How The Media Has Hurt The Japanese People


First and foremost I have a personal message for the 180 or so heroes who have been working in shifts around the clock to save their nation from a worse disaster than the one that Japan has already suffered.


To the Heroes of Fukushima: 

May you each be most correctly and sincerely honored - not just by by your own nation, but by the whole world.  You have risked your lives to save others.  You are morally remarkable people who have actively taken part in serving our global society.  Through your diligence and perseverance you have become public role models.  You each deserve at least these three medals of honor:

Portuguese researchers have discovered a "broad spectrum" cancer suppressor gene called LRP1B which acts by removing proteins crucial for cancer development from the tumor environment.

The fact that LRP1B does not act on the tumor itself (in this study thyroid tumors) but, instead, on molecules which are known to be important to many different cancers is what makes it so interesting. Because this means that LRP1B, and also therapies capable of inducing it (or mimicking its effect), could in theory be used to treat a variety of cancers.

For decades we have been told that with the lessons learned from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy is safe. As the still unfolding mayhem at the Dai-Ichi plant in Fukushima, Japan, proves, nothing could be further from the truth.

Infants and toddlers can suffer serious mental health disorders, yet are unlikely to receive treatment that could prevent lasting developmental problems, according to an analysis in  American Psychologist.

For years now the generic PC was getting somewhat cheaper and that was generally good for science. Lots of PCs are running or assisting in many different ways experiments and measurements in laboratories of many sorts.

The generic PC could have been getting much cheaper and perhaps specialized, but the complicated interplay between the dominating operating system and consumer market social aspects lead to the development which simply happened. But somehow everybody in science was happy.

In the category of "Duh?" for the week, we have a new article from France looking at how parental beliefs regarding autism dictate treatment choices. Dardennes et al. (2011) put 78 parents through a questionnaire called "the Lay-Beliefs about Autism Questionnaire (LBA-Q; Furnham&Buck, 2003). This questionnaire explores beliefs regarding the etiology and treatment of autism. LBA-Q’s authors considered two main academic theories of the possible causes and treatment of autism: the psychogenic model and the biomedical model" (Dardennes et al.).

This is the best song I have heard all year. (Thanks to i'm a chordata! for the shout out.) I might even go so far as to say it's the best song I will hear all year. What could possibly be more awesome than this beautiful, bluesy explanation of why animals in the ocean undertake vertical migrations?

In Nanjing, that is close to Shanghai, and I suppose also in other places around here*, you cannot buy salt anymore. Every last grain has been bought up. Why? Apparently, some evil guy started the rumor that table salt, which is sodium chloride (NaCl), can protect you from radioactivity. We are not talking about iodide salt here, nor even sea salt either, which has some iodide in it, but simple salt, which there is already way too much in the Chinese diet.

*(Update: In the whole of China, the first person died already from eating too much salt!)

So I check my blog comments this morning, and guess who the culprit is? IT IS ME! According to the comments to my last article, I am the one to blame! How so?

Language may have an undervalued role in learning the meanings of numbers.   A study based on research using deaf people in Nicaragua who never learned formal sign language showed that people who communicate using self-developed gestures (homesigns) were unable to comprehend the value of numbers greater than three because they had not learned a language containing symbols used for counting.

Given the general fear regarding radiation levels around Japan, this seems the perfect time to give a short introduction to this important topic. There is a lot of confusion regarding radiation and radiation poisoning and this article will try and break it down. 

Radioactive decay