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Tumors in a (quack) human stem cell therapy

It's almost like a bad Yakov Smirnoff joke, "In America you test therapies in animals before giving them to humans, in Russia..." All I can do is wonder, what were they thinking? Injecting stem cells into a kid's spinal fluid to correct a genetic disorder? Are they insane? Stem cells, in particular embryonic and fetal stem cells, are useful because they represent cells that are less differentiated than the cells that are working at specific functions throughout your body. Another result of being stem cells is that they are able to divide and proliferate without differentiating or…

Migraines prevent breast cancer!!!!!!!

When reporting on science, reporters and editors like sexy stories. Since most science isn't particularly sexy, there's usually a hook. If you can squeeze "risk" and "cancer" into a headline, an editor sees good headline. What I usually see is a sensationalist article that is going to get it very wrong. One of the questions most often asked in the medical literature is "what is the risk of x?" It's a pretty important question. I'd like to be able to tell my patient with high blood pressure what their risk of heart attack is, both with and without treatment. And risk is a sexy topic---the…

Cancer 201---treatment basics

Once a cancer has been diagnosed, we must use our knowledge of biology, medicine, and clinical trials to plan treatment. Treatment can be curative or palliative (that is, with a goal of reducing symptoms or extending life, rather than effecting a cure). Understanding cancer treatment requires a little bit of basic biology, and as with all of my more "science-y" posts, please forgive any oversimplification (but please also note that this complexity stands in stark contrast to the simplistic altmed cancer "cures"), or for overtopping the head of the hapless non-scientist. As you recall from…

Eating can be bad for your health. Oh, and don't forget the phages.

Sure, we have obesity problems in this country, but we also have more direct food safety problems. Summer has brought with it news of the bungled tomato-Salmonella affair, and now, from the Midwest, contaminated beef. One of our local supermarket chains has been forced to recall hamburger meat because of over a dozen cases of E. coli-related disease. These cases have occurred over a wide area, and the bacteria are genetically linked, indicating a likely common source. erv handed me some legitimate criticism regarding my very brief post on diarrhea. It was certainly not my intention to…

A little HIV knowledge

A few months ago, I gave you a short primer on the immunology of vaccines. It's time now for another short, oversimplified primer, this time on the immunology of HIV. This was originally up on the old blog, but it will provide some necessary background for upcoming posts (I think). HIV denialists form a persistent little cult, and one of their newest leaders is Gary Null. Despite their small size and dearth of academic heavy-weights, they are quite loud, and can affect health policy. Let's delve into the immunology, and, once again, please forgive the over-simplification. HIV---nasty non-…

Get off the damn cross already

All the evolution denialists are up in arms because one of their own, Guillermo Gonzalez, was denied tenure. It's persecution they cry! Let's write a letter to ISU they cry! And now Denyse O'Leary says, "It's a conspiracy!" How tiresome. Could a kind reader make me an animated gif of a man climbing up on a cross for me? This persecution complex of the IDers needs a graphic. There are a number of good reasons why Gonzalez might have been denied tenure (and so far I haven't seen Gonzalez himself cry persecution - just his fans at UC) It's getting so old. If you criticize them it's…

A Rule Worth Keeping?

Student guest post by Jay Watson We've all been there at some point before: a hot summer day, your delicious ice cream cone or tasty treat, and that uneven sidewalk. After taking about ten steps away from the vendor, you mistakenly put your foot into a gigantic fault in the sidewalk and accidentally toss your tasty treat face-down into the pavement. For many of us, "what now?" is actually a deliberation of a bunch of different, yet seemingly important questions: Who is watching me? How hungry am I? How much did it cost? Does this thing look dirty? Can I salvage most of it? But perhaps…

Post Polio Syndrome Week - No Presidential Proclamation Required

Student guest post by Ron Bedford. The first week of February 2010 must have been some sort of Post Polio Syndrome (PPS) week. The New York Times ran a story about PPS on February 2nd. On the following Saturday, during the broadcast of the 2009 AKC/Eukanuba National Championship dog show, a Labrador Retriever named Benton was honored with an AKC Humane Fund Award for Canine Excellence (ACE) in the service category for his work as an assistance dog for his owner, Margo Dietrich, a polio survivor who "lives with physical limitations due to experiencing adult-onset Post Polio Syndrome". Since…

Antivirals as a treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome?

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is one of those nebulous diseases that's really more of a diagnosis of exclusion than anything else. As the name suggests, it's characterized by overwhelming fatigue--often so much so that patients can barely get out of bed--as well as a number of non-specific symptoms, including weakness, muscle pain, and insomnia. Currently, there is no diagnostic test for the disease, and the cause(s) is (are) unknown. Indeed, it should be noted that there's disagreement over even the most basic assumption that such a thing as CFS exists, or whether it's merely…

Is OSHA Trying to Snooker Congress?

By David Michaels Days before the House will vote on legislation to force OSHA to regulate diacetyl (the artificial butter flavor chemical that causes bronchiolitis obliterans), the agency has apparently decided that perhaps it is finally time to begin the rulemaking process for this substance. Yesterday, fourteen months after we petitioned OSHA for an emergency standard, the agency has called for a stakeholder meeting to discuss how it might address the problem. Although OSHAâs press release claims that the agency is âinitiating rule-making,â if you read the small print, it is clear that…

Who Cut the EPA Out of Chemical Plant Safety? Vice President Cheneyâs Son-in-Law

By David Michaels How did the Congress pass legislation that not only cut EPA out of chemical plant safety, but also ensured that the job would be given to the Department of Homeland Security, which has neither the authority nor the commitment to do it right? The job was done by Philip Perry, general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who is married to Vice President Cheneyâs daughter Elizabeth. The sordid details are Art Levineâs new article in the Washington Monthly, "Dick Cheney's Dangerous Son-in-Law." Levine describes a meeting in March 2003, at which senior Bush…

Rush to Judgement : industry consultant too quick to give IBM a clean bill of health

by Dick Clapp  The latest issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine contains a commentary from Ken Mundt, a consultant with ENVIRON International Corporation, on âCancer incidence among semiconductor and electronic storage device workers,â an IBM-funded study by Bender et al appearing in the same issue. Mundt says that âthe study offers some reassurance that at this stage of follow-up no noteworthy increases in cancer risk are seen among employees in the semiconductor production and storage device sectorsâ (though he notes that additional follow-up should be considered). I believe he…

Has OSHA Forgotten How to Issue Standards?

By David Michaels In my post Monday, I wrote that breathing diacetyl, the chemical in artificial butter flavor, is killing and crippling workers around the country. It is now more than six years since the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was first notified that workers in a popcorn plant in Missouri had developed the terrible and sometimes fatal lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans. In response, the agency did send an inspector to the facility, but OSHA's Area Director concluded that OSHA could not issue a citation since the agency had no standards on the chemicals in…

WaPo publishes anti-GW nonsense

The pathetic thing is that it's the same old tripe. Emily Yoffe writes "Gloom and Doom in A Sunny Day" and rehashes the same tired old anti-GW tripe. We start with the use of an idiotic example of misunderstanding climate change to mock global warming: It was a mild January evening, and people had filled the restaurant's outdoor patio. As our group walked past the tables, one of my friends said, "This terrifies me." I don't know if she was reassured later by the chilly April, but we are all supposed to be terrified of the weather now. It's just as stupid when people who are concerned about…

Attack of the flying steamer ducks

I like ducks, and I particularly like steamer ducks. Again, here we revisit some Tet Zoo ver 1 text that was originally published in 2006 as part of the Ten Birds Meme. The most widely distributed of the four Tachyeres species*, the Flying steamer duck T. patachonicus inhabits both the fresh and marine waters of the Falklands and southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. While all other steamer-ducks are flightless, T. patachonicus is (obviously) not, and in contrast to its flightless relatives it has proportionally bigger pectoral muscles and lower wing loadings. But what makes the species…

Basics: Binary Search

For the basics, I wrote a bunch of stuff about sorting. It seems worth taking a moment to talk about something related: binary search. Binary search is one of the most important and fundamental algorithms, and it shows up in sorts of places. It also has the amazing property that despite being simple and ubiquitous, it's virtually always written wrong. There's a bit of subtlety in implementing it correctly, and virtually everyone manages to put off-by-one indexing errors into their implementations. (Including me; last time I implemented a binary search, the first version included one of the…

My regrets on your traumatic brain damage!

I was looking for a Hallmark card with that on the cover (and also, preferably, a sad-eyed puppy dog) to send to Josh Rosenau and Chris Mooney, but they didn't have one, so I had to settle for a blog post. Here's the sad puppy, at least. Oh, Internet, you are like a giant greeting card store that is always well-stocked with lovely cliches. What seems to have scrambled their brains is that Richard Dawkins said, in an interview for Newsweek, that "there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God" and accepts that "there is that compatibility". Shock! He must have…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 14 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, 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: No Detectable Maternal Effects of Elevated CO2 on Arabidopsis thaliana Over 15 Generations: Maternal environment has been demonstrated to produce considerable impact on offspring growth. However, few…

Charlotte Allen really is angry at us

Oh, no. I spent a long day traveling, getting my daughter to the airport in Minneapolis so she could fly off to Phoenix for 10 weeks of research (she has arrived, and seems a bit shocked to be in a desert), and then I drove all the way back. I sit down to see what has happened in the world, and discover that Charlotte Allen hates me. She doesn't like you much, either. And she got her little tirade published in the LA Times. Let's take a look and see what she doesn't like about us. Her opening is clear. She thinks we're "crashing bores". A hint for Ms. Allen: never start an essay by declaring…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 17 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, 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: PER3 Polymorphism Predicts Cumulative Sleep Homeostatic but Not Neurobehavioral Changes to Chronic Partial Sleep Deprivation: The variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism 5-repeat allele of the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Personal Touch In Farming: Giving A Cow A Name Boosts Her Milk Production: A cow with a name produces more milk than one without, scientists at Newcastle University have found. Drs Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson have shown that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual, farmers can increase their annual milk yield by almost 500 pints. Wild Boar Given Plenty Of Food And Shelter Do Not Live As Long As Struggling Wild Boar: Lack of shelter and the large amount of food available from crops in the mid-valley of the Ebro reflect primarily how human beings influence the…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Home Range Utilisation and Territorial Behaviour of Lions (Panthera leo) on Karongwe Game Reserve, South Africa: Interventionist conservation management of territorial large carnivores has increased in recent years,…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

It's almost Friday, so let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. 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, Mendeley, 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: Googling Food Webs: Can an Eigenvector Measure Species' Importance for Coextinctions?: Predicting the consequences of…

Bones, Rocks and Stars

How do we know how old things are? That's a straightforward and very scientific question, and exactly the kind of thing students ought to ask; it's also the kind of question that has been muddled up by lots of bad information (blame the creationists), and can be difficult for a teacher to answer. There are a great many dating methods, and you may need to be a specialist to understand many of them…and heck, I'm a biologist, not a geologist or physicist. I've sort of vaguely understood the principles of measuring isotope ratios, but try to pin me down on all the details and I'd have to scurry…

Sleep Schedules in Adolescents

Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26, 2006. Also check my more recent posts on the subject here and here... I am glad to see that there is more and more interest in and awareness of sleep research. Just watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN or listen to the recent segment on Weekend America on NPR. At the same time, I am often alarmed at the levels of ignorance still rampant in the general population, and even…

New and Exciting on PLoS ONE

There are 21 new papers on PLoS ONE published this week. Here are some titles that got my personal attention: Climate Change, Genetics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind's Earliest Ornament Larger in the Pleistocene Than in the Holocene? by Peter R. Teske, Isabelle Papadopoulos, Christopher D. McQuaid, Brent K. Newman and Nigel P. Barker: The southern African tick shell, Nassarius kraussianus, is the earliest ornament known to be used by humans, dating back ~75,000 years. This study investigates why beads made from these shells in more recent times are smaller. It is likely due…

A heartless faith

There was an appalling and tragic plane crash in Montana: 14 people were killed, 7 of them children. Tom Hagler, a mechanic at the Oroville airport, told The Sacramento Bee that he allowed several children ages 6 to 10 to use the airport bathroom before they boarded the doomed plane. "There were a lot of kids in the group," he said, "a lot of really cute kids." Nine of them were members of one family. This was a horrifying and genuinely horrible accident; I can't begin to imagine the grief felt by the survivors, who lost children and grandchildren. I can feel great anger, though. Here is…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 41 new articles published in PLoS ONE tonight. Look around, rate, comment, and send trackbacks. Here are my picks for this week: Song Diversity Predicts the Viability of Fragmented Bird Populations: In the global scenario of increasing habitat fragmentation, finding appropriate indicators of population viability is a priority for conservation. We explored the potential of learned behaviours, specifically acoustic signals, to predict the persistence over time of fragmented bird populations. We found an association between male song diversity and the annual rate of population change…

My Living Will

Note: Inspired by the Terri Schiavo situation, I rewrote the basic template for a living will from one that was emailed to me by a reader, R (thanks!). This was then nominated for a 2005 Koufax Award for "Most Humorous Individual Post". This essay was first published on 2 April 2005 on my original site under the same title. Date: 2 April 2005 Living Will of GrrlScientist, (also known as Hedwig the Owl in some parts of the blogosphere), [address elided], NY, NY, 10024. I, GrrlScientist (also known as Hedwig the Owl), being of sound mind and body, unequivocally and publically declare that in…

Bone Hormone Linked to Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes

tags: researchblogging.org, osteocalcin, type 2 diabetes, obesity, bones, medicine Even though bones seem to be metabolically inactive structures, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, bones are rebuilt constantly through the action of cells known as osteoblasts while old bone is destroyed by other cells known as osteoclasts. Bones also produce red and white blood cells, help maintain blood pH and store calcium. However, exciting new research has shown that bones also act as an endocrine organ. Not only do bones produce a protein hormone, osteocalcin (pictured), that regulates…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, 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: Delimiting Species without Nuclear Monophyly in Madagascar's Mouse Lemurs: Speciation begins when populations become genetically separated through a substantial reduction in gene flow, and it is at this…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 26 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, 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: Sleep Deprivation Impairs Object-Selective Attention: A View from the Ventral Visual Cortex: Most prior studies on selective attention in the setting of total sleep deprivation (SD) have focused on behavior…

The “problem” is our existence

MAJeff here, getting all gay and stuff. It's been a pretty big year for LGBT folks in the U.S. A couple weeks ago, the state in which I live repealed a law enacted during the height of anti-miscegination activity, and is now allowing same-sex couples from anywhere to marry here. Prior to that, California joined us in offering full equality to same-sex couples. That victory may be short-lived, though. There is an effort underway to take away the right to marry. Folks here can help out by contributing to Equality California who are leading the NO ON 8 campaign. I had to chuckle the other…

The âproblemâ is our existence

MAJeff here, getting all gay and stuff. It's been a pretty big year for LGBT folks in the U.S. A couple weeks ago, the state in which I live repealed a law enacted during the height of anti-miscegination activity, and is now allowing same-sex couples from anywhere to marry here. Prior to that, California joined us in offering full equality to same-sex couples. That victory may be short-lived, though. There is an effort underway to take away the right to marry. Folks here can help out by contributing to Equality California who are leading the NO ON 8 campaign. I had to chuckle the other…

deflation, economic dynamics and strange attractors

most people really only think in microeconomic terms and most of the time that is fine, except when it is not an example of this, is the meme that governments ought to cut expenditure when economic times are hard, by analogy with families, which react rationally to budget shortages and overexpenditure by cutting back on spending but, as was famously elucidated by one of the few economist to become rather rich through application of his own macroeconomic theories, this only works in the linear perturbative limit we are not in the linear perturbative limit right now covariance terms are large…

He's Baaack!!

tags: Harry Potter, movie review With one more agonizing week to wait for the last Harry Potter book to arrive in my mailbox, I finally saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night. I literally could not wait one more minute for my Harry Potter fix, so I went to the very last showing of the movie for the night, which kept me in the theatre until early this morning. Since I have been talking about Harry Potter for months now, I am sure you all want to know what I thought of the film, so here it goes; I liked it. But I'll give you more details below the fold (although my comments…

Why Did the Chicken Cross The Road?

tags: politics, humor, satire, why did the chicken cross the road A friend set this to me, asking me if he was the last person to read this important philosophical essay. Well, apparently not, because I have never read this, either. But I found it amusing anyway. Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change! JOHN McCAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road. SARAH PALIN:…

Giant Beetles: Not Your Average Everyday Pet

tags: pets, insects, beetles, coleoptera, hercules beetle, neptune beetle Male Hercules beetle, Dynastes hercules hercules, from South America. This is a popular pet throughout Asia, especially in Japan. Orphaned image. What constitutes a pet? Different people keep pets for different reasons, although I'll guess that companionship is likely the top reason for keeping pets. While I do enjoy the companionship of my pets, I enjoy keeping interesting animals as pets, and that means that, in addition to the large variety of mammals, birds, fishes and the few reptiles, amphibians and…

Creating a Mouse Model of Bipolar Disorder

tags: bipolar disorder, mania, manic mouse, psychiatric research Some of you, like me, suffer from bipolar disorder or might know someone who does, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to write a little about the creation of a mouse model to study the genetics that are thought to underlie the manic phase of bipolar disorder -- a phase that has not been well understood so far. Bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, is a psychiatric condition that affects a person's moods. Typically, a person who suffers from a classical bipolar disorder (Also known as bipolar affective disorder,…

On memorializing miners

by Beth Spence Last week a friend and I visited the memorial dedicated to the miners who were killed in the 2010 Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine disaster.  The massive 48-foot granite structure with 29 ghostly silhouettes is a powerful tribute to the lost miners and to the industry that has been so dominant in the Appalachian region. It is fitting that the memorial is in Whitesville, nestled in the Coal River Valley not far from where coal was first discovered in West Virginia, and that it stands on the very site where, in the days and weeks after the disaster, an organic memorial sprang up to…

Maintenance matters -- in cookstoves and other global health interventions

At Wonkblog, Brad Plumer highlights a new NBER paper that's disappointing to those who hoped that distributing cleaner cookstoves in India and other countries would be an easy way to improve respiratory health and help slow global warming. Many low-cost, traditional cookstoves belch soot, which is bad for the lungs of people who spend long hours near the stoves and for the ice that melts more quickly when soot particles settle on it. Cleaner stoves would improve respiratory health and could run on less fuel, and these changes could be of particular benefit to women, who often spend hours each…

IOM recommends simple nutritional labeling system

The Institute of Medicine has released a report recommending that the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture consider "a fundamental shift in strategy" when it comes to nutrition labeling." While the recommendation for a "front-of-package" (FOP) labeling system is not new, the IOM authors don't just want the usual nutrition facts to be moved from the back of the package to the front; rather, new labels should specifically encourage shoppers to choose healthier products. The authors cite EPA's Energy Star program as a successful government labeling system, because it…

50 serious safety violations and $917,000 penalty don't jive with corporate PR about integrity, safety, responsibility

One Middleton, Massachusetts resident thought it was an earthquake. Others said it sounded like a sonic boom. When Mr. Charlie Veradt heard the explosion, he said "I knew right off the bat that it was down the street," referring to the Bostik Inc. chemical plant owned by the global giant, petrochemical firm TOTAL. Just before 8:00 pm on Sunday, March 13, part of the plant exploded. "'...We were sitting having dinner and then all of the sudden we thought the house was caving in,' said Joyce Cucchiara, who lives near the explosion. 'It was just unbelievable.'" The explosion sent four…

STD programs not sexy enough to avoid funding cuts

By Kim Krisberg Public health director Kerran Vigroux sounds almost matter-of-fact when she talks about having to shut down her department's screening services for sexually transmitted diseases. As she talks about the prevention and education opportunities that packed up and left along with the testing services, there's that familiar, barely audible public health tone to her voice -- the one that says "this makes no sense at all." Vigroux directs public health services in the New Hampshire city of Nashua, and she isn't alone in having to shutter her department's STD services. New Hampshire…

OSHA lists 147 employers as "Severe Violators" of worker safety standards

What do Kraft Foods Global, Tyson Foods, Sea World and Lucas Oil Production Studio have in common? They are four of the 147 employers identified by OSHA as "severe violators" of worker health and safety standards. Earlier this month, federal OSHA posted on its website a document listing employers in 30 States who meet the agency's criteria as a "recalcitrant employers who endanger workers by demonstrating indifference to their responsibilities under the law." The OSHA document is a 4-page PDF and for your convenience, I've converted it into a spreadsheet in MS-Excel to make it easier to…

"Carmageddon" and the Persistence of Traffic Congestion

This weekend, Los Angeles will close a 10-mile stretch of the 405 freeway for 53 hours so work crews can conduct demolition that will enable widening of the freeway. Locals are referring to the planned closure as "Carmageddon," anticipating gridlock on nearby roadways that remain open. The hope is that the short-term pain will bring relief of chronic traffic congestion once the widening project's finished. Unfortunately for hopeful Angelenos, adding more road space probably won't relieve congestion. NPR's Guy Raz spoke to University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner, co-author of a study…

NPR & Charleston Gazette ask court to reject call for "sealed record" in Massey-Alpha merger litigation

[June 3, 2011: Update below] [May 31, 2011: Update below] The West Virginia Supreme Court has taken up the case by Massey Energy shareholders to block the $8.5 Billon sale of the firm to Alpha Natural Resources. The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr., and National Public Radio's (NPR) Howard Berkes have followed the day-to-day event on the suits (here, here, here, here.) Now, their organizations are part of the action. The two news outlets filed a motion today before the WV Supreme Court, urging the judges to reject the request by the California State Teachers Retirement System (a…

100 years ago today, 146 workers killed in NYC garment factory

The New York Times'' headline read: STREET STREWN WITH BODIES; PILES OF DEAD INSIDE. The article went on this way: "Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the General Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. ...it was the most murderous fire that New York has seen in many years. The victims...were mostly girls of 16 to 23 years of age. They were employed at making shirtwaists by the Traingle Waist Company. ...Most of them could barely speak English. Most of them came from Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hard-working…

Greek yogurt boom relies on low-wage Mexican, Guatemalan immigrants in New York

My typical afternoon snack has its roots in New York’s $14 billion a year dairy industry. The state leads the country in Greek yogurt production. A new report by the Workers’ Center of Central New York (WCCNY) and the Worker Justice Center of New York (WJCNY) fills me in on the laborers who make possible my daily cup of Chobani. I understand better now why many, many dairy parlor workers say their employers care more about the cows than the well-being of their employees. Milked: Immigrant Dairy Farmworkers in New York State is based on interviews with 88 dairy workers from 53 different farms…

Study: Fracking chemicals linked to reproductive health abnormalities in mice

In a new study — the first of its kind — researchers fed water laced with fracking chemicals to pregnant mice and then examined their female offspring for signs of impaired fertility. They found negative effects at both high and low chemical concentrations, which raises red flags for human health as well. “These are preliminary findings,” Susan Nagel, the study’s senior author and an associate professor in Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women’s Health at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, told me. “But I think they suggest that we should absolutely be looking more closely at the…