Temperature and Life How do you help a baby get through a vaccination? You warm her up. Because temperature matters a lot. And that fact also has implications – for adults who are trying to sleep and rest. Decreasing Pain Babies, like most human beings, don’t like getting shots – what the British call “jabs.” […]
Shoot yourself in the heart, then donate your brain to science? Why are we killing the athletes? (5/10/12)
Pleasures and Pains Sports provide us the most delirious euphorias, the pure delight of seeing the human body to do what it’s built to do. Sports also kill and maim us. Two thousand young Americans die of sudden cardiac arrest every year, with perhaps triple the risk in athletes. When hockey enforcer Derek Boogard died at age 28, […]
Do clothes make the brain? (4/18/12)
Seeing Behind Clothes Do the clothes you wear change how your brain processes information? Yes. But can the same suit of clothes, given a different occupational meaning, change the whole process of focus and how you see the world? Yes again. Clothes Make the Man Mark Twain’s statement that “clothes make the man” distills what […]
Sleepwalking stops vegetarianism (4/2/12)
Eating in Your Sleep Some people do not eat meat; they will not eat meat. The reasons are many. They range from concern for their own health to concern for the health of the planet, as eight pounds of grain is usually needed to create one pound of meat. Yet even vegetarians of 40 years […]
Surviving with nothing – lessons from bears and men (3/26/12)
Recycling and Hibernating How important is recycling to regenerating your body? Critical. We use up a lot of “stuff” getting through the day – proteins, sugars, fats, DNA – and much else. Fortunately we get to remake it constantly – and remake ourselves continually as we go. And some animals – like bears – can […]
