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Happy Twelfth Night - Or Divorce Day, Depending On How Your 2026 Is Going

Today is, in Christian observance, Twelfth Night, the end of The 12 Days of Christmas in that song...

Blood Pressure Medication Adherence May Not Be Cost, It May Be Annoyance At Defensive Medicine

High blood pressure is an important risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease and premature...

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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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One little-known secret in the medical community is that it is not greedy doctors or insurance companies or hospitals that made health care so expensive. It is unnecessary tests and procedures doctors and hospitals must do in order to check off the boxes for the inevitable lawsuit. They are waiting to pounce on doctors and hospitals while wrapping themselves in the flag of 'holding the medical establishment accountable' and that keeps doctors and hospitals doing some things twice. And some things doctors know are unneeded but must do.

From neurosurgery to dermatology, nearly all doctors practice this "defensive medicine" and it isn't, as conspirators claim, to make more money - it is to avoid blame if something goes wrong with a patient that was basically unavoidable.(1)
There are lots of advertisements for 5G cellular service but it still isn't available in most places, and devices that take advantage of it are in relatively low use. Better quality cat videos on a 5-inch screen are not all that compelling

Sooner rather than later, people are going to want the haptic internet - a virtual reality tactile experience far more advanced than a vibrating Xbox controller - and businesses will want holographic conferencing and both will require more mobile edge computing - mini-clouds closer to users than current centralized storage.

Those will require the next evolution in the terahertz band - 6G. It is blocked out to be from 95 GHz to 3 THz.

Over 26 percent of the western US  is in exceptional drought while  72 percent is in severe drought. That has not stopped the federal government from dumping so much water into rivers it creates hazardous conditions for people in them.
In 2016, after over a half century of fighting, the communist group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) gave up. The revolutionaries had hidden in the Andes-Amazon region and the occupied rainforest remained under-developed for obvious violent reasons: if you want to have a successful takeover, you can't make people happier, you have to make them miserable and hope they blame the government. 

It didn't work, and instead simply created multi-generational terrorism. The only winner during the attempted overthrow was, strangely, the environment, according to a new paper.
Old age is the biggest risk factor for most diseases, but if you have solid nutrition your health is likely to be better throughout all periods of life. Including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the USDA dietary guidelines produced every five years won't tell you how to optimize nutrition for where you are at in life. They are one size fits all for broad swaths of age and gender, and that needs to change

The dietary guidelines were created to make sure consumers are kept in touch with the latest science and that taxpayer-funded programs like school lunches are properly feeding developing brains.
Animals can cause diseases in humans. That won't surprise you. What may surprise you is to read that these diseases can be prevented by eating less meat.