I Challenge You to Learn About ALS and the Ice Buket Challenge
The neurodegenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), has been the center of YouTube videos and Facebook feeds for the past few months. It has bee...
Category: Uncategorized
CTE to ALS, a Deadly Path
ALS, the current neurological disease du jour, has been thrust into the minds of Americans via the now-infamous “Ice Bucket Challenge”. While the cause of this ...
A-L-S: Can it E-N-D?
ALS is a race. But not a normal race, not even close. This race does not have a definitive starting point, and you can be certain that the finish line is not cl...
Capping off Neurochem
Honestly, I mainly took neurochemistry because I had to for my minor. I’ve never been all that into chemistry, and my expectations were about at the level of “t...
The Little Element That Could
With just 3 protons, you could perhaps be excused for thinking there isn’t much to lithium. But it turns out it’s good for a lot more than just batteries. Lithi...
Liberal Learning at its Finest
Wow, it is hard to believe that it is already the end of fall semester senior year. Where did the time go? Well that means it is time to reflect on my “capstone...
Concussions
When I was 15 my sister had an accident while sledding and suffered a concussion. Visiting her in the hospital was a rather surreal experience, with her failing...
Iron on the brain
Continuing a trend of unlikely players, the paper “Targeting dysregulation of brain iron homeostasis in Parkinsons’ disease by iron chelators” tells us the stor...
Adding Injury to Injury: Diabetes can make you more prone to Alzheimer’s?
Like I expect most people would, I used to think that insulin was just something for diabetes. As a biology major I suppose I knew that it regulates how your bo...
Dopamine: For more than just the good times
Dopamine is one of the few neurotransmitters that most people have probably heard of. It’s the ‘reward chemical’, the one that makes us feel good when we reach ...