The shining eye

Shining through

It may be in vogue as a car colour, but for millenia insects, birds and fishes have evolved the metallic look. Many insects, birds and fish display vivid metallic colours. But such a show is not the result of pigments, but the structured reflections of light hitting the surface of the organism. Although such reflections are widespread in contemporary species, no one has discovered evidence of s...

Shining the 'spotlight' on obesity.

In his seminal book, ‘The Strategy of Preventive Medicine,’ the English epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose suggested that true epidemiology involves looking not just at the cause of a disease, but at the ‘cause of the cause’ and the ‘cause of the cause of the cause’ [1] . A quarter of a century earlier, Susan Sontag (‘Illness as Metaphor’) stated that: ‘any important disease whose causality is murky ...

Shining light on the Sunshine Act.

INTRODUCTION Section 6002 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the Sunshine Act, requires that manufacturers report payments or other transfers of value made to physicians and teaching hospitals [1,2]. The tracking of such payments goes into effect on August 1, 2013, and the new rules could affect radiologists. In this column, I pose and answer several questions rega...

Shining a light on the Sunshine Act.

Shining new light on the brain

Optogenetics - a new methodology that involves expression of light-responsive proteins in specific groups of neurons, which can then be activated with light - has only been around for six years, but some researchers are already using it to target big psychiatric questions. Michael Gross reports.