Scientific American - Health & Medicine

Measuring Up: New NIST Director, Plus Big Budget Put Measurement Science in Public Eye

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Commerce confirmed Patrick Gallagher as the 14th director of its National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) . Although the title may be new to Gallagher, NIST's mission of developing measurement science, standards and technology isn't. The 46-year-old physicist began his career in the organization's NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) in 1993 to pursue studies in neutron and x-ray instrumentation; in 2004 he became NCNR's director. [More]

What to Do About Endocrine Disruptors? A Q&A with Linda Birnbaum

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:37:00 EST

Nearly a year ago, toxicologist Linda Birnbaum was named director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. She sat down with Environmental Health News journalist Jane Kay in San Francisco on Wednesday to answer questions about the environmental health risks we face today. [More]

Women should undergo fewer Pap tests for cervical cancer, medical group says

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:25:00 EST

Just days after the release of controversial new guidelines recommending against routine mammograms for most women under 50, a different group of medical professionals has announced that the frequency of Pap tests for cervical cancer detection should also be decreased for most women. [More]

Readers Respond on "Do Parents Matter?"--And More...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Parents and Peers As a psychologist very familiar with the research, I think in “ Do Parents Matter? ” Judith Harris is conflating personality and behavior, which are two different concepts. Personality has more to do with genetic traits related to mood and energy (which plenty of research indicates are strongly influenced by genetics). Behavior, on the other hand, depends on context and is guided by laws of behaviorism--that is, reinforcement principles. If parents do (or do not) provide reinforcement for specific types of behavior, you will either see or not see those behaviors. Likewise, certain behaviors will be reinforced in the classroom by teachers.

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War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

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MIND Reviews: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

BOOKS Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals [More]

Beyond the Still: 6 Bioscapes Contest Videos

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:29:00 EST

The entrants in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition provide fitting tribute to nearly 1,000 years of making the invisible visible. These six videos include one winner and five Honorable Mentions.

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Researchers Try to Solve the Mystery of HIV Carriers Who Don't Contract AIDS

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:55:00 EST

More than half a million people in the U.S. have died from HIV infection , and more than a million currently live with the virus, but a relative handful of people infected with HIV never get treatment for it and never get sick from it. The immune systems of this small population--perhaps 50,000 Americans--somehow control the virus for long periods of time. Of course, there is typically a bell curve of response to any disease, but figuring out how these people control the virus is one of the most vexing mysteries of the AIDS pandemic . Solving it might unlock new ways to prevent and treat HIV infection, and now several research teams are going after the answer. [More]

Pharaohs Had Heart Disease

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:12:08 EST

You've probably heard the expression “a heart attack on a plate.” Maybe it’s fettuccini alfredo. Or maybe it’s a bacon cheeseburger, covered in batter and deep fried to artery-clogging perfection. Either way, it's clear that our modern diet is not always the most cardio-friendly. But that doesn’t mean that heart disease is a recent invention. Because a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that some Egyptian mummies show signs of atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries. [More]

Government panel recommends fewer and later mammograms, no self-exams

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:25:00 EST

Most women would do fine to hold off until age 50 for their first mammograms and skip self-exams for breast lumps altogether, according to new government recommendations released Monday that came as a surprise to many in the medical community--and women in general. [More]

Bumping Off Bedbugs without Poison

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: Why are bed bugs a big issue right now? Where do they come from and what real harm do they do? Are there non-toxic ways of dealing with them? --Harper H., Newburyport, MA

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The AMA eases its stance on marijuana

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

The Obama administration announced last month that people who buy or sell medical marijuana in the growing number of states that have decriminalized its therapeutic usage should not be targeted for arrest or prosecution by federal authorities. Now, the American Medical Association (AMA) has called for the federal government to go one step further in easing restrictions, the Los Angeles Times reported last week . [More]

For Sale: Human Eggs Become a Research Commodity

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST

Paying a woman for her eggs to use in stem cell research has been a bioethical no-no for years. But this past June, New York State decided to allow just that, becoming the first state to permit public money to be used in this way. The decision, which allows payment of up to $10,000, will likely jump-start donations--and thereby research. Many bioethicists, however, worry that the financial incentive could exploit women and compromise their health.

Ethical issues surround egg donation because the process is not without risk. It requires a series of hormonal stimulation injections as well as an invasive procedure to retrieve the eggs. The long-term health effects and risks of complication are not well known. A woman who provides eggs for research is “assuming unknown risk for unknown benefits,” says Debra Mathews, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University. The lingering unknowns prompted the National Academy of Science to issue in 2005 nonbinding guidelines to prohibit payment (but allow direct reimbursement for expenses), as a means to protect underprivileged women in particular.

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Putting Madness in Its Place: Can the Environment Explain Schizophrenia's Hereditary Patterns?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST

Schizophrenia hides its heritability well. Although fewer than 1 percent of the general population will be diagnosed as schizophrenic based on symptoms such as hallucination and disorganized thought, for children of a schizophrenic parent, those odds jump to about one in 10. And yet the condition’s genetic underpinnings have stubbornly resisted discovery. In the latest attempt, three crack teams of investigators pooled genomic data from 8,000 schizophrenics of European ancestry but could lay claim to only a handful of weak genetic risk markers.

Analyses such as these, which appeared online July 1 in Nature ( Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group), have led researchers to question the value of brute-force genomics for analyzing schizophrenia. “I think we need to pause and think through the risk pathways to disease more clearly,” says Dolores Malaspina, director of the social and psychiatric initiatives program at New York University Langone Medical Center. In particular, devotees of genetics might want to cede a little ground to their colleagues in epidemiology, who over the past decade have amassed a provocative, interlocking set of studies implicating urban birthplace and migrant status as persistent risk factors.

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Renewed Hope for an AIDS Vaccine

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:01:00 EST

The long search for an AIDS vaccine has produced countless false starts and repeated failed trials, casting once bright hopes into shadows of disenchantment. The now familiar swings appeared in high relief this past fall, with news of the most recent, phase III trial in Thailand . Initial fanfare for a protective outcome gave way to disappointment after reanalysis showed that the protection could be attributed only to chance. But rather than dashing all hopes for an AIDS vaccine, the trial has heartened some researchers, who see new clues in the battle against the fatal illness. [More]

Why Bangladesh Water Contains Arsenic

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:29:08 EST

It seemed like a good idea--because rivers and ponds in Bangladesh were contaminated with bacteria, Bangladeshis switched to wells. But soon after, in the early ‘80s, researchers realized those wells were harming Bangladeshis with a new poison--arsenic.

The underground sediment of the Ganges Delta contains arsenic. In 2002 M.I.T. researchers determined that microbes digesting organic carbon were freeing that trapped arsenic. But where did the carbon come from and how was the arsenic getting into the water supply? The M.I.T. team now thinks they have the answers, which they report in the journal Nature Geoscience .

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Squashing Malaria: Advances in Research and Prevention [Slide Show]

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:42:00 EST

Despite having been subdued in many parts of the world by the 1970s, malaria --and the mosquitoes that spread it--has come back in force, now killing at least a million people worldwide each year. An efficient illness, the parasite has become largely resistant to the popular drug chloroquine, and many mosquitoes have similarly developed resistance to the pesticide DDT. Most of its casualties are children, and of the hundreds of millions who survive the disease, many are left disabled and vulnerable to reinfection from the parasite's liver-dwelling cells. [More]

New recipe looks back for how to feed the world

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:21:00 EST

When it comes to feeding Earth's masses of people who regularly go hungry, a few things are clear: communism's large-scale, collective farms don't work, and breeding for specific traits in staple crops can boost yields, sometimes significantly. After all, two of the most significant agricultural successes of the past 50 years--a period marked by explosive population growth--were the redistribution of land in China to 160 million peasant families and the Green Revolution touched off by Norman Borlaug 's pioneering work with wheat. [More]

MIND Reviews: Shaken: Journey into the Mind of a Parkinson's Patient

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

DVDs Shaken: Journey into the Mind of a Parkinson’s Patient [More]

Readers Respond on "Grassoline"

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Feed the World As a retired farmer, I know that the information in “Grassoline at the Pump,” by George W. Huber and Bruce E. Dale, about agricultural residues is false in a most dangerous way. There is NO extra residue from the corn harvest. Sure, you can take it away and use it to create fuel. But that residue is desperately needed right where it fell, to renew the soil. All of it and more are needed to sustain our already low organic matter levels created by years of plowing and other unsustainable agricultural practices. Soil can and does “die,” and then it is unable to produce food. Energy creation is important, but so is our ability to feed the world. [More]