Juxta-medullary nephrons are consistently found to have higher filtration rates than superficial nephrons. Is this due to the underlying anatomy of the cortical radial artery, from which the juxta-medullary afferent arterioles branch before the superficial arterioles? Is it due to anatomical differences in the glomeruli, such as length, surface area or permeability? Or is it perhaps a matter of differences in the regulation of glomerular blood flow?
It's funny how the mind works. The placebo effect remains an unknowable mystery, where the body somehow compensates for an expected effect even in cases where the subject is aware that they are receiving a placebo. On an equally mysterious topic, I was deeply surprised when I first discovered the serious consideration with which some bizarre superstitions were treated in the healthcare field.
A mixture of papers concerning renal function and chronic kidney disease (CKD), IgA nephropathy, and modelling tumour vascularisation and growth.
For me, the choice of platform came down to R or SciPy. I am aware of Sage, but it seemed like such a huge and sprawling collection that I found it a little off-putting (and I suspect it greatly exceeds my needs). In the end, I chose R because I had (very limited) experience with it, and I figured I'd enjoy using a statistical language more than a general-purpose language for this kind of work. That's not to say I didn't get thoroughly confused at times, of course.
This paper caught my eye a while back: "Positive" Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences (2010). To quote the abstract:
If the hierarchy hypothesis is correct, then researchers in "softer" sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes. Results confirmed the predictions at all levels considered: discipline, domain and methodology broadly defined.
I wonder where the authors would classify this work on the soft/hard scale?
Bearing the plain title of Renal Circulation (2011), this review article provides great detail about renal microcirculation and autoregulation. It's probably just as useful for the references as for the actual content.
Update: I didn't realise that this is a chapter from Handbook of Physiology that is now available as part of [Comprehensive Physiology](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/cphy, and that this body of work is being regularly updated.
Several papers that discuss the complexities of kidney oxygenation and the utility of mathematical models.
Some existing whole-kidney models, which also include other portions the cardio-vascular system.