revere
Posts by this author
November 20, 2008
There's a lot of stupidity in state legislatures, and the responsibility for that stupidity rests squarely with the people who voted for these morons. Take Tennessee. Please.
Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down…
November 20, 2008
There is a story on the wires today about an upcoming Lancet article describing the case of a young Columbian woman whose failing airway was replaced by a bioengineered airway whose cells were cultured from adult stem cells obtained from the patient's bone marrow. Since there is as yet no…
November 19, 2008
The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is one of the most maligned and hated federal agencies. And for good reason. They are worse than useless, performing uncounted acts of "security theater" (in Bruce Schneier's apt coinage), like confiscating water bottles and making you take off your…
November 19, 2008
A congressionally mandated independent panel of scientists has just issued a report verifying what many of us have know since the early 1990s. Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) is real:
Gulf War syndrome is real and afflicts about 25 percent of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the 1991 conflict, a U.S.…
November 18, 2008
In 2001 Ignacio Chapela, an ecologist from the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author David Quist published a highly controversial paper in Nature that appeared to show that genetically engineered genes used in genetically modified (GM) corn (maize) was spreading from GM cornfields in…
November 18, 2008
It's now two and half months since CDC and US FDA declared an end to the infamous tomatoes-no-it's-peppers salmonella outbreak of last summer. The outbreak itself was even longer: 3 months. There were some 1400 reported cases but probably many more that escaped detection. That's typical for…
November 17, 2008
Interesting new findings on household bleach as a disinfectant. Yes, we know it's a disinfectant. What we don't know is why it is a disinfectant. How exactly does it work? This utilitarian question has just been explored in a paper in the super select and prestigious journal Cell. Here's a bit of…
November 17, 2008
The team of investigative reporting team of Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel just keeps rolling along, this time with an amazing story about how microwave safe plastics are leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) at potentially unsafe levels. We are saying potentially unsafe…
November 16, 2008
World leaders confront global crisis
Economic summit in Washington is likely only a first step
to new rules to prevent financial meltdown and market mayhem.
In 1955 the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a classic book about the stock market crash of 1929 (The Great Crash 1929). It hasn't…
November 16, 2008
The latest hilarious dust-up over religion has to do with an ad on DC buses scheduled for the holidays by the American Humanist Association (AHA):
Ads proclaiming, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake," will appear on the outside and inside of DC Metro buses starting next Tuesday…
November 15, 2008
You probably never heard of the EPA Appeals Board, but they have just handed down a ruling that will affect scores of power plants using coal. Affect them how? Not clear at the moment:
The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal…
November 15, 2008
One of the good things about the pandemic flu threat (if you'll let me put it that way) is the stimulus it has provided for vaccine technology. While current flu vaccines are still mired in horse and buggy technology of egg-based production, all sorts of alternative ways of making antigen or…
November 14, 2008
Reader JJ reminds me that while we celebrate Obama's victory and a new mood of hope and optimism in the US, the people of the Gaza strip have little to celebrate and even less reason for hope and optimism:
The UN has no more food to distribute in the Gaza Strip, the head of relief efforts in the…
November 14, 2008
The idea of stopping flu "at the border" has received almost uniformly bad reviews from public health experts. Once human to human transmission starts we won't be able to stop it by closing our borders, although we likely will cause the usual unintended consequences, like preventing vital personnel…
November 13, 2008
If there's an influenza pandemic in the near future all bets are off when it comes to unplanned for consequences. Well, maybe not all bets. Right now the only oral antiviral likely to have any effectiveness in a pandemic is oseltamivir (Tamiflu), although how effective and how long it would retain…
November 13, 2008
Last spring NIH scientist Charles Natanson published a meta-analysis of studies on hemoglobin-based blood substitutes in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Natanson, C., Kern, S. J., Lurie, P., Banks, S. M. & Wolfe, S. M. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 299, 2304-2312 (2008)). Blood…
November 12, 2008
In the 1960s, long before anyone ever heard of "World Music," a young South African artist by the name of Miriam Makeba made us fall in love with the music of her continent. Known throughout the world as Mama Africa, Miriam Makeba collapsed and died on Monday just after leaving a concert stage in…
November 12, 2008
Half of all restaurants in the United States are fast food restaurants. They do $100 billion worth of business a year (that's one seventh of a Bailout, a new unit of expenditure). A lot of the fast food is in the form of beef (hamburgers), chicken (sandwiches, tenders or nuggets) and french fries.…
November 11, 2008
The Reveres, November 11, 2008, year five of the War in Iraq and year seven of the War in Afghanistan
November 11, 2008
Dr. Susan Wood blogs on occasion over at The Pump Handle (where we cross post quite often). She is pretty busy these day on another assignment: co-chairman of Obama's advisory committee for women's health. And it's reported one of the first things the Obama administration will do is undo the blue-…
November 10, 2008
The common simile of someone being shunned like a leper is an irony considering we still don't know how leprosy is transmitted. Leprosy (now usually referred to as Hansen's Disease) is still being diagnosed in the US, with an annual incidence of about 150 cases a year and a prevalence of about…
November 10, 2008
One resource the incoming Obama administration is certainly to find no shortage of is advice. We don't know whom they will listen to, although we know much of it -- maybe most of it -- is likely to be of the self-serving variety. How to separate the wheat from the chaff will be a delicate task.…
November 9, 2008
Unemployment is up, state and local tax revenues are down. Along with their jobs people are losing their health insurance. Their sole remedy will be Medicaid, jointly financed by the states and the federal government. What a great time to cut the federal share of support:
In the first of an…
November 9, 2008
Breaking up is hard to do. We all know that. Once science and religion got along. They even thought they could make a go of it. But let's face it, they lived in different worlds. It just wasn't to be. It's probably better for the children:
November 8, 2008
When I think of what happens in November I think of elections, Thanksgiving, the first snowfall, the advent of winter. I don't think about being killed by running into a deer. But November is apparently the most likely time for that to happen. And it happens to a couple of hundred people a year in…
November 8, 2008
One nasty (and usually fatal) consequence of infection with bird flu (influenza A/H5N1) in humans is that the virus doesn't just infect the lungs but becomes disseminated to many different organs. We know that a bird-like receptor that the virus can use to get into cells is found in several other…
November 7, 2008
So we have more Salmonella contamination out and about. This one is in dry pet food. But it wasn't the pets that were getting the Salmonella:
Salmonella-contaminated dry pet food sickened at least 79 people, including many young children, and could still be dangerous, the U.S. Centers for Disease…
November 7, 2008
The virulent influenza A subtype H5N1, known colloquially as bird flu, has caused sporadic cases of human disease but has not yet become a pandemic strain. There are several things which still separate H5N1 from the kind of seasonal influenza infections that are a serious periodic public health…
November 6, 2008
Lots of speculation about Obama's appointments and perhaps the most science oriented one is Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Wired has a list of the rumored possibles, via Bloomberg:
Leading candidates for the position, reports Bloomberg News, include former Pennsylvania…
November 6, 2008
I wasn't in Grant Park the night Barack Obama won the election, which is a pity as it seemed like a joyous and life affirming event. But I've been in Grant Park with tens of thousands of others, the last time 40 years ago. There was tear gas everywhere, students and others being clubbed to the…