What does space travel do to your mind?
You’ll know that Congress and NASA are serious about deep space missions when they stop pretending that Orion is adequate for them, and start serious work on Nautilus, or collaborate with Bigelow.
Category Archives: Health
The Social Safety Net
…is a form of institutionalized child abuse. And as the New York Times would say, minorities are hit hardest.
Healthier Snacks
This is a step in the right direction, though they persist in the myth that the problem with potato chips is fat. I’d love to try a collard- or cabbage- or kale-based chip.
Finding Out What’s In The Bill
Many Senate Democrats want to delay the medical device tax, because they’re concerned that it will cost jobs.
Gee, if only someone had told them about this before they voted for it. Oh, wait.
Morons.
The FDA
Time for SCOTUS to rein it in.
Safety Netting Our Citizens
…to death:
…it’s true that at any point Rob could have taken concrete actions to change his path — and he bears moral responsibility for his failure to act — but it’s also true that our government has relentlessly incentivized every step of his deterioration, all in the name of compassion. Even worse, by providing such generous benefits with no meaningful strings attached, we’ve also essentially immunized him against the kind of assistance that he truly needs — the “tough love” that demands that a man do what he can to help himself through productive work.
The result? Another statistic. Another father who is no longer a role model for his children. Another sadly shortened lifetime’s worth of money (some borrowed from China) paid to sustain a lifestyle not good enough to enjoy and not tough enough to leave.
There’s nothing compassionate about this. And I don’t even believe that the intentions are good.
ObamaCare
Will it go the way of McCain-Feingold?
There’s still plenty to litigate, and Roberts, having been burned by the election, is unlikely to give it any more passes.
Coffee
The case for drinking as much as you like.
I’ve been thinking about starting to drink it for health reasons, but “as much as I like” is currently none at all — I’ve just never developed a taste for it, and I’ve never envied people who seem (or claim to be) unable to function in the morning without it. I don’t want to get dependent on it in that way. From the article, the most obvious benefit is to reduce triglycerides, but mine are already very low from my paleo diet.
It wouldn’t be hard for me to take it up, because I make a pot for Patricia every morning. I’d just have to make more.
So I still don’t know what to do about it.
The Secret Of Immortality
From a jellyfish?
[Update a few minutes later]
I posted this without reading it all, because it’s a long. But I found this telling:
Even some of Kubota’s peers are cautious when speaking about potential medical applications in Turritopsis research. “It is difficult to foresee how much and how fast . . . Turritopsis dohrnii can be useful to fight diseases,” Stefano Piraino, a colleague of Ferdinando Boero’s, told me in an e-mail. “Increasing human longevity has no meaning, it is ecological nonsense. What we may expect and work on is to improve the quality of life in our final stages.”
My emphasis. This is a religious belief, not a scientific one.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: life extension through gene therapy:
Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average, and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals’ health, delaying the onset of age-‐related diseases — like osteoporosis and insulin resistance — and achieving improved readings on aging indicators like neuromuscular coordination.
The gene therapy consisted of treating the animals with a DNA-modified virus, the viral genes having been replaced by those of the telomerase enzyme, with a key role in aging. Telomerase repairs the extreme ends or tips of chromosomes, known as telomeres, and in doing so slows the cell’s and therefore the body’s biological clock. When the animal is infected, the virus acts as a vehicle depositing the telomerase gene in the cells.
This study “shows that it is possible to develop a telomerase-based anti-aging gene therapy without increasing the incidence of cancer,” the authors affirm. “Aged organisms accumulate damage in their DNA due to telomere shortening, [this study] finds that a gene therapy based on telomerase production can repair or delay this kind of damage,” they add.
It’s from May, but I don’t recall seeing it.
[Update a while later]
Must be early-onset Alzheimers. I posted about it at the time.
ObamaCare: Still Unpopular
…and still a mess:
It’s a situation no one anticipated when the Affordable Care Act was written. The law assumed states would create and operate their own exchanges, and set aside billions in grants for that purpose.
Why did the law assume that? Because, as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote back in October, “The law’s supporters . . . expected the health-care law to become more popular over time.” T’was ever thus, for blind optimism is Obamacare’s founding principle: If people understand it, they’ll like it; if Obama makes just one more speech about it, they’ll like it; if Congress passes it, they’ll like it; if HHS spends millions of dollars promoting it, they’ll like it; if the states are forced to implement it, they’ll like it. And so on and so forth. And yet…
This is why federalism was invented.