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Clinging tightly

Clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus).Image credit: Thomas Kleinteich Live Science posted a story recently on the sticking power of clingfish. Northern clingfish, like the one shown in the image above, live in turbulent waters off the Pacific Coast of North America. In order to cling to surfaces, the animals have what are called adhesion discs on their bellies that they use to hold on tightly to various surfaces. Biologist Adam Summers at the University of Washington has been studying how these fish cling to surfaces. His research team put a variety of sandpaper textures into a tank of water…

But I don't think I want to be this bigot's brother

The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions. But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have, and like you have if you're a Christian and if you're saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother…

Artificial networks see illusions, too

You've seen this illusion before, right? The "grid" defining the light gray squares on the left side of this figure seems to get lighter where the lines intersect. The graph on the right shows that the actual reflectance (or brightness when depicted on a computer screen) of the figure does not change along the path marked by the blue line. But perceived brightness (indicated in red on the graph) does change. But what's really interesting about this graph is that the thing doing the perceiving isn't a human. It's an artificial neural network. Auntie Em has the details: The brain in question…

The Legend Lives On

Biologists in northern Vietnam have identified a soft-shell giant turtle believed to be extinct in the wild! Swinhoe's turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) was found and photographed in a lake west of the capital, Hanoi. It's one of the most critically endangered species of turtle in the world. And get this: These legendary animals grow up to 1m long and can live to be 100 years old! According to Reuters: The reptile in the Hanoi city lake has a special place in Vietnamese folklore and whose appearance some believe to be a portent of an extraordinary event. The legend tells how the 15th century…

The Bitch Of Living

Remember high school? Social pressure and teen angst amid discovering sexuality and a changing physique... perhaps finding your first love while drunk on a cocktail of emotions that defy explanation? Heck, at 27, I'm still confused now and then. But I suspect these feelings are universal and it's comforting to recognize that no one's quite got it all figured out. So what is it that governs our actions and how do we come to terms with the raw emotions that influence our thoughts and behaviors? This is what I got to wondering while in NYC where I caught 'Spring Awakening'--the best show I…

I get email

Sometimes, my email is a little disturbing. I AMI AM the "goddamned cracker" sir. This is a personal invitation. I am Karl Duane Anderson. I live at REDACTED in Fargo, North Dakota. If you want to desecrate the Body of Christ, please find out just what it is that you are desecrating. Come to my upstairs apartment and do it to me. What, a cracker is asking me to come to his apartment and nail him? I'm flattered, sir, but this is not Craig's List, I do not swing that way, and if I did, I would respond better to an invitation to dinner and a movie than to ordering me directly to your…

Spikes & maps in the brain

This week, I've received three books which I'll be writing about in the near future: My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Dully was lobotomized at the age of 12 at the behest of his stepmother - that's him on the right, holding an instrument identical to the one he was lobotomized with; this book is his memoir. The Lobotomist, by Jack El-Hai, a biography of Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist who, in 1960, performed Dully's lobotomy. The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee. This is about the somatosensory cortex, that part of the brain on which the…

Tid Bits

This will be short - I'm performing a big protein purification prep today. Visualizing a single ribosome translating amino acids, one at a time at Biocurious (Nature Article here). Two posts on that Lin-28 paper in Bayblab and The Skeptical Alchemist. Just to remind you, Lin-28, a factor that was part of the four gene cocktail that the Thomson group used to program stem cells, has now been shown to inhibit the processing of let7 miRNAs. More posts on miRNAs and stem cells on Science and Reason. RPM gets excited about how sleep deprivation affects fly sex - oh and it's all on prime time TV (…

Disruption at the American Repertory Theatre

Two weeks ago we went to see Mike Daisy's monologue, Invincible Summer at ART. A great show. Once upon a time, Mike was putting on a one man show in Seattle about the dot com life when a fire, a book deal, and some crazy ideas led him to move to New York City. After settling in to his new home, he started "working" on his manuscript when September 11th happened. In his new show he recounts all this and more. The performance was excellent. Daisey is a master story teller. Even John Hodgemen gave it a great review on his blog (yes, John Hodgeman has a blog). Then this afternoon I got an email…

Senate To Fund Ocean Acidification Research

A bill in the senate has passed that will focus research on ocean acidification. The Lutenberg Measure, crafted by Senator Frank R. Lutenberg (D-NJ) and cosponsored by Barbara Boxer (D-CA), directs funds to the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study of the acidification of oceans and how this process affects the United States. "Ocean acidification is a threat to our marine ecosystem and our economy," said Sen. Lautenberg. "The change in ocean chemistry caused by greenhouse gases is corrosive and affects our marine life, food supply and overall ocean health. But research on ocean…

Earthquakes in Stockholm?

Sharon Begley of The Wall Street Journal is one of the finest science reporters around. Her Friday column was typically interesting. It's about how global warming might lead to increased tectonic and volcanic activity: One cubic meter of ice weighs just over a ton, and glaciers can be hundreds of meters thick. When they melt and the water runs off, it is literally a weight off Earth's crust. The crust and mantle therefore bounce back, immediately as well as over thousands of years. That "isostatic rebound," according to studies of prehistoric and recent earthquakes and volcanoes, can make the…

Another science fair idea

We're back at the Monterey Bay Aquarium today. Shortly after our arrival, the kids are up to their elbow in touch-tank water. Then, the younger Free-Ride offspring gets critical. "The decorator crabs here aren't very decorated." "It's true," says the volunteer working the touch-tank. "These decorator crabs can't smell any predators in their environment, so they figure they don't need to try to hard." After a few moments with a deeply furrowed brow, the younger offspring asks, "How can I smell like a decorator crab predator and get the crabs to decorate themselves better?" The volunteer…

Worst deal ever: Comcast Extreme 105

As Comcast moves towards being the next AT&T (and I'm talking about the ATT of the 1960s, which was more powerful than most countries and more nefarious than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney combined), it gets increasingly strange, self serving, and dangerous as a company to deal with. Over the last year or so, our service (we have Comcast cable) has increased in price and decreased in stations being offered that we will at this point do better by canceling it and adding an antennae (but this is how we get Internet). Now, Comcast offers a thing called "Extreme 105" which costs a bundle even if…

A little quackademic medicine in Texas

Calling all Texas skeptics! Well, at least Texas skeptics who can find their way to Galveston on March 29. The reason? Well, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is hosting the Nicholson Round-table Integrative Lecture Series: "Complementary and integrative medicine in cancer care -- What does the evidence show?" will be presented by Dr. Moshe A. Frenkel, founder of the integrative oncology clinic at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He will be joined by panelists Dr. Avi B. Markowitz, chief of the division of hematology/oncology and head of the office of oncology clinical trials at…

I'd like to teach the world to ...

This weeks ask a Science blogger question is: "If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?" Random sampling. If I want to know how many crimes there were in the country last year, you get a more accurate answer if you take a random sample of people and ask them than if you add up all the crimes recorded by the police. Now the crime rate in your sample might not be exactly the same as the population, so you have introduced an error by sampling, but we can mathematically estimate the size of the error, while using police records introduces an…

Remind me never to get on Brian Deer's bad side

Before I move on to other topics, I can't resist one last comment about the corrupt and sleazy Andrew Wakefield, the man who, with the help of heaping piles of cash from lawyers, almost singlehandedly produced a scare over the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes autism so large that vaccination rates in the U.K. fell precipitously, leading to massive misery due to a resurgence of the diseases prevented by the MMR vaccine and at least one death. Brian Deer, as you may know, is the journalist who exposed the disgusting underbelly of Wakefield's activities and who also broke the story of…

Those who do not remember the National Lampoon are condemned to repeat it

Deja vu, man, deja vu. I remember this magazine cover—I even bought the magazine, not because I was worried about the dog, but because I always read the National Lampoon. This is supposed to be a joke, though. So now Goosing the Antithesis leads me to the Answers in Genesis page, and what do I see? You have got to be kidding me. This is no joke: AiG has a a new campaign going that one-ups NatLamp and suggests that if you don't buy in to Jesus, you will get shot. If we evolved from lower life forms, then the Bible isn't true and we are no more than animals. So why should we listen when it…

Pielke Sr's new statistical technique

You might have learnt in stats class how to use linear regression to estimate trends. Well I'm sorry but you going to have to forget it all and the boring statistics books are going to have to be rewritten because that stuff is obsolete due to revolutionary breakthrough by Roger Pielke Sr. If you use the boring-and-now-obsolete linear regression stuff on the University of Colorado at Boulder sea level data you discover that the trend is positive and highly statistically significant, even if you just consider the data since 2006. But using his revolutionary new technique Roger Pielke Sr…

Upside down

Most of my memories of Charles are upside down. When I was a kid, that's how he carried me around--on his back, giggling; under his arm, waving at his knees; or thrown over his shoulder, poking at his armpit. I remember him as big, gentle, and quiet, with his mouth where his eyes should've been. Charles was diagnosed with cancer around two years ago. With the support and love of his wife, Sara, he fought it hard. Every time I called, he was in another city, at another hospital, investigating another experimental treatment. But the kind of cancer he had wasn't an easy one to fight, much less…

Corrupt Bush Appointee Leaves USFWS

Julie MacDonald, the Bush appointee accused of suppressing the Endangered Species Act last year has resigned after proof of her corruption was brought to light: Julie MacDonald left her position as the Department of Interior's deputy assistant secretary of fish, wildlife and parks, from which she controlled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species program. Her resignation follows a finding March 29 by the agency's Inspector General Earl Devaney that she violated federal ethics rules by sending "nonpublic information" to industry lobbyists. MacDonald repeatedly leaked internal…

Selenocysteine (#21)

Amino acids impart lots of functions to proteins, and a lot of the interesting chemistry happens at a few residues. Many hydrophobic residues like valine and leucine play a huge role - they don't like to touch water, and they help the protein fold, but the heavy lifting of catalysis happens in just a few reactive places. Two of these are cysteine, and its rare brother, selenocysteine. Going down the periodic table, things at once change and stay the same. A chlorine will act a lot like a bromine, which will act a lot like an iodine, but there are distinct differences in how they react. Just…

Quorn (Mold Meat)

I love this one. It's not exactly a molecule. If you've heard of it, you're nodding and smirking, if you haven't, you'll be surprised. Back in the 1960's, people set out trying to make new meat substitutes. Apparently, it was suspected that there would be a worldwide shortage of protein by the 80's. I like to think it's because we were a lot keener to do weird things just because back then. One bizzare product of this search was Quorn. Amazing how much the image on that page looks like chicken stir-fry, eh? It is quite hypnotic to click through the Quorn website, looking at the crypto-chicken…

HuffPost Science Off to a Good Start

Yes, I am well aware of skeptics of The Huffington Post, especially in coverage of science, medicine and technology. Skepticism is a healthy process in science. So let's look at the facts. Below is a list of some of the first posts on the new Science section in The Huffington Post - and, in case you were not aware, writers at HuffPost are by invitation only. I invite you to explore this site! While some may disagree with the writer's interpretations or conclusions, they would be hard pressed to challenge their credentials. Bernie Bulkin: Can Science Save the Planet? Former Chief Scientist…

Publishing Original Research on Blogs - Part 1

This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here. In April of last year, Bora pushed the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. As a responsible researcher, I would need to obtain permission from any collaborators (including my advisor) before publishing anything we have been working on together. But what about small side projects or minor findings that I don't expect to publish elsewhere? As it turns out, such a project has been laying…

Junk in the Media

The recent Scientific American article on junk DNA (discussed here) has instigated a quite a furor in the bioblogosphere. Here is a collection of links: ERV linked with a tone of disgust. I restated my frustration with the term junk DNA. JR Minkel, the author of the Scientific American article, responded to my criticisms. Ryan Gregory replied to Minkel's SciAm blog post, introducing the term "junctional DNA" to replace junk DNA describe sequences with unknown function. Gregory also tells us how a genome is like an onion (let me count the ways), or something of the sort wonders why onions…

For your Christmas List: Real Snake Oil

Well, OK, it's actually fake snake oil.... Wired Magazine (wired.com) gadgets section has its annual (I don't really know if it's annual, but it should be) issue of Snake Oil products. Such as The Orbo: When it comes to gadgets, perpetual motion machines are bullshit's bread and butter. Steorn, the Irish company behind Orbo, is only the latest in a long line of deluded, incompetent or fraudulent firms to claim the scalp of the laws of thermodynamics. File this one under deluded: enthusiastically setting up a public display, the inventors were humiliated when it failed to operate. But wait!…

Digby revisits the evolutionary views of neo-cons

And it's a right embarrassing spotlight to be caught under, I imagine. A couple of years ago, The New Republic polled various well-known conservatives about their position on evolutionary biology; Digby reviews their responses, and they're a mess (I also summarized their views diagrammatically way back then). Most wouldn't be caught dead admitting to believing the kind of nonsense Ken Ham favors, so they're spluttering evasively and many are embracing with great relief the concept of Intelligent Design. Digby is making the point that it reveals how uncomfortable the leaders of the…

Who counted them? And how?

Sean notes without comment a piece on how Muslims should find Mecca when traveling in space. I am in awe of the mind that could write this. A user-friendly, portable Muslims in Space calculator , could determine the direction of the Qiblah and prayer times on the ISS. Its essential feature would be the use of the Projected Earth and Qiblah Pole concepts. These are based on the interpretation of the holy house of angels in the sky above Mecca. The place is always rich with angels worshipping. As many as 70,000 angels circumambulate it every day. Thus, one virtual Qiblah pole can be taken as a…

Tid Bits from Yesterday

Yesterday I attended Seed/Harvard Bookstore/The Edge's sponsored event: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it. The discussion narrowed down to key topics ... consciousness, free will ... etc. Here's a link to a Harvard Crimson article about the whole affair: Profs Debate Consciousness. (I'll write a longer entry on the whole "What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove" lecture later today.) One tidbit that came out: apparently Freeman Dyson (noted cosmologist and member of the faithful) had some nasty things to say about Daniel Dennett. When I find…

Squids May See with Organ as Well as Eyes

A new study at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has shed some light (oh... ZING!) on how squids may use another organ, along with their eyes, to see. Some squids have a light organ on them which they use to camoflauge themselves from predators below them. The organ is filled with a luminous bateria that the squid can activate to light up. The idea is that the squids can illuminate their organs to match the light coming from the surface of the water, thus confusing a rising, hungry fish or giant crab monsters recently loose from attacking deep sea oil drilling stations. By studying the…

The Scurvy Poets Society

Shiver me timbers! The RV Tangaroa has a poet on board, and he's makin' jingles at sea. The mate is there up on the bridge, steering us south down the Ridge. It's blowing a lot when he gets to the spot, so he alters the course, just a smidge. The deckhands are standing about, so the bosun is starting to shout, "Quit all ya blabbing, these moorings need grabbing"- he's laid money on how many come out. "Get to work," calls the bosun, "understand? I want all those deck winches manned!" But they all have to wait, cos the mooring guy's late........then he appears, transducer in hand. Now the…

Scientists discover particles in waves?

There are a couple of things I should probably not talk about. One of them is photons. But no matter what you think about photons you will probably agree that this is not a very good description of electromagnetic radiation. (from comos4kids.com) Structure of Energy:All EM energy waves travel at the speed of light when in a vacuum. No matter what their frequency or wavelength, they always move at the same speed. Some properties of waves, such as diffraction and interference, are also seen in EM radiation. Scientists have figured out that there are tiny particles in these waves. The…

Avatar

I saw Avatar in 3D. - The special effects were very good. I have seen special effects of similar quality, but never such quality in such quantity. The detail was striking enough that I assume I stopped thinking of it as "special effects" and more as simply a background canvas. I'm talking more about the landscape, the flora and fauna, than the humanoids, who occasionally slipped into uncanny valley territory. - The plot was melodramatic and not particularly exceptional. The ideological ax didn't bother me because the plot was mostly extraneous to the film's experience anyhow. - I think that…

Tip of the Tongue

I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: the tip-of-the-tongue moment. Late in 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor's office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could recognize people, and remember all sorts of information about them, he had no idea what to call them. He'd lost the ability to remember any personal name, even the names of close friends and family members. He was forced to refer to his wife as "wife." A few months before, the man, known as LS in the scientific literature, had been in a…

Chris Mooney & Carl Zimmer on Unscientific America

Two emigrants from ScienceBlogs to Discover Blogs, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer, are on Bloggingheads.tv. The focus is the new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, coauthored by Chris & Sheril Kirshenbaum. A comment from below seems appropriate: I remember an interesting (if apocryphal statistic) about radiation levels in the UK - you could get a higher radiation dose from living in the relatively undeveloped and unspoilt Cornwall than from living next to Sellafield (the UK's nuclear processing plant, aka Windscale) simply because the granite rocks…

Messier Monday: A Galactic Highlight to Ring in the New Year, M96

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." -John Wayne There's a lot to look forward to on the precipice of the new year, and many of us will be up until midnight to ring it in. Well, if you're up that late, why not step outside and take a look at one of the deep-sky wonders of the Universe that won't be visible in the early part of the night for months! This Messier Monday, a near-moonless sky will greet you until the pre-dawn twilight, and…

Evolutionary Psychology: Careful, some practitioners may be carrying a kitchen knife!

Darwinian Psychology, or really, any “Psychology” that claims to be science, will operate under the assumption that the human brain, as an organ, has arrived at its modern form through the process of evolution, which includes a certain amount of design through Natural Selection. It does not take that much additional sophistication to realize that the human brain is not only good at, but absolutely requires for typical functioning, a great deal of learning. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the typical human brain functions as it does because of information provided by the genes that…

The Vacuity of “Natural Law,” Continued

It's been complete bedlam at my house lately. I made one of my periodical forays into cultural Judaism this past weekend by hosting a Passover seder. My parents, my brother and sister-in-law and their two kids (ages eight and ten) and some friends, eleven in all, packed into my small house. It was a lot of fun, but stressful too. The poor cats had a rough weekend, since they're morbidly afraid of anyone who isn't me. This was disappointing to my niece and nephew, who had been told that there would be cats to play with. But that's all behind me now, so it's time to get back to sneering…

Are we psychologically prone to be more hawkish?

Daniel Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon, writing in Foreign Policy, put forward a fascinating thesis that because of the way human beings are organized psychologically we are prone to be more hawkish. Basically the thrust of their argument is that social and cognitive psychologists have documented numerous psychological errors that human beings make consistently. In this sense human beings are not exactingly rational. Where our judgment consistently differs from pure rationality we make mistakes. With respect to foreign policy these mistakes make us more hawkish because they place a higher…

CAM infiltrates the mandatory medical school curriculum

I don't know about you, but I was getting a little tired of writing so often about the same topic last week, namely the insinuation of unscientific and unproven "alternative medicine" into the medical school curriculum and its promotion by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). I had planned on giving the topic a rest for a while, but then on a mailing list to which I subscribe, an example came up of something so outrageously egregious that I had to post just one more time. (Dr. R. W., as usual, has beaten me to it, but I plan on going into it in a little more detail.) It's a…

The gene for Jamaican sprinting success? No, not really.

Anyone who has walked past a TV set over the last few days will have seen footage of the remarkable Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who comfortably cruised to victory (and a world record) in the Olympic 100 metre sprint, and as I write this has just done precisely the same thing in the 200 metre sprint. The interest in Bolt stems not from the fact that he wins his races, but rather from the contemptuous ease with which he does so. And Bolt is not the only Jamaican to impress in short distance events in Beijing: the country's women's sprint team took all three medals in their 100 metre dash.…

Gun Control Part II: My response to Matt Springer

I was curious to see what kind of defense Matt would put on against my suggestion of additional regulations to address the problem of gun violence and homicide in the US, and I was a bit disappointed to see that the response is largely a "no problem" argument. I had actually come into this debate thinking that both of us at least acknowledge that the US has a problem with gun homicide, but it appears as though I'll have to backtrack a bit. So, starting with the "no problem" argument, I will describe why it is bogus, why the US does have a problem with firearm homicides (I can't believe that…

Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective, the book

As you'll know if you have your fingers on the throbbing pulse of dinosaur-related publications, the massive, incredibly pricey volume published by the Geological Society of London, and resulting from the 2008 meeting History of Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Saurians, now exists in dead-tree form. It's titled Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective and (in my totally unbiased opinion) is a definite must-see* for anyone interested in the historical side of Mesozoic reptile research. Here are thoughts and comments on some of the contents. * I initially wrote 'must have',…

Why Has the Response to the California Drought Been so Weak?

In the past few weeks, I have had been asked the same question by reporters, friends, strangers, and even a colleague who posts regularly on this very ScienceBlogs site (the prolific and thoughtful Greg Laden): why, if the California drought is so bad, has the response been so tepid? There is no single answer to this question (and of course, it presumes (1) that the drought is bad; and (2) the response has been tepid). In many ways, the response is as complicated as California’s water system itself, with widely and wildly diverse sources of water, uses of water, prices and water rights,…

Do We Also Taste Just Like Chicken?

Perhaps. But we do other stuff just like chicken (December 09, 2004): ------------------------------------------------ Fantastic news in science: Researchers compare chicken, human genomes http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-12/nhgr-rcc120804.php Some highlights: Chicks have less junk DNA: In their paper published in Nature, members of the International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium report that the chicken genome contains significantly less DNA than the human genome, but approximately the same number of genes. Researchers estimate that the chicken has about 20,000-23,000…

Hazards behind a chicken dinner: US poultry workers ask USDA and OSHA to protect their safety

Nearly 50 billion pounds of chicken (about eight billion chickens’ worth, or 37 billion pounds of poultry products) were processed in the United States in 2012 by about half a million workers, many of whom handle more than 100 birds per minute. This labor involves standing in chilled processing plant facilities, cutting, gutting, scalding, defeathering and hanging birds as they speed by on automated machinery, often at more than one bird per second. According to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), since 1975,workers in this industry have consistently suffered injuries…

One more GOP “healthcare” bill that would gut Medicaid and wreck individual insurance market

Republican Senators have proposed one more bill to repeal the ACA. The Graham-Cassidy (or Cassidy-Graham) proposal would dramatically shrink the pool of federal money going to healthcare and revise how it’s distributed to states, in a way that is especially damaging to states that accepted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. They hope to pass this destructive bill before the end of September, due to the upcoming expiration of reconciliation rules that let them pass a healthcare-related bill with votes from 50 Senators and Vice President Mike Pence. Like Republican bills from earlier in the year,…

Identifying Lead-poisoned Adults

The 1,050 State public health experts who make up the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) is urging the States and CDC to adopt a new case definition for adults of elevated blood-lead levels (BLL) and to require laboratories to report ALL blood lead test results to NIOSH's Adult Blood Lead and Epidemiology (ABLES) Program.  CSTE recommends the definition of  an "elevated BLL" change from 25 ug/dl and greater, to 10 ug/dl and greater.  The CSTE's policy statement is grounded on the growing body of evidence linking "low" levels of lead in adults with decreased …

Worker Injuries and Painkiller Abuse

The front page of Sunday's Washington Post (Jan. 13) featured the blackened face of coal miner Forest Ramey, 24, but the story was not about a deadly explosion or workers trapped underground.  A Dark Addiction, by the Post's Nick Miroff, gives us a peak into the lives of coal miners who are struggling with painkiller abuse. "Tazewell County, Va.  The crowd is gathering early in the dirt parking lot outside the Clinch Valley Treatment Center, the only methadone clinic within 80 miles.  ...It is 2:45 am...the clinic does not start dosing until 5 am.  ...Many of the patients who fill…

Where will new Medicaid beneficiaries get healthcare?

Millions of people will gain insurance under the Affordable Care Act, but will they be able to get appointments with healthcare providers? Coverage doesn't automatically translate into access, and some newly insured individuals will struggle to find physician practices that will take them on as patients. In particular, states that adopt the (now optional) Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, which extends eligibility to adults up to 133% of the poverty level, may encounter a severe shortage of providers willing to accept new Medicaid patients. Although Medicaid reimbursement levels vary…