Tag Archives: health

All of Earth’s land mammals by total weight in one graph (notice wild vs. livestock)

by NereidaMcneal Posted on March 5, 2014

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Dataslate: Tyranid Invasion – Rising Leviathan II (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

The invasion of Satys enters a new and deadly phase as the Hive Mind drowns the planet in a deluge of biohorrors. Though tens of thousands lie dead already, the Catachans, led by Colonel Krelm, desperately try to hold key fortifications within the irradiated jungles, hoping to keep the swarm at bay. The surviving members of the Aurora Space Marine Chapter fi […]

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White Dwarf Issue 5: 1 March 2014 – White Dwarf

Issue 5 of White Dwarf celebrates the release of the Imperial Knight kit with a look at the new Codex: Imperial Knights and the glorious new Imperial Knights Companion book. There’s also a ‘Knightly Duels’ minigame which allows you to use your Imperial Knight in a fun new way, along with painting guides, a Battle Report and much, much more. Ab […]

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Codex: Imperial Knights (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

Imperial Knights are ancient war machines of the Imperium, each one a towering engine of destruction capable of laying waste to an entire army. Smaller and more versatile than the Titan Legions, Knights often give close support to Imperial armies, where their mighty guns and devastating reaper chainswords vanquish even the strongest foes. Each Knight hails f […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Codex: Legion of the Damned (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

Appearing from the shifting tides of the Warp, the Legion of the Damned are mysterious bone-adorned Space Marines who arrive unlooked for to aid the servants of the Imperium. No one knows for sure where they come from, but none can doubt the fury with which they fight, or the trail of dead foes they leave in their wake. Tormented by a ghostly past and afflic […]

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Marijuana Horticulture – Jorge Cervantes

Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible is the most complete, thorough, and comprehensive cultivation book available on the market today. This book has been dubbed the “bible” by its readers because it explains every aspect of cultivating marijuana and yielding high quality and abundant crops. It explains […]

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A Life In Stitches – Rachael Herron

In these 20 heartfelt essays, Rachael Herron celebrated romance novelist by day, 911 dispatcher by night, and founder of the hugely popular blog Yarnagogo.com shows how when life unravels there’s always a way to knit it back together again, many times into something even better. Honest, funny, and full of warmth, Herron’s tales, each inspired by so […]

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Codex: Legion of the Damned (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

Appearing from the shifting tides of the Warp, the Legion of the Damned are mysterious bone-adorned Space Marines who arrive unlooked for to aid the servants of the Imperium. No one knows for sure where they come from, but none can doubt the fury with which they fight, or the trail of dead foes they leave in their wake. Tormented by a ghostly past and afflic […]

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White Dwarf Issue 4: 22 Feb 2014 – White Dwarf

Issue 4 of White Dwarf is dominated by the arrival of the Imperial Knight; we support it with painting guides, full rules and more. About this series: White Dwarf is Games Workshop’s weekly magazine, and boasts a wealth of great content, from the latest new releases to modelling and painting guides, gaming features, interviews with designers and writers […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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All of Earth’s land mammals by total weight in one graph (notice wild vs. livestock)

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15 Amazing Uses for Potatoes

by NaomiTcbgaklpum Posted on March 1, 2014

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15 Amazing Uses for Potatoes

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Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

by LauraFore Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This week, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni approved a harsh new bill making “aggravated homosexuality” a crime punishable by life in prison, he cited a recent report from the Ugandan Ministry of Health’s Committee on Homosexuality, which concluded that same-sex attraction is mostly a learned impulse. “Since nurture is the main cause of homosexuality, then society can do something about it to discourage the trends,” Museveni said. “That is why I have agreed to sign the bill.”

This pronouncement creates a quandary for the United States. American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have vehemently condemned Museveni’s decision. Yet millions of US taxpayer dollars are flowing to the agency that the Ugandan leader used to justify the legislation, according to records from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gay rights activist argue that the Committee on Homosexuality report was engineered to ensure the bill’s passage, and at least one committee member—a physician named Eugene Kinyanda—refused to sign his name to it because the process had “taken a very political” direction. “I will not be used to justify the passing of a bill which as a doctor I do not fully understand,” he wrote in an email to a fellow committee member, which was reprinted on the blog Patheos.

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Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

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The Best Way to Maintain a Wooden Cutting Board

by EdwinFortin Posted on February 26, 2014

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The Best Way to Maintain a Wooden Cutting Board

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Marcellus Energy Development Could Pave Over an Area Bigger Than the State of Delaware

by MichellWhitesid Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Development of natural gas and wind resources in the Marcellus shale region could cover up nearly 1.3 million acres of land, an area bigger than the state of Delaware, with cement, asphalt and other impervious surfaces, according to a paper published this month in the scientific journal PLOS One.

The study, conducted by two scientists from the conservation organization The Nature Conservancy, predicts that 106,004 new gas wells will be drilled in the Marcellus region, based on current trends in natural gas development. The region includes parts of New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Virginia.

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Marcellus Energy Development Could Pave Over an Area Bigger Than the State of Delaware

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Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

by AmparoQmoipxlt Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I wrote about a new CDC study showing a 43 percent drop in obesity rates among 2-5 year-olds. It seemed inexplicably large to me, especially because no other age group showed any decline at all. Today, Zachary Goldfarb helpfully publishes a bit more of the data, and I’ve extracted two lines from his chart. This only deepens the mystery.

As you can see, there’s a fair amount of noise in the chart, and it’s possible that this explains the whole thing. But if we take the data seriously, you can see something even more dramatic than a 43 percent drop over a decade. Between 2003-04 and 2005-06, there’s a 25 percent drop. That’s a gigantic decline over the space of two years.

But there’s more. If there’s anything real going on here, you’d expect to see some kind of correlation between 2-5 year-olds and 6-11 year-olds with a time lag of a few years. But I don’t see anything. The 2005-06 cohort of 2-5 year-olds is noticeably less obese, but the 2007-12 cohort of 6-11 year-olds shows barely any change at all.

So this whole thing is very strange. As I said, it’s possible that noise is responsible for a lot of this. But even if there really is something going on, it doesn’t seem to be having any impact at all once children get a few years older. That’s both strange and disappointing. I wouldn’t expect miracles, but the whole point of obesity interventions in small children is that it prevents a lifetime of bad habits. As the New York Times put it, “New evidence has shown that obesity takes hold young: Children who are overweight or obese at 3 to 5 years old are five times as likely to be overweight or obese as adults.” But if that’s true, it sure isn’t showing up in the data. As near as I can tell, reducing obesity among 2-5 year-olds has precisely zero effect on obesity later in childhood.

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Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

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A 2-Ingredient Deodorant Recipe That WORKS!

by ShelaChoaiv Posted on February 26, 2014

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A 2-Ingredient Deodorant Recipe That WORKS!

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How Many People Aren’t Vaccinating Their Kids in Your State?

by y32nmet Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s easy to find bad information about the safety of vaccines on the internet. That’s, well, the internet. But what’s scarier is that in many states, parents who buy into those myths can easily opt out of immunizing their children. In some cases, it’s no harder than checking a box on a school form saying that vaccines are against their “personal beliefs.”

In a 2012 study of vaccine exemption policies across the country, a team of researchers led by Saad Omer, a professor of public health at Emory University, found that of the 20 states that allowed personal belief exemptions for enrollment in a public school or child-care program, less than a third made it “difficult” to do so (for instance, by making parents re-apply for one each year, explain their beliefs in writing, or get a notarized letter of approval from a health care provider). In the nine “easy” states identified in the study, the rules required only signing a form. Indeed, Omer suspects that some parents sign vaccine exemption forms not because they actually hold anti-vaccine beliefs, but simply because it’s easier than juggling the doctors’ appointments, missed work, and other inconveniences of getting kids vaccinated. (More about that here.)

Personal belief exemptions aren’t the only option available to vaccine-averse parents. Every state allows for medical exemptions for reasons such as an anaphylactic allergic response to a previous vaccine. Forty-eight states (all but West Virginia and Mississippi) allow exemptions on religious grounds. In many states, obtaining a religious exemption isn’t any harder than getting a personal belief exemption. But according to Omer, religious exemptions aren’t as popular as personal belief exemptions. He’s found that opt-out rates in states that allow personal belief exemptions are 2.5 times as high as rates in states that only permit religious exemptions. In one analysis he found that whooping cough rates in states with personal belief exemptions are more than double those in states that allow only religious exemptions.

Unsurprisingly, Omer’s research also shows that states that make it easy to get a non-medical exemption see a corresponding dip in numbers of schoolchildren who get their shots. Rates of non-medical exemptions in the “easy” states were 2.3 times higher than rates in states with difficult exemption policies. Not only that, but that rate is climbing faster in easy states than it is in difficult states.

Rates of Nonmedical Exemptions from School Immunization, According to Type of Exemption and Ease of Obtaining One, 2006–2011 Saad Omer et al, The New England Journal of Medicine

Non-medical vaccine exemptions are dangerous because they threaten what’s known as “herd immunity:” Diseases simply can’t spread in a community where a high enough percentage of the population is vaccinated against them. The required percentage of vaccinations to ensure herd immunity varies by disease; for pertussis (whooping cough), it’s between 93 and 95 percent, according to Johns Hopkins’ Jessica Atwell, lead author of a study on pertussis and vaccines published last year in the journal Pediatrics. So if even a seemingly small number of kids across the state aren’t getting their shots, the immunity rate of the entire community can drop below safe levels. When that happens, lots of people are put at risk: infants who are too young to get shots, children who haven’t had their full series of shots yet, and those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons such as pregnancy or immune-system problems. And, of course, the exempted, unvaccinated children are also at risk.

In California, the percentage of kindergartners who get their full set of shots has been dropping since 2008, while the rate of personal belief exemptions jumped by nearly a percentage point in that time. Given that the national average exemption rate is 1.8 percent, that’s a big increase. During a California outbreak of pertussis in 2010, more than 9,000 cases were reported, and ten infants died. It was the worst outbreak of whooping cough in 60 years.

In the Pediatrics study, Atwell and her fellow researchers identified 39 geographic “clusters” across California—ranging in size from a few blocks to entire counties—where belief-driven opt-out rates are higher than the norm. The team found higher rates of whooping cough associated with these clusters. For example: Marin County, which had a personal belief exemption rate of 7.8 percent in 2012—nearly four times the national average—has the second-highest rate of whooping cough in the whole state. These results support the findings of a 2006 study led by Emory’s Omer which found higher rates of pertussis in states that allowed personal belief exemptions and had easy policies for doing so.

California is not the only state with high-exemption hotspots. On Vashon Island, Washington, 17 percent of kindergartners failed to receive their shots in 2013 due to a “personal/philosophical” exemption. That’s nine times the current national average. The year before, Vashon Islanders accounted for 16 percent of all whooping cough cases in Washington state’s King County, despite housing just one percent of its population. And a 2008 study of exemption rates in Michigan found 23 clusters within the state, and, you guessed it, a correlation with higher rates of whooping cough. Even individual schools and churches can serve as ground zero: After a measles outbreak broke out in north Texas in 2012, the state epidemiologist linked it t a local megachurch whose pastor had spread anti-vaccine myths in the past.

Now, some states are rethinking the personal belief loophole. Reeling from the 2010 outbreak, California passed a law making it harder to get a personal belief exemption. As of January 1, parents seeking a personal belief exemption have to obtain the signature of an authorized health care provider. (Finding such a doctor may not be easy; recent studies show that more pediatricians are choosing to drop patients who refuse to vaccinate their children.)

But not all states that currently allow personal belief exemptions are looking to tighten the rules for getting one. In a study released last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Omer and his colleagues surveyed the legislative landscape of vaccine exemptions, state by state. They found that of 36 bills introduced across the country last year, 31 sought to expand access to exemptions. While none of these passed, they far outweighed the number of restrictive bills; five were introduced, and three of these passed, in Washington, Vermont, and California.

There’s evidence that tightening exemption laws makes a difference. After reaching an exemption rate of 7.6 percent in 2009, Washington state passed a law requiring parents to get a doctor’s signature if they wanted to opt out of their children’s vaccinations. In just two years, the exemption rate plummeted by more than 40 percent. Pertussis vaccination rates climbed to 92.4 percent in the past school year, representing “the highest pertussis vaccine completion rate for kindergartners since the state began to collect this data in the 2006-2007 school year,” according to the Washington’s Department of Health.

Now Colorado wants to follow suit. The state is tied for ninth in the nation (with Maine) for the number of kindergartners who show up at school with vaccine exemptions—nearly 3,000 of Colorado kindergartners in the 2012-2013 school year, according to the CDC. To get a personal belief exemption, parents need only fill out a single form. Recently, a task force led by the state health department released a set of recommendations for lowering the state’s high opt-out rate. Among them: publicizing the percentage of immunized kids at every public school or child-care center in the state.

Additional research by AJ Vicens and Eric Wuestewald.

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How Many People Aren’t Vaccinating Their Kids in Your State?

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A New Study Shows Real Costs of Toxins

by johnsmithwindows Posted on February 15, 2014

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A New Study Shows Real Costs of Toxins

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Comcast-Time Warner Merger Really Has Nothing to do With You and Me

by hoseawilder7387 Posted on February 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Matt Yglesias, I see that Matthew Klein has finally written a short post that explains what’s really behind the Comcast-Time Warner merger:

To understand what the deal is really about, remember that pay-TV distributors are at the mercy of the networks that sell programming. According to Bloomberg Industries analyst Paul Sweeney, about half your cable bill goes to companies such as Viacom Inc. and Walt Disney Co. The networks consistently raise prices about 10 percent a year on average, irrespective of the state of the economy. By contrast, the typical cable bill only goes up by about 5 percent a year. Cable companies have eaten the difference by lowering their margins and cutting costs elsewhere, but there are limits to both processes.

This margin squeeze is why Time Warner Inc. spun off its cable business, why Comcast acquired NBC Universal, and why Internet-based subscription services offered by Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have invested in original programming as a defense against the rising cost of licensing content. It also explains why Time Warner Cable had to cave to demands for higher fees from CBS Corp. a few months ago. Merging the two biggest cable operators might give them more bargaining power with the networks, especially if it encourages DIRECTV and Dish Network Corp. to consolidate the satellite business.

In the same way that the health care business can largely be understood as a competition between suppliers (hospitals, pharma, etc.) and consumers (insurance companies), the video entertainment business should largely be understood as a competition between content producers (Disney, Viacom, etc.) and content distributors (Comcast, Verizon, etc.). Ideally, you want competition everywhere. That is, you want enough producers that they compete with each other; enough distributors that they compete with each other; and enough balance between the two that neither producers nor distributors have the whip hand against the other.

So the question we should be asking about the Comcast-Time Warner merger is simple: Do content distributors need more clout? Klein suggests they do: they’re at the mercy of rapacious networks who keep raising carriage fees and they don’t have the market power to fight back. The merger will help that.

That may be, but I’d like to hear more about this. Networks and cable companies fight constantly, as you know if you’ve ever seen dueling ads about why your favorite shows will soon be off the air in your area. The networks run ads telling people that if they don’t want to miss the next episode of CSI, they better call their cable company and tell them to knock off the gamesmanship. The cable companies run ads insisting that the network is jacking up rates unconscionably and everyone should besiege them with demands that they be more reasonable. Usually this continues until about one minute before the current contract runs out, at which point both sides make a deal. Occasionally it goes longer, and certain shows really are blacked out for a while.

If you’ve ever had trouble figuring out which side is really at fault in one of these battles of the titans, well, that’s the problem. Two mega-corporations are duking it out, and the rest of us are just caught in the middle. From a consumer point of view, part of the problem is that we’ve all been trained to hate the cable companies who send us outrageous bills every month and love the content producers who make all the shows we love. But don’t fall for that: it’s just an artifact of which business happens to be customer facing. The truth is that both sides are big, soulless corporations who have no claim on your emotions. That said, I’d normally take Klein’s side of this except for one thing: would a bigger Comcast really have more negotiating clout than they do now? I guess that’s possible, but they have a helluva lot of clout already. No network can afford to be shut out of Comcast’s market for long. So it’s not clear to me that a bigger Comcast would really do much for the rest of us.

In any case, that’s how to think of this stuff. Practically every big battle you see in the media arena is, one way or another, a battle between gigantic producers on the one hand and gigantic distributors on the other. That’s what net neutrality is all about. That’s what copyright battles are all about. That’s what broadband fights are all about. And that’s what this merger is all about. We are all just pawns watching the fireworks.

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Comcast-Time Warner Merger Really Has Nothing to do With You and Me

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