Archive for 2010

A TEN CENT blood-type test. “The cheap, portable, paper-based test could improve medical treatments in the developing world.”

SHOULD PREGNANT WOMEN AVOID ALL ALCOHOL? “Indeed, a study published last year found that boys born to mothers who drank 1 to 2 units per week were less likely to have conduct problems and hyperactivity at the age of 3 than those born to abstainers. Girls of such mothers, meanwhile, were less likely to have emotional symptoms and peer problems. The children of moderate drinkers (consuming 3 to 6 units a week) seemed roughly similar to those of abstainers, but there was an increased risk of behavioural difficulties in the children of women who drank more than 7 units a week.”

PETER SUDERMAN: Media Matters (To Itself): What Helen Thomas’s career has to do with the FTC’s push to reinvent journalism. “The problem with government’s fealty to the myths that establishment journalism has created for itself isn’t just the expense—it’s that it inevitably produces feedback loops. A government that props up the media inevitably leads to a media that props up the government. Despite being cloaked in the language of preservation, the real gap that these proposals fill isn’t in news coverage, but in the cozy linkage between government and media.”

LEADERSHIP?

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

They’re reconsidering that now. . . .

Related: Poll: Many fault federal regulators for Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

STOPPING MUSCLE CRAMPS . . . WITH PICKLE JUICE?

PALIN’S PRIMARIES: “Some of Sarah Palin’s riskiest endorsements scored major victories Tuesday for the former Alaska governor, showing off her power in Republican primaries.”

“LYING FACE TO FACE.” “A member of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s staff, himself a former major and judge advocate in the U.S. Marines, is calling Blumenthal a liar and disgrace to the Marine Corps for representing himself repeatedly as having served in Vietnam.”