While preparing my talk for the Springschool Healthy Ageing, which I also chair, I found this movie on Youtube. It is an older movie already (from 2006), but it perfectly shows why I felt so inspired after reading ‘Ageing with grace’ from David Snowdon, the PI of the Nun Study. Isn’t it amazing that, at […]
Posts in the Blog category:
Main Blog
IEEE Spark: inspiring high school students
As a senior member of IEEE I was happy to see that they just launched a new website – IEEE Spark – aimed at 14-18 year olds who want to learn more about careers in engineering, technology and computing. It features articles on technological innovation, university preparation tips, professional career profiles, at-home activities, cartoons, and […]
Diagnosis by machine
One of my scientific interests is the use of EEG or fMRI for diagnosis of neurological disorders in individual patients. So far, most studies (including my own) have been able to find statistically significant differences between groups of patients or between patients and healthy subjects. But, as not everyone realizes, these results unfortunately do not […]
The Netherlands: a country for young (and older) women?
It is not always easy to find female role models, which is one of the reasons why I volunteer for ‘Spiegelbeeld’, a Dutch initiative to show female highschool students that maths, physics and all exact sciences in general are highly interesting (i.e. not dull or boring at all), are applied in more practical areas than […]
Ultrafast fMRI: capturing the brain @work
I am a bit late to report it but here it is: researchers from Berkeley, Minnesota and Oxford have developed a new ultrafast EPI sequence for fMRI that brings down the repetition time (TR) to only 400 ms at 3T. Their finding was published in the 20 dec 2010 issue of PLoS one. This is […]
MRI at the movies
I couldn’t agree more with Randi Silberman in his IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk blog, when he states his amazement at the way fMRI is used in the new Angelina Jolie movie Salt. In the movie it is suggested that fMRI is used as a lie detector without any of the current extended fMRI machinery visible […]
Dancing helps you think
Professionally I’m interested in why certain old people age with grace whereas others suffer from cognitive problems at a relatively young age. Not only do I use neuroimaging techniques to find out how certain elderly can compensate functionally for the degradation of grey matter and the loss of white matter connectivity, but I am also […]
Teaching the world through internet
This initiative is truly one very good example of how internet can be used to benefit other people: Salman Khan has set up the Khan Academy, a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere. On his website www.khanacademy.org he provides over 1400 YouTube videos covering everything from basic […]
Travelling wave NMR
In the February 19 2009 issue of Nature David Brunner and Klaas Pruessmann from ETH Zurich showed that by using travelling instead of standing radio-frequency waves to acquire MR images, it becomes possible to obtain high-quality images of larger parts of the body at once. More importantly from the perspective of a patient, even at 7T […]
TED: talks by great researchers for everyone
TED provides 15 minute presentations by both eminent researchers and young rising stars on very diverse subjects. Both very interesting from a content point of view, but also to learn how to present your topic in only 15 minutes in an accessible, thought-provoking and entertaining way. I loved the talks by Ramachandran and by Petsko on the […]