NYTimes ScienceTimes+: Americans are trash idiots, Nature’s clues for glues ; DARPA’s boss, subtle medical bias for $$$…
Leaving aside the ScienceTimes section for the moment, one has to admire the hard edge found on the front page under Elizabeth Rosenthal‘s byline – a piece filed from Denmark on Europe’s happiness with clean, high-temperature and heavily filtered trash and garbage-burning urban powerplants. This contrasts things there with widespread public opposition to such things in the U.S. The subtext that perhaps only I see, but it seems clear enough: Americans are kind of chicken-little stupid. This is, one must add, the flip side of European horror at – and the contrasting shrug among Yanks at – genetically modified organisms or “frankenfoods” on farms. In the latter case, from one perspective, the Euros are the stupidos. Strange, but true.
On to ScienceTimes.
- Henry Fountain : Studying Sea Life for a Glue That Mends People ; What’s the idea, Henry, writing a story on biomimetics without once using the term, on my list of all time prettiest and most evocative in science? Wonderful art, well-reported, interesting detail on how a worm mixes ingredients to make an underwater sandcastle glue. But, one must add, on a topic that has been covered many times and has no particular reason for being reported now. Sure enough, mussels come up. They’re a standard ingredient in underwater glue newswriting, as it the observation that chemists have yet to make something like nature’s adhesives that surgeons can use to fix broken bones – but they’re working on it.
- John Markoff : New Force Behind Agency of Wonder ; On DARPA. Perfect example of how a profile can carry readers into a world that they would not ordinarily visit if the vehicle were a standard news story.
- Denise Grady : In Reporting Symptoms, Don’t Patients Know Best? ; And good luck getting a clear answer from this piece. But it does describe evidence that patients’ complaints and observations about their meds and how they feel don’t get put on medical charts very much. The value of the article may be more subtle – underscoring how non-rigorous is much of the so-called science of clinical medicine (i.e., bring on those outcome-based metrics for guiding docs to the best treatment options).
See Also:
- Celia W. Dugger: A Campaign Shows Signs of Progress Against Polio; filed from South Africa, largely about eradication efforts in Nigeria and India. (Dugger also contributed heavily last week to coverage of the newly-found, 2-million year old hominid fossils founds near Johannesburg).
AS always, lots more. Whole Section.
- Charlie Petit
