I’ll admit that gas prices at the pump have no significant effect on me. I live close to everything I need to be in person (food, healthcare), and I drive a sub-compact fuel-efficient car. I combine trips and keep my tires inflated. The reality is that oil prices affect much more than your personal mobility. […]
There’s no question about the safety and efficacy of vitamin K shots in newborns. They’re not vaccines. “Amid a rise in broader anti-vaccine sentiment, some influencers and media figures have cast doubt on the routine vitamin K shot given to newborn infants – and new reporting from ProPublica suggests such rhetoric may have had deadly […]
Academic tenure is a commitment by a college or university to award permanent employment status. Most faculty contracts stipulate that tenure can only be removed for cause or for financial exigency. In the last year of my postdoctoral fellowship, I applied for tenure-track positions at various universities around the US. Tenure-track means that the university […]
HPV infection accounts for 99% of cervical cancers. There’s a vaccine against HPV. Back when we still lived in Missouri, we had our teenage daughter vaccinated against HPV. Glad to see that in our adopted state of Rhode Island, 95% of adolescents got at least one dose of the HPV vaccine. Why would any parent […]
There’s no question that microplastics are ubiquitous our planet. Are they a threat to human health? RFK Jr, who is neither a physician nor a scientist, thinks so. “Reaching for a number to convey the urgency of the problem, he cited research that “reports concentrations [of plastic] in the brain equivalent by mass to roughly […]
My mom led an extraordinary and full life. The youngest of three, she was raised in Johnstown PA, northern Appalachia. Her dad died when she was a teenager. Her mom, who never finished high school, went to work as a domestic. She was able to attend William and Mary thanks to money provided by an […]
This is what the MAGA GOP supports: “Workers are earning record low wages and other compensation compared to their labor output, according to the BLS productivity and costs report published Thursday. Called the “labor share,” this indicator essentially measures how much of the nation’s economic earnings is used to pay wages and other worker benefits. […]
A typical administrative response to financial difficulty in large organizations is to hire consultants. The theory is that the expertise of consultants will uncover efficiencies that will (a) relieve the difficulties and (b) repay the investment in the consultants. So how’s that working out for American nonprofit hospitals, many of which struggling and threatened with […]
I recently retired as a professor in the Edward A. Doisy Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Who was Edward A. Doisy? He was the only Nobel Laureate from Saint Louis University. He shared the 1943 prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying the two forms of vitamin […]
From a PBS post on Facebook yesterday: “On May 5, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution. “It all began when the state of Tennessee passed a law making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools. The newly-organized American Civil Liberties Union responded immediately, placing an ad […]