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Wanker of the Day: Mike Gene

The pseudonymous IDolator who wrote this: I do not make any appeals to personal qualifications, training, or expertise. The reason being is that if I have no qualifications or relevant training, this may cause some to dismiss or overlook a good argument for this reason alone. On the other hand, if I do have qualifications and relevant training, this may cause some to embrace a bad argument for this reason alone. I would rather let the arguments stand on their own. Thinks this is a fair argument against Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins: is Harris (or Dawkins) recognized as someone who displays…

Nerds and the dating game.

Given that I've weighed in on "nerd culture" and some of the social pressures that influence women's relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on: The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It's pretty much the dreck you'd expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it's not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We're not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, "…

A meme between stacks of papers needing grading.

The grading is unrelenting. The crud is not entirely cleared from my system. I still owe you the promised post on plagiarism. Must be time for a meme (specifically, the ABC meme, which I saw at jo(e)'s)! Accent: Not usually. When I taught lots of kids from Maryland and Virginia, I'd drift a little southern. Out here, I sometimes drift a little surfer (dude!). But, despite having spent the bulk of my childhood in New Jersey, I don't have a Joisey accent. Booze: Usually single-malt Scotch, but this time of year mojitos. Chore I Hate: Besides grading? Dishes. Thankfully, my better half…

Our Health Care System Makes Me Ill

When Republicans talk about their plans for health-care, they are talking about people like me. My insurance plan has an extremely high deductible ($5000) which discourages me from excess "consumption" of health care resources. (This is known as the "moral hazard" effect, which economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured. If I know my doctor visits are free, I'll visit my doctor more.) Even preventative measures (like regular checkups) cost me lots of money. I don't have health insurance so much as I have catastrophe insurance. So…

Testosterone and Comedy

Men are getting less manly: our testosterone levels continue to decline. Given the Hobbesian state of the world, that might not be a bad thing. (Unfortunately, falling testosterone levels have negative medical consequences. So world peace might require a reduction in the male life span.) Over at the LA Times, the always hilarious Dan Neil - I think he's even funnier than Anthony Lane - explores the implications of falling testosterone levels from a slightly more personal angle: My wife and I--and two dozen highly trained and generously compensated reproductive doctors, nurses and technicians…

Creationism and Dinosaurs

When my girlfriend told me that the Baptist church down the street was holding a dinosaur fair at its summer camp, I didn't expect anything unusual. I assumed the kids might watch Jurassic Park, or learn about the teeth of T-Rex, or excavate some fake fossils. Alas, I was wrong. The poor campers were being brainwashed: The church is sponsoring the "Great Dinosaur Expedition," a five-day series of games, skits and Bible lessons for kids. During the kids' evening sessions, adults attend presentations of their own, from "Dinosaurs and the Bible" to "The Early Earth: Eden or Ape Men?" Leading the…

Friday Sprog Blogging: in which hermetic knowledge is revealed and a scientific disagreement is resolved.

Dr. Free-Ride: (to younger offspring) Could you teach me all the words to your song about the planets. Younger offspring: It's secret. Dr. Free-Ride: Please? Younger offspring: Oh, alright! Nine planets, fine planets, In our solar system. Nine planets, fine planets, See if we can list 'em. Mercury is planet number one, It's right there close to the Sun. Then there's Venus, the planet of love, Brightest planet in the heavens above. Earth is planet number three, It makes a home for you and me. Mars, the red planet, is number four. Old man Mars is the god of war. Then there's Jupiter, number…

Mother of all squid!

Well, more like great-great-many-times-great-aunt of all squid, but it's still a spectacular fossil. Behold the Cambrian mollusc, Nectocaris pteryx. (Click for larger image)Reconstruction of Nectocaris pteryx. This was one of those confusing, uninterpretable Cambrian animals, represented by only one poorly preserved specimen. Now, 91 new specimens have been dug up and interpreted, and it makes sense to call it a cephalopod. It has two camera eyes — not arthropod-like compound eyes — on stalks, an axial cavity containing paired gills like the mantles of modern cephalopods, and a flexible…

Amateur Science

In the latest Seed, Steven Shapin has a great essay on the state of modern science. We take the current setup, in which science is a professional activity, shaped by peer-review journals and the priorities of funding institutions, for granted. But it was not always so. Once upon a time, scientists were curious amateurs: Well into the 19th century, and even into the 20th, doing science was typically more of an avocation than a job. In the 17th century, the great chemist Robert Boyle not only financed his science out of his own deep pockets but also shared a common view that doing science as a…

Nature, Nurture and Switched Babies

Once upon a time, back when the Human Genome Project threatened to unravel the mystery of human nature - every aspect of individuality would be reduced to a SNIP - the Nature/Nurture debate seemed like the most hotly contested question in science. Are personality traits inherited or learned? To what extent can we rebel against our nature? How free are we? Those questions now seem rather obsolete. They were rooted, after all, in a false dichotomy. Here is how I summarized this new understanding in my book: What makes us human, and what makes each of us our own human, is not simply the genes…

Free Will and Ethics

Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior: In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage…

Spitzer, Ethics and Evolution

Evolutionary psychologist David Barash excuses the behavior of Eliot Spitzer on the grounds that monogamy is unnatural, an artificial construct of bourgeois civilization: One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female differences, deriving especially from the production of sperm versus eggs. Because sperm are produced in vast numbers, with little if any required parental follow-through, males of most species are aggressive sexual adventurers, inclined to engage in sex with multiple partners when they can. Males who succeed…

Measuring Carbon

Michael Specter has written a really fine article on the ambiguities and complexities involved in the measurement of carbon emissions. Sounds dull, right? It's actually full of fascinating facts: Just two countries--Indonesia and Brazil--account for about ten per cent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. Neither possesses the type of heavy industry that can be found in the West, or for that matter in Russia or India. Still, only the United States and China are responsible for greater levels of emissions. That is because tropical forests in Indonesia and Brazil are…

More on Sexual Fluidity

After posting on some new research that suggests we are more sexually fluid than we typically assume - in other words, our strict sexual categories are largely cultural - I got a fascinating email from a reader: I thought you may find my own experience, having lived in both eastern and western societies, interesting. I was born and lived the first 18 years of my life in Iran, and have been in the States for the last 21 years. Although Iran is an extremely conservative and mostly religious society; social and sexual norms are not what one may expect them to be in a muslim society (or at…

Redoubt update for 3/17/2009

Now that Redoubt has decided that Yellow/Advisory is not to its likely and has returned to an Orange/Watch status, I'll continue bringing new updates of the volcano has events unfold. And nothing much has unfolded since the phreatic explosion that occurred on Sunday. The current state of the volcano, according to AVO, is minor seismic unrest and that is about it. They do offer some more details of the events on Sunday: An AVO overflight Sunday witnessed activity from 11:30 AM until about 3:00 PM and was able to document ash emission from a new vent, just south of the 1990 lava dome and west…

How it feels to go without hijab

Nadia El-Awady, who you'll recall as a science writer in Egypt who helped chronicle the revolution from Tahrir Square (she's also organizing this year's World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha), tried an experiment: I experimented last week. I took off my hijab - the headscarf many Muslim women wear to cover their hair. I have been wearing a headscarf when I leave the privacy of my home for 25 years, since I was 17. That's a long long time in human years. I took my hijab off during a recent trip to Europe. I wanted to know what it would feel like. I wanted to know how people's…

What's the deal with the Tea Party?

Via the Monkey Cage, a study which used an interesting survey technique to assess just how wingnutty the teabaggers really are. They did a survey focusing on issues involving race and politics, especially in states where Tea Party candidates did well last November, and along the way managed to tease out some important differences between various branches of conservatism. For instance, they found that 76% of self-identified teabaggers want President Obama's policies to fail, compared with only 32% among conservatives not affiliated with the Tea Party. Four in ten non-teabag conservatives…

Our streets are full of angels, too

Daniel Hernandez, intern, stays by Gabrielle Giffords' side: Daniel Hernandez had been U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' intern for five days when she was shot Saturday outside Tucson. The junior at the University of Arizona was helping check people in at the "Congress on Your Corner" event when he heard gunfire. He was about 30 feet from the congresswoman. When the shots began, he ran toward them. Hernandez, an unpaid intern who hadn't even finished his first week on the job, ran toward the shooting. He administered first aid, never worrying that his clothes were soaked through with blood (…

Simple answers to stupid questions

Steve Fuller (and fuller) writes to ID creationist Bill Dembski's blog about the question Do We Need God To Do Science?: I debated the question with the historian Thomas Dixon, who basically holds that while we may have needed God to do science, we donât need the deity anymore. My own view is that if we mean by âscienceâ something more than simply the pursuit of instrumental knowledge, then that quest still doesnât make much sense without the relevant (Abrahamic) theological backdrop. I continue this line of argument in a new book, due out this summer. The question's answer is "no." This…

Thoughts from Kairo

Alexandria, actually, but still. I'm here at the British Council's conference on Darwin's Living Legacy. It's really a remarkable event, bringing together brilliant biologists from around the world to talk about how the research program begun by Darwin continues today, as well as historians and philosophers giving us a nuanced view of Darwin himself and the reception of his ideas around the world, not to mention sociologists and education experts exploring contemporary reactions to Darwin's ideas (including my own talk comparing Islamic creationist rhetoric with that of American creationists…

Biology amendments

Lawrence Allen proposes to strike the noxious 7B from Biology standards. That standard states: "analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record." McLeroy claims that evolution can't explain stasis or sudden appearance. Must I observe that stabilizing selection is kinda well-documented? McLeroy would've brought his evidence had he known he had he'd face this again: "I have the Time magazine cover." "It's not complicated! I disagree with these experts." "Yes, it's hard to…

Democracy & Creationism in Turkey

Another article on Creationism in Turkey: To John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, however, the news could hardly be more encouraging. "Why I'm so interested in seeing creationism succeed in Turkey is that evolution is an evil concept that has done such damage to society," said Morris, a Christian who has led several searches for Noah's Ark in eastern Turkey. Members of his group have addressed Turkish conferences numerous times. ... After a decade in the trenches, Kence said he believes aggressive creationism "is part of a larger plan to convert people to a…

Rapid change in media technology

This article about Redbox is quaint and suggests some recent trends. First, other stuff I've read about Redbox pretty much indicates that it's a boon for downscale and techphobic consumers who aren't utilizing services like Netflix, and so pay a higher per unit price for rentals than otherwise would be the case. So though Redbox is putting downward pressure on the DVD sales & rental market, this seems a case where the studios want to maintain "cash cows" in the form of consumers who simply aren't making recourse to the internet for various reasons (25% of Americans are not on the internet…

Did 9/11 give religion a bad name? Probably not

Over at Why Evolution Is True Greg Mayer wonders: I also recalled that the percentage of religiously unaffiliated had gone up noticeably from 1990 to 2008, and that another survey found the percentage was higher among young people. What could have happened so that younger people, growing up in the 90s and 00s, would be less religious? And then it occurred to me: 9/11. Something finally happened which gave religion a bad name. This was forcefully expressed at the time (here, here, and here) by Richard Dawkins. The the fact that the % of Americans who aver "No Religion" has increased…

Japanese are brown-eyed a bit differently

Genotyping of five single nucleotide polymorphisms in the OCA2 and HERC2 genes associated with blue-brown eye color in the Japanese population: Human eye color is a polymorphic phenotype influenced by multiple genes. It has recently been reported that three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within intron 1 of the OCA2 gene (rs7495174, rs4778241, rs4778138) and two SNPs in intron 86 (rs12913832) and the 3 UTR region (rs1129038) of the HERC2 gene - located in the upstream of the OCA2 locus - have a high statistical association with human eye color. The present study is the first to…

Let's keep agreeing

This is nice. Andrew Sullivan has a suggestion to exempt those wanna-be terrorists, the Hutarees, from the fold of the faithful. Surely we can all assent to the notion that a Christian militia of the type now accused of planning domestic terrorism is not Christian. This is why I call them Christianist. Anyone planning to murder innocents by way of IEDs cannot plausibly call himself or herself a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Good thing he threw in that specific bit about IEDs, or I'd have to mention all the innocents slaughtered in Christ's name since, oh, the Dark Ages. They are spared by a…

The secularizing & de-Catholicizing 1990s

Gallup has a new report up, This Easter, Smaller Percentage of Americans Are Christian, which is rather self-explanatory. These data aren't surprising, other surveys report the same general finding. Here's an interesting chart with some long term trends: I want to point to the numbers for Catholicism. In the early 1990s I remember reading popular press accounts about how Catholicism would become the dominant religion of the United States in the early decades of the 20th century because of immigration. That doesn't seem like it's panning out. Why? The American Religious Identification…

Information vs. Meaning

If you regularly follow comments on this blog, you'll know that I've been having a back-and-forth with a guy who doesn't know much about information theory, and who's been using his ignorance to try to assemble arguments against the Kolmogorov-Chaitin information-theoretic measure of information in a string. In the course of doing that, I came up with what I think are some interesting ways of explaining bits of it, so I thought I'd promote it to the top-level to share with more readers. To be absolutely clear up front: I'm far from an expert on K-C theory. It's something that I find…

Asian doctors are white

About 10 years ago Eugene Volokh wrote How the Asians Became White. I think it's aged rather well. Volokh starts: Don't believe me? A recent MSNBC news headline announced a "Plunge in Minority University Enrollment" at the University of California, with UC Berkeley reporting that "minority admissions had declined 61 percent." Actually, the total percentage of racial minority students at Berkeley, Asians included, fell from 57% to 49%. If you exclude the burgeoning group of people who decline to state their race, the minority percentage fell only three percentage points, from 61% to 58%.…

I get email

Gosh. I have been informed that yesterday's posting of my crazy email was too, too harsh, and that I'm such a meanie. Well, I resolved to be much nicer as I worked my way through my neglected in-box, so here are a couple more letters I've gotten in the last day or two. Dear PZ, I find the blatant hostility shown towards God and Jesus Christ defies belief when all either of them (God and Jesus) want is for mankind to have peace on Earth. And peace IS possible if only the emotionally handicapped intelligensia were to open their hearts to the love God has for each one of us - including them…

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory blogging, chapter 7

Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. And so with the completion of the 7th chapter the first half, book I of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, ends. From this point on we shift from history of science to science proper. At over 1,300 pages of narrative prose (add index, bibliography, etc., and it weighs in at nearly 1,450 pages) this is a multi-course meal. But judging from the initial comments when I began my trek through this undiscovered Gouldian land the author started with some rather unappetizing starters which suppressed rather than whetted the eagerness of many for future…

The genetical evolution of social behaviour - I

Inclusive fitness is something you've heard of before no doubt. J. B. S. Haldane, one of the greatest evolutionary geneticists of the 20th century, once quipped that he would "...lay down [his] life for two brothers or eight cousins," a succinct expression of the subset of this framework which is bracketed under kin selection. The logic is pretty self-evident, but in the 1960s a lonely graduate student in England, William D. Hamilton, toiled away attempting to formally explain the mystery of altruism. The fruit of his labors were two papers, The genetical evolution of social behaviour - I and…

Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives

You know a scientist has made it to the "big time" when they are given the opportunity to write to a general audience. Some thinkers, such as Richard Dawkins, have made their name via popularization. Others, such as E.O. Wilson, only became notable figures outside of academia after having established their reputation and stature within science. David Sloan Wilson has taken the latter path. Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives is an ambitious book, as the title should make clear. But just as E.O. Wilson's forays into popularization have…

It weren't "junk" after all

There's a new paper in Nature (OPEN ACCESS), Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project: ...First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap one another. Second, systematic examination of transcriptional regulation has yielded new understanding about transcription start sites, including their relationship to specific regulatory sequences and…

From the Archives: Miscellaneous physics books by Smoot, Batterson, Pickover and Luminet

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one is from August 22, 2008 and reviews the following books: Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe Pursuit of Genius: Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study Archimedes…

Exploring levels of protein structure with molecular models and snake venom

Imagine a simple hike in a grassy part of South America.  You hear a rattle and feel a quick stab of pain as fangs sink into your leg.  Toxins in the snake venom travel through your blood vessels and penetrate your skin.  If the snake is a South American rattlesnake, Crotalus terrific duressis, one of those toxins will be a phospholipase.  Phospholipases attack cell and mitochondrial membranes destroying nerve and muscle function.  Without quick treatment, a snakebite victim may be die or suffer permanent damage (1, 2). The phospholipase from the South American rattlesnake is called crotoxin…

Where will you be after you're dead?

Jesse Bering has an interesting article on why many people have so much difficulty holding a realistic view of death — why they imagine immortal souls wafting off to heaven, and why they can't imagine their consciousness ceasing to exist. He's trying to argue that these kinds of beliefs are more than just the result of secondary indoctrination into a body of myth, but are actually a normal consequence of the nature of consciousness. We never personally experience the extinction of our consciousness, of course, except for the limited loss of sleep — and we always wake up from that (at least,…

More On Female Orgasm

Evolution of Female Orgasm is one of the ever-recurring themes on blogs. This post was first written on June 13, 2005. There were several follow-ups as well, e.g., here, here and here. Under the fold. The discussion about the recent studies on female orgasm, first about its adaptive function and later about its genetic component, has been raging around the blogosphere for a while now. It was spawned by the publication of Elizabeth Lloyd's book on the topic (it is on my wish-list), and by a paper in Biology Letters about the genetics of female orgasm based on a survey of twins. For…

Top Ten Reasons Why I Will Never Be Elected a Dogcatcher, Let Alone a US Senator

This post is really ancient - from September 24, 2004 - but it was fun to write, I remember. In the meantime I learned that it is actually official - as an atheist I cannot get elected for any office in North Caroina (and a dozne or so other states). That is written in the state law. Only people who believe in fiary tales (or are good at lying about it) can get elected here. Under the fold.... I will never be elected a dogcatcher. I'd never run for that office as I happen to like dogs and would have a problem with taking them to the pound. Even if I ran I would never get elected for a…

I get email

First of all, I have to point out that sometimes, amazingly cool people are incredibly stupid about biology. Case in point: Jack Kirby was an evolutionary ignoramus. Now that's just sad. Of course we share this world with related forms of life — we've been looking for years, and what would be a disturbing enigma would be if we found a species that was not related to every other species on the planet. So I'm afraid those panels contain three characters, every one of whom is babbling complete drivel. Still, you have to concede that Jack Kirby was a major influence on comic book art, and…

Basics: Biological Clock

Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite using it all the time. Since the science bloggers started writing the 'basic concepts and terms' posts recently, I've been thinking about the best way to define 'biological clock' and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold: A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of…

Enforcement matters: Philadelphia Lead Courts speed lead-paint abatement

In a recent opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press, David Fukuzawa of the Kresge Foundation suggests that improving the performance of Detroit's public school children requires tackling lead poisoning. Federal and state funds to prevent lead poisoning have dropped, and the millions of dollars spent to improve Detroit schools "cannot succeed without improving the public health of the city's children, especially young children." Reducing lead exposure can be costly and complicated, but the payoff is worth it. Even though the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned lead paint in 1978, housing…

Will We Pass 10 Billion?

The fact that the mid-range projections for world population rose by nearly a billion people this week should have garnered a lot more attention than it did. The UN offers biennial updates of its world population estimates, and for the last few years, the mid-range (ie, the most likely scenario) has suggested that the world will peak around 9.2 billion people near the middle of this century, and then slowly begin to decline. The 2010 estimate, however, found that the decline is no longer considered likely, and that by 2100, the world may have as many as 10.1 billion people. This raises a…

Outcry

By Francis Hamilton Rammazzocchi For the second time in two months, America has witnessed a catastrophic industrial explosion involving multiple fatalities. On December 19, 2007, the small T2 Chemicals in Jacksonville, FL, detonated in a towering mushroom cloud, killing four workers. And earlier this week, the Imperial Sugar plant outside of Savannah, Georgia, exploded, killing at least 6 workers and probably more. Not only were both of these disasters preventable, but the factors that caused both explosions had been subjects of Chemical Safety Board (CSB) regulatory recommendations to OSHA,…

Conspiracy belief prevalence, according to Public Policy Polling is as high as 51%

And it may even be more when one considers that there is likely non-overlap between many of these conspiracies. It really is unfortunate that their isn't more social pushback against those that express conspiratorial views. Given both the historical and modern tendency of some conspiracy theories being used direct hate towards one group or another (scratch a 9/11 truther and guess what's underneath), and that they're basically an admission of one's own defective reasoning, why is it socially acceptable to espouse conspiracy theories? They add nothing to discussion, and instead hijack…

What is the cause of excess costs in US healthcare? Take three - signs of reform

We've already extensively discussed why it costs twice as much for the US to provide healthcare for it's citizens all the while failing to cover health care for all. Most recently, we discussed the hidden tax of the uninsured and the perverse incentive structure of US healthcare which encourage costlier care, more utilization, and more procedures. To summarize, the US spends more on healthcare compared to other industrialized nations because We deliver it inefficiently Without universality problems present when critical and in the ER Fee-for-service incentives in the form of excessive…

Rick Santorum: usually wrong, never in doubt

There is a joke expression about surgeons, "sometimes wrong, never in doubt." Depending on how you feel about surgeons I've heard it begin "sometimes right" and "even when wrong." Applied to Rick Santorum, I think it has to be "usually wrong" if not "always wrong" given the serious of ridiculous distortions, lies, and made up statistics in the last week. Starting with his claim that 62% of people that go to college religious graduate without their faith. It seems plausible. College expands peoples experiences and exposes them to new ideas, and such experiences are not going to always mesh…

Reprogramming adult cells into pluripotent stem cells - what do these new results mean

You guys might have noticed I've been quiet lately, that's because I've scheduled a thesis defense and am under deadlines. However, I couldn't let these two (1) papers(2) on reprogramming of human adult cells into stem cells slip by without some comment (NYT piece here) These reports are a follow-up on landmark animal studies that we discussed previously that showed that expressing 4 genes in cells obtained from adult animals you could induce them to form embryonic stem cell (ESC) like cells that researchers dubbed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). At the time we noted several…

Animal Rights Extremists Wreck Scientist's House

The latest pathetic assault on a scientist came from ALF against UCLA scientist Edyth London. Using a garden hose they flooded her home, causing tens of thousands in damage. However, rather than intimidating her out of performing research in addiction she has written an article for the LA Times, defending animal research. For years, I have watched with growing concern as my UCLA colleagues have been subjected to increasing harassment, violence and threats by animal rights extremists. In the last 15 months, these attempts at intimidation have included the placement of a Molotov cocktail-type…

Obstetric fistula as a neglected tropical disease

Mahabouba*, age 14, was sold into a marriage as a second wife to a man 50 almost years her senior. Raped and beaten repeatedly, she ended up pregnant, finally succeeding in running away 7 months into her pregnancy. Fleeing to the nearby town, she found that the people there threatened to return her to her husband, so she ran back to her native village in Ethiopia. However, her immediate family no longer lived there. An uncle eventually took pity on her and provided her with housing. When Mahabouba went into labor, lacking resources, she tried to deliver her baby herself. Her pelvis was still…