A periodic backup of my mobile phone yesterday - mainly pictures and videos - was the occasion to give a look back at things I did and places I visited in 2014, for business and leisure. I thought it would be fun to share some of those pictures with you, with sparse comments. I know, Facebook does this for you automatically, but what does Facebook know of what is meaningful and what isn't ? So here we go.
The first pic was taken at Beaubourg, in Paris - it is a sculpture I absolutely love: "The king plays with the queen" by Max Ernst.



Still in Paris (for a vacation at the beginning of January), the grandiose interior of the Opera de Paris...

There are tens of thousands of human-made chemicals circulating today and some have been bad despite studies that didn't initially find harm, yet almost every chemical is under siege by environmental groups, and they all claim science is on their side.

Everything from bisphenol A used in plastics to neonicotinoid pesticides to glyphosate weed-killers are criticized by lawyers at environmental groups despite the science consensus. How can the public know which ones really pose threats to our health and environment and which ones are just studies designed to keep poisoning lab animals until they show an effect?

A Western diet may be negatively affecting your brain not just your belly. Jams, CC BY-NC-SA

By Terry Davidson, American University and Camille Sample, American University

Hurricane Sandy pummeled cities along the east coast in 2012, causing billions of dollars in damage. Shutterstock

By Delavane Diaz, Stanford University

Climate change is as much an economic problem as an environmental one.

The effects of climate change, such as damage from more severe weather or health problems from higher temperatures, will impose a cost on society. On the other hand, moving away from a fossil fuel-based energy system will require significant investments into low-carbon technologies. How does society determine which efforts are most cost-effective?

Men and women are different in lots of ways and some contend that women are more emotional and that makes a difference in others areas. A recent large-scale study focused on determining the gender-dependent relationship between emotions, memory performance and brain activity.  

The scientists found that women rate emotional images as more emotionally stimulating than men do and are more likely to remember them but there were no gender-related differences in emotional appraisal of neutral images.

When there is a market, someone will sell to it, even if it does not make much sense. So you can purchase organic pineapples and non-GMO rock salt if it makes you feel better.

In Europe, most genetically modified foods, as European politicians define them, are banned but cows eat GMO feed. The cows can't tell the difference nor have studies shown any difference in milk production or meat. Vermont passed a GMO labeling law but made sure to exempt cows so that the $300 million company run by the primary funder of the Just Label It campaign could still use milk from Vermont cows fed GMO grain in organic yogurt.

Researchers are on the verge of developing a new class of anesthetics, something that has not happened in decades, according to a study published in Anesthesiology. It is being derived thanks to a new approach to identifying compounds may lead to the next generation of anesthetics.

Positional cloning is a genetic mapping technique used to pinpoint the location of specific traits of interest, such as disease-causing genes or mutations, within the genome. Very simply, this map-based technique involves crossing mutant individuals with wild-type individuals and examining the offspring in order to localize a candidate region in the genome for the mutation. By identifying genetic markers that are linked to the trait, progressively more precise areas on a chromosome are defined until the gene is identified.

This approach has contributed to the successful mapping of genes involved in numerous human diseases such as Huntington's disease and cystic fibrosis, an important first step in understanding these conditions.

A research team has discovered a molecular "rheostat" in the brain's appetite control center that may provide new insights into obesity, which is at epidemic levels in this country.

The discovery of this novel cell signaling pathway, reported today in the journal Nature, revises the previous "on-off" switch model of appetite control, said Roger Cone, Ph.D., who led the research team with Masoud Ghamari-Langroudi, M.D., Ph.D.

The discovery centers on a receptor in the brain's appetite control center, the melanocortin-4 receptor, or MC4R, a G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) embedded in the membranes of nerve cells.

Acute kidney injury often arises after major surgery because the kidneys can be deprived of normal blood flow during the procedure. The use of contrast media, or dyes, can contribute to this problem.

In patients undergoing coronary angiography or percutaneous coronary intervention, which are heart procedures that use dyes to help surgeons visualize the arteries, a high dose of the statin atorvastatin was linked with a reduction in blood levels of creatinine, a marker of kidney injury, as well as a lower incidence of acute kidney injury compared with a low dose of the statin.