Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum takes on Paul Krugman over his assertion that small-town America is aggrieved because the working-age men are more likely to be unemployed than their metropolitan counterparts. As usual, Kevin brings the charts and numbers to show that while Krugman isn’t wrong, the differences are small and don’t explain “white rural […]
When I was in college majoring in microbiology, we were taught that diseases like scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jacob and kuru were caused by “slow viruses.” Over many years, it has become clear that misfolded proteins, not viruses, are the cause of these and other spongiform encephalopathies. Stanley Prusiner struggled for a long time to convince the scientific […]
Other than among Jehovah’s Witnesses, vaccination rightly gained widespread trust and acceptance in America. Inoculation against smallpox was around for hundreds of years before Jenner described the eponymous vaccine. Polio was a scourge in the US through the 1950s until it was virtually eliminated by vaccination. Many deadly diseases like whooping cough and measles were […]
In January, the governor of Utah signed the “Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act.” The law sets up a process for the state to overrule or otherwise ignore federal rules and decisions. For now, the law is just performative right-wing Republican bafflegab. While it appears to set up a challenge to the US Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause,” Governor […]
One of the corollaries to the “life begins at conception” view is that all zygotes created by in vitro fertilization are fully human, so their deliberate destruction is ipso facto murder. This would effectively end IVF, since most zygotes will never be implanted. So sayeth the Alabama Supreme Court: “An embryo created through in-vitro fertilization […]
I first met my friend Gunter at a scientific meeting on the Greek Island of Crete in 1986. He was from East Germany. I knew his published work at the time, and when I shared my unpublished data, he agreed to send me some Drosophila stocks that would advance my research. At the meeting, he […]
“Using the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — the scientists sustained a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. That’s enough to power roughly 12,000 households for the same amount of time.” Progress, yes, but incremental. “And myriad challenges […]
Not all genes, their mutations, and the conditions caused by those mutations are overwhelmingly complex. We’ve known for decades that sickle cell disease is caused by a specific nucleotide change at a specific position in the human adult beta globin gene, and we can predict the consequences to a patient with the disease to a […]
From a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com: “The walls are more a sign of desperation than power. A better way is to fix Central America so there is a larger buffer between the US and the problems in South America. Fixing includes making conditions in the continent prosperous enough for all that we don’t have […]
My dad died a few years ago with dementia. The diagnosis was Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia (FTD), based on a psychiatric evaluation and brain imaging. After he died, we had a brain autopsy done, which returned a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. So which was it? As far as I know, it could be both. But what […]