Laws and Flaws

The roots of miscarriages of justice.

  Although this article is about the common law, the author hopes that it may be of more than passing interest to scientists and to all seekers after truth.

  Over the course of some twenty years the author has used his skills in logic, science and literature research to carry out an in-depth study of the history of English law and of the causes of miscarriages of justice.  The main focus has been on English case law, but many cases from other common law jurisdictions have also been studied.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug and more than 50 percent take two, scholars writing in Mayo Clinic Proceedings say. Antibiotics, antidepressants and painkilling opioids are most commonly prescribed, they found. 20 percent of patients are on five or more prescription medications, according to the findings.

Terrorism-induced smoking is a new explanatory factor that will keep public health academics from accepting that free choice happens - some people will do things that are bad for them.

 A Weill Cornell Medical College public health study is stuck in pre-9/11 determinism too; the author concludes that the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks caused 1,000,000 former smokers to take up the noxious weed again - and maintain it.

The analysis in Contemporary Economic Policy is distinct in that it is the first to examine terrorism-induced smoking in the United States and come up with net societal costs they feel are directly linked to terrorism.  All determined by phone surveys.

The world really stinks today. We have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.

Oh wait, no we haven't.

But if you are an anti-science pessimistic hippie of the 1960s (or today, though their descendants only forecast doom for poor people, they will still have their iPads) you can be forgiven for thinking all that was going to have happened by now. Because a whole lot of people were once saying we were doomed in lots of ways. And millions still do it today but, like conservatives and Reagan, they try to validate their modern beliefs by invoking icons of the past. To wit:

If you support less efficient agriculture, organic food or conventional food without science optimization, crop yields will not be enough to feed the population of 2050. It's the population bomb scare of the 1950s and '60s reborn a century later.

While American agriculture has dematerialized in the last few decades - we produce far more food on far less land - Europe and other countries have not kept pace. Due to that, crop yields worldwide won't increase quickly enough to support estimated global needs in 2050, according to the claims of a paper in PLoS ONE. 

In defense of Pharmacy and Catholic Pharmacists was written during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. This was not written for publication but for my own piece of mind, to justify my own career.

At that time pharmacy, was under attack, recently the attack has been renewed. I have been a Catholic all my life and a pharmacists for over forty years. The use of birth control medications has, until recently, been a private and professional medical decision. Holy-mother-church may not have approved of contraception but she did respect the doctor patient relationship.

If anyone still felt CNN was credible before their Boston Bomber coverage two months ago, it was only because they hadn't read their science and health coverage.

Sure, all mainstream media loves its Miracle Vegetable of the Week stories, alternated with their Scary Chemical of the Week stories, but CNN is positively Huffington Post-ish in their willingness to engage in advocacy. And in New York City, there is always something to advocate.

Our internal circadian clock regulates daily life processes and is synchronized by external cues, the Zeitgeber, with the main cue being the light-dark cycle.

But the light-dark cycle effect is largely reduced in extreme habitats such as in the Arctic during the polar summer. Using a radiotelemetry system a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology have now found, in four bird species in Alaska, different daily activity patterns ranging from strictly rhythmic to completely arrhythmic. These differences are attributed to the species' mating systems and behaviors. Their study shows that activity patterns can change according to social and environmental factors, which suggests a remarkable plasticity in the avian circadian system.

Glycoproteins are sugar-protein hybrid molecules that the protective mucus that lines our lungs and stomach and are also part of the fluid that lubricates our joints, the synovial fluid, and cover all our cells, with the sugar parts, the glycans, sticking out like a tiny forest of antennae.

 Researchers at ETH Zurich and Empa have also identified a surprising effect that glycans have on the water molecules that surround them.

Air pollution is related to forest decline and also appears to attack the protecting wax on tree leaves and needles, say scientists who have now discovered a responsible mechanism: particulate matter salt compounds that become deliquescent because of humidity and form a wick-like structure that removes water from leaves and promotes dehydration. 
Wax helps to protect leaves and needles from water loss.