The Old North State
terrasig | November 8, 2009Yesterday, the real-life mailbox brought the Pharmboy household the Fall 2009 issue of DukeMedicine connect, a biannual publication on current news from the Duke University Health System. Produced by DUHS Marketing and Creative Services, it "strives to offer current news about health topics of interest" to its readers. This issue is not yet online but you can see the Spring 2009 issue here.
What caught my eye was a cover teaser titled "Detox Delusion" and an article on detoxification diets focusing on an interview with Beth Reardon a nutritionist with Duke Integrative Medicine.
(Note added…
terrasig | October 26, 2009While working on a science-rich post and writing an exam, something came across Twitter that is, well, too good to just be seen only on Twitter.
Fullsteam is the name of the plow-to-pint Southern microbrewery in Durham, NC, no-longer-in-planning-but-not-quite-done and I have written about the tweeter several times. The imagination behind brewing a beer with sweet potatoes (it's awesome, btw) or kudzu comes from the very same mind that burped into his iPhone for the benefit of shared education with his daughters.
The result:
I use Google voice search all the time and have been very…
terrasig | October 20, 2009Science journalist, Steve Silberman, just brought to my attention that Rob Walker at The New York Times wrote an article that last week on the method behind Pandora online radio. The article, The Sound Decoders at Pandora, made me go back through my archives to my own visit three years ago with Pandora founder, Tim Westergren.
Tim, together with musicologist Dr Norman Gasser, has applied science to music by cataloging songs based purely on musical attributes (over three dozen criteria) and providing the listener with a program of music similar to one's liking of a band or even a particular…
terrasig | September 29, 2009When writing the other day about how blogging has been of benefit to my career, I neglected to mention my recent invitation to the board of Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC).
Founded in June 2007 by Karl Leif Bates and Chris Brodie, and now headed by President Ernie Hood (Radio In Vivo), SCONC is a group of "science writers, journalists, public information officers, teachers and institutional communicators from academia, government labs, industry, museums and schools -- just about anyone interested in communicating science," who aim to improve public understanding of science…
terrasig | September 17, 2009
From today's article by the always-interesting Sarah Avery at the News & Observer:
After several failed attempts to extract the item, Manley was referred to another doctor, who suggested removing the entire left lung. "I said, no, I wouldn't be doing that," Manley says.
That's when he decided to seek a second opinion at Duke University Medical Center.
We've heard of "hot tub lung" and "popcorn lung" but my chest hurts just thinking about "jagged, fast-food implement lung."
If this case does not make it into the New England Journal of Medicine, I will be disappointed.
Photo credit: Duke…
terrasig | September 7, 2009
. . . or as Dr Barrett refers to it more accurately, Insurance Reform.
On Friday, Sarah Avery of the News & Observer reported on her interview with the now-retired Pennsylvania psychiatrist who started the Quackwatch.com website in 1996 following years of investigating fraudulent health practices.
From the Quackwatch Mission Statement:
Quackwatch is now an international network of people who are concerned about health-related frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct. Its primary focus is on quackery-related information that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere. Founded by…
terrasig | August 29, 2009In today's Letters to the Editor of the News & Observer, well-known substance abuse treatment researcher Dr Wendee Wechsberg bemoans the potential cost-cutting of religious studies and women's studies at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC.
The irony: Meredith College is a well-regarded private women's college established by Baptist missionaries.
Meredith counts among its alumnae the journalists Judy Woodruff and Marcia Vickers, Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court Sarah Parker, and attorney/former First Lady of New York Silda Wall Spitzer.
Given that her expertise extends from…
terrasig | August 18, 2009
A couple of four years ago, a few dudes I just met around town had this idea to bring together a few bloggers who write about science. One was Anton Zuiker and the other was Bora Zivkovic, also known as Coturnix or He-Whose-Mind-Teh-Intertubes-Pass-Before-Going-Out-To-The-World. Anton also has a title, bestowed upon him by News & Observer columnist Dan Barkin back in 2007:
He's a quiet visionary. He's a low-key doer. He's a let's-get-together-and-see-where-this-goes guy. It's the Zuikers of this new, interwoven world who may play a significant role in determining how far Web 2.0 goes…
terrasig | August 2, 2009Just a quick note this morning as I picked up the dead-tree version of The New York Times this morning in the PharmDriveway.
For some reason, I recognized the name of Anthony DeCurtis in the byline of this short essay on the Manson family Tate-LaBianca murders marking the demise of the 1960s counterculture movement. I posted yesterday on the speakers at the upcoming conference, U2: The Feedback and The Hype - DeCurtis is keynote speaker.
No surprise here since DeCurtis - Dr. DeCurtis, I learned below - has been a contributing editor to Rolling Stone mag and books, with many works in the NYT…
terrasig | August 1, 2009
During the summer between high school and college, about this very time in 1981, I was sitting at a beach house in North Carolina listening to my uncle rail against The Beatles. He held that the band never truly took its fame and international press attention to doing anything good for the world except to glorify LSD.
I now get to tell him about U2.
That summer also saw the launch of MTV and in fall I watched four young Dubliners on a barge playing a song called, "Gloria," the opening track of their album October. And in the intervening years the band, and especially its lead singer Bono…
terrasig | July 26, 2009In the United States, herbal and non-herbal dietary supplements can be sold without any assurance of safety or efficacy as a result of a hastily-passed, late-night, final-session piece of legislation put forth by Sen Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). (Aside: Utah has several large dietary supplement manufacturers.) This piece of legislation is named the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, or DSHEA. A FAQ for consumers is provided by the US Food and Drug Administration here.
An unusual aspect of the law is that supplement manufacturers can make a variety of wellness or structure-function…
terrasig | July 12, 2009For those of you in the North Carolina Research Triangle area wanting to extend your weekend as much as possible, you'll want to catch a a local music showcase at The Berkeley Café in Raleigh (217 W Martin St, 27601) tonight, Sunday 12 July at 7 pm. Yours truly will be playing a 30 min solo acoustic set of mostly original songs.
(Addendum: Cool! Eva Amsen just posted her interview of me yesterday for her Musicians and Scientists project)
Most notable on the bill are two fantastic roots reggae bands, Anchants and Curry Don (de Doc). I'm supposed to go on 8 pm or so.
Figure 1. This lovely 2001…
terrasig | July 3, 2009As I agonized over what I'd write about for this week's installment of The Friday Fermentable, my Wine Authorities newsletter arrived followed by their tweet on their inaugural music video.
Wine Authorities, my local wine merchants and community gods, have been spreading the gospel of rosé wines as a summer alternative to the red wines we enjoy most of the rest of the year. But contrary to the sweet white zinfandels and such that might turn off those who enjoy good wine, there is now a plethora of foreign and domestic wine offerings (and values) that show off red grapes in a lightly-crushed…
terrasig | June 19, 2009I am bursting with local pride this morning at the summer camp stunt of a NC State University materials scientist and his students.
Ginny Skalski (@30Threads, @GinnySkal, Ginny from the Blog), local media maven and founder of the Research Triangle blog distiller 30Threads, was on the scene yesterday as - well, the title says it.
For the past three years, high school students at N.C. State University's materials camp get to find out what happens when you drop Silly Putty from the roof of the D.H. Hill Library. Last year, the camp dropped 30 pounds. This year they dropped 50 pounds (…
terrasig | June 14, 2009Salvia divinorum (Salvia, Magic Mint) is a plant used for entheogenic purposes by the Mazatec people of Mexico. A relative of the common garden plant "scarlet sage" (Salvia splendens), S. divinorum contains several hallucinogens that include salvinorin A, the first non-nitrogenous agonist known for kappa opioid receptors (KOR).
I had known of salvinorin A since a highly-cited 2002 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper by Bryan Roth, Richard Rothman and colleagues (full text here). At that time, I had read several anecdotal reports (that I cannot locate now) that the…
terrasig | June 13, 2009
I enjoy this regular feature in the New York Times where editors put together highlights of specific destinations that can be enjoyed in a day-and-a-half. In this weekend's Travel Section, now online, my adopted home gets the treatment.
I've always wondered how locals in each area covered might view the choices. For us, I'd say that J.J. Goode's opening paragraph captures this scientific training and career destination pretty well:
TELL North Carolinians you're heading to the Research Triangle, and they'll probably ask "Which school are you visiting?" Yet the close-knit cities of Raleigh,…
terrasig | June 13, 2009WordCampRDU is a community oriented one-day conference on all things related to the blogging and website platform WordPress. There are tracks for beginner and advanced WordPress users with presentations and useful information. WordCampRDU will be highlighted by a much anticipated keynote speech by WordPress Founder, Matt Mullenweg. http://wordcamprdu.com/2009/
This is my first "camp" conference after having gone exclusively to science-related blogger gatherings. I'm also very excited that this conference is being hosted at the School of Education at North Carolina Central University in…
terrasig | June 11, 2009
The heavy blanket of moisture across the City-That-Tobacco-Built is being broken this morning on the 69th wedding anniversary of the late civil rights scholar, Dr John Hope Franklin, and his late wife, Aurelia Whittington Franklin, with a high-profile memorial and celebration of their lives. Leading the dignitaries in speaking will be former President William Jefferson Clinton and attorney Vernon Jordan, Jr.
The memorial will be held today, 11 am - 1 pm EDT, on the campus of the University-That-Tobacco-Built in the conservatively-named Duke Chapel, more appropriately described as a Gothic…
terrasig | May 24, 2009Award-winning investigative journalist friend, Barry Yeoman, passes along this morning a fantastic post from awesome local Durham, NC, blog, Bull City Rising.
Heh. Rising.
Now Men's Health magazine has given Durham another trumpeting tribute, having taken a long, hard look at one of the rankings that only such a periodical could bring.
Durham found itself in stiff competition -- one hundred other cities and metro areas, to be precise -- but stood tall to prevail, ranking sixth in the U.S. among...
...cities that don't need Viagra.
Just what we need: another reason for the University-That-…
terrasig | May 19, 2009
Although I saw this obituary over the weekend, I didn't get to posting it until today. I was reminded by a local friend, an outstanding young scientist in her own right, of the impact that Dr Schanberg had made on so, so many lives in science, medicine, and our larger community.
I only had the honor of meeting Dr Schanberg once, shortly after his cancer diagnosis, while we were at a Duke Cancer Patient Support Center fundraising dinner. His wife of over 50 years, Rachel, is founder and former director of the organization which they started following the loss of their own daughter.
Among…