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Groovy teeth, but was Sinornithosaurus a venomous dinosaur?

It's a dinosaur tooth, and clearly one that belonged to a predator - sharp and backwards-pointing. But this particularly tooth, belonging to a small raptor called Sinornithosaurus, has a special feature that's courting a lot controversy. It has a thin groove running down its length, from the root to the very tip. According to a new paper from Enpu Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it was a channel for venom. Thanks to a certain film that shall remain nameless, a lot of people probably think that we already know that some dinosaurs are venomous. But the idea that Dilophosaurus was…

Fossil Fuels Go Down, Finally, Their Reign Over

PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS d-orbitals start off with the ball, hauling it down from the top off, and run the court to drop in the first 2. Fossil Fuels respond, carrying the ball up easily, temperately. They get into a 3-2 formation and then charge right up the gulley, working the flim-flam all the way around until the wizzle blocks around through the spot, right over, into it, oh yes dropping in a lay up with nary a wink. d-orbital comes back quick, dribbles down, passes, passes, dribbles, passes, dribbles, passes, shoots, misses, gets the rebound, kicks it out, passes, shoots,…

Enter Adam, the Robot Scientist

In a laboratory at Aberystwyth University, Wales, a scientist called Adam is doing some experiments. He is trying to find the genes responsible for producing some important enzymes in yeast, and he is going about it in a very familiar way. Based on existing knowledge, Adam is coming up with new hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. He carries them out, records and evaluates the results, and comes up with new questions. All of this is part and parcel of a typical scientist's life but there is one important difference that sets Adam apart - he's a robot. Adam is the brainchild of…

An Atheist's View On Abortion

An Atheist's View On Abortionby Juno Walker On the drive home from work tonight I was behind a pickup truck that had a rather large white sign with red letters that read: "ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN" taped to the inside of his back window. In addition, he had a bumper sticker with a picture of a smiling infant and a Bible verse, Jeremiah 1:5. For those who don't know, this verse reads in part: "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." I've seen this before; and one of my colleagues cited this verse as the main reason she attends anti-abortion rallies each year in Washington, D.C. But on…

Are we 'safe' with 2 degrees of warming?

That is, as the Dane said, the question. The short answer is "nobody knows," of course. The ice core records suggest that we're adding CO2 to the atmosphere faster than the planet has ever seen before. That doesn't necessarily mean that the consequences of doing so ;;;; planetary warming and extreme drought in dry areas, for example ;;;; will be felt soon, or at all. But in the past, such consequences sooner or later come about. And it would be foolish to operate on the assumption that the Earth has some of kind of hitherto undiscovered compensatory mechanism that spares us from them. Which…

Dear John...

Last week, I wrote to John Tomlinson, "a local conservative columnist" for The Flint (Michigan) Journal to ask him for the sources he used for a recent column on the scientific evidence against global warming. He indulged me, and "thousands" of others" who expressed interest by supply those sources in a mass email. In return, I have a few thoughts that I have put in the form of an open letter. Dear John, Thank you for taking the time to share the sources you used in your Flint Journal essay of 19 January 2009, "It's time to pray for global warming," which attracted considerable attention this…

My secret addiction, revealed!

Back in the day, when I was a teenager, I used to hop on the bus to Seattle and spend a day wandering the seedier parts of town. I'd get off around Pike Street, near the Farmers' Market, and wander around 1st and 2nd Avenues, which were not nice places for a quiet young man. But I had an obsession and a pocket full of change, and I was jonesing for a fix. I'd go to the porn shops. Maybe you don't remember 70s-era porn shops. Maybe you weren't even born then. But the like of these beasts is something that we'll not see again. They were beautiful. The typical layout was to have walls covered…

The problem with evo devo

Last week, I gave a talk at UNLV titled "A counter-revolutionary history of evo devo", and I'm afraid I was a little bit heretical. I criticized my favorite discipline. I felt guilty the whole time, but I think it's a good idea to occasionally step back and think about where we're going and where we should be going. It's also part of some rethinking I've been doing lately about a more appropriate kind of research I could be doing at my institution, and what I want to be doing in the next ten years. And yes, I want to be doing evo devo, so even though I'm bringing up what I see as shortcomings…

Reset Button for DSM Diagnosis? (Part 1)

The American Psychiatric Association is considering whether to href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/magazine/05wwln-safire-t.html">reboot their diagnosis machine.  In 1952, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was published.  In 1980, the third edition was published.  The third edition was important, because for the first time, it required the use of specific criteria for establishing a diagnosis.  (See href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/01/03/050103fa_fact">this New Yorker article for a description of the history of DSM and the development of the descriptive…

DeSoto and Hitlan Revisted

About a month ago, I posted about a paper in Child Neurology that was correcting a previous paper that looked at the relationship between mercury and autism. The original paper, Ip et al. 2004, was a case control study that compared the levels of mercury in hair samples from children with autism as opposed to children without. The 2004 paper showed that there was no statistically significant difference in mercury content. DeSoto and Hitlan showed that the p-value for the 2004 paper was improperly computed. Further, they argue that using new corrected data -- published in an erratum by…

Neuroscience of Envy and Schadenfreude

I don't think I am alone in saying that I often feel a little envy and schadenfreude towards my peers. Science is a particularly competitive business with few remunerative rewards, so a lot of my self-worth is tied to comparisons with my peer's successes and failures. I won't deny being envious when someone gets a Science paper. And while seeing the abject failure of my peers isn't high on my list of priorities, I won't deny the small satisfaction that I get when someone who breezed through their PhD gets taken down a peg. These aren't happy-joy-joy emotions. They don't make me swell with…

All the News That's Too Big To Print

Size matters. At least that's the result of some recent research on long-term evolutionary trends that I'll be reporting in tomorrow's New York Times. Here are the first few paragraphs... Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case of evolution, the saying is apparently right. The notion that natural selection can create long-term trends toward large size first emerged about a century ago, but it fell out of favor in recent decades. Now researchers have taken a fresh look at the question with new methods, and some argue that these trends are real. Biologists have recently found that in…

Hierarchical Prefrontal Control: Exception Proves the Rule?

What if we got the organization of prefrontal cortex all wrong - maybe even backwards? That seems to be a conclusion one might draw from a 2010 Neuroimage paper by Yoshida, Funakoshi, & Ishii. But that would be the wrong conclusion: thanks to an ingenious mistake, Yoshida et al have apparently managed to "reverse" the functional organization of prefrontal cortex. First things first: the task performed by subjects was very tricky. Yoshida et al asked subjects to sort three stimuli, which were presented simultaneously. Each of the three differs from each other in three ways: number of…

Free energy:Entropy :: Motivation:Control :: Medial Prefrontal Cortex:Lateral Prefrontal Cortex

When I started this blog back in '06, new hypotheses were appearing on a possible functional architecture of the lateral prefrontal cortex - a recently-evolved brain area implicated in high-level cognitive functions like planning, analogical reasoning, and cognitive control. Since then, these hypotheses have been refined, and the results replicated numerous times. Today, it's essentially incontrovertible that the prefrontal cortex is parcellated into a functional hierarchy in which more anterior areas influence processing in more posterior areas according to the more abstract information…

Pavlov's Dogs: Proving the Null With Bayesianism

How many times did Pavlov ring the bell before his dogs' meals until the dogs began to salivate? Surely, the number of experiences must make a difference, as anyone who's trained a dog would attest. As described in a brilliant article by C.R. Gallistel (in Psych. Review; preprint here), this has been thought so self-evident "as to not require experimental demonstration" - yet information theoretic analysis suggest the idea is incorrect, at least when the time from the bell to the food is constant. More problematic is the fact that the whole issue is ill-formed for experimental verification…

A Reply to Dr. Isis

A warning: if you are a survivor of sexual assault you may just want to skip this post and the ensuing ugly comment thread it is sure to engender. A week or so ago the redoubtable Dr. Isis wrote an open letter to me. In part she wrote: The pragmatic part of me wants to agree with you that there is no place for open ogling in the workplace. The other part of me fears that there may be a hint of truth in Greg's argument that we are inherently sexual beings... I see no reason to fear the truth that we are inherently sexual beings. But the fact that we are sexual beings does not mean that…

Letters, Packages, Good Advice: How Mom Nurtured My Inner Engineer

The theme of the upcoming Scientiae carnival is "Mothers and Others, women who have influenced you along the way". So here are my musings. scientiae-carnival I am fond of saying that my mom is the reason I became an engineer. She is not, of course, the sole reason I became an engineer, nor is she the sole person responsible for me sticking it out despite all the crap I had to put up with and all the jerkwads who tried to discourage me and get me to quit along the way. But she played a pretty significant role, and that's all the more remarkable given who she is and where she came from.…

Joy of Science Week 2 Reading Summaries

Welcome to the Week 2 of our course on "Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science". This post will be a presentation of the summaries for each of this week's assigned readings. If you were not able to do the readings or couldn't get access to the books, I hope this post will give you a good flavor of what the week's readings were all about. You can reference the course syllabus for more details about the readings in the whole course and the course structure. Here's the initial post about the course. And here are some guidelines about how I'll post on readings and what we should strive for in…

The Montreal Massacre and Gendercide In Iraq

This post grew out of an exchange with Benjamin Franz on my post This Is The Patriarchy: When Talking To The Master, Speak In A Civil Tone. I felt the exchange itself was worth promoting to a post, with some additional commentary, especially since we are getting so close to the anniversary date of the Montreal massacre. For those who are not familiar with this tragic event, you will find a case study at Gendercide.org. Here's a summary from their site: December 6, 1989 is a date that lives in the collective consciousness of Canadians, and many others worldwide. On that day, a deranged…

Framing: It's About The Goal

During a weekend that was marked by the release of another of the IPCC's summaries for policymakers, the hottest topic here at Scienceblogs was (still) the Nisbet/Mooney "Framing Science" paper. (It's also a bit of a water-cooler debate topic here at UH right now, and I suspect the same is going to be true at other universities.) This is, of course, not unexpected. It's a touchy topic among scientists, and has been for some time. One paper is not going to change that overnight. Some good points have been raised by people on both sides of this debate, but there's also been a hell of a lot…

How fast can evolution work?

There's been a bit of talk about "Evolutionary Speed Limits" over at the Intelligent Design weblog Uncommon Descent. Most of the discussion involves "Haldane's Dilemma." This concept is rooted in an article written by the noted evolutionary geneticist J. B. S Haldane in 1957. There's a lot of math involved, and you can see it over at the Wikipedia page I linked above. The bottom line, for those not interested in the math, is this: according to Haldane's calculations, a species cannot reasonably fix beneficial mutations (a particular mutation becomes "fixed" when it is present in all of the…

Guidelines of EMS #19.

The Cheerful Oncologist just tossed up a post on one of the Laws of Medicine. Sitting here, on my third beer of the night, I can't help but wonder if he knows how lucky he is to be working in an area of medicine that is stable enough to have laws. Back in my younger days, a decade or so ago, I put in a couple of years as an EMT. Emergency Medical Services has no laws, and while there are things that we might call "rules," they're more like guidelines. Since I'm writing up this particular trip down memory lane in response to a post from an MD, it seems only appropriate to start with Guideline…

Cladism and culture

Razib has a little post on cultural cladism, but I think he gets it quite wrong. He repeats the usual trope canard that culture isn't like biology in terms of its evolution. I think it is exactly like it, and that the "analogy" between cultural traditions and species is quite exact. All that differs is the frequency of the various kinds of evolution. For instance, take Razib's example. He says that because Judaism is very unlike Christianity in some respects, and much more strictly like Islam in its monotheism, it should be seen as a sister taxon to Islam and not Christianity, and the…

On evolved morality

Larry Arnhart has a post up on how Huck Finn's moral quandary about turning in Jim, the escaped slave, as good religion said he should (at the time), when he has come to know and admire Jim as a man, displays the evolved nature of morality. I tend to agree with this view. Huck decides, "Very well then, I'll go to hell". Here's the entire passage, one of the greatest in English literature. Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell…

Sociobiology 5: What is at issue

So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts. Humans are animals. They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes. Like other animals, their behaviours are formed, constrained, and in most cases fully dependent upon their biology, but the confounding factor in doing sociobiology is the trap of taking one's own culture, the culture of the researcher, as being "normal" and treating all other cultures as less than normal, or primitive, or in some other manner less than worthy, treating biases…

"Class" war

An essay in Nature recently, titled "A question of class" (by Jeffrey Parsons and Yair Wand) puts the case that classification is crucial to science and needs to be understood. They hold, as I do, that a poor understanding of classification - particularly of the concepts/words "class" and "category" - lead to unproductive and dangerous conclusions within science. But I don't think they get there quite yet... Classification - the act of putting things into classes - is something that every science does, ranging from elements and planets, to diseases, taxa and functions. The authors make the…

The evolution of morality

A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it. It's what humans do. We are social apes that follow rules. Sometimes the sanctions for following rules (which turn out to be sanctions for potential defectors rather than the majority, who will tend to follow rules with or without promises of reward or punishment) rely on a god. Mostly, they don't. The famous Euthyphro Dilemma (whether something is good because God…

Sociology and science

I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and contacts over the years (you study what? Your navel?), I guess I am a bit inured to such things. But I forgot that in this case there is a double whammy: philosophers have spent a lot of time mocking sociology, especially in the context of science. So below the fold, I put a comment made by respected sociologist of science, Eli Gerson, which he put in the comments of that post, and which…

How to report scientific research to a general audience

Today I'm going to be working with some students in Greta's course "Psychology Goes to the Movies" to help them write CogDaily-style reports on scholarly research. With any luck, you'll see their reports here this summer! I thought CogDaily readers might be interested in some of the principles I'll be sharing with Greta's students, so I'm reprinting them below. If you have any other suggestions for them or other science writers, feel free to add them in the comments section. 1. Find interesting research This may seem like an obvious step, but there are a couple of problems with the way…

Do VLBW Preemies Get PTSD?

This is in response to a href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/05/childhood_ptsd.php#comment-439606">comment from a prior post.  There are a few related questions here. Can preemies develop PTSD, can they be labeled with PTSD, if they can get PTSD is it fundamentally the same as it is in adults, and if it is different, should we call it something else???? The comment was left by Stacy, the author of a blog, href="http://thepreemieexperiment.blogspot.com/">The Preemie Experiment.  I spent a bit of time on href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi">Medline…

A tale of two weeks: week 2

I've survived my spring break; now I have my first week back, while my husband tries to survive his. Week of March 17-23 Monday we moved the appliances and all the kitchen stuff back into the kitchen, packed up all my stuff from the previous week, all my husband's stuff for the forthcoming week (his spring break), all my parents' stuff for their trip to visit my sister, and a bunch of extra boxes to move to our other house. We packed up the fridge so we'd have something to eat when we got back to Indiana, and put it all into 3 cars. We put one more poly coat on the floor, cleaned, and made…

The neurobiology of fear

Fear, that most primitive of emotions, is good, at least when it is kept under control. It is essential for survival, allowing an organism to detect a potential threat to its life. Too much fear, however, can lead to pathological conditions such as anxiety, phobia, paranoia, or post-traumatic stress disorder. The neural circuitry which processes information about fear is well mapped, but otherwise, little else is known about the biological basis of this emotion. In recent years, however, neuroscientists elucidated some of the cellular and molecular mechnisms underlying fear. A greater…

The quantum mechanics of smell

Olfaction (smell) is the most mysterious of senses, and is wrongly regarded as insignificant by most people. The sense of taste, for example, consists in large part of smell - try holding your nose next time you eat - and the recent identification of putative pheromone receptors in humans suggests that olfaction affects behaviour in as yet unknown ways. The human nose, while not as sensitive as, say, that of a dog, can still detect very low concentrations of odorant molecules as they diffuse through the air. The initial event in the process of olfaction is the recognition of an odorant…

Repost: Guide to Getting Into Graduate School for the Sciences

A common question I am asked, on my blog and in real life, is what is the "trick" to getting into a good graduate program (for the sciences). The trick is that there is no trick, but there are a few preparatory steps that *do* make all the difference in the application process. And no, it isn't all about GPA. Cause I didn't even have one. 1. Spend your spare time doing research. This one should be a no-brainer, so to speak. If you want a career in research, you need to show your commitment early on. Also, as tough as it might be, many research positions are not paid. You gotta just suck it…

Tomorrow's Myriad appeal: are genes unpatentable products of nature?

Tomorrow morning, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hear arguments in the appeal of Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - better known as the Myriad gene patent case.* It has the patent and genetic blogospheres in a bit of a tizzy, and the mainstream media is picking up on it too. See, for example, this Atlantic article by Andrew Cohen, this Nature.com editorial by my friend Shobita Parthasarathy, and even a "Spectator's Guide to the Myriad Oral Argument" by Genomics Law Report -- which has a dedicated icon and…

He's Just a Frackin' Adolescent Ass

Way, way back in September of 2005, a Danish newspaper published some cartoons depicting Muslims and their prophet, and in response, thousands of Muslim extremists responded with varying degrees of threatened and actual violence. As you all know, this resulted in a storm of media coverage around the world, including pretty extensive coverage in the American media. This coverage resulted in several important and, it seems to me, pretty productive discussions on a wide variety of relevant issues, including self-censorship among journalists, the double standard that exists when criticizing…

Cognitive Load and Moral Judgment

I've been posting about moral cognition anytime a new and interesting result pops up for a while now, and every time I think I've said before, though it bears repeating, that every time I read another article on moral cognition, I'm more confused than I was before reading it. Part of the problem, I think, stems from a tendency towards theoretical extremes. For a long time, in fact for most of the history of moral psychology, empirical or otherwise, some form of "rationalism" dominated. That is the view that there are ethical rules in our heads, and that moral judgment involve applying those…

You're No Suffragist

This is the way it always works. I quit the nouveau atheist blogs cold turkey, and their nonsense starts popping up elsewhere so that I can't escape it. That's how I learned that some of them are now comparing their movement to the suffragists. The comparison seems to have been first made by Larry Moron Moran in a comment at yet another blog (see, they're everywhere!), and was subsequently endorsed by PZ Myers, who writes in a comment: When we compare atheists to feminists, the labor movement, gays, or civil rights, we are not saying these are identical; in this case, it is to a narrower…

How Transcription Affects Genomic Organization and Vice Versa

Recently there has been a flood of press about epigenetics and non-coding RNA. What is lacking from these articles is a description of how DNA is packaged and what DNA elements such as promoters and enhancers do. Today I would like to touch upon all of these subjects with a post on how DNA is organized and how this affects the turning on or off of genes. OK here we go ... One of the biggest findings over the past couple of years is how the act of transcription feeds back onto the organization of DNA. What do I mean by that? Well in our cells, DNA is wrapped around highly conserved…

LSD discovered on this day 65 years ago

On this day in 1943, Albert Hofmann (right), a chemist working for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD. Hofmann had actually first synthesized the drug 5 years earlier, as part of a research program in which the therapeutic effects of derivatives of ergot alkaloids - chemicals produced by a fungus - were being investigated. In his autobiography, LSD: My Problem Child, Hofmann explains how he accidentally ingested the drug while synthesizing it in the laboratory: It seemed to have resulted from some external toxic influence; I surmised a…

I'll show you a hostile workplace! (MIT update)

Three Bulls is on top of this, but I want to add a few comments of my own (as is my habit). The story about Susumu Tonegawa sinking MIT's attempt to hire Alla Karpova is not over yet. Sure, the Boston Globe (and the MIT News Office) report that MIT has formed a committee to try to get its neuroscientists to collaborate with each other better. But it looks like they've got their work cut out for them, judging by the email exchange between Tonegawa and Karpova, obtained by the Globe. On the surface, the emails sound respectful, maybe even friendly. But, anyone who's been in the snakepit that…

Placebo versus the Law of Attraction

Since 2012 was rung in a month and a half ago, I've been writing a lot more about placebo medicine than I have in a while. Specifically, I've written a lot more about placebo effects than usual. This proliferation of posts on the topic was sparked by how Harvard University's very own not-a-PhD faculty, credulous promoter of acupuncture and all things "integrative medicine," and generally clever propagandist for woo, Ted Kaptchuk seemed, like Elvis, to be everywhere for a while. The message he was spreading was, although he didn't admit it or put it that way, a response to the growing body of…

Andrew Wakefield and Mark Geier: Why does the "autism biomed" movement love one and not the other?

It's been a busy and rough week. The news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, with the release of one bad study and another highly touted great white hope of a legal study. As much as I'm tired of blogging about vaccines this week, it's still mandatory for me to note that something very wonderful has happened. So bear with me, please. Remember how recently, after well over five years of his flouting the law, the State of Maryland suspended "autism biomed" quack Dr. Mark Geier's medical license? In fact, Maryland didn't just suspend it, but emergently suspended it. Well, on…

"Excuse me, there's some food in my bugs!"

Speaking of people eating insects ... as we were ... I do have this fun story from the Ituri Forest. One day something funny happened. I was traveling in the most remote part of Central Africa, several days walk from any place you could possibly drive a car, visiting uncharted villages mainly occupied by people who had moved into the deep forest because they were in trouble with the "law" in some way (usually for perfectly good reasons in this lawless country). I was traveling with a Lese Villager and his sister, who was hired as our cook, and three Efe Pygmy men. We visited a village that…

Bloviations and pontifications on the state of cancer research, part 1 (of 2)

Readers who don't like me might think that the title of this post refers to what I am about to write. I know, the title perfectly encapsulates the verbose style that is my stock and trade. In reality, though, it's referring to a couple of articles floating around the blogosphere of which I've become aware and about which I've been meaning discuss because of their similarities. One is a pretty worthless piece of conspiracy-mongering; the other, although it makes some appropriate criticisms of how we go about cancer research, comes to a wildly incorrect conclusion about what we should be doing…

Did sexist white males cause the extinction of the woolly mammoth, or was it climate change?

Ever since 3,599 years ago humans have been asking the question "Why did our furry elephant go extinct?" What caused the woolly mammoth's (not to be confused with the also-woolly mastodon) extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting that the more-plausible cause was human expansion. The woolly mammoth went extinct less than four thousand years ago. The bones of miniaturized woolly mammoths have been found in Siberia dating to about 3,600 years ago. Indeed,…

Your Friday Dose of Woo on Saturday: Apparently the FDA doesn't get the "VIBE"

Due to my activities at the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting in San Antonio, somehow I didn't manage to crank out a bit of that Insolence, Respectful or Not-So-Respectful, that you all crave. So, given that this is Friday, I thought I'd to a "rerun" of a bit of classic woo. This one's a little newer than the reruns I usually do, only two and a half years old. So, if you've been reading less than two years, it's new to you! In the nearly two years of its existence, I have strived to feature only the finest and most outrageous woo that I can find. It's mostly been medical quackery but…

More evidence that alternative medicine boosters don't really want scientific evaluation of their therapies

Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on December 27, 2005. Enjoy! Since the very beginning of this blog, I've said that I'd love to see "alternative" medicine treated on equal footing with conventional medicine. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean what alties think it does. When I say "equal footing," I don't necessarily mean that alt-med should be treated with equal…

Doctors of depravity

As longtimers around here know, I have a great interest in all things World War II, including the Holocaust. I've written numerous times, either in the context of discussing the Holocaust or while discussing bioethics and the evolution of about the horrific medical experiments carried out by the Nazis. Much less frequently mentioned are the equally horrific excuses for "medical experiments" carried out by the Japanese on various prisoners that fell into their hands. Although not as systematic or widespread an atrocity as the Nazi medical experiments, they should not be forgotten, and,…

A truly pointless way to die, part 2

The other day, I commented on the very sad death of a young woman named Jennifer Strange. In essence, Ms. Strange died after a radio contest to see who could drink the most water without urinating. The prize? A Wii. This was pretty clearly a case of water intoxication leading to hyponatremia, an impression that was reinforced by a later report (now confirmed) that she had drunk 2 gallons of water in a short period of time. Since then, the three DJs involved in the contest, plus seven other employees of the radio station, have been fired for "violating the terms of their employee agreements."…