Driving Forward Driving excitement is in danger. Google has begun producing cars without steering wheels or pedals. Cars that drive themselves. Drivers may someday be obsolete. Humans will no longer be required to control the wheel. And think what we will lose: the pleasures of the iconic machine of American life – the embodiment of […]
Marijuana – the Panacea of Our Times? (5/12/14)
Marijuana – What Does It Treat? “It does everything,” my colleague explained, shaking his head. “It treats pain. It treats headaches. It treats depression and anxiety. Epilepsy. They keep asking me for it, every day.” A novel antidepressant? An extraordinary new anti-anxiety agent? No, marijuana. My internist friend is bombarded with requests to […]
New Era for Alzheimer’s? (4/14/14)
New Days It’s not just in media, high tech and politics where hype often overwhelms hope. It also happens in medicine. The discovery of abnormalities in amyloid and tau proteins made researchers in the 1980s believe they had a handle on Alzheimer’s disease. A host of medications promised to stall or push back its manifestations. […]
Your Lying, Cheating Brain (3/3/14)
Creating Useful Lies “I just know it’s true. I saw it.” But your brain is not a DVD player, correctly recording what happened. And that’s a good thing. The unreliability of memory has been a literary theme for thousands of years. The creation of our many “true fictions” are ascribed to factors varying from personality […]
The Pleasures of Pesticides (1/13/14)
Common Uses of Marijuana and Tobacco New years bring new adventures. Across the US, people camped out, filed into buses and trains, and drove thousands of miles to witness – Legal Pot. Marijuana cigarettes were lit celebrating the “new history” of America, where the failed Drug War would be put to rest. It just shows […]