health
esiegel | February 7, 2012"If people decide they're going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there's not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education." -Harrison Schmitt
Last year, I asked a simple question with no easy answer: Whom Do You Trust For Your Science, Health, and Education? Because unless you yourself are the expert in a given field, it's often very, very difficult to tell what's trustworthy from what's not.
Images credit: Dr. Roy Spencer (top) and American Meteorological Society (bottom).
This is especially true when…
esiegel | January 22, 2012"I want more muscles! I go to the gym three or four times a week with a personal trainer. I can afford that now. I can't put on weight though, no matter how much I eat." -Christopher Parker
Many of us struggle in all sorts of aspects of our lives: to balance work and leisure, friends and family, responsibility and fun. For nearly all of us, something eventually goes awry, and when it does, we suddenly can't meet all our commitments at once. Regardless of where you come from or what you like, this is a problem we all have to face at some time or another. For this week, I'd like to introduce…
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2012I'm on the latest instalment of the Skeptic's Guide podcast talking about the Mora/Orsa electrophobia case and the Obscurantist of the Year anti-award. I also mention a bunch of upcoming European skeptics' conventions, though Steve Novella cut out the bit where I recommended that the skeptical rogues grow mullet hair styles and mustaches for the Berlin meeting in May to honour the German porn industry.
(My previous interview with the SGU, about the Swedish Skeptics and weird archaeology, was almost four years ago! Time flies.)
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2012Saltpetre, potassium nitrate, is added to food to give meat products a nicer colour. One winter in the 70s when we were living in Connecticut, my dad went to a New York drug store to buy saltpetre for our traditional Christmas ham. And the elderly druggist winked at him and said this odd thing.
"Hehe, it's an old army trick!"
As my dad told us later that night, he had to ask what on Earth the guy meant. And then he learned that the druggist thought he was going to take the saltpetre as an anaphrodisiac, to decrease his sex drive. Supposedly the US armed forces did this as a matter of course…
denialism | January 6, 2012For some reason the NYT is all about neck injury lately. In yesterday's discussion of a possible chiropractic induced injury, Russell asked:
But given all the other stresses people put on their necks, from accidents such as headbumps, from purposeful athletics such as whacking soccer balls, and from just craning one's head in odd positions when performing various kinds of mechanical labor, it puzzles me that the risk from a chiropractor would be much greater than the risks from these other kinds of use/abuse. Of course, this is not excuse for the chiropractor, who is imposing that risk,…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2012Went to bed with a headache, woke up intermittently during the night to find it still there, and got up in the morning with the same headache or one very similar to it. So I took an aspirin, which stuck in my throat, as pills usually do. I figured it would slide down along with my breakfast. The headache receded after a cup of caffeine solution and I forgot about my pill.
After more than five hours, during which I had no trouble eating or breathing, I coughed the pill up, unchanged. Where was it in the interim!? Can most people swallow pills without nibbling them to gravel, as I usually have…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2012The Swedish Skeptics, of whom I am the chairman, have just announced their annual awards for 2011 [a - b].
The Swedish public TV show Hjärnkontoret receives the Enlightener of the Year award,"...for their excellent science coverage directed towards children. Hjärnkontoret has aired for 16 years and thus contributed to the upbringing of the entire current generation of students and young scientists at Swedish universities. Thanks to its welcoming format and accessible time slot on public television, Hjärnkontoret reaches out to children of all backgrounds, thus widening and democratising…
pronald | December 31, 2011In Memoriam,
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2011The memory of Herman Lundborg (1868-1943) is insolubly linked to the Swedish State Institute of Eugenics that he headed, and thus lives in infamy. Eugenics was the pseudoscientific belief that human populations deteriorated over time unless care was taken to weed out weak specimens and keep them from procreating. Somehow, these allegedly weak specimens tended to have foreign looks and/or a low income and education. But the social pseudo-Darwinism of the early 20th century explained that people were poor and uneducated because they were stupid, and they were stupid because they had bad genes.…
gregladen | December 13, 2011Acupuncture is the ancient East Asian practice of poking people with needles in specific places and in specific ways in order to produce any one of a very wide range of results that could generally be classified as medicinal or health related. I don't know much about it, but Wikipedia tells us:
Its general theory is based on the premise that bodily functions are regulated by the flow of an energy-like entity called qi. Acupuncture aims to correct imbalances in the flow of qi by stimulation of anatomical locations on or under the skin called acupuncture points, most of which are connected by…
aardvarchaeology | November 29, 2011For the past few days, Swedish skeptics have been shaking their heads in disbelief over Mora municipality's office for the environment. The office had taken the complaints of a man with radiation phobia seriously and demanded that all radio transmitters in the area be turned down or re-pointed to ensure that the man's house would not receive more that 50 nanowatts of radio - an extremely low value. The thing about radiation phobia (or "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" as it is called by sufferers, "electricity allergy" in Swedish) is that it is all in one's head. These people have real…
esiegel | November 15, 2011"If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance." -Abraham Lincoln
It was nearly four years ago that I started blogging back at my old site, branching out from the hardcore research of physical cosmology and the teaching of physics and astronomy, and into what I think of as science communication.
Image credit: The cover of Paul Halpern's book.
And there have been a number of very curious things I've learned, some of which I expected and some of which caught me by surprise.
The least surprising: the entirety of our experience in this world is something…
gregladen | November 13, 2011The British Medical Journal has published an editorial calling for a Parliamentary investigation realted to Andrew Wakefield's dishonesty:
It is now more than 18 months since the UK's General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield guilty of dishonesty and other serious professional misconduct; and it is nearly a year since the BMJ concluded that his now retracted Lancet paper linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism and bowel disease was an "elaborate fraud." At that time, January 2011, we called on Wakefield's former employer, University College London (UCL), to…
esiegel | October 24, 2011"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." -Jules Henri Poincaré
The higher you fall from, the faster you'll be moving when you hit the ground.
Image credit: Marianne Holland.
Seems like the most obvious thing in the world. You know this intuitively, of course, based on all your experience in the world. Drop an egg from too great a height and it breaks.
While you wouldn't be afraid to jump off of a diving board like the one above, jumping from a greater height…
gregladen | October 18, 2011There are several reasons why there is no vaccine for malaria, but the thing you might want to know is that malaria is not a virus, and it is not even a bacterium. It's a protist. Generally speaking, there are not really vaccines for such organisms. One metastudy that looked specifically at Malaria had this to report:
We identify and evaluate 1916 immunization studies between 1965-February 2010, and exclude partially or nonprotective results to find 177 completely protective immunization experiments. Detailed reexamination reveals an unexpectedly mundane basis for selective vaccine…
gregladen | October 6, 2011A study incorporating over 12,000 prior peer reviewed publications, addressing the question of vaccine safety, is due for release by the National Academies of Science. The study attempts to understand adverse effects of vaccines and to assign causality to supposed negative outcomes. The 667 page study covers a large number of vaccines. And yes, it addresses autism.
The study cataloged about 60 distinct adverse effects across 8 categories of vaccine treatments, two of which contain multiple vaccines, for a total of 12 distinct vaccines, as well as more general injection-related events (…
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2011Friday was quite a day for me: wake up at 5 after a restless night, travel by air, give test lecture, get praised beyond belief, eat excellent mutton & cabbage, do very friendly interview, become optimistic, meet up with local skeptical buddy, return home. Then a metal gig headlined by Graveyard, whose stellar new album Hisingen Blues is a must for all Zeppelin fans, preceded by Top Hawk with a basso singer and Horisont as fine openers, the latter with a particularly impressive drummer and an 80s-style high-tenor singer. (All three bands also had technically brilliant lead guitarists who…
egrossman | September 28, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
Why some people who inhaled the airborne contaminants unleashed by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 became sick for only a short time, why some have become chronically ill, and others terminally ill, may never be known. What is known, however, is that the dust and aerosols released in that disaster contained a potentially treacherous mix of everything that was in those enormous buildings and in those aircraft. What is also known is that, as Paul J. Lioy, professor and vice chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine…
lborkowski | September 12, 2011As Jori Lewis notes in the case study about World Trade Center recovery workers' health and safety, those who showed up at Ground Zero on the days and weeks after 9/11 got some misleading information about the risks they faced. Most notably, the EPA issued reassuring statements about the air quality - when, according to a 2003 EPA Inspector General report, the agency had insufficient data and analyses to support calling the air there safe. More accurate information might have increased the use of respirators and delayed people's return to homes and offices in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Now…
