Tag Archives: olfaction

Bandwagons, Bicarb, and Broca’s Bitty Bulb

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The Baby Bed Box Bandwagon.

Finnish-style baby box photo
Cutting edge baby sleep technology Photo by myglesias

What is it about public health issues that lends itself to bandwagons? John Pienta, Levi Endelman, Hillary O’Brien, Issac Schwantes, and Jason Lewis discuss Finland’s contribution to parenting, the cardboard box in which babies sleep.  This year, hundreds of thousands of boxes will be given to new parents by US states in an attempt to improve infant mortality rates.  Is that at all helpful, or are we ignoring other causes of death among infants?

This week in science and medicine news

You know things are weird in healthcare when baking soda is in such short supply that hospitals start cutting back on open-heart surgery. And thanks to a certain 19th neuroanatomist’s ideas about the relative sizes of the frontal lobe and the olfactory bulb, we decided that humans have crappy senses of smell…a ‘fact’ that turns out was never tested and is probably not at all true!

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We also heard from listener Mike, who we offended 70 episodes ago.  We’re not entirely sure what we said, exactly, that made Mike give us up after listening to roughly 80 hours of our half-baked opinions, but we always count ourselves fortunate to hear specific negative feedback (and hey, positive feedback is nice, too).  Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Bandwagons, Bicarb, and Broca’s Bitty Bulb

Match Day 2015!

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photo of smiling, matched medical students
What relief looks like. Photo by Dave Etler
The excitement was palpable as we waited for the clock to strike 11 a.m. CST. Or maybe it was fear, hope, dread…whatever it was, we were waiting for the results of Match Day 2015, when med students throughout the country found out where they’d be going as newly minted residents to finish their training for the next few years. After the drama had played out, and everyone else had left the building to start celebrating, Damien Ihrig–he’s the registrar here at the College of Medicine–sat down with Nathan Miller, Melissa Palma, and Jordan Harbaugh-Williams to talk about Match Day and everything that lead up to it. Continue reading Match Day 2015!

Silent but Therapeutic

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wrinkled nose photo
Oh, cheer up, Melinda. Your cancer is cured! Photo by bradleygee

This week on The Short Coat Podcast, Lisa Wehr, Cole Cheney, Zhi Xiong, and Greg Woods are back with this week’s completely inadvertent theme: odoriferous treatments.  Also we talk about how medical students do a lot of staring at the bark and missing the trees, and the scandalous and sexist mnemonics used in medical school for all that bark staring.  Dave looks forward to the delivery of his iPad Air 2 and ditching his 2010 iPad 2 because iOS 8 destroyed it.  U2’s Bono reveals that his silly glasses are a treatment for his glaucoma, making everyone feel bad for thinking he was just trying and failing to look cool. There is a evolutionary reason for the thick male skull, which seems to coincide with the appearance of The Three Stooges on the fossil record. Cole reveals he’s a beta male as evidenced by his reaction to blood draws, and how this reaction perpetuates the survival of the species. A British man fakes a 2-year coma to avoid court. Proposals for a robot force to deal with Ebola.  The University of Exeter isolates a compound from the smell of flatulence that they think will treat diseases that are mediated by damage to mitochondria. Researchers peg when adult humans gained lactase and thus the ability to process milk, and as a result we are thankful that Lisa grew up on a dairy farm and explains why and how adults grew to do that.  Scientists discover that our skin contains odor receptors, and a man with a spinal injury gets cells from his olfactory bulb transplanted into his spine and regains motion and sensation.

Listen to more great shows for medical students on The Vocalis Podcast Network.

The opinions expressed in this feed and podcast are not those of the University of Iowa or the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.