A researcher Paul Voosen talked to for a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education on phthalates and preterm births pointed to a drop of water in an inch-wide hole as they stood in a cave. “The water drop is very persistent,” she said. “Little by little you start making that hole, and eventually it becomes very large. Being persistent. I always say you have to be like water.”
Persistence is precisely what is being required of the researcher and her colleagues, who suspect that the plastic additives known as phthalates might be linked to preterm birth. For more, check out Voosen’s travels with scientists in Puerto Rico who are trying to find out.
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Gary Schwitzer at HealthNewsReview.org gives a mixed review to TIME‘s cover story, “Manopause?! Aging, Insecurity and the $2 Billion Testosterone Industry.” The story, Schwitzer wrote, “discussed the hype, the amount of money some people are making off of Low T ‘therapies,’ the uncertainties, the potential hazards, and the fact that the FDA has ‘scheduled a meeting of experts for September to sort out red flags from red herrings in the disputed science of T therapy.’”
On the other hand, he quotes TIME’s health director, Siobhan O’Connor, who said on the TODAY show, “The promise is absolutely incredible.” I don’t have a subscription to TIME and can’t get past the paywall, so I haven’t read the story. But O’Connor’s remark is silly. A lot of promises are incredible. But the reality is different. The side effects of testosterone are sobering. And the use of testosterone can make men unable to have children. (And please, let’s get rid of “manopause.” There is no such thing, and it’s the worst coinage since chillax.)
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At On Science Blogs, Tabitha M. Powledge rounds up the latest on the legalization of marijuana and an even trickier proposition–the legalization of marijuana research. She also links to a Wall Street Journal story on Google’s new project to digitize the human body, so to speak, which the Journal calls a “moonshot” (a 45-year-old cliché). The project doesn’t impress Craig Venter or Antonio Regalado at Technology Review.
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Laurel Rosenhall at The Sacramento Bee has an important story on tobacco lobbying. The first graf talks about lawmakers’ proclivities (“Democrats in the California Capitol have become increasingly willing in recent years to take money from cigarette companies, a source of campaign funding that was once so controversial it remains shunned by their state party organization”) and the second graf delivers the lede: “Donations from the nation’s two major cigarette companies to Democratic candidates for the Legislature and other California offices more than quadrupled over the last five years, a Sacramento Bee analysis of campaign finance data shows.”
The money “came as the Legislature, dominated by Democrats, quietly rejected several bills aimed at reducing smoking and the illnesses that come with it.” Gibraltar may crumble, but tobacco lobbying is here to stay. It’s reassuring, isn’t it?
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