purepedantry | January 4, 2007This is the question that I get all the time in family gatherings. Well, maybe not in those words. Usually it is phrased as "How can I not get Alzheimer's? Because that would be a bummer...for me..."
People are concerned about the issue of cognitive decline with aging -- both with pathological decline such as Alzheimer's disease and your normal "I can't find my keys" declines. Numerous popular remedies exist that purport to improve your chances of staying with it longer, such as doing crossword puzzles or running ten miles a day for your entire life.
In the late 90s, the National…
purepedantry | January 3, 2007A UK charity called Sense About Science is taking on celebrities who misrepresent scientific reality:
MELINDA MESSENGER, TV PRESENTER
"Why should I allow my body or my children to be filled with man-made chemicals, when I don't know what the health effects of these substances will be."
Dr John Hoskins, toxicologist: "Away from the high doses of occupational exposure a whole host of unwanted chemicals finds its way into our bodies all the time.
"Most leave quickly but some stay: asbestos and silica in our lungs, dioxins in our blood. The most important thing is dose: one aspirin cures a…
purepedantry | January 3, 2007Pat Robertson is up to his old fun:
In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."
Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people…
purepedantry | January 3, 2007Grrrr. Tell me if this article bugs you as much as it does me:
Social Dementia' Decimates Special Neurons
By Michael Balter
Being human has its pluses and minuses. Our cognitive powers are superior to that of other animals, and we can act consciously to alter our destinies. On the other hand, our highly evolved brains are prone to serious malfunctions such as mental illness and dementia. Now a team of neuroscientists has found that some of these blessings and curses might be linked to the same specialized neural circuits.
In 1999, researchers discovered that the brains of humans and great…
purepedantry | January 3, 2007Men with no sons have an increased risk of prostate cancer in relation to those with at least one son:
The researchers in the Mailman School's Department of Epidemiology analyzed the relative risk of prostate cancer by the sex of offspring among fathers registered in a family-based research cohort in Israel. From this cohort of 38,934 men, followed from the birth of their offspring (in 1964 through 1976) until 2005, the authors conclude that genes on the Y chromosome may be involved in prostate cancer risk in this population.
"We surveyed vital status and cancer incidence, and found a strong…
purepedantry | January 2, 2007Cartoon Physics, part 1
by Nick Flynn
Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries
will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down -- earthbound, tangible
disasters, arenas
where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning…
purepedantry | January 2, 2007Prion diseases such as mad cow disease or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) are caused when normal proteins adopt an adverse conformational state. The protein sequence is the same as a normal protein; it has just adopted a conformation that causes it to aggregate or do other bad things. These diseases are transmissible because the protein is capable of inducing that conformation state in other normal proteins. If you get a little bit of the bad protein, it can make all of your proteins go bad as well. (It is so sad when good proteins start running with a bad crowd.)
These diseases…
purepedantry | January 2, 2007Who knew:
While public perception may frame surfing as a dangerous sport, new research begs to differ. In the first study of its kind, researchers have computed the rate of injury among competitive surfers and found they are less prone to harm than collegiate soccer or basketball players. Led by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital and Brown Medical School, the findings of the study are published in the January 2007 issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine.
"We found that competitive surfing has a relatively low risk of injury - 6.6 significant injuries per 1,000 hours of surfing -…
purepedantry | December 29, 2006The FDA -- after years of twiddling their thumbs because of the irrational fears of "consumer" groups -- has finally approved cloned food for human consumption:
After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded yesterday that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals are safe to eat. That finding could make the United States the first country to allow products from cloned livestock to be sold in grocery stores.
Even if the agency's assessment is formally approved next year, consumers will not see many steaks or pork chops from cloned animals because the technology…
purepedantry | December 28, 2006Wired Magazine has the Foot-in-Mouth Awards for 2006. My personal favorite:
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."
-- Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) deconstructs the frustrations of (we think) file sharing, during a speech opposing net…
purepedantry | December 28, 2006The Economist has an article that wonders whether new knowledge into neuroscience and more particularly social pathologies will erode our belief in free will. I roll my eyes every time I read an article like this one, mostly because they tend to express an uniformed view about how the brain works:
For millennia the question of free will was the province of philosophers and theologians, but it actually turns on how the brain works. Only in the past decade and a half, however, has it been possible to watch the living human brain in action in a way that begins to show in detail what happens…
purepedantry | December 28, 2006Poem of the Week is a bit late because of the holiday, but I think it is worth it.
The World Is a Beautiful Place
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born…
kcontreary | December 28, 2006A 17-year-old man under suspicion for attempted murder is refusing to have a 9-mm bullet removed from his forehead. Prosecutors claim that the bullet, which is lodged just under the skin, could prove that the man was involved in a shootout with a used car-lot owner after taking part in a gang-related robbery of the lot.
Prosecutors say it will prove that Bush, 17, tried to kill the owner of a used-car lot after a robbery in July. And they have obtained a search warrant to extract the slug.
But Bush and his lawyer are fighting the removal, in a legal and medical oddity that raises questions…
purepedantry | December 21, 2006If you hadn't heard yet, Time's Person of the Year is...well...You. The thrust of their argument is that New Media is user-generated media, and sites like blogs, MySpace, and YouTube are changing the way that we create and distribute information. It has a totally tacky mirror on the front cover so that you can see yourself.
George Will wrote an editorial where he takes issue with the self-absorbed silliness of this choice. While I am inclined to agree on some points -- frankly it strikes me as the choice you make when you don't really want to make a choice -- he makes (or rather questions…
purepedantry | December 20, 2006This is never going to end:
A lawmaker introduced a bill on Tuesday that would make Massachusetts the first U.S. state to ban artificial trans fats from restaurants, closely following New York City's ban of the artery-clogging oils.
"We have an opportunity to vastly improve public health by directing restaurants to switch to healthier alternatives," Peter Koutoujian, a Democratic representative in the Massachusetts Legislature, said in a statement.
The bill uses language similar to new regulations announced this month by New York City, but marks the first effort to force restaurants in an…
purepedantry | December 20, 2006There is some good stuff on Scienceblogs right now:
Evolgen has an article about how the oft quoted 1% genetic difference between chimps and humans may hide much larger differences due to copy number and expression differences.
Jonah Lehrer reports on how the function of dreams may be to replay and consolidate daytime memories.
Mixing Memory mentions a paper that compares money and money-seeking behavior to drugs. Interesting. I never thought that Kara was into that sort of thing.
purepedantry | December 20, 2006German scientists have created a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for far red light:
The trick is to assemble an array of electronic components that resonate with the electric and magnetic fields of the light waves as they pass through. These materials are unlike any conventional substance, hence the name "metamaterial". Pendry suggested that an array of coils and wires much smaller than the wavelength of light would do the trick and first demonstrated the idea for radio waves with a frequency between 15 and 20 megahertz.
Later experiments extended the technique to shorter…
purepedantry | December 20, 2006Americans are not waiting until marriage to have sex:
More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.
"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."
Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and…
purepedantry | December 19, 2006I wrote before about how I think the NY trans-fat ban is scientifically supportable but not particularly the government's business. Here is interesting speculation in Free Exchange:
Banning trans fats in restaurants, but not in grocery stores, doesn't make sense. I guess the supermarket lobby is more powerful than the fast-food and donut lobby.
I'd guess that it has more to do with public choice theory than ardent lobbying. Since national food producers are unlikely to reformulate their entire line for the benefit of a few million New Yorkers, a trans-fat ban would sweep large categories…