The makers of the uChek app, which analyzes photos of urine samples to give users quick health information, recently got a letter from the FDA asking it to show it had approval from the FDA or document why it doesn't need it.The FDA lets the entire NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) get $128 million per year without giggling but this iPhone app is apparently a concern. How would they feel jurisdiction over an iPhone? The chemical strips which determine the levels of elements in urine become, when used by uChek, part of an "automated strip reader" and therefore a medical testing system that requires its approval. Even though the strips are meant to be read by eyes.
If you are tired of Democrats getting all of the media attention for spouting anti-science nonsense about food, energy and medicine, there is good news; someone on the right-wing can make weird anecdotal proclamations about health as well.Talk show host Bill O'Reilly recently announced that giving up wheat made his cholesterol drop and "and I feel stronger, more manly."Well, that's nice. When I was 19 years old I fasted for 4 days every two weeks, nothing but water. It also gave me a lot of energy. Despite the existence of 'hunger pangs' your stomach is a muscle that adapts rather quickly. After 24 hours without food you no longer get them, even though you are more 'hungry' than ever, and the energy increase is tremendous.
The family which originally sold the Dead Sea Scrolls to collectors and institutions about 70 years ago says they kept some fragments in a Swiss safe deposit box all these years - and those have been up for sale. The manuscripts are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found and the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land.
Last weekend, May 18th, 2013 an aurora appeared over Marquette, Michigan in the northern USA, after coronal mass ejections from the sun made contact with Earth’s magnetic fields, funneling energy and particles into near-Earth space. The outer solar atmosphere, the corona, is structured by strong magnetic fields and where those fields are closed, often above sunspot groups, the confined solar atmosphere can suddenly and violently release bubbles of gas and magnetic fields. We call those coronal mass ejections and they erupt from the sun with billions of tons of solar material that can impact satellites.
Lost in the media crush of celebrity worshipers extolling or criticizing actress Angelina Jolie for her op-ed on opting to have a double mastectomy was the science factoid that trumps everything else:99% of women do not have the BRCA1 mutation. The BRCA1 mutation is a very bad thing, it represents a gigantic increase in the chances of getting breast or ovarian cancer.
If spending is the metric, Canadian research is in trouble.Of course, if spending is the metric, American Democrats hate science a lot more than American Republicans do, but you'd have a hard time getting science media to acknowledge that. Still, spending is at least one metric.
Elements Make HeadlinesIf you ever enjoyed Tom Lehrer's take on the elements, or even if not, check out this way of using the names of the elements in a novel way:http://news.knowledgedoor.s3.amazonaws.com/home_headlines.html
While the new DSM-5 has attracted plenty of criticism - and the National Institute of Mental Health has given up on it, saying "patients with mental disorders deserve better" - not everyone is critical.
Students of sociology professor Dr. Leszek Sibilski at University of Maryland made a video asking for action on climate change. They regard climate change as a social problem - most in science would regard it as a physics one but certainly taking action is a political, and therefore social, issue.
The people who brought a certain cultural demographic (*cough*) sand-free peanut butter have now come out with a new product that is going to appeal to the anti-science crackpots that shop in places like Whole Foods and/or have a giant majority in California - non-GMO rock salt.
