Saturday, June 2, 2018

Junesomething

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/well/cancer-group-calls-for-colorectal-cancer-screening-starting-at-age-45.html An article from the NYT about the new guidelines from the American Cancer Society recommending that people age 45 and above receive colorectal cancer screening. There will be six options offered for screening, including stool sample collection at home to be brought to a lab for tests, to colonoscopy, the most invasive test. This screening is necessary because it is expected that 16.450 new cases of colon cancer will be diagnosed in the age group 45-49 Americans under the age of 50 this year. There has been a 50% increase in cases of colon cancer in adults under the  age of 50 from 1994 to 2014. I have had students (college) who have had more than one colonoscopy so I am only partly surprised by this.



https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/06/broccoli-coffee-scientists-create-new-way-to-eat-more-greens  From The Guardian, Scientists have made powdered broccoli, which can be added to foods to increase the amount of greens in one's diet.  This was done by the Australian science agency CSIRO. But I don't think of broccoli as "ugly" produce.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/protected-area-myth.html This is an opinion in the NYT about areas devoted to wildlife protection according to the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity. The author asks us to examine what he calls the "delusions" that accompany this type of project. Apparently, designating these areas is easy but protecting them hard. In Australia's Barrow Island Marine Park, a designated protected area due to the richness of wildlife there, the government allowed construction of a vast energy complex. There is something called Paddd, protected area downgrading, downsizing and degazettement (?) because this is such a common occurrence.





https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/climate/trump-administration-science.html An article from NYT about the fact that, even now as Trump meets with North Korea, when denuclearization is sure to come up as a topic of conversation, Trump has no science advisor. Past advisors to presidents  say that the absence of such high level expertise could put Mr. Trump at a disadvantage. (I would have said "is sure to"). This indicates the marginalization of science is shaping US policy. Neither the State Department nor the Department of Agriculture have chief scientists, for example. Even as we speak, Scott Pruitt, head of the EPA, is rolling back legislation designed to protect the environment.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/health/mediterranean-diet-heart-disease.html An article in NYT about the Mediterranean Diet Study, much-cited, reporting that the Mediterranean diet, containing more vegetables and fruits, cuts risk of heart attacks/strokes, was not randomized. The paper was reanalyzed and, according to Barnett Kramer, director of cancer prevention studies at NCI. contains the same flaws.






https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/climate/antarctica-ice-melting-faster.html This goes into the Antarctica is Melting column. 0.3 inch doesn't sound like a lot for the sea level to rise but this is the statistic for the years 2112-2117 as published in the journal Nature. By 2100 it is expected that there will be a rise of another 6 inches as estimated by the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Oh, not to mention that Greenland also lost one trillion tons of ice between 2011 and 2014.










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