Placebos are getting stronger and more effective against a wide range of ailments.

“The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script … People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health [...]

I’ve been genuinely intrigued at how much fiction and reality have been intersecting recently.
See, there’s this film called MOON and it follows the story of a guy working on the far side of the moon who figures out that there’s a lot more to his mission than collecting the natural resource Helium-3. It’s a [...]

Thanks to Justin and company for welcoming me on here as a regular contributor. I will be posting on a number of issues, but one area you can expect that I will regularly be tracking is technology related developments and how they interact with the political world and policy. I also live less than ten [...]

In America, we tend to laud the optimist and shun the pessimist. Not surprisingly, we are inundated with bromides about positive thinking and self-affirmation. But, turns out, all that stuff might not work. A new study published in Psychological Science argues that forcing positive thoughts can have negative consequences.
I’ve always thought self affirmations were a [...]

The first confirmed death in the US.
Fron CNN:
A child in Texas has become the first fatality from swine flu in the United States, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.
“I can confirm the very sad news out of Texas that a child has died of the H1N1 virus,” the [...]

There’s been a lot of talk about this little virus the past couple days, so I figured it might be helpful to connect everybody with some more stories that could help you sort the wheat from the chaff.
And away we go…

Officials in Mexico are scrambling to find the source of the infection, and it points [...]

A Smithfield Foods farm could be linked to the outbreak.
Grist has more…
Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 [...]

The news about the flu is scary enough, but to think that the leader of the free world may have been exposed to this newly mutated virus is disturbing.
To be clear, this hasn’t been confirmed and the man in the picture isn’t the one who died, but that is the same museum Obama was [...]

O.k., this story is just cool:
Earlier this month, Wilson thought of a tweet (the name for a post to the social networking site) and poof, his computer read his mind and sent the darn thing. At just 23 characters, Wilson’s message, “using EEG to send tweet,” was done with a computer setup that interprets brain [...]

Next time you finish off a box of cookies or a whole pie, despite having controlled yourself all day, don’t blame yourself. Blame human nature.
In the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science, the researchers taunted subjects with the story of a waiter who was surrounded by gourmet food but not allowed a taste. Some [...]

Could be true.
Mounting evidence suggests a supervolcano located in modern-day Siberia may have killed 90% of life on Earth by wrecking havoc on the planet’s climate. The event happened 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian era.
The theory is the supervolcano’s magmas intruded on massive coal fields and turned the volcano into [...]

Yes. If we catch MS earlier, it may be reversible.
From New Scientist:
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease in which the fatty myelin sheath that wraps around nerve cells and speeds up their rate of transmission comes under attack from the body’s own defences. [...]
For the first time, some of the disability associated with the early [...]

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs answers a lot of questions for the transition. Definitely try to watch them all.
However, check out the last question/answer around 4:15 of this video.

All I can say is…it’s about time.
I’ve never understood the claim that somebody disclosing their sexuality would destroy troop morale, especially when it has been well documented that [...]

Watch this…

Spooky, but I totally want one.
(h/t: TechCrunch)

A new study published in Pediatrics has found that those who take virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as their non-pledging peers and are more likely not to use birth control.
Instead of comparing pledge-takers with the general teenage population, this new study used a refined methodology that controlled for the likelihood that [...]

The weekly radio address…

The team sounds impressive, mostly because there are actual scientists in this group and not just a bunch of industry lobbyists.
Steve Benen says it best…
I realize that it’s a testament to Bush’s presidency that I get so excited about a new president talking about science is such a progressive way, but I [...]

Steven Chu is the pick and his background is beyond impressive.
From Wash Post:
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental [...]

Welcome to reality South Africa.
From CNN:
South Africa has an estimated 5.5 million people living with the HIV virus — the highest total of any country in the world and more than one-sixth of the global total. About 1,000 South Africans die each day of the disease and complications like tuberculosis. Even more become infected because [...]

The nation has been clamoring for a solution on this and Bush finally decided to address it in this hour of need when healthcare workers are being inhumanely forced to give their patients information about birth control and artificial insemination.
The horror!
But it doesn’t just stop there…as the LA Times reveals:
It also seeks to cover [...]