Alcohol is dangerous, but people who abstain from alcohol may die sooner, even sooner than heavy drinkers:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2014332,00.html
Alcohol deadens feelings, but depression appears to be more common among those who never drink a drop:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1928187,00.html
The new 20-million-dollar question is:
“Do you eat foie gras?”
If the person does not answer with a clear NO, you may be dealing with someone with no conscience whatsoever. A very useful diagnostic in business dealings.
Alternatively, the person is uninformed about the nature of what he or she is eating.
Gaming can make a better world
I’m with her on this.
Also watch this one, by Seth Priebatsch, and other talks.
The talk by Jane McGonigal (PhD from Berkeley) made me pose some questions about the UK, such as “Does the UK have a big gaming culture?” I did a search and found a survey by PopCap, of the US and the UK. Two differences struck me:
“Only 17% of UK-based social gamers chose “connect with others” as a reason for playing, compared to 28% of their U.S. counterparts.”
“U.S.-based social gamers are far more likely to play with strangers than their UK counterparts (41% vs. 29%).”
“Consumers Not Buying Seafood’s Clean Bill Of Health” said a tweet that caught my eye this morning.
The issue is important enough to post the link to the item on NPR here:
“Certain areas of the Gulf of Mexico have been given permission to resume commercial fishing. Consumers, however, are still leery about eating seafood from the Gulf since all the oil hasn’t been cleaned up yet.”
The item’s audio will be available at about 9am Eastern Time (Miami, New York, Boston), which is 3pm Central European Time (Amsterdam, Paris, Cologne, Madrid).
Yesterday, I spotted a research photograph of tuna eggs accredited to “huevos” – which is Spanish for eggs! It was Spanish research, yes.
Ensalada mixta!
On Friday, February 19, 2010, the nuclear reactor in the Dutch town of Petten shut down for maintenance. At the same time, repairs at the Chalk River reactor in Canada were taking longer than planned.
This knocked out 70% of the world’s production of radiopharmaceuticals, as medical isotopes are also called. Now repairs in Canada have been completed. Isotope production would resume by the end of July, said the June 16 press release.
The status update of July 28 explains how a instrumentation hiccup during the restart has now delayed the process by another week or two during which these reactor instruments will be replaced.
Coffee is… a friendly drug that puts a smile on your face. That’s what research at the University of Portsmouth appears to be revealing.
See also this article in the Daily Mail, about research at the University of Coventry that speculates on how drinking coffee could be key to completing a marathon.
Two news items in the area of nutrition caught my attention in the past few weeks. The first one had to do with the finding that foods with a high glycemic index impact a woman’s health much more than a man’s. The second one discussed a link between certain foods and asthma. Neither findings came as a huge surprise to me, but I find both very interesting and I want to share them with you. I invite you to read these two papers and a number of comparable studies.
When I later tracked it down, I found that it concerned an article in the April 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine on the EPICOR Study, entitled . The paper reports that there appears to be a link of high glycemic load and high-GI food intake with coronary heart disease in women, but not in men.
The EPICOR study followed 15,171 men and 32,578 women for a median period of 7.9 years. The paper concludes “In this Italian cohort, high dietary GL and carbohydrate intake from high-GI foods increase the overall risk of CHD in women but not men.”
It reported on a study at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Apparently, eating a high-fat meal with for example burgers can cause inflammation in airways within hours, linked to a receptor response to saturated fatty acids (and also affecting the effectiveness of the medication albuterol).
When I tried to track this down, I first found Lisa Wood’s page at the University of Newcastle in Australia. The item in Metro mentioned an announcement made on May 17, 2010 and gave the following quotes:
“This is the first study to show that a high fat meal increases airway inflammation, so this is a very important finding,” said Dr. Wood. “The observation that a high fat meal changes the asthmatic response to albuterol was unexpected as we hadn’t considered the possibility that this would occur.”
It looks like the mentioned announcement concerns a presentation at the 2010 International Conference of the American Thoracic Society in New Orleans.
“Don’t leave. It’ll be worth the wait.” That’s what Craig Venter said when he briefly popped out of the Sheldonian Lecture Theatre in Oxford on October 25, 2007. It turned out he was right.
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.