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Is Alexa Ray Joel's "homeopathic overdose" possible?

Alexa Ray Joel, the daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, was hospitalized Saturday with what I originally thought was an overdose of some type of sedative. However, today's Newsday and MTV are reporting that the family is calling this an overdose of a homeopathic medication called Traumeel. Traumeel is manufacturer by an Albuquerque-based company called Heel USA, a company founded by a German physician in the 1920s. If Traumeel is truly homeopathic, there is absolutely no way this product could have caused Joel's hospitalization. If you are new to our blog, you may not know the…

Trust, skepticism and the value of blogging

Too much of anything is a bad thing, and skepticism is no exception. Indeed, without some degree of trust, modern society would be impossible. Which brings us to another of those questions that dominated last weekend's North Carolina Science Blogging Conference: Just what are bloggers good for, anyway? Thousands of years back, long before the advent of toll-free product help lines, the typical member of Homo sapiens was entirely capable of evaluating the advice and opinions of their family, friends and hunting-party colleagues. Most knowledge was essential, and therefore shared by all members…

Hosed again by that damn metric system!

Begin your week with a dose of hilarity at the expense of the editor of the Ely Times, a modest little publication for some of the very few readers in Nevada who don't live in Vegas or Reno. If you have time you can then let the story drag you in a more substantive issue. In an attempt to make sense of the role of carbon dioxide in climate change -- the somewhat inaccurate but useful metaphor of the greenhouse effect -- editor Kent Harper ends up mired in a war of words with climatologist Michael Mann over just how cold the Earth would be without atmospheric CO2. Of course, Harper loses, and…

Requiem for a brainiac

Are we ScienceBloggers just wasting our time when it comes to politics? While I'm sure that none of us are operating under the delusion that anything we write has a significant influence on the outcome of pivotal events like presidential elections, could it be that the scientific, rational approach to running this country is completely irrelevant? Do Americans, by and large, actually distrust intelligence and reason to the point where they prefer their candidates be ignorant and simple-minded? In other words, was George W. Bush more than an aberration? Ten days ago on NPR's All Things…

How to lose friends and alienate people by disrupting the brain

Oscar Wilde once said, "One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation." All well and witty, but for those of us who aren't Victorian cads, reputation matters. It's the bedrock that our social lives are built upon and people go to great lengths to build and maintain a solid one. A new study shows that our ability to do this involves the right half of our brain, and particularly an area called the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). Disrupting the neurons in this area hampers a person's ability to build a reputation while playing psychological…

What is the difference between the human genome and a pair of headphones?

If you've ever put a pair of headphones in your pocket, you'll know how difficult it is to keep a long cord in a bundle without getting it hopelessly tangled and knotted. You'll also start to appreciate the monumental challenge that our cells face when packaging our DNA. At 2 metres in length, the human genome is longer than the average human but it needs to be packaged inside the nucleus of every one of our cells, each just 6 millionths of a metre long. How does it do it? One of the secrets behind this monumental feat of folding has just been revealed by research that reveal's the human…

Holding heavy objects makes us see things as more important

Gravity affects not just our bodies and our behaviours, but our very thoughts. That's the fascinating conclusion of a new study which shows that simply holding a heavy object can affect the way we think. A simple heavy clipboard can makes issues seem weightier - when holding one, volunteers think of situations as more important and they invest more mental effort in dealing with abstract issues. In a variety of languages, from English to Dutch to Chinese, importance is often described by words pertaining to weight. We speak of 'heavy news, 'weighty matters' and 'light entertainment'. We weigh…

The Catholic Church still doesn't get it

The Catholic Church still doesn't get it By Adrian Liston No matter how many revelations of child sex abuse by Catholic Priests come out, the Catholic Church still doesn’t get it. Take, for example, this story told by the Archbishop of New York, in which he recounts a (probably apocryphal) encounter with an angry man at an airport. According to the Archbishop, the ex-Catholic said that he cannot look at a Catholic Priest without thinking “sexual predator”. The Archbishop’s response is telling, as he thinks only of the “shame and damage of the wound” that had been inflicted on himself with…

Jesus, etc.

Listen: genius is genius. Here's what we know: Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" is genius. This need not be argued, as if we had to argue that the greatest scientific and technical accomplishments were genius - relativity, quantum theory, polio vaccine, the human genome, that programmable Roomba vacuum cleaner. We already know it to be true. Jeff Tweedy's work on YHF is genius, in the sense of all great forms of human creativity. It's a subject for appreciation. (and one that goes along with Dave's recent music appreciation posts here, here, and here. If not here too.) Originally…

Simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students

In American high schools, black students typically perform worse than their white peers, which can damage their self-esteem and their future prospects. Studies have found that the fear of living up to this underachieving stereotype can cause so much stress that a child's performance suffers. Their teachers may even write them off as lost causes, and spend less time on them. With so many students caught in this vicious cycle, where the stereotype of poor performance strengthens itself, it might seem absurd to suggest that you could turn things round in less than an hour. But try telling that…

Dinosaur daddies took care of their young alone

In 1995, a palaeontologist called Mark Norrell reported an amazing discovery - the fossilised remains of a dinosaur called Troodon, sitting on top of a large clutch of eggs. The fossil was so well-preserved and its posture so unmistakeable that it provided strong proof that some dinosaurs incubated their eggs just as modern birds do. And since then, two other small predatory species - Oviraptor and Citipati - have been found in brooding positions on top of egg clutches. But a subtler look at these fossils reveal much more about dinosaur parenting than the simple fact that it existed. To…

Pondering a Ponderous Pendulum

Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, which constitutes half of the beautiful and brand spanking new two-building complex now housing the Texas A&M department of physics. The pendulum is a Foucault pendulum, meaning its support allows it to swing freely in any direction. If you put one of them at the north pole, the plane in which is swings would appear…

Sunday Function

There's an interesting book I'm working on called The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, by historian Brian Ward-Perkins. He argues (against a prominent modern school of thought) that Rome did indeed fall rather than merely change, and that European civilization really was wrecked pretty hard with a recovery that by many fairly objective numerical metrics took almost a thousand years to reach its former level of economic complexity and living standards. It wasn't a fast and sharp break separating the Roman from post-Roman world, but it was in fact a break. You can make a similar…

SciRate Papers 7/25 to 8/1

Summary of what's new and happening on the arXivs according to voters on SciRate. 0807.4935 (15 scites) "Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels" by Graeme Smith and Jon Yard. I blogged about this article here. 0807.4753 (9 scites) "Counterexamples to the maximal p-norm multiplicativity conjecture for all p > 1" by Patrick Hayden and Andreas Winter One of the largest one questions in quantum information theory is the additivity of the Holevo capacity of quantum channels. The Holevo capacity of a quantum channel is the rate at which you can send classical information down this…

An Open Letter to Victor Frankenstein

I recently saw the beautiful (and beautifully ugly) National Theatre production of Frankenstein – written by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, and projected into cinemas around the world (just like opera simulcasts). Here is a review of the play, written as an open letter to Dr. Frankenstein: Dear Victor, I just saw the most recent portrayal of your exploits – the Nick Dear authored, Danny Boyle directed, broadcast version of the National Theatre play. What a masterpiece production – one of the best versions of your story I've ever seen – largely because of the intense focus on the…

Science. History. Ears. Happy Together.

This post was written by guest blogger Elizabeth Green Musselman.* One year ago I began producing The Missing Link, a monthly podcast on the history of science, medicine, and technology. In case you are unfamiliar with the world of podcasting, which is a type of audio blogging that began in 2005, let me give you a brief equation that will explain what I am about to do: 1 year = grizzled, world-weary podcaster experience When I was young, back in 2004, we got our history from books and articles and the occasional blog, and we liked it that way. Then along came podcasts and whole new…

Chinese and Western dyslexics have different affected brain regions

(I have been meaning to post this for about two weeks, so if it is a bit dated forgive me.) Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by slower reading skills acquisition, and it is associated with certain structural abnormalities in the brain. However, it turns out that different areas of the brain are affected depending on whether your language is alphabetic (like English) or symbolic (like Chinese). Siok et al. present evidence in PNAS that English and Chinese languages utilize different brain systems and that as a consequence dyslexia presents differently in English and Chinese…

A Review of Smart People

Yesterday I took a day off (first in a while for me), and I had a chance to see the movie Smart People starring Randy Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ellen Page. The movie is about a rather odd literature professor, Lawrence Wetherhold, (Quaid) who is exhausted by the difficulties of academic life. His oft-obnoxious daughter (Page) obsesses over getting into college and feels superior to others due to her intelligence -- as is clearly evidenced by her high SAT scores. Wetherhold is a widower, and since the death of his wife he has been supported by his daughter. When he falls…

Did cooking allow for the increase in human brain size?

Science has a fascinating review about the history of cooking and its relation to human evolution. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, has been pushing the idea that the expansion in Homo erectus' skull size was the result of additional energy released by cooking meat: What spurred this dramatic growth in the H. erectus skull? Meat, according to a longstanding body of evidence. The first stone tools appear at Gona in Ethiopia about 2.7 million years ago, along with evidence that hominids were using them to butcher scavenged carcasses and extract marrow from bones. But big changes don'…

New Potentials in Parkinson's Disease Therapy: Neurogenesis

Recently the topic of Parkinson's has come up both here (in regards to more young people getting the disease) and at Neurotopia (who gave a great summary of a paper which suggested that chemicals in pesticides can contribute to Parkinson's symptoms). I want to keep the ball rolling on the topic by offering a silver lining: a promising new therapy for Parkinson's via neurogenesis (replacing or regenerating lost neurons). This post (beginning below the fold) was written by an expert on the dopaminergic system and a fellow Neuroscience PhD student here at the University of Michigan. We'll call…

Illusions of bodily awareness adapted for the pub

DO you think that you perceive your body and the world around you as they really are? If your answer to that question is "yes", then think again. Our perceptions are little more than the brain's best guess of the nature of reality, constructed from fragments of information it receives through the senses. This is demonstrated by visual illusions, which produce discrepancies between physical reality and what we see of it, and by illusions of bodily awareness, which distort the way we perceive our bodies. Psychologists and neuroscientists have long used illusions to investigate the mechanisms…

Your eyes betray the timing of your decisions

WHEN it comes to making decisions, timing can be everything, but it is often beneficial to conceal the decision that has been made. Take a game of poker, for instance: during each round, the player has to decide whether to bet, raise the stakes, or fold, depending on the hand they have been dealt. A good player will have perfected his "poker face", the blank expression which conceals the emotions he feels and the decisions he makes from the other players sitting at the table. Increasing numbers of researchers are using brain scanning techniques to perform what is commonly referred to as "…

Repetition priming of inhibition reflects more than attentional capture, and is stimulus-based

"Priming" refers to a pervasive phenomenon in which the repetition of a particular stimulus, response, or thought process facilitates its subsequent use. Might this phenomenon extend to more "executive" capacities as well? In a recent article from theJournal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Verbruggen, Logan, Liefooghe & Vandierendonck explore the phenomenon of repetition priming in the stop-signal paradigm. The stop signal paradigm requires subjects to make one or more "Go" responses to a particular stimulus class (typically, to press one button in response…

The Science of Monty Python

Monty Python: The scientists of silliness? I'm currently working on a book (scheduled for release sometime in the 2010s) that intends to be an extension of my research in evolutionary anthropology and the history/philosophy of science. In the coming months I may be tempted to write more about it -- and could be persuaded to publish short excerpts like Brian at Laelaps has been doing with his current opus -- but I'm not quite ready for a grand unveiling. However, I'm often amazed at the kinds of science related books that are commonly published ("related" being the word to emphasize). These…

Reverse Bestiality: When Animals Commit Sexual Assault

Sexual assault is no laughing matter - unless, of course, the would-be rapist isn't human. Who doesn't giggle when they see a small dog humping someone's leg? But what many people don't realize is that reverse bestiality - where an animal makes unwanted sexual advances on a person - is a true problem for scientists working in the field where the actions of wild animals are completely unpredictable. Sure, sexual assault is embarrassing though tolerated when committed by a small, fluffy pomeranian with an overactive sex drive. Most people won't report the assailant to any kind of authority. It'…

"Soldiers", "Troops", and an Unreasoning American

The anticipation of reading is almost always wonderful, but the actual reading is often frustrating. You can spend hours enjoying the wonderful indecision of the bookstore before you walk away with the comforting weight of a new release hardcover in your hand. The book can sit on the coffee table for days, weeks, or months before you finally find the time to sit down with it. At some point, you finally find time some quiet evening to pick up the book, sit yourself down with a nice glass of the beverage of your choice, and open the cover. And by page six, you're wondering what on earth the…

The Playing Field Will Never Be Equal: Gender Equity For Physicists

N.B.: Nature Physics (3, 363; 2007) has an editorial on a recent American Physical Society workshop, Gender Equity: Strengthening the Physics Enterprise in Universities and National Laboratories. This post is based** on that editorial, which is behind a paywall; you can read part of it here. So, the American Physical Society had a gender equity workshop, and all the bigwigs came - chairs of 50 major physics departments, 14 division directors of national labs, leaders from NSF and DOE. "After all, if there is to be change, it has to come from the top." Sounds good on paper. There was…

Reality Matters

I've been looking at the Ward Churchill case more than I expected. I don't know why, exactly. It might be because Churchill is such a fantastically outrageous character - both in the tone of his published works and in the depths of his academic malfeasance. It might be because of the delicious irony involved. Churchill's misconduct was discovered, after all, as a result of the public hue and cry that came after one of his essays came to light - an essay that Churchill had subtitled, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." Mostly, though, I think it's because as I read more of what Churchill…

McCain, the Media, and Baghdad Security.

Senator (and Presidential candidate) John McCain toured parts of Baghdad the other day. He wasn't alone, of course. He had a few friends with him. Senator Lindsey Graham was there, too. So were Representatives Mike Pence and Rick Renzi. Oh, yeah, and they had some security with them, too - judging by descriptions, at least a full rifle company's worth of ground security, not to mention the air support. The purpose of their visit? A demonstration that it is safe to walk the streets in parts of Baghdad. Seriously. No, this really isn't a late April Fool's gag. After the Congresscritters…

Sunday Evening Sermon - Inverse Pascal

I was sitting and thinking earlier today - it's a dangerous hobby, and I try not to do it too often, but sometimes I can't resist - and found my thoughts drifting toward the topic of Pascal's Wager. As some of you probably know, Pascal suggested that it is always a better bet to believe in God than to disbelieve, because if you believe in God but are wrong, you won't ever really know it, but if you don't believe and are wrong you stand to lose a hell of a lot more. I've never been particularly impressed with that argument, mostly because I've never been able to conceive of a deity that…

Microbial species 2: recombination

The cluster of genomes of asexual organisms forms what is called a "phylotype" (Denniston 1974, a term coined by C. W. Cotterman in unpublished notes dated 1960; I like to track these things down). Phylotype is a taxon-neutral term, though, that is determined entirely by the arbitrary level of genetic identity chosen. For example, "species" in asexuals might be specified as being 98%+ similarity of genome, or it might be 99.9%+ (I have seen both in the literature). A phylotype of, say 67% or 80% might be used for other purposes (such as identifying a disease-causing group of microbes). The…

Islamic apologetics in the International Journal of Cardiology

I've run into this particular phenomenon many times: the True Believer in some musty ancient mythology tells me that his superstition is true, because it accurately described some relatively modern discovery in science long before secular scientists worked it out. It's always some appallingly stupid interpretation of a vaguely useless piece of text that wouldn't have made any sense until it was retrofitted to modern science. My particular field of developmental biology has been particularly afflicted with this nonsense, thanks to one man, Dr. Keith L. Moore, of the University of Toronto. He's…

Science in public between consenting adults

Rarely has science been as much a public issue as in the past 30 years. Sure, people have queried the wisdom of this or that science or technology in the past, like the use of nuclear power or for weapons. But apart from anti-vaccination movements since the late nineteenth century, very little public attack was made on the science itself, and, when it was, it was rarely taken seriously. Sometime in the past few years, things changed. Why? This is merely my impression, but I think that science began to be treated as equivalent to personal opinion some time in the 1970s, with the New Left…

The scientist's role in policy-making, part 459

William "Stoat" Connolley draws our attention to a couple of essays by Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia climate team on the role of climatologists -- and scientists in general -- in the policy-making process. I have to agree with William, it's not exactly clear just what Hulme is getting at. Some excellent points are raised, though, and the essays are worthwhile fodder for thought as the Copenhagen conference begins. Hulme may be a fine scientist, indeed one of the best, but I have trouble following his line of reasoning on this subject in both the Wall Street Journal and the BBC…

The Place of Science in Society

It came as an email. Then it was on the Seed Bloggers Forum. Now it's on my frigging Facebook - they really want me to answer this: In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and imagination." And on Tuesday, in his inaugural address, President Obama cemented his commitment to a new ethos and culture by vowing to "restore science to its rightful place." At Seed, we are firmly committed to President Obama's vision and want to help make it a reality. We begin today by asking you, our friends and…

Why James Watson shouldn't be advising anyone anyone about science

Cognitive Daily readers know that we generally shy away from political issues on our blog. The goal of this blog is to show readers what science is all about, through the example of the fantastic research being done cognitive psychology. But when James Watson made his most recent comments about race and intelligence, we took notice. James Watson, renowned for his role in discovering the structure of DNA, is also the adviser to the Seed Media Group Board of Directors. The Seed Media Group owns ScienceBlogs.com, which hosts Cognitive Daily. That's why were troubled last fall, when Watson was…

Why does seeing red make test-takers choke?

Yesterday we discussed several experiments offering converging evidence that exposure to the color red, even for brief periods before taking a test, can result in lower achievement. It's startling research, but as my daughter suggested at breakfast this morning, maybe people are just intimidated by the color red because that's the color that's always used for grading. Aren't we just conditioned to see red as threatening? That might be part of it, but in nature red also frequently suggests danger. Many poisonous plants and animals are red. Blood is red. Hot coals and lava are red. It's…

Agreeing on what to call things -- do we value cooperation or just consistency?

Jim just started playing this year for his school's junior varsity lacrosse team. As a beginner, he doesn't see a lot of action, but it's nonetheless exciting to watch the games -- they are fast-paced, with plenty of scoring and a few hard hits. Most junior varsity teams don't have the equipment budget of a varsity team, so they don't have separate home and away uniforms like varsity teams do. This means game officials have a hard time remembering which team is which, so instead of referring to players as "home" or "away," they use the color of the uniforms to distinguish between teams.…

Everybody Hates Francis Bacon, Part I

Male chauvinist pig? Or worse? I haven't even read Copernicus yet, and probably won't at least until this weekend. As far as my reading goes, the scientific revolution hasn't yet started and I'm still stuck with Ptolemaic glasses on. History 293, though, is churning away, and yesterday we did our section on Francis Bacon and The New Atlantis. (Not satisfied with the course packet excerpt, this is the version I ordered from Amazon.) Man, here was a dude who, although writing in the early 1600s, sounds stunningly "modern"--a term I must now put in quotes due to the fact that I'm studying…

Book Review: Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend

In the middle of August 2008 Matt Whitton, Rick Dyer, and "professional Bigfoot hunter" Tom Biscardi claimed to have found what so many had sought after: the body of a real Bigfoot. FOX News picked up the story, DNA tests were performed, and a grand unveiling was planned, but, as ever, it all was a hoax. There was still no definitive proof that Sasquatch, Bigfoot, the Skunk Ape, Skookum, or a long lost "missing link" by any other name ever existed. Last summer's brief frenzy over Bigfoot was hardly unique. As author Joshua Blu Buhs illustrates in his new book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of…

Indohyus: Almost like a mouse deer?

A beautiful artistic reconstruction of Indohyus by Carl Buell. During the last 30 years paleontologists have uncovered a startling amount of fossil evidence which has illuminated the early evolution of whales. The earliest members of the cetacea looked nothing like the marine mammals we are familiar with today, and in December of 2007 a paper in Nature identified a small hoofed mammal called Indohyus as one of the closest relatives to the earliest whales. This hypothesis was supported by a subsequent study published a few months ago in the same journal. One of the most interesting aspects…

Tracking the location of objects in your mind: It depends on what you believe

Imagine yourself in a room surrounded by eleven objects arranged in a circle. You memorize the position of the objects, then you close your eyes, and rotate a third of the way around (120°). Keeping your eyes closed, can you point to the object that was behind you before? Most people can do this without much difficulty, and only take an instant longer than if they'd stayed in the same position. Now imagine the objects are rotating on a turntable as you yourself rotate, so that the same object is still in front of you -- in many respects, it's as if you've never turned and the objects never…

Shock Doctrine

rel="tag">Naomi Klein's href="http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine" rel="tag">Shock Doctrine is a powerful piece of work.  I became aware of it after a tip from a href="http://www.quirkynomads.com/wpt/">reader.  I saw the video "trailer" for the book, and knew I had to blog about it.  But it has taken some time to pull my thoughts together.   Ms. Klein has written a book about a theory of economic change, as proposed by the free-market advocate href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman" rel="tag">Milton Friedman in the 20th century.  She ties this theory to…

Optimizing publications for a Ph.D. student

New blogger Mrs. Comet Hunter is in the latter stages of her Ph.D., and she's at the stage of trying to figure out how to break her work out into discrete publishable chunks. She recently wrote a post about the topic, and she sent me an email to ask some related questions. With her permission, here's the bulk of the email: Dear ScienceWoman, I've been reading the Sciencewomen blog for a couple of months now (I know, I'm new to the blog thing) - and find it very interesting! I especially like your shoe posts, and "Ask ScienceWoman". I have a suggestion for an Ask ScienceWoman topic: how to…

Alice's late-nite pointers to writing conference papers

I had been agonizing over what would be my first "substantive" post for this new venue. My husband (who will be properly introduced in another post) suggested I make a list of a bunch I'd like to write so I have fodder for the fire when I feel otherwise tapped out. Ah, me of little faith. I made such a list, verily I did. But instead of drawing from the well of better-intentioned ideas, I will blog about what I'd like to see in conference papers while I'm still all hot under the reviewing collar. One of my professional societies is ASEE - the American Society of Engineering Education. It…

How not to negotiate your start-up funds*

If I had the chance to do one thing over again in the whole job search process, I wouldn't hesitate a minute before making my decision of what to change. I did a miserable job negotiating my start-up package. Actually, miserable may be too nice a word. (Let's pause for a moment and put things in context: I had a baby. A month later the whole family flew across the country for an interview. I rocked the interview and I got all sorts of encouraging signs from the department. They told me that they would call within a few days. Weeks passed. About 7 if I recall, but who's counting. I didn't…

Compulsive Gambling a possible side-effect of Restless Leg Syndrome drugs

Restless Legs Syndrome is a neurological disorder, in spite of what you might think from the ridiculous ads on television. RLS is a syndrome where the individual has weird sensations in their legs while they are trying to relax. These sensations can be just unpleasant, or they can be quite painful. The result is that the individual has trouble sleeping -- leading to a marked reduction in their quality of life and ability to function. RLS is treated with drugs similar to Parkinson's drugs -- drugs that function as dopamine agonists. It is known that a rare side effect of Parkinson's…

Clear Think About The Overmedicated/Undermedicated Controversy

Judith Warner has some insightful essays in the NYT column, pertaining to the long-raging question about whether psychiatric patients are style="font-style: italic;">overmedicated or style="font-style: italic;">undermedicated. One of the essays addresses the question directly: style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/overselling-overmedication/">Overselling Overmedication Judith Warner February 14, 2008 ...In the book, Barber argues that Americans are being vastly overmedicated for often relatively minor mental health concerns. This over-…

Reversal of Progress on Folate Supplementation

(This is a public health announcement for women and men.) News agencies are, appropriately, reporting on the finding that the average levels of folate in American women are falling.  (e.g. href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-01-04-folates_x.htm?csp=34">Folate levels in young American women fall, could lead to rise in birth defects) The media are doing a pretty good job of putting this in context.  I am happy to see that the subject is getting as much attention as it is.  But it is so important, that I want to add some additional background information, in order to reinforce…

5 Years after the start of the Iraq War

OK I've been silent too long. But with every political pundit I hear, with every column or blog post I read, I've become more and more upset. I'm distiurbed by all the frivolousness out there when it comes to politics and the current slate of candidates. Seven and a half years ago, we suffered an unimaginable tragedy. Close to 3000 innocent people died, for what? Thousands more suffered, for what? Because a group of fanatical religious zealots had some point to make. We were angry, we needed to do something. Those lunatics were out of touch with reality. They were driven by some ideology that…