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Does Red Weigh More Than Blue?

Let's step into the wayback machine and talk about some research that even the psychologists among us might not be aware of (I certainly wasn't). It seems that at the turn of the 20th century, many psychologists and psychophysicists (including the father of psychophysics, Gustave Fechner) were interested in aesthetics. Out of this interest came the idea, inspired by the work of Helmholtz and others, that geometrical figures had a certain "energy," which influenced the subjective quality of their combinations. For some reason, this idea reminded one psychologist, E. Bullough1, of what he…

Lying-uh and unreasonable-uh

Man, Todd Friel is painful to listen to — so many grating rhetorical tics. Can someone tell me where this weird habit of carefully voicing every vowel and adding extra vowels to the ends of words come from? When he calls Bill Nye unreasonable and lying, it comes out UN-REEE-ZUN-A-BULL-AH and LIE-ING-UH. It makes him irritating to listen to before I even think about the content. Here, you can suffer too. If you don't want to listen — and I don't blame you — I'll give you instead his two stupid arguments against Bill Nye's points in the recent creation debate. They are focused entirely on the…

Book review: And the Band Played On.

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin's Press, 1987. There are a few books on my shelf that I can read any given number of times without being bored or impatient. One of these is And the Band Played On, a painstaking work of journalism that never feels laborious in the reading -- despite being in excess of 600 pages. Randy Shilts, who was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on AIDS in the early 1980s, assembled an intricate chronological telling of the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, from the first glimmerings of…

Homeschooling and chemistry.

The April 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an interesting article about homeschooling families looking for chemistry curricula. (You need an individual or institutional subscription to view the article; it might be worth checking with your local library.) I'm far from an expert on homeschooling (as we're availing ourselves of the public schools), but I'm fascinated by the ways some of the families featured in the article are piecing together what they need for their kids. Why families choose to homeschool is an interesting question. From the article, One common reason [to…

Hanging a whiteboard.

Let's say I was taking down a chalkboard and trying to mount a whiteboard in its place. (For the sake of argument, let's assume I was doing this someplace where I have complete freedom to do such things all by myself, with no work order or "cooling off" period or anything like that.) That would be a quick and easy operation, right? Ha. So, the instructions that came with the whiteboard were short, clear, and well-illustrated. They might even have been written in English rather than translated into English by way of four other languages. Basically, they called for: deciding where you want…

Animal research, abortion, and ethical decision making as a matter of balance, not absolutes.

Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can't help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical…

The Best of Quiche: Let's start with some music.

Sort of. The Quiche Moraine Blog has been a success in a number of ways. We have a community, though it is small. We have a voice, though it is subtle. And, we have simply done a good deal of pretty good writing on it. And now, as we approach our 2,000th comment, I thought it would be appropriate to drag out highlight a handful of my own contributions to that blog that I particularly enjoyed writing, or for some reason or another, look back on fondly. I thought about reposting them on QM, but we've never done that before and I'm not sure we should. So instead, I've decided to pick…

The Phalarope: Not just another polyandrous bird...

MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its "reversed" sex-role mating behavior. For at least some species of Phalarope, females dominate males, forcing them to build nests and to care for the eggs that the females place there after mating. If a female suspects that a male is caring for eggs of another female, she may destroy the eggs and force the male to copulate with her a few…

Louisiana's Stealth Creationism Bill Takes A Hit

Louisiana State Senate Bill 561 is an "academic freedom" bill intended to push discussion of creationism, global warming denialism, and so on into state public schools. This is the latest in a long series of efforts of right wing fundamentalist christians to indoctrinate public school students in their particular religious (and political) beliefs. In 1981, a law was placed on the books in Louisiana requiring that creationism receive equal time as evolution in public schools. The ACLU challenged the bill, and by 1987 it was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court because, obviously, it…

A commenter takes me to task for being mean to Andrew Wakefield

It's been pointed out to me that our old pal David Kirby, perhaps the cleverest antivaccine propagandist out there, is back at (where else?) The Huffington Post (a.k.a. HuffPo) asking why The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won't Go Away (short answer: because opportunists like Kirby have teamed with believers in pseudoscience to keep fanning the flames of this manufactroversy whenever they fade to embers). I've been debating whether it's worthwhile to produce a response to his disingenuously slimy arguments yet again, given that Kirby's being even more disingenuously slimy than usual. In the…

November 1-6 to be "Vaccine Awareness Week"? Not so fast, Barbara Loe Fisher and Joe Mercola!

Posting will probably be very light the next couple of days because I'm at the Lorne Trottier Symposium. Not only have the organizers have packed my day with skeptical and science goodness, but I only have Internet access when I'm back at the hotel, which isn't very much. This is somewhat distressing to me because several readers have sent me a truly bad study implying that (with the press out and out saying that) because investigators couldn't detect signs of cancer in Egyptian mummies there must not have been cancer in pre-industrial times, the further implication being that all cancer is "…

Even more hysterical than Age of Autism?

Remember how I had a little fun with Katie Wright's overheated rhetoric about Kathleen Sebelius' request to the press that they not give equal weight to anti-vaccine cranks when they report about issues of vaccines? Her exact words, if you will recall, were: There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for a variety of problems, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. We (the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services) have reached out to media outlets to try to get them not to give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting. Nothing…

Reactions to the Schechter and Grether vaccine/autism study on Mothering.com

I've pointed out before how MotheringDotCom and its associated discussion forums are supportive havens for the worst antivaccinationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, and anti-amalgam wingnuts, which is one reason why I do not recommend them for any parent as a source of health information. So, out of curiosity, before I move on to other topics tomorrow, I was curious what the reaction on the MDC discussion boards was to the study by Schechter and Grether yesterday that provided strong evidence against a link between the mercury in thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs) and autism/autism spectrum…

Miranda Devine: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Miranda Devine tells her readers what GIGO means: The outputs are totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the inputs. At university we had a name for what often happens: GIGO - garbage in garbage out. And then perfectly illustrates it: Yet a paper published last week by the Lavoisier Group, Nine Lies about Global Warming, says the real censorship is applied by the scientific establishment to those scientists who express scepticism about the global warming "consensus". A retired climate expert and founder of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre, Garth Paltridge, says he…

Duncan and Maltz letter to the AEI

Keiran Healy observes that the U Chicago Federalist Society acted with integrity when Lott libeled Donohue. In the comments, Michael Maltz posts the letter that he sent with Dudley Duncan to the AEI about Lott and the reply they received: October 21, 2003 Christopher DeMuth President American Enterprise Institute 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20036 Dear Mr. DeMuth: As you are doubtless aware, a number of commentators have recommended that AEI initiate an inquiry into allegations of unprofessional and unethical behavior by John R. Lott, Jr., an AEI Resident Scholar. They…

A credulous treatment of the mercury militia on PBS

The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS: I first caught wind of the autism film "Beautiful Son" through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his "journey" of discovering that his child has autism. This, along with other footage and interviews, have become a film about autism called "Beautiful Son." [...] The film has not yet premiered, but there is enough supporting evidence via a web site and film preview to draw a few conclusions. Let's start…

London Calling

Around the time you read this, barring any flight delay agonies, I will have touched down at Heathrow Airport to spend a week in London. It's the first real vacation that my wife and I have taken, possibly since our honeymoon. Certainly it's been the first time I've been out of the country since my honeymoon and the first time I've been to London since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and I was too young to appreciate it properly. After the last couple of months, I desperately need some R&R, and this will hopefully fill the bill. This trip means a couple of things. First, the blog…

Essential reading on HIV/AIDS denialism

Fellow SB'er Tara Smith, and academic neurologist Steve Novella have written an essential primer on the dangerous pseudoscience and quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism. It's published in PLoS and is entitled HIV Denial in the Internet Era. It makes a number of excellent points about the deadly quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism, including how its advocates portray science as "faith," shift the goalposts when asking for evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and in general engage in all the same sorts of logical and scientific fallacies beloved by pseudoscientists and cranks like creationists…

A truly pointless way to die

After competing in a water-drinking contest to win a Wii for her children, a young mother died of water intoxication: SACRAMENTO, California (AP) -- A woman who competed in a radio station's contest to see how much water she could drink without going to the bathroom died of water intoxication, the coroner's office said Saturday. Jennifer Strange, 28, was found dead Friday in her suburban Rancho Cordova home hours after taking part in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest in which KDND 107.9 promised a Nintendo Wii video game system for the winner. "She said to one of our supervisors that she…

Experiments you can do with Mark Steyn columns

Mark Steyn on the trouble he has with facts: Incidentally, I stopped writing for the [New York] Times a few years ago because their fanatical "fact-checking" copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge. I think it's some sort of chemical reaction -- add facts to a Mark Steyn column and it curdles into sludge. Macleans doesn't seem to bother with fact checkers because check this Sten column out: The other day, an admiring profile of Cate Blanchett ("Green before it was hip, she cites Al Gore and David de Rothschild as heroes and believes that leaf blowers 'sum up everything that is…

One year later: The autopsy results on Abubakar Tariq Nadama

Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, as I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "cure"…

House jumps the shark

True confession: I try to watch the medical drama House when I can. It's lead character is an acerbic and brilliant atheist M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie, a comedic actor—which was a smart casting decision), and the humor is snarky and dark. That's just the kind of thing I enjoy. It's been going downhill, I think, because the episodes have gotten far too predictable—there's always a weird illness which is handled via increasingly wild semi-random diagnoses that always, and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient. The infallibility is wearing a little thin. Last…

Monckton's triple counting

Thanks to Drudge, all the right-wing blogs have been touting a story alleging the American Physical Society has reversed its stance on global warming. Joe Romm has the sordid details. The basis for the story is an article published in an APS newsletter (not jornal) by our old friend Christoper Monckton. Monckton's article now carries a disclaimer saying: The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article…

Linking instead of Thinking

Glenn Reynolds, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt are prolific bloggers, posting several posts each day. With such frequent posting they don't seem to have time to check to see if they stuff they link to is correct. They don't accept the scientific consensus on AGW so they link to every thing that comes along about cold weather or global cooling -- for example, the misrepresentation of Tapping's views on the solar cycle got linked again and again and again and again. Since I've been critical of Glenn Reynolds, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt it's no surprise that all three linked to this post where JF…

Donald Roberts, "Scientific Fraud", and DDT

In this piece Roger Bate, Donald Roberts and Richard Tren accuse the UN of "Scientific Fraud against DDT". Their Accusation is based on an Opinion paper by Roberts and Tren published in Research and Reports in Tropical Medicine. So let's look at their paper and see where the "Scientific Fraud" is. Roberts and Tren's key argument is that reductions in malaria in the Americas were not the result of Global Environmental Facility interventions but were caused by increased use of antimalarial drugs. In their own words: "However, their successes were not a result of the interventions we describe…

Ten Amendments Day

You may not know this, but today has been designated Ten Commandments Day. It sounds pretty innocuous, right? After all, why would anyone object to a celebration of the Ten Commandments? And, of course, it's every American's right under the First Amendment to celebrate the precepts of his or her religion. Nothing wrong with that. So why do I have misgivings about this Ten Commandments Day? Could it have something to do with the rhetoric on the website? For example: Is it possible that the mark of God-- the Ten Commandments was placed in America over 500 years ago? Is it possible that God…

Success of the EIS and the Case Study Method

Karen Starko writes: Even though I am a former EIS officer I am still amazed by the many successes of the EIS that Mark Pendergrast so clearly details in Inside the Outbreaks, The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. As I reflect on the outbreaks and epidemics described in the book and my own experience, I realize that the case study method employed in the training course and the two-year hands-on program plays a critical role in the success of the EIS program. Picture this: young doctors, nurses, veterinarians, and other health professionals, many barely out of…

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley

Originally posted by Grrlscientist On March 27, 2009, at 10:59 AM I have lived and worked with people whom I have decided, in retrospect, were more than merely hateful and mean-spirited, they were just plain evil. So when Barbara Oakley asked me to read and review her book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend (Prometheus Books; 2008), I readily agreed. This well-written and very readable book is an exploration of evil people who exhibit an extreme form of Borderline Personality Disorder, which profoundly damages the lives of so many…

Friday Fractal XX

Deep within the pockets of a Mandelbrot set, delicate branches display endless variations. When highlighted with the colors of autumn, (since today is, after all, the Autumnal Equinox,) patterns of exquisite beauty emerge: These patterns can remind us of many forms in nature, including a grove of quaking aspen: Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) Aspen are members of the poplar family, along with their cousins, the cottonwoods (featured in last week's fractal.) While they are known for their brilliant foliage in the fall, the species has another claim to fame: the world's largest organism…

Lott/Mustard Debate

[Originally posted to firearmsreg Aug 16 1996] Daniel Polsby writes: Mr. Lambert, and for that matter most others on this list, assume that firearms are used defensively when they are brandished. All of the endless back and forth about survey research techniques of establishing how often this sort of thing happens has embedded this assumption. No, my comments were directed specifically at the deterrence theory. IF concealed weapon permit holders used their weapons frequently (say two or three times a week) and IF these incidents were given wide publicity (so that criminals were made aware of…

Weighing something [encore edition]

The other day, while I was carefully loosening a perfect oyster from its bearings, a good friend said to me, "Signout, your blog rocks my world. However, what is up with--if you'll excuse the expression--all the mental masturbation?" (Quite the wordsmith, this friend.) "You should use your blog to offer more than just discussion of interesting problems: you should offer concrete solutions." I said, "Solve this," and pointed him toward the following post. Then, with great regret, I schlepped my bags to the airport and headed home…

It's Just an Animal

On the way home from the mountains Sunday night, I was decelerating around one of those lovely Pennsylvanian descending hairpin curves just as a big white dog trotted casually up the slope in the middle of the road. I swerved to avoid it, fully into the opposing lane, barely missed. I swung the car around about a hundred feet down, pulling over to the side of the road. The dog had turned around, and was trotting towards my car, wagging its tail. Heather grabbed Oscar's leash and got out before I could say anything but "Careful," holding her hand out for him to sniff. It barely acknowledged…

Lott's letter to Cramer

After discussion has simmered along via email, Usenet and mailing list, Marie Gryphon has posted a nice summary on her blog. Several blogs have picked up on this: Julian Sanchez, Jim Henley, Jane Galt, Kevin Drum and Thomas M. Spencer. Clayton Cramer has posted a letter from John Lott on his blog. Some highlights: "The overwhelming majority of the survey work was done at the beginning of the period over which the survey was done. It has obviously been a while, but my recollection is that the small number of people surveyed after the first four or five weeks (mainly…

Saturday Review: Oral Vaccines

Last week, I talked about strategies to improve vaccine efficacy and safety. Most of those strategies were in the context of standard, inject-into-your-arm vaccines, but what about totally new delivery methods? This week, there was a review in PLoS Pathogens of strategies for generating vaccines that you can swallow: Enhancing Oral Vaccine Potency by Targeting Intestinal M Cells The immune system in the gastrointestinal tract plays a crucial role in the control of infection, as it constitutes the first line of defense against mucosal pathogens. The attractive features of oral immunization…

Stimulus Bill Moves America Closer to Practicing Evidence-Based Medicine

As part of the stimulus package passed by Congress last Friday (H.R. 1: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), the US will be ramping up efforts to encourage evidence-based medicine. This is a very good thing. Specifically (from The New York Times): The $787 billion economic stimulus bill approved by Congress will, for the first time, provide substantial amounts of money for the federal government to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for the same illness. Under the legislation, researchers will receive $1.1 billion to compare drugs, medical devices, surgery and…

It's Getting a Little Hotter in Here

When I published my review of Sizzle yesterday, I felt like adding a reluctant-parent-disciplinarian-esque "this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" qualifier. Although I felt that Randy Olson's heart was in the right place, I just didn't have many positive things to say about his new movie, and I wasn't too excited about the prospect of writing such a negative review. But, since I had been recruited--like so many others--to participate in this science blogosphere-wide experiment before seeing the movie, I went along grudgingly. Fortunately for me, various events today have helped…

Pervasive Political Interference at the EPA

When the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) last week released a report detailing widespread political interference in science at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I almost didn't blog about it, since the fact that political interference runs rampant in the Bush Administration shouldn't be news to anyone. And, since this interference is occasionally motivated by political or religious ideology but much more often driven by the disproportionate protection of the business interests of the Administration's industry supporters, one would expect political interference at the EPA to be…

The Great Firewall of China Strikes Again!

As demonstrating and rioting against the heavy-handed Chinese occupation of Tibet increased in intensity this weekend, it's not surprising that China cracked down using one of its favorite tools: internet censorship. As of sometime Saturday, the Chinese government had already blocked YouTube in response to protest/riot footage on the site, and recent reports indicate that Google News has also been blocked. The government's crackdown has already caused the loss of about 80 lives, and it's doing its best to prevent footage of the crisis from reaching the rest of China (through internet…

Bush Administration Bravely Fights the New Communist Threat of Children's Health Insurance

Although the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP or CHIP) passed in both the House and the Senate earlier this month, the Bush Administration has once again decided that it prefers to preempt the Democratic process. President Bush had already promised to veto the legislation before it had even come up for a vote, but now it seems that the Administration can't even wait for the two chambers of Congress to reconcile their versions of the bill and has instead decided to carry out its agenda uninhibited while Congress is on recess. Last Friday, the Director of the…

Sex and The Science Baby

A breakthrough infant formula for babies 0 to 12 months * The first infant formula with BIFIDUS Bâ¢--beneficial cultures like those found in breastmilk to help support Baby's healthy immune system1 * Gentle 100% whey COMFORT PROTEINS® designed to be easy to digest * Complete nutrition in a milk-based formula * DHA & ARA for Babys brain and eye development There's a classic saying in the advertising industry: "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." Gerber's "Good Start Protect Plus" baby formula commercial, shown in the video above, is an example. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the…

Monday Pets - Back to Basics: Visual Cognition (Here's one for the cat people)

Today for Monday Pets, we're going to go old school and talk about vision. Vision is arguably our most (intentionally) utilized sensory system, so its pretty important to figure out how it works. And it's what David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel set out to investigate starting in the late 1950s. Ultimately, their work would get them a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1981. Basically, they took a bunch of cats, anesthetized them, and showed them patterns of light on a screen. Meanwhile, some microelectrodes were placed in various precisely determined spots in the cat's visual cortex, and…

Women in the Sciences

Nature has a news article on the resignation of Teri Markow from her position as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution. I don't know much about what happened other than the stuff in the Nature piece, but apparently Markow was frustrated by the treatment of women within the administrative ranks of scientific professional societies. I have some quotes and comments below the fold. I hardly know Markow -- I have met her and a few of her students briefly -- so I am in no position to evaluate her personally. She does excellent research in a top notch department. She is also the…

The difference between astronomers and biologists

The debate about intelligent, extra-terrestrial aliens goes on, with the usual divide: astronomers insisting that the galaxy must be swarming with alien intelligences, which is popular with the media, and the biologists saying no, it's not likely, there are probably swarms of single-celled organisms, but big multicellular intelligences like ours are probably rare. And the media ignores us, because that answer simply is not sufficiently sensational. But we will fight back! Here's an interesting review of the alien argument. There is actually a historical and conceptual reason why astronomers…

Clay County (Florida) School Board Adopts Pro Creationist Standards, Breaches Ethics

First, from the standard news sources in Jacksonville: Despite impassioned opposition from science experts, teachers and some clergy, Clay County School Board members unanimously resolved Tuesday night that evolution should be presented as a theory, and not fact, in the classroom. The board passed a resolution, proposed by Superintendent David Owens, asking the Florida Department of Education to reword its newly proposed state standards, which presents evolution as "the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported in multiple forms of scientific evidence." Baker County…

Hemispheres, triumphalism and xCamps

Say what? I don't believe the three words are directly related--but they all play into changes in articles in the Library Leadership Network over the past week. It's been one of those weeks where everything's a change in existing pages articles than brand-new articles. Sometimes that's a tough decision, sometimes not. Last week, it was a split decision: One major commentary from a blog, and a smaller related commentary from a different blog, started out as a new article--until I realized, the same day, that they worked better as part of an existing article. Anyway... Hemispheres Much of…

White House Office's Two-Fisted Assault on Science in Policymaking

With a calculator in one hand and a red pen in the other, the White House Office of Management and Budget is in an ugly light when it comes to scientific integrity and policymaking. The calculator hit yesterday with a recess appointment that is directly related to January's OMB rule change (see "New Oversight Policy Bad for Science-based Decisionmaking"). With Congress out on Easter break, President Bush appointed Susan E. Dudley to serve as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in OMB. Dudley is considered to be the main influence -- if not the author -- of the…

New Oversight Policy Bad for Science-based Decisionmaking

President Bush signed a whole heap of bad yesterday. Amendments to a Clinton-era executive order will substantially increase the influence of the President's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) over federal agencies such as NASA, the EPA, and the FDA. From Greenwire (subscription required): Under revised Executive Order 12866, each agency must install a presidential appointee as its "regulatory policy officer," reporting to the agency head and involved "at each stage of the regulatory process." The Clinton order created the policy officer post but did not specify what type of agency…

Sex, Love, and SSRIs

Would you rather be miserable and smitten, or serene and passionless? If you're suffering from depression and your doctor has prescribed SSRIs (or serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors) these are your options, according to anthropologist Helen Fisher. Fisher, who has been called the "doyenne of desire," believes that Prozac and other SSRIs are robbing us of our ability to form satisfying romantic relationships. It's no secret that SSRIs squelch the sex drive. Over the past decade, Prozac's libido-dampening effects have become such a part of the cultural conversation that the issue was even…

Microscopic mind control

What would you say if I told you that parasites are infesting the brains of half the human population? Or creepier still, that these little buggers have the power to control people's behavior, making some irascible, others docile, and still others certifiably insane? You'd probably say I'd watched one too many X-Files reruns--and you'd be right--but that doesn't change the fact that it could be true. It's easy to dismiss parasites out of hand. Unless your intestines are playing host to a parasitic colony, they seem fairly benign. But it turns out stomach upset is one of their lesser powers.…

Henrietta Lacks and the changing face of informed consent

I had the good fortune of spending a woefully-insufficient amount of time with author Rebecca Skloot at ScienceOnline10 last weekend. Rebecca has worked for the last decade on a remarkable book which is being released next month, but thanks to a quick hand on the keyboard, an active twitter account, and a glass of Merlot (don't ask) I have an advance copy. (I had already pre-ordered one, which I will likely give away in some sort of selfless act of tzedakah.) The book is called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and documents one of the most important discoveries in modern biology and the…