Death
oracknows | March 10, 2017[NOTE: As I mentioned yesterday, our power outage continues, and, thanks to having to decamp to a hotel last night, I didn't have time to produce new Insolence. So I thought I'd repost a "classic" from 11 years ago that I don't believe I've ever reposted before during vacation or otherwise. It represents a sort of blogging that I haven't done for years, just a personal story with nothing to do with my usual topics, such as pseudoscience, quackery, clinical trials, and basic science. This story is based on a real patient encounter from around 25 years ago, but details have been changed.]
I don…
oracknows | October 19, 2016Eight months ago, I asked the question: Did chiropractic manipulation of her neck cause Katie May’s stroke? Now, it appears, I know the answer, and the answer is yes:
Katie May, a model who posed for Playboy and gained a massive following on Snapchat, suffered a “catastrophic” stroke in early February and later died after being taken off life-support. Now, TMZ reports reports that a visit to the chiropractor left her with an injury that precipitated the stroke.
TMZ obtained May’s death certificate, which says that she suffered a blunt force injury during a “neck manipulation by [a]…
gregladen | August 4, 2016It is the time of year that we talk about drowning. I’m focusing here on the US, and for the most part, recreational drowning, as opposed to being drowned in a flood. Also, I'm using mainly information from Minnesota as an exemplar. It turns out that analyzing drowning data, and social behavior related to drowning, at the state level (as a proxy for the media market level) is important, because, I contend, the likelihood of a child drowning in a given media market is roughly inversly proportinate to the number of children who have drown or nearly drown in that same media market over the…
milhayser | December 12, 2014New research from the Weizmann Institute of Science reveals that "cells in our brain form little hexagonal grids that keep us oriented, map-like, in our surroundings." Weizmann's resident blogger describes this finding as "a pyrotechnic flash of insight that changes how we understand the brain to work." Game developers delight; this discovery shows "that you can really apply mathematical models to understand how our mammalian brains get their bearings." It may also have immediate implications for understanding human brain disorders such as vertigo. Meanwhile, on ERV, Abbie Smith explores a…
dr. dolittle | August 28, 2014 Image of a naked mole rat from www.animals.sandiegozoo.org
The naked mole rat is the longest lived rodent species (>31 years). Unlike most mammals, they seem resistant to many age-associated ailments until much later in life, making them an exciting model of healthy aging. They are also resistant to the development of cancer as mentioned in this prior post.
According to the CDC, cardiovascular disease is currently the leading cause of death in the United States, claiming the lives of roughly 600,000 people annually (or 1 out of every 4 deaths). In a new study published in the American…
FDA is looking for your help to determine source of illnesses and deaths related to dog jerky treats
dr. dolittle | October 22, 2013 Image from Vin News Service (http://news.vin.com/VINNews.aspx?articleId=22697)
The FDA is calling for help to determine the source of roughly 580 deaths and over 3600 illnesses (gastrointestinal and kidney) related to jerky treats that were made in China. The mystery dates back to 2007 when illnesses were first being reported by pet owners. Most of the victims have been dogs, although 10 cats have become sick from eating these treats as well.The FDA has tested treats for contaminants including chemical, microbiological/bacterial, antibiotics, metals, and pesticides in addition to DNA and…
catdynamics | August 28, 2012catching up on random snippets:
How the American University was Killed - a guide in 5 Easy Steps
Sterrekundig Instituut Utrecht: The Last Years
"The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine!
Who guards to-day my stream divine?"
Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist
How do Science Blogs Change the Face of Science?
Graduate Orientation -changing the face of scientists
"Graduate school, especially at the beginning, is an ego-destroying, even humiliating, experience."
Science for Princesses...
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Scientific Talk
Kinds of Wrong
One Leaving Academe
oracknows | August 23, 2012When I first started this blog, I had little idea of what I was in for. I thought I had some idea from having read a bunch of blogs and found role models whose blogging style I tried to emulate back in those early days, long before I developed the persona and writing style that most of my readers love and quacks and antivaccinationists really hate. Now that I've been at it for nearly eight years, there's very little that surprises me. Much of the quackery, pseudoscience, and nonsense that I see is stuff that I've seen before and possibly blogged about multiple times before. I'm starting to…
esiegel | July 30, 2012"Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order." -Robert Coover
Our Milky Way, the swath of light and dark that dominates the darkest skies here on Earth, contains a huge variety of stars: large and small, red and blue, from young to old to ancient.
Image credit: ESO / Serge Brunier, Frederic Tapissier, The World At…
esiegel | May 28, 2012"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there." -Ray Bradbury
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, where we honor all the soldiers who have fought and fallen for our country. The peace and prosperity that I have enjoyed my entire life is because of a price paid, many times over, mostly by people…
stoat | October 19, 2011 Never blog when pissed [*] they said...
So, Kloor and Romm are having a dust up over stuff, and if you care you can read the details or even take sides (I'm with Kloor, you won't be surprised to learn). But we can take a step back and consider a more generalised problem, in the context of Doctors Warn Climate Change is "Greatest Threat to Public Health": suppose we care about famine in the third world (in the sense of wanting to do something about it, rather than in the sense of finding it interesting material to blog about it): what might we do?
* stop climate change (reduce impacts)
*…
cevans | August 28, 2011The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite...
Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space.
As it turns out, DNA components have been found on meteorites before, but it's never been entirely clear if the space rocks came to Earth bearing these molecules, or if they were contaminated upon arrival. Furthermore, this recent study of meteorites was the first to discover trace amounts of three molecules -- purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-…
stoat | June 3, 2011In the comments to Romm Echoes Groundless Cell Phone/Cancer Fears? we've degenerated into an argument about the safety of nuclear versus solar power ("which do you think has killed more people: radiation from Fukushima, or solar-voltaic installers falling from ladders?" was my question. It is a trick question, of course, because no-one has died from Fukushima as far as I know. But the correct question, of course, is deaths per unit of 'lectric generated). MV, beng something of a spoilsport (just joking, don't worry) pops the bubble by pointing to someone who has actually worked some numbers…
terrasig | June 16, 2010Was just checking the old SiteMeter stats before foraging for dinner and saw a surge in search hits for "Amy Bishop."
Yup. Lo and behold she has been charged with murder - for the 1986 death of her brother.
From an article an hour ago by Donovan Slack and Shelley Murphy at the Boston Globe:
The slaying of Seth Bishop was declared an accident by Norfolk County authorities at the time. But questions were raised about the investigation after Bishop, a college professor, was charged in February in a shooting rampage at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Three of Bishops' colleagues were…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2010tags: gorilla, death, mortality, science, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, Onion News Network, ONN, streaming video
Tulane University researchers have successfully taught a captive gorilla that he will die one day. The gorilla, named Quigley, is now able to experience the crippling fear of impending death previously only accessible to humans.
sciencepunk | March 24, 2010Some time back, I was researching a feature for Wired when I stumbled across the US Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration. One of the responsibilities of this office is to monitor workplace fatalities. Each week, a roundup of deaths in the workplace are posted online. They make for compelling reading.
As Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis states on the site: "With every one of these fatalities, the lives of a worker's family members were shattered and forever changed. We can't forget that fact". Yet the lists only hold the briefest of details. The company…
terrasig | February 25, 2010A year ago we wrote about a death of a San Jose teenager from poisoning by hydrogen sulfide gas, or H2S. At the time, I had hypothesized that the death might have been from an attempt at synthesizing methamphetamine gone awry.
But while one can mistakenly generate hydrogen sulfide gas from improper meth synthesis, I soon learned that intentional suicides with H2S is an increasing US trend imported from Japan. One can easily mix commonly-available consumer products to generate the gas and high enough concentrations can cause death. The gas acts in a manner similar to cyanide by binding to the…
stoat | February 14, 2010As I was about to write up the latest smoggy stuff, I thought I'd better check out Eli in case he had written it up first. And lo, I thought, Condolences referred to the death of Christy's scientific reputation. But no, it is about real death. So I need to press on.
[[John Christy]] has been a bit of a skeptic for ages. Quite where he gets it from is unclear - perhaps because he and Spencer did the first version of the [[satellite temperature record]] and, well, they got it wrong. In that it showed cooling, and so they became the poster boys for the real septics like Singer and Michaels and…
catdynamics | January 23, 2010
Andrew Lange RIP.
Andrew Lange - story at Cosmic Variance
Lange's "How DId the Universe Begin" Segre Distinguished Lecture at Berkeley Nov 2009.
Lange's 2004 KITP talk on "Future Directions in Cosmic Microwave Background Observations"
Audio/Web Cam
ddobbs | December 22, 2009via Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
For a while now, the FDA and other regulators have been looking at safety risks associated with a few drugs patients sometimes take before getting MRI scans.
While it's common for new risks to crop up with established drugs, the Times of London this weekend highlighted an interesting twist in this case: GE has filed a libel suit in Britain against a Danish radiologist who gave a talk about the risks associated with Omniscan, a GE drug that's one of the medicines regulators have been looking at.
The doctor, Henrik Thomsen, gave a presentation to about 30…