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The Science of Magic

There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific terms the techniques that magicians use to trick their audiences. The authors break down these into "visual illusions (after-images), optical illusions ('smoke and mirrors'), cognitive illusions (inattentional blindness), special effects (explosions, fake gunshots, et cetera), and secret devices and mechanical artifacts (…

Visual images reconstructed from brain activity

Recent advances in functional neuroimaging have enabled researchers to predict perceptual experiences with a high degree of accuracy. For example, it is possible to determine whether a subject is looking at a face or some other category of visual stimulus, such as a house. This is possible because we know that specific regions of the brain respond selectively to one type of stimulus but not another. These studies have however been limited to small numbers of visual stimuli in specified categories, because they are based on prior knowledge of the neural activity associated with the conscious…

Thoughts on Approaching Hormone Therapy Data

I recently posted three "Basics"-style blurbs about menopause and hormone therapy (HT). If you missed it, they are here, here, and here. The field has gone through a lot of upheaval since the WHI studies in 2002, and I would just like to share my thoughts on how to approach where we stand now. These are the sorts of questions and considerations that researchers and health care professionals need to keep in mind when they evaluate HT. After the reference-heavy previous posts this one is going to just be my thoughts, and very off-the-cuff at that. We, as humans, have a tendency to put…

Uncertainty Reduction: Ambiguity Resolution Mechanisms in Language

Ambiguity is a constant problem for any embodied cognitive agent with limited resources. Decisions need to be made, and their consequences understood, despite the probabilistic veil of uncertainty enveloping everything from sensory input to action execution. Clearly, there must be mechanisms for dealing with or resolving such ambiguity. A nice sample domain for understanding ambiguity resolution is language, where problems of uncertainty have been long appreciated. The meaning of words in general (not to mention referents like "that" or "he") can be highly ambiguous (see "the gavagai…

Gun Control, The Military, and Nidal Hasan

ScienceBloggers Greg Laden and Matt Springer have both weighed in on the weapons used by Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Matt disagrees with the basic gun control argument that Greg initially raised, but focused primarily on correcting some factual errors that Greg made in a later post. Unfortunately, Matt seems to have some incorrect assumptions about firearm availability on military installations. He also seems to have missed at least one important factual point about the firearms that were used in the shooting. Matt starts off quite badly, at least from the perspective of the facts on…

If Smallpox could talk - not really.

A little late on this one, but the scienceblog question of the week (of last week), reads: "Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?..." If you take the question at face falue - that is in an empirical sense - then the answer is of course not. You could, I suppose, say it would be nice to at least give everything a fighting chance, especially so far as how our own human ecological footprint comes into play. But the fact of the matter is that even if we embarked on a "preservation of all kick," the reality would be that it would be done under a human…

Freud meets cognitive psychology

My first introduction to psychology was in a required social science class in college over 20 years ago, reading Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. The experience made me think I'd better be careful if I ever had kids: I didn't want them telling their psychoanalysts how my misadventures in early parenting had scarred them. But while true Freudian psychoanalysts are becoming rarer with each passing year, one of the concepts he advocated has persisted for more than a century: transference. Freud believed that transference was a fundamental part of the psychoanalytic…

Academic freedom isn't always honored in the breach

This is a rather chilling story of academic freedom getting trampled. A whole pile of documentation is available at that link, I'll try to simplify it down a lot. UC Davis was sponsoring a public seminar on prostate cancer; specifically, they were actively promoting the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test. One professor, Michael Wilkes, objected — the PSA test is now discouraged as worse than useless. Wilkes is a specialist in prostate cancer; he knew this. Heck, I knew this, and my local MD knows this. He explained to the department that was sponsoring the seminar that it was wrong, and he…

Hewlett Packard "Infomania" Study Pure Tripe, Blogs Not

A "study" conducted for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages and this impacting (what else?) their IQ. This came in 2006, but I just stumbled upon it today and became predicably irate at yet another example of terrible science reporting. The study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence. Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking…

Lying-uh and unreasonable-uh

Man, Todd Friel is painful to listen to — so many grating rhetorical tics. Can someone tell me where this weird habit of carefully voicing every vowel and adding extra vowels to the ends of words come from? When he calls Bill Nye unreasonable and lying, it comes out UN-REEE-ZUN-A-BULL-AH and LIE-ING-UH. It makes him irritating to listen to before I even think about the content. Here, you can suffer too. If you don't want to listen — and I don't blame you — I'll give you instead his two stupid arguments against Bill Nye's points in the recent creation debate. They are focused entirely on the…

RWOS Redux: Endocrine Disruptors

A while back, I wrote (twice) about the nettlesome issue of rel="tag" href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/endocrine_disruptors.php">endocrine disruptors.  A more detailed post was offered at href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Terra Sig.  The reason this is a nettlesome problem is that it is an area with potentially huge implications, but with not enough hard data.   The huge implications come in two forms: if we are not cautious enough, we could be inadvertently lowering our fertility by exposure to chemicals that…

Using Google Calendar from the Linux Command Line

Computer-based calendars are very useful, and the Google Calendar is probably one of the more widely used personal calendars other than scheduling programs such as MS Outlook and Groupwise (both of which are broken). But, webby gooey applications can be rather bothersome because they tend to take up a lot of screen real estate and other resources, and on smaller screens such as a laptop can be rendered virtually useless by all that added functionality built into the web browser itself as well as the calendar page. It is quite possible that on your laptop, your Google Calendar may look…

A credulous treatment of the mercury militia on PBS

The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS: I first caught wind of the autism film "Beautiful Son" through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his "journey" of discovering that his child has autism. This, along with other footage and interviews, have become a film about autism called "Beautiful Son." [...] The film has not yet premiered, but there is enough supporting evidence via a web site and film preview to draw a few conclusions. Let's start…

London Calling

Around the time you read this, barring any flight delay agonies, I will have touched down at Heathrow Airport to spend a week in London. It's the first real vacation that my wife and I have taken, possibly since our honeymoon. Certainly it's been the first time I've been out of the country since my honeymoon and the first time I've been to London since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and I was too young to appreciate it properly. After the last couple of months, I desperately need some R&R, and this will hopefully fill the bill. This trip means a couple of things. First, the blog…

Experiments you can do with Mark Steyn columns

Mark Steyn on the trouble he has with facts: Incidentally, I stopped writing for the [New York] Times a few years ago because their fanatical "fact-checking" copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge. I think it's some sort of chemical reaction -- add facts to a Mark Steyn column and it curdles into sludge. Macleans doesn't seem to bother with fact checkers because check this Sten column out: The other day, an admiring profile of Cate Blanchett ("Green before it was hip, she cites Al Gore and David de Rothschild as heroes and believes that leaf blowers 'sum up everything that is…

More on Dawn Winkler, unhinged antivaccination activist

Yesterday's post on Dawn Winkler, the antivaccination activist who is presently running for the Governor of Colorado on the Libertarian ticket, provoked this comment, which linked to an amusing e-mail exchange that Australian skeptic Peter Bowditch had with her regarding vaccines a couple of years ago. After reading that exchange, I now think that I was probably a bit more easy on Ms. Winkler than she deserved. Perhaps I gave her too much of the benefit of the doubt because of the death of her first child of SIDS. I realize more strongly now that personal tragedy does not immunize her from…

Monckton's triple counting

Thanks to Drudge, all the right-wing blogs have been touting a story alleging the American Physical Society has reversed its stance on global warming. Joe Romm has the sordid details. The basis for the story is an article published in an APS newsletter (not jornal) by our old friend Christoper Monckton. Monckton's article now carries a disclaimer saying: The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article…

Late Mother's Day Reflections

Mother's Day is drawing to a close. I've spent a better part of the day, appropriately, mothering. While being showered with cards and kisses from my six-year-old son, I've had a chance to reflect a bit on the subject of motherhood. (Being a mom is a busy job--I'm just now getting a chance to write this down!) In six years, I've learned an incredible amount about being a mother. But the greatest lessons, and the most powerful tools for raising a child, I learned from my own mother. It was never anything she said, although she's always offered me advice when I've asked (or sometimes even…

Are You Doing Climate Change Research in the Rockies? Take This Survey

Found this on ECOLOG this morning: Dear Colleagues: We are writing to invite your participation in a survey of wildlife responses to climate change in the Rocky Mountains. Results of this important project will help frame policy decision making, media reports to the public, and the direction of future science and management programs. Climate change is no longer a matter of "what if" or "when." The scientific community agrees: a growing body of evidence indicates that human activities are causing unprecedented disruptions to the global climate system. Furthermore, it is clear that these…

It's Getting a Little Hotter in Here

When I published my review of Sizzle yesterday, I felt like adding a reluctant-parent-disciplinarian-esque "this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" qualifier. Although I felt that Randy Olson's heart was in the right place, I just didn't have many positive things to say about his new movie, and I wasn't too excited about the prospect of writing such a negative review. But, since I had been recruited--like so many others--to participate in this science blogosphere-wide experiment before seeing the movie, I went along grudgingly. Fortunately for me, various events today have helped…

The Big Rip : an end to the Universe without recollapse

There's been a revolution in cosmology in the last 10 years. Alas, many of the popularizations and textbooks are taking time to catch up... mostly because they were published more than 10 years ago, I suppose. As such, there's this idea out there that cosmologists are trying to work out if the Universe will recollapse or not. It won't. OK, I sound more confident than I really am. However, for it to recollapse, Dark Energy would have to be way more perverse than we think it is anyway. Way. We're pretty sure at this point that a recollapse is far off of the table. And, yet, I still…

Skeptics and Atheists Should be Relatively Happy about Twilight and New Moon

My review. The last movie of this genre I watched had Christopher Lee as the Werewolf Hunter. In this movie, the Werewolves engaged in a periodic orgy in which a newly converted nubile female would would be converted into a wolf-like form to have repeated dog-like copulations with a male vampire-wolf counterpart under the observation of the king and/or queen vampire and a dwarf. Or something like that. I came in during the middle of the movie and never quite got it. But it was obvious, and this is always true in traditional vampire and werewolf movies, that the Catholic Church is very…

Interesting Long Term Study of "Killer Bee" Role in South American Ecology

Aggressive African bees were accidentally released in Brazil in 1957. As "killer bees" spread northward, David Roubik, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, began a 17-year study that revealed that Africanized bees caused less damage to native bees than changes in the weather and may have increased the availability of their food plants. Let me add a little context before you go back to the press release. Apis mellifera, is most well known 'honey bee,' and is one of the only stinging honey bees (famous for being suicidal stingers ... worker bees will swarm an invader…

Noooo! Antivaccination nonsense in Michigan!

You know, I keep trying to get away from this topic for a while. But, as Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part III, "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in." I suppose it is unfortunately a measure of the success that antivaccinationists have been having with their public relations effort this year that this stuff keeps popping up everywhere like some mercury- and "toxin"-crazed Whac-A-Mole⢠that I can never seem to stay quiet more than a couple of days on the topic lately. Sometimes I ignore it, even when it's David Kirby. Sometimes I can't. This time I can't, because…

Captioned Memo

I was reading the normally sensible Steve Bainbridge when I came across this post that seems to have come from the planet Zebulon in the galaxy Warblogger. Bainbridge offers his interpretation of an intelligence memo in parallel with Kevin Drum's. I was struck by the complete disconnect between Bainbridge's interpretation and the actual words of the memo. I emailed Bainbridge to see if I could get an explanation. With his permission, I post our correspondence: TL: Your interpretation of: "Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to…

Invertebrate vs. Photosynthesis should be S3 highlight

[The Theme from Chariots of Fire playing] Craig: From 64 to 32 and now to the Sweet 16. In today's post, we follow the journeys of two strong teams, Invertebrates and Photosynthesis as they navigated the ranks of the Octopus Bracket to face off in the 3rd round of the Spring Science Showdown (S3). We turn to Peter Etnoyer, our man in the field, to discuss the rise of Team Photosynthesis. Peter: Indeed tree huggers everywhere were angered when photosynthesis was the only team from Division Plantae 1A to be selected for the tournament. Craig: As I understand it, Photosynthesis…

Carbon Tax

The Wall Street Journal polled 60 economists, and a big majority backed a carbon tax: Forty of 47 economists who answered the question said the government should help champion alternative fuels. "Economists generally are in favor of free-market solutions, but there are times when you need to intervene," said David Wyss at Standard & Poor's Corp. "We're already in the danger zone" because of the outlook for oil supplies and concerns about climate change, he said. A majority of the economists said a tax on fossil fuels would be the most economically sound way to encourage alternatives. A…

You Fool! You didn't know this, this, and this...

Ben Stein is out and about flogging his upcoming farce of a documentary, Expelled, and he recently repeatedly shot himself in the foot during a recent appearance on Glenn Beck's self-aggrandizing CNN show. If you can stomach it, here's the video; Hearing what Stein said during this brief interview, he has certainly confirmed what the scientific community has been saying all along, and they have every right to call him a fool. I'm not sure I would call the first slip-up a mistake though, perhaps it's honesty, but it significantly weakens Stein's entire premise. Beck says "Tell me about…

The Advantages of Tourette's

I was a stuttering child. Whenever I got the slightest bit nervous, I had an annoying tendency to run out of air on vowel sounds, so that beginning a phrase with "A" or "eee" or "I" was all but impossible. I would choke and sputter, my eyes blinking in mad frustration. This minor affliction led me to become extremely self-aware of my speech. Before I said anything out loud, I would consider the breathy weight of the words, and mentally rehearse all those linguistic speed bumps and stop signs. If the phonetics seemed too dangerous, the sentence would be rewritten in my head, edited down to the…

Inequality Aversion

The ultimatum game is a simple experiment with profound implications. The game goes like this: one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing. When economists first started playing this game in the early 1980s, they assumed that this elementary exchange would always generate the same outcome. The proposer would offer the responder approximately $1â¯a minimal amountâ¯and the responder would accept it. After…

Zippers: Making Functional "Updates" Efficient

In the Haskell stuff, I was planning on moving on to some monad-related stuff. But I had a reader write in, and ask me to write another post on data structures, focusing on a structured called a zipper. A zipper is a remarkably clever idea. It's not really a single data structure, but rather a way of building data structures in functional languages. The first mention of the structure seems to be a paper by Gerard Huet in 1997, but as he says in the paper, it's likely that this was used before his paper in functional code --- but no one thought to formalize it and write it up. (In the…

Pufferfish and ancestral genomes

The fugu is a famous fish, at least as a Japanese sushi dish containing a potentially lethal neurotoxin that was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. Fugu is a member of the pufferfish group, which have another claim to fame: an extremely small genome, roughly a tenth the size of that of other vertebrates. The genome of several species of pufferfish is being sequenced, and the latest issue of Nature announces the completion of a draft sequence for the green spotted pufferfish, Tetraodon nigroviridis, a small freshwater species. Tetraodon has about the same number of genes as we do, 20,…

Britain: wildlife theme-park

Over the weekend Neil Phillips, Richard Hing, Jonathan McGowan and I went into the field, in quest of tetrapods (Jon and Neil are shown in the adjacent image, as are other mammals). And we saw a bunch. In an effort to produce a post that is essentially an excuse to showcase some of Neil's photos (for the whole set go here), it occurred to me that this is a good chance to throw out some random facts about Britain and some of its wildlife... well, more random facts than I've already thrown out, anyway. Contrary to the idea that Britain lacks anything interesting, I still think we have a really…

Messier Monday: The Closest Messier Original, M39

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all." -Abraham Lincoln It might be Veterans Day / Armistice Day all around the world, but it's still Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! We may have been fighting wars for all of human history, but nearly all of the 110 deep sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue go back long before that. Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://www.lex.sk.ca/. Today, we take an in-depth look at one of the brightest and closest star clusters in the entire night sky, one that -- despite being…

Messier Monday: A Secretly Active Spiral Galaxy, M77

"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave." -Patrick Henry It's not a good idea to showcase a galaxy for you every Messier Monday, considering that even a crescent Moon can render most of them completely unobservable. Now that the autumnal equinox has passed, however, a very special spiral will be visible after sunset for the next six months or so in a relatively nondescript part of the night sky. Out of the 110 deep-sky objects that comprise the Messier catalogue, a full forty of them are galaxies, although today's object wasn't recognized as…

Messier Monday: A double-ringed mystery galaxy, M94

"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -Robert Frost It's time again for another Messier Monday! To kick off each week, we've been taking a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue. Compiled in the 18th Century to help skywatchers avoid these fixed night sky wonders (so that they could better hunt comets), these represent some of the most viewed and easily visible nebulae, star clusters and galaxies visible from our home world. Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://rockpoint.dyndns.org/. An…

Evolution of the Lexicon

I recently posted about the work by Pagel and colleagues regarding ancient lexicons. That work, recently revived in the press for whatever reasons such things happen, is the same project reported a while back in Nature. And, as I recall, I read that paper and promised to blog about it but did not get to it. Yet. So here we go. The tail does not wag the dog The primary finding of the Pagel et al. study is this: When comparing lexicons from different languages, meanings that shared a common word in an ancestral language change over time more slowly if the word in question is used more…

Reviewing Unscientific America, Part Two

In Part One of this review I focused on the broad themes of Mooney and Kirshenbaum's book. My general feeling is that their presentation of the state of play is simplistic in crucial ways and that their proposed solutions are impractical at best. Now I would like to zoom in specifically on the eighth chapter of the book. It is called, “Bruising Their Religion” and focuses especially on what M and K see as the doleful influence of the New Atheists. Regrettably, I think they get a lot of important things wrong. Let us have a look. They begin with a whitewashed version of the Webster…

Global Warming, The Carbon Cycle, and Fish Poop.

When we talk about the role of fossil fuels in climate chance, what we're really talking about is the carbon cycle. That's the term that scientists use to describe the different forms that carbon is stored in on the earth, and the different ways that it can move from form to form. Understanding the carbon cycle is one of the keys to understanding both the effect of burning carbon-based fuels and the issues involved in trying to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. According to a paper in the latest edition of Science, there may still be some pretty significant gaps in our knowledge of…

It Can Be Expensive to Use Money If...

...you're poor. Previously, I discussed the effects of the de facto privatization of money: But most of the discussion is over how large the fees should be. That's important, but ignores the larger issue: the de facto privatization of our monetary system. While it doesn't seem obvious, when you use cash there are 'fees' involved--the cost of supporting the U.S. Treasury operations (printing the money, shipping the money, preventing counterfeiting, and so on). To put this another way, the U.S. government could decide to abolish all paper and metal currency, and make all of our accounts…

Black, but how black?

Comparing Genetic Ancestry and Self-Described Race in African Americans Born in the United States and in Africa (H/T Yann): Genetic association studies can be used to identify factors that may contribute to disparities in disease evident across different racial and ethnic populations. However, such studies may not account for potential confounding if study populations are genetically heterogeneous. Racial and ethnic classifications have been used as proxies for genetic relatedness. We investigated genetic admixture and developed a questionnaire to explore variables used in constructing racial…

The Arc of Evolution Is Long and Rarely Bends Towards Advantageous Alleles: Why Does Popular Science Ignore Neutral Theory?

I came across this excellent article by Jerry Coyne, which is part book review, part defense of natural selection. I recommend it highly. But, in reading the article, I wondered why people are so threatened by natural selection. Because that's not the philosophically challenging part. Unless you're a biblical 'literalist', the idea of a creator dude who acts through the mechanism of natural selection isn't too theologically challenging. After all, traits that are beneficial (at least locally and in the short term) increase, while the deleterious ones decrease. Surely, this is the best…

Welcome to Culture Dish, the Sequel [Culture Dish]

Yes, it's true, Culture Dish has found a new (and improved) home. After a long blogging hiatus while I finished writing my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (see below for details), I'm now packing up shop and moving here to ScienceBlogs (you can subscribe via RSS here, or get Culture Dish updates delivered to your email inbox by clicking here). As a welcome to readers old and new, here's a bit of a Culture Dish history as an introduction: I'm a science writer whose forthcoming book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, tells the story of the amazing HeLa cell line and the woman…

The New Rez, 2010 Edition

In the comments thread to my previous post, Greenpa, who apparently gets a kick from watching She Who Cruncheth over at The Crunchy Chicken and me competing, suggested that I ought to try to top her "latest post." In the interim, La Crunch put up a fascinating post about bull semen and the genetic diversity of dairy cows, which left me deeply, deeply confused. Was I supposed to top her by talking about some other crisis in genetic diversity? Spotlight some other species' semen? Or was I supposed to put my own contributions to species diversity up for scrutiny? (Sadly, we don't pass muster…

Labor Dept Lawyers Turn Backs on Whistleblowers

One of the nation's top advocates for miners' health and safety, Tony Oppegard, sent a scathing letter last week to the Deputy Solicitor of Labor (SOL), Ronald G. Whiting, mincing no words about their pitiful performance.  Oppegard's letter concerned a particular case involving a worker who was fired for complaining about safety, but its content speaks volumes about SOL's "consistent and undistinguished record" of turning its back on workers who exercise their statutory rights.  As Oppegard foretells: "If SOL is going to continue to insist that a discrimination case be a clear-cut…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 14 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Light-Induced Fos Expression in Intrinsically Photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells in Melanopsin Knockout (Opn4â/â) Mice: Retinal ganglion cells that express the photopigment melanopsin are intrinsically…

Cephalopod venoms

The history of venoms is a wonderful example of an evolutionary process. We're all familiar with the idea of venomous snakes, but the cool thing is that when we examine exactly what it is they're injecting into their prey, it's a collection of proteins that show a nested hierarchy of descent. Ancient reptiles had a small and nasty set of poisons they would use, and to improve their efficacy, more and more have been added to the cocktail; so some lizards produce venomous proteins, while the really dangerous members of the Serpentes produce those same proteins, plus a large array of others.…

New and Exciting in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology

A bunch of new articles got published in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology yesterday. Here are my two picks, and you go and check the rest: Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness: Understanding the neural mechanisms that distinguish between conscious and nonconscious processes is a crucial issue in cognitive neuroscience. In this study, we focused on the transition that causes a visual stimulus to cross the threshold to consciousness, i.e., visibility. We used a backward masking paradigm in which the visibility of a briefly presented stimulus (the "target…

Blurring the distinction between contraception and abortion

Monday morning, PST: time for some science with a side of controversy, Danio-style There's a Department of Health and Human Services document circulating that's got the pro-choice lobby up in arms. Afarensis and The Questionable Authority weighed in on the sociopolitical impact of such a policy last week, but in addition to the significant threat to reproductive rights that it presents, this proposal is yet another example of the complete lack of scientific expertise informing decisions about public health. At issue is the determination of a time point that marks the beginning of pregnancy…

Study: Americans trading more work for less sleep, putting their health and safety at risk

Feeling tired? You’re not alone. A new study finds that many U.S. workers aren’t getting enough sleep, which is essential to optimal health, and that people who work multiple jobs are at heightened risk of getting less than the recommended hours of nightly rest. To conduct the study, which was published in the December issue of the Sleep journal, researchers examined the responses of nearly 125,000 Americans ages 15 years old and older and who participated in the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2011. They found that work was the dominant reason for reporting less sleep across nearly…