As someone with an elderly parent who takes a huge amount of costly medication to treat risk factors like high blood pressure rather than real diseases, I’ve been suspicious that this approach is less effective than claimed. And I have been particularly leery of the enthusiasm for statins (which lower cholesterol) which some cardiologists have […]
Read more...Periodically, the Earth has experienced significant species die-offs. While the so-called K-T extinction, which marked the end of the dinosaur age, has been attributed to an asteroid crash, other declines remain something of a mystery. An article in Science magazine, summarized on its website, recounts a study by researchers from the University of Kansas in […]
Read more...A sad day for therapists, a boon for big Pharma. From Press Esc: MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice, according to an article in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Researchers from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory hope that their work could lead to the first […]
Read more...I will let you in on a dirty secret. Appearances to the contrary, this blog isn’t about finance and markets. Its real purpose is to encourage critical thinking, but since I know a wee bit about the financial services industry, I tend to use that as the point of departure. In that vein, it’s important […]
Read more...A Canadian study, “Food Web–Specific Biomagnification of Persistent Organic Pollutants,” published in Science Magazine, identifies a new class of chemicals that pose a potential threat to human health. This conclusion results from a more fundamental insight: the traditional method of looking at bioaccumulation did so by studying marine life. However, air-breathing creatures discharge toxins differently […]
Read more...This article from the Economist, “The long and the short of it,” points to research that finds a strong correlation between paternal and children’s lifespans, and also indicated that children of older parents are longer-lived (counter-intuitive, since they are also subject to more birth defects). However, this work was conducted with a comparatively small sample […]
Read more...The headline in Mark Thoma’s blog is more colorful: “To Reduce Crime, Get the Lead Out.” His post points to a Washington Post story, “Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity,” in which economist Rick Nevin says lead exposure is the biggest factor behind crime. Now as any statistician will tell you, correlation is not causation, […]
Read more...Most news stories touting the findings of a ten year investigation of organic versus conventionally farmed tomatoes make broader claims (example; CNNMoney “All-natural veggies good for heart“) than the study’s immediate findings, namely that the fruit, when raised organically, has nearly double the level of some key flavinoids (quercetin and kaempferol. Flavinoids have been found […]
Read more...Hope you had a happy 4th. Since we are still in a slow news period, I’ll pass along a couple of items I enjoyed, and hope they strike a chord with those of you who have pets smart enough to have wrapped you around their paw. First from Physorg, “Clever orangutans confirm Aesop’s fable“: Orangutans, […]
Read more...This is the title of what, according to Steven Shapin in the New Yorker, is a very good book by British historian David Edgerton on technology. Edgerton makes a bold argument, namely, that the way we think about technology is dominated by a heroic narrative in which a new approach sweeps aside what came before […]
Read more...Six highly respected climate scientists have published a paper, “Climate change and trade gasses,” in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (hat tip Gristmill) that says things are worse than is being reported. The paper takes issue with some of the assumptions of the IPCC report, arguing that it ignores that ice sheets melt […]
Read more...The blog Overcoming Bias pointed to an article in Reason Magazine, “More Information Confirms What You Already Know.“ The article cites a study by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. “Affect, Values, and Nanotechnology Risk Perceptions: An Experimental Investigation,” which sought to assess attitudes towards new technology but has broader implications: [R]esearchers polled […]
Read more...In a New York Times article, Daniel Gross sympathetically discusses a paper by MIT economists Peter Temin and Frank Levy on the role of institutional behavior and social attitudes in income inequality. As a preface to his comments about their work, he sets forth some of the conventional arguments for the inevitability of inequality, namely, […]
Read more...Yet another instance of the Administration fudging the data in an effort to change the record. After a proud history of climate change denial, the White House now claims that the US has been more successful than Europe in reducing greenhouse gases. “The Political and Selective Use of Data: Cherry-Picking Climate Information in the White […]
Read more...Earlier this month, the national science academies of the G8 plus those of China, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and India, issued a strongly worded joint statement about global warming and energy usage. Let us stress that it is pretty much unheard of for this many independent science bodies to agree on such an unequivocal […]
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