In the fall, I emceed Pitch Day, an RWJF event to discover innovative ideas for solving health and health care challenges. Go inside Pitch Day by watching RWJF's video of the event.
Read MoreOne of the biggest battles between strong scientific evidence and those with a downright pigheaded refusal to accept the facts isn’t happening inside a medical clinic, but in the dairy fields of Northern California.
Read MoreOver at Wired Playbook, I wrote a piece about a group of researchers using ECG sensors, GPS, accelerometers, and a mobile phone to accurately monitor a patient with heart trouble, in real-time, during their prescribed exercise routine.
Read MoreSad statistics, laid out in a provoking article from The Atlantic.
Despite sitting on a trust fund that's worth over $1 billion in equity from a "purchase" of the Black Hills that the tribe never agreed to, the Sioux are suffering from chronic disease and have what's sure to be one of the lowest ethnic life expectancies in the United States:
Read MoreMy first short feature for Slate ran last week, covering the importance of tummy time for infants.
The Back To Sleep Campaign was instituted by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1992 to battle the number of infants dying each year from SIDS. And it was hugely successful, cutting SIDS cases in the US in half since it started.
Read MoreScienceBlogs.com -- one of the most well-known and highly-cited blog sites -- caused quite the hullabaloo on Twitter and the blogosphere today when they announced their newest contributor: PepsiCo. For quite some time, SEED Media (the parent company behind ScienceBlogs.com) has sold advertising space on contributors' sites. But as PalMD describes in his post, the center panel of each site is always under the direct control of the author. With the launch of the PepsiCo blog, SEED Media is in grave danger of blurring the line between advertising and content.
Read MoreA few months ago, a story ran in Wired Magazine that described a noticeable shift in the scientific method, and attributed the change to our ability to produce and store large amounts of data.Historically, the scientific method was built around a testable theory. But in the 21st century, theories were becoming obsolete; the data simply spoke for itself.
Read More"The human body does enormously well healing itself," Keas founder, and ex-Google Health lead, Adam Bosworth told Health 2.0 conference-goers shortly after stepping on stage. On the heels of an article in the New York Times that touted the company's beta launch, Bosworth walked the crowd through the way we'll keep ourselves healthy in the future, using Keas' platform.
Read MoreI saw this study in Science at the beginning of the month, and a summary was posted at The Scientist:
Read MoreA bacterium that infects insects may provide a biological method for stunting the spread of a range of devastating human diseases. The bacteria may protect their hosts against disease-causing pathogens by hiking up the insects' immune response, according to a study published online today (October 1) in Science.
I think many of us assume that if experts say that Vitamin C can boost the immune system, then grabbing a 500mg bottle at your local health nutrition store must be a good idea. I know I've been guilty of this mindset. But it turns out that if you exercise, taking antioxidant vitamins might not be in your best interest. There was a good summary by Derek Lowe at 'In The Pipeline' about a new PNAS paper that argues against popping vitamins while engaged in an exercise routine. The study found that the experimental group that took a combination of Vitamin C and Vitamin E actually lost some of the inherent benefits of exercise, such as changes in insulin sensitivity and formation of natural antioxidants. My only criticism of the study is that Vitamin C is capable of regenerating Vitamin E, so I wonder whether this phenomenon will carry through for all supplemental antioxidants, or if it's limited to the particular vitamins used in this study.
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