Drugs used as a “chemical cosh” to placate Alzheimer’s patients in care homes double their chance of dying, a new study has shown.
What a Shocker
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Category Archives: Knowledge
A Dangerous Power
From the Wall Street Journal….
One can spend a long time in jail in the U.S. without ever being charged with a crime.
It happened to H. Beatty Chadwick, a former Philadelphia-area lawyer, who has been behind bars for nearly 14 years without being charged.
Businessman Manuel Osete spent nearly three years in an Arizona jail without ever receiving a criminal charge. And investment manager Martin Armstrong faced a similar situation when he was held for more than six years in a Manhattan jail.
All three men were jailed for civil contempt, a murky legal concept. Some scholars say it is too often abused by judges, to the detriment of those charged and their due-process rights. “These results of too many civil-contempt confinements are flatly outrageous and often unconstitutional,” says Jayne Ressler, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
For All The Romantics Out There
Stony Brook University researchers looked at the brains of Bernstein and 16 other people who had been married an average of 20 years and claimed to be still intensely in love. They found that their MRIs showed activity in the same regions of the brain as those who had just fallen in love.
“It’s always been assumed that passionate love inevitably declines over time,” said Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University and one of four authors of the study, presented in November at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
“But in survey after survey we always have these people who have been together a long time and say they are intensely in love. It was always chalked up to self-deception or trying to make a good impression,” he said.
This study suggests that’s not the case, said Bianca Acevedo.
Sunlight helps your eyes keep their shape
Children who regularly play outside are far less likely to become short-sighted, research has shown.
Makes sense to me. I will bet that is also at least part of the reason that adults start to become short sighted. Obviously, sunlight is not the only factor though.
A long slow death
A man shot in the back 35 years ago has died of complications from the shooting, years after he was thought to have healed.
As usual with the Telegraph, they don’t tell you anything about this case that you really want to know. How did getting shot kill him after he live 30+ years in perfect health? Anyone find out more details let us know.
Another Reason To Live Far From A Sewer Plant In New York State
Starting in February, the plant will be required to discharge two-thirds less nitrogen per liter of water — from 18 milliliters per gallon down to 6. To do that, the plant will have to use methanol, a chemical both volatile and expensive.
Of the $2.2 million budgeted for all chemicals in 2009, $1.3 million of it is for methanol — three times more than the $400,000 that was budgeted for chemicals in 2008. Overall, the plant is looking at a $1.8 million increase for chemicals.
Instead of saying “volatile” why don’t they just come right out and say that it is explosive? The average sanitation worker is not paid all that much. I don’t know how much I trust them to deal with something that is “volatile.”
Three Links of Interest
Is it a fluke or a sign of something bigger coming?
From the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory….
Yellowstone seismicity increased significantly in December 2008 due to an energetic earthquake swarm that commenced on December 26. This swarm, a sequence of earthquakes clustered in space and time, is occurring beneath the northern part of Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park. As of this writing, the largest of these earthquakes was a magnitude 3.9 at 10:15 pm MST on Dec. 27. Through 5:00 pm MST on Dec. 31, the sequence had included 12 events of magnitude 3.0 to 3.9 and approximately 20 of magnitude 2.5 to 2.9, with a total of at least 400 events large enough to be located (magnitude ~1 or larger). National Park Service (NPS) employees and visitors have reported feeling the largest of these earthquakes in the area around Yellowstone Lake and at Old Faithful and Grant Village.
The hypocenters of the swarm events cluster along a north-south-trending zone that is about 7 km long. The vast majority of the focal depths are shallower than 5 km. It is not possible to identify a causative fault of other feature without further analysis.
Blood sugar relates to memory?
Spikes in blood sugar can take a toll on memory by affecting the dentate gyrus, an area of the brain within the hippocampus that helps form memories, a new study reports.
Researchers said the effects can be seen even when levels of blood sugar, or glucose, are only moderately elevated, a finding that may help explain normal age-related cognitive decline, since glucose regulation worsens with age.
Something to Keep in Mind
Experts say that most drugs, whatever the disease, work for only about half the people who take them. Not only is much of the nation’s approximately $300 billion annual drug spending wasted, but countless patients are being exposed unnecessarily to side effects.
This is one reason why I think that the FDA does as much harm as it does good. The broad based statistical studies that it demands before it will approve a drug can only tell you so much. I wonder how many drugs that got turned down because they would not help the majority of people who tried them would have still greatly benefited a small minority.