We discussed Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben earlier this year. His message is that climate catastrophe is not foreordained, even if the current “weather” is odd and suggests that something in seriously amiss. I grew up in the American South, where “hot” is the normal state of being from April through October. One […]
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...Part the First: Nutrition and Medicine. The current Secretary of Health and Human Services is not wrong in his emphasis on nutrition (a stopped analog clock is right twice a day). I don’t know where Lauren Rice is attending medical school in New York City, but her editorial take seems about half right in I’m […]
Read more...It is a curious thing that our politicians and economists in the Uniparty believe that economic growth, now and forevermore, will solve all our problems and cure all our ills. One looks around and it’s clear this is not so. Still, this economics truth was stated with utmost, if utterly spurious, clarity by a former […]
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...Only one part this Friday. The president announced Casey Means, MD, would be his nominee for Surgeon General of the United States hearings in the middle of 2025. The US Senate began considering her nomination this week. The back and forth has been interesting. Where to begin? First we can start with the previous nine […]
Read more...The Great American Food System™ is productive when measured by output, but it is not particularly good at producing wholesome and healthy food for the American people. The nature of healthy food has been argued for the past sixty years, with various food plates, pyramids, and other arrays used to illustrate recommendations of the day. […]
Read more...Part the First: What is Landscape? I have heard of John Stilgoe but have never gotten around to reading his work. That will change as soon as possible. His book What is Landscape? is described in the MIT Press newsletter in a series of questions, the first being: You place enormous weight on etymology and […]
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...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 […]
Read more...According to the news article in Damage Assessment (paywall that may be surmounted by registration) in Science by Jeffrey Mervis, the stated goals of Trump v2.0 have been consistent and were implicit during Trump v1.0. These have been: (1) shrink the size and scope of the federal government, (2) expand the power of the presidency, […]
Read more...After one full year the grim news on the science front – all fronts really – this Coffee Break is devoted to why science is interesting and fun. And useful, even if its use value cannot be predicted before the fact. Part the First: Ancient Travelers. Or, social networks (not this kind) have always been […]
Read more...Part the First: The President Fixes Healthcare. Oh, joy! A very long time ago I told myself that, surely, by the time I was eligible for Medicare the United States would have fixed our healthcare system so that job lock and other assorted problems would have vanished. Silly me. I have been eligible for Medicare […]
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