Aging in Flight You fly business class from LA to Beijing, sacrificing a college tuition payment for sixteen inches of leg room. Whisked to your hotel room you fall into bed and repeat attempted slumber. When you wake you feel thirty years older. Then you open the blinds, look out on the smog, and drop […]
Deep Living (9/16/13)
Deep Life How slow can life go? How deep? At what point does biology become geology? Dig down and you will find some answers. If you go to the bottom of the ocean, first drill and drill and drill until you reach a further 2.5 kilometers. Smack through rock that has lain there 100 million […]
Wild Type Humans Like Moving (9/5/13)
Walk on the Wild Side You have been part of a great biological experiment. You did not sign up for it. Yet it has changed the way you walk, the way you sleep, how you talk and socialize. Pretty much everything you do, in fact. In laboratories scientists make a major distinction between species born […]
To Sleep – Perchance to Drive (8/26/13)
Safe to Drive? The FDA has recently requested sleeping pill manufacturers conduct more “morning after” driving tests. Getting sleep is important, but remaining sleepy while operating a vehicle is another story. They should have spoken to the police in New Zealand. Recently police in Hamilton received an odd call. A woman called about her friend. […]
Medical Overuse (8/12/13)
Three Trillion a Year How did American health care come to cost nearly three trillion dollars a year? One place to look is at procedures – diagnostic tests and therapeutic treatments. In terms of costs, “procedures” can be as simple as a red blood cell count or as complicated as a liver transplant. Hospitals, drug […]