Here is the medical writer’s dilemma: A terrific story comes along, with top flight researchers, a deadly disease, and hints of a treatment that could be, to use a forbidden word in medical writing, an actual breakthrough. Yet, the list of good results is just one case long. But it’s a GREAT and gripping tale. […]
Press frenzy over Ancient Fossil as the long-expected fish-to-land “missing link;” or take THAT, Creationists
The 365-million-year old bones, uncovered recently in Canada’s arctic, are of a hefty creature caught “in the act of adapting toward a life on land,” its discoverers report in Nature. Head like a crocodile or maybe a toothy salamander, tail like a fish, and fins stiffened by bones that foreshadow terrestrial limbs. Of course, maybe […]
Obesity through thick and thin
Fat, that staple of health writers everywhere, claimed even more ink in Wednesday’s papers with the appearance of the April 5 JAMA. Inside were two faces of the issue–calorie restriction (at last, a hint of evidence that it does some things in humans that seem beneficial, though the study lasted only six months) and the […]
AP: Feds to do own spotted owl recovery plan
We haven’t heard much about those elusive spotted owls for awhile. Well, here’s news from the bureaucratic front: After long promising a plan for protecting spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest, the Fish and Wildlife Service says it can’t afford to pay an outside contractor the $400,000 to write up the strategy, reports AP’s Jeff […]
Reuters: Canadian bison set to stroll Siberia
In a move to restore a bit of Pleistocene flavor to Siberia, a few dozen rare wood bison from Canada apparently are fated to live out their lives in Russia’s far east, Reuter’s Danny Glenwright reports. He does a nice job squeezing some skeptical views that this ecological adjustment truly offers the prospect of bison […]
Obesity gets Lots of Press: US Men and Kids Fatter and Fatter
No real surprise, maybe, that fat makes news, but data from the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, reported in this week’s JAMA, says while supersizing isn’t slowing down among men and children, women seem to be holding steady on the scales. The AP’s Mike Stobbe: Read it Chicago Sun Times’s Jim Ritter: Read […]