Intern is Sandeep Jauhar’s story of his days and nights in residency at a busy hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question our every assumption about medical care today. Residency -- and especially the first year, called internship -- is legendary for its brutality. Working eighty hours or more per week, most new doctors spend their first year asking themselves why they wanted to be doctors in the first place.

Jauhar’s internship was even more harrowing than most: he switched from physics to medicine in order to follow a more humane calling—only to find that medicine put patients’ concerns last. He struggled to find a place among squadrons of cocky residents and doctors. He challenged the practices of the internship in The New York Times, attracting the suspicions of the medical bureaucracy. Then, suddenly stricken, he became a patient himself—and came to see that today’s high-tech, high-pressure medicine can be a humane science after all.

Now a thriving cardiologist, Jauhar has all the qualities you’d want in your own doctor: expertise, insight, a feel for the human factor, a sense of humor, and a keen awareness of the worries that we all have in common. His beautifully written memoir explains the inner workings of modern medicine with rare candor and insight.

See also the NYT review.

Intern, by Sandeep Jauhar

By activating multiple fluorescent proteins in neurons, neuroscientists at Harvard University are imaging the brain and nervous system as never before, rendering these cells in a riotous spray of colors dubbed a “Brainbow.”

This is from a few months ago but apparently it hasn't been cited here. The Nature article, Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system, is available in the Google cache. The editor wrote:

The 'Brainbow' technique can paint hundreds of individual neurons with distinctive hues, producing a detailed map of neuronal circuitry. This technology should not only boost mapping efforts in normal or diseased brains, but could also be applied to other complex cell populations, such as the immune system.

Scientists image vivid ‘brainbows'

A sort of follow-up on Professors Could Take Performance-Enhancing Drugs for the Mind.

When imagining the possible influences of efficient cognitive enhancers on society as a whole, there can be many positive effects. Such drugs may enable individuals to perform better and enjoy more achievements and success. However, cognitive enhancers may have a darker side. Fears have been raised of an overworked 24/7 society pushed to the limits of human endurance, or of direct and indirect coercion into taking such drugs. If other children at school or colleagues at work are taking cognitive-enhancing drugs, will you feel pressure to give them to your children or take them yourself? What if a perfectly safe and reliable cognitive enhancer existed, could society deny it to healthy individuals who may benefit from it?

Professor's little helper | Nature

Hallucinogenic drugs, which blew minds in the 1960s, soon may be used to treat mental ailments.

Psychedelic Healing? | Scientific American

A conversation about the public understanding of science with:

Guest Host Sir Paul Nurse, President, The Rockefeller University
Physicist Brian Greene (On Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything, One Hundred Years of Uncertainty, The Time We Thought We Knew, The Fabric of the Cosmos)
Actor Alan Alda (What is the nature of fads?)

A Discussion about Science

Jonah Lehrer's smart, elegantly written little book expresses an appealing faith that art and science offer different but complementary views of the world. His main argument, that artists have often intuited essential truths about human nature that are later verified by scientific research, is hardly new. But he pursues this argument with freshness and enthusiasm in eight enjoyable case studies studded with arresting sentences that voice the 25-year-old author's delighted sense of discovery.

Drawing Conclusions Outside the Lines

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.

What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?

Proteins are the most diverse and versatile set of biological macromolecules, having crucial roles in all biological processes. Now that researchers have identified whole complements of proteins (proteomes) for many cell types, they are pushing the frontiers of protein science: from the regulation and function of single protein dynamics to the evolution and inhibition of protein–protein interactions.

Proteins to proteomes

My experience with Greenpeace gave me a long-running interest in the way much environmental science involves mathematical formulas or computer models. The most famous recent examples of these are the "general circulation models" used to produce predictions of future climatic conditions. An important book has just been published by an Australian academic that raises the question of whether this should be regarded as science at all.

The book is Science And Public Policy, and the author is Professor Aynsley Kellow, the head of the school of government at the University of Tasmania. Kellow believes that environmental science has often been corrupted by the good intentions of its practitioners, so that it consists of wishful thinking rather than facts and provable theories. Perhaps the first big case of this was the notorious Limits To Growth study published by the Club of Rome in 1972, based on computer modelling and subsequently disproved. One might expect the quality of models to improve, but since then they have been used for all sorts of predictions, and there is little evidence they have got much better.

Despite this, the predictions made by such models are now contained in scientific papers published in leading journals, which gives the status of science to what is often little more than wishful thinking.

Virtual science is no substitute for the real thing

One morning seven years ago, Sherrilyn Roush woke to discover that the left side of her body had gone numb.

A year and a half later, caused by a lesion the size of a lentil in a region of her midbrain, she began to feel tingling on her body in response to sounds.

Today, more than ever, she feels sounds on her skin.

When the Senses Become Confused