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Clinical trial of deep brain stimulation for depression

Depression is a common neuropsychiatric disorder which affects at least 1 in 7 adults. The condition can have a major effect on patients' quality of life, and is a major cause of both disability and suicide. Many patients with depression can be treated effectively with antidepressant medications, such as the specific serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) fluoxetine (more popularly known as Prozac). However, a significant proportion of patients - up to 20% - do not respond to these drugs, or to other forms of treatment. Now a study published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry suggests…

Aetogate, continued: Norman Silberling shoots his mouth off

Last month I blogged about the ongoing ethics case in which paleontologist Spencer Lucas and several of his colleagues were accused of claim-jumping research from a number of individuals and institutions involving ancient archosaurs called aetosaurs. Mike Taylor has been keeping track and all the developments on an exhaustively-detailed website, and some of the latest news is most disconcerting. On February 21, 2008, it became known that the Department of Cultural Affairs was holding a third inquiry into the case, an article published that very day in the Albuquerque Journal announcing the…

Preparations to Visit Manu, Peru: Vaccinations

tags: Manu, Peru, travel, birding, eco-tourism, vaccinations, Kolibri Expeditions I was contacted by Gunnar Engblom (Kolibri Expeditions), whom I've been casually acquainted with online for years, asking me if I'd like to be the "official blogger" for a birding trip to Peru. Yeow, would I?!? This unexpected offer surprised me, to say the least, but it didn't take too long for excitement to set in after I realized this was a serious offer: I would get to observe and photograph wild parrots! Unfortunately, I have recently been preoccupied with several seemingly insurmountable tasks, including…

Fight to Protect our Public Libraries from the Zombie Economy!

tags: NYC Life, NYPL, public services, public education, public libraries Today, I spoke with several people who work at and administer their local library branches in NYC about the economic situation they are faced with. Mayor Bloomberg, the eighth richest person in America, is proposing a 22% funding cut to all three New York City public library systems (NYPL, Brooklyn and Queens). These cuts would eliminate 943 employees, end all weekend service, and the materials budget will be cut by at least 30%. The City Council must approve this budget by June 30. "At the Brooklyn Public Library,…

Farm and Garden Design Class Starts Tomorrow!

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow Aaron Newton and I will begin our next Farm and Garden Design Class. The class covers everything from the very basics of design - how to get started planning for a garden or small farm, soil, sun and water issues, seed starting, choosing perennials, making the best use of space etc... to small-scale livestock keeping, making money and long term design. We've done the class a number of times, and we've had people with 100s of acres and people with tiny city lots, and people with no land at all gardening in community gardens, on public spaces or sharing…

Preserving Records of the Past, Today

An interesting article from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Preserving Records of the Past, Today by James W. Cortada. In concerns the difficulty that scholars of the history of computing have in finding primary materials to work with, mostly in the form of documents. Scholars examining the history of information technology run into many practical, nuts-and-bolts problems more frequently than historians in other fields that have existed for considerable periods of time, such as diplomatic and political national history. Problems with the history of information…

The Association for Computing Machinery on Open Access

Via Lance Fortnow's Twitter post, it's interesting to see Communications of the ACM editor Moshe Y. Vardi on Open Access: First, a point of precision. Open-access experts distinguish between "Gold OA," described earlier, and "Green OA," which allows for open access self-archiving of material (deposit by authors) that may have been published as non-open access. ACM Copyright Policy allows for self-archiving, so ACM is a Green-OA publisher. Still, why doesn't ACM become a Gold-OA publisher? *snip* As for ACM's stand on the open-access issue, I'd describe it as "clopen," somewhere between open…

Books I'd like to read

It's been quite a long time since I did one of these posts, but as the summer reading season approaches I thought I'd highlight a few interesting items that are coming out soon. Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amazon.ca) In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far…

Nanotech: Rewards, Risks, and Responses

As weâve noted before, research on nanotechnology safety has lagged behind the use of nanomaterials in consumer products. Three recent stories describe the potential rewards and risks of nanotechnology and some of the efforts to learn more about nanomaterialsâ effects on humans and our environment. Much of the use of nanotechnology in todayâs consumer products is of questionable value to society â the tiny particles are used to make tennis rackets more lightweight, skin cream more sheer, and socks less smelly. But nanomaterials also hold great promise for making solar cells and water…

My picks from ScienceDaily

The Secret To Chimp Strength: February's brutal chimpanzee attack, during which a pet chimp inflicted devastating injuries on a Connecticut woman, was a stark reminder that chimps are much stronger than humans--as much as four-times stronger, some researchers believe. But what is it that makes our closest primate cousins so much stronger than we are? One possible explanation is that great apes simply have more powerful muscles. New Link Between The Evolution Of Complex Life Forms On Earth And Nickel And Methane Gas: The Earth's original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to…

Creating an Open Forum to Advance Global Health and Social Justice

At Harvard, a week ago: Recap: Wednesday's Health and Human Rights Discussion Yesterday afternoon at the Loeb Theater, Harvard hosted a forum celebrating the tenth edition of their journal Health and Human Rights. This edition is the journal's first to be presented in open-access format, meaning that anyone can read it without paying the exorbitant fees associated with most journal articles. Bostonist was in the front row as Agnes Binagwaho, Gavin Yamey, Philip Alston, and Paul Farmer (profiled as "a man who would cure the world" by Tracy Kidder) discussed the past, present, and future of…

To Educate vs. To Inform

You may be aware of the ongoing discussion about the tense relationship between scientists and science journalists. Here is the quick rundown of posts so far: Question for the academic types--interview requests The Mad Biologist and Science Journalists Science Journalists are NOT the Problem Just don't quote me Science and the Press Scientists and Journalists, Part Deux Scientists in the Media Science/journalists update redux: Mooney chimes in Science and journalism Journalists and scientists - an antimatter explosion? Madam Speaker, I Yield My Remaining Time to the Paleontologist from the…

Who's scooping whom and why this matters?

Aetosaurs. No, I have not heard of them until now. But that does not matter - the big story about them today is the possibility - not 100% demonstrated yet, to be fair - that some unethical things surround their discovery and naming. And not just Aetosaurs. Some other fossils as well. As I am not on the inside loop of the story, you need to first read the background story on Aetosaurs by Darren Naish - Part 1 and Part 2. Then, carefully read Darren's today's post and responses by Laelaps, Cryptomundo and Paleochick. For the ethical side of the story, read Janet's take. For the gory…

Cutting Academia Badly

A lot of people have asked me to link to and comment on the SUNY Albany cuts and some of the reactions to it by some online academics... To cut a long story short, the SUNY system took another round of cuts, and the President of SUNY Albany decided to cut whole programs rather than keep trimming around the edges. Classics, French, Italian, Russian, and Theatre cut by directive, at short notice and with little open consultation. Gregory Petsko wrote a high profile defence of the humanities, from a science perspective, and the Dangeral Professor hisself pitches his penny's worth in, while…

More on the future of bookstores

A great article in last Friday's Globe and Mail, Will the last bookstore please turn out the lights? The main thrust of the article is that while there's a lot of doom and gloom in the industry, there's also some hope and, more importantly, some innovation. One source of Bleumer's optimism is the "ferocious" level of reading she sees going on among young people. Those ferocious readers will be the regular book buyers of the future. What stores need to do, she insists, is not only focus on old-fashioned face-to-face customer service, but also remain flexible enough to adapt to whatever comes…

On (Not) Talking About It

tags: researchblogging.org, psychology, trauma, emotions, 9-11, psychological health To talk or not to talk, apparently that is the question, especially after a collective catastrophe, such as 9-11 or the Virginia Tech University shootings. A paper that will be published in the June issue of Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology reveals that -- contrary to current opinion -- verbally expressing one's emotions is not necessary to cope successfully with a community tragedy, and in fact, doing so might actually be harmful. Expressing one's emotions in the aftermath of a community…

Worker remain missing four days after failure of West Virginia coal slurry impoundment

[Updated 12/19/2012 below] The Charleston (WV) Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. continues to provide updates (here, here, and aerial photos) on efforts to locate a worker caught on Friday, Nov 30 in the collapse of a massive coal slurry embankment failure in Harrison County, WV.  The worker was operating a bulldozer when part of the embankment failed; he and the vehicle submerged into the pond of coal fines and chemical-laden waste water.   Two workers in pick-up trucks were also caught in the collapse, but they survived and are being treated for their injuries. The coal slurry impoundment is owned by…

Canada moves to ban asbestos. Will Trump follow the lead of our neighbors to the north?

Canada's Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan announced today that her country plans to implement a comprehensive ban on asbestos by 2018. The proposal includes: Banning the import of asbestos-containing products such as construction materials and brake pads; Expanding the on-line registry of asbestos-containing buildings; Prohibiting the use of asbestos in new construction and renovation projects; and Improving workplace health and safety rules to limit the risk of contact with asbestos. Duncan indicated that the Canadian government's action will involve several agencies. Foreshadowing that…

Row-over

On friday, the last night of the bumps loomed like the vast wall of black cloud I could see through the glass wall of our atrium. Fortunately the rainstorms were mostly over by 5 and even the Ladies second division got a clear row. Even more forunately the eventual results weren't too black. This time I even remembered to charge the cox-box so didn't end up hoarse (I'm sure I remember the good old days when only M1 had a cox-box and even then most of the time it didn't work). Last night of the bumps traditionally sees crews, especially from the lower divisions, dolled up in war paint. Ladies…

A Charity Extra! Going Above and Beyond

As many of you know, I am raising money and volunteer time for charity by shaving my head. Yes, I'm nervous about it, and yes, I'm definitely going to do it once we get 100 donors. If you'd like to donate, some fantastic charities that I can recommend are: Heifer International: providing livestock and training in poor areas around the world, helping people to lift themselves out of poverty, while requiring them to, in turn, train others and donate some of the animals' offspring. Kiva: providing no-interest loans to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas, allowing them to lift themselves out of…

Links for 2011-07-11

Thoughts on Cheating « Cooperative Catalyst "Don't tell teachers, "whatever it takes," and then act surprised when they follow that advice to its logical extreme.  Don't tell the principal, "you'll lose your job and we'll shut down the school if it doesn't make AYP," and then act surprised when the leadership finds ways to cheat. When politicians set ultimatums like job security, institutional safety and student retention on kill-and-drill tests, cheating will occur.  True, the teachers in Atlanta were unethical.  In many cases, their students would have performed well on the tests if the…

Links for 2012-04-11

Denim and Tweed: Asking permission Last May, the Republican-controlled state legislature voted to amend the Minnesota Constitution, adding a thirteenth section to the "Miscellaneous Items" of the Constitution's Article XIII to declare, "Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota." The Democratic governor's veto was purely symbolic; in Minnesota, the fate of constitutional amendments proposed by the legislature is determined by statewide ballot. So seven months later, I started calling total strangers and asking them to vote against the…

Tech Note: Our Crappy Computers

The Rundkvist family's aging computer collection is in a sad state. Our newest machine is also the only one that's still working flawlessly. A little 2008 LG netbook, it runs Win XP and Ubuntu linux and is mainly used by Junior as a gaming machine. When travelling, my wife and I like to bring it along for its handy dimensions and slight weight, but the dinky screen doesn't lend itself to everyday computing. My dear 2005 Dell laptop, on which I type these lines, is barely holding together. Its recently renewed Win XP installation is flaky, booting up with an arcane error message and unable to…

Hugo Recommendations

As Kate and I are planning to attend the Worldcon this year, we're eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, which are sort of SF's version of the Oscars, or maybe the Golden Globes (the Nebula Awards being the other). This is only the third time I've had this opportunity, and it's always kind of difficult, given that I end up having basically no opinion in so many of the categories. I do have a few ideas about works to nominate, but I'd like to hear suggestions from other people. So, what should I be putting on my nominating ballot this year? I'll put the list of categories below, with my…

Links for 2009-09-16

Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace "[F]rom where I now stand-9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far-it now seems obvious to me what the book is "about". Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107 The question now becomes: why does it take so long to realize this? Surely this does not reflect well on Wallace, that he so thoroughly buried the lede that someone could abandon the tome 800 pages in and still not know the point. In fact, it seems as though those with only a superficial knowledge of the book-having read only…

Excellent neuroscience grad student blogger breaks my writer's block with her flippant comment about a cytochrome P450

The always-outstanding neuroblogger, SciCurious, put up an excellent post overnight on a presentation she saw at the current Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in Chicago. Therein, she wrote about a poster presentation she saw on the relationship between iron, cholesterol, and Alzheimer's disease. All was quite well until near the end of her post. That is where my writer's block of the last week dissipated and manifest itself as a blogpost-length comment. This is a lovely post otherwise but you've obviously been drinking if you think you could get away with "an enzyme…

You gotta have thick skin

It's finally time to comment on Gore's Law: "As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one." I don't know why this is. I remember the first bumber sticker I saw after crossing the NC-Tennessee border during my first trip into Nashville, Tenn., for my training session with Gore and his Climate Project. It was a 2000 campaign leftover reading "A Gore-free Tennessee." What Gore did to warrant such antipathy is beyond me. I wasn't living in the U.S. during his tenure as vice-president, so maybe I missed…

The Biologic Institute, Bill Dembski, and ID Research in 2008

Over at the Panda's Thumb, Dave Wisker has (correctly) pointed out that members of the DI-funded Biologic Institute produced four papers in 2008: D'Andrea-Winslow L, Novitski AK (2008) Active bleb formation is abated in Lytechinus variegatus red spherule coelomocytes after disruption of acto-myosin contractility. Integrative Zoology 3: 106-113. doi:10.1111/j.1749-4877.2008.00086.x Axe DD, Dixon BW, Lu P (2008) Stylus: A system for evolutionary experimentation based on a protein/proteome model with non-arbitrary functional constraints. PLoS ONE 3: e2246. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002246…

How to Read a Food Label

In a post a few weeks ago, I included links to some current and recently passed legislation on food, food safety, and food labeling. One of them, H.R. 875 -- a bill "To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services" -- has a particular devotion to "science" and "science-based" data and "science-based" practices. It's all so very post-Bush era. Debate about it is now starting to ramp up on-line. But what got me thinking more about food and labeling was the Honest Tea Organic Honey Green Tea with 250 mg of EGCG Super Anti-oxidant I recently…

The "Stick:" Now available at amazon.com

Taking reduce, reuse, recycle to the pinnacle, a great piece from McSweeney's, reprinted below for your enjoyment: THE STICK, RECENTLY INDUCTED INTO THE TOY HALL OF FAME, IS NOW AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM. By Ralph Gamelli **** Nice toy, but not for all children By JJ (PA) We gave our son The Stick for his fifth birthday this past summer, and at first he loved to jump around the yard, slaying dragons and evil knights with his magic sword. Then the girl across the street got her hands on it and started to prance around, pretending it was an umbrella handle. Our son was devastated. We tried to…

Students are “soft-bellied targets”

The animal rights loons are ranting again. These people are simply terrorists, as you can see in this quote from their odious website. Every time a vivisector's car or home — and, eventually, the abuser him/herself — blows up, flames of liberation light up the sky. They're quite proud of taking the unconscionably violent position. And now, just to show how low they can sink, they have announced a new target: our students. Debuting The Soft-Bellied Target and New Resistance Tactics: Bringing the War to the Student Body When we attack professors, we can only expect limited gains. They are…

Indirect Truths: Understanding the Social Impact of Documentary Film

How much impact has Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth had on the global warming debate? More generally, how can we understand the range of influences that a documentary film might have on the public or on policy? I address these questions and others in the introduction to a recent report published by the Center for Social Media at American University. As I review, in a fragmented media system with many competing choices, even blockbuster documentaries such as Inconvenient Truth reach relatively small audiences of already concerned or engaged citizens. Selectivity bias, however, can be…

Our genome: Ten years old and still growing fast

Double helix, courtesy NIH/National Genome Research Institute It's the 10th anniverary of the coding of the human genome. Snuck up on me -- but not on Nature or Reuters. Both of these outfits â two of the best science/med reporting teams out there â published big, beautiful, multipart packages today. They're worth a look even if you're not a genome geek. Reuters looks at what NIH director and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute Francis Collins found when he finally had his genome run last summer: a disposition for type-2 diabetes, among other things. Collins was…

Shifting Tastebuds

Having established the link between overeating and overfishing, it is also worth noting the trend of Fishing Down Marine Food Webs, another phenomenon uncovered by Daniel Pauly and team in 1998. 'Fishing down marine food webs' describes the fishing industry's elimination of top predators in the marine system over the last fifty years. Since these top predators are unable to reproduce quickly, the fishing industry targets the next biggest fish, and so on and so on, down the marine food web. A recent article sent to us by Mike Hirshfield of Oceana fits neatly into 'fishing down marine food…

Some new work on speciation and species

There is a widespread tendency of biologists to overgeneralise from their study group of organisms to the whole of biology. Sometimes this is because the organisms are model organisms, like Drosophila (the "fruit flies" that have been used in genetics since the beginning).Other times it is because specialists tend to overestimate the generality of their results and domain. The recent trend to finding "speciation genes" is an example. For some time now various researchers like Chung-i Wu and his collaborators have sought speciation genes. These are genes that cause speciation, in a general…

Casual Fridays: Calendar Quirks

Last week we asked readers how they used their calendars: we were curious if the way people used their calendars said anything about how busy their lives were. We found out an awful lot about how readers use calendars, but we also found that there may not be much of a pattern to how calendars are used. First, the basics: what type of calendars do CogDaily readers use? It was a little surprising for me to see that over a third of our tech-savvy readers still rely on printed calendars -- 208 out of 612 respondents. Even if readers said they used one or the other type of calendar, we allowed…

Electronic Jihad 2.0

11/11 is to be the new 9/11, according to the jihad-watchers at href="http://www.debka.com/" rel="tag">DEBKAfile.   href="http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=4723">DEBKAfile Exclusive: Al Qaeda declares Cyber Jihad on the West October 30, 2007, 9:23 AM (GMT+02:00) In a special Internet announcement in Arabic, picked up DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources, Osama bin Laden's followers announced Monday, Oct. 29, the launching of Electronic Jihad. On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda's electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. On…

The U.S. Military's Ongoing Use of Psychiatrists

Ever since the inception of the Global and Perpetual War on Terror, there has been concern about the role of professionals with training in psychology and psychiatry in the design, conduct, and interpretation of torture programs. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) banned such participation in May 2006.  The American Medical Association (AMA) followed a few weeks later. These associations do not have any regulatory authority.  Nonetheless, their proclamations and highly influential.  Oddly, the American Psychological Association [the other APA, call it AP'A, (p-prime)] did not follow…

YABM, YABM, YABM

Yet Another Book Meme.  I found this one at Yet Another Ann Arbor Blog, named Bloug.   href="http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000506.html">Nov 16, 2006: Fie on Louisa May Alcott, Roald Dahl, Cormac McCarthy, and all their ilk... Now that's a weird list! These are authors of books that, according to href="http://www.librarything.com/">LibraryThing's new "UnSuggester" service, are least like Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. UnSuggester looks at co-occurrence (or, in this case, lack thereof) in LibraryThing members' collections; sadly, Green Eggs and Ham…

Anaesthetics may increase post-surgical pain

General anaesthetics activate a heat-sensitive protein found in pain pathways and may exacerbate post-operative pain, according to a new study published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Anaesthetics suppress activity of the central nervous system, leading to a reversible loss of consciousness. The suppression of neural activity is thought to occur by the actions of the anaesthetic on the GABA receptor, which is normally activated by gamma-aminobutyric acid, the principal inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. Every year, more than 100 million…

Fool or real? Chiropractic treatment fights global warming

Given that my attempt last year to pull an April Fool's Day gag fooled no one and in essence went over like the proverbial lead balloon, I'm chastened enough not to try it again this year. Maybe by next year, I'll get up the nerve again. In the meantime, this little gem came through a mailing list that I'm on, and I wanted to see what my readers thought of it: Redondo Beach Surfer News. Where the sun shines most the time, and the feelin' is laid back. Sunday Apr 1, 2007. 5:40am Chiropractic treatment fights global warming by Olga Re With the specter of global warming on the horizon, many…

Another fabrication from John Lott

John Lott, in the National Review Online writes: Nor does it really matter that the only academic research on the impact of trigger locks on crime finds that states that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rape. Criminals are more likely to attack people in their homes, and those attacks are more likely to be successful. Since the potential of armed victims deters criminals, storing a gun locked and unloaded actually encourages crime. Lott falsely claims that his own paper with Whitley is the only academic research on the…

More Assistance Creature Follow Up - The History of Service Monkeys, Plus Monkey Waiters

The first service monkey, Jack the SignalmanI'll be posting a few more follow ups to my recent NY Times Magazine article, Creature Comforts, today and tomorrow (earlier ones here and here). Then, I promise, I'll post about something other than animals. But for now, the history of service monkeys: The other day a reader pointed me to what must be the first documented service monkey, Jack the Signalman, a baboon that dates back to the 1800s. His story is pretty amazing (thanks, Carter!). I didn't have room in my article to include as much information as I'd hoped about the history of…

Kopel/Lott/Reynolds vs Levitt--timeline

First, a recap and a time line on the Kopel/Lott/Reynolds attacks on Steve Levitt: 16 Aug 2001 Glenn Reynolds claims that the NAS panel is "stacked" with "ardent supporters of gun control", especially Levitt. 29 Aug 2001 Dave Kopel and Glenn Reynolds write an article in National Review Online where they claim that most of the people on the panel are anti-gun and that Levitt has been described as "rabidly antigun". They offer no evidence to support their attack on Levitt. 29 Aug 2001 Levitt emails Reynolds, denying the charge, pointing to this op-ed as evidence that he is not rabidly…

We Need to Bring Back the OTA

In discussions lamenting modern day political interference in science and the less-than-prominent role science plays in formulating policy, bringing back the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is commonly offered as a key facet of any comprehensive solution. And, this is for good reason, as Gerald L. Epstein explains in a new article at Science Progress: Over its history, OTA informed members of Congress and their staffs and helped shape legislation. But its reports played a far wider role. Since they explained complicated technical concepts to a non-technical audience, they…

My Second Scientific Paper: Matrix Protease Activity in Tumor Cell Invasion

The second paper from my undergraduate work at Texas A&M University was recently published in Molecular Cancer. The abstract can be found here, and the pdf of the full paper here. Molecular Cancer is an open access journal, so a subscription is not required to read the paper. It's also an online-only journal that publishes manuscripts immediately upon acceptance, so the version of the paper currently available is not the final (nicely-formatted) version. (Update: this now links to the final version of the paper.) As with my first paper, which was published in October of this year, I'…

Erasing a single memory

It looks like under very controlled circumstances, with rats, you can pick and choose which memory stays and which memory goes with a new drug. Don't worry though - the CIA won't be implanting and removing memories of last Tuesday any time soon. I'm not saying they can't wipe out most of last January, but they've always been able to do that with a whole lot of electric shocks and crazy drugs ;) Now, aliens on the other hand, they have a decent success rate with people. At last it seems that way since some people don't recover the memories of their anal probes until years later. In any case…

Everyone else on the internet is wrong

I'm crabby. Normally I'm a pretty easy-going dude, but right now I'm crabby and some of the stuff I'm reading on the internet lately is so stultifyingly stupid, I just can't contain myself any longer. It's not unexpected for Dr. Communication-is-My-Field to belie his title with every word he writes, but last week's post of his is truly a new level of dumbassery. Nisbet, who revels in telling the rest of the world how poorly they communicate, lobbed a shit-bomb into the blogosphere when he declared: Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions…

BMI TMI

Note: I've been informed by one or two experts whom I trust that my plan sucks. My basic plan is based on a Weight Watchers model, but I take experts with evidence very seriously, so there may be some serious modifications to this post. --PalMD Obesity is a bad thing. This isn't a moral judgment. If one of your values is long life and good health, then obesity is a bad thing. In general, I think it's a bad idea for me to write about my personal health issues, but I'd like to try an experiment. I suffer from one of the most common and fasting-growing (!) health problems in the U.S.---…

Worlds oldest animal aged to 4000 years

Texas A&M University researcher Brendan Roark announced last week at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that age and growth studies of deep-sea gold corals (Geradia sp.) and black corals (Leiopathes glaberrima, pictured left) indicate these animals live between two and four millennia, repectively. Science Magazine covers the story here, the press release is here, and Discover Magazine reports here. The new findings break all records previously claimed for marine invertebrates like the cold seep tubeworms (estimated 200 years old), quahog clams (estimated 400 years…