Search Results for: label/People and the Planet Report

• Anorexia nervosa, neurobiology, and family-based treatment

  period. These results were a clear illustration of just how profound the effects of months of starvation were on the body and mind. Alas, Keys’ findings were pretty much ignored by the field of eating-disorders treatment for 40-some years, until new technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and research gave new context to his work. We now know there is no single root cause for eating disorders. They’re what researchers call…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on August 10, 2012

• After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

  …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on March 27, 2013

• Double Xpression: Darlene Cavalier of Science Cheerleader and SciStarter

  creatic cancer. That criticism that’s ill informed is the worst type. Putting them in a bad light and they don’t deserve it. They volunteer to do this. They do it because they really believe in it. There are an estimated 3 to 4 million cheerleaders in the US. They want to reach that group, let them know it’s OK to love math and science, (to say) here’s my experience, here’s how I learned what an engineer is, here’s what my day is like. They’re al…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on April 18, 2012

• Double Xpression: Debbie Berebichez, PhD Physicist

  …m.  My femininity allows me to be a voice in a field that has tended to isolate themselves from the public, which is bad. Some of my colleagues have become a little snobbish.  The fact that I have serious credentials (PhD and 2 postdocs) shows that I had to work like crazy – looks and personality can only go so far.  It s hard work that gets you there! Serious science communication has a lot of math and problem solving in order to explain things…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on June 2, 2012

• The path from science to alarmism: How science gets twisted before it gets to you

  …hem have never shown any connection to Autism (or even ADHD, another diagnosis they name-check). In fact, many of them show that with exposure to these chemicals, the outcome differentials between exposure and non-exposure is 5 IQ points. FIVE IQ POINTS. Statistically significant? Perhaps. Practically important for a parent? No. IQ itself is a strange and vague thing. And 5 points isn’t going to move your super-genius down to the level of an aver…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on May 4, 2012

• Vaccination attitudes are contagious

  …est (29 total), or didn’t vaccinate altogether (5 total). When she asked the parents about the most influential people and sources they consulted for their vaccination decisions, Brunson found a couple of trends. First, 59% of the people in nonconformers’ “source networks” recommended “something other than complete, on-time vaccination.” But only 20% of the conformers’ source networks suggested anything o…

  Authored by Tara Haelle on April 24, 2013

• With height, we get what we want

  …of personal ads from a dating site that let users indicate the tallest and shortest person they’d consider dating. On average, women said they weren’t interested in men more than 17% taller than themselves. For a 5-foot-5 woman, for example, that means  a man over 6 foot 4 seems like a little much. To compare these preferences to a real population, Stulp and his coauthors used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a broad sampling o…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on March 12, 2013

• Double Xpression: Liz Neeley, Science Communicator Extraordinaire

  …p cloth, and let stand at room temperature for 2 hours. 4.     Mix 1Ž2 or more of your olives and all the basil into the dough, and try to get them evenly distributed. It won’t be perfect, but it will be delicious. 5.     Dump the dough onto a lined baking sheet. Flatten it with your hands until it’s a big rectangle about 1″/2.5cm thick. Slather with olive oil. Let rise for 1 hour. 6.     Preheat your oven to 425°F/220°…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on June 11, 2012

• Depressing genes

  me overzealous and attack their own body’s tissue, often leading to serious health problems and death. Only rarely do gene variants cause primarily negative consequences, such as BRCA1, the breast cancer gene, or APOE epsilon 4, the early-onset Alzheimer’s disease gene. If insurance companies did, in fact, try to weed out clients based on their genetic make-up, they would soon find that most gene variants that put carriers at risk for some diseas…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 17, 2013

• 10 ways healthcare reform might help people with disabilities

  What reform might do for a diverse, often overlooked group.           by Laura Newman Healthcare reform discussions frequently center on the changes anticipated for the general population. But people with disabilities — about 56 million in the United States — are generally left out of the healthcare reform picture. That absence is not unusual. According to Lisa Iezzoni, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Institute for He…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 16, 2013