During a recent lunch meeting, my trainee met a startling cockroach in his lunchbox. He hadn't even noticed that his mouth was hanging open. He rushed out of the room as if he had stepped on the teeth of a rake or slammed his thumb with a hammer.

Uh-oh.

Which leads me to the theory of negativity dominance hypothesized by the pyschologist Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust. Just imagine a single cockroach in your most favorite dish such as a bowl of cherries. I can hear the

I was reading the Time magazine cover story Your Life Is Fully Mobile when my broadband service at home was upgraded to 30M yesterday.When it comes to the wireless mobile technology, Nancy Gibbs has commented that more people have access to mobile device than to a toilet or running water, and the average smart phone today has more computing power than Apollo II when it landed a man on the moon. She dares us to name one example of tool with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we

Most shutterbugs had heard, at one time or another, the unmistakable question concerning the number of pixels when people think about the choice of digital cameras. Every so often we consider high-pixel number to be sine qua non of high-quality camera. It isn't.

If you are to go looking for a place where people fall in love with magic figure - which is not magic at all, in fact - the field of medicine is a pretty good candidate. Overwhelmed by the work at hand and with

I have been looking forward to the first day of bringing my kid to the kindergarten.

Well, really - how could you not?

I decided to take a half day off. The sun was bright, the traffic heavy. My daughter, still every inch of her a toddler, was excited and brought with her the picture book " Let's Go to School ." We heard the sparrows chirping as we ran up the hill to the bungalow campus. It was the natural and lively outdoor environment I like most

Go ask a doctor how it goes after the on-call day, and odds are that the doctor will tell you how lucky or unlucky he has been.

Some of us take solace, after a stormy night, by calling ourselves unlucky. To us, a peaceful night means luck.

But be not beguiled.

Now that I've got senior enough to be on call once in a while, what I look forward to is the luck (sort of) to see more difficult cases and learn. I remember

Few words are more likely to make one think of impartial judgement and idealism than that big term peer review . A beacon of justice for scientific knowledge. Almost all manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals are now sent out to reviewers, selected by virtue of their knowledge about the manuscript's topic, before any decision on publication.

Reviewers are obliged to return the review within two weeks. The deadline is not difficult to meet, unless I forget the request. When I returned from Berlin, I thought I'd finished all