I’m so old I can remember when you had to wash and dry lettuce by hand. What a pain in the neck that was. Then came a fabulous invention: the salad spinner. Salad spinners may seem pretty primitive to you … Continue reading →
Like Charlie Gard before him, British toddler Alfie Evan’s situation highlights not just questions of medical ethics, but the power of the state over the individual. I wrote about Charlie here. Alfie Evans’ situation differs in some details, but it’s … Continue reading →
This is an important and sobering article about brain function. Here’s an excerpt: At TIRR, [Kothari, an assistant professor of rehabilitation at Baylor College of Medicine] estimates nine out of 10 patients who come to him with a vegetative label … Continue reading →
That’s the clickbait headline for this BBC article. I thought it might be something about Neanderthal genes, or perhaps mitochondria. But no; it’s about bacteria, mainly gut bacteria: Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. … Continue reading →
That’s the headline for this eyecatching article in the Guardian. At any rate, it certainly caught my eye. I initially assumed it might be about assisted or permitted suicide, and whether and when a minor could be allowed to make … Continue reading →
As a person who had some trouble with infertility when I was trying to conceive, I found this story very touching.
Continue reading →No, but it will seem longer. That’s my attempt at a joke. But maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe it’s true. For many years there’s been an idea—derived initially from animal research—that restricting caloric intake makes a person live longer. … Continue reading →
For quite a wile, psychiatric hospitalizations have been on the decline. New drugs are responsible for a lot of this; what used to be untreatable is now often controllable. In addition, there is Szaszian PC mental-illness-is-a-myth thinking, which began to … Continue reading →
The extreme conditions of climbing Mt. Everest, and the risks involved, hardly seem worth it to us regular folks who can’t even imagine voluntarily subjecting oneself to such an ordeal: Just ahead of them, a man from another party was … Continue reading →
Every now and then there’s a side discussion in the comments section where I respond to someone at such great length, and with so much research involved, that I figure it makes sense to turn my comment into a post. … Continue reading →
I keep reading online discussions in which people assume that there’s been a big increase in teen killings, both murder and suicide. It’s taken almost as a given, but I rarely if ever see anyone citing statistics to back up … Continue reading →
When I read the news of a possible breakthrough in Alzheimer’s research, it sounded at least somewhat encouraging. Maybe, maybe someday it could lead to a cure or at least an effective treatment for this dreadful scourge of an illness: … Continue reading →