bend and stretch
From The NY Times
Yoga is a good thing, so you tend to push further than you would in a sport where you are actually more attuned to injury and afraid of injuries,” said Dr. Michelle Carlson, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan who specializes in arms and [...]
the power of numbers
From Wired Magazine
Brin, of course, is no ordinary 36-year-old. As half of the duo that founded Google, he’s worth about $15 billion. That bounty provides additional leverage: Since learning that he carries a LRRK2 mutation, Brin has contributed some $50 million to Parkinson’s research, enough, he figures, to “really move the needle.” In light of the [...]
queen of the opera
An end of pain…
Fascinating piece on the invention of anesthetic from The Boston Globe
The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at [...]
poppy day
Amazing druggie story from the Tuscon Weekly
Columbus Day almost killed me.
I woke up avalanched under a junkyard of pain, my body a trap of torn nerves and trashed organs. An oily rash of sweat had soaked through my pillow and into the mattress. I was coughing, confused and crazy with anger. A throbbing, deep-pink chemical [...]
turning a bad situation into an opportunity
Stephan Zielinski did the only thing you can do when you’re faced with the possibility of a deadly disease ravaging the earth’s entire population, he turned its DNA code into ambient music. Now we’ll be able to hear what’s killing us…
Swine flu has been sequenced. More out of curiosity than anything else, I wrote code [...]
At any cost
Here is an interesting, if brutal analysis of English paper, The Daily Mail’s various approaches to the subject of the cervical cancer vaccination in different territories. Layscience cynically suggest that the contradictory stances may be due to the fact that the newspapers will say whatever they think their readership want to hear in an effort [...]
them bones them bones
If I was a soldier, I’d find this latest success in The Pentagon’s research program unnerving. One can only imagine how cavalier they’d be with human life, if they could feel confident that any limbs their soldiers mighjt lose, could be quickly grown back. It remind me of nothing more than the Monty Python scene [...]
the ubermensch is coming
from The Irish Times
“The first British baby genetically selected to be free of a breast cancer gene has been born, doctors said today. She grew from an embryo screened to ensure it did not contain the faulty BRCA 1 gene, which passes the risk of breast cancer down generations.
University College London said the mother and [...]
Iodine
From The New York Times
“Travelers to Africa and Asia all have their favorite forms of foreign aid to “make a difference.” One of mine is a miracle substance that is cheap and actually makes people smarter.
Unfortunately, it has one appalling side effect. No, it doesn’t make you sterile, but it is just about the least [...]