Hits of the week past
Category: Brains and minds
The week's best -- with new features!
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neuron Culture
David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.
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I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. My previous books include Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years.
You're encouraged to subscribe to Neuron Culture by email; see more of my workat my main website; or check out my catch-all-streams Tumblr log.
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- Your genetic info -- not free, easy, or clear
- Gleanings from round the net, Apr 1 2010
- Neuron Culture's big hits for March
- Is the Mirror Neuron theory unfalsifiable?
- Our genome: Ten years old and still growing fast
- Accidental brain evolution suffers a reversal
- The Week's Best: Evolution, healthcare reform, clever apes, and Cheever in his undies
- The old print roots of blogging. Mostly SFW
- Choosing not to use genetic testing is an option. Ignorance isn't.
- There will always be a Britain
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Science policy:
Watchdogs, sniff this: What investigative science journalism can investigate
Category: Journalism - rebooting (aka future of)
I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Posted by David Dobbs at 11:16 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Quick dip: Fish hatchery mischief; health-care-reform sabotage; wiki science; and maple seeds
Category: Healthcare policy
I can only hope he'll as vigorously ask people such as Mitt Romney what exactly is wrong with offering more attractive insurance options to the almost 75 million people who are un- or under-insured.
Posted by David Dobbs at 3:05 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What if you could predict PTSD in combat troops? Oh, who cares...
Category: Healthcare policy
At a time when we are much concerned with reducing PTSD in combat troops, it's valuable to learn that we could apparentlly cut the PTSD rate by more than 50% simply by keeping the least healthy 15% -- as measured by fairly simple health questionnaires we already have in any and -- out of combat zones. So why is this study going almost completely ignored?
Posted by David Dobbs at 4:00 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Afternoon dip - Zombie fire ants, stereotype threat, bedtime routines, floating plastic, and tree-climbing bots
Category: Brains and minds
Speaking of pleasure: Having lived with fire ants, stepped in fire ants, laid down with fire ants, and been bit just about everywhere by fire ants, this pleases me immensely: Parasitic flies turn fire ants them into zombies. The fly maggots eat their brains.
Posted by David Dobbs at 3:12 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Pharma objects to empiricism, part xxx
Category: Healthcare policy
This gets at the deep, deep problem created by allowing pharma to dominant drug testing data while we lack the ability to collect information on how well various drug and other treatments actually work in clinical practice.
Posted by David Dobbs at 12:02 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Effect Measure on what "so far, so good" means
Category: Medicine
While approaching an intersection you see a truck on the intersecting road is fixing to run the stop sign and smash you. You slam on the brakes -- as the truck driver slams on his. You release the brakes and roll through unharmed. Have you overreacted?
Posted by David Dobbs at 3:38 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Flu news you can use
Category: Science policy
A few of the better bits from the last 24 or so, on Mexico's response, how fast this might spread, and the possibility of a re-emergence in the autumn (a la 1918).
Posted by David Dobbs at 7:06 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Effect Measure on the question of swine flu's "kill rate"
Category: Science policy
I'm guessing most everyone interested in swine flu already reads Effect Measure (as well you should; it was an invaluable resource in my reporting for my Slate piece on the mystery of the virulence of the outbreak in Mexico). But in case you haven't or are not, today's primer there on case fatality rates, virulence, and mortality would make an excellent start.
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Swine flu and the Mexico mystery
Category: Science policy
Of the two qualities vital to a nasty pandemic-- rapid spread and high mortality -- this a brand-new strain of swine flu, or H1N1, seems to possess the first: Evidence is high that it spreads readily among humans. But how deadly is it? Despite the 100+ deaths in Mexico, we don't really know.
Posted by David Dobbs at 3:22 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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