Principle author Heidi Hutton tells us something new: binge drinking seems to cause women to be more likely to engage in risky and/or unprotected sex.
Maybe there was somebody in the western hemisphere who didn’t know this, although it’s hard to imagin. The rest of us knew what that guy at the frat party was thinking as he eagerly refilled his date’s drink. And it wasn’t gallant.
From the press release announcing the publication of the article:
Flood Hazards, Insurance Rates, and Amenities: Evidence From the Coastal Housing Market
Yes, this article starts off with the headline Women Aren’t Men.
In fairness, they are pointing out that the medical profession kind of ignores the distinction, but really, duh.
Dr. Thomas Brewer at Kent State managed to snag some money from our Department of Justice to pin down some slippery data. In a study published in Law and Human Behavior, Brewer belabored the obvious:
In a study published in Law and Human Behavior, Brewer found that blacks and whites seem to give mitigation the same level of attention in the majority of capital cases. However, an exception occurs when the capital case involves a black defendant who is faced with killing a white victim; in these instances, black jurors become significantly more receptive to mitigating evidence than their white colleagues on the jury.
So, there are major differences along color lines in in the American justice system? Now that’s news!
The American College of Gastroenterology hasn’t just been sitting around viewing colonoscopy videos all day. No, member Mashahiro Matshushita has been studying in Japan, and has released some fairly starting news. Apparently, eating uncooked fish can make you sick.
Dr. Matshusita observer that:
larvae for the parasitic worm Anisakis cannot survive in a human host, but the ingested larvae can produce severe intestinal problems warranting a visit to the emergency room. When ingested by humans, the larvae attach themselves to the tissues lining the stomach and intestines, resulting in sudden abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
So, let’s see. Cooking food kills parasites. Eating food without cooking it can cause ingestion of parasites, making one sick.
Duh!
Things must be pretty slow up in Illinois. Slow enough that Dr. Stephen Persell from the prestigious Northwestern Med School, is apparently working on his next degree: Master of the Obvious.
Persell actually managed to scam a grant from “the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Michigan Department of Community Health” in order to come to the following startling conclusion:
New research from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has found that nearly 50 percent of patients taking antihypertensive drugs in three community health centers were unable to accurately name a single one of their medications listed in their medical chart. That number climbed to 65 percent for patients with low health literacy.
It’s pretty obvious that, despite the MD tag, Persell has never actually spent any time talking to patients. Otherwise he could have written the paper without even running the study, perhaps titling it “Majority of Patients Dumber Than Dirt”.
Well, you certainly aren’t going to catch any grass growing under the American College of Gatroenterology! In a survey released today, their members reported that acid reflux symptoms made it more likely that a person would have trouble sleeping.
Yes, it turns out that typical symptoms, such as:
coughing, sore throat, snoring, wheezing, choking, and chest pain
can actually have an effect on getting good rest.
People are such babies, aren’t they?
The British Journal of Sports Medicine apparently though enough of some research by Richard Thomas Clinghan, Graham P. Arnold, Tim S. Drew, Lynda Cochrane, and Rami J Abboud, to publish it. The title of the article was “Do you get value for money when you buy an expensive pair of running shoes?”, and you can read the abstract here.
The goal of the study was to find out if high-priced running shoes actually functioned any better than low-priced shoes from the same manufacturer. And guess what? They found out that all you get for the extra bucks is some status value, no actual performance improvement.
No kidding, my wife could have told you the same thing in 30 seconds.
In this article, we see that Nobel Prize winner Mario Capecchi is investigating the question of why bats can fly and mice can’t.
Mario describes some of the work he’s currently doing:
We’ll use the mouse as a sort of surrogate to understand bats. Why can they fly and echolocate while a mouse of the same size cannot?
Mario? Could it be that mice don’t have wings?