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The January 2010 American Journal of Psychiatry has two articles pertaining to the relationship between dietary practices and mental health.  One article presents the results of a study; the other is an editorial. href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/ajp;167/3/305">…
James Gunn, the director for the movie href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slither_%282006_film%29">Slither, seems to be enthralled by creepy crawly things.  He also has a blog-like website, on which he posted href="http://www.jamesgunn.com/2009/07/02/evolution-fucked-your-shit-up-the-…
Sometimes I see sad-looking plants on clearance, buy them, and try to heal them.  This activity provides me with a gratification that is similar to that which comes from healing sad-looking people, but without the tribulations that occur if it does not work as well as we had hoped. I even…
The American Psychiatric Association has href="http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx">gone public with the details of their proposed revisions to their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  As expected, most of this is bland and not worthy of attention from the general public. …
href="http://www.researchblogging.org"> src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0pt none ;">Objective diagnosis is in some ways the holy grail of medicine.  It has been maddeningly elusive in psychiatry.  Now comes a paper in…
I decided to try using Google Chrome as a web browser. The reason is that it is supposed to be faster, particularly for sites that make heavy use of Flash. It turns out that installing it is a hassle if you do it the obvious way, because Flash does not work without fiddling around. That sort of…
I saw this headline on Google Fast Flip, and had to read it.  I'm always game for an anti-big-pharma story: even though I appreciate their efforts to relieve suffering, I do like to take notice of their shadier practices. href="http://business.theatlantic.com/2010/01/…
Susanne Sternthal, a writer based in Moscow, has published an article about the ecology of stray dogs.  The article is in Financial Times, of all places.  Why is that? href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628a8500-ff1c-11de-a677-00144feab49a.html">Moscow's stray dogs By Susanne Sternthal…
I've been mulling this over for a few days, finally deciding to write about it.  There was an article in the NYT on 13 January 2010 about an NEJM article: href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/research/14morphine.html"> href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/research/…
The earthquake in Haiti is only the most recent in a series of catastrophes stretching back over two centuries.  It was not always like this.  Haiti, in fact, was once the most prosperous colony in the New World.  When it was a French colony, known as class="bc_2">St. Domingue (…
Those of us who watch the drug development pipeline have been pining for a nonaddictive anti-anxiety drug.  Occasionally there are glimmers of hope.  One candidate is href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emapunil">emapunil, aka XBD-173 or AC-5216.  In 2004, there was an article in…
...for canceling the showing of a creationist film, Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.  The background is on Greg Laden's Blog, href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/10/los_angeles_venue_cancels_inte.php">Los Angeles Venue Cancels Intelligent Design Film:…
Today is the birthday of Linus Torvalds. That is all.
Thanks to a tip from a reader, for this one.  A photographer named href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky">Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) made glass negatives in the early 1900's that could be used to create color images.  He did this by…
Visiting with Kevin, went hiking in Soledad Canyon.  The light was crazy, alterating between awful for photography, and interesting, but always challenging.  When it stopped snowing and the wind wasn't blowing me around, I was able to get some decent pictures. style="display: inline;"…
Nicely illustrated in this photo: Thanks to Jim R., who doesn't have a blog to link.
From Shorpy (Always Something Wonderful), this is a photo of the href="http://www.shorpy.com/node/2119">Christmas tree at the home of Wilbur and Orville Wright, in the year 1900. style="display: inline;">
One of the more enlightening and worrisome articles I read recently was href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_surowiecki">The Perils of Efficiency, by James Surowiecki.  The article was a discussion of the practical effects of the mathematical concept, that…
Today is the 90th anniversary of the first Felix the Cat cartoon. href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz26t_1919felix-the-cat-feline-follies_fun">1919-Felix The Cat - Feline Follies Uploaded by iToons. - Watch more comedy videos and sitcoms. Needless to say, it changed a lot over the…
I couldn't resist that title, but I must admit it isn't mine; the author's post is href="http://pasadenasubrosa.typepad.com/pasadena_sub_rosa/2009/12/let-them-eat-antipsychotics.html">here.  This is about the NYT article about the finding that children on Medicaid are more likely to be…
This is a tip for selecting the fastest DNS server.   href="http://www.opendns.com/">OpenDNS already has fans at ScienceBlogs ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/08/turkish_ass_shuts_down_a_slice.php">1 href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/08/…
This is a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=41500">high-resolution photo of Pearl Harbor (click to enlarge). When I saw that it had been posted to the NASA Earth Observatory, I wondered -- momentarily -- why they would post a photo of Pearl Harbor. Then I remembered:…
I wrote about this before, a couple of times, most thoroughly href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/06/national_infrastructure_protec.php">here.  I was reminded of this topic when I saw that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have updated their href="http://www.…
Sharon Astyk will be joining Scienceblogs soon.  Everyone is encourage to href="http://sharonastyk.com/2009/11/30/new-shiny-stuff-classes-contests-and-the-new-blog-announcement/">read the post about her upcoming transition.  I would especially encourage my sciblings/colleagues here to…
This post is about a journal article that describes mortality rates in populations of persons with eating disorders.  It is sort of about that.  The article is in the APA green journal, which is not openly accessible.  Only the abstract is free.  Usually I don't write about…
While we have a cold, dreary rain here: a photo of brighter, hotter times: style="display: inline;"> This is from September 2007.  It is a desert spiny lizard ( href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sceloporus_magister">Sceloporus magister) on a desert willow ( href="http://en.wikipedia…
Environmental regulations have greatly reduced the amount of sulfur in gasoline.  This has created many benefits.  But did you ever wonder what happens to all that sulfur?  Perhaps not, if it was never clear to you why you should care. The reason you should care is this: …
The USA still leads the world int he number of scientific papers published per year.  Germany and Japan were essentially tied for second, for years.  According to a recent report by Thomspon-Reuters ISI, there is a new player at the table: class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style…
Is there some kind of especially violent undercurrent right now, in the right-wing river of hate? Ed Brayton just href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/11/missouri_republicans_call_for.php">posted about a billboard put up by the GOP, specifically the href="http://…
Reasonable persons still wonder why some others insist that permitting gay marriage will threaten heterosexual marriage.  Now we find out: it happens as an unintended consequence.  Take Texas (please): href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/1340136.html">Texas' gay…