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Obesity Crankery - A growing problem

Recently, it seems there has been a backlash against medicine and the current knowledge of the relationship between diet, weight and overall health. I don't actually believe this is directly the fault of scientists or doctors, who react to the trashy mainstream reporting of science with little more than the occasional raised eyebrow. However, many people in response to all these silly health pronouncements, which seemingly come from on high but really are from press coverage of often minor reports in the medical literature, have lost their trust in what science has to offer as a solution to…

Sex, rap, and rock 'n' roll

And the winner of today's bad headline award goes to: Sexual lyrics prompt teens to have sex Teens whose iPods are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study found. Whether it's hip-hop, rap, pop or rock, much of popular music aimed at teens contains sexual overtones. Its influence on their behavior appears to depend on how the sex is portrayed, researchers found. Songs depicting men as "sex-driven studs," women as sex objects and with explicit references to sex acts are more likely to trigger early sexual behavior than those…

The power of nonsense

Forgive me, readers, but Madeline Bunting has raised up her tiny, fragile pin-head again, and I must address her non-arguments once more. Well, not her non-arguments, actually, but the same tedious non-arguments the fans of superstition constantly trundle out. She was at some strange conference where only people who love religion spoke and came away with affirmations of the usual tripe. It's as if the "New Atheists" have provoked a counter-attack by critics armored in pudding and armed with damp sponges. …the Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, "beware of the power of nonsense…

You Have To Buy Their Defective Product

The health care reform process is getting extremely ugly.  href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story"> href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story">Healthcare insurers get upper hand Obama's overhaul fight is being won by the industry, experts say. The end result may be a financial 'bonanza.' LA Times  By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger August 24, 2009 href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090823_this_isnt_reform_its_robbery/">…

On Labor Day, looking back at the year in US occupational health and safety

Last year, Celeste Monforton and I started a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year. The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2012 – Summer 2013, the second edition in the annual series, is now available online. We want it to be a resource for activists, regulators, researchers, and anyone else who values safe and healthy workplaces. Much as the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report focuses attention on workplace injury and illness statistics each April…

Transposition of the Great Arteries

OK, it's time for another science-y post. Usually, I take on something very relevant to my specialty---it's a helluva lot easier to write about stuff I already know. But some basics are just really cool, and worth exploring, even though I'll have to step a bit outside my comfort zone. In this case, it's the heart.  Because I'm venturing a bit on the wild side, I consulted an expert, whose hot, hot science helped illuminate this topic. If you've taken a basic biology course, you probably have some idea of how the human heart works, but understanding can be a bit deeper if we look at the heart…

Why Terra Sigillata?

[This post appeared originally at my Blogspot site on 20 December 2005 to describe my rationale for the name of this blog. With today's traffic from the Daily Kos, I thought it would be useful to new readers to know our story here. FYFI, here is why I chose the pseudonym Abel Pharmboy. - APB] If you Google, "Terra Sigillata," you'll get a number of hits for various clay pottery recipes. Very complicated stuff, requiring the use of a deflocculant to separate out large clay particles from the small ones. Terra sig, as it is known among pottery hipsters, is then used to coat finished pieces…

NSF Workshop on Scholarly Evaluation Metrics – Morning 1

I attended this one-day workshop in DC on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. These are stream of consciousness notes. Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL) - intro - Lots of metrics: some accepted in some areas and not others, some widely available on platforms in the information industry and others not. How are these metrics selected? Why are some more attractive than others? Two other points: informal science communication on the web - it's being adopted rapidly - scholars immediately reap the benefits. Lots of metrics: views, downloads, "favorites", followers. So our current metrics are impoverished (…

Dangerous Jumping Calculator

Maybe this could fall under my "physics of parkour". It could also apply to the MythBusters "dumpster diving" episode. In both of these cases, the question is: how far can you jump off of something and not severely hurt yourself. They do this a lot in parkour. Here are some examples: There are a ton of these things on youtube. Let me go ahead and say it. I would not recommend trying any of this stuff. Even reading this blog won't adequately prepare you. So, if you go ahead and try to do some cool jump, don't blame me for your injuries. Now that the warning is out there - let me get on…

National Geographic's Wild Case Files covers the 'Montauk monster'

On March 14th 2011 National Geographic screened episode 1 of their new series Wild Case Files (here in the UK, the episode was screened on April 11th), and the reason I'm writing about it is because I featured in said episode. The first section of the show was devoted to an investigation of the 'Montauk monster'. They provided a potted history of the whole 'Montauk monster' story, spoke to all the main characters involved, and ended with me explaining how the carcasses (both the original, July 2008 specimen, and the 'Clapsadle carcass' of May 2009 and 'Gurney's Inn monster' of September…

Allies: Duke's Henry Friedman, MD

In preparing for the ScienceOnline'09 session on Gender in Science - Online and Offline, one planned discussion point will be how to enlist allies representing the dominant power structure to enhance equality and diversity in the STEM disciplines. No one ally can do it all but a combination of like-minded people can make a huge difference. Here is a terrific example of an ally, written by superb higher ed reporter, Eric Ferreri, of the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, on Dr Henry Friedman and CAPE, the Collegiate Athletic Pre-Medical Experience: Georgia Beasley was practicing her jump shot…

Copyright Infringement = Theft. (or; A Few Pharyngulites Behaving Badly)

I haven't always had as much concern about copyright infringement as I do now, but I've always considered it to be a given that copyright infringement involves taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying the owner. Taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying the owner is, at least under any system of ethics that I'm familiar with, theft. Not "something like theft". It is theft. I was surprised (and a little disappointed) to find that a handful of people over at Pharyngula don't seem to understand that view. There's a discussion going on over there right now in…

Birds in the News 178: Helsinki Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Plump and hoping to get plumper, a red knot takes a break from eating horseshoe crab eggs at Mispillion Harbor. Image: Louisa Jonas/WYPR [larger view]. Birds in Science Catching adult eagles for research purposes is no easy task, but a Purdue University researcher has found a way around the problem, and, in the process, gathered even more information about the birds without ever laying a hand on one. "Many birds are small, easy to catch and abundant," said Andrew DeWoody, associate professor of forestry and natural…

Don't Throw Out Those Introns

A somewhat accidental discovery and random meetings between proteins in a cell: These are the subjects of two new online articles. Each, it its way, involves a technological advance that will, in turn, lead to further scientific discovery. The first involves a partnership between a physics group and a cancer-research group. Among other things, such collaboration is essential for dealing with large data sets - multiple gene expression patterns, for example. When the team made their discovery, they were looking not just at gene expression, but at pieces of genes. More precisely, they were…

Beyond Smoke and Mirrors

Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century By Burton Richter Cambridge University Press, 218 pages. Do we really another book summarizing the science of climate change and the available response options? Sure. Why not? What's the harm? In this era of hyperfractionated audiences and echo-chambers, there's no such thing as too many arrows in our collective quiver. This one, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, doesn't contribute anything new. But at this point in the conversation, there's not much new to contribute, just novel approaches to making the argument…

Bio Databases 2016

Someone missed the memo. Over the past year, news and presentations by NIH leaders like Philip Bourne have communicated that the proliferation biologically focused databases is unsustainable. However, unlike last year, where the number of databases tracked by Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) dropped by three databases, 2015's net growth was 136. Counting databases is hard As summarized in the database issue's introduction, Rigden, Fernández-Suarez, and Galperin tell us this year's issue (the 23rd annual) has 178 papers. 62 papers describe new databases, 95 provide updates, and 17 are updates of…

There's no fool like a Bush administration fool

Since this piece in Wired referenced an email with a date of April 1 I was pretty sure this was an April Fool's joke. But the joke was on me. It's was for real: A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results. Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It's funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of…

How Obama uses Behavioral Economics to change our habits

In TIME, a couple of days ago - How Obama Is Using the Science of Change: Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!" Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample…

What kind of personality predisposes one to start blogging?

That is an interesting question, an answer to which was attempted in this paper: Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging: The Big Five personality inventory measures personality based on five key traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness [Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Normal personality assessment in clinical practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment 4, 5-13]. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that individual differences on the Big Five factors are associated with different types…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait: We advance this long tradition of surveying teachers with reports from the first nationally representative survey of teachers concerning the teaching of evolution. The survey permits a statistically valid and current portrait of US science teachers that complements US and international surveys of the general public on evolution and scientific literacy [2,24] and on evolution in the classroom [3,25]. Between March 5 and May 1, 2007, 939 teachers participated in the study, either by mail or by completing an identical…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Early Experience Affects Where Birds Breed For Life: What Happens If Habitat Changes?: How young migratory birds choose the nesting location of their first breeding season has been something of a mystery in the bird world. But a new University of Maryland/National Zoo study of the American redstart suggests that the environmental conditions the birds face in their first year may help determine where they breed for the rest of their lives, a factor that could significantly affect the population as climate change makes their winter habitats hotter and drier. Ancient Puzzle Solved In Fossils…

Twittering is a difficult art form - if you are doing it right

Yesterday, Jay Rosen on Twitter wrote that his goal on Twitter was to have "a Twitter feed that is 100 percent personal (my own view on things...) and zero percent private." This is an excellent description of mindcasting. Its alternative, 'lifecasting' is 100% private made public. There is nothing wrong with lifecasting, of course. It is a different style of communication. It is using Twitter with a different goal in mind. Mindcasting is a method to use Twitter for exchange of news, information, analysis and opinion. Lifecasting is a method to use Twitter to make friends and communicate…

Safety blitz at WV Massey Energy mine, 20 instances of aggravated misconduct

The Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Adminstration (MSHA) issued a news release yesterday reporting on the results of an inspection at Inman Energy's Randolph coal mine, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. MSHA chief Joe Main said: "the conduct and behavior exhibited when we caught the mine operator by surprise is nothing short of outrageous. ...The conditions observed at Randolph Mine place miners at serious risk to the threat of fire, explosion and black lung. Yet, MSHA inspectors can't be at every mine every day. Our continuing challenge is counteracting the egregious behavior of…

New survey finds many Americans are open to discussing gun safety with their doctors

Every year in the U.S., more than 32,000 people die due to gun-related violence, suicide and accidents. That number includes the deaths of seven children and teens every day. So it’s not surprising that health care providers — those who witness the tragic results of gun violence — are often vocal proponents of gun safety reform. But when it comes to the intimate patient-provider relationship, do people want to discuss gun safety with their doctors? A group of researchers set out to explore that question in what may be the first nationally representative survey on whether Americans feel it’s…

Study: School Breakfast Program linked to better academic achievement

Thanks to the federal School Breakfast Program, millions of low-income children have the opportunity to start the school day with a healthy meal. But does the program impact the brain as well as the belly? A new study finds that it does, with students at participating schools scoring higher in math, reading and science. A striking illustration of the connections between nutrition and education, the study not only found higher academic scores within schools that participate in the School Breakfast Program, it also found that the effect was cumulative. In other words, the longer the school…

Peter Watts, Blindsight [Library of Babel]

This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared. Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a…

Arnie: $150,000 puppy

This is the funniest thing I have read since PZ got thrown out of EXPELLED. This cant freaking be real. A woman by the name of 'Bernann McKinney' just made news by having her dead pit bull, Booger, cloned by a S. Korean company, RNL Bio. Shortly after 'Bernann' rescued Booger off the streets, 'Bernann' was attacked by another dog, and Booger came to her rescue. She feels like shes alive because of Booger. I know the loyalty pits show their owners-- I feel her pain. But since she rescued Booger, 'Bernann' of all people should know what great dogs you can find on the street and in shelters…

A Pox on Both Your Cultures

A lot has been written about Steven Pinker's article about "scientism," most of it mocking his grandiose overreach in passages like this: These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-…

How should we talk about Army Ants?

Neivamyrmex army ants attacking a pavement ant, California I see this morning that Daniel Kronauer has published a review of army ant biology in Myrmecological News.  The paper, among other topics, attempts to straighten out some key terminology: AenEcDo army ant: a connotation free abbreviation that is introduced here to avoid the term "true" army ant. It collectively refers to species in the three subfamilies Aenictinae, Ecitoninae, and Dorylinae and is strictly taxonomically defined. Army ant: any ant species with the army ant adaptive syndrome. Army ant adaptive syndrome: a life-…

The incredible calculating canine!

It's hard to believe that a dog can understand four languages, discuss the intricacies of Christian theology, and perform complex mathematical operations, including calculus and algebra, but it's even harder to believe that the editors of an until-now reputable newspaper would be so hard up for local news that they'd be able to find space for 1,500 words on the subject. But the Asheville Citizen-Times did just that. On the front page. I can't remember when they gave 1,500 words to anything. Never mind that the video accompanying the story gives away the trick -- the dog's clearly following…

Clearing the air on the Airy fuction

There was some dissension in the comments of my post on solving the Schrodinger equation with a linear potential. What the post boiled down to was that the solution was Ai(u), where we found that u was: The point of the post was to work through and get that coefficient that's in front of the (Fx + E). The point wasn't to actually solve a physics problem with that, so I glossed over the fact that in solving the physical problem we'll need to deal with boundary conditions, which means paying attention to both types of Airy function Ai(u) and Bi(u), as well as taking into account that only…

Photons, Universes, Etc.

I thought about linking this Forbes article on the economic situation simply because it's interesting. What actually made me link it was the sentence at the end: And reality tells us that we barely avoided, only a week ago, a total systemic financial meltdown; that the policy actions are now finally more aggressive and systematic, and more appropriate; that it will take a long while for interbank and credit markets to mend; that further important policy actions are needed to avoid the meltdown and an even more severe recession; that central banks, instead of being the lenders of last resort…

Things that are effective but dangerous (in our quest for science literacy)

So, as mentioned previously, I got the chance to hang out with Chris Mooney this past week, and gracious as he is, he also took time to meet and greet a few of the local gang of science scouts. Anyway, his visit was great as a number of interesting topics were broached both in casual conservation as well as the public panels that he was involved in. A big theme that seemed to be reoccuring was the issue of public relations, branding, and the role of overall aesthetics in getting folks to notice things - um big things like the issue of global warming or general scientific literacy for…

You Probably Shouldn't Buy This Laser

The laser pointer, much beloved of PowerPoint lecturers, cat owners, amateur scientists, and middle school boys at movie theaters, is actually a pretty amazing device. There's quite a bit you can do with a relatively cheap laser, and they're just plain fun. They're also relatively safe. The red pointers are usually Class 2 and the green ones are usualy class 3R. Class 2 lasers are very difficult to hurt yourself with, and while Class 3R lasers can cause eye injury, in general brief exposures are unlikely to cause permanant damage. There's two higher classifications for lasers: 3B and 4. Class…

Mortality in Eating Disorders NOS

This post is about a journal article that describes mortality rates in populations of persons with eating disorders.  It is sort of about that.  The article is in the APA green journal, which is not openly accessible.  Only the abstract is free.  Usually I don't write about closed-access articles.  But this is different, because I am not going to do a traditional post about a peer-reviewed article.  You don't need to have access to the whole article to get the point. href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/166/12/1342">Increased Mortality in Bulimia Nervosa and Other…

Rime of the Ancient Parasite

Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye--number of legs, color of hair, live young or eggs. Or they can paint a creature at the cellular level--the twist and turns of collagen fibers in a horse hoof or the poison-producing organelles of a rattlesnake. In the past few years a new kind of portrait has been hung in the biological museum: a portrait of the genome. In the thousands or millions of DNA base pairs, genomes can…

Technology and Genealogy

What makes you a member of family, or a citizen of a nation? Over at Sciencewoman, Alice reports on a session she attended at this year's NWSA conference: In a session on the technologies of citizenship, Banu Submramaniam of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst talked about the developing practice of doing DNA maps to understand your heritage, and then linked into a discussion about how caste is argued by some activists as analogous to race, and then DNA scientists go in to study caste with no sociological or historical theorization of what it means. It's all very interesting to me,…

DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: fund classroom proposals, help kids.

It's October, which means ScienceBlogs bloggers are, once again, participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. The idea behind the drive is simple: we're appealing to you, our readers, to help public school teachers across the U.S. fund proposals for classroom supplies, activities, and field trips. As I wrote at the start of our very first drive in 2006: Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way. A lot of us fell in love with science because of early…

Patents Patently Absurd: The End of Innovation in Education Will Come at the Hands of The Corporate Business Model

I've been avoiding discussion of the patent issue. This is partly because I don't know enough about it, and partly because I am terribly annoyed by it. Yes, yes, I blog about stuff that annoys me all the time, but these are topics that I'm professionally engaged in, so the annoyance is not personally as troubling. The basic idea is this: The US patent office has apparently gone nuts, or is being well paid off, and is accepting or approving patents on things that really should not be patented. The result is that a corporation with lots of money can patent something, and the next day sue…

Why should Catholicism be a prerequisite for speaking science?

I just received my copy of the latest Seed, and although I feel a bit reluctant to say it because it may be interpreted as sucking up to the corporate masters who provide my bandwidth, it really is a very good science magazine—I'd be subscribing even if they weren't sending it to me for free. Take a browse through it sometime, there's a lot of the content available online. Anyway, of course the first thing I turn to in the magazine is Chris Mooney's article on Learning to speak science. It's good and has some productive suggestions, and I agree with Mooney on 90% of what he says in it, but… (…

Eight Things to Hate about Me

I'm fucking sick of blog memes. Not only do I find online surveys totally lame, I also never get tagged. Boohoo, nobody likes me. Now, John Logsdon orders me to tell you eight things about me. I'm only doing this 'cause we had dinner together last week. Here are the rules: We have to post these rules before we give you the facts. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget…

The Benefits of Seawater

Hope over at Benefits of Seawater suggests my original debunking of Original Quinton Marine Plasma was not "logical". First, who is 'Hope'? She is a freelance writer who is paid by Quinton to generate an internet buzz. Just started up two blogs for a new client on the benefits of seawater. They're meant to promote the client's product by spreading internet awareness as it were. If you want to check up on the blogs and see how they are doing. You can visit the Benefits of Seawater and All About Seawater Therapy. If this works out it will also be a regular gig, Yay!, which can…

Tradeoffs

I'd like to tell you a story about a routine of modern life that is really bad for your brain. Everybody performs this activity - sometimes multiple times a day! - and yet we rarely realize the consequences. In 2008, scientists at the University of Michigan did a very clever study illuminating how this activity led to dramatic decreases in working memory, self-control, visual attention and positive affect. Other studies have demonstrated that people who are less exposed to this activity show enhanced brain function. They are better able to focus and even recover more quickly in hospitals.…

Borges Was A Neuroscientist

The neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga has written a lovely appreciation of Jorge Luis Borges in the latest Nature (not online). Quiroga focuses on Borges interest in neuroscience, which led him to write his classic short story Funes the Memorious, about a man who cannot forget: In the story of Funes, Borges described very precisely the problems of distorted memory capacities well before neuroscience caught up...In a study using electrodes to probe the hippocampus in epileptic patients for clinical reasons, we identified a type of neuron that fires in response to particular abstract…

Quoth Mark Blaxill: "Science is funny" when it comes to mercury in vaccines and autism

I must admit that, after having taken it easy over the last few days, when the time came to sit down and get back into the swing of things, I had a bit of a hard time. No, it's not just blogging. That's actually a rather minor component of the whole malaise that descended upon me like a shroud. Rather, it's the simple fact that the Labor Day weekend in the U.S. represents the unofficial end of the summer season. After that, it's all back to school, back to work, back to the grind. Back to real life after summer. This reluctance, not surprisingly, seeped out of real life and started to permeat…

Reinventing the Informal Economy

As I gear up to finish my Adapting-in-Place book, I've been thinking a lot about the role of the informal economy in supporting a culture that can't keep growing and consuming resources at the same rate. As those of you who have been following my work for a while know, the informal economy represents the larger portion of the world economy (3/4 of all economic activity) and includes a wide range of important activities. When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed - and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question - and…

True "individualization" of cancer therapy

One major point I've tried to make over the last few years is that the so-called "individualization" or "personalization" of treatments claimed by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is not "individualization" at all, but rather a sham that appears superficially like individualization but in reality is not. I say that because the "individualization" promoted by CAM practitioners is not based on science and clinical trials. Another point I've been trying to make is that the true "individualization" of treatments will require science, and it will not be easy. In fact…

Immediate reconstruction after breast cancer: A most disturbing study

I realize that being in academic medicine at a tertiary care center often produces the "ivory tower" syndrome, but occasionally it is brought home to me that the way we practice surgery here often differs considerably from how surgery is practiced "in the trenches." This time around, it was a study about how often surgeons referred women whose breast cancers are large enough to require a mastectomy to treat to plastic surgeons for a discussion of reconstruction options prior to the mastectomy. The answer was: Not nearly often enough. See for yourself: ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Forty-four percent of…

Worldview Weekend's Bad 14th Amendment Scholarship

I've mentioned before being on the Worldview Weekend mailing list. This is basically a group of religious right types who meet, appropriately, in Branson fairly regularly. They send me a list of articles on their website every week and it's typically a source of much amusement. No group that features the deep thoughts of Kirk Cameron can possibly fail to entertain. My favorite of the new batch is this essay by Steven Voight on the 14th amendment, wherein he promises to reveal "startling" research that will overturn "decades of legal assumptions" about the doctrine of incorporation. If only…

A patient you won't hear about from Stanislaw Burzynski or his apologists

It's been a while since I mentioned Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who has somehow managed over the last thirty-plus years to treat cancer patients with something he calls "antineoplastons" without ever actually producing strong evidence that they actually cure patients, increase the chances of long-term survival, or even improve disease-free progression. Although there was a tiny bit of prior plausibility behind the concept--albeit only very tiny--back in the 1980s, the relentless drip, drip, drip of negative evidence, coupled with Burzynski's failure to advance his therapy…