You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2008.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain turns 72 today.
(Hat tip: Thingsyoungerthanmccain.com)
I wasn’t vaccinated as a child. My mother, as she explains now, reasoned that because all of the other children I played with had been vaccinated—and thus, a “herd immunity” had been achieved—there was no reason to expose my sister and me to the dangers of a vaccine (however small those dangers may be).
A quarter century later and that rationalization is still all too common. Last week, the CDC published an update of national measles data. Eight years ago, measles had been practically eradicated from the U.S.; and between 2001 and 2007, an average of just 63 cases per year came in through Americans who had visited other countries. But this year, just from January to July, 131 cases of measles were reported. CDC attributes the rise to plummeting vaccination rates.
On Monday, news spread of a major mumps outbreak outside of Vancouver, which included 190 people belonging to an “unnamed Christian fundamentalist group” that is against vaccines of all kinds.
Vaccines do not cause autism, we know. However, vaccines are not 100 percent safe, and no public health official or (good) doctor has ever claimed that they are. (You’re basically exposing a child to a disease, remember?) So parents tend to ask the same thing my mom did: Why should I risk my child’s health for the sake of everyone else’s? (More below the fold)
Language Log has a fun one up now…
If a desert island is uninhabited by humans, it doesn’t follow that humans uninhabit it. Likewise, if half the money was unaccounted for, that doesn’t mean that anyone unaccounted for it. And you can say that someone’s support was unwavering, but you can’t say that it unwavered.
But wait a minute, maybe you can after all.
At least, it seems that someone writing headlines at the LA Times can:
Bigger heads: In mice that lack PTEN in a small subset of neurons, the cerebral cortex is thicker and part of the hippocampus is larger.
Of the 18 candidate genes for autism uncovered so far, 3 genes — PTEN, TSC1 and TSC2 — are part of a biochemical pathway with a long-established role in cancer.
New research shows that knocking out these genes in mouse brains causes enlarged neurons, seizures and behaviors similar to autism.
“[This] brings about an enormously optimistic idea that, for some small subset of kids with autism, treatment of this pathway with a drug might reverse some symptoms,” says microbiologist Arnold Levine of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University.
Apparently, winning a gold medal has nothing to do with practice, dedication, athletic prowess, or uh, merit. No, says British statistician Kenneth Mitchell, winning gold depends on your astrological sign. As reported in Reuters:
After comparing the birthdates of every Olympic winner since the modern Games began in 1896, British statistician Kenneth Mitchell discovered gold medals really are written in the stars.
He found athletes born in certain months were more likely to thrive in particular events.
Mitchell dubbed the phenomenon “The Pisces Effect” (pisces is Latin for fish) after finding that athletes born under the sign received around 30 percent more medals than any other star sign in events like swimming and water polo.
…In the history of the Games, the big winners in the overall medals haul were born under the signs of Capricorn, Aquarius and Aries. They boasted a significantly higher number of golds.
Ok, we all know that astrology is complete woo. So what’s going on here?
When medical scientists try to find a cure for disease X, they usually start by engineering an animal model that exhibits the etiology (or at very least, the symptoms) of the disease.
I’ve been writing recently about genetic mouse models of autism which, because of the heterogeneity and “humanness” of the condition, are extremely difficult to make.
I was pretty surprised to learn today that scientists have also had major difficulties making a mouse model of a decidedly less complex condition: acne.
On Sunday, soul music legend and devoted Scientologist Isaac Hayes died of a stroke. The next day—in one of the most entertaining articles I’ve read in a long time—Slate took on the question of what’s in store for Mr. Hayes’ soul.
The Scientology Press Office says that it will be “born again into the flesh of another body;” conveniently, the exact mechanisms of that process cannot fully be understood by “church outsiders.”
Fortunately, the Slate article digs up some of the few juicy details that have been revealed to “outsiders” in the 46 years since L. Ron Hubbard made up the religion:
Need a new desktop wallpaper? Check out these amazing satellite images. Shown above, the Malaspina Glacier, in Alaska:
Several glaciers spill onto the Gulf of Alaska to form the gentle ripples of the Malaspina, an ice field so large it can only be seen in its entirety from space. Its tongue, here shown in sky blue, flows from the stunning Saint Elias Mountains towards the sea, filling the plain, although at no point does it actually reach the icy water.
