Friday Fun

I just discovered my new favorite blog.  So in the spirit of the upcoming weekend and in the belief that we all need a little humor in our lives I wanted to share it with you.  The blog focuses on articles retrieved within NCBI.  But unlike the very helpful blog, PubMed Search Strategies by Cindy Schmidt (mentioned on David Rothman’s site), my new favorite blog is a little more humorous. 

NCBI ROFL is a blog that posts the citations (and its abstract) to a real articles found in with PubMed.  However, they aren’t what you would think of as usual articles in the biomedical world.  In fact they post the unusual and often very humorous citations that they or others have found in the PubMed database.   “NCBI ROFL is the brainchild of two Molecular and Cell Biology graduate students at UC Berkeley,” and without their blog I would never have known that these articles were even in the medical literature let alone indexed in PubMed. 

Here are some of the posts, and true to the title of the blog they had me Rolling On Floor Laughing.

• Does garlic protect against vampires? An experimental study.
• Is Mr Pac Man eating our children? A review of the effect of video games on children.
• Swearing as a response to pain.
• Why are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity.

I want to thank Amy Blevins who posted a link on her Facebook wall to NCBI ROTFL, without it and the catchy vampire title (which is always sure to grab my SciFi geek eye) I would have never known about this site. 

(Update:) After looking around, I see that I must have been sleeping because both David Rothman and Laika wrote about this fun site back in June.