Smooth Pebbles

First wine, now coffee's good for you!

Nothing like that first cup of the day

Personally I am glad to read this:

First came the fine news that red wine may help prevent Alzheimer's. Now a 20-year study (admittedly a bit flabby) of 125.000 health-care in Spain found that drinking 2 or more cups of java a day may help prevent heart disease. I find this a good thing to contemplate as I drink my first cup today.

Catch it in the abstract of the paper by Esther Lopez-Garcia and colleagues in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a news story by Ewen Callaway at NewScientist, or the skeptic's take at Dana Blankenhorn's ZDNet Healthcare blog.

Callaway's story at NewScientist notes that other studies have had other results and declares that study author "Lopez-Garcia and other experts caution that it's too early to act on the study's findings." Too early for a cup of coffee?

More thoughtful (written) threats are likely more serious

From Mind Hacks, which turns up such gems (and thoughtful essays) with astonishing regularity

Serious threats distinguished by style over substance:

Last September's Journal of Forensic Sciences had an intriguing study comparing email and handwritten threats to members of the United States Congress.

While threats by letter were more thoughtfully composed, they need to taken more seriously as they were more often followed by a threatening physical approach and more frequently written by people with a significant criminal history.

A comparison of email versus letter threat contacts toward members of the United States Congress.

J Forensic Sci. 2007 Sep;52(5):1142-7

Schoeneman-Morris KA, Scalora MJ, Chang GH, Zimmerman WJ, Garner Y.

To better understand inappropriate correspondence sent to public officials, 301 letter cases and 99 email cases were randomly selected from the United States Capitol Police investigative case files and compared. Results indicate that letter writers were significantly more likely than emailers to exhibit indicators of serious mental illness (SMI), engage in target dispersion, use multiple methods of contact, and make a problematic approach toward their target. Emailers were significantly more likely than letter writers to focus on government concerns, use obscene language, and display disorganization in their writing. Also, letter writers tended to be significantly older, have more criminal history, and write longer communications. A multivariate model found that disorganization, SMI symptoms, problematic physical approach, and target dispersion significantly differentiated between the correspondence groups. The group differences illuminated by this study reveal that letter writers are engaging in behavior that is higher risk for problematic approach than are emailers.

Pacific Salmon take another hit, where it really hurts

Via the invaluable Knight-Ridder Science Journalism Tracker comes woeful news from the L.A. Times: One of the few remaining success stories, the Alaskan salmon fishery, is under threat by a parasite whose expansion seems related to climate change.

I'm trying to finish an unrelated story myself, so will simply post the Tracker's write-up below the photo, which comes from a first-rate photo essay that accompanies Kenneth Weiss's full story at the LA Times. There's also quite a nice video version at the Times' site. (I can't figure out how to embed it here, but it heads the main story.

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2008-05/39343633.jpg

More Pacific coast salmon woes. In Alaska’s warming rivers the chinook are getting “ick.”

Up on Alaska’s northernmost, tundra-speckled coast the locals already have complained in recent years that global warming has made it harder to keep meat fresh in their cellars - as permafrost thaws, the ground doesn’t provide a natural freezer in every hole. Now, across more of the state, some salmon are going bad while they’re still swimming. The LA Times’s Kenneth R. Weiss on Sunday had a long feature (and isn’t it nice to find a paper, even the LAT with its buyouts, layoffs, and other thrift, still running such?) on it. An increasing number of salmon pulled from the Yukon and other rivers, gleaming and flopping, are promptly thrown in the “dog pot” as inedible and unmarketable for people. The meat, it says here, turns mealy. Smoked and dried it looked more like “strips of greasy rotten mango” than the intended rich red jerky.

The fish have a form of the parasitic disease ich, pronounced ick (familiar to many aquarium-owning fish hobbyists), reports Weiss. His piece lays out the rise of its incidence, suspicion that the warming water has made the fish more susceptible in the last 20 years, and a scientific and regulatory ruckus that pitted factions within the fishing industry and state fish and game officials over the problem’s urgency. The issue, it appears from this piece, has been a hot one for some time there. Weiss gives it a needed, more national stage and presents it as an example of the changing landscape of wildlife diseases.

Included, in this age of converging media, is a photo gallery online and a well-done video version.

It’s a colorful package with many cited sources. The Tracker would have had plenty more questions for the researchers about the disease’s dynamics and the hypothesized link to warmer water. Such as - do young salmon probably catch it on their way out of the rivers, then worsen when they migrate back from the sea to spawn? Do salmon in rivers farther south, from Canada down into California where rivers presumably have been this warm all along, get ich - or might subpopulations there have developed resistance? (LATE ADDITION: Weiss says he asked. No answer yet and room in the news hole for questions that have no answers is rare). But this yarn is convincing as it stands. Something has changed. Temperature is a prime suspect.

Technorati Tags:
salmon, climate_change, commercial_fishing

Pebble Collection: Nails in the skull and other wonders from the web

Unusual penetrating brain injuries

from Neurophilosophy

The e'er enchanging Neurophilosopher has a radiologically rich roundup of penetrating injuries to the head. Paintbrushes, nails, Don't try this at home.