science

I was speaking to a retired dermatologist who said that a lot of patients came into his office for tattoo removal. He mentioned that many people with tattoos become allergic to the barium, a heavy metal, in the ink and needed to have it removed. I hadn't heard of this so I went to PubMed and Google Scholar to find out more.

Research shows that writing by hand has neurological benefits. One paper (Muller and Oppenheimer, 2014) covered three studies of adult learners which led them to the conclusion that taking notes by hand requires notetakers to process information more deeply than those who take notes on their laptops. What happens is that typing notes during a lecture ends up being more like transcription rather than learning. They proved this by asking each set of notetakers conceptual questions about the material for which they were taking notes. Guess who performed better? Right, the ones who took their notes by writing them down.

Okay, so sometimes the media gets things wrong. An eye-popping study appears on the wire and they're off and running. The media mostly has to - being the first to report and getting the most eyeballs is how part of their business model is structured.

How healthy would you like to be in the coming year? Here are some ideas.

Become a McDougaller

If you don't already, eat a plant-based diet with no added oils. Begin with Dr. McDougall's 10 Day Free Program. It was easier than I thought it would be and I've been mostly eating this way for almost three months.

The kids and I had the pleasure of listening to the inaugural show of Invisibilia last Sunday on Michigan Radio. It was an accident. I was cooking late that night and I usually listen to the radio while I cook. I had heard promos of the show and thought it would be depressing. While the show began with the segment "Dark Thoughts", it morphed into one of personal triumph, hope, and the strength of the human spirit and/or mind.

Cooking is math. Why else would there be measuring utensils for half teaspoons, quarter teaspoons, and one-third cups? If you've ever doubled or quadrupled a recipe for a batch of cookies, you know you need to be able to add and/or multiply fractions.

In PubMed: Part 1, I explained why using PubMed to search for answers to medical questions is helpful. Now I'll describe how to use its advanced search functionality as I promised.

The default search form is located at the top of the page and looks like this:

Many of us have searched the web for information regarding medical conditions. If you haven't used PubMed, you should try it.

PubMed is a database of peer-reviewed scientific articles which are mostly health-related in scope. It's maintained by the National Library of Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

The New York Times published the article, "As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up" yesterday. While it's true that robotic technology has advanced, it still has room for improvements especially in the field of autonomous robots.

One of my friends who lives in Florida complained that it was cold there now. She said it was 68 degrees. Earlier this month, the temperature had been averaging in the 80's. I had gone running the morning she complained and thought 20 degrees was warm. Where I live, we had been experiencing single digit temperatures. So what the heck is going on?

Simply put, the body adapts to the environment's temperature. According to Wikipedia,