Deriding government bureaucrats seems to be a popular pasttime among certain politicians and talk-radio hosts, so it’s nice every so often to remind ourselves about the important and valuable work our civil servants do. An article by Patricia Sullivan in the Washington Post provides a glimpse into the world of one longtime federal-government employee who’s […]
American Public Media’s Marketplace program is taking a look at “the economic legacy of 9/11” this week, and this morning’s story focused on security spending in the private sector. Marketplace’s Jeff Horwich highlighted an unexpected example: security for grain elevators.
The Department of Labor’s Labor Day 2011 website features some interesting historical info on this holiday, and an address from Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis that focuses on job creation. What I found particularly interesting was an op-ed by Secretary Solis – one of many linked from the site’s News page – published Friday in […]
A study just published in The Lancet compares the incidence rates of cancers in firefighters who worked at the World Trade Center site during and after the 9/11 attacks to the rates in firefighters not exposed to the disaster or its aftermath. Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Montefiore Medical Center and the […]
Pictures of Hurricane Irene’s destruction are circulating and making many of us realize we’re lucky to still have our homes and power lines intact. There’s also one Irene-related problem that’s invisible to the naked eye: raw sewage in waterways. Here’s the Washington Post’s Darryl Fears on local contamination:
Hurricane Irene wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been. The consensus here in DC seems to be “nowhere near as bad as Isabel” (which hit the Mid-Atlantic in 2003), and many of the New Yorkers who ignored Mayor Bloomberg’s orders to evacuate are probably feeling smug. Nonetheless, millions of people have lost power, and […]
Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science has put up a terrific two-part post about the early history of leaded gasoline, which bears much of the blame for lead poisoning in workers and the general population. (Paint containing lead is the other main culprit.) Blum’s “At the Door of the Loony Gas Building” and “Of Dead Bodies […]
Public Health Science
Shrimp on treadmills, laundry-folding robots, and the problem of ridiculing research
I felt a sense of déjà vu Tuesday morning when I heard NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce reporting on Senator Tom Coburn’s attacks on National Science Foundation-funded research. I realized that the same thing happened last August, and I wrote about it in a post called “Scoring Political Points by Misunderstanding Science.” Last year, the report mocked […]
As those of you who read other ScienceBlogs are probably already aware, the ScienceBlogs overlords have decided that all bloggers on this network must blog under their own names — no more pseudonyms. I don’t understand or agree with this policy. Some of my favorite ScienceBlogs are written by authors using pseudonyms, and the quality […]
A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked (or, in the case of the first item, found horribly disturbing but important): Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Ringing the Warning Bell: Colistin-Resistant Klebsiella J. Malcolm Garcia in Guernica: Smoke Screen (“In Afghanistan, the U.S. military disposes of garbage–computers, motorbikes, TVs, shoes, even human feces–in open burn pits. […]