Xeni Jardin is a journalist who was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago and is undergoing the difficult treatment that is called for. She has a fine piece where she says she has had it up to here with quacks promoting bogus cures that give false hope to people with the disease and endangers them by luring them away from real medicine.
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Next to heart disease, cancers are the leading cause of death in the US. But Richard Stevens writes that unlike with most other cancers where the major causes are known, identifying what primarily causes breast cancer remains stubbornly elusive.
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The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a major study today that once more shows that there is no link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism. You can read the paper here. As this news report on the study concludes:
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The SpaceX company successfully launched its cargo to the Space Station. But they had another goal in mind and that was to see if, once the cargo capsule had peeled away, they could land the Falcon 9 booster rocket onto a floating barge because that would enable them to reuse the booster and provide a huge savings.
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I tend to be swayed back and forth by the promise of self-driving cars. On the one hand, I read about how good they are and have advanced so much that one might expect them to be available for commercial use within the next decade. Then I read that that they are only as good as the latest map updates and cannot cope with the kinds of temporary changes in road conditions that are common and then I feel pessimistic that they will be a reality soon.
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In his interview with John Oliver, Edward Snowden said something that many computer-savvy people are aware of and that is that modern computers can sweep through the entire set of possibilities of eight-character passwords in less than a second and that is how hackers break into systems. He suggested that rather than using complicated and hard to remember combinations of characters, we need to think in terms of long phrases that are easy for each user to remember but are unlikely to be found in any written form anywhere.
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John Bohannon, a microbiologist and science writer, and Black Label Movement (a Minneapolis dance company), argue that using interpretive dance would be much more effective than using PowerPoint in communicating things to the public. In this demonstration, they use dance to give the viewer a pretty good sense of how photons can be used to cool atoms down to almost absolute zero and transform it into a superfluid.
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Gavin and Tara Hills are Canadian parents of seven children who had been frightened away from vaccinating all of their children ages ranging from 10 months to 10 years because of all the alarmist rhetoric they read on the internet.
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The rise in incidence of preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough due to people not getting their children vaccinated has resulted in some states trying to tighten up the loose standard for getting exemptions. But that effort has stalled due to fierce opposition from the anti-vaxxers.
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I came across a fascinating story about a tiny bird that puts human endurance records to shame. It was a about a small songbird called the blackpoll warbler that every autumn makes a non-stop flight from Vermont to Puerto Rico, a distance of 1between 1,400-1,700 miles that takes it three days to complete. This is a a pretty amazing feat for a bird that weighs just 12 grams.
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