Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald has a response to the anti-vaccination movement, taking his cue from the Navy: There’s a manual that every Navy gunnery officer is required to read or re-read every year: OP 1014; Ordnance Safety Precautions: Their Origin and Necessity. It’s a collection of stories about, and photographs of, spectacular accidents […]
Category: Medicine
The Joys of Day Care
SteelyKid is now in day care five days a week. This is good for us, in that it lets Kate and I both go back to work full-time, and good for her, in that she gets to meet new people, and spend the whole day playing with interesting toys. Of course, it has its bad […]
Checklist: Check!
SteelyKid was delivered by Caesarean section (MacDuff won’t stand a chance…). They let me in to the operating room just before the moment of delivery, and I stuck around while they cleaned her up and did the early tests that they do on newborns, before they brought her over for me and Kate to see. […]
RFK Jr.
Looking over my scheduled posts for today, I see that there isn’t anything stridently political. Not wanting to shock the systems of readers still coming down off the election, let me add my voice to the chorus of ScienceBloggers expressing concern over the idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Environmental Protection […]
Medicine Nobel for TLA’s
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was split three ways, with half going to Harald zur Hausen for the discovery that Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer. The other half is split between Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for the discovery of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV, and won’t this make the denialists’ […]
Unintentional Irony in “Alternative” Medicine
The New York Times today has an article on scientific studies of “alternative” medicine. Quack-bashing isn’t my usual line, but it seemed to me like there was a good bit of stuff that will torque Orac off. I couldn’t help laughing at the final paragraph, though: “In tight funding times, that’s going to get worse,” […]
Virtual Science Debate
As you might have guessed from yesterday’s tease, the folks at ScienceDebate 2008 have now managed to get answers from the McCain campaign (to go with Obama’s froma few weeks ago). Which means that while you may never see them answering science questions on a stage together, you can put them head-to-head on the Web, […]
Fit Trumps Fat
The New York Times today has an article about obesity, showcasing new studies that find weight isn’t that important as an indicator of health: Despite concerns about an obesity epidemic, there is growing evidence that our obsession about weight as a primary measure of health may be misguided. Last week a report in The Archives […]
Journalists Doing Science Right
Via a comment to an earlier post, here’s an example of a journalist doing science right: NPR’s Sarah Varney looks at “cleansing” foot pads, and finds them wanting. She took a set of the pads, tried them out, and then brought used and new pads to a laboratory at Berkeley, where chemists studied the composition […]
Why Don’t They Predict That?
In a comment on the FutureBaby betting thread, Rivka writes: (I’m laughing at all these people who are predicting early. The average gestation for a first time mother is 41 weeks, 1 day.) Of course, as a physical scientist, my immediate reaction to that is “If they know that, then shouldn’t that be figured into […]