While many fields realize that modernity comes to an end like any epoch eventually does, the “hard sciences”, especially physics, still rest in relatively naïve stages, still proud of their “modern” status like a teenager loving his first car. Attempts to advance beyond adolescence are countered with references to the Sokal Affair, although that affair has long since been understood in more enlightened ways and even Alan Sokal himself in the end concluded that the affair proved the enormous bias due to pure status in all sciences, news perhaps to the physicist Sokal, but certainly not to social constructionists.

Dentistry has been around for almost long as people have had teeth go bad but evidence for dentistry is another matter entirely. We don't pull off an arm when it is sore so the first human to figure out that pulling something attached to the skull would help keep people alive was taking nearly as big a chance as the first patient.

Ancient evidence of prehistoric dentistry has been discovered in a Neolithic graveyard in Pakistan and other findings in a Neolithic graveyard near Parma have detailed creative tooth work. An artificial tooth from the cemetery of Gebel Ramlah, Egypt, dates back 5,500 years.

Combat traits usually get most of the attention from researchers, because they are thought to have arisen due to intense male-male competition for access to females. Large, elaborate weapons become the focus of sexual selection studies because the connection is obvious. Collared lizards (Crotaphytus collaris), for example, have bite force correlated with head width, and it positively predicts the number of offspring produced in a breeding season, suggesting sexual selection on head morphology and the role of attacking traits.

In a few weeks I will speak in Torino, Italy at Comunicare Fisica 2012, a conference devoted to the communication of Physics in the media, in schools, through web sites, etcetera. And I need your help !

Let me explain. I have submitted an abstract which reads as follows:

A balanced and well-researched Wired article by Jason Kehe reveals the latest "yoo-hoo transmission to aliens"  stunt.  Of course I consider these things to be, at best, dopey, with a small but significant chance of being thoughtlessly dangerous for all of humanity.  Above all, to cast such noises outward, based on untested assumptions, without at least offering to discuss it first with our planet's population and its greatest sages?  That is simply rude.

Laboratory modified corn has shown some progress in treating a rare, life-threatening childhood genetic disease. Researchers have been developing enzyme therapeutics for lysosomal storage diseases - rare but devastating childhood genetic diseases – for more than a decade. 

In the most severe forms of these inherited diseases, untreated patients die in early childhood because of progressive damage to all organs of the body and currently, enzyme treatments are available for only six of the more than 70 diverse types of lysosomal storage diseases.

Doctors don't want to be general care physicians, they want to specialize, and it is a problem that will only get worse because it involves money.

Primary care physicians are at the heart of health care in the United States, they are the first to diagnose patients and ensure those patients receive the care they need.  But faced with increased regulations, paperwork, the onslaught of defensive medicine, malpractice costs and staggering medical school bills, many are instead opting to become specialists.

Health Robotics today announced that it has entered the Blood/Plasma Automation Industry by leveraging its technology across the Pharmaceutical and Blood/Plasma industry sectors. They also announced the general availability of embedded Radio-frequency identification (RFID) for its Sterile Compounding Automation solutions i.v.STATION, i.v.SOFT, and i.v.STATION ONCO. These RFID upgrades will be showcased at the upcoming ASHP Midyear Meeting&Exhibition (American Society of Health-System Pharmacists) on December 2-6 in Las Vegas. 

Recently I have been intrigued by James Ladyman and Don Ross’s ideas about naturalistic metaphysics and in the course of my discussion of their book, Every Thing Must Go, I pointed out that those ideas (as the authors themselves recognize) are compatible with one form or another of mathematical Platonism (hear also Ladyman on the RS podcast).