four in the morning with a prescription, you’d be there?”

Me: “Yes, sir, we’d be open.”

Customer: “And what time do you open?”

Me: “Sir… we never close; we are always open. Think of it like a 24-hour diner; there’s always someone here to help you.”

Customer: “Oh, man, that must stink! When do you get time to go home and sleep?!”

Me: “Er… we have cots in the back

Insert Butt Crack Here

Great Stuff, Health & Body, Pharmacy | Right | October 31, 2008


Customer: “Hi, I’m having a problem with my suppositories. They’re not working at all!”

Me: “Okay, let me get the pharmacist for you so he can help you.”

(The customer decides to just yell the same question over two counters to the pharmacist in front of at least 10 other people.)

Pharmacist: “Ma’am, would you like to come over to our consultation are so we can talk about this privately?”

Customer: “No, I just want to know why my suppositories aren’t working!”

Pharmacist: “Well, okay. Are they melting before you insert them?”

Customer: “No, nothing like that!”

Pharmacist: “Are they breaking up into pieces before you use them?”

Customer: “No, no, nothing like that! They’re all in one piece and the same shape and all that stuff! I know how to follow the d*** directions!”

Pharmacist: “Are parts of the foil wrapper sticking to it at all?”

Customer: “What wrapper?!”

(Note: the suppository wrappers are aluminum foil with sharp edges. Ouch.)

After This, She’s Gonna Need An Antidepressant

Crazy Requests, Extra Stupid, Money, Pharmacy | Right | October 26, 2008


Customer: “Hi, can I have some of those allergy medications that are behind the counter? The 24 hour kind.”

Me: “Sure thing…”

(I grab one, because law mandates that the computers only allow me to check out one 24 hour medication for a certain period of time).

Customer: “Oh, I wanted four. Can I have four, please?”

Me: “Sorry, I can only give you one. There’s a law that makes me check your ID on the computer. It won’t let me check out more than one for you, at least not in the 24 hour dose.”

Customer: “Well, can you at least try? If you’d TRY once in a while, you never know what you can do!”

Me: “All right, then…”

(I scan one and sure enough, the second won’t go through.)

Me: “Yup, it won’t let me check out the second one. Your total’s gonna be about 20 bucks.”

Customer: “Okay, now try the third one.”

Me: “What?”

Customer: “If the second one didn’t work, maybe the third one will.”

Me: “Ma’am, all four of these are exactly the same. If the second one didn’t work, what makes you think if I rang up another box of the exact same thing would work?”

Customer: “JUST DO IT!”

Me: “Okay… yeah… it’s not working.”

Customer: “Okay, now try the fourth one.”

(Suffice it to say it doesn’t work; after she buys her one box, she comes back about fifteen minutes later.)

Customer: “HOW DARE YOU SELL ME THIS EXPIRED MEDICATION!”

Me: “Err… what? I can guarantee you it’s not. I checked it before I gave it to you.”

Customer: “Oh yeah? Then what’s this? It says FEB 20!”

Me: “Yes… February… of 2020. Not February 20th.”

Customer: “Uh… well, I’m older than you and I probably make way more than you anyway, so I’m right. I’m 42 and I make $[amount] an hour!”

Me: “I’ll agree with you, you’re much older than I am. I’m only 26. But, ma’am, you are talking to a pharmacist. I make twice that. Oh, wait… I’m in overtime now… three times that. Actually, in the time it took me to help you, I just made one hour’s worth of your wage. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

Even Managers Have A Stupid Quota

Bosses & Owners, Crazy Requests, Health & Body, Money, Pharmacy, Refund | Right | October 8, 2008


(A young, angry-looking woman is standing at the pharmacy counter with a small pile of white sticks.)

Me: “How can I help you?”

Customer: “Yeah, these pregnancy tests are all faulty. I want a refund.”

Me: “Okay. So, what happened? Were they broken or missing pieces?”

Customer: “No, they keep saying positive. I’m not pregnant.”

Me: “Um… okay. So, if you’re not pregnant, then why get the tests?”

Customer: “Get your manager!”

Me: *gets manager*

Manager: “What’s the problem?”

(I wander off at this point, called into the vitamins section. When I come back, security is taking the woman out of the store.)

Me: “What the…?”

Manager: “Twit. She just wanted her money back. I hope she has twins that cause a LOT of pain and are ugly. REAL ugly… and poop a lot!”

Speak For Yourself

Great Stuff, Jerk, Pharmacy, USA | Right | August 28, 2008


Customer: “Excuse me!”

Me: “How can I help you, sir?”

Customer: “My wife sent me in here to pick up some chestnut brown and I can’t find it.”

Me: “Okay, is that makeup or hair color?”

Customer: “I don’t know; she just said chestnut brown.”

Me: “Do you happen to remember the brand name?”

Customer: “No! She just said chestnut brown. Weren’t you listening?”

Me: “Well, it sounds like hair dye to me. Let’s have a look.”

(We both go to the hair coloring aisle and I start to look through every shade in every brand. The man does not help at all; it takes me ten minutes.)

Me: “Here you go, sir. This is Garnier hair color, chestnut brown.”

Customer: “Are you sure that’s it? I don’t want to go home and have to come back.”

Me: “You could call your wife and ask her.”

Customer: “She’s not at home. Oh, wait, hold on.”

(He pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and begins to read it.)

Customer: “Yep, Garnier chestnut brown. That’s it!”

Me: “Sir, no offense, but you could have saved us a lot of time by reading that note in the first place.”

Customer: “That’s the problem with this country. Nobody wants to work anymore!”

Me: “Yeah, that’s our problem.”

He Shoots, He Misses

Pharmacy | Right | August 13, 2008


(I used to work at a drug store. From time to time, the pharmacy portion of the store wouldn’t open because there wasn’t a pharmacist to do so. A customer reads the closed sign…)

Customer: “What’s the meaning of this?!”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir. The pharmacy is closed today because we don’t have a pharmacist.”

Customer: “People are SICK! They need their MEDICATION!”

Me: “I wish there was something I could do, sir, but–”

Customer: “You know what this is? Do you?! Two words! TWO WORDS! UN-ACCEPTABLE!”

Thirteen Bucks Can Buy A Lot Of Beans

Great Stuff, Health & Body, Money, Pharmacy | Right | August 4, 2008


Customer: “I hear there’s this stuff you can put on your food that won’t give you gas.”

Me: “Oh, yeah… it’s called Beano. Put a couple of drops on your food and the enzymes in it prevent the food from giving you gas.”

Customer: “So, you have it?”

Me: “Yep. I’ll show you.”

(We walk over to the shelf where Beano is kept. I show him the little 3 or 4 oz. bottle; a little goes a long way with that stuff.)

Me: “This is it.”

Customer: “How much?”

Me: “$12.99.”

Customer: “For THAT little bottle? S***, I’ll just fart!”

The Inadvertent Thief

Criminal & Illegal, Extra Stupid, Great Stuff, Health & Body, Pharmacy | Right | June 26, 2008


Lady: “Do you sell aloe vera gel?”

Me: “No, I’m afraid we don’t, but you might be able to get it at [Store] down the street.”

Lady: “Oh, great, thanks.”

(She leaves and ten minutes later returns wielding a tube, looking irritated.)

Me: “Hello again, did you manage to find it okay?”

Lady: “No! You told me they had aloe vera gel! All they had is the cream! I don’t want the cream!”

Me: “Um… you didn’t want the cream but you bought it anyway?”

Lady: “No, of course I didn’t BUY–”

(She suddenly stopped and looked at the tube in her hand. Her expression turned to horror and she legged it back out the door. My coworkers and I laughed for a good ten minutes at that one.)

Up Munchkins

Extra Stupid, Great Stuff, Pharmacy | Right | May 23, 2008


(I live in a town where 65% of the people are 65 years old and older. When we were redoing the design of the store, they placed a large white walkway from the front door to the pharmacy.)

Customer: “Hi, I would like to pick up my prescription.”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but this is the front of the store. Your prescription is in the back of the store, in the pharmacy.”

Customer: “How do I get there?”

Me: “Follow the white brick road.”

Teenage Boys And Smutty Mags? You Don’t Say!

Crazy Requests, Great Stuff, Parents/Guardians, Pharmacy, Religion, Rude & Risque | Right | May 19, 2008


Angry Old Woman: “Excuse me! I am very upset because you sold my young grandson p*rnography!”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we don’t sell p*rnography.”

Angry Old Woman: “Get me the manager, now!”

Manager: “What seems to be the problem, ma’am?”

Angry Old Woman: “Your pervert cashier sold my grandson p*rnography!”

Manager: “Are you sure about that? We don’t sell anything like that here.”

Angry Old Woman: “Do you think I’m stupid? I saw it with my own eyes! It had naked women and he told me he bought it here with no problem!”

Manager: “Could you show me on the shelf what it was?”

(She goes over to the magazines, and points at Maxim.)

Angry Old Woman: “It was this one! See? Right here! Where any child could see!”

Manager: “Ma’am, this magazine is not p*rnography. Granted, the women are scantily clad in a few pictures but they aren’t naked and there is no age restriction on its sale.”

Angry Old Woman: “I know p*rnography when I see it, and this is very offensive. How could you sell it to young children?”

Manager: “Well, actually our store policy dictates that we won’t sell this to a young child even though it is still legal. How old is your grandson?”

Angry Old Woman: “He’s only sixteen!”

Manager: *rolls eyes* “I don’t want to offend your moral beliefs, Ma’am, but if your sixteen year old grandson wants to look at women in bikinis there is no force on earth that is going to stop it. Seriously.”

Angry Old Woman: “The power of Jesus can stop it! The power of Christ should compel you to remove this magazine from your shelves!”

Manager: “Right… Real quick, ma’am, before I get back to work, can I ask you a question? Does your grandson have Internet access?”

Angry Old Woman: “What does that have to do with anything?”

Manager: “A lot, and I think that the power of Christ should compel you to learn how to look up his browser history. Have a good day.”

How About Some Ritalin While You’re At It

Pharmacy | Right | May 7, 2008


(Our insurance transmitter was experiencing problems, so we were unable to transmit to any insurance companies when filling prescriptions. I explained this to one customer, who decided to sit and wait for a while to see if the transmitter would come back up. Meanwhile another customer came in with a prescription.)

New Customer: “Hi, I’d like this filled please.”

Me: *explains transmitter problem*

New Customer: “Oh that’s okay, I don’t have insurance.”

Me: “No problem, we’ll have it ready in just a few minutes.”

Original Customer: “Wait! I was ahead of her! Why isn’t mine ready!?”

Me: “We are still waiting for the insurance transmitter to come back up, sir.”

Original Customer: “Well how did you fill hers!”

New Customer: “I pay cash, I don’t have prescription coverage.”

Original Customer: “Well I pay cash too!”

Me: “You want to just get it at retail price, and not use insurance?”

Original Customer: “Yes! I have cash! I’ll pay for it, just fill it now!”

(Five minutes later…)

Me: “Okay, sir, we’ve got you ready. The total comes to $35.99.”

Original Customer: “WHAT! My co-pay is only $3.00!”

Me: “Sir, you said you wanted to go ahead and pay cash price since the insurance transmitter is still down.”

Original Customer: “I do have cash! See?” *shows wallet with cash in it* “Why is it $35?! You people don’t know anything! I’m taking my business elsewhere!”

Me: *facepalm*

We Can Also Give It Lots Of Benadryl

Great Stuff, Ignoring & Inattentive, Pharmacy, USA | Right | April 28, 2008


(Our new drugstore is assigned a phone number that had previously belonged to the animal shelter. We ALWAYS answer the phone with our store name and hours, but people don’t always listen. This becomes annoying, but one of my coworkers likes to have fun with it.)

Caller: “Uh, yeah. I have this raccoon in my backyard.”

Coworker: “Hmm… that’s nice.”

Caller: “Yeah, well it seems to be acting strangely… like it’s crazy.”

Coworker: “What do you want me to do about it?”

Caller: “Well, you should do your job and come out and get rid of it! Isn’t that why I pay my taxes?”

Coworker: “Okay, then. Give me your address.”

Caller: *gives out address*

Coworker: “All right, after I close the drugstore I’ll be over with my shotgun around midnight. There will be a loud noise, so warn your neighbors. Since I don’t work for your taxes, just tape a $20 bill inside your mailbox, more if you want a fancy burial. Have a nice day!” *click*

Back In My Day, Pills Fell Like Mana From The Heavens

Crazy Requests, Great Stuff, Health & Body, Pharmacy | Right | March 13, 2008


(I was cashiering the closing shift on a Sunday night. The pharmacy closes earlier than the rest of the store on weekends. A customer comes in at 9:30pm.)

Customer: “Oh sh*t! The pharmacy is closed?!”

Me: “Yes, they close at 6pm on weekends. They will open again at 8am tomorrow morning.”

Customer: “But I need a prescription filled.”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but the pharmacist will not be here until 8am tomorrow morning.”

Customer: “Can’t you do it?”

Me: “No…”

Customer: “Why not?!”

Me: “I’m not a pharmacist.”

Customer: “Don’t be a smart a**!”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir. Only a pharmacist can fill your prescription.”

Customer: “What is this world coming to?!” *storms out*

Unfiltered Story #179127

Australia, Pharmacy | Unfiltered | December 9, 2019


(In the pharmacy I worked at they had a sign that said medications are up to 80% off of the regular retail price. A customer comes to my till to pay for his purchases.)

Me: You’re total is (total).

Customer: Where is my discount?

Me: What discount sir?

Customer: The 80% off that it says on that sign!

Me: Oh the discount is already added. What we sell you is already up to 80% off the regular retail price.

Customer: No, it says it’s 80% off, I want my discount.

Me: The discount is already included, it’s off the regular retail price not our current sale price.

(Customer continues to get angrier. He yells at me and won’t let me explain how it works and how it clearly states on the sign what it means. He then starts to blame me personally about the false adversiting in the store even though I have no say as it is a chain store. Eventually he leaves, leaving me to take a break to compose myself.)

Getting The Tattoo Was Too Painful To Remember

Extra Stupid, Pharmacy, USA, Washington | Right | November 27, 2019


(A man covered in tattoos walks up to the pharmacy window to pick up a prescription for his son.)

Cashier: “What is the person’s name?”

Customer: “[Child].”

Cashier: “What is [Child]’s birthday?”

Customer: “Um, is it [date]?”

Me: “No.”

(While the customer is trying to remember his child’s birthday, the cashier notices that a large tattoo on the customer’s arm is the child’s name… and birthday.)

Cashier: “Is [Child]’s birthday [date]?”

Customer: *wide-eyed* “Yes! How did you know?”

Cashier: *speechless*

(I would have thought that if you spent a couple of hours under a tattoo needle, you’d remember what was imprinted into your skin, but I guess I was wrong.)

One Ring To Rue Them All

Bad Behavior, Doctor/Physician, Pharmacy, USA | Healthy | November 13, 2019


My mom has an accident at work and spills boiling water directly on her hand, badly burning several of her fingers, one of which happens to be the finger she wears her wedding ring on. Her boss drives her to a nearby pharmacy clinic where she is seen by the on-call doctor.

At this point, her fingers have swelled a lot, locking her wedding ring on her finger and causing painful constriction. It’s clear that the ring needs to be removed. My mother is assuming they will cut the ring off of her finger, which she is sad about, but at this point, she’s much more concerned about relieving the intense pain she is in. The doctor comes into the room and quickly examines her hand, saying, “What a beautiful ring! It would be such a shame to damage it by cutting it off!”

He then proceeds to forcibly yank the ring off of her finger past the swelling, putting my mother in even more pain and tearing open the blisters that have started to form.

She has since healed and is relieved to be able to wear her ring again and not need to pay to have it fixed, but she isn’t sure it was worth all of the pain and the extra time it took to recover due to the blisters being torn

Mitochondria are the 'canary in the coal mine' for cellular stress

Finding by Salk researchers helps explain how some cancers resist chemotherapy

Salk Institute


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IMAGE: Pictured are mitochondria (red), cell nuclei (blue) and mtDNA (white dots). view more 

Credit: Salk Institute/Waitt Advanced Biophotonics Center

LA JOLLA--(December 13, 2019) Mitochondria, tiny structures present in most cells, are known for their energy-generating machinery. Now, Salk researchers have discovered a new function of mitochondria: they set off molecular alarms when cells are exposed to stress or chemicals that can damage DNA, such as chemotherapy. The results, published online in Nature Metabolism on December 9, 2019, could lead to new cancer treatments that prevent tumors from becoming resistant to chemotherapy.

"Mitochondria are acting as a first line of defense in sensing DNA stress. The mitochondria tell the rest of the cell, 'Hey, I'm under attack, you better protect yourself,'" says Gerald Shadel, a professor in Salk's Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory and the Audrey Geisel Chair in Biomedical Science.

Most of the DNA that a cell needs to function is found inside the cell's nucleus, packaged in chromosomes and inherited from both parents. But mitochondria each contain their own small circles of DNA (called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA), passed only from a mother to her offspring. And most cells contain hundreds--or even thousands--of mitochondria.

Shadel's lab group previously showed that cells respond to improperly packaged mtDNA similarly to how they would react to an invading virus--by releasing it from mitochondria and launching an immune response that beefs up the cell's defenses.

In the new study, Shadel and his colleagues set out to look in more detail at what molecular pathways are activated by the release of damaged mtDNA into the cell's interior. They homed in on a subset of genes known as interferon-stimulated genes, or ISGs, that are typically activated by the presence of viruses. But in this case, the team realized, the genes were a particular subset of ISGs turned on by viruses. And this same subset of ISGs is often found to be activated in cancer cells that have developed resistance to chemotherapy with DNA-damaging agents like doxyrubicin.

To destroy cancer, doxyrubicin targets the nuclear DNA. But the new study found that the drug also causes the damage and release of mtDNA, which in turn activates ISGs. This subset of ISGs, the group discovered, helps protect nuclear DNA from damage--and, thus, causes increased resistance to the chemotherapy drug. When Shadel and his colleagues induced mitochondrial stress in melanoma cancer cells, the cells became more resistant to doxyrubicin when grown in culture dishes and even in mice, as higher levels of the ISGs were protecting the cell's DNA.

"Perhaps the fact that mitochondrial DNA is present in so many copies in each cell, and has fewer of its own DNA repair pathways, makes it a very effective sensor of DNA stress," says Shadel.

Most of the time, he points out, it's probably a good thing that the mtDNA is more prone to damage--it acts like a canary in a coal mine to protect healthy cells. But in cancer cells, it means that doxyrubicin--by damaging mtDNA first and setting off molecular alarm bells--can be less effective at damaging the nuclear DNA of cancer cells.

"It says to me that if you can prevent damage to mitochondrial DNA or its release during cancer treatment, you might prevent this form of chemotherapy resistance," Shadel says.

His group is planning future studies on exactly how mtDNA is damaged and released and which DNA repair pathways are activated by the ISGs in the cell's nucleus to ward off damage

Dartmouth study finds conscious visual perception occurs outside the visual system


Dartmouth College


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IMAGE: One of the stimuli from the fMRI experiments illustrates the remarkable difference between the perceived (illusory) path versus the real (physical) path of the Gabor patch. Click here ((https://www.cavlab.net/Demos/CBDemo/) for... view more 

Credit: Figure by Sirui Liu and Patrick Cavanagh.

A Dartmouth study finds that the conscious perception of visual location occurs in the frontal lobes of the brain, rather than in the visual system in the back of the brain. The findings are published in Current Biology.

The results are significant given the ongoing debate among neuroscientists on what consciousness is and where it happens in the brain.

"Our study provides clear evidence that the visual system is not representing what we see but is representing the physical world," said lead author, Sirui Liu, a graduate student of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. "What we see emerges later in the processing hierarchy, in the frontal areas of the brain that are not usually associated with visual processing."

To examine how the perception of position occurs in the brain, participants were presented with visual stimuli and asked to complete a series of behavioral tasks while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. For one of the tasks, participants were asked to stare at a fixed black dot on the left side of the computer screen inside the scanner while a dot that flickered between black and white, known as a Gabor patch, moved in the periphery. Participants were asked to identify the direction the patch was moving. (Click here (https:/​/​www.​cavlab.​net/​Demos/​CBDemo/​) to view or download the video of the stimulus used in the experiment). The patch appears to move across the screen at a 45 degree angle, when in fact it is moving up and down in a vertical motion. Here, the perceived path is strikingly different from the actual physical path that lands on the retina. This creates a "double-drift" illusion. The direction of the drift was randomized across the trials, where it drifted either towards the left, right or remained static.

Using fMRI data and multivariate pattern analysis, a method for studying neural activation patterns, the team investigated where the perceived path, tilted left or right from vertical, appears in the brain. They wanted to determine where conscious perception emerges and how the brain codes this. On average, participants reported that the perceived motion path was different from the actual path by 45 degrees or more. The researchers found that while the visual system collects the data, the switch between coding the physical path and coding the perceived path (illusory path) takes place outside of the visual cortex all the way in the frontal areas, which are higher-order brain regions.

"Our data firmly support that frontal areas are critical to the emergence of conscious perception," explained study co-author and co-principal investigator, Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, and senior research fellow and adjunct professor of psychology at Glendon College. "While previous research has long established the frontal lobes are responsible for functions such as decision-making and thinking, our findings suggest that this area of the brain is also the end step for perceiving where objects are. So, that's kind of radical," he added

Following the lizard lung labyrinth

Savannah monitor lizards have a unique airflow pattern that is a hybrid of bird and mammal flow patterns

University of Utah


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IMAGE: Different types of airflow patterns in animal lungs. Mammals (top left) have a tidal airflow pattern where air moves to-and-fro through a branching network of bronchi. Birds (top right) have... view more 

Credit: Robert Cieri

Take a deep breath in. Slowly let it out.

You have just participated in one of the most profound evolutionary revolutions on Earth--breathing air on land. It's unclear how the first vertebrates thrived after crawling out of the sea nearly 400 million years ago, but the lungs hold an important clue.

Birds, reptiles, mammals and birds have evolved diverse lung structures through which air flows in complicated ways. Birds and mammals are on extreme ends of the airflow spectrum. Mammals inhale oxygen-rich air that funnels into smaller branches, ending in tiny sacs where oxygen enters and carbon dioxide leaves the bloodstream. When mammals exhale, the depleted air follows the same route out of the body, exhibiting a so-called tidal flow pattern.

In contrast, bird breath travels tidally through part of the respiratory system, but in a one-way loop throughout most of the lung. Thanks to a unique design with aerodynamic valves, air always moves toward the head through many tiny tubes in birds--during both inhalation and exhalation. Scientists thought this pattern of flow is hyper efficient and evolved to support flight until University of Utah biologist Colleen Farmer's research group discovered that alligators and iguanas also have a unidirectional air flow pattern.

In their latest study, U biologists have discovered that Savannah monitor lizards have lung structures that are a kind of a hybrid system of bird and mammal lungs. The researchers took CT scans of the entire lung labyrinth and used two different supercomputers to simulate airflow patterns at the highest resolution. The software used computational fluid dynamics similar to those used to forecast weather, calculating millions of equations every tenth of a second. The findings show that vertebrate lung evolution is complicated and we have yet to understand the full picture.

"We don't know why animals have different types of lung air flow," said lead author Robert Cieri, a postdoc at the University of the Sunshine Coast who did the research while a graduate student in Farmer's lab. "Why do humans have the lungs we have verses the lungs of a bird? That's not a simple question. By answering that, maybe we can find out more about our own history."

The paper published on Dec. 13 in The Anatomical Record.

A unique airflow pattern

The Savannah monitor lizard has long fascinated scientists because they have one of the most complicated lung systems of any reptile. In 2014, Cieri and colleagues analyzed one section of the lung that had primarily one-way airflow. This new study uses more powerful techniques to paint a completer and more complicated picture. Savannah monitor lizard lungs are structured around a long branchial tube that runs through to the back of the lung and opens into a big sac. Many smaller tubes branch off from the main one and distribute air into tiny chambers. These chambers have holes in their walls, allowing air to flow also from chamber to chamber. This complicated layout results in an airflow pattern that changes over the course of a breath cycle. It's a unique pattern that is part bird, part mammal.

When the animal exhales, nearly all of the air flows towards the front of the lung and out of the trachea in a net unidirectional flow. At the beginning of inhalation, air enters through the trachea and flows towards the back of the lung. As the inhale continues, the air begins to distribute throughout the different side chambers and starts to loop back around towards the front of the lung. As these loops become more dominant, the late stages of inhalation look similar to exhalation because most of the air is flowing unilaterally back from the central chamber. The complicated structure has no flaps or valves that determine airflow, like the heart pumps blood. Pure aerodynamics guide the complicated physics.

"This study is important in demonstrating it is possible to numerically analyze patterns of airflow in these extremely complicated lungs. This quantitative ability opens up new avenues to study the basic mechanisms of how aerodynamic valve work, and gives us better tools to piece together the evolutionary history of these patterns of flow and the structures that underpin them," said senior author Farmer.

Supercomputers tell a complicated story

The physics is so complicated that Cieri needed two supercomputers from the Center for High Performance Computing at the U and the National Science Foundation Blue Waters to run the computer fluid dynamics simulation. After creating the CT scans, he modified existing software to predict the velocity and pressure based on the lung structure. He divided the structures into millions of tiny "boxes." Each box has the physical parameters of that section of the lung. The simulation uses equations to predict what the pressure and velocity will be in the next box, and so on.

"There are millions of these elements. Each one is influencing another one every ten-thousandth of a second in every direction. That's why we needed the computer power--the simulation is brute force balancing two equations at each step to figure out the next piece," said Cieri.

The evolution of lungs is one crucial clue to understanding the pressures that led to where we are now. Along with learning more about lung evolution, Cieri believes we can learn something from the physics of the structure.

"We have this amazing wealth of really cool fluid dynamics out there in the animal world that we want to know more ab

Salmon lose diversity in managed rivers, reducing resilience to environmental change

Natural resilience is more important than ever in the face of unprecedented climate change

NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region


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IMAGE: Chinook salmon smolts are facing increasingly warm waterways in order to reach the ocean. view more 

Credit: Photo: Rachel Johnson, NOAA Fisheries/University of California, Davis

The manipulation of rivers in California is jeopardizing the resilience of native Chinook salmon. It compresses their migration timing to the point that they crowd their habitats. They may miss the best window for entering the ocean and growing into adults, new research shows.

The good news is that even small steps to improve their access to habitat and restore natural flows could boost their survival.

The curtailment of high winter river flows by dams means that they no longer provide the cue for the smallest fish to begin their migration to the ocean. The loss of wetlands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta leaves little of the refuge habitat they need to grow along the way. Meanwhile later-migrating fish suffer from rising summer temperatures that reduce their survival even though they migrate at a larger size.

Fish that begin their migration in mid-spring are the ones that survive best and dominate adult salmon returns to rivers such as the Stanislaus. These results were cited in a study published this week in Global Change Biology. Flow alteration and habitat loss have in effect homogenized the survival opportunities of salmon in this highly managed river system, researchers wrote.

That diminishes what is called the "portfolio effect," where a diversity of salmon migration strategies help the fish cope with changing environmental conditions. This is similar to how diversified investments help buffer your financial portfolio against jolts in the stock market. Chinook salmon in California evolved diverse migration timing to handle the wide variation in climate, ocean, and river conditions in the Central Valley region. This is also important as climate change and rapidly changing, "whiplash weather" patterns further alter the picture.

"You never know what's going to be a winning strategy in the future," said Anna Sturrock of the University of California, Davis, and lead author of the research that also included scientists from several other agencies and universities. "Keeping options on the table is the best strategy, but that is not what we see happening."

The research also found that the lower flows released from dams tend to reduce fish production. This is likely due to reduced access to floodplain habitats and lower food production in rivers.

Biologists analyzed two decades of salmon migration data and tracked seven generations of Chinook salmon in the Stanislaus River using chemical signals in their ear bones, called otoliths. Otoliths grow in proportion with the salmon and reflect the chemistry of the surrounding water. Researchers can use them to trace the way fish travel to the sea and gauge their size when they move among habitats.

The use of otoliths made it possible to track very young juvenile salmon called fry that are too small to fit with the electronic tags typically used for such research. This alternative approach revealed that large numbers of migrating fry can survive to adulthood--if they can find freshwater rearing habitat where they can grow along the way.

"That tells us there is this other life history strategy that may be really important," said Rachel Johnson, a research fisheries biologist at NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center and senior author of the research. "Tracking the smaller fish through their otoliths provides important new insights into Chinook salmon dynamics that have otherwise been missing from the picture."

The trouble is, less than 3 percent of wetland habitat remains in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This leaves the small, early migrating fry without the much needed feeding and rearing refuge they need to grow and thrive on their seaward journey.

The authors say that even minor steps to restore some of the natural fluctuations in river flow could benefit salmon by helping maintain some of their valuable diversity. Fry migrate early in such great numbers that even small improvements in their survival rates through the Delta could yield many more fish to help boost adult returns.

"As the climate gets more unpredictable, we need to think about incorporating bet-hedging into river management rather than manipulating the environment in ways that limit options for fish," Sturrock said. "The more options that are left on--or added to--the table the better chance that some fish will be in the right place at the right time."

New assay assesses multiple cellular pathways at once


Baylor College of Medicine


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A novel technological approach developed by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine expands from two to six the number of molecular pathways that can be studied simultaneously in a cell sample with the dual luciferase assay, a type of testing method commonly used across biomedical fields.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the report shows that multiplexed hextuple luciferase assaying, meaning a testing method that can effectively probe six different pathways. It can also be used to monitor the effects of experimental treatments on multiple molecular targets acting within these pathways. The new assay is sensitive, saves time and expense when compared to traditional approaches, reduces experimental error and can be adapted to any research field where the dual luciferase assay is already implemented, and beyond.

"One of the interests of our lab is to have a better understanding of the processes involved in cancer. Cancer usually originates through changes on many different genes and pathways, not just one, and currently most cell-based screening assays conduct single measurements," said corresponding author Dr. Koen Venken, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and pharmacology and chemical biology at Baylor.

To get a more detailed picture of the cellular processes that differentiate normal versus cancer cells, researchers resort to conduct several independent screening assays at the expense of time and additional cost.

"Our goal in this study was to measure multiple cellular pathways at once in a single biological sample, which would also minimize experimental errors resulting from conducting multiple separate assays using different samples," said Venken, a McNair Scholar and member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.

Dr. Alejandro Sarrion-Perdigones, first author of the paper, focused on developing a multiplexed method - a method for simultaneously detecting many signals from complex systems, such as living cells. He developed a sensitive assay using luciferases, enzymes that produce bioluminescence. The assay includes six luciferases, each one emitting bioluminescence that can be distinguished from the others. Each luciferase was engineered to reveal the activity of a particular pathway by emitting bioluminescence.

"To engineer and deliver the luciferase system to cells, we used a 'molecular Lego' approach," said co-author Dr. Lyra Chang, post-doctoral researchers at the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor. "This consists of connecting the DNA fragments encoding all the biological and technological information necessary to express each luciferase gene together sequentially forming a single DNA chain called vector. This single vector enters the cells where each luciferase enzyme is produced separately."

Treating the cells with a single multi-luciferase gene vector instead of using six individual vectors, decreased variability between biological replicates and provided an additional level of experimental control, Chang explained. This approach allowed for simultaneous readout of the activity of five different pathways, compared to just one using traditional approaches, providing a much deeper understanding of cellular pathways of interest.

"In addition to applications in cancer research, as we have shown in this work, our multiplex luciferase assay can be used to study other cellular pathways or complex diseases across different research fields," Venken said. "For instance, the assay can be adapted to study the effect of drugs on insulin sensitivity in different cells types, the immune response to viral infections, or any other combinations of pathways."

News Release 13-Dec-2019

Neural network for elderly care could save millions

A deep neural network model helps predict healthcare visits by elderly people, with the potential to save millions

Aalto University


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If healthcare providers could accurately predict how their services would be used, they could save large sums of money by not having to allocate funds unnecessarily. Deep learning artificial intelligence models can be good at predicting the future given previous behaviour, and researchers based in Finland have developed one that can predict when and why elderly people will use healthcare services.

Researchers at the Finnish Centre for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI), Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) developed a so-called risk adjustment model to predict how often elderly people seek treatment in a healthcare centre or hospital. The results suggest that the new model is more accurate than traditional regression models commonly used for this task, and can reliably predict how the situation changes over the years.

Risk-adjustment models make use of data from previous years, and are used to allocate healthcare funds in a fair and effective way. These models are already used in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and the US. However, this is the first proof-of-concept that deep neural networks have the potential to significantly improve the accuracy of such models.

'Without a risk adjustment model, healthcare providers whose patients are ill more often than average people would be treated unfairly,' Pekka Marttinen, Assistant Professor at Aalto University and FCAI says. Elderly people are a good example of such a patient group. The goal of the model is to take these differences between patient groups into account when making funding decisions.

According to Yogesh Kumar, the main author of the research article and a doctoral candidate at Aalto University and FCAI, the results show that deep learning may help design more accurate and reliable risk adjustment models. 'Having an accurate model has the potential to save several millions of dollars,' Kumar points out.

The researchers trained the model by using data from the Register of Primary Health Care Visits of THL. The data consists of out-patient visit information for every Finnish citizen aged 65 or above. The data has been pseudonymized, which means that individual persons can not be identified. This was the first time researchers used this database for training a deep machine learning model.

The results show that training a deep model does not necessarily require an enormous dataset in order to produce reliable results. Instead, the new model worked better than simpler, count-based models even when it made use of only one tenth of all available data. In other words, it provides accurate predictions even with a relatively small dataset, which is a remarkable finding, as acquiring large amounts of medical data is always difficult.

'Our goal is not to put the model developed in this research into practice as such but to integrate features of deep learning models to existing models, combining the best sides of both. In the future, the goal is to make use of these models to support decision-making and allocate funds in a more reasonable way,' explains Marttinen.

The implications of this research are not limited to predicting how often elderly people visit a healthcare centre or hospital. Instead, according to Kumar, the researchers' work can easily be extended in many ways, for example, by focusing only on patient groups diagnosed with diseases that require highly expensive treatments or healthcare centers in specific locations across the country.

A self-cleaning surface that repels even the deadliest superbugs

Researchers create the ultimate non-stick coating, with medical settings and food industry in mind

McMaster University


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HAMILTON, ON, Dec. 13, 2019 - A team of researchers at McMaster University has developed a self-cleaning surface that can repel all forms of bacteria, preventing the transfer of antibiotic-resistant superbugs and other dangerous bacteria in settings ranging from hospitals to kitchens.

The new plastic surface - a treated form of conventional transparent wrap - can be shrink-wrapped onto door handles, railings, IV stands and other surfaces that can be magnets for bacteria such as MRSA and C. difficile.

The treated material is also ideal for food packaging, where it could stop the accidental transfer of bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella and listeria from raw chicken, meat and other foods, as described in a paper published today by the journal ACS Nano.

The research was led by engineers Leyla Soleymani and Tohid Didar, who collaborated with colleagues from McMaster's Institute for Infectious Disease Research and the McMaster-based Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy.

Inspired by the water-repellent lotus leaf, the new surface works through a combination of nano-scale surface engineering and chemistry. The surface is textured with microscopic wrinkles that exclude all external molecules. A drop of water or blood, for example, simply bounces away when it lands on the surface. The same is true for bacteria.

"We're structurally tuning that plastic," says Soleymani, an engineering physicist. "This material gives us something that can be applied to all kinds of things."

The surface is also treated chemically to further enhance its repellent properties, resulting in a barrier that is flexible, durable and inexpensive to reproduce.

"We can see this technology being used in all kinds of institutional and domestic settings," Didar says. "As the world confronts the crisis of anti-microbial resistance, we hope it will become an important part of the anti-bacterial toolbox."

The researchers tested the material using two of the most troubling forms of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: MRSA and Pseudomonas, with the collaboration of Eric Brown of McMaster's Institute for Infectious Disease Research.

Engineer Kathryn Grandfield helped the team verify the effectiveness of the surface by capturing electron microscope images showing that virtually no bacteria could transfer to the new surface.

The researchers are hoping to work with a commercial partner to develop commercial applications for the wrap.

Tracking lab-grown tissue with light

New proof-of-concept photonic pH sensor could advance studies of tissue regeneration

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)


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Someday, doctors would like to grow limbs and other body tissue for soldiers who have lost arms in battle, children who need a new heart or liver, and many other people with critical needs. Today, medical professionals can graft cells from a patient, deposit them onto a tissue scaffold, and insert the scaffold into the body to encourage the growth of bone, cartilage and other specialized tissue. But researchers are still working toward building complex organs that can be implanted into patients.

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are supporting this field of research by developing a promising new kind of light-based sensor to study tissue growth in the lab.

The NIST team's proof-of-concept work, published today in Sensors and Actuators B, demonstrates a small sensor that uses a light-based signal to measure pH, the measurement unit for acidity, an important property in cell-growth studies. The same basic design could be used to measure other qualities such as the presence of calcium, cell growth factor and certain antibodies.

Unlike conventional sensors, this measurement method could be used to monitor the environment in a cell culture long-term -- for weeks at a time -- without having to disturb the cells regularly to calibrate the sensing instruments. Watching properties of the tissue in real time as they slowly change, over days or weeks, could greatly benefit tissue engineering studies to grow teeth, heart tissue, bone tissue and more, said NIST chemist Zeeshan Ahmed.

"We want to make sensors that can be put inside growing tissue to give researchers quantitative information," Ahmed said. "Is the tissue actually growing? Is it healthy? If you grow a bone, does it have the right mechanical properties or is it too weak to support a body?"

The work could have benefits beyond tissue engineering too, into studying the progression of diseases such as cancer.

"What these sensors could give people is real-time information about tissue growth and disease progression," said American University chemist and NIST guest researcher Matthew Hartings. Conventional sensors give researchers a series of snapshots without showing them the path between those points, Hartings said. But photonic sensors could provide scientists with continuous information, the equivalent of a GPS navigation app for disease.

"We want to provide researchers with a detailed map of the incremental changes that happen as tissue either grows in a healthy way or becomes diseased," Hartings said. "Once researchers know the 'streets' a disease is taking, then they can better prevent or support the changes that are happening" in a patient's body.

A Problem to Solve

Measurements of pH are a vital part of tissue engineering studies. As cells grow, their environment naturally becomes more acidic. If the environment becomes too acidic -- or too basic -- the cells will die. Scientists measure pH on a scale from 0 (very acidic) to 14 (very basic), with an ideal environment for most cells in a narrow range around a pH of 7.

Commercial pH instruments are highly accurate but unstable, meaning they require frequent calibrations to ensure accurate readings day to day. Without calibration, these conventional pH meters lose up to 0.1 pH units of accuracy daily. But tissue engineering studies take place on the order of weeks. A culture of stem cells might need to be grown for almost a month before they turn into bone.

"An increment of 0.1 pH is significant," Ahmed said. "If your pH value changes by 1, you kill the cells. If after a few days I can't trust anything about my pH measurement, then I'm not going to use that measurement method."

On the other hand, if researchers disturb the growing cells every time they have to measure the cell culture's pH, then the scientists are introducing another kind of uncertainty to their measurements, since they are altering the cells' environment.

What's needed for this kind of research, Ahmed said, is a measurement system that can stay inside an incubator with the cells in their culture medium and not need to be removed or calibrated for weeks at a time.

Brave New Sensors

For years, Ahmed and his team have been developing photonic sensors, small lightweight devices that use optical signals to measure a range of qualities including temperature, pressure and humidity.

Some of these novel devices use commercially available, flexible optical fibers etched with a Bragg grating, a kind of filter for light that reflects certain wavelengths and allows others to pass. Changes in temperature or pressure alter the wavelengths of light that can pass through the grating.

To adapt their photonic devices to a pH measurement, Ahmed and Hartings relied on a well-known concept in science: When an object absorbs light, the energy absorbed "has to go somewhere," Ahmed said, and in many cases that energy turns into heat.

"For every individual photon, the heat produced is a very small amount of energy," Ahmed said. "But if you have lots of photons coming in, and you have lots of molecules, it becomes an appreciable change in heat."

For their demonstration, the scientists used a substance that changes color in response to changes in pH, a material that many people may remember from biology classes: red cabbage juice powder. Cabbage juice changes its color from shades of dark purple to light pink depending on the acidity of a solution. That change in color can be picked up by Ahmed's photonic temperature sensors.

Researchers filled a petri dish with the cabbage juice solution. One optical fiber was positioned above the dish. It was connected to a laser pointer and shined light into the sample. A second optical fiber was physically embedded in the liquid. This second fiber contained the Bragg grating and acted as the temperature sensor. Ahmed's team controlled the solution's pH manually.

To make a measurement, the researchers shone one color of light -- such as red -- into the sample from above. The cabbage juice absorbed the red light to varying degrees based on its color, which depended on the pH of the solution at that time. The photonic thermometer fiber picked up these slight changes in the juice's heat. A change in temperature changes the wavelengths of light that can pass through the fiber's Bragg grating.

Next, the researchers shone a second color of light -- such as green -- into the liquid, and repeated the process.

By comparing how much heat was generated by each color of light, researchers could determine the exact color of the cabbage juice at that moment, and that told them the pH.

"Literally we said, 'Can we turn two laser pointers on and off for a few minutes and see if we can turn that into a pH meter?'," Ahmed said. "And we were able to show that it works over a wide range," from a pH of 4 to a pH of 9 or 10.

Ongoing work shows the photonic pH measurements are accurate to plus or minus 0.13 pH units and are stable for at least three weeks, much longer than conventional measurements.

Beyond Cabbage Juice

The researchers say that according to their tissue engineering collaborators, the new photonic sensors could provide useful information for a range of biological systems being studied, particularly the growth of heart and bone cells.

For their next round of experiments, already underway, the NIST researchers are using another pH-sensitive dye called phenol red. In addition, they are working to encapsulate the dye in a plastic coating around the fiber itself so that it does not interact with the cell medium. The team is also conducting its first test of the system in a real cell culture, with help from NIST colleagues who specialize in tissue engineering.

Future plans include measuring quantities beyond pH, which would simply require swapping out phenol red for a different dye sensitive to whatever property researchers want to measure.

NIST researchers will also be testing how cell cultures are affected by the slight, temporary temperature changes (about 1-2 kelvin) in localized areas of the sample that occur as a result of this measurement method. Ahmed says that so far, potential collaborators are not overly concerned about the issue of localized heating, and that his team will be working to reduce the temperature changes as much as possible.

And much further in the future, Ahmed hopes the measurement scheme could potentially be used to monitor the growth of tissue in a real person's body.

"The long-term goal is being able to put implantable devices into people where you're trying to grow bones and muscles, and then hopefully over time the sensors could be designed to dissolve away and you wouldn't even have to go back in and remove them," Ahmed said. "That's the ultimate dream. But baby steps first."

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was updated on the afternoon of December 13, 2019 with an additional paragraph to indicate the temporary temperature changes that result from this technique as well as the researchers' plans to test their effects on cell cultures.

Tracking lab-grown tissue with light

New proof-of-concept photonic pH sensor could advance studies of tissue regeneration

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)





IMAGE: An empty petri dish with two optical fibers, illustrating one version of the researchers' experiment. The left-hand fiber (usually shining infrared light, but depicted here as visible red light) is... view more 

Credit: J.L. Lee/NIST


Someday, doctors would like to grow limbs and other body tissue for soldiers who have lost arms in battle, children who need a new heart or liver, and many other people with critical needs. Today, medical professionals can graft cells from a patient, deposit them onto a tissue scaffold, and insert the scaffold into the body to encourage the growth of bone, cartilage and other specialized tissue. But researchers are still working toward building complex organs that can be implanted into patients.

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are supporting this field of research by developing a promising new kind of light-based sensor to study tissue growth in the lab.

The NIST team's proof-of-concept work, published today in Sensors and Actuators B, demonstrates a small sensor that uses a light-based signal to measure pH, the measurement unit for acidity, an important property in cell-growth studies. The same basic design could be used to measure other qualities such as the presence of calcium, cell growth factor and certain antibodies.

Unlike conventional sensors, this measurement method could be used to monitor the environment in a cell culture long-term -- for weeks at a time -- without having to disturb the cells regularly to calibrate the sensing instruments. Watching properties of the tissue in real time as they slowly change, over days or weeks, could greatly benefit tissue engineering studies to grow teeth, heart tissue, bone tissue and more, said NIST chemist Zeeshan Ahmed.

"We want to make sensors that can be put inside growing tissue to give researchers quantitative information," Ahmed said. "Is the tissue actually growing? Is it healthy? If you grow a bone, does it have the right mechanical properties or is it too weak to support a body?"

The work could have benefits beyond tissue engineering too, into studying the progression of diseases such as cancer.

"What these sensors could give people is real-time information about tissue growth and disease progression," said American University chemist and NIST guest researcher Matthew Hartings. Conventional sensors give researchers a series of snapshots without showing them the path between those points, Hartings said. But photonic sensors could provide scientists with continuous information, the equivalent of a GPS navigation app for disease.

"We want to provide researchers with a detailed map of the incremental changes that happen as tissue either grows in a healthy way or becomes diseased," Hartings said. "Once researchers know the 'streets' a disease is taking, then they can better prevent or support the changes that are happening" in a patient's body.

A Problem to Solve

Measurements of pH are a vital part of tissue engineering studies. As cells grow, their environment naturally becomes more acidic. If the environment becomes too acidic -- or too basic -- the cells will die. Scientists measure pH on a scale from 0 (very acidic) to 14 (very basic), with an ideal environment for most cells in a narrow range around a pH of 7.

Commercial pH instruments are highly accurate but unstable, meaning they require frequent calibrations to ensure accurate readings day to day. Without calibration, these conventional pH meters lose up to 0.1 pH units of accuracy daily. But tissue engineering studies take place on the order of weeks. A culture of stem cells might need to be grown for almost a month before they turn into bone.

"An increment of 0.1 pH is significant," Ahmed said. "If your pH value changes by 1, you kill the cells. If after a few days I can't trust anything about my pH measurement, then I'm not going to use that measurement method."

On the other hand, if researchers disturb the growing cells every time they have to measure the cell culture's pH, then the scientists are introducing another kind of uncertainty to their measurements, since they are altering the cells' environment.

What's needed for this kind of research, Ahmed said, is a measurement system that can stay inside an incubator with the cells in their culture medium and not need to be removed or calibrated for weeks at a time.

Brave New Sensors

For years, Ahmed and his team have been developing photonic sensors, small lightweight devices that use optical signals to measure a range of qualities including temperature, pressure and humidity.

Some of these novel devices use commercially available, flexible optical fibers etched with a Bragg grating, a kind of filter for light that reflects certain wavelengths and allows others to pass. Changes in temperature or pressure alter the wavelengths of light that can pass through the grating.

To adapt their photonic devices to a pH measurement, Ahmed and Hartings relied on a well-known concept in science: When an object absorbs light, the energy absorbed "has to go somewhere," Ahmed said, and in many cases that energy turns into heat.

"For every individual photon, the heat produced is a very small amount of energy," Ahmed said. "But if you have lots of photons coming in, and you have lots of molecules, it becomes an appreciable change in heat."

For their demonstration, the scientists used a substance that changes color in response to changes in pH, a material that many people may remember from biology classes: red cabbage juice powder. Cabbage juice changes its color from shades of dark purple to light pink depending on the acidity of a solution. That change in color can be picked up by Ahmed's photonic temperature sensors.

Researchers filled a petri dish with the cabbage juice solution. One optical fiber was positioned above the dish. It was connected to a laser pointer and shined light into the sample. A second optical fiber was physically embedded in the liquid. This second fiber contained the Bragg grating and acted as the temperature sensor. Ahmed's team controlled the solution's pH manually.

To make a measurement, the researchers shone one color of light -- such as red -- into the sample from above. The cabbage juice absorbed the red light to varying degrees based on its color, which depended on the pH of the solution at that time. The photonic thermometer fiber picked up these slight changes in the juice's heat. A change in temperature changes the wavelengths of light that can pass through the fiber's Bragg grating.

Next, the researchers shone a second color of light -- such as green -- into the liquid, and repeated the process.

By comparing how much heat was generated by each color of light, researchers could determine the exact color of the cabbage juice at that moment, and that told them the pH.

"Literally we said, 'Can we turn two laser pointers on and off for a few minutes and see if we can turn that into a pH meter?'," Ahmed said. "And we were able to show that it works over a wide range," from a pH of 4 to a pH of 9 or 10.

Ongoing work shows the photonic pH measurements are accurate to plus or minus 0.13 pH units and are stable for at least three weeks, much longer than conventional measurements.

Beyond Cabbage Juice

The researchers say that according to their tissue engineering collaborators, the new photonic sensors could provide useful information for a range of biological systems being studied, particularly the growth of heart and bone cells.

For their next round of experiments, already underway, the NIST researchers are using another pH-sensitive dye called phenol red. In addition, they are working to encapsulate the dye in a plastic coating around the fiber itself so that it does not interact with the cell medium. The team is also conducting its first test of the system in a real cell culture, with help from NIST colleagues who specialize in tissue engineering.

Future plans include measuring quantities beyond pH, which would simply require swapping out phenol red for a different dye sensitive to whatever property researchers want to measure.

NIST researchers will also be testing how cell cultures are affected by the slight, temporary temperature changes (about 1-2 kelvin) in localized areas of the sample that occur as a result of this measurement method. Ahmed says that so far, potential collaborators are not overly concerned about the issue of localized heating, and that his team will be working to reduce the temperature changes as much as possible.

And much further in the future, Ahmed hopes the measurement scheme could potentially be used to monitor the growth of tissue in a real person's body.

"The long-term goal is being able to put implantable devices into people where you're trying to grow bones and muscles, and then hopefully over time the sensors could be designed to dissolve away and you wouldn't even have to go back in and remove them," Ahmed said. "That's the ultimate dream. But baby steps first."

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was updated on the afternoon of December 13, 2019 with an additional paragraph to indicate the temporary temperature changes that result from this technique as well as the researchers' plans to test their effects on cell cultures.

13-Dec-2019

Meaningful change in culture urged to save neurology, reduce gender gap


University of California - Davis Health


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(SACRAMENTO) -- Allison Brashear, Dean of the UC Davis School of Medicine, is working to save the future workforce of neurology and to reduce the gender gap in the medical specialty.

More trained neurologists are needed to meet the demand for care in the U.S. More trained neurologists are needed to meet the demand for care in the U.S.

In an editorial published Dec. 3 in the journal Neurology, Brashear and colleague Nina Schor call for meaningful changes in the culture of the field - ones that aren't portrayed as concessions to accommodate women's shortcomings or special needs. Schor is deputy director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

"Burnout among all physicians and the persistent predominance of men in the neurology workforce are widening the gender gap, at a critical time when the demand for neurologists is only expected to increase," Brashear said.

In the U.S. alone, the number of trained neurologists is expected to increase by only 7% by 2025, while the projected demand for services places the increased need at 16%.

"As women increasingly make up medical school classes, choose medical fields in which they can earn the same salaries as their male colleagues, seek positions that provide flexibility in workload and work hours, and retire before 65 years of age, the specialty needs to evolve to both meet these needs and prevent the burnout that may result in early retirement and part-time status," Schor said.

Reducing the gender gap in neurology means addressing a variety of factors, from burnout and women leaving the field, to the difference in pay between male and female neurologists - a gap which is one of the largest in any medical specialty.

"In many fields and on six continents, women physicians, nurses, physician assistants and residents deal with larger clinical workloads, longer clinical hours, lower salaries and more personal caregiving and homemaking duties than their male counterparts," Brashear said. "There are also fewer women in leadership positions to advocate for change. Only 14 of 113 neurology department chairs are women."

The authors believe identifying and mitigating these factors may help narrow the gender gap and increase the supply of neurologists to better meet future patient needs. They suggest structuring positions to give more time to complete administrative tasks, offering more flexible work hours, providing daycare at the workplace, setting salaries at a level that encourages hiring help for daily tasks and chores in the home, and making it routine for all early career neurologists (men and women) to have mentors for personal and career support.

Students do better in school when they can understand, manage emotions

Emotionally intelligent students get better grades and higher test scores, study says

American Psychological Association


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WASHINGTON -- Students who are better able to understand and manage their emotions effectively, a skill known as emotional intelligence, do better at school than their less skilled peers, as measured by grades and standardized test scores, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Although we know that high intelligence and a conscientious personality are the most important psychological traits necessary for academic success, our research highlights a third factor, emotional intelligence, that may also help students succeed," said Carolyn MacCann, PhD, of the University of Sydney and lead author of the study. "It's not enough to be smart and hardworking. Students must also be able to understand and manage their emotions to succeed at school."

The research was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

The concept of emotional intelligence as an area of academic research is relatively new, dating to the 1990s, according to MacCann. Although there is evidence that social and emotional learning programs in schools are effective at improving academic performance, she believes this may be the first comprehensive meta-analysis on whether higher emotional intelligence relates to academic success.

MacCann and her colleagues analyzed data from more than 160 studies, representing more than 42,000 students from 27 countries, published between 1998 and 2019. More than 76% were from English-speaking countries. The students ranged in age from elementary school to college. The researchers found that students with higher emotional intelligence tended to get higher grades and better achievement test scores than those with lower emotional intelligence scores. This finding held true even when controlling for intelligence and personality factors.

What was most surprising to the researchers was the association held regardless of age.

As for why emotional intelligence can affect academic performance, MacCann believes a number of factors may come into play.

"Students with higher emotional intelligence may be better able to manage negative emotions, such as anxiety, boredom and disappointment, that can negatively affect academic performance," she said. "Also, these students may be better able to manage the social world around them, forming better relationships with teachers, peers and family, all of which are important to academic success."

Finally, the skills required for emotional intelligence, such as understanding human motivation and emotion, may overlap with the skills required to master certain subjects, such as history and language, giving students an advantage in those subject areas, according MacCann.

As an example, MacCann described the school day of a hypothetical student named Kelly, who is good at math and science but low in emotional intelligence.

"She has difficulty seeing when others are irritated, worried or sad. She does not know how people's emotions may cause future behavior. She does not know what to do to regulate her own feelings," said MacCann.

As a result, Kelly does not recognize when her best friend, Lucia, is having a bad day, making Lucia mad at her for her insensitivity. Lucia then does not help Kelly (as she usually does) later in English literature class, a class she often struggles in because it requires her to analyze and understand the motivations and emotions of characters in books and plays.

"Kelly feels ashamed that she can't do the work in English literature that other students seem to find easy. She is also upset that Lucia is mad at her. She can't seem to shake these feelings, and she is not able to concentrate on her math problems in the next class," said MacCann. "Because of her low emotion management ability, Kelly cannot bounce back from her negative emotions and finds herself struggling even in subjects she is good at."

MacCann cautions against widespread testing of students to identify and target those with low emotional intelligence as it may stigmatize those students. Instead, she recommends interventions that involve the whole school, including additional teacher training and a focus on teacher well-being and emotional skills.

"Programs that integrate emotional skill development into the existing curriculum would be beneficial, as research suggests that training works better when run

News Release 12-Dec-2019

Students do better in school when they can understand, manage emotions

Emotionally intelligent students get better grades and higher test scores, study says

American Psychological Association


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WASHINGTON -- Students who are better able to understand and manage their emotions effectively, a skill known as emotional intelligence, do better at school than their less skilled peers, as measured by grades and standardized test scores, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Although we know that high intelligence and a conscientious personality are the most important psychological traits necessary for academic success, our research highlights a third factor, emotional intelligence, that may also help students succeed," said Carolyn MacCann, PhD, of the University of Sydney and lead author of the study. "It's not enough to be smart and hardworking. Students must also be able to understand and manage their emotions to succeed at school."

The research was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

The concept of emotional intelligence as an area of academic research is relatively new, dating to the 1990s, according to MacCann. Although there is evidence that social and emotional learning programs in schools are effective at improving academic performance, she believes this may be the first comprehensive meta-analysis on whether higher emotional intelligence relates to academic success.

MacCann and her colleagues analyzed data from more than 160 studies, representing more than 42,000 students from 27 countries, published between 1998 and 2019. More than 76% were from English-speaking countries. The students ranged in age from elementary school to college. The researchers found that students with higher emotional intelligence tended to get higher grades and better achievement test scores than those with lower emotional intelligence scores. This finding held true even when controlling for intelligence and personality factors.

What was most surprising to the researchers was the association held regardless of age.

As for why emotional intelligence can affect academic performance, MacCann believes a number of factors may come into play.

"Students with higher emotional intelligence may be better able to manage negative emotions, such as anxiety, boredom and disappointment, that can negatively affect academic performance," she said. "Also, these students may be better able to manage the social world around them, forming better relationships with teachers, peers and family, all of which are important to academic success."

Finally, the skills required for emotional intelligence, such as understanding human motivation and emotion, may overlap with the skills required to master certain subjects, such as history and language, giving students an advantage in those subject areas, according MacCann.

As an example, MacCann described the school day of a hypothetical student named Kelly, who is good at math and science but low in emotional intelligence.

"She has difficulty seeing when others are irritated, worried or sad. She does not know how people's emotions may cause future behavior. She does not know what to do to regulate her own feelings," said MacCann.

As a result, Kelly does not recognize when her best friend, Lucia, is having a bad day, making Lucia mad at her for her insensitivity. Lucia then does not help Kelly (as she usually does) later in English literature class, a class she often struggles in because it requires her to analyze and understand the motivations and emotions of characters in books and plays.

"Kelly feels ashamed that she can't do the work in English literature that other students seem to find easy. She is also upset that Lucia is mad at her. She can't seem to shake these feelings, and she is not able to concentrate on her math problems in the next class," said MacCann. "Because of her low emotion management ability, Kelly cannot bounce back from her negative emotions and finds herself struggling even in subjects she is good at."

MacCann cautions against widespread testing of students to identify and target those with low emotional intelligence as it may stigmatize those students. Instead, she recommends interventions that involve the whole school, including additional teacher training and a focus on teacher well-being and emotional skills.

"Programs that integrate emotional skill development into the existing curriculum would be beneficial, as research suggests that training works better when run by teachers rather than external specialists," she said. "Increasing skills for everyone - not just those with low emotional intelligence - would benefit everyone."

How does political news affect moods? New study in young doctors shows real-time effects

Major American political events of the last three years altered interns' moods, but non-political events didn't, signaling a politically aware generation of physicians

Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan


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IMAGE: The study looks at the impact of political events on the moods of young doctors. view more 

Credit: University of Michigan

They work in a bubble of 80-hour work weeks, and 24-hour shifts. They're caring for patients for the first time, while still learning the ropes of the medical profession. The constant stress wears on their mental health.

But for first-year doctors who started their careers in the past few years, a new study shows that certain political events pierced that bubble of intense training.

In fact, some political events affected their mood just as much as the intense first weeks of their training had.

In a paper in the journal BMJ, a team from the University of Michigan reports the results of a real-time, long-term assessment of the moods of young doctors, called interns, in relation to major political and non-political events of the past few years.

The authors call for further exploration of the interactions between politics and medicine, and the implications for physicians and their patients.

Monitoring mood

The study used data from an ongoing study of intern health that has already yielded findings about the high risk of depression among interns, and the relationship between intense stress and mental health in general.

The new paper focuses on daily mood ratings from 2,345 interns who were in their first year of training at American hospitals anytime between mid-2016 and late 2018, and how they changed in the immediate aftermath of major national and world events.

Three events -- the 2016 U.S. election, the 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration, and the failure of a federal spending bill to fund a Mexican border wall - were followed by the largest collective changes in mood.

The first of these events was actually associated with a drop in mood larger than the drop that interns experienced in the first weeks of their intense training. The second led to a sizable mood drop, while the third led to a collective mood boost.

The authors note in an accompanying commentary, the decline in mood immediately after the election was four times greater than any other day they had tracked, and female interns' mood drop was twice as large as that seen among male interns. The study group was 55% female, a slightly higher percentage than the current generation of recent medical school graduates.

Two-thirds of the major political events in the study period prompted significant changes in interns' moods. No non-political event during the study period - not mass shootings, hurricanes, wildfires, a royal wedding or a solar eclipse - affected interns' moods.

"This suggests to us that interns were deeply engaged with and affected by the election, even while facing the incredible demands of their intern year," says Elena Frank, Ph.D., the director of the Intern Health Study. "It also suggests that the 2016 election was experienced as deeply personal and distressing for many young women in medicine."

Politics and physicians

Srijan Sen, M.D., Ph.D., the principal investigator of the Intern Health Study and a professor of psychiatry at U-M, said that given the intensity of the intern year's demands, he had been surprised that any external event managed to affect the moods of interns as much as the study shows.

He recalls that Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans and neighboring areas of the Gulf Coast during his own intern year, and he only became aware weeks later.

"The new generation of physicians seems to be more politically engaged than how doctors had traditionally been seen," he says. "This suggests that there is a real opportunity for physicians to lend their voice and join the discussion on issues relevant to clinicians and their patients."

Frank, Sen and their colleagues used mood ratings collected daily from interns via a smartphone app used in the study, which asks them to assess their mood each evening. They combined these data with national Google search data about the most searched-for events during the study period.

They note that the strong negative and positive reactions to certain news events may also have to do with the changing demographics of those going into the medical profession - not just more women, but more people of color, and more people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds.

But the question of whether the broader range of backgrounds - and political views - of doctors will translate into more political activism and public expression of views still remains to be seen. Physicians in the past may have refrained from engaging in politics in public ways, to avoid having their political views affect their interactions with patients.

"There has always been a vigorous debate in medicine on whether physicians should engage in politics and to what extent," says Brahmajee Nallamothu, M.D., M.P.H., a co-author of the study and professor of internal medicine at U-M. "These data suggest deep engagement is happening in young doctors during even their most intense clinical workload."

The new findings may also add to understanding of how the tumult of the current period may be affecting people who aren't in the midst of intense medical training.

"Political events may be affecting people's moods in ways they didn't before, and we hope our research in general can help illuminate the ways that stress and external events affect mental health," says Sen.

Why are giant pandas born so tiny?

New clues from bones put an old theory to the test

Duke University


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IMAGE: This newborn panda skull casts doubt on an old idea about why bears are born so tiny. view more 

Credit: Courtesy of Peishu Li and Duke SMIF.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Born pink, blind, and helpless, giant pandas typically weigh about 100 grams at birth -- the equivalent of a stick of butter. Their mothers are 900 times more massive than that.

This unusual size difference has left researchers puzzled for years. With a few exceptions among animals such as echidnas and kangaroos, no other mammal newborns are so tiny relative to their mothers. No one knows why, but a Duke University study of bones across 10 species of bears and other animals finds that some of the current theories don't hold up.

Duke biology professor Kathleen Smith and her former student Peishu Li published their findings this month in the Journal of Anatomy.

Baby panda skeletons are hard to come by, but the researchers were able to study the preserved remains of baby pandas born at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

The National Zoo's first panda couple, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, had five full-term cubs in the 1980s, but none of them survived long after birth.

The researchers took micro-CT scans of two of those cubs, along with newborn grizzlies, sloth bears, polar bears, dogs, a fox, and other closely related animals from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine.

They used the scans to create 3-D digital models of each baby's bony interior at birth.

As a baby animal grows and develops inside the womb, its bones and teeth do, too. The researchers examined the degree of ossification, or how much the skeleton has formed by the time of birth. They looked at whether the teeth had started to calcify or erupt, and the degree of fusion between the bony plates that make up the skull.

The panda may be an extreme example, but all bears have disproportionately small babies, Li said. A newborn polar bear's birthweight as a fraction of mom's is less than 1:400, or less than one-half of one percent of her body mass. For the vast majority of baby mammals, including humans, the average is closer to 1:26.

One decades-old idea links low birthweights in bears to the fact that, for some species, pregnancy overlaps with winter hibernation. Pregnant females don't eat or drink during this time, relying mostly on their fat reserves to survive, but also breaking down muscle to supply protein to the fetus.

The thinking is that, energetically, females can only afford to nourish their babies this way for so long before this tissue breakdown threatens their health. By cutting pregnancy short and giving birth to small, immature babies, bears would shift more of their growth to outside the womb, where babies can live off their mother's fat-rich milk instead of depleting her muscles.

Proponents of the theory concede that not all bears -- including pandas -- hibernate during the winter. But the idea is that small birthweight is 'locked in' to the bear family tree, preventing non-hibernating relatives from evolving bigger babies too.

"It's certainly an appealing hypothesis," Smith said.

But the Duke team's research shows this scenario is unlikely. The researchers didn't find any significant differences in bone growth between hibernating bears and their counterparts that stay active year-round and don't fast during pregnancy.

In fact, despite being small, the researchers found that most bear skeletons are just as mature at birth as their close animal cousins.

The panda bear is the one exception to this rule, results show. Even in a full-term baby panda, the bones look a lot like those of a beagle puppy delivered several weeks premature.

"That would be like a 28-week human fetus" at the beginning of the third trimester, Smith said.

Other factors might have pushed panda babies toward smaller sizes over time -- some researchers blame their bamboo-only diet -- but data are scarce, Li said. The researchers say the panda bear's embryonic appearance likely has to do with a quirk of panda pregnancy.

All bears experience what's called "delayed implantation." After the egg is fertilized, the future fetus enters a state of suspended animation, floating in the womb for several months before implanting in the uterine wall to resume its development and get ready for birth.

But while other bears gestate for two months after implantation, giant pandas are done in a month.

"They're basically undercooked," said Li, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago.

The researchers say they only looked at skeletons in this study, and it could be that other organs like the brain tell a different story. But the new study suggests that baby pandas follow the same trajectory as other mammal relatives -- their bones mature in the same sequence and at similar rates -- but on a truncated timetable.

"Development is just cut short," Smith said.

Scientists are still searching for a complete explanation of why the panda's peculiar size differential evolved over geological time, and how.

"We really need more information about their ecology and reproduction in the wild," Smith said, and we may not have much time given their risk of extinction. But this study brings them one step closer to an answer.

The wild relatives of major vegetables, needed for climate resilience, are in danger

The wild relatives of chile peppers, pumpkins, carrots, and lettuce join a growing list of poorly conserved plant species; these ancient plants have genes that may help our food withstand the harsh climate of our future; if they don't go extinct first

International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)


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IMAGE: These maps show the distribution of wild chile pepper taxa across the Americas. Green dots on the left map shows where wild species have been collected and stored in gene... view more 

Credit: Khoury et al.


Growing up in the wild makes plants tough. Wild plants evolve to survive the whims of nature and thrive in difficult conditions, including extreme climate conditions, poor soils, and pests and disease. Their better-known descendants - the domesticated plants that are critical to a healthy diet - are often not nearly as hardy. The genes that make crop wild relatives robust have the potential to make their cultivated cousins - our food plants - better prepared for a harsh climate future. But a series of new research papers show these critical plants are imperiled.

"The wild relatives of crops are one of the key tools used to breed crops adapted to hotter, colder, drier, wetter, saltier and other difficult conditions," said Colin Khoury, a scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT. "But they are impacted by habitat destruction, over-harvesting, climate change, pollution, invasive species, and more. Some of them are sure to disappear from their natural habitats without urgent action."

Khoury and colleagues' latest focus has been on the wild relatives of vegetables, including chile peppers, lettuce, and carrots. Their most recent publication was on the distribution, conservation status and stress tolerance of wild cucurbits, or the gourd family, which includes zucchini, pumpkins, and squash. The findings were published online Dec. 10 in Plants People Planet.

Even with protection in the wild, the researchers found that many crop wild relatives require urgent safeguarding in gene banks to assure long-term survival. They determined that more than 65 percent of wild pumpkins and more than 95 percent of wild chile peppers are not in any gene bank.

Gene banks are repositories for seeds and other plant material that assure continued propagation of new plants and allow scientists to study their often complex genetic traits.

The studies include the first highly detailed maps of the distributions of the wild relatives of these crops. Mapping their ranges, and especially areas with a great density, endemism, and diversity, can help policymakers and conservationists prioritize areas in need of protection. The findings will help crop breeders more efficiently find wild relatives with traits needed for crop development. The results will be used to guide rescue missions aimed at collecting vulnerable species before they disappear.

"If they disappear, they are gone," said Khoury. "Extinction is forever, which is a loss not only in terms of their evolution and persistence on the planet, but also a loss to the future of our food."

"Our main finding is that more conservation work needs to be done to ensure that these wild species are well represented in gene banks, and are also adequately protected in their natural habitats," said Khoury, who is also a researcher at the United States Department of Agriculture and Saint Louis University. "We were able to produce maps that can help indicate to plant collectors and to land managers where the most significant gaps are in terms of current conservation, including where you might go to find and protect many species in hotspots of diversity".

A global effort for a global concern

The work also highlights the extent to which the wild relatives of vegetables have not been a priority for conservation when compared to other crops.

"Since they aren't cereal commodities, vegetables get less attention, especially when it comes to their wild relatives. But for health and sustainability reasons, these are the kind of crops that researchers should be devoting more of their time to," said Khoury.

The collection of studies is a big step toward providing foundational information about the wild relatives of these four globally important vegetable crops.

Contributors included botanists, geographers, crop breeders, and conservationists from international and national agricultural research organizations and leading universities. They drew upon their expertise, combined with vast amounts of publicly available research data, for the studies. They also used global climate information to assess which species might have the most useful adaptations to heat, cold, drought, and other crop production challenges.

Finally, they assessed how well the species are represented in current international and national gene banks, as well as how well safeguarded the species are within officially designated protected areas.

Chile peppers, pumpkins, carrots, and lettuce are among the most widely consumed vegetables in the world, with the first three crops providing essential nutrients such as vitamin A and C. Research on such crops has been minor compared to cereals and starchy tubers such as wheat, maize, rice, and potatoes, despite the widely acknowledged need to consume more vegetables across essentially all people worldwide. Because of the lack of research, these crops are often much less productive than grains and tubers. At the same time, these crops need more resources including water and land to produce them and are generally more sensitive to climate change and pests and diseases.

"Filling the gaps in information about the wild relatives of vegetable crops such as chile and bell peppers will help these crops fulfill the nutritional roles they will need to in the future," said Derek Barchenger, a plant breeder at the World Vegetable Center, located in Taiwan, who was involved in the chile research.

"The results reveal at high resolution the geography of the wild relatives of these important crops. This is of interest not only to conservation, but also to better understand the origins and diversification of these species over millions of years, and even possibly to shed further light on where the crops may have been domesticated," said Heather Rose Kates, a postdoctoral associate at Florida Museum of Natural History.

"Our research outlines some of the major breeding challenges that the crops face, in terms of climatic stresses, for example, heat and drought for carrots," said Najla Mezghani, the curator of vegetable crops in the National Genebank of Tunisia who was involved in the wild carrot research. "We determined which populations of wild relatives might have adaptations to these stresses that can make them particularly useful in plant breeding".