Tag: Rochester
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Lebanon during the catastrophe
Najat FadlallahBeirut, LebanonJulian MaamariRochester, Minnesota, United StatesAbeer HaniBeirut, Lebanon After several chaotic cycles of resuscitation attempts, the twenty-something-year-old woman was pronounced dead. This was less than half an hour after a massive blast shook the heart of Beirut, Lebanon on the eve of August 4, 2020. “I immediately looked around, devastated that I was about…
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“Am not I a fly like thee?” Drosophila melanogaster and the human genome
Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, United States Animal models have been essential to medical research for millennia. Ethical concerns about their use has led to a decrease in use of large animals (e.g., dogs, cats). Perhaps the smallest of research animals is Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit fly, one tenth inch in length, which has contributed…
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Eye-brain-extremity coordination and enduring sports achievement
Marshall LichtmanRochester, New York, United States Neuroscientists have imaged the brain of athletes, looking for changes related to the sports they played, whether principally aerobic or anaerobic. These efforts have suggested expansion of the gray matter in certain anatomical areas of the brain in elite athletes. These analyses have been crude by necessity, as the…
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Maria Callas—her inner voice revealed
Eelco WijdicksLea DacyRochester, Minnesota, United States In Prima Donna: The Psychology of Maria Callas, Paul Wink convincingly concludes—based on largely secondary sources—that Maria Callas was not only a wildly ambitious operator who was not known for an emollient manner, but a prime example of narcissism. Wink, a professor of psychology at Wellesley College, used conventional…
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Doris Unland: Surgical nurse extraordinaire
Frederic GrannisDuarte, California, United States Doris Unland was an extraordinary American surgical nurse who worked for forty-seven years at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. She may have participated in more major surgical operations than any other person—physician or nurse—in history. Born on December 19, 1910, she traveled in 1932 to Rochester, Minnesota, to attend…
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Ahab’s gift: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the meaning of pain
Xi ChenRochester, New York, United States In the summer months before my first year of medical school, I unfurled the pages of Moby Dick. Immersed in the novel’s adventurous spirit and Shakespearean prose, I followed the narrator from the piers of Nantucket into the Atlantic and waded through Captain Ahab’s quest for the legendary white…
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The smartest vampire story
Alice TheibaultRochester, New York, United States There is something uniquely terrifying about vampires. The concept of a nocturnal creature showing up at one’s home to suck their blood is enough to make just about anyone uneasy, and so vampires have been mined as a horror device for generations. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is arguably the…