Completely shutting down–‘making safe’, you could say–the damaged Fukushima reactors is likely to take years. The work will put dozens, even hundreds, of people at risk of further exposure to radiation. What is the best way to protect these people? A paper in the Lancet, Safety of workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant,…
Few would dispute that good communication is essential to a happy and successful relationship. Even arguments might not necessarily be a bad thing–an air-clearing argument need not be destructive, and is probably more healthy than sullen silences. But recent work reported in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy now suggests that what partners discuss,…
The BBC reports that life expectancy is on the rise in the UK–despite all those pies, chips and beer. It cites a paper by David Leon of the London School of hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the International Journal of Epidemiology, Trends in European life expectancy: a salutary view (open access: 10.1093/ije/dyr061). While I’m not…
The British Heart Foundation funds basic research into coronary and circulatory diseases. They’ve recently launched a campaign to “Mend Broken Hearts“, with the aim of raising £50 million over the next ten years. This money, which is in addition to the ~£70 million the BHF spends on research each year, is going to be devoted…
It’s no big secret that we’re not fans of the journal impact factor. So it’s possibly justified to feel a little smug that overstating conclusions of research is positively correlated with impact factor.
It’s all too easy to call someone stupid when they disagree with you. Understandable, but wrong nonetheless. Some of these people, who don’t seem to understand science or reason, may be politically motivated. Others may be genuinely confused, uncertain, or scared and vulnerable. This does not mean they’re stupid.
They say that bilateral symmetry is an indicator of attractiveness and freedom from disease1, 2.
Perhaps the most distinctive and powerful thing about Science is its tendency, or rather proclivity to ask searching, even uncomfortable questions. And unlike belief systems, or ideological and political and movements, or pseudoscience, it asks those questions of itself. There’s been a fair bit of that going on recently.
The Wakefield story rumbles on. Last week we linked to the BMJ editorial, signed by Fiona Godlee, Jane Smith and Harvey Marcovitch, introducing investigative journalist Brian Deer’s report on the extent of the autism/vaccine fraud. Yesterday, we linked to the first piece by Deer, in which he describes the scientific discrepancies: the details of the…
Critical differences between the human immune system and that of other primates, such as chimpanzees and rhesus macaques, lead to humans being more susceptible to a number of infectious agents including HIV and malaria. Now, the first genome-wide functional comparison in chimps, macaques and humans reveals changes in immune system gene expression that could explain…
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