Search Content

Displaying results 74551 - 74600 of 87950

Nucleosome Binding Sites

A paper from a week or so, describes a method for detecting regions in the genome where DNA wrapping takes place. So what (you may asked) is DNA wrapped around? Nucleosomes! Each nucleosome (red balls in the cartoon) contains 8 histone proteins (two each of Histone 2A, 2B, 3 and 4). In addition, histone 1 (yellow in the diagram) hangs out at the periphery and is involved in linking neighboring nucleosomes together (we think). Histones are not only the most conserved eukaryotic proteins but also the most abundant. In fact, if you were to run a protein gel and stain for total proteins (by…

Growing Science in the Bronx

Pick a Scienceblogger - any Scienceblogger - and you'll find someone who loves science, and thinks that everyone should be exposed to it. That's one of the reasons that we spend time hammering out these posts. We also, as a group, have this funny belief about science education. We think it's important. We think that it's a good thing for children to learn about the way their world works, and we're all for anything that helps with that. That's why there are, as you may have seen on the main Scienceblogs page, a whole bunch of us clamoring for your money right now. We're embarking on a…

Dana Rohrabacher: Congressional Embarrassment

Congressman Rohrabacher (R-California) gave a presentation yesterday concerning global warming which was carried live on C-SPAN. I have not been able to find either video or a transcript but here's the gist of it: Rohrabacher resides firmly in the lunatic fringe. He's a global warming denier and a conspiracy theorist. He plays fast and loose with the facts and apparently has no problem with misrepresenting them. In layman's terms, he's bat-shit crazy. Rohrabacher denies the existence of global warming outright and obviously, any link that humans might have to its cause. It should be pointed…

Taking Notes: Lab Notebooks in the Private Sector

One of my to-do tasks includes making some revisions to a standard operating procedure draft document for lab notebook policies for our division. I'm a member of an "executive lab notebook committee" or as I fondly like to call my assignment, the stinking albatross that hangs around my neck. The confluence of discovery scientists and attorneys is an uneasy one, and acting as an intermediary between the two factions can get pretty stinky in that dead-avian pendant way. I have no one to blame but myself for landing in this role. I made the grievous error of telling my boss about my prior…

There's plenty of time for evolution

This is a familiar creationist argument, stated in this case by a non-creationist: Consider the replacement processes needed in order to change each of the resident genes at L loci in a more primitive genome into those of a more favorable, or advanced, gene. Suppose that at each such gene locus, the argument runs, the proportion of gene types (alleles) at that gene locus that are more favored than the primitive type is Kâ1. The probability that at all L loci a more favored gene type is obtained in one round of evolutionary "trials" is KâL, a vanishingly small amount. When trials are carried…

Easterbrook on Dawkins

I've said before that I don't care for Gregg Easterbrook, and my views on Richard Dawkins' latest book are amply documented as well. So what do you get when a very silly person reviews a flawed book about complex issues? Easterbrook's review hits a few points that everyone seems to agree on – Dawkins is right that religion shouldn't be treated as a genetic trait, Dawkins reduces the actual diversity of religious thought to a straw man, he ignores the good that has come from religion while excoriating it for all the ills its followers have wrought. Along the way he mangles what Dawkins says…

Happy belated birthday to T.H. Huxley

With all my running around this weekend I completely forgot that yesterday was the 183rd anniversary of T.H. Huxley's birth. Unfortunately, however, Huxley is generally regarded as "Darwin's Bulldog" and little else, his other accomplishments and role in the formation of professional science often overshadowed by a debate that never actually happened. While Huxley certainly did use his "beak and claws" to defend evolution, his view of how and when evolution occurred would seem unfamiliar to us today. His career has become something of a historical footnote, his support of evolution widely…

An Evolutionary Puzzle

A little more than two years ago, I asked the woman who is now my wife to marry me as snow began to fall in Central Park. The ruse I employed to get her out to the spot was the excuse that I wanted to make sure I saw the special Darwin exhibition before it moved elsewhere (which was true), knowing that after a visit to the AMNH we'd traditionally sit out by the pond across the street for a little while. By the time we made it back to the her house, though, enough snow had fallen to make driving treacherous, so it looked like I was going to have to crash on the couch that night. To pass some…

Book Review: Wolf Empire

Revered and reviled, the wolf embodies the concept of the "noble savage," a sort of respectable wildness that is both admired and feared. Presently many populations of wolves in North America continue on at the indulgence of our own species, humans essentially exterminating as many wolves as they could in America, and the tenuous position of modern wolves in the United States relies on understanding and the death of the "Big Bad Wolf" mythos. Scott Ian Barry, a photographer and wolf enthusiast who is intimately familiar with the natural history of these animals, has released a new book to…

Tablecloth and dishes trick - the BMW version

Hat tip to Frank for sending me a link to this video: If you have never done a demo like this (without the motorcycle), you should. It really isn't too difficult. Here is a video of my version: Inertial demo from Rhett Allain on Vimeo. So, the question is: is the motorcycle thing real or fake? First, let me talk about the key aspect of this demo. Why don't the glasses move? Well, they move - but just not very far. The demo is supposed to be an example of Newton's Second law, or you could say it is the momentum principle (which is what I will use). If a force is applied for a short time…

Physics of Parkour, or how to run up a wall

Parkour: the act of running and jumping like a crazy superhero. I can't do any of it. But I can analyze it. So, let me start with the wall-flip (or any kind of move that involves walking on vertical walls). This looks like a good example (there are a bajillion on youtube). Pretty cool, huh? How do you run up a wall? Well, it has to do with friction. Remember, this is a fairly useful model for the magnitude of the frictional force on an object: Where N is the force the surface exerts on the object (the normal force) and ?s is the coefficient of static friction. Note that this less…

Tides. Why are they so hard?

Every introductory astronomy text and most intro physics texts talk about tides. The usual explanation is something along the lines of: The moon exerts a gravitational force on the Earth and all the stuff on the Earth. This force decreases with distance (1/r2). Thus the moon pulls greater on one side of the Earth than the other This doesn't matter except for oceans which can move. BOOM. Two tides a day due to a bulge on the side close to the moon and the opposite side. Oh, the Earth is slowing down. Really, that is what almost all intro texts say. Go check for yourselves. Yes, the tides…

Palin-genesis

Time magazine digs into Mayor Palin's early days: At some point in those the fractious first days, Palin told the department heads they needed her permission to talk to reporters. "She put a gag order on those people, something that you'd expect to find in the big city, not here," says [local paper editor] Naegele. "She flew in there like a big city gal, which she's not. It was a strange time, and [the Frontiersman] came out very harshly against her." [Former mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she…

Setbacks in Science

Denyse O'Leary uses Bill Dembski's blog (and a dozen other ID blogs) to report a comment from a friend about the mission statement for Nature. The mission statement reads: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life. Her friend replies: To report…

WALL-E Gravity and Air

I finally saw the movie WALL-E. Good flick, I liked it. There was, however, one part I must comment on. You know I can't help myself. I feel like the shark Bruce in Finding Nemo. I try not to attack, but there is a tiny drop of blood in the water. Here is the scene that I want to talk about: I guess I should give a spoiler alert. Although, I will not talk about the plot of the movie. In this scene, WALL-E is hitching a ride on this space craft. The space craft is entering a hanger deck of a space station. While the hanger door is still open, WALL-E is clearly hanging on so that he…

Will I?

We can't help but talk to ourselves. At any given moment, there's a running commentary unfolding in our stream of consciousness, an incessant soliloquy of observations, questions and opinions. But what's the best way to structure all this introspective chatter? What kind of words should we whisper to ourselves? And does all this self-talk even matter? These are the fascinating questions asked in a new paper led by Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and published in Psychological Science. The experiment was straightforward. Fifty three…

Youth and Paradigm Shifts

I just discovered (via Tyler Cowen) a fascinating economics paper on the changing dynamics of scientific production over the 20th century. A few months ago, I wrote about the tangled relationship of age and innovation, and why different fields have different peak ages of creativity. In general, math, physics and poetry are for the young, while biology, history and the social sciences benefit from middle-age: Interestingly, these differences in peak age appear to be cultural universals, with poets peaking before novelists in every major literary tradition, according to [Dean] Simonton's…

Porn and Mirror Neurons

Mirror neurons are a classic illustration of a scientific idea that's so elegant and intriguing our theories get ahead of the facts. They're an anatomical quirk rumored to solve so many different cognitive problems that one almost has to be suspicious: how can the same relatively minor network of motor neurons be responsible for tool use, empathy, language and be a core feature of autism? I'm not saying that mirror neurons don't have the potential to be an astonishingly cool cortical feature, especially when it comes to the intuitive understanding of physical actions. But I have yet to be…

The Neuroscience of McGriddles

A few days ago, I had my first McGriddle. While I usually try to avoid McDonald's meat products - that's the benevolent influence of my wife, who rightly insists on eating humanely raised animal products - I was stuck in an airport and couldn't bear the idea of another yogurt parfait. The "standard" McGriddle consists of bacon, a brick of bright yellow egg and neon orange American cheese served between two small pancakes that have been injected with maple syrup (or some sort of maple simulacrum) so that they taste extremely sweet and yet aren't sticky to hold. The top of the griddle pancake…

Creativity and Living Abroad

The Economist summarizes a new study looking at the link between living abroad and increased creativity: Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link. As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of…

Watching Movies

In his review of State of Play, David Denby laments the rise of incoherence as a filmmaking technique: "State of Play," which was directed by Kevin Macdonald, is both overstuffed and inconclusive. As is the fashion now, the filmmakers develop the narrative in tiny fragments. Something is hinted at--a relationship, a motive, an event in the past--then the movie rushes ahead and produces another fragment filled with hints, and then another. The filmmakers send dozens of clues into the air at once, but they feel no obligation to resolve what they tell us. Recent movies like "Syriana," "Quantum…

Hate

Hate is a strong word, it goes beyond mere distaste and disagreement. The people who left death threats and scared Kathy Sierra out of a planned appearance didn't just hate her. They had no reason to hate a person who writes a blog about computer interfaces. Their hate is for women, and their actions were driven by a hate for all women, and a desire to hurt all women. The people who called a random pedestrian in Lawrence a "faggot," jumped out of their car and beat him to the ground may not have hated him personally. If the police charge of a hate crime bears out, it will be because of…

In Defense of Rick Santorum

If the polls are accurate, Senator Rick Santorum is about to lose his re-election bid. That's a good thing. Santorum is a bad cliche of the culture wars, a powerful politician who actually believes that the earth is 6,000 years old, that abortion is tantamount to murder and the Catholic church scandal began in Massachusetts because Boston is a "liberal bastion". In recent months, he's also gotten rather deranged on the topic of foreign policy, arguing that what we need is more pre-ememptive action against Iran, because our aggressive war in Iraq worked out so well. And yet, when Rick Santorum…

Is Porn Adultery?

In the new Atlantic, Ross Douthat argues that porn is a moral slippery slope, and is part of the adultery continuum: Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it's never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become--at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by "real" prostitutes and "real" affairs, we're…

Sexual Fluidity

Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah, deserves credit for bringing a controversial idea to the academic surface. Here's the Boston Globe Ideas section: In this country, we tell a certain story about homosexuality: We believe that people who come out as gay almost always stick with that gay identity for the rest of their lives. Diamond's research reveals that - at least for some females - that story might be wrong. She followed dozens of women for 10 years, as they graduated from college, worked their first jobs, fell in love, changed their minds, and tumbled into the arms of…

We are all scientists in the ICU

Over at Anthropology.net Emanuel Lusca has a post, Science As A Human Practice. I sniped a little in the comments, to which Emanuel responded: My intention was not to refine, clarify, or elevate science. My intention was to point out that science should not be put on a pedestal, that it is like any other human practice, e.g. religious practice. In my mind science and religion are equally valuable and insightful. And of course, you and many others will criticize me for that, but that's okay. Photo Credit: Kim Fulton-Bennett 2005 MBARI This is the sort of problematizing which makes cultural…

Why "Dr. Free-Ride"?

Longtime readers of the previous incarnation of this blog knew me as "Dr. Free-Ride". Most of them, however, never asked where that pseudonym came from. As it happens, the source of the pseudonym was a class discussion (in my "Ethics in Science" course) that, by its very liveliness, inspired me to start the blog in the first place. The class discussion was about whether those with scientific training are morally obligated to practice science. Some (like Kristin Shrader-Frechette, in her book Ethics of Scientific Research) have argued that trained scientists have a positive duty to do…

Working to do human subjects research right.

Today, some news that makes me smile (and not that bitter, cynical smile): UCSF has announced that it has received full accreditation for its program to protect research participants from the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP). This is a voluntary accreditation -- nothing the federal government requires, for example -- that undoubtedly required a great deal of work from UCSF investigators and administrators to obtain. (AAHRPP describes the process as including a preliminary self-assessment, followed by appropriate modifications of your…

The greatest scandal in Washington...

...Is telling the truth. This answers the NPR ombudsman's question: It's hard to decide which of [fired NPR development director Ron] Schiller's remarks [in a heavily-edited video released by dishonest jackass James O'Keefe] was worse for someone representing NPR. - That the Republican Party is "anti-intellectual?" - That Tea Party people aren't "just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic.I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-American gun-toting, I mean it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people." - Or that NPR "would be better off in the long-run without…

Don't get too agitated about BART superbugs

For some perspective on yesterday's story about MRSA and other bugs found on BART train seats, let's turn to Good Magazine, which interviews microbiologist Pat Fidopiastis about a separate study, funded by Clorox, which found bacteria on shopping cart handles. Fidopiastis writes: none of this means much unless you can show me a significant risk involved with coming in contact with a shopping cart. You might be able to say that "X percent" more kids get sick if they touch a shopping cart handle versus a bathroom door knob, for example. But what are the actual numbers? Is this like saying, "…

I don't know if that's helping

The nice thing about being an agnostic is feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" when there's not enough evidence to say yes or no. I mention this because I want to be clear that I mean no criticism by saying that I don't know if Ophelia is right about the positive effects of New Atheism. She's picking up on a study which yet again demonstrates that Americans overstate their church attendance. The latest is based on a study comparing churches' attendance figures with people's self-reported church attendance. Earlier demonstrations of this effect included researchers counting cars in…

In which I begin to appreciate twitter and tangle with moral philosophy

When I started tweeting (@JoshRosenau), I was unconvinced. I'm already overwhelmed with silliness and interesting people writing interesting stuff, so why would I a) want to read more and b) want to restrict myself and others to 140 characters. And the character limit still grates, though I'm learning to have smaller ideas. But what's nice about twitter is that it's a massive conversation across continents with the people you like chatting with. And the 140 character limit eliminates the throat-clearing and extended explanations that tend to come into contentious blog posts. You can link…

“Hello, My name is Herb Grossman”

It's hard to find something dumber than Kent Hovind, but here you go: the website of Herb Grossman, trashevolution. It's what Hovind could have produced if he'd been an alcoholic gay man in denial. He has a rambling, mostly incoherent set of pages that he claims disprove evolution, but if you read just one, it should be his page on homosexuality. It doesn't really exist, you know, although he has been feeling supernatural homosexual urges for years. No one has to be a homosexual, because— —Homosexuality is a Cruel Deception, and you should not worry about possibly being a homosexual,…

On the etymological association of atheist and scientist

I'd known for a long time that the term "scientist" had been coined in the early 19th century, but I just ran across a first-hand account of the event by the fellow who came up with it, William Whewell. The context is this: many in the science establishment of the day had been chafing at the premier British institution, the Royal Society, which had grown stodgy and was infested with politicians, bishops, and other such hangers-on, and they formed a new institution, the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As part of the process of establishing their identity, they struggled…

West Eurasian population substructure + the Baloch

Dienekes points me to a new paper, European Population Genetic Substructure: Further Definition of Ancestry Informative Markers for Distinguishing Among Diverse European Ethnic Groups. You've seen this song & dance before: Population substructure in Japan Population substructure of Mexican Mestizos European population substructure Genetic Map of East Asia The genetics of Fenno-Scandinavia Finns as European outliers Uyghurs are hybrids Genetic structure of Eastern European populations Genetic map of Europe; genes vary as a function of distance More genetic maps of Europe Human population…

The biological bases of behavioral variation

Alex Tabarrok points me to a new paper on the effects of Toxoplasma gondii, Increased incidence of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective effect RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study: We confirmed, using for the first time a prospective cohort study design, increased risk of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected subjects and demonstrated a strong protective effect of RhD positivity against the risk of traffic accidents posed by latent toxoplasmosis. Our results show that RhD-negative subjects with high titers of anti-Toxoplasma…

Advice from believers is demonstrably worthless

Speaking of the ABC, I revisited their Global Atheist Convention blog, which I can say without hesitation was absolutely the worst effort any of the media put out. I think I prefer the blatant stupidity of a Gary Ablett to the mawkish blitherings of a gang of pious apologists — at least it's honest. And that's all they've got — the blog is still limping along with a series of tepid guest posts by people making weak excuses for their faith. It was supposedly a blog about the convention, but it never quite rose to the standard of even meeting their own aims — instead, it's an exercise in breast…

Joint Statements on Climate Change from National Academies of Science Around the World

National academies of sciences from around the world have published formal statements and declarations acknowledging the state of climate science, the fact that climate is changing, the compelling evidence that humans are responsible, and the need to debate and implement strategies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Not a single national science academy disputes or denies the scientific consensus around human-caused climate change. A few examples of joint academy statements since 2000 on climate are listed here. Many national academies have, in addition, published their own reports and…

Exclusive: Interview with Senator John Edwards on Science-Related Topics

I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week. As I am at work and unable to moderate comments, the comment section is closed on this post, but will be open on the previous post (here) where I hope you will remain civil and stay on topic. You are also welcome to comment on this interview at several other places (e.g,. DailyKos, MyDD, TPMCafe, Science And Politics, Liberal Coalition, the Edwards campaign blog as well as, hopefully, your own blogs). I…

Sheldon Whitehouse and Ted Lieu Demonstrate Superior Climate Change Activism

Subtitle: Politicians School Scientists In How To Do It Alternative Title: Where were Bernie and Hillary???? You need to know right away that the Lede to this story is buried way the hell down the page. That’s OK, though, because others are covering this, and the point of my missive is to put the current situation into a somewhat larger context. Ultimately, the point I want to make is this: Even when a problem is mired in deeply entrenched corporate interests, small groups of tenacious heroes can make the world measurably better, and there is such a thing happening right now in the…

The Problem of Expertise

I have been thinking a lot lately about the problem of expertise. By the problem of expertise, I mean how people who know better should relate to those who don't. Whether you are a physician or a physicist, this issue comes up a lot. People want the opinions of educated people -- pundits of various stripes proliferate -- but they do not always follow those opinions in their personal lives. Further, nearly every controversial scientific issue today involves some element of the knowers trying to impose their views on the know-nothings (or at least those who know significantly less). How…

Book review: Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World.

Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009 The scientific enterprise is built on trust and accountability. Scientists are accountable both to the world they are trying to describe and to their fellow scientists, with whom they are working to build a reliable body of knowledge. And, given the magnitude of the task, they must be able to trust the other scientists engaged in this knowledge-building activity. When scientists commit fraud, they are breaking trust with their fellow scientists and…

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski strikes again

I was originally going to write about an amazing article that appeared in the NEJM today, but then, as happens all too often, something more compelling caught my eye. Unfortunately, it's compelling in exactly the wrong way. It's infuriating and saddening, all at the same time. It's also yet another example of how it's so very, very difficult to blog about these cases. Yes, unfortunately, it's Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski again in the news, and this time around he's managed to snare yet another unfortunate family into believing the hype about his "antineoplastons," his "personalized, gene-targeted…

The long, sordid antivaccine history of Donald Trump

Note added 9/17/2015: I knew it. The vaccine issue came up during the second debate and Donald Trump repeated basically the same nonsensical antivaccine tropes that he's been repeating for at least eight years. It rather puts the lie to his claim that he listens to experts and changes his opinion based on what they tell him. Hilariously, Mike Adams is painting it as an attempt by CNN to "destroy" Donald Trump using the vaccine issue. Depressingly, Ben Carson, while defending vaccines, fell into the "too many, too soon," trope, something a pediatric neurosurgeon should know better than to say…

Medicine and evolution, part 12: Using evolution to develop adaptive chemotherapy

Three years ago, I wrote about what I considered to be a fascinating and promising approach to understanding tumor biology. This method involved understanding that tumors are in general made up of a heterogeneous collection of cells. Using this knowledge, it is possible to apply evolutionary principles to cancer, treating a tumor as, in essence, an ecosystem. Indeed, that is exactly what Maley et al did three years ago. They applied evolutionary principles to the precancerous lesion in the distal esophagus known as Barrett's esophagus by examining various measures of population diversity in…

Dr. Emoto's water woo metastasizes

Indiana Jones had a saying: "Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?" This line was most famously delivered in Raiders of the Lost Ark after he and his friend Sallah had opened the Well of Souls and were staring down into it. Sallah noticed that the ground appeared to be moving within; so Indy shined a light down the entrance, only to see thousands of snakes waiting for him at the bottom. Sallah then drily observed, "Asps. Very dangerous. You go first." As we knew from earlier in the movie, Indiana Jones hated snakes and was afraid of them; so it was only natural that later in the movie he would…

The sea urchin genome

Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week's issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I'm late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn't just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin…

Cries the antivaccinationist: Why are we injecting TOXINS into our babies? (revisited)

Alright, I think I got the whole Maher/Dawkins thing out of my system for now. True, given the highly annoying reaction of one reader, I was half-tempted to write yet another post on the whole fiasco just out of spite, but I decided that spite in and of itself was not a good reason to write a blog post. Well, in this case it isn't, anyway, but if it were someone like Vox Day, or J.B. Handley, or a hapless quack or creationist, well, a wee bit of spite can make for some mighty fine blogging that's really fun to write. True, spite should never be the be-all and end-all of a blog, but certainly…

Effect Measure on "Science-based Medicine 101": FAIL

Effect Measure is a site I highly recommend with experienced epidemiologists in charge. In other words, it's run by adults. But scientists often disagree about things. This is apparently a secret to non-scientists and many reporters who assume that when two scientists disagree, one is lying or wrong. But it's true nonetheless. Whatever the subdiscipline, there are disagreements. If you pick up almost any issue of Science or Nature you will find plenty of them, usually (but not always) couched in polite language in the Introduction or Discussion section of a paper or in the Letters. So it's…

Yawn, still one more overhyped acupuncture study: Does acupuncture help infertile women conceive?

Oops, they did it again. You think the media would learn after the last time, but no.... There it was on Friday greeting me on the ABC News website: "Study: Acupuncture May Boost Pregnancy" in bold blue letters, with the title of the webpage being "Needles Help You Become Pregnant." Wow, what a claim! Naturally, I had to know more. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) The story began: It sounds far-fetched sticking needles in women to help them become pregnant but a scientific review suggests that acupuncture might improve the odds of conceiving if done right before…