purepedantry | December 17, 2008Not to indulge in too much schadenfreude, but some of these are pretty funny. Foreign Policy compiled the 10 most astonishing wrong predictions for 2008:
"There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet." -- Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org
Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century's version of Chicken Little for…
purepedantry | December 17, 2008Here is a cool idea. Researchers in Britain have come up with injectable bone:
"Injectable bone is the first delivery system for stem cells and growth factors that forms a material with the strength of a bone," said Robin Quirk, a pharmacist and co-founder of RegenTec -- the University of Nottingham, In England, spin-off company commercialising the technology.
...
Quirk said he hopes that injectable bone might one day reduce or eliminate the need for bone-grafts to repair skeletal defects and fractures -- which often require painful invasive surgery.
Not only does the technique reduce the…
purepedantry | December 17, 2008I have been meaning to talk about this story, but I have been busy.
A study in Nature looked for genes linked with "common" obesity (more on that in a moment), and it was one of the first to link genes to the disease. Turns out several are genes expressed in the brain:
A genetic study of more than 90,000 people has identified six new genetic variants that are associated with increased Body Mass Index (BMI), the most commonly used measure of obesity. Five of the genes are known to be active in the brain, suggesting that many genetic variants implicated in obesity might affect behaviour,…
purepedantry | December 16, 2008I really love coming to visit you, Grandpa.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales are using sarcasm to determine whether patients have frontotemporal dementia (FTD), otherwise known as Pick's disease:
Researchers at the University of New South Wales found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic.
The study, described by its authors as groundbreaking, helps explain why patients with the condition behave the way they do and why, for example, they are unable to…
purepedantry | December 16, 2008Mark this on the list of "things to expect in 2009." Craig Venter and his team expect to create the world's first artificially synthesized organism:
One likely announcement, which may happen any day of the year, is of the world's first artificial living creature. The announcer will almost certainly be Craig Venter, an American biologist who has been working on making such a creature for over a decade. It will not be quite as billed. Mycoplasma laboratorium, as the bacterium is expected to be dubbed, will need the shell of a natural bacterium to get going. But the genes themselves will have…
purepedantry | December 11, 2008I caught this article on ScienceDaily about the work of Professor Bart Hoebel at Princeton who has been attempting to show that sugar is an addictive substance like a drug. He presents data at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting to suggest that sugar fulfills the criterion for substances that we traditionally define as addictive:
Professor Bart Hoebel and his team in the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute have been studying signs of sugar addiction in rats for years. Until now, the rats under study have met two of the three elements of…
purepedantry | December 9, 2008If you are like me, you are pretty disgusted with the idea of bailing out the Detroit Big 3. In reference to that disgust, I was struck by this post at Think Markets channeling one of my favorite economists -- Frederic Bastiat.
Bastiat wrote an essay called "What is Seen and What is Not Seen" reminding economists to consider the consequences of particular policies in terms of opportunity costs. All economic decisions divert resources from one thing to another. It is a fine thing to say making cars is important, but it ignores what is not seen -- who will be put out of work by the…
purepedantry | December 9, 2008I was sorry to read over at Megan McArdle's blog over at the Atlantic yesterday that she has Hashimoto's thyroiditis and as a consequence has to give up being a vegan. (Her diet was high in soy for protein, and there is some evidence that soy interferes with thyroid function. More on this in a bit.) Anyway, I noticed in the comments that there are lots of people that hadn't ever heard of Hashimoto's (and my Mom actually had it too), so I would say a couple of things to clarify.
Hashimoto's thyroiditis is the most common kind of thyroid failure in areas of the world where people get enough…
purepedantry | December 5, 2008Nicholas Wade (a friend of mine's Dad actually) was on the Colbert Report talking about cloning wooly mammoths. Colbert asks the obvious question: why don't we just staple shag carpeting to an elephant?
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The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Nicholas Wade
Colbert at ChristmasColbert Christmas DVD
Green ScreenBill O'Reilly Interview
purepedantry | December 5, 2008Patient H.M. just died:
In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.
For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.
And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. As a participant in hundreds of studies, he helped…
purepedantry | December 4, 2008CNN is shutting down their science-and-technology unit. Not that it was much of a unit considering there was only one reporter:
CNN has decided to shutter its science and technology unit -- a move that will result in the loss of seven jobs including veteran space correspondent Miles O'Brien.
The other six jobs are producers, the Atlanta-based cable news network said Wednesday.
"Miles has made many contributions to CNN over the years. He is a terrific reporter, and we wish him all the best," the network said in a statement. His departure date has not been set.
The decision to do away with…
purepedantry | December 2, 2008Some doctors are considering dropping vaccinations because some are vaccinating at a loss from insurance reimbursement.
About one in 10 doctors who vaccinate privately insured children are considering dropping that service largely because they are losing money when they do it, according to a new survey.
A second survey revealed startling differences between what doctors pay for vaccines and what private health insurers reimburse: For example, one in 10 doctors lost money on one recommended infant vaccine, but others made almost $40 per dose on the same shot.
The survey was revealing even to…
purepedantry | December 1, 2008For acupuncture to work, you don't actually have to put in the needles:
The acupuncture study of 215 patients who were undergoing radiation treatment in the abdomen or pelvic region chose by lot one of these two acupuncture types.
109 received traditional acupuncture, with needles penetrating the skin in particular points. According to ancient Chinese tradition, the needle is twisted until a certain 'needle sensation' arises. The other 106 patients received a simulated acupuncture instead, with a telescopic, blunt placebo needle that merely touches the skin.
The acupuncture was performed by…
purepedantry | December 1, 2008Drug companies are not publishing all the trial data that they submit to the FDA, and those trials that are published are more likely to show positive results.
Rising et al. compared all the New Drug Applications (NDAs) (the vehicle for initiating a new clinical trial) given to the FDA in 2001 and 2002 to subsequent published literature. They found that only about 3/4 of the trials were later published in journals, and those that were published were 5 times as likely to show favorable results for the drug being tested by the drug company as those that were not:
The researchers identified…
purepedantry | November 28, 2008The economy is rough for everybody. The super-rich are cutting back on their mistress subsidies:
According to a new survey by Prince & Assoc., more than 80% of multimillionaires who had extra-marital lovers planned to cut back on their gifts and allowances. Still, only 12% of the multimillionaire cheaters said they plan to give up on their lovers altogether for financial reasons.
"Rich people are getting hit, and they're all expressing the need to curtail unnecessary spending," said Russ Alan Prince, president of Prince & Assoc., a wealth-research firm based in Connecticut. "Lovers…
purepedantry | November 28, 2008Check out this crazy video of a rare "elbowed" giant squid recorded from a Shell Oil remote operated vehicle in the Gulf of Mexico.
purepedantry | November 27, 2008Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
I was reading the Web this morning, and this story reminded me of a Thanksgiving a couple years ago.
The news story is about how Thanksgiving dinner can cause flareups of gout. Gout -- if you don't know -- is an inflammatory joint disease caused by the deposition of little crystals of uric acid. Uric acid is a compound found in many types of food and drink. It is actually a product of purine metabolism (purine is a component of DNA). Foods that have the most purines are meats -- particularly sweat meats. Here is a list of danger foods. Eating lots of…
purepedantry | November 23, 2008Over at the NYTimes Well blog they have a really good summary of studies about vitamins and improvements to health.
Everyone needs vitamins, which are critical for the body. But for most people, the micronutrients we get from foods usually are adequate to prevent vitamin deficiency, which is rare in the United States. That said, some extra vitamins have proven benefits, such as vitamin B12 supplements for the elderly and folic acid for women of child-bearing age. And calcium and vitamin D in women over 65 appear to protect bone health.
But many people gobble down large doses of vitamins…
purepedantry | November 10, 2008I agreed (reluctantly) with the need to bailout banks because they constitute a special case in the financial system -- the overall health of banks is linked to the overall health of the economy. I am not against bailouts per se, but the devil is in the details. There are a lot of ways that they can make recessions worse by putting inefficient companies on life support. This view of recessions is explained well on Economist Democracy in America blog:
A dialectic model of the business cycle suggests that in prosperity, inefficiencies are allowed to build up alongside innovations until the…
purepedantry | November 5, 2008Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, has a great article in Scientific American about the limits of interpreting fMRI scanning studies -- particularly how they are presented in the media. The biggest point is that the brain is not a collection of modules isolated from one another; rather, it is a collection of interconnected systems with diverse roles in diverse tasks:
A number of interconnected neural networks may in some cases be localized and bundled into modulelike units, but in most ways they are better described as being splayed out over, under or through the brain's crevasses…