Category Archives: Science and Medicine

Exercise as cellular housecleaning

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Chris

The NY Times has an interesting article on exercise as cellular housecleaning–which I admit makes exercise sound less appealing than it should be. But the point is that many diseases seem to arise because the cellular detritus of daily living … Continue reading →

Foxp2

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Chris

An interesting article published in Nature about FoxP2 (Forkhead box protein 2) gene, which has been shown to be critical for learning speech. Discovered first in a British family with inherited speech problems, foxp2 has been shown to have two … Continue reading →

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Nocebo effect

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Chris

The Guardian has this article about the winner of the Wellcome science writing prize, which is about the Nocebo effect. This is a sort of reverse brain hacking, or brain hacking to make yourself worse off. If placebo are harmless … Continue reading →

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Overcoming math (and other) anxiety

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Chris

Researchers recently looked at brain activity in those who have math anxiety and those who don’t. What they found was that among those who have math anxiety, through focus and concentration they could perform just as well on test as … Continue reading →

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More evidence exercise rewires the brain

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Chris

In this item from NYTimes Well blog, they discuss research showing that vigorous exercise can diminish the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in ways that drugs can’t. Yet more evidence that exercise is powerful medicine for many systems in the body, … Continue reading →

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Drug company cluelessness

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Chris

I’m reading Mukherjee’s “Emperor of all Maladies, a biography of cancer” and am impressed yet again by the clueless nature of drug companies. So often the drug companies resist developing a drug that turns out to be a blockbuster, and … Continue reading →

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How to run faster than you can run

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Chris

The world racing authorities have decided that women’s running records have to be set in women-only races. That is to keep them from being paced by generally faster men. What difference should that make? Another recent study cited in the … Continue reading →

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“Debriefing” after trauma actually increases PTSD

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Chris

An interesting article in Scientific American about the change in how people are helped in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. It used to be the standard practice (and still is, unfortunately, for some psychologists) to engage in a … Continue reading →

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Musings on the physics of baseball

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Chris

I was just reading that Jose Bautista, the current MBL home run leader has popped 31 home runs, well behind the 50 or so that Mark McGuire was hitting by this time of year during the height of the Steroid … Continue reading →

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A new advance for an old technology: steel

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Chris

I’ve long been fascinated by the process of making steel and the huge role it played in the economic history of the world, when inventions like the Bessemer process made it economical to produce steel on a large scale. A … Continue reading →