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Selenium the cause of Lechuza Caracas polo horse deaths

Regular commenter and friend of Terra Sig, leigh (the path forward), let us know overnight that Florida State Veterinarian Dr Thomas J Holt officially confirmed that selenium overdose killed 21 Venezuelian polo horses in Wellington, Florida, on 19 April. An attempt by an Ocala, Florida, compounding pharmacy to reproduce an equine dietary supplement called Biodyl resulted in a toxic dose of sodium selenite to be given to the horses. The pharmacy is cooperating fully with the FDA and other authorities but there is no official word as to whether the pharmacy made a calculation error or were…

Seder supper with the NC blog hive courtesy of the Coturnix family

My deepest gratitude goes out this morning to Bora Zivkovic, Mrs. Coturnix, and family for hosting what was for my daughter and I our first Seder supper. The evening was made even more special with Sheril Kirshenbaum, her BF and his labmate, Lisa (I'm sorry I don't know your full name but I do remember you got your recipe for the spicy matzah dish from The Southern Jewish Cookbook), Anton Zuiker and his wife, and all our kids - celebrating as Bora said, in "a very secular/humanist/feminist/environmentalist way, focusing on good company, good food and good wine." Speaking of the latter, I…

NCI science writing internships available for recent graduate degree recipients

Coolio! I think I would've applied for this. I assume NCI means either recent MS or PhD graduates: Applications are now open for the July 2009-January 2010 National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) Health Communications Internship Program, a 6 or 12-month program for graduate students or for persons who have recently completed a graduate degree interested in a career in science writing. Applications close March 3, 2009. For additional information or to apply, visit: https://hcip.nci.nih.gov. The NCI, the Federal Government's principal agency for cancer research and training, invites qualified…

Test post in shiny new MT4, with help from They Might Be Giants

Regular readers may note that ScienceBlogs.com has been off the air for the installation and upgrade of our blogging platform, MovableType. So while I finally learned how to use the old one after being here two-and-a-half years, I am now starting over. Hence, this first post being completely devoid of content. However, I wish to honor my first two commenters with the new interface: a spammer from Istanbul (not Constantinople). So without further delay, some music to mark this occasion: There is also a very impressive version performed live (for an audience of one, the host) on MTV Europe in…

Why I think Sanjay Gupta is a good pick for Surgeon General

PharmGirl just sent me this tip after I got out of a meeting but I see that some bloggers have already weighed in about Obama's apparent selection of Dr Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General. PalMD was briefly positive but PZ is concerned that Gupta is merely a talking head or placeholder and an apologist for the US health care system. However, I see two main advantages. 1. He knows firsthand the limitations of the US health care system, especially in poor rural and urban areas where access to care is a challenge even under normal circumstances. Gupta has also been on-site for several of the…

ScienceBlogs, science blogs, and solely science in science blogging

A lively discussion has ensued this week across the intertubes about the ScienceBlogs.com network to which we belong and what should or shouldn't be provided as content in a blog that calls itself a science blog. As usual, the most sober, inclusive, and non-inflammatory treatise on the topic comes from ethicist, philosopher, and physical chemist (because one Ph.D. is never enough), Prof Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science: she calls it navel-gazing. I submit that her navel is among the wisest around: Why do so many bloggers at ScienceBlogs write about stuff besides science? We…

Release of Tripoli 6 / Benghazi 6!

I woke this morning to BBC reporting that the six Bulgarian nurses and doctor charged erroneously with transmitting HIV to over 400 Libyan children have been released and are safely home in Bulgaria. Orac and Revere here at ScienceBlogs covered the upholding of death sentences against the six that opened the procedural door to their release. It appears that the wife of new French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy, Cecilia, played an important role over the last 48 hrs in negotiating the terms of release together with other EU officials. The terms are only just beginning to emerge, but it…

Underreporting of herb-drug interactions

An article in the most recent issue of Annals of Pharmacotherapy concludes that the vast majority of known cases of herbal medicine interactions with drugs go unreported. Researchers at the University of Alberta, University of Toronto, and Health Canada surveyed 132 pharmacists. While 47% of pharmacists had identified an herb-drug interaction, only 2 (1.5%) reported their cases to Health Canada. But, according to the study authors, "19% of pharmacists said they had reported adverse events from mixing prescription and non-prescription drugs." Why do pharmacists feel that reporting herb-…

Larry (Bud) Melman: character and comedian, but pharma shill, too?

By now you've heard about the recent death of Larry (Bud) Melman, the old Late Night With David Letterman character whose real name was Calvert DeForest (NYT obituary). In an intellectual property dispute, NBC claimed ownership of the Larry (Bud) Melman name, even though it had been devised by a "Letterman" writer, Merrill Markoe. From the moment his face appeared as the center of the CBS eye logo on the debut CBS show, Mr. DeForest used his own name. He parlayed his "Letterman" fame into other film roles and commercials for a wide range of companies including M.C.I., Honda, Cheerios and…

What does it take to knock off K2 Spice readership?

Just the other day, I wrote about how DrugMonkey and I have experienced unprecedented and sustained blog traffic for posts we wrote in February on K2 Spice, one of a couple of marijuana-like "incense" products still sold legally in the United States. Every morning, I dial up my SiteMeter blog statistics and take a look at what posts readers first land upon when coming to visit the humble world headquarters of Terra Sigillata. Last week, 2,700 to 2,800 of the 4,000 most recent hits were landing on our February K2 Spice post. (You will also note below the sad state of my readership in that…

Former date rape drug reincarnated as answer to unmet medical needs

Just a quick post on an article that caught my eye: Jazz Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, CA, has announced that the US FDA has accepted their new drug application (NDA) filing for JZP-6, or sodium oxybate, for the treatment of pain and fatigue associated with fibromyalgia. The NDA was based on positive outcomes of two, Phase III clinical trials - those randomized, placebo-controlled double-blind trials that serve as the gold standard for drug efficacy. The company expects an approval decision from FDA by October 2010. Jazz has already garnered approval for sodium oxybate under the brand name…

James Ray arrested, charged with three counts of manslaughter in Sedona sweat lodge debacle

A few weeks ago, we discussed (1, 2) some of the drugs confiscated by authorities who searched the Sedona resort room occupied by self-help guru, James Ray, following the October 2009 deaths of three followers who paid nearly $10,000 each for his Spiritual Warrior retreat program. Late this afternoon, Ray was arrested - the best news and supporting information continues to come from The Prescott (AZ) News, with a sidebar to the lower right of the story that links to their extensive timeline of coverage: The Yavapai County Grand Jury returned a "true bill" on 3 counts of Manslaughter against…

Who would want them?

What an odd news item: there is a rule that the Pope can't be an organ donor. My first thought was ick — he's rather decrepit, and if I ever require an organ transplant, I'd rather the source were a young, stupid motorcyclist who doesn't wear a helmet. The Catholics have other reasons, though. Vatican officials say that after a pope dies, his body belongs to the entire Church and must be buried intact. That's rather morbid and weird. Why bother? It's not going to be intact for long, and it's actually going to belong to the worms and bacteria. But it's this part that blew my mind. Furthermore…

Meet the John McCain of ScienceBlogs

By now we've all seen the John McCain ad that juxtaposes Paris Hilton and Britney Spears with Barack Obama. Most of us probably recognize it as disingenuous use of imagery to make a flawed argument. Sadly, the same technique is being used by one of our own here on ScienceBlogs. The culprit is Matt "Framing Science" Nisbet. Take a look. Matt is off on yet another crusade against the "new atheists" as represented by fellow SciBlogger PZ Myers. His post is full of nonsense, and I don't say that lightly. But what really annoyed me is his choice of photographs to illustrate his point. At the top…

No, no, no, no, no no!

We have to nip this idea in the bud: Shell is reviving the notion of liming the oceans. Why? ...because adding lime to seawater creates an increase in alkalinity, which in turn improves the water's ability to scrub the air clean of carbon. Right. We know everything we need to know about ocean ecosystems, so there shouldn't be any problem with dumping millions of tonnes of limestone into them. The project's coordinator, Gilles Bertherin, cites potentially massive ecological benefits from adding limestone to the waters. "Adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of…

16-year-old libels James Hansen

I'm sure James Hansen has better things to do with his NASA paycheck than hire a lawyer to sue a 16-year-old over a libelous statement on her website. Give the amount of time he's spent crafting public letters to governors, prime ministers and corporate CEOs, though, perhaps he could find the time to write a small note expressing his concern to the parents of Kristen Byrnes of Portland, Maine. Ms. Byrne was featured on NPR's Morning Edition this Tuesday. She's a top student at her school, and to her credit has recognized the importance of skepticism in science, something it took me an extra…

Everything you ever wanted to know about climate change but didn't know whom to ask

New Scientist has assembled a marvelous list of 26 of the most-cited objections to the scientific consensus on climate change. Temperatures rise before carbon dioxide; polar bear population is increasing; there is no consensus; it's all there. This handy-dandy resource -- the answers include source materials -- should be bookmarked. Here's the complete list: ⢠Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter ⢠We can't do anything about climate change ⢠The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong ⢠Chaotic systems are not predictable ⢠We can't trust computer models of climate ⢠They…

My piece of the Pi meme

The Pi meme: If for no other reason than it's good to re-examine one's motives.Thanks to Janet for cooking up this particular indulgent recipe. 3 reasons you blog about science: 1. Nothing better to do with my free time 2. Can't resist a good argument 3. Need somewhere to spew; otherwise my opinions might find their way into something I actually get paid good money to write. Point at which you would stop blogging: 1. When science is no longer a political football 1 thing you frequently blog besides science: The evils of dogma. 4 words that describe your blogging style: Opinionated,…

Sex and Simultaneity

From the inimitable xkcd, a comic about relativity in sex: This rather clever piece of humor is referring to the relativity of simultaneity. According to relativity, time and space are different for observers in different reference frames. Events which are simultaneous in one frame are not necessarily going to be simultaneous in a different frame moving with respect to the first frame. This isn't just a failure to correct for light travel time either, it's a genuine geometric effect of spacetime. So if one person is, er, moving at near the speed of light the effect can be quite pronounced…

Gas in a (very small) box.

Before the physics, I want to point out one of the most interesting ScienceBlogs posts I've seen in a long time: Not Exactly Rocket Science discussing the body-swapping illusion. You should read it. Now, here's a quiz I gave my Physics 201 students. Easy as usual, but I'm a sucker for these order-of-magnitude problems where you get an intuitive feel for what a right answer "feels like". It's taken from one of the homework problems in their textbook: What is the length of the side of a cube containing a number of molecules equal to the number of people in the world (~6 billion) assuming a…

Sunday Function

Here's sin(x). What, you don't believe me? Ok, ok, I'm leaving something out. Let's do some background before I tell you what it is. The first thing we need is the incredibly interesting and important Euler's formula. It's the key that relates the exponential and trigonometric functions. We won't pause to figure out why it's true, for now we'll just take it as a given: Now replace x with -x, and we'll use the fact that cos(x) is the same as cos(-x), and sin(-x) is the same as -sin(x). So that's two ways of saying the same thing. Now we'll subtract the second equation from the first.…

Walk the Line

See these guys? They're racewalking. It's like running in that you do it as fast as possible, but you're not allowed to have both feet off the ground at any time. One foot has to be planted on the track at all times. The guy to the far right is slightly cheating - both his feet are off the ground. But take a closer look at the foreground guy in the red, white, and blue. He illustrates the proper form very well. Think a little abstractly and imagine how the leg moves. The foot is planted and so the leg forms the radius of a circle. The hip therefore traces out part of that circular…

Octopus carries around coconut shells as suits of armour

Octopuses are masters of camouflage that can change their shape, colour and texture to perfectly blend into their environment. But the soft bodies that make them such excellent con artists also make them incredibly vulnerable, should they be spotted. Some species have solved that problem with their fierce intellect, which allows them to make use of other materials that are much harder. The veined octopus, for example, dons a suit of armour made of coconut shells. The veined octopus (Amphioctus marginatus) lives in sandy, exposed habitats that have little in the way of cover. To protect…

Vote for your story of the year - animal behaviour

We're less than a month away from the end of the year (the decade, even). In past years, I've done a review of the year, where I select my favourite posts. But those were more innocent and less productive times. This year, I have written 245 posts and counting and it's now easy to narrow these down to a manageable number. So I thought I could get you to do it, and we could have some in the process Throughout December, I will be getting you lovely readers to vote for the top stories covered on this blog over the last year. I've selected the ones that have interested me the most and divided…

Goodbye, Kiribati

It's a triumph of hope over reason, and that means the residents of the Kiribati Islands, an archipelago of tiny islands with an average altitude of 6.5 feet, are doomed. They've got faith, you know, but one thing they haven't got is any reason. NPR reports on their dire situation as the waters slowly rise and the climate changes: "I'm not easily taken by global scientists prophesizing the future," says Teburoro Tito, the country's former president and now a member of Parliament. Tito says he believes in the Biblical account of Noah's ark. In that story, after God devastates the world with…

"Is It For Me?": Bell Telephone System is This Week's World's Fair Sponsor

For those who forgot, we began seeking alternative sponsorship at this site in the face of unstable valence properties in Dow Chemical's "Human Element." Last week, we read "Documents show that Dow Chemical has been pressing India to disassociate the firm from the 1984 tragedy," in Chemical and Engineering News (August 6, 2007, Volume 85, Number 32, p. 26). It's about how Dow is seeking to use some of its P.R. funds not just to plaster every magazine and website you've ever seen with their Human Element ad campaign, but to downplay (cover up, misrepresent, distance, poo poo, make appear as…

'Environmentalism As Bad As Communism'

So says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, fan of Thatcher, admirer of Reagan, despiser of global warming rhetoric. Speaking to U.S. Congresspeople last week, he offered a few nuggets to chew on (but didn't mix metaphors like that). The Inter Press Service News Agency reports it here.* A few snippets: [The] Czech President asked the congressmen not to yield to pressure from environmentalists and abandon the principles of free society: "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants.…

Ken Ham brags about his websites

I really should stop linking to these bozos, since they don't ever bother to link to any sites outside their incestuous coterie of jebus-wanking apologetics sites, but I cannot resist. Ken Ham is bragging about his web traffic, and it's rather pathetic. • In 2010, the Answers in Genesis main website had more than 10 million visits for the first time (10,225,465 visits, previously 8,726,503--a 17% growth) from more than 5 million unique visitors (5,445,617 unique visitors, previously 4,650,206--a 17% growth). • The Creation Museum website had more than 1 million visits for the first time (1,…

That MIT Hunger Strike Guy Ended His Strike!

This now becomes the third in an unplanned series on James Sherley's threatened, acted upon, and now ended hunger strike. I saw notice of this in Science [print issue*] last week. Then, curiosity piqued once again, I found an article ("MIT professor ends 12-day hunger strike") from the Boston Globe about it. The two reports offered different senses of what actually happened. Science made it seem that MIT administration had acquiesced and said (I'm paraphrasing) 'okay okay, we'll give your case more serious and immediate consideration.' Specifically, they said this: [MIT] agreed this…

Solar Bikinis: The Classic Male Designing Mind?

This is ecological design of a completely different sort than our last post. And product design at its most beach-like. The bikini, part of a student project displayed at the ITP Winter Show, "cools your beer and charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!)." ITP, incidentally, is the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. (picture credit, where you can find a demo video too.) Says, Andrew Schneider , the creator: "The suit is a standard medium-sized bikini swimsuit retrofitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in…

Sunday Function

Happy birthday to the United States! It's one of the younger countries on the planet and yet has still managed to have one of the oldest continuous systems of government. Not too shabby. Here's hoping our current wobbles get straightened out and our next few Independence Days occur under more pleasant conditions. I'm not sure what function might fit very well in the context of this holiday, but I'll make sort of a stretch and do a function about the Pythagorean theorem. The Pythagorean theorem is a very ancient discovery with numerous different methods of proof. One of them was discovered by…

Sunday Function

Sine, cosine, and tangent are of course the workhorse functions of trigonometry. You learn 'em in high school, and if you go on in math and science you never stop using them. Now on many occasions you might have the sine or cosine or tangent of some angle, and you want a way to invert those functions to recover the angle from those values. Let's take a look at the inverse tangent function: Now we'll do one of those things were we skip any motivation and just do some stuff for reasons we'll get to at the end. Let's find the derivative of the arctangent function. To start, take the…

Pushmi-pullyu

This is a pulley, pulled straight off Wikipedia: On the test that my students had last week, there was a question involving pulleys connected in a sort of eclectic arrangement. The objective was to find the tension in certain ropes which were holding the pulleys up. Imagine instead of being connected to the ceiling, the pulley in the picture is being held up by your hand. Hanging from the pulley is a heavy metal block, and the rope holding the block up is itself being temp taut by another person. So just like the picture, except for simplicity assume that the rope is not pulled at an…

The Amazing Spider-Man!

Spider-Man, of mass 90kg, is perching 10 meters above the ground when he notices his (depending on the continuity) crush/girlfriend/wife Mary Jane (50 kg) being menaced by... I dunno, a menace. I'm more of a DC fan really. He swings down toward her to spirit her our of harm's way. Assuming he starts from rest and lets gravity do the work, how fast is he going just before he reaches her? Well, he has a gravitational potential energy mgh. And just before he reaches her, it's all been turned into kinetic energy, half the mass times velocity squared. Fig. 1: A free-body diagram. Which…

De Plane!

Here's a rather harrowing video I recently watched. It's a commercial airliner on approach to a runway during a severe crosswind. The plane is attempting to perform a maneuver to keep itself flying over the runway without drifting off course, but this requires flying at an angle into the wind. It's difficult and the pilot narrowly averts disaster by aborting the landing at about the last possible second. The difficulty is one of relative motion. If you're in a boat crossing a river to a point directly opposite your starting point, merely plowing straight ahead will result in your landing…

Some 'splainin to do!

There was, if I am not mistaken, an episode of I Love Lucy wherein Lucy manages to get her head stuck in a metal teakettle. Ethel jokingly (I hope!) suggests that she put her head in the oven to heat up the metal so it will expand and she can fit her head out. A clever idea, not counting the fact that it would have unfortunate side effects for Lucy! But we shouldn't be so convinced it would work. Consider a piece of sheet metal with a circular hole punched out. Heated, the metal expands. The hole will either get larger or smaller - does the overall expansion cause the metal to expand…

Every silver lining has its cloud and the climate-energy bill is no exception

Even the most optimistic elements of the environmental community know that Friday's passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act by the U.S. House of Representatives was the easy part. Getting something comparable through the Senate will be much tougher. Paul Krugman says it best: Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday's debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a "hoax" that has been "perpetrated out of the scientific community." I'd call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to…

Why I believe...

.. climatologists are right when they say we should be worried about what we're doing to the global heat balance. A commenter on my previous post asked What aspects of the science do you feel are most convincing in demonstrating the link between fossil fuel emissions and rising global average temperatures? To which I offered one glib and one sincere but pass-the-buck response. I want very much to get past the whole "what's the evidence for climate change" thing. But on reflection, it's important to remind those who are new to the debate, especially younger participants, just why we have as…

Stephen Chu for energy secretary

The president elect has disappointed many of his supporters by choosing relatively hawkish and right-leaning types to run his foreign and economic policies. But to my mind, his choices for secretary of energy and interior and Environmental Protection Administration chief are more important. And the news Stephen Chu will be energy secretary suggests Barack Obama is going to be progressive where it really counts. Chu now runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and won a Nobel for physics a while back. He also understands both the threat posed by climate change and the role clean,…

Fuller makes (un)common descent into idiocy

Well it's official, Steve Fuller (see here, here, here and here) has officially joined the ID echo-chamber that is Uncommon Descent. He will, apparently, be arguing that "Darwinism is an undead 19th century social theory" indeed stripped of its current scientific scaffolding, Darwinism is a 19th century social theory that has been turned into a 'general unified theory of everything', and as such belongs in the same category as Marxism and Freudianism. The big difference is that Marxism and Freudianism - throughout their existence - have been contested (many would say decisively) by several…

Center for Quantum Information and Control Postdocs

At least three postdoc positions at the University of New Mexico and the University of Arizona's "Center for Quantum Information and Control." Here is a pdf ad for the positions. The Center for Quantum Information and Control (CQuIC) is seeking to hire at least three postdoctoral fellows over the next year. CQuIC has research nodes at the University of New Mexico (UNM) under Professors Carlton Caves and Ivan Deutsch and at the College of Optical Sciences of the University of Arizona (UA) under Professor Poul Jessen. Research at CQuIC is focused on quantum information, quantum control,…

Gisin Wins Inaugural Bell Award

The Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (the palindromic CQIQC) recently established the John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications. And the first winner is (opening the envelope, wondering whether he will find a dead or live cat inside)....Professor Nicolas Gisin from the Université de Genève: Nicolas Gisin, Professor of Physics at the Université de Genève, is a true visionary and a leader among his peers. He was among the first to recognize the importance of Bell's pioneering work, and has throughout his career…

QI Position at the University of Guelph

David Kribbs sends along info about a quantum information position at the University of Guelph: The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph invites applications for a full-time tenure track position to start 1 July 2009 or thereafter, at the rank of Assistant Professor. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to become a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research program in Quantum Information Processing. Guelph is centrally located in southern Ontario, and the candidate will have the opportunity to participate in activities at the nearby…

School's Out For Summer...Almost

Today is the final exam for the course I've been teaching this summer. So I need some reading material for when I'm not watching the students take their exam. Here are two fun ones I just downloaded (one via Alea): arXiv:0803.3913: The Reverse of The Law of Large Numbers Authors: Kieran Kelly, Przemyslaw Repetowicz, Seosamh macReamoinn Abstract:The Law of Large Numbers tells us that as the sample size (N) is increased, the sample mean converges on the population mean, provided that the latter exists. In this paper, we investigate the opposite effect: keeping the sample size fixed while…

Best Science Movie? It Doesn't Take a Genius...

After a comment suggesting that a Science Film festival be held to combat a certain idiotic movie, He of Uncertain Principles agreed, and then the powers that be at scienceblogs decided to hold a poll on the Best Science Movies. And the four choices are...."Contact", "Gattaca", "An Inconvenient Truth", and "Jurassic Park." To which I can only say... What! No "Real Genius?" I mean come on! Talk about the ultimate of geeky science movies. Make that geeky physics science movies. Do I even need to count the ways? Okay I guess I do: Lasers. Really, really powerful lasers. Lasers so…

Measuring Reviewers

I enjoy reviewing papers even knowing it sucks up too much of my time. I mean what better way is there to get out any inner angst than to take it out on the writers of a sub par paper? (That's a joke people.) Reading Michael Nielsen's post taking on the h-index (Michael's posting more these days!), reminded me of a problem I've always wondered about for reviewing. Suppose that in the far far future, there are services where you get to keep control of your academic identity (like which papers you authored, etc.) and this method is integrated with reviewing systems of scientific journals. (…

Off the Queue and Into the Neurons

Books conquered during the holiday resting season: "Learning the World" by Ken MacLeod, "The Crack in Space" by Philip K. Dick, and "Washington Wines and Wineries: The Essential Guide" by Paul Gregutt. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod. A first contact novel. Or rather, a pre-first contact novel. Enjoyable, but I was left wishing that the characters were more fleshed out. Also [SEMI SPOILER ALERT] notable for its use of the increasingly common "universitas ex machina." You know what I mean: "universitas ex machina" is where parallel universes/the multiverse are used as a nice escape…

Garden Update

When the bees start buzzing around, it is past time to get started with the garden. The photo above shows a bee that is finding something of interest on a peach tree. Tomato seedlings are doing well. Notice that two of them are blooming already. They are growing in peat pots coconut coir pots. We use an Ikea serving tray to take them outdoors in the daytime, to harden off. It is still too early to put them in the ground, but we have raised beds ready for them. Today the high temp around here is supposed to get to 81F, but there are still freezing temps anticipated at night in the…

K Street Remains the Fourth Branch of Government

Just goes to show how lobbying reform hasn't gone anywhere near far enough: href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/10/guest-post-bank-lobbyists-not-only-trying-to-kill-new-regulations-they-are-trying-to-weaken-existing-regulations.html">Bank Lobbyists Are Not Only Trying to Kill NEW Legislation, They Are Trying to Weaken EXISTING Regulations By George Washington of href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/">Washington's Blog. Everyone knows that the lobbyists for the financial giants are trying to kill any tough new regulations. But they are also trying to weaken existing…

On Climate Change, the Public May Not Support Changing Their Own Diet, But Would They Support Programs to Change Society's Diet?

In reaction to our BMC Public Health study published this month that examined the potential to re-frame climate change in terms of health, reader Stephanie Parent had this astute observation, one worth testing in follow up research. I was jazzed to read your article "Maibach et al., Reframing climate change as a public health issue: an exploratory study of public reactions BMC Public Health 2010, 10:299" and learn of the Center for Climate Change Communication. The discussion regarding Figures 4 and 5 struck an idea regarding how people did not respond well to the sentence about increasing…