Tuesday, July 15, 2008 . 7/15/2008
This is an excellent article on multivitamins and how they are largely ineffective and can even be harmful.I always get this from my mom: "You should take a vitamin everyday" "It will make you feel better" etc, etc. I always tell her that if she thinks I'm severely lacking in a vitamin(s), then she can take me to the doctor's and they will determine it. That's what people should do when considering taking a supplement, anyway. Many times, perfectly healthy people will take vitamins in pill form when they simply don't need to, and as a result can overdose and even get sick as a result. Taking vitamins while at the same time eating a balanced diet just seems extremely redundant to me.
In my opinion, multivitamins and other supplements should only be available by prescription from a doctor (and not a "holistic" one either, but an actual licensed medical doctor).
Labels: science
0 Comments - Post/view commentsTuesday, July 08, 2008 . 7/08/2008
Live Longer: The One Anti-Aging Trick That Works
The formula is simple: Eat less. It could add years to your life, several experts now say. And done in moderation, it could at least help you live a more healthy life.
The only question is: Will the average person do it?
While little short of a nip-and-tuck will make you look younger, calorie restriction, as it is called, is as close to a real Fountain of Youth as any known technique comes. Even scientists who are cautious about anti-aging hype say it works, both by cutting risks for some diseases and by allowing all body cells, somehow, to hang in there longer.
"There is plenty of evidence that calorie restriction can reduce your risks for many common diseases including cancer, diabetes and heart disease," says Saint Louis University researcher Edward Weiss, who last week announced a new study that brings fresh understanding to how it works. "And you may live to be substantially older."
The numbers
Here's a rough rule of thumb that many experts generally agree on now: Eat 15 percent less starting at age 25 and you might add 4.5 years to your life, says Eric Ravussin, who studies human health and performance at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana.
One important caveat: Ravussin's estimate is based mostly on studies of other animals and only preliminary research in humans. But the work by Weiss and others is unlocking the mysteries of aging and suggesting the animal studies apply to humans.
"There is absolutely no reason to think it won't work," Ravussin told LiveScience.
Perhaps even more promising, though in early stages of research, are drugs designed on the basis of what's been learned from calorie-restriction studies. Those drugs would target human cells to deliver the same benefits, turning off bad things and turning on good things to extend cell life in general, or offer new therapies and cures to vexing diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.
If you can hang in there until these promising new drug therapies are developed, you may live in a world where lifespan increases by 10 to 15 years, researchers say.
Don’t plan on living to be 200, Ravussin said, "but I think we're going to gain quite a few years."
My only concern is that this might "encourage" eating disorders in people who don't understand. From what I'm getting from the article, it's important to still eat enough so that you're not severely restricting, otherwise you'd have the opposite effect and die (obviously).
Another interesting article from LiveScience:
Most Sunscreens Fail to Protect
The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington-based research group and habitual gadfly to the business world, has found that 4 out of 5 of the nearly 1,000 sunscreen lotions analyzed offer inadequate protection from the sun or contain harmful chemicals. The biggest offenders, the EWG said, are the industry leaders: Coppertone, Banana Boat and Neutrogena.
While 3 out of 3 industry leaders are rather upset with the EWG report, and while some dermatologists criticize it for hyperbole, the report does underscore several long-standing health concerns:
Sunscreens do not offer blanket protection from the sun and do little to prevent the most deadly form of skin cancer; reliance on them instead of, say, a hat and protective clothing, might be contributing to skin cancer; and the Food and Drug Administration has yet to issue any safety standards, mysteriously sitting on a set of recommendations drafted 30 years ago.
Subcutaneous homesick blues
Sunlight contains ultraviolet radiation, largely in two forms: UVA and UVB. Aside from sunburn, UVB exposure causes the most common forms of skin cancer — basal cell carcinoma, which is rarely deadly and mostly only disfiguring, and squamous cell carcinoma, which can turn deadly about 1 percent of the time.
UVA penetrates the skin more deeply and causes wrinkling. Recent research, however, has found that UVA exacerbates the carcinogenic effects of UVB and might cause skin cancer itself.
Most sunscreens block only UVB. And the SPF system, short for Sun Protection Factor, refers only to UVB. SPF provides an estimate of a lotion's level of sunburn protection. If you start burning in about 30 minutes, then SPF 15 will allow you to stay in the sun 15 times longer before getting burned, in theory.
SPF of 1 zillion
Total UV protection is within reach and has been used for millennia. It's called clothing. Unfortunately this isn't so convenient when summertime fun calls for minimal clothing.
The EWG report takes an ax to the loose SPF claims. Almost all sunscreen lotions contain chemicals that, perhaps counter-intuitively, breakdown in the presence of sunlight. But in fact this is how they block UVB from penetrating the skin, like a castle wall protecting against cannonballs until the wall crumbles.
Notions of all-day protection, as some sunscreen products claim, or even several hours of protection are ludicrous, the EWG said, because most sunscreens start deteriorating in as quickly as 15 minutes. This doesn't even account for sweat and casual rubbing, further reducing protection.
Also, few sun-worshipers use the recommended shot-glass-amount of lotion with each application. We merely think we are protected; few really are.
Controversy, not just skin deep
The EWG also trashed any lotion containing harmful chemicals that can easily penetrate the skin. Oxybenzone, which blocks UVA, is a main offender. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found oxybenzone in the urine of just about everyone tested.
This chemical can promote DNA damage in the presence of sunlight. Oxybenzone and similar cancer-causing chemicals in sunscreens contribute to the minority view that sunscreens actually cause more and deadlier cancers than they prevent. Several small studies have found an increased risk of malignant melanoma, by far the deadliest form of skin cancer, among regular users of sunscreens.
Many zinc-based protects appear to be safe, according to the EWG. Until the FDA breaks its silence and offers some guidance, there's the EWG list of recommendations at http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/special/sunscreens2008. Or you can move to Seattle.
Labels: science
0 Comments - Post/view commentsSaturday, June 14, 2008 . 6/14/2008
This might be way above what I'd ever be able to do, but someday, I'd like to be both a scientist and a popularizer of science like Carl Sagan. I know I need to work on being more patient with the more... uhmm... "thinking challenged" types in order to be as likable as him, and I'm working on that. And I know no one will ever be as great as he was. But that doesn't mean no one can't at least try.
Science is amazing in and of itself, but sometimes people need an extra "push" to see that.
Monday, March 31, 2008 . 3/31/2008
A few days ago I came across Be the Creature on TV, a show with the Kratt brothers. I practically grew up watching these two, ever since I was around four years old and maybe even younger. I liked how they made learning things exciting. Same for Bill Nye the Science Guy. With him, science was really fun to learn. And it got me thinking.. why can't more documentary/learning programs be this way? I enjoy watching regular documentaries and all, but I can understand how a lot of people would be put off on that kind of thing all together simply because, well, most documentaries tend to have narrators with monotone voices. Unless the subject matter is really interesting to me, even I become bored.Speaking of which, why can't learning math in schools be put in a more exciting way? I really hate math, but I would like so much to understand it better. I would like to understand at least the very basics of how physicists solve problems with math, too. Part of the problem is that learning math is just boring for me and a lot of other people. Similarly, learning science can be boring for some people (although for the life of me, I can't understand how. Some people out there are probably wondering the same thing about me and math). Science and math pretty much go hand in hand, so why can't teachers find ways to make even math exciting?
Labels: science
0 Comments - Post/view commentsSunday, March 09, 2008 . 3/09/2008
From Ask Bill Nye:
Along with the semiannual confusion, there is controversy around daylight saving time. Some people think it saves energy and thereby, perhaps, helps average Americans save money. The argument here is that we keep our lights off more when the Sun is still up later in the day.
Other people assert that we actually use more energy than we would without daylight saving time, because we drive around and shop more while the Sun shines. These are apparently both real effects: Less electricity is used with more daylight available, but more energy is consumed as automobile usage increases.
So far, studies agree that traffic accidents go down a tad during daylight saving time, but it's not clear how much.
Legislating daylight
A Department of Energy study about our energy use, commissioned in 2005, is still being ... er ... studied. Regardless, the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 declares that we continue to observe daylight saving time indefinitely. It even changed the start and end dates to give us four more weeks of DST. Since March 2007, DST begins each year on the second Sunday in March, and ends the first Sunday in November. (It used to start the first Sunday in April, and end the last Sunday in October.)
Many argue that daylight saving time (not "savings time") just causes more confusion than it's worth. Everyone agrees that there is a loss of efficiency whenever the time changes. At world stock markets, for example, one estimate claims that $31 billion leaks away in the confusion every year. Airline schedules are just a pain in the neck when the clocks are messed with. The actual time it takes to get from one place to another stays the same, still it's easy to end up being late (or early) if you forget to change your clock along with the rest of the world. But with all this, we've stuck with daylight saving for about a century.
Ben Franklin's Joke
Writer, inventor and American founding father Ben Franklin is often credited (or blamed) for starting daylight saving time. He apparently joked that the people of Paris should be home and in bed as soon as the sun set because horse-drawn coaches -- taxis -- should be banned from the streets at night. He took his facetiousness further by saying the citizens of the City of Lights should be awakened every morning by a blast of cannon fire, and that anyone shuttering their windows from sunrise would be taxed.
Franklin was writing with his well-known dry wit. He loved Paris and traveled there frequently. But somehow, his suggestions about going to bed early and rising early planted the notion that he was behind this whole business of changing our clocks to match the sunrise and sunset.
In reality, Englishman William Willett, an avid outdoorsman, gets the credit for all this clock adjusting. The Victorian-era builder and pamphleteer felt that people were missing the best part of every summer day and argued strongly for daylight saving. One of the primary points of his argument was that adjusting our clocks would save money and resources since people would be using artificial lights less if they were up and working when the Sun was up.
Minority report
His idea was not popular, but Britain tried it out in 1916, in an effort to save money during World War I. Willett had died the previous year, so he was not around to see the various trial-and-error attempts at making his proposal work. Appropriately enough, the memorial sundial dedicated to Willet is always on Summer Time.
This is where I'd like us all to start thinking about the problem -- the value and reasoning behind daylight saving time. For starters, keep in mind that this is a minority idea worldwide. Most people on Earth don't use it.
After all, about half the people on Earth have never even used a telephone! It's a developed-world idea. People in parts of the world without clocks get up with the Sun and reckon midday by the moment the Sun is highest in the sky. Why don't we all just do that?
Any way you slice it ...
If we divided the day into "halves" based on daylight and darkness, winter "hours" would be much shorter than summer hours. You can note this well for yourself by comparing a stopwatch or an oven timer, say, to a sundial.
In planetary science, "solar noon" is the moment when the Sun is highest in the sky. But during solar noon the Sun is not straight overhead in North America -- it's actually well to the south. In South America, it's to the north. And, since not everyone starts daylight saving time/Summer Time reckoning at the same time, there are one-, two- or three-hour differences between north and south twice a year. Phew.
But, if you're going to pick a time to start counting, solar noon is a pretty good one. We humans have gone on to divide the year, Earth's orbit of the Sun, into an equal number of seconds: 31,557,600.
By so doing, the clock's noon hardly ever lines up with the Sun's noon. We have come to like it this way. We can make our trains, planes and computer games all work together, coming and going to places north, south, east and west, to altitudes high and low, in the fourth dimension -- in time.
So is daylight saving worth holding on to? For my part, I like it. I love being outside all summer, often missing some good television and not having time for it, even if I record it. But, others must find it a messy inconvenience.
Arizona and Hawaii, sunny places, don't bother. In Alaska, certain citizens' groups want to discontinue it. Why don't we all just get up earlier in the summer and enjoy what Willett called the best part of the day? Apparently, there is something about our mathematical nature that finds daylight saving time appealing.
We've grown so accustomed to our precise arithmetic dividing the year into seconds -- even if we think of the year in larger increments -- that we prefer it to straight-up astronomical reckoning or the Sun's path in the sky.
We'll see how that Dept. of Energy study comes out, but I've got a feeling we all just like moving our clocks ahead, because we can sleep to the same part of the Sun's day, but get up when our clock reads what we feel is a civilized time.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008 . 1/29/2008
For some bizarre reason my dad thinks scientists and in particular, climatologists, have an agenda. He says that the government or whatever pays them to say something, like for example, humans are the cause of the current global warming. Like I've said so many other times in this blog, for someone who claims he knows how the scientific method works, it is painfully obvious that he doesn't. Or maybe he thinks they are just guidelines, who the hell knows. He also says that lots of scientists disagree with the human-caused global warming thing and I keep telling him, if they presented sufficient evidence that it is natural, it would be a breakthrough and distribution of Nobel Prizes would be in order. So far however, that hasn't been the case. Science is about finding things out, it is a process. A scientist may not like what he discovers but that doesn't matter; what does is the evidence.Labels: Denialism, Global Warming, Rants, science
0 Comments - Post/view commentsSunday, December 30, 2007 . 12/30/2007
You know what's frustrating? Being told that I'm a bully by my own mom.We were watching Jesus Camp, right. And my parents (at least my mom) thought that it was indeed a horrible thing; however something about creationism popped up and my parents thought that it should be taught in school along with evolution. I tried to calmly explain that creationism has absolutely no basis in fact and is not science at all. My dad said that science isn't all based on fact and that "a lot of it is still just theory". By this point I got pretty irritated since I always knew my dad to know science. I'll admit that I did raise my voice a little at this point, trying to explain that a theory in science was as close to fact as you can get. But then my parents played the "oh it's just your opinion" card and my mom accused me of being a bully.
Fucking hell.
Labels: Rants, Religion, science
0 Comments - Post/view commentsSunday, December 16, 2007 . 12/16/2007
This is awesome, albeit old. Known as the Demikhov experiments, the surgery involved attaching a puppy's head to a fully grown dog. The experiment, aimed at finding ways of replacing portions of the human body lost through injury or disease, was pronounced Russia's "most successful".And yet, some people are too ignorant to understand this. "OMG POOR DOGS HOW THE HELL IS THIS SUPPOSED TO HELP HUMANS", etc. This is extremely irritating to me because without experiments on animals such as those dogs, people would never have been able to receive lung or heart transplants. Furthermore animals are used to help detect diseases in humans to this day and are used to develop vaccines. Without them, we wouldn't live to see the age of fifty, if even that.
I know some would argue that "we shouldn't mess with nature", "we weren't meant to live that long", etc. Those people forget that we are part of nature also; we are animals. They also must not care very much about how the world works. If we were to continue our ignorance, it is likely people would have kept the belief that demons caused illness.. and some still do, in places where science isn't so well-developed. Even in the U.S, instead of real treatment, exorcisms are sometimes still done which in the end is a waste of time and can potentially kill the person.
Through the curiosity of people, we now know that mental illness and seizures are not caused by demons, but by malfunctions of the body itself, and which can be treated accordingly with medicines and vaccines. 0 Comments - Post/view comments
