It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness?
Placebo-philes - Anxious Machine - 1 views
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n a recent article for the Atlantic, David H. Freedman argues that there's virtually no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (anything from chiropractic care to acupuncture) has any curative benefit beyond a placebo effect. And so many scientists are outraged that anyone takes alternative medicine seriously. However, there is one area where alternative medicine often trumps traditional medicine: stress reduction. And stress reduction can, of course, make a huge impact on people's health. The Atlantic article quotes Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “We tend to forget how powerful an organ the brain is in our biology,” Blackburn told me. “It’s the big controller. We’re seeing that the brain pokes its nose into a lot of the processes involved in these chronic diseases. It’s not that you can wish these diseases away, but it seems we can prevent and slow their onset with stress management.” Numerous studies have found that stress impairs the immune system, and a recent study found that relieving stress even seems to be linked to slowing the progression of cancer in some patients. Perhaps not surprisingly, a trip to the chiropractor or the acupuncturist is much more likely to reduce your stress than a trip to the doctor. If anything, a trip to the doctor makes you more anxious.
The Trouble with Snooze Buttons (and with Modern Sleep) : The New Yorker - 1 views
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Research into sleep patterns, wake times, the effects of light and dark, and how these affect cognitive abilities
What You Look Like to a Social Network - 0 views
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"This infographic allows you to explore the categories of information that various social networks make available to other applications."
Michael Specter: Exploring the Human Microbiome : The New Yorker - 0 views
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""Germs make us sick," he said. "But everyone focusses on the harm. And it's not that simple, because without most of these organisms we could never survive.''"
In The Beginning There Was ... Nothing? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views
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"If the origin of life is mysterious, the origin of the universe is much more. After all, the universe, by definition, includes all there is. How can everything come from nothing?"
BBC - Future - Science & Environment - What is one degree? - 0 views
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"Temperature matters, but what is it? And what is one degree? These may seem like simple questions, but the reality is anything but clear-cut."
Why Your Name Matters : The New Yorker - 1 views
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"We see a name, implicitly associate different characteristics with it, and use that association, however unknowingly, to make unrelated judgments about the competence and suitability of its bearer. The relevant question may not be "What's in a name?" but, rather, "What signals does my name send-and what does it imply?""
Pulchrinomics: Handsome C.E.O.s, Handsome Returns : The New Yorker - 0 views
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"Researchers today are no less interested in how physical appearance shapes political and economic outcomes. Half a century after Kennedy debated Nixon, the economist Daniel Hamermesh, from the University of Texas, coined the portmanteau pulchrinomics, the economic study of beauty. Hamermesh and his colleagues have produced a large body of research that is fascinating, if disconcerting: the basic principle of pulchrinomics is that beauty drives economic success."
Michael Pollan: How Smart Are Plants? : The New Yorker - 0 views
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"Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables-light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants-that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant's behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals."
A world empire by other means - www.economist.com - 0 views
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"IT IS everywhere. Some 380m people speak it as their first language and perhaps two-thirds as many again as their second. A billion are learning it, about a third of the world's population are in some sense exposed to it and by 2050, it is predicted, half the world will be more or less proficient in it. It is the language of globalisation-of international business, politics and diplomacy. It is the language of computers and the Internet. It is now the global language. How come? Not because English is easy."
I Had My DNA Picture Taken, With Varying Results - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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"So I decided to read the tea leaves of my DNA. I reasoned that it was worth learning painful information if it might help me avert future illness. Like others, I turned to genetic testing, but I wondered if I could trust the nascent field to give me reliable results. In recent years, a handful of studies have found substantial variations in the risks for common diseases predicted by direct-to-consumer companies. I set out to test the tests: Could three of them agree on me? The answers were eye-opening"
How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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"What does the way you speak say about where you're from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map."
The 1914 Christmas armistice: a triumph for common humanity - FT.com - 0 views
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"We should be aware that views of the war have changed dramatically over time and that those who experienced it directly often saw it in ways that we would find astounding. Memories and remembrances are more plastic than we like to think, changing over time and under the influence of current preoccupations."
Mapping Emotions On The Body: Love Makes Us Warm All Over : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views
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"When a team of scientists in Finland asked people to map out where they felt different emotions on their bodies, it found that the results were surprisingly consistent, even across cultures."
Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 2 views
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"The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can't take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven't spread."
Annals of Medicine: As Good as Dead : The New Yorker - 1 views
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"Confusion about the concept of brain death is not unusual, even among the transplant professionals, surgeons, neurologists, and bioethicists who grapple with it regularly. Brain death is confusing because it's an artificial distinction constructed, more than thirty years ago, on a conceptual foundation that is unsound. Recently, some physicians have begun to suggest that brain-dead patients aren't really dead at all-that the concept is just the medical profession's way of dodging ethical questions about a practice that saves more than fifteen thousand lives a year."
The Insane Morgan Freeman iPad Painting: An Investigation in Four Acts - 0 views
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A problem of art in the digital age.
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