June 15, 2009
Photo: Tyler Hicks, via Scientific American
What if you could predict which troops are most likely to get PTSD from combat exposure -- and takes steps to either bolster them mentally or keep them out of combat situations? A new study suggests we could make a start on that right now -- and cut…
June 12, 2009
Jim Schnabel has an interesting story at Nature, free to all viewers, on the tetchy difficult of assessing how TV affects kids. I've often wondered whether the rise in ADHD diagnoses was due at least partly to TV. This story looks at a researcher who -- amazed at how riveted his infant son was by…
June 3, 2009
Forgive my recent blogopause. i was fishing, and then traveling, and then writing rather head-down intensely -- all activities I have trouble mixing with blogging and social media such as Twitter, which I've also left idle these last days.
So what gives with all that? I often find it awkward to…
May 22, 2009
Having lived with fire ants, stepped in fire ants, laid down with fire ants, and been bit just about everywhere by fire ants, the news that parasitic flies turn fire ants them into zombies by eating their brains pleases me immensely.
Speaking of pleasure: Vaughn whacks the dopamine = pleasure…
May 20, 2009
What's wrong -- but horribly expected -- in this picture? One week the CEO of Lilly attacks the idea of a public health insurance plan because it might reduce consumers' "ability to choose, in an informed way, from all the available alternatives." The next week, PhRMA, the trade group this CEO's…
May 19, 2009
Found some Koufax footage. About halfway through this short clip he Ks Mantle, looking, and a bit later, in the dark footage toward the end, is a good strip of him throwing the devastating curve. Note there the emphatic downward motion of his shoulder -- which brought down his hand the faster,…
May 18, 2009
A few weeks ago, when I posted that "Uh-oh: POW benefit claimants exceed recorded POWs, one reader wrote saying the post made her wonder whether I have "a problem with veterans." As one reader noted, a concern with bogus POWs suggests I have a problem with -- well, bogus POWs. Should it not bother…
May 18, 2009
A ring-tailed lemur, via Afarensis
Here's one that'll grab you. Via Discover's 80beats science news blog:
A small, lemur-like creature may have been an early ancestor of monkeys, apes, and humans. A magnificently preserved fossil dating from 47 million years ago reveals an animal that had, among…
May 18, 2009
via Ezra Klein comes this bottom-line chart from the Center for Economic and Policy Research:
That orange line headed heaven-ward? That's our deficit. All those other lines dipping down? That's our deficit if we had the same health care spending per person as France, Germany, Canada, and the UK…
May 15, 2009
Koufax, bringing the four-seamer. God save the guy at the plate.
I always look forward to the Illusion of the Year contest, but this year brings a special treat: a new explanation of how the curveball baffles batters.
Just a few days ago, during BP, my friend Bill Perreault threw me one of those…
May 12, 2009
Most of us recognize the power of the urge to conform , but you don't often see it evoked and displayed so starkly as in this old Candid Camera segment. The CC crew seeds an elevator with several crew members who do odd things like face the rear of the elevator car. See how long the naive…
May 12, 2009
Ezra Klein thinks the stars -- and the forces -- are so far lining up much more promisingly than in 1994:
The opponents of health reform are, at this juncture, entirely isolated. Industry is adopting an attitude of relentless positivity. Republicans are grudgingly attempting to appear cooperative.…
May 7, 2009
I should just have a permanent pointer from here to Effect Measure. But as I've not figured out how to do that, here's some more sensible thinking from Revere:
No one on the public health side has over reacted. When an outbreak or pandemic is unfolding, you get only one chance. The window is a…
May 6, 2009
Science Progress looks at the discouraging feedback loop between climate change and Western wildfires:
New research investigating the impact of climate change on western wildfires presents a bleak picture. CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy covers the latest science in an American Progress column…
May 6, 2009
I've noted several times here how more measured heads keep emphasizing that a) we're working on partial information in responding to the current swine flu outbreak and b) new developments may complicate things at any point along the line.
Here's a great example of what these folks (like Effect…
May 6, 2009
While I'm at it, here are a few other recent posts about modulating our thinking about the swine flu outbreak that is a) so far less horrid than our worst fears and b) still working its way around the globe, as it may well be doing for some time to come.
Greg Laden notes that nothing has changed…
May 6, 2009
In a post titled "Dead, Your Majesty," H5N1, Crof ponders why we scramble to deal with swine flu while ignoring other problems ranging from cancer to the 3000 children a day who die of malaria in Africa :
Most of us are comfortably settled in rich industrial countries where problems like TB and…
May 1, 2009
Theme of the day (again, sort of): managing expectation, or Do I panic or just ignore this thing and scoff at those who express concern?
Neither, of course.
I'm personally provisionally encouraged at the aggregated news from yesterday -- meaning I was glad to see that though the virus is spreading…
April 30, 2009
Wanted to draw attention to this wonderful interview with CDC virologist Ruben Donis, chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from ScienceInsider. It's echoes nicely some of the themes I and others have been trying to hit in this…
April 30, 2009
In his morning news roundup at Slate today, Daniel Politi hits what seems to me -- this morning, anyway -- about the right tone, which is that the events of the last 24 hours are encouraging. (Though I wouldn't throw out those flu masks just yet.)
The New York Times points out that while the WHO…
April 30, 2009
Nature's Declan Butler looks at how baffled virologists are as they examine this virus's DNA:
Researchers are scrambling to study the evolution and spread of the novel H1N1 strain of swine influenza whose leap to humans was officially confirmed last week....
The genetic make-up of this swine flu…
April 29, 2009
It'd be nice to think otherwise. But even as WHO moves to Phase 5, recognizing that there is sustained human-to-human spread of this virus, we're still not sure how much punch it has. Which, as SophieZoe points out at A Pandemic Chronicle doesn't leave us with much :
Beyond the change in the…
April 29, 2009
Amid my flu frenzy I missed Vaughn Bell's excellent consideration of CIA psychology through the declassified memos:
I've been reading the recently released CIA memos on the interrogation of 'war on terror' detainees. The memos make clear that the psychological impact of the process is the most…
April 29, 2009
As I've noted before, the U.S.'s health-care and education systems share some fundamental flaws: In both medical care and schooling we spend far more than other countries and get substandard results; in both cases, the overspending and poor results occur partly because our decentralized "systems"…
April 29, 2009
Revere reminds us of how isolation and quarantine are not the same:
Both Avian Flu Diary and H5N1 look at how Mexico's 160+ "swine flu deaths" got knocked back to just 7.
Andre Picard (why do so many ace flu reporters come out of Canada?) argues we should Keep the fear-o-meter on low for now…
April 29, 2009
This swine flu business is moving fast now, with confirmed or reported cases popping up everywhere and the first reported death outside Mexico -- a 23-month-old child in Texas -- reported this morning. As Effect Measure notes
Some of the fear [generated in the U.S. by this deat] will be lessened by…
April 28, 2009
Brandon Keim, who is part of Wired's ace science writing crew also keeps a blog, Earthlab Notes, where he recently put this nice post on The Language of Horses:
In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important…
April 28, 2009
Via emails, comments, and so on, quite a few people offered their own explanations for why mortality might be higher in Mexico (as of yesterday), the subject of my Slate piece.
First, though, a correction: I punched my numbers a bit too quickly in computing the flue's hypothetical kill ratios in…
April 28, 2009
Apparently the Bush Administration's survey of the legal literature of torture missed something.
From Antemedius:
George W. Bush's Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn't even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan's Justice Department…
April 28, 2009
Leave it to Vaughn Bell to find this stuff: emotional maps of different cities. Got to get a hold of this -- and as Vaughn explains, you and I can, with free download. (But leave the author some $. It's the right thing to do.)
Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance…
