CategoryMedicine and Health
Book Banning Today: Silently … Not Like in the Old Days
Traditional anti-book banning groups are simply not where the action is and maybe don’t want to beLast week we looked at the way censorship in the age of the internet is typically invisible. It’s not the police raiding bookstores; it’s — for example — sudden downranking of posts so that information that might have reached millions of people reaches only dozens. Constantly suppressed, it can’t go viral. We can see the change more clearly if we look at the difference between how books (and other information) used to get banned and how they get banned today. Book banning before the internet When the word “book bans” is used today, it usually means something different from what it meant even a few decades ago. Ulysses, a groundbreaking work by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) was indeed banned Read More ›
Will Neuralink’s Brain Implant Help Paralysis Victims?
Addressing disabilities like paralysis, limb loss, and blindness seems a more realistic goal than the hyped (and feared) human–machine hybrids
Why Is 23andMe — the Hot Gene Testing Startup — Now Worthless?
Birthed in Silicon Valley among high-tech go-getters, it should still be steaming along, right? But traditional bedrock business realities cursed it at its birthEmbattled genetic testing outfit 23andMe had a customer base of 14 million for its home DNA testing kits. Thus, many of us know at least someone who has discovered a partial Mongolian, West African, or even Neanderthal ancestry via the famous “spit kit.” The 2006 startup, birthed in Silicon Valley and riffing off the Human Genome Project (2000), had a dazzling “the future is now!” launch. The founder, Anne Wojcicki (pronounced as if “Wojisky”), was the daughter of “Godmother of Silicon Valley” Esther Wojcicki and sister of YouTube’s former CEO, Susan Wojcicki. For a time, she was married to Google co-founder Sergei Brin and had plenty of billionaire backers. Thus 23andMe raised $1.4 billion in funding. So why has the Read More ›
Forget Stuff? Relax. Your Mind Is Likely Functioning As It Should
Recent research suggests that memories can sometimes be in a “dormant” stage due to interference
Psychiatrist Looks at Mindfulness From a Christian Perspective
UCLA research psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz notes that the word “heart” in the biblical sense means the seat of consciousness, the seat of our spirit
New Studies Point to Ways We Might Reduce the Effects of Dementia
New Findings About Our Mysterious “Second Brain”
The Placebo Effect Shows That the Mind Is Real
The placebo effect works even when patients know it’s a fake,
Our Brains Don’t Really Rewire, Neuroscientists Caution
Professors Tamar Makin (Cambridge) and John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins) say that when the brain adapts to losses, it uses “latent capacities,” not new ones
Everyday Evidence of the Mind’s Reality: the Placebo Effect
The placebo effect — you get better because you think you will — may be getting stronger, as researchers manipulate it more effectively
Yes, the Film on Near-Death Experiences Is Another “Hated Hit”
As with Sound of Freedom, critics trashed After Death but audiences loved it. And the critics just aren’t keeping up with the science
Assisted Suicide and the Dangers of “Word Engineering”
When radical policies are proposed, the first step is to change the lexicon to make it seem less extreme, even mundane.
Researchers: Conscious Experience May Occur Near Time of Birth
Researchers generally stress that the unborn child’s brain is in a rapid, ongoing, and little understood state of development
Are Near-Death Experiences Becoming Science Now?
The laughter has died down? Good. It was modern medicine — not religion — that created the hard evidence for credible near-death experiences
Will Studio’s New “After Death” Be a Hit Like “Sound of Freedom”?
The new 90-minute film interviews researchers and survivors of near-death experiencesAfter Death (Angel Studios 2023), a look at the many recent accounts of near-death experiences, will premiere October 27. Angel is the studio that produced the recent smash hit Sound of Freedom (2023). There’s a story in that: While SoF was trashed by fashionable media, it outgrossed some of the biggest films at the box office. Will After Death, directed by Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke, meet the same fate? Its basic message is that NDEs are becoming an intersection of science/medicine and faith. It will be interesting to see how the same fashionable media react. The principle reason for exploding interest in near-death experiences in recent decades is that high-tech medicine has been bringing back thousands of people from Read More ›
COVID Helped China Get Ahead on Genetic Therapies
Why is China trying to lead the world in genetic technology?
Affirmative Action and Health Care
It is high time that our medical journals stick to medicine.
Near-Death Experience Study: Brain Is Active After Death
Science media are making surprisingly few efforts to attack or explain away the team’s findings