Carbohydrates Increase Risk Of Dementia – Because You’ll Believe Anything
David Perlmutter, MD, became well-known last year as the best-selling author of Grain Brain, which demonizes wheat (and, of course, gluten) and he recently claimed that simple dietary changes would prevent half of Alzheimer's cases.
Here’s Your Chance To Get 450 Space Inventions For Free
ESA, the European Space Agency, is my favorite space organization.Yeah, I said it. The guy whose favorite movie is "The Right Stuff" and who could write a whole book on the Mercury program prefers the ESA over NASA. The reason is because ESA cares about outreach in a way that NASA doesn't. ESA does not care if you are the BBC or Science 2.0, if you call someone, they call back. If it involves more than a press release claiming it has 'implications for life on other planets' you are going to be stuck in a maze of bureuacracy.
Missed It By That Much…
For THE WIRED WORLD IN 2013 annual prognostication issue, predictions for the year by some of the luminaries in science media, I predicted that one of the Big 5 organs would be created.The benefit is obvious; organs created from a patient's own adult stem cells mean no chance of rejection and no need for expensive immunosuppressive drugs. Science-fiction/ethical scenarios like raising animals or people for 'harvesting' by wealthy elites are off the table because a customized organ could be grown in the lab.
Systems Biology Post-Docs May Have A New Best Friend In…Philip Morris?
When you think of systems biology, you don't ordinarily think of process verification and methodology.Sure, there has been data verification in biology and clinical trials in pharmaceuticals, but best methods and best practices don't really exist for systems biology.And when you think of systems biology, you really don't think of Philip Morris, the cigarette folks.
It may be time to rethink both.
A Backdoor Effort To Label Genetically Modified Food
A Washington state referendum to put warning labels on genetically modified foods, I-522, failed in the last election, but a new effort is more clever - they want to warn the public about Frankenfish and are couching it in an effort to simply make the public aware if it's farm-raised or caught in the wild or, oh yeah, a TRANSGENIC ABOMINATION OF NATURE.No Date This Valentine’s Day? Feel Better With An Evolutionary Theory Of Loneliness
Loneliness is not a gnawing, chronic disease without redeeming features, social isolation is just a different scale of organization that can't be grasped outside evolutionary time and evolutionary forces. Well, maybe.If you are alone this Valentine's Day, you are not...alone, you are part of a giant biological imperative, according to the psychologists behind an evolutionary theory of loneliness, who write in Cogntion & Emotion about its potential adaptive value on an evolutionary timescale.
3 Ways To Keep America Dominant In Science And Technology
Research and Development (R&D) has become something of a dirty word throughout a giant swath of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) community. Academia is where it's at, the saying goes, and basic research, learning for the sake of learning with no defined public benefit, is what scientists are told they must do if they want to be real scientists.Technology will be fine, it is assumed. Like gifted students who find their school programs cut, the belief is that American technology will be find a way to be dominant.
Institute Of Cancer Research Criticizes Drug Companies For Not Testing On Children Enough
In the endless war on pharmaceutical companies, there is a consistent refrain; the US Food and Drug Administration is too slow to approve new drugs unless it approved drugs too quickly and the product hurt someone. Mainstream media highlight the complaints of doctors and patients that some drug or another is available in Europe or Asia but not here and then on another page delights in a lawsuit about how evil the company was for making a drug which carried risks.
Sneezing Sponges! Did They Evolve Noses?
Evolutionary biology sounds exciting - there wouldn't be any movies on the SyFy Channel without Gatoroids and Sharknados and other feats of life science run amok - but in reality you are going to spend a lot of time paying your dues watching sponges in mid-sneeze before you get to create an epidemic or a giant monster.
Sneezing sponges? Isn't that a little far-fetched, even for the network that brought us "Arachnoquake"? No, actually the sponge thing is real, and a new paper points to Porifera sneezing as evidence for a sensory organ in one of the most basic multicellular organisms on Earth, even though it doesn't even have a nervous system to interpret sensory information.