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Campylobacter jejuni-Associated Guillain-Barré Syndrome: It's No Picnic

Student guest post by D.F. Johnston As the year marches forward, ever closer to that summer sun we missed so much during dreary winter days, we also get closer to the traditional summer picnics and barbecues. Sometimes, in our hurry to enjoy quality time with friends and family, we get distracted from our usual practices for proper food handling. We might try to get little Billy his hamburger before he has time for a full-fledged temper tantrum, so we hurry it along, figuring a tiny bit of pink in the middle won't be the end of the world. Or we might realize that we're short a couple of…

Vitamin D not so good for health?

Long time readers of this weblog will know I have an interest in Vitamin D. It has been hypothesized to be one of the major causal factors in generating human skin color variation, and we know from evolutionary genomics that the genes which underly skin color have been under very recent & powerful selection pressures. There is also data that Vitamin D levels may have a relationship to endemic diseases such as flu, and chronic ones such as arthritis. And then we find out nuggets such as the fact that most non-whites in Canada are Vitamin D deficient. But what if we're putting the cart…

Cats

The "domestic" cat, Felis silvestris catus, has been with us for nearly 10,000 years. Recently, a 9,500 year old burial of a human and their companion cat was discovered on Cyprus. Cats are not indigenous to the island, so it seems that the presence of this cat must be owed to human intervention in some manner. Though we are used to thinking about how humans shaped cats through selective breeding the recent data on Toxoplasma gondii suggests that cats might have an impact on human behavior that could explain cultural differences! Some intellectuals have posited that the selection of…

You are your peers (sort of)

A few weeks ago the study about obesity being socially contagious was all the rage. For anyone interested in human behavior this shouldn't be surprising, we are a social creature and our peer group is an essential part of our 'extended phenotype'. The psychologist Judith Rich Harris has famously argued that the 40% of unattributed component of variation of personality is due to our peer groups (10% is parents and 50% is genes). In Harris' model the best thing that parents can do is choose a particular peer group with values which reflect their own priorities. In other words, buying a house…

Texas A&M To Host USA Science & Engineering Festival Oct. 23

Check out Texas A&M one of our Satellite Festivals! OLLEGE STATION, Oct. 5, 2010 - Texas A&M University officials invite the Brazos Valley community to experience the nationwide excitement of science and engineering later this month as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival, set for Saturday, Oct. 23. No fees or tickets are required for the free public event, which will showcase the best of Texas A&M science and engineering with a simultaneous, daylong series of hands-on activities, demonstrations and displays in the Chemistry, Zachry Engineering and Mitchell Physics…

Kevin in China, part 9 - What Really Happened That Night, or, The Night Of Too Many Toasts!

Here is a little tangent to Kevin's adventure. You may recall from one of the previous installments (Kevin in China, part 6 - The Mystery Snake) that there was an evening that Kevin does not remember very clearly, due to great hospitality of his hosts and the high alcohol levels of the wine served at dinner. You may also recall that another American was present at that dinner - Vanessa. Unlike Kevin, she remembers that evening very well and here is her lucid report: This is Vanessa, the "guest-star" of Kevin's Pinqian report. He was kind enough to include my name amongst his email list;…

Swine flu: borderline insanity

[NB: I have been traveling and offline all day. No way I can even read much less respond to the many excellent comments, tips, questions. Thanks to all. Help each other. Back at home base now.] Closing US borders with Mexico for swine flu is fruitless since the virus is already planted in a dozen or more countries. And while right wing xenophobes are trying to blame Mexican immigrants, most of the international spread has come from commercial travelers, either tourists or business people. If we had sealed the borders, would it have included all American nationals in Mexico? Somehow I don't…

Reprogramming the pancreas

Wow…so have you heard about this result? One goal of regenerative medicine is to instructively convert adult cells into other cell types for tissue repair and regeneration. Although isolated examples of adult cell reprogramming are known, there is no general understanding of how to turn one cell type into another in a controlled manner. Here, using a strategy of re-expressing key developmental regulators in vivo, we identify a specific combination of three transcription factors (Ngn3 (also known as Neurog3) Pdx1 and Mafa) that reprograms differentiated pancreatic exocrine cells in adult mice…

The Good Fairies of New York

tags: The Good Fairies of New York, Martin Millar, fantasy, humor, book review Immediately after I'd broken my arm, I found it impossible to concentrate for long periods of time (longer than five or ten minutes at a stretch) because of the intense pain or because of the haze caused by the pain medications. But nevertheless, I wanted to retreat into a book, so I decided to read a book that was completely different than my usual fare -- just for fun, of course. Thanks to one of my readers, I already had the perfect book in my possession; The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar (Brooklyn,…

President Obama moves to the right on regulation; appeasing business has real life costs

by Rena Steinzor, cross-posted from CPR Blog Sixteen months ago, President Obama stood in the well of Congress and issued a ringing call for a progressive vision of government. Working to persuade Members of Congress to adopt health care reform, he said that "large-heartedness...is part of the American character." Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand." Many took comfort from that vision, the first avowedly affirmative one we had heard from a President…

Tuvalu

On with the boring. Disclaimer: this is nit-picking, for the question "is Gore accurate?". On the wider issue, I'm with the judge and with RC: Gore is basically correct. First off, its not really Tuvalua, its vaguer: "that's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand" is what the judge has him saying (p 26). Which also fits a transcript NJ kindly pointed me to. Just in case we're in any doubt as to the tense Gore is using, the book rather helpfully has a double page spread with large letters for the hard-of-reading (p186-7) saying "Many residents of low…

Physics Catfight!

There's a kerfuffle in the physics blogosphere these days over the somewhat arcane issue of TrackBacks to posts on the ArXiV, the commual preprint server where researchers can post drafts of the papers that they have submitted to research journals (or, if they're working in high energy physics, post a paper and then call it a day, without bothering with print publication). They've relatively recently begun accepting TrackBack links from certain blogs-- but only certain blogs. Raise your hand if you think that this is likely to cause a problem at some point... Now, take that hand, and pat…

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling (and some other stuff)?

I liked Freakonomics, so I'm a bit sad to see the (inevitable) sequel being so hopelessly wrong. Probably this is a case of the old rule: whenever you see people write about stuff you know, they get it wrong. Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I'll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault. It looks like the "global cooling" junk is just one chapter, but of course it is the only one I'll pay any attention to. Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don't understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a…

The only time it's safe to put a star atop your tree

"Bethany: Is your house on fire, Clark? Clark: No, Aunt Bethany, those are the Christmas lights." -National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation Ahh, Christmas. It's easy to forget how much the invention of the light bulb in 1879 reduced the number of tree fires in people's homes. It was a mere three years later that people began decorating Christmas trees with strings of lights instead of candle flames, and as you can imagine, the reduction in open flames atop fresh kindling had its benefits, and caught on like wildfire. Trees now routinely sport previously unfathomable numbers of lights, limited…

How high can the sea level rise if all the glacial ice melted?

NOTE: I've rewritten this post and redone the graphic. The original map on which I based the reconstruction, provided by the USGS, is distinctly different than the one the USGS provides today. The difference is, in fact, rather dramatic. In comparing the older and newer versions of the maps, I have decided to assume the later, more recent, version is more correct. I admit to being a little annoyed at the USGS providing a truly bogus map on their web site, but that is water under the bridge, as it were. So, the following post is edited a bit and a new graphic is provided. Thanks to…

Are fruit bats a reservoir for Ebola?

As I've mentioned before, Ebola is a virus near and dear to my heart. (Figuratively, not literally. I'm not quite that enamored of it). In that previous post, I mentioned that we didn't know the reservoir of Ebola in nature. It certainly isn't for lack of trying that it wasn't determined previously. The first field studies took place shortly after the initial 1976 outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan. In the former, 818 bedbugs, 1500 mosquitoes, 10 domestic pigs, one cow, seven bats, 123 rodents, eight squirrels, six Cercopithecus monkeys, and three small antelopes…

Why Do Polarized Sunglasses Work?

In the previous post about light polarization, I promised to post an explanation of why it is that "Polarized" is a selling point for sunglasses. Given that sunlight is unpolarized, the only obvious benefit would be that polarized sunglasses will automatically block half of the light hitting them, but it's actually much better than that. To understand why they work, though, we need to talk about how it is that light waves are produced and propagate in a medium. Sticking with the classical picture of light as an electromagnetic wave, you can understand the production of electromagnetic waves…

You Can't Cook a Cow: The Problem with Raw Data

Bill Hooker is a regular advocate of "open science," and is currently supporting a new subversive proposal: to make all raw data freely available on some sort of Creative Commons type license. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on the face of it, but I have to say, I'm a little dubious about it when I read things like this: First, note that papers do not usually contain raw (useful, useable) data. They contain, say, graphs made from such data, or bitmapped images of it -- as Peter says, the paper offers hamburger when what we want is the original cow.  Chris Surridge of PLoS puts it…

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Wellspring of Chaos [Library of Babel]

Wellspring of Chaos is the umpteenth book in the Recluce saga by L.E. Modesitt (who, amusingly, turns out to be a Williams alumn), and even more than the Hodgell book, is not something I would ordinarily give a high priority to in catching up on the book log. If you've read pretty much any of the previous books, you know what you're going to get here, and you either like it enough to be keeping up with the series, or you gave up a long time ago. I happen to find these weirdly comforting reads, which is why I'm still reading them. It's sort of strange, because they're very repetitive: A…

Evolution without genes - prions can evolve and adapt too

If you search for decent definitions of evolution, the chances are that you'll see genes mentioned somewhere. The American Heritage Dictionary talks about natural selection acting on "genetic variation", Wikipedia discusses "change in the genetic material of a population... through successive generations", and TalkOrigins talks about changes that are inherited "via the genetic material". But, as the Year of Darwin draws to a close, a new study suggests that all of these definitions are too narrow. Jiali Li from the Scripps Institute in Florida has found that prions - the infectious proteins…

Notes from Honduras V

In 1999, during my intern year, Hurricane Mitch struck Central America. As stated below, I wanted to become involved. The program director of my residency was kind enough to view this as a worthwhile educational experience. This is my diary from the trip. Part IV is here. Leaving Our final evening in Juticalpa saw the reunion of the medical teams that had been sent to the outlying countryside. Our friend Jeremy returned essentially unscathed but with a few stories from the hinterlands. His group was lodged in a small house in a distant village. They bathed with buckets of river water from a…

The Book of Exogenesis

The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite... Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space. As it turns out, DNA components have been found on meteorites before, but it's never been entirely clear if the space rocks came to Earth bearing these molecules, or if they were contaminated upon arrival. Furthermore, this recent study of meteorites was the first to discover trace amounts of three molecules -- purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-…

How to Catch a Comet

By Dr. Mark Showalter Senior Research Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute Four and a half billion years ago, a fluffy "snowball" coalesced out of the cloud of ice, dust and debris still surrounding our Sun. Most of the snowballs like it later merged to become the planets we know. This one, however, had a chance flyby with a young planet, probably Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity propelled it out into the far reaches of the Solar System, where it remained in deep freeze, among many others like it, as a member of the so-called Oort cloud.…

Prioritizing research time

Dear PhysioProf, You're wrong. Here's why. In the comments on a post about a forth-coming paper and it's possible impacts on my own, you said: Getting completed work out the door should always be at the absolute top of the to-do list of junior tenure-track faculty, without exception. It should come before teaching, administrative, doing new studies, eating, sleeping, or even taking a ... whizz. In the comments section, I defended myself by playing the mommy card...my previous paper was submitted mere days before Minnow was born. And I'll grant that you conceded that babies come first. But I'…

Quantum Hustles

Over at masteroftheuniverse, the master has posted a great list of prop bets. Among his bets is one that probably won't work on many computer scientists (or it shouldn't if they've had even a decent theory course) based upon the birthday problem. Sometimes the birthday problem is called the birthday paradox, but the problem is no more a paradox than the twin paradox is about twins. The birthday problem has to do with the probability that a set of randomly drawn people share a birthday. In other words, assuming that everyone in a group of N people has an equal probability of being born on a…

Society for Neuroscience: UM Represents!

I'm headed to Atlanta, for the Society for Neuroscience meeting. I don't have a poster (just presented one in France!) so I'll just be a tourist. And, hoping to run into a few neuro-bloggers like Evil Monkey, Jake of Pure Pedantry, and the Neurocontrarian. Here's how the UM Neuroscience PhD students are representing, though. If you're going, check them out. Saturday, October 14, 2006 Talks 1:00 pm - 4:30 pm Slide 14. Sleep Georgia World Congress Center: Room C301 1:00 pm - 1:15 pm 14.1. Sleep and fatigue during chronic viral infection M. D. OLIVADOTI, M. R. OPP Posters 2:00 pm - 3:…

I get email

I mentioned earlier this week that sometimes I get positive email, and that it actually outnumbers the outright hostile hate mail. But both classes are greatly outnumbered by the most common kind of email I get, the cranks and crazies. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Woolsey, Stephen D Mr CIV USA — a perfectly representative exemplar of the crap clogging my in-box. Yes, he's posting from an army.mil email address, which may account for some of the strange stuff inserted in the text, but not all of it. Skeptic..? (UNCLASSIFIED) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: FOUO Dear Sir…

Lame counter-attack on Javers

The pro-payola people have launched a lame counter attack on Javers. Before we begin, note that even if they could prove Javers guilty of some wrong-doing, it would not mean that Fumento was not guilty of unethical behaviour. Anyway, Fumento is really excited: Well, there's now enough evidence to bring Javers to the stake. And I don't mean using the new rules of journalistic ethics he invented on-the-spot, applied specifically to me, and made retroactive. No, these are the tried and true old rules he violated. Disclosing payments you received from a company when you write about them are…

A Tale of Two Health Care Systems

Mike Dunford tells a compelling story today at The Questionable Authority: Yesterday, I took the kids to the doctor for their school physicals. I wouldn't normally subject you to an account of the day-to-day minutia of my personal life, but given the current debate about how we should handle health care in the United States, the details might be of interest. We arrived - without an appointment - at a medical facility that we had not been to before. We did not have medical records with us, and the only paperwork of any kind that we had brought were the forms that needed to be filled out to…

Are You Getting More Radiation than Tokyo? It Depends

This article was co-authored with Dr. Rama Hoetzlein, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture and Media Technology at the Aalborg University at Copenhagen. Dr. Hoetzlein prepared the graphic. With increasing concern about radiation exposure in Japan and beyond, you might wonder: How much radiation am I getting? It depends... Note that Dr. Hoetzlein and I are not experts in nuclear engineering; this graphic has been prepared using authoritative source material and is intended as a general guide. This visualization shows a map of low level ionizing radiation levels received from…

Morality and Political Psychology: A Guest Post

Ravi Iyer, a graduate student and colleague of mine at the University of Southern California in social psychology, blogs regularly about moral psychology at polipsych.com, and tweets from @ravi_polipsych. He collaborates with others on YourMorals.org, where interested individuals may participate in research in political and moral psychology. I asked him to contribute a guest post about his work. As a moral psychology researcher, I was very excited when Jason wrote that his posts this week would cover moral psychology, and I have enjoyed his previous posts concerning the evolution of morality…

More "Junk" DNA is Not

Some of the base pairs in a given genome are strung together into templates that code for proteins or RNA molecules. These are the classic "genes." Other base pairs probably have little or no function. Among the DNA that is not in classic gene-templates, however, there is a lot of important information, including "control regions." How much of each "type" of DNA exists in a particular genome varies. A recent study suggests that the currently used methods for scanning DNA for regulatory sequences may systematically m miss more than half of that information. Looking specifically at the DNA…

President Straw Man

Now here's something you don't see every day: a news analysis article pointing out a politician's love of a logical fallacy: WASHINGTON - "Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently. Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free." "There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people." Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made…

Late Sunday sermon: Tolerance, politics and religion

Sandy Levinson tackles the issue of Religion and politics after reading Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign by Michael Honey: Almost every single chapter of Honey's book makes clear, once more, the absolute centrality of churches to the civil rights (and labor) movement in Memphis. This is most obvious with regard to African-American churches. King was only the most famous "reverend" to play a key role in the Movement. But there are also the white clergy (and rabbi); usually, they were pusillanimous and hesitant to move more than a step or two…

Morality, Psychopaths and Emotions

On Monday, I posted about some recent imaging work documenting the way the brain distinguishes between "personal" and "impersonal" moral dilemmas. Now comes a new Nature paper from a medley of researchers documenting how damage to a single brain region - the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPO) - erases this fundamental distinction. Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to…

What average genetic variation can tell us (or not)

To the left I've juxtaposed the images of the four Bushmen males whose genomes were analyzed in the recent Nature paper and compared to Desmond Tutu. I've added to the montage a photo of a Swedish and Chinese man. The Nature paper looked at the HapMap data sets which had within them whites from Utah, northwest Europeans, and Chinese from Beijing, and compared these populations to the Bushmen and Desmond Tutu. One important point that this paper emphasized was that the rule-of-thumb that African populations have the most extant genetic diversity of all human groups, and that the Bushmen have…

Birds in the News 121 -- Daylight Saving Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Populations of the Southern cassowary, Casuarius casuarius, around Mission Beach in North Queensland, Australia, are still suffering from the effects of Cyclone Larry two years ago. Image: iStockphoto. Birds in Science In humans, as in all mammals, sleep consists of two phases: deep, dreamless slow-wave-sleep (SWS) alternates with dream phases, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM)-sleep. In newly published study, sleep researchers found that pigeons can engage in "power sleep" just as mammals can to make up for lost sleep…

Tiger Mothers, Depression Moms and Reasonable Expectations

I didn't expect to like _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ - in fact, I expected to hate it. Instead, I found it funny, charming and moving - and give Amy Chua a lot of credit for having the ovaries to expose herself. I didn't just like the book, I loved it. If that seems strange, give me a minute to explain before you assume I'm secretly Mommy Dearest ;-). I should note that I am not a Tiger parent, although Chua and I perhaps have more in common than you might think. You see, like Chua, I don't necessarily think that that assumptions of western parenting are always right. Like Chua, I…

Will doing crosswords prevent age-related cognitive decline?

This 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…

National Infrastructure Protection Plan

On 6 June 2008, the Federal Register in the USA href="http://www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2008-06-06-E8-12671">contained a notice, that the Department of Homeland Security is conducting a review.  They are reviewing the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). The Federation of American Scientists href="http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/06/dhs_invites_public.html">points out that DHS is soliciting public comment. The NIPP is explained and documented at a DHS href="http://www.dhs.gov/xprevprot/programs/editorial_0827.shtm">site.  one of the documents (1.3MB PDF) is…

Congress and science: White House threatens to veto bills that would change EPA science advisory boards and limit EPA use of science

Often unwatched by all but policy-wonks yet key to determining policies put forth by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Boards. These boards consult with the EPA on the science that influences regulations, particularly on individual chemicals – science that’s used to protect the public from chemical hazards. On Tuesday the House passed a bill, the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2013 or H.R. 1422, that would change how the EPA selects Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) members. The White House, in a statement from the Office of Management and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

It didn’t make a lot of headlines, but a new presidential executive order could be a big deal for workers' rights and safety. On July 31, President Obama signed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order, which requires federal contractors to disclose prior labor violations and prohibits contractors from forcing workers into arbitration to settle workplace discrimination cases. The National Law Review explains the order in detail. According to writers Dwight Armstrong and Nisha Verma, the order applies to federal contracts valued at more than $500,000 and could affect a substantial…

Fukushima Radiation Issues

From Time/CNN: The ongoing struggle to snuff out the nuclear crisis occurred amid mounting confusion about key elements of risk now in play. At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Gregory Jaczko, called the radiation levels at one of the plant's units "extremely high." He added that "for a comparable situation in the United States, we would recommend evacuation for a much larger radius than is currently being provided in Japan." And he said his information suggested that there was no water left in the pool containing the spent…

Excellent GMO debate hosted at Intelligence Squared - a summary

The GMO debate hosted by Intelligent Squared was excellent and informative. I admit I learned things from listening and that's always a bonus, but it's worth watching to see the "respectable" arguments against GMO posed and dealt with very effectively by the pro-side in this debate. Spoiler alert, the pro-GMO side spanked the anti-GMO, going from 30% pre-debate in support of GMO (~30% against and 38% undecided) to 60% in support of GMO post-debate with anti-GMO only climbing 1% to 31. While voting on points of science and data is largely irrelevant, science is not democratic, it is reassuring…

HIV denial: alive and well in 2014 [UPDATED]

Everything old is new again. For years on this blog, I wrote about HIV denial and the few fringe scientists and journalists who espoused it. I attracted a host of trolls, some of whom repeatedly attacked my credibility, my appearance, even showed up at my academic office. One of the most prolific of these was Henry Bauer, who posts long-debunked ideas on HIV/AIDS (and the Loch Ness Monster to boot). That was, oh, 2007-ish and prior. In that same year Steven Novella and I co-authored an article on HIV denial for PLoS Medicine. In 2008, a leader of the denial movement, Christine Maggiore of "…

Behaviors, Human Papilloma Virus and Sex Act Cancers

This is the sixth of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease. By Ousmane Diallo I was dumbfounded when I read this news article relating HPV to the increase of lip and oral cancers because of oral sex. It reminded me my younger years, as a med student, debating with my professor of psychology the fundamentals of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego. It was a rather philosophical debate more than anything else, a combination of religious and cultural reciprocal statements of beliefs. At that time, we were exposed to the new French "sexual education"…

Quantum Computation Complexity: BQP

What started me on this whole complexity theory series was a question in the comments about the difference between quantum computers and classical computers. Taking the broadest possible view, in theory, a quantum computer is a kind of non-deterministic machine - so in the best possible case, a quantum machine can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. The set of things computable on a quantum machine is not different from the set of things computable on a classical machine - but the things that are tractable (solvable in a reasonable amount of time) on a quantum computer may be…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 20 new articles in PLoS ONE last night. 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: The Effects of Aging on Researchers' Publication and Citation Patterns: The average age at which U.S. researchers receive their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data…

Functional Free Will

In the building where I usually work, there are four doors on the ground floor. The main front door, that I usually exit during the day; a back door that I usually enter and leave at the ends of the day; and a left and right side door. The door to the left leads to a parking lot, with no sidewalk right where the cars turn into the lot entrance, but it is closer to the post office and coffee; the door to the right leads to a nice sidewalk, but it is set back from the main road, and closer to the downtown restaurants. Two summers ago, the front door was blocked for many weeks by road…

Public Health Classics: Collecting children's baby teeth to identify lead poisoning

The pediatrician suspected that something wasn't quite right with the youngster.  He'd met the teen as part of his North Philadelphia community health center's psychiatry outreach program.  "He was a very nice kid...[but] he had trouble with words, with propositions and ideas," the pediatrician remembered.  It made him wonder, "how many of these kids who are coming to the clinic are in fact missed cases of lead poisoning?" That's the story recalled by Herbert Needleman, MD and shared in 2005 with historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz about the pediatrician's initial inquiries into the…