When Boonseng Leelarthaepin, a scientist in Sydney, Australia, picked up the phone, he heard a question he didn't expect: Where, a voice said, is the missing data?
Leelarthaepin paused. "I knew in my mind where it was," he said later. He went to his garage and dug through decades of boxes and...
When Boonseng Leelarthaepin, a scientist in Sydney, Australia, picked up the phone, he heard a question he didn't expect: Where, a voice said, is the missing data?
Leelarthaepin paused. "I knew in my mind where it was," he said later. He went to his garage and dug through decades of boxes and old scientific papers and found it--"an obsolete 9-track magnetic computer tape" on an "unremarkable looking brown spool with a faded 3M label that had the words LEE 3 printed in blue ink," reports Kelly Crowe of the CBC.
The data was from the 40-year-old Sydney Diet Heart Study, and the person asking for it was Christopher Ramsden at the National Institutes of Health. By breaking down the data in ways that were not done at the time of the original Sydney study, he was able to find that omega-6 unsaturated fatty acids in...
Once, while striding across Harvard Yard with the biologist and Harvard professor...
Once, while striding across Harvard Yard with the biologist and Harvard professor E.O. Wilson, I said something about the history of the place, which bears the memory of the footprints of hundreds of thousands of Harvard students, including some who later became presidents or great scholars and thinkers. (Or had less exalted careers; let's be honest.) Wilson raised an arm, swept it across the landscape before us and said the yard's dank, black soil, even after centuries of human habitation, almost certainly harbored species unknown to science.
I thought of that while reading Carol Kaesuk Yoon's lead piece in today...
Outrage over the decision by ScienceBlogs to run a blog produced by Pepsi--see...
Outrage over the decision by ScienceBlogs to run a blog produced by Pepsi--see my post earlier today--continues to grow. Best-selling author Rebecca Skloot has now announced her resignation from the site; her Culture Dish will reappear elsewhere. And the Guardian has published a confidential letter from Adam Bly, Seed's founder and CEO, in which he attempts to justify the decision to give Pepsi a blog.
Excerpts from Bly's letter to his bloggers...
"Methylmercury Cuts Could Save the U.S. Millions of Dollars,"...
"Methylmercury Cuts Could Save the U.S. Millions of Dollars," says a recent headline in Chemical & Engineering News.
The reason? Mostly that reducing mercury in the environment could reduce the number of heart attacks.
Sounds good--I vote yes! Or I would have, if I hadn't kept reading...
Writer Naomi Lubick starts backpedalling even before the ink is dry on the lede. The connection between mercury and heart attacks "remains weak," she writes, because "the studies relied on small sample sizes." If mercury doesn't cause heart attacks--and we're apparently far from confirming it--then methylmercury cuts could...
On Monday, 16 food companies said they would cut the amount of sodium in their food as part of a...
On Monday, 16 food companies said they would cut the amount of sodium in their food as part of a national campaign to reduce American's intake of salt, eliminating thousands of deaths and saving billions of dollars.
Important, if true. Sadly, the announcement provoked a torrent of uncritical stories that could easily have been written by the companies themselves.
The AP story by Karen Matthews lets the PR chief of Mars Foods get away with this one:
Mark Broadhurst, director of corporate affairs for Mars Foods, said the company would cut the salt in its Uncle Ben's flavored rice products...
My sympathies go out to anyone who tries to do a takeout on fat, carbs, and obesity. I've...
My sympathies go out to anyone who tries to do a takeout on fat, carbs, and obesity. I've waded into that murk repeatedly, and I've never been entirely satisfied with anything I've written. But I keep hoping somebody will sort this out.
So I eagerly dipped in to Melinda Wenner Moyer's piece on Slate, End the War on Fat: It could be making us sicker. It's a timely and well-reported look at some of the new research on the role of diet in heart disease. Sadly, however, it goes astray in the last few grafs. Moyer's competent reporting doesn't justify the conclusions she tries to draw from it.
Much of the story turns on the work of Ronald...
According to a study presented Monday at the American Heart Association's annual meeting, "heart disease patients who practice TM [Transcendental Meditation...
According to a study presented Monday at the American Heart Association's annual meeting, "heart disease patients who practice TM [Transcendental Meditation] have almost 50% lower rates of heart attacks, stroke and deaths compared to similar patients who don't practice meditation." That's from Shari Roan on the Los Angeles Times blog, Booster Shots.
I bet you can guess where I'm going with this. That 50 percent drop represents what--100 heart attacks in the control group and 50 in the meditators? Or two in the control group, and one in the meditators? Roan doesn't say.
I wasn't at the heart association meeting this year, so I went to...
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