Science & Society
Although, by international standards, the UK has very low rates of deaths in children, within western Europe the UK has a higher rate of deaths in children than nearly every other country in the region.
The mortality rate in the UK for children under five is 4.9 deaths per 1000 births, more than double that in Iceland (2.4 per 1000 births), the country with the lowest mortality rates. 3800 children under five died in the UK in 2013, the highest absolute number of deaths in the region.
The findings in The Lancet come from a new study coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and…
Hank |
Food is interesting to me. It's essential, of course, but it's also a lot of cutting-edge science that people don't see. It's hard to imagine now that when I was a kid, Prof. Paul Ehrlich (and then later our current science czar, Dr. John holdren) were projecting that we would be having worldwide riots and mass starvation by now.
Instead, while I was living on a small subsistence farm, American agricultural science ignored that apocalyptic memo, and they began producing far more food on far less land.
Today, we are so optimistic about food science that an entire swath of rich American elites…
Cash |
I'll tell you up front, I am not a big fan of chemicals.
It's not that I'm chemophobic, or have any science-phobia, I instead have that special sort of elitism that is available to people who have just been lucky enough to not need chemicals. I don't even like to take aspirin and I have that luxury because I haven't needed to take any drugs for a recurring condition, so it's really easy for me to embrace such naturalistic posturing. When if comes to food, if I had my way, nothing my family eats would be grown, processed, killed, cleaned or cooked by any hands but mine.
Yet I know the bulk of…
There are three simple family-oriented rules of thumb to overcome childhood obesity.
They basically involve limit setting to address the brain's "get more" drive strengthened through habitual over-consumption of temptations including highly caloric processed food, hyper-reality media and electronics, as well as excessive sitting. His 3 "rules" of living promote physical and mental health for children and parents for both treatment and prevention.
They are below, though the official - and slightly weirder - terms for them are farther down:
1) Limit highly caloric processed food2) Limit…
Parents are always worried about their special snowflakes - unless a phone call needs to be made. Then, parents are no less likely to engage in cell phone and other distracting behavior than the general public, according to a new paper in Academic Pediatrics.
The worst offenders - wealthy, educated elites.
Each year, more than 130,000 children younger than 13 are treated in U.S. emergency departments after motor-vehicle collision-related injuries. About one in six fatal motor-vehicle collisions in the U.S. in 2008 resulted from driver distraction, and Macy says that over time that…
Over 60 years of data collected across 8 states by citizen scientists may demonstrate their potential to contribute to monitoring long-term lake water trends over a large area, according to results published April 30, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Noah Lottig from University of Wisconsin and colleagues.
Lakes provide valuable resources for people, animals, and fish, among others. Long-term monitoring of 'lake health' across a large region can be difficult and expensive, but using a simple, standardized tool, the Secchi disk—a circular disk that measures water transparency in…
In the United States, murders have plummeted in the last 20 years, as has crime. A culture that in the 1980s was commonly projected to be morphing into gangs of youth wilding across urban areas has become just the opposite. Even New York City is reasonably safe.
But one thing has risen dramatically while crime has dropped; incarceration.
Now, a group of scholars is saying jail has little to do with crime rate or prevention and they further believe that the negative social consequences (harder to get a job, can't buy a gun, can't vote) and cost of incarceration means we should open…
Hank |
I can be lazy. I was famous for it as a child. I didn't bother to walk, I didn't bother to talk. When I got older, if I had to do a chore, I found a way to be a screw-up and break something. I had unlimited time for D&D and art and sports, though, and I did well enough in school to get a scholarship to college. Because those things weren't work.
If only I had Alicia Silverstone as a mom, who knows how much more brain power I could have devoted to higher pursuits? Because Silverstone has figured out how to optimize everything.
She doesn't even require her kids to chew food, so they…
It used to be that homelessness was a way of life - the hobo lifestyle was one of odd jobs and flop houses.
But as governments increasingly regulated buildings, flop houses were no longer viable and it is illegal to hire people unless they are registered contractors or making them employees. Actual homelessness has surged.
A group in Canada has a solution - build permanent shelters for them. The scholars from St. Michael's Hospital and McMaster University assessed the success of Hamilton's Transitions to Home program – a program designed to find permanent housing for men who are…
Terrorism can be a successful strategy for rebel groups during civil war, according to a Michigan State University political science academic, because governments will believe responding with force extends the conflict
Jakana Thomas, assistant professor of political science, writing in the American Journal of Political Science, believes that if governments negotiate or use sound counter-terrorism efforts, they stand a better chance of bringing about a peaceful resolution
Thomas analyzed civil conflict from 1989 to 2010 in Africa, which has been a terrorism hotbed since many…