Part the First: War Begets War, A Conversation. Daedalus hosted a conversation among Robert Jay Lifton (1926-2025), Neta C. Crawford, and Matthew Evangelista last year. It was preprinted recently in The MIT Press Reader. I immediately noticed the participation of Robert Jay Lifton. Back in my dark ages, when the university had a University Bookstore […]
Read more...Less is known about psilocybin mushrooms than you might think even as their popularity and potency of products like edibles rises.
Read more...Research suggests that rocket exhaust and debris could be threatening the ozone layer, though uncertainties persist.
Read more...Part the First: The Slow Death of Biomedical Research Continues in the United States. We have covered this before, but the entire unfolding situation gets more surreal by the week. STAT News has been a go-to source, as in NIH will spend its full budget this year, agency director promises House appropriators. The first shot […]
Read more...Recently published studies raise basic methodology questions about the tests used to vet firearms ballistic analysts.
Read more...“A tipping point commonly means a point of no return. But conservation can still help ecosystems restore their balance.”
Read more...Trump’s war on universities, like Iran, is doing great damage to the US, here via success in reducing research funding and causing chaos.
Read more...Newsom backs the PMC over anti-vaxxers, even though Northern California is a stronghold of RFK Jr. health fetishists and quacks.
Read more...Part the First: As Giants Still Walk the Earth. Stanley Plotkin began practicing medicine in the 1950s. When he was an intern, outcomes for patients such as this little boy were frightening and devastating: Stanley Plotkin recalls a night in 1957, during his pediatrics internship, when a father brought a gravely ill toddler into the […]
Read more...How Category III CPT codes for new procedures became entangled in a politically driven, zero-sum reimbursement game, to patient detriment.
Read more...Part the First: Confirmation the Scientific Literature Has Entered Terminal Decline? In an update from last week’s Coffee Break, Cabell’s Predatory Reports database passes 20,000-journal milestone: The US-based information services company reports that Predatory Reports has grown by more than 300% since its launch in 2017. Having reached 10,000 journals in 2019 and 15,000 in […]
Read more...In this modern world, sometimes it seems that everyone has “something,” and many of these conditions are relatively “new” and their incidence is increasing. Leading diagnoses from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), include ADHD, autism, depression, and anxiety. Conditions that have become more common in recent years that have no primary […]
Read more...Part the First: Predatory or Not? Over the past six years the biomedical literature has accumulated 494,547 scientific “publications” with “COVID” (case insensitive) somewhere in the paper. A search using “AIDS HIV” as the query returns 204,559 papers over the past forty-five years. Something does not add up here. And that something is the nature […]
Read more...How large is the exposure of gender transition doctors who were quick to provide treatments to teens? A $2 million award says pretty big.
Read more...Part the First: Whalers in Brazil 5,000 Years Ago. Whaling rightly has become anathema in this modern world, except in certain, very limited, circumstances. But the historical origins of whaling remain an interesting question. It turns out that whalers were active in southern Brazil 5,000 years ago: Some of the oldest harpoons ever found reveal […]
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