T. R. Reid explores health care in developed countries and how that compares to heath care in the U.S. Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors’ offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. |
Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus. |
Reid was the lead correspondent for the 2008 Frontline documentary Sick Around the World, which examined five other capitalist democracies, looking for lessons on health-care delivery. His books include Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West and The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. |
In short, yes. To learn more listen to the interview. According to the National Cancer Institute, the number of people who have developed melanoma has more than doubled over the past 30 years. Dermatologist Darrell Rigel joins Fresh Air to explain the sun’s effects on the skin, what “SPF” means and why skin cancer rates are going up. |
A clinical professor at New York University Medical Center, Rigel has tested sunscreen efficacy for Johnson & Johnson and the Procter & Gamble Company. He is the lead editor of Cancer of the Skin, the major textbook in his field. Rigel maintains a private practice in Manhattan. |
People flock to mountain in northern Thailand to see "frozen dew". URL: www.nationmultimedia.com
Great news as the promise of gene therapy begins to become the reality of gene therapy.
Gene therapy has recently had some important successes in treating severe inherited diseases (1–3) after years of skepticism from the scientific community and neglect by the pharmaceutical industry. On page 818 in this issue, Cartier et al. (4) report another major advance—the successful first clinical testing of an HIV-derived vector in hematopoietic stem cell (HSC)–based gene therapy. The procedure was used to treat a severe neurodegenerative disease, X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), and the results indicate stable expression of a therapeutic gene in a substantial fraction of patients’ hematopoietic cells, as well as clinical benefits. Read more at www.sciencemag.org |
Darwinian explanation for religion?
How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science’s series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. No consensus yet exists among scientists, but potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself. Some researchers, exploring religion’s effects in society, suggest that it may boost fitness by promoting cooperative behavior. And in the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin’s lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought.
Read more at www.sciencemag.org |
The “Little Ice Age” and the “Medieval Climate Anonmaly” seem to be linked to the tropical pacific which appears to run in a counter trend (i.e. tropical pacific warm|cold, extratropical northern hemisphere cold|warm) | Global temperatures are known to have varied over the past 1500 years, but the spatial patterns have remained poorly defined. We used a global climate proxy network to reconstruct surface temperature patterns over this interval. The Medieval period is found to display warmth that matches or exceeds that of the past decade in some regions, but which falls well below recent levels globally. This period is marked by a tendency for La Niña–like conditions in the tropical Pacific. The coldest temperatures of the Little Ice Age are observed over the interval 1400 to 1700 C.E., with greatest cooling over the extratropical Northern Hemisphere continents. The patterns of temperature change imply dynamical responses of climate to natural radiative forcing changes involving El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation–Arctic Oscillation.Read more at www.sciencemag.org |
Not so sure about #7 with our improved understanding of complex systems since the early 1970s. 1. There is no definite formulation of a wicked problem. |
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rules. |
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse. |
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem. |
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly. |
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan. |
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique. |
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another [wicked] problem. |
9. The causes of a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution. |
| China’s mercantilist trade policy is another contributor to its asset bubble. By artificially depressing the value of its currency and making it difficult for locals to invest abroad, China has forced an artificially large amount of capital to chase after domestic investments, inflating property and stock prices. |
Bubbles, it bears noting, tend to surprise many observers with their longevity. (A FORBES cover story warned six years too early that the U.S. housing bubble threatened to tank the economy.) But when bubbles do eventually blow, it’s usually with a bang. |
| Friends have been telling me about the deranged property prices in Beijing, and once again, as with the malls, it just strikes me as common sense that this is not sustainable. |
| What Epstein is describing mirrors to the letter what we saw in the US in five years ago |
A new method of finding Earth like planets seems to be working. The hunt for Earth-like worlds has taken a major step forward with the discovery of a planet only 2.7 times larger than Earth. Its mass and size are just as theorists would expect for a water-rich super-Earth. |
| A tantalizing case for such a breakthrough is presented by Charbonneau et al.1 on page 891 of this issue. They provide the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our Solar System. |
These findings also add more hard evidence to the smoking-cancer link. Now imagine if we had waited for this level of evidence (50 years) to wait for the skeptics to say that we as a society should take the issue seriously. | Cancer is driven by mutation. Worldwide, tobacco smoking is the principal lifestyle exposure that causes cancer, exerting carcinogenicity through >60 chemicals that bind and mutate DNA. |
| Using massively parallel sequencing technology, we sequenced a small-cell lung cancer cell line |
| to explore the mutational burden associated with tobacco smoking. |
| Multiple mutation signatures testify to the cocktail of carcinogens in tobacco smoke |
| These findings illustrate the potential for next-generation sequencing to provide unprecedented insights into mutational processes, cellular repair pathways and gene networks associated with cancer.Read more at www.nature.com |
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