Researchers Have Just Discovered A Process In Fruit Flies Which Links Inflammation With Impaired Motor

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Unconditional love isn't a free pass to hurt me.

Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking

ScienceAlert

A New Pathway Found in The Brain Could Help Spell The End of Migraines

A newly discovered communication pathway linking far-flung nerve centers within the brain and skull, and the body beyond, could provide a ne

A newly discovered communication pathway linking far-flung nerve centers within the brain and skull, and the body beyond, could provide a new target to stop migraine pain in its tracks. Researchers have long tried to pinpoint where migraines begin in the brain, and how these one-sided, nauseating headaches induce pain and other symptoms, such as vomiting. Understanding this would help find new ways to prevent migraines from happening or at least ease the searing pain once it starts.

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Franz Kafka, from a diary entry featured in "The Diaries of Franz Kafka,"

Joan Didion writes, in On Keeping a Notebook, that the purpose of keeping a notebook, or a journal for that matter, isn’t because you simply want keep a personal record of things; but because you want to remember the person you were at that specific moment. we write things down on our notebook/journal/diary (whichever one of those you keep) because we want to remember. we want to remember what specific people meant to us on a particular day or hour. or minute. we want to remember our first impression of something (or of doing that something), possibly of someone, too. sometimes we think we’ll “always remember” important events: “I’ll make a mental note of that” etc etc. but in reality everything is fleeting. so Didion says write it down. keep a journal. that way, people, places, and certain events will always be there in case you ever want to come back to them sometime in the future. but also so that they don’t ever haunt you.

people who work/study in quantitative bio-adjacent fields, rise up. computational neuroscience where you get to see someone's thoughts in feelings in graph form??? so cool. biophysics where you can pass blood plasma through an electric field to determine whether a patient has cancer or not?? unbelievable. biomedical engineering where you can literally build a device to pump someone's heart and be the difference between their life and death??? oh my god. disease modelling, being able to predict AND prevent communities being affected by disease on a large scale through your analysis of data??? i love science

— Sylvia Plath, "The Bell Jar"

It’s wild to me that we don’t take women’s health care seriously. We should have better treatment for things like endometriosis and PCOS. I’m in the most excruciating pain, can barely walk and the most I get is an IUD (that is no longer working) thrown at me. But don’t worry, we have tons of cosmetic surgeries directed at women. Buccal fat removal, Brazilian butt lifts, face lifts, etc. All the medical research has gone into making women look more appealing to men and none of it is directed towards women’s health conditions.

Joan Didion, from Blue Nights