Researchers have come up with a way to get cancer cells to kill each other.
Faster, please.
Category Archives: Health
A New Desalinization Method
If this works out, it would be huge. It might be useful for Martian water, too.
When A “Scientific Consensus” Isn’t Worth The Paper It’s Printed On
The WaPo finally wakes up to reality.
And yes, it’s not just whole milk, but small steps, I guess.
Food Preferences
Yes, I think that, while some people have serious health issues, much of this is just fad.
[Update a while later]
I should note that I’m allergic to tree nuts, but it’s never been life threatening, as far as I know. It’s just that if I eat them, the linings of my mouth and throat itch.
One more point. I’m not normally into censorship, but I think that the “Food Babe” moron should be banned from the Internet.
Schizophrenia
Instead of curing it, it may be possible to prevent it.
Faster, please.
Paleolithic Sleep Patterns
Apparently, sleeping all night isn’t a modern industrial invention:
The volunteers also slept continuously. They would toss and turn like everyone does, but they almost never woke up for a concerted window in the middle of the night. This contradicts a growing idea, popularized by historian Roger Ekirch, that sleeping in eight-hour chunks is a modern affectation.
Ekirch combed through centuries of Western literature and documents to show that Europeans used to sleep in two segments, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness. Siegel doesn’t dispute Ekirch’s analysis; he just thinks that the old two-block pattern was preceded by an even older single-block one. “The two-sleep pattern was probably due to humans migrating so far from the equator that they had long dark periods,” he says. “The long nights caused this pathological sleep pattern and the advent of electric lights and heating restored the primal one.”
Interesting. Also some good advice for better sleep.
Sit
Standing desks don’t extend lifespan?
I don’t know, it still seems like you’ll expend more energy by standing than sitting. But now I don’t feel as bad that I’ve never gotten around to getting/making one.
How Scientists Fool Themselves
…and how they can stop.
Nutrition Guidelines
Tom Vilsack: “I wish there were scientific facts.”
Pro tip to Vilsack. An “informed opinion” not based on scientific facts is an uninformed opinion.
And here’s a nice bit of illogic:
Lawmakers also noted that federal nutrition guidelines could be considered a failure because of the country’s high obesity rates. But Burwell fought back, arguing that obesity would be much worse had the guidelines not been in place.
“We are on the wrong trajectory, but would the trajectory have been worse?” Burwell said, acknowledging there was an obesity problem.
Since it was the original crap low-fat guidelines from the government that caused the problem, no, there’s no reason to consider them a success, or to not end the insanity.
The Dangers Of Mars
The movie understates them. I vehemently disagree with this, though:
Martian gravity is roughly one-third the gravity on Earth. Experiments on the International Space Station show that plants, animals and humans all suffer in weightlessness, but no one knows how living creatures will fare in reduced gravity.
“Maybe plants will be happy, maybe animals will be happy, maybe humans will be happy,” McKay says. “Or maybe not.” The effect of reduced gravity isn’t easily tested ahead of time and though probably not a huge problem, it could be a “showstopper,” McKay says.
It is easily tested ahead of time. Stop wasting money on a giant rocket and build a gravity lab. The fact that we’re not is one of the strongest indicators that neither NASA or Congress are serious about Mars.
[Update a few minutes later]
Barriers to colonizing Mars. I don’t buy this number for a minute, though:
NASA’s current Mars mission concept would set us back about $50 billion over the course of a decade, or about twice as much as the moon program cost between 1962 and 1972.
First, in current-year dollars, we spent more like a hundred billion on Apollo (the $25B is in sixties dollars). But they’re probably going to spend that much just on SLS/Orion, without any actual Mars hardware.
[Late-morning update]
Don’t worry, Matt Damon won’t get stranded on Mars, because NASA can’t get him there.