Report a relative proportion of patients ruled-out or ruled-in with a diagnostic test

One measure of the performance of a diagnostic test is the proportion of patients the test stratifies as likely not to have the condition (ruled-out:RO) or to have the condition (ruled-in:RI). This proportion depends on the prevalence of the... continue reading

Restricted SDM: Predicting habitat suitability from species occurrence only

Species Distribution Models are commonly used to predict species habitat suitability. The data needed to build such a model usually consist of a range of environmental variables together with a target variable - the species occurrence itself... continue reading

A combinatorial approach towards treating cancer through Cisplatin

Cisplatin is an effective chemotherapeutic drug against a vast variety of cancers. It is a cytotoxic drug that kills cancer cells by forming DNA adducts, thereby damaging the DNA leading to apoptosis. However, the clinical use of cisplatin is... continue reading

Antibiotics indicating a link between migraines and gut bacteria

Recent research has found links between the composition of gut bacteria and whether a person suffers from migraines. Since [antibiotics influence gut... continue reading

FearOmone: A cat pheromone based Bio-synthetic deterrent to minimize post-harvest losses caused by rat manifestation.

In India, post-harvest losses amount to 16 million metric tons of food grains each year (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296677/). Improper storage and transport is the main problem to be addressed since it contributes to more than... continue reading

Phylogenetic tree representation in n-dimensional space

Traditional phylogenetic trees are represented as bifurcating trees, where the leaf nodes represent taxa and the internal nodes represent common ancestors. Bifurcating trees offer advantages of interpreting common ancestors as well as being widely... continue reading

Use of waste plastic as a reducing agent for iron ore

China's recent announcement that they will cease to accept large quantities of waste plastic has brought a growing crisis into sharp focus; global capacity for waste plastic handling is being rapidly outstripped by production. The clear solution... continue reading

Orthogonal versus redundant data in education

Our university was recently hit by malware. It took weeks to restore most data, some lost completely. All backups were affected making a simple restore ineffectual. Why take this redundant approach in data safety? Consider flight data recorders:... continue reading

METRICS: a pattern language for education scholarship

Scholarly activities in health professions education have been growing but despite the interest, what is considered as scholarship in (medical) education has remained vague. Boyer’s classes of scholarly activity (Boyer 1990) and Glassick’s... continue reading

“Venus” cult and “Old Man” mythological motif have already existed since 50.000 BP

If human language and genes spread “in tandem” as postulated by Michael Witzel, the split up time of the major phylogenetic lineages may provide a minimum age for the origin of Palaeolithic myths.
If this hypothesis is true, the distribution... continue reading

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