In both the excerpt and the TED talk, he uses a case where he, a doctor probably more careful than most, was misled into prescribing a drug later shown to be not only ineffective, but harmful.
Two of my favorite science writers, Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer, got me reading Goldacre.
Ed Yong's "Missing Links" list this week was short (nearer 60 than 100+), because he was traveling. My favorites from his list are all photos or short videos.
WOW! Watch fromINSIDE a mussel’s shell, as a starfish shoves its stomach in and starts digesting [Rusten: fascinating in spite of the hyperdramatic Peter Coyote voice-over]
Hummingbirds are just as efficient whenflying backwards or hovering forward. [Rusten: not exciting video, but amazing how utterly stable their flying is in different wind conditions]
Here are a couple of stories that appeared today, one semi-technical, the other not technical at all.
Ed Yong, "Thanks to one gene, this fly needs a cactus to escape Neverland" Without feeding on the Senita cactus, a Sonoran desert fly can't transform from larva to adult. Story teaser: In North America’s Sonoran desert, there’s a fly that depends on a cactus. Thanks to a handful of changes in a gene called Neverland, Drosophila pachea can no longer make chemicals that it needs to grow and reproduce. These genetic changes represent the evolution of subservience – they inextricably bound the fly to the senita cactus, the only species with the substances the fly needs.
Robert Krulwich, "The Best College Prank Of The 1790s (With Bats, Poop & Grass)" A simple story of a bit of eco-terrorism (ok, my anachronism, not his) over 200 years ago carefully designed to help introduce British gardeners to the wonders of guano. (With illustrations by Benjamin Arthur.) Story teaser: When William Buckland was a kid, an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1790s — around the time George Washington had just finished being President — he pulled a prank that was so rude, so smart, and so biologically sophisticated for his day, I think he deserves a second crown, this one for Best Use of Grass Ever.
The whole "Why's this so good?" series at the Nieman Storyboard is a great resource for writers. But Jacqui Banaszynski's contribution, "No. 36: Alice Steinbach and one boy's vision", on Steinbach's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 piece, "A Boy of Unusual Vision" in the Baltimore Sun (PDF) is magnificent.
In fact, Banaszynski's whole reading list for her Intermediate Writing class, which you can find on the Nieman Storyboard's What's on your syllabus? page, would, with her annotations, be a great way to remind oneself of what writing can be.
Banaszynski won her own Pulitzer for Feature Writing in 1988 "for her moving series about the life and death of an AIDS victim in a rural farm community" in the St Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, titled "AIDS in the Heartland" (PDF).
A nice little post at The Last Word on Nothing reminded me of the ever-changing cairn garden near one of the old lime kilns in the Pogonip near UCSC. The photo at left, taken in the fall, doesn't have enough contrast to do the cairn-builders justice. The cairns are always changing, sometimes incorporated into mazes, sometimes riding the limbs of surrounding trees as well as inhabiting the ground.
Follow the links in Nijhuis's post to more wonderful balanced stone sculptures. The beautiful, fanciful, and sometimes astounding ones by Adrian Gray were new to me.I recommend going to his site and watching the two BBC videos of Gray working with stones on the beach. Goldsworthy, less a rock-balancing specialist, is always amazing.
Top of the story: My neighborhood, as I've mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money's on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a stone-balancing celebration in Flagstaff, Arizona. Was this a competition, we asked? No. Just a bunch of people stacking stones? Well, yes, but it's more fun than it sounds. Do you leave the stacks for other people to find? Yup.
"Just Google it," he finally said, giving us a beatific smile.
So I did, and found that yes, a bunch of people gathered in Flagstaff this past Sunday to stack stones. It seems to be habit-forming: this was the third international gathering of stone balancers, and balancers have even written an "Art Manifesto of Stone Balance" with ethical guidelines. (No glue, no bolts, no wires. Just gravity.) For some, such as artists Adrian Gray and Andy Goldsworthy, stone balancing is high art. For others, it's a meditative practice or just a prankish pastime ...
Botanist and biodiversity scientist Chris Martine at Bucknell University has begun an online project called "Plants Are Cool, Too!" to spur interest in plants as part of understanding biodiversity. The first two in a series of roughly 15-minute videos are out on YouTube (PlantsAreCoolToo) and highlighted in a little promo piece from Bucknell, "The dawn of adventure biology". In each video, Martine goes into the field with folks who are exploring the world of plants and their histories. They're well done and worth watching.
The first episode, on "The Pale Pitcher Plant", explores its ecological setting in the Southeastern US and dissects its "stomach" to show both how it collects the insect food it needs in a soil-nutrient-poor habitat and how other critters collaborate in breaking down those unfortunates the plant has trapped.
The second episode, on "Fossilized Forests", heads to Clarkia, Idaho, and a set of sediments where leaves were trapped 15 million years ago at the bottom of an inland lake created when lava flows blocked a river. The leaves aren't just fossils. They're the actual leaves that can still be lifted from the sediments. Their structure and color have been preserved, and folks are trying to recover their DNA.
An intriguing three-part series "Mystery in the Fields" by Sasha Chavkin and Anna Barry-Jester reports that a mysterious and deadly form of chronic kidney disease is killing tens of thousands of young farm workers from Sri Lanka and India to Central America. There are clues that may link all of the cases, but researchers remain uncertain.
The impressive investigative project, part of it done in collaboration with PRI's The World, includes the three stories, helpful infographics, a photo slideshow, and two short videos by Anna Barry-Jester.
In North America’s Sonoran desert, there’s a fly that depends on a cactus. Thanks to a handful of changes in a gene called Neverland, Drosophila pachea can no longer make chemicals that it needs to grow and reproduce. These genetic changes represent the evolution of subservience – they inextricably bound the fly to the senita cactus, the only species with the substances the fly needs.
When William Buckland was a kid, an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1790s — around the time George Washington had just finished being President — he pulled a prank that was so rude, so smart, and so biologically sophisticated for his day, I think he deserves a second crown, this one for Best Use of Grass Ever.
A nice little post at The Last Word on Nothing reminded me of the ever-changing cairn garden near one of the old lime kilns in the Pogonip near UCSC. The photo at left, taken in the fall, doesn't have enough contrast to do the cairn-builders justice. The cairns are always changing, sometimes incorporated into mazes, sometimes riding the limbs of surrounding trees as well as inhabiting the ground.
My neighborhood, as I've mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money's on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a stone-balancing celebration in Flagstaff, Arizona. Was this a competition, we asked? No. Just a bunch of people stacking stones? Well, yes, but it's more fun than it sounds. Do you leave the stacks for other people to find? Yup. 
