Month: February 2014
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How Does the Plague Kill People?
Every year, about seven Americans come down with plague. Yes, that plague, the one known as Black Death and which wiped out about one-third of Europe’s population in the mid-1300s.
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The Scientifically Unengaged Drive Biotechnology Debates
We are allowing our national science policy debates to be partially dominated by people who know almost nothing about science.
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Not Every Disagreement Is a Logical Fallacy
Blaming our disagreements, particularly political ones, on logical fallacies does nothing other than delude us into thinking that our opponents are illogical and that we are intellectually superior.
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Nobody Wins in Fundamentalist ‘Creation Debate’
Young-Earth Creationists and fundamentalist atheists actually have quite a bit in common.
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Vitamin C: Maybe Linus Pauling Wasn’t Entirely Crazy
Though Linus Pauling is still mostly wrong, perhaps the potential therapeutic benefit of vitamin C injections could be magnanimously interpreted as a small step toward rehabilitating his tainted legacy.
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Obama Must Take Hit for Pot Talk
The apparent heroin overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who first used drugs decades ago, is a reminder of just how difficult it is to get a handle on drug abuse and the youth culture that enables it. One reason for the surge in heroin use over the past five years is a crackdown…
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Microbial Warfare: Anthrax Assassin
A DEAD zebra in the open savannah of Namibia’s Etosha National Park would be an off-putting encounter for most people. But for Holly Ganz of the University of California, Davis and an international team of researchers, the striped ungulate’s carcass reeked of opportunity. Read the rest at The Economist.
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Sit Down. We Need to Talk About Norovirus
Be thankful you live a country that has good medical care.
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Dream Analysis Reveals if You Are Psychotic
“The Freudian notion that ‘dreams are the royal road to the unconscious’ is clinically useful, after all.”