Snowbound and Murderous

By: | February 19, 2014

Montreal_-_Plateau,_day_of_snow_-_200312My God but the veneer of civilization is thin. Baltimore had one of its whomping good snowstorms last week – I stopped measuring at 14 inches – and the next day it had another 3 inches or so, plus sleet, and the day after it had only an inch, plus more of that sleet, and then of course the inch yesterday.  Baltimore is a poor city and thinks of itself as Southern, and the combination means that neighborhood streets don’t get ploughed.  The houses are generally rowhouses, so close to each other and two cars each.  I’m setting the scene here:  lots of snow, lots of cars, no ploughing.  So classic dog-eat-dog kicked in, and a genteel and sociable neighborhood lost its civility.  It was ugly out there.  I personally was enraged.

Most of the neighbors have a bone-deep understanding of the dangers of dog-eat-dog thinking.  For the most part, we do the civilized work-around and opt for cooperation.  We shovel out our own cars, then help the neighbors shovel out theirs.  This maximizes the space available for parking and minimizes the chance of getting stuck in somebody else’s glacial ice, and most important, it feels good – we have parties afterward, safe and happy in our common good.  Civilization triumphs.

Civilization’s fall took only a couple of guys.  Continue reading →

This Is a Story About Dancing Monkeys. Really.

By: | February 18, 2014

shutterstock_87758917What do you do if you are trapped in a room with a chimpanzee, a macaque, and a sea lion? The answer, apparently, is pump the tunes and get the party started.

This week at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (basically the US version of the Royal Society) scientists discussed the ability of various animals to “synchronize with auditory beats.” In other words, to get their groove on. Some species, it seems, can recognize the beat of the rhythm of the night. Others reportedly can dance until the morning light. Unfortunately, ethologists are still divided as to whether they can forget about the worries on their minds.

The list of animals that can sway to the rhythm of love is short but growing. It includes macaques, bonobo chimps, an orphan cockatoo, a sea lion, and most shockingly, Peter Gabriel. Yes, these are adorable YouTube fodder but it turns out that this behavior might also open a window into a key set of mental processes.

Continue reading →

A Lungful of Quiet

By: | February 17, 2014

B2_Photos_Lung_IngramI’m writing to you from inside an artificial lung. Really.

I’m sitting at a desk in a cylindrical, windowless room, 180 feet across. The floor and walls are concrete, and the ceiling, several stories above, is rimmed with an enormous black rubber gasket which sighs gently—up, then down—every time somebody opens the door.

No one has opened the door for quite a while now, and the quiet is thick. I’m pretty happy about that.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 15, 2014

loon2February 10 – 14

In the wake of this week’s mammogram research, Christie said it’s no longer a question that increasing the number of cancers detected is the wrong objective: “we should be aiming to save lives, not create as many cancer patients as we possibly can“.

Cassie looked back on scientists acting as their own guinea pigs, and found Jonas Salk’s vaccine test especially shocking.

When guest poster Jennifer Holland found no clear explanation for every twinge and pang of aging, she also discovered that trying too hard to find one takes you to a very dark place.

Jessa mourned the drowning loons.

And Richard told us what Galileo had in common with the Beatles.

Breast cancer’s latest saga: misfearing and misplaced goalposts

By: | February 13, 2014

AirmanMastectomy

What’s the number one killer of women? It’s a question that practitioners asked every new patient at a clinic where physician Lisa Rosenbaum once worked, and she hasn’t forgotten the answer given to her by one middle-aged woman with high blood pressure and elevated blood lipids. “I know the right answer is heart disease,” the patient told Rosenbaum, “But I’m still going to say ‘breast cancer.’”

Rosenbaum recounts this experience in a perspective published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, which follows on the heels of a long-term study published online Tuesday in BMJ that found no benefit from screening mammography. The two papers make fine companions.

The Rosenbaum commentary explores a phenomenon that Cass Sunstein dubbed “misfearing” — our human nature to fear instinctively, rather than factually. Her patient’s first answer is correct — heart disease kills more women than all cancers combined, and yet breast cancer seems to invoke far more fear among most women. “What is it about being at risk for heart disease that is emotionally dissonant for women?,” Rosenbaum asks. “Might we view heart disease as the consequence of having done something bad, whereas to get breast cancer is to have something bad happen to you?” Continue reading →

The beleaguered loon

By: | February 12, 2014

Loon 1In the autumn of 1996, my daily walk to school took more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. It brought me from the shores of Ramsey Lake in Sudbury, Ontario, through a bright birch forest where everything was whishy and dappled and stripy-white. Blueberry bushes lined the path.

A birch tree alone is a beautiful thing, stark against the darker trees, but a whole forest of birch monoculture is matched in its strange artificiality only by the eerie verticality of a bamboo forest.

Artificial it was. Before they raised the smokestacks in 1972, the local nickel mine’s activities had rained sulphuric acid on the local lakes until all the native vegetation was gone. The place was like a moonscape.

After twenty years it had regenerated to the point where plants that loved acidic soil – birch and blueberries – had begun to thrive. But still the fish stocks were depleted and the Common loon, whose 30-year lifespan makes for slow reproduction, was still limping back into residence.

A little loon goes a long way, though, and I can still bring to mind the avian voice that projected across the lake most nights. I could write its call on sheet music if I knew the notation for quarter-tones. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Painful Lessons

By: | February 11, 2014

abdominal pain

It used to go like this: The nice doctor smiles and checks your heart, ears, and knees, pronounces you healthy, and off you go. Grab a lollipop on your way out! (Doctors used to have candy jars. Dentists used to give out toothbrushes.)  You are not yet 20! Life is good!

Then suddenly you’ve flown past 30. Cried over 40. Crept up on 45. And now, anything can happen.

Like this: I was having pain under my ribs for days. I finally went to the ER. Pancreatitis? Really? I had a follow-up MRI, because pancreatitis is for old alcoholic men; I was a tiny 43-year-old woman who can barely finish a beer. On results day, I perched on the edge of a big rolling chair as the doctor made an invisible circle on the computer screen with his capped pen. Here is your pancreas, he said of one mystery blob. And here—tapping a shadow on the blob—is the mass on your pancreas.

A mass on my pancreas. Continue reading →

Polio and a Father’s Certainty

By: | February 10, 2014

Salk_headlinesA couple of weeks ago, I was researching the history of polio vaccination, and I stumbled across a photo that stopped me cold. There was Jonas Salk, the researcher who developed the polio vaccine we use in the US today, giving his son a shot. The caption reads: “Peter Salk receiving the inactivated poliovirus vaccine from his father, Jonas Salk. Salk also injected himself, his wife, and his two other sons. The vaccine was still experimental at this point.” And it wasn’t just Salk. Julius Youngner, who worked in the lab with Salk, told the Daily News in 1980, that he had given it to his children as well, and that all the lab members had been vaccinated. “You can’t ask other people to take it if you don’t give it to your own children,” he told the reporter. “People offered their children as volunteers.” Continue reading →