Cheap Slut Strivers Swapping American Medicine
Maybe You Do Need A Hole In The Head - To Let The Medicine In by Carl Zimmer (Discover): There is a thing called the ‘blood-brain barrier’, which basically stops most stuff in your bloodstream from getting into your brain. Which is a good thing - your brain is pretty important and pretty fragile, and you don’t want any old stuff getting into it (bacteria, for example). Of course, one of the things it stops from getting into your brain is most psychiatric medicine, which is why the typical dose is quite large. Are there ways to get around the blood-brain barrier?
The End Of Cheap Coffee: Why The Diner Staple Is About To Become A Luxury by Zak Stone (Good): Stone argues pretty convincingly that coffee is going to get pretty expensive in upcoming years - it’s a side effect of climate change. Coffee only grows well in certain climates, at certain altitudes, and climate change will reduce the areas of the world which have those climates, and is already making it hard for coffee growers. (If ever there were a reason for latte-sipping elites to be putting more effort into doing more to fight climate change…) [via]
Pay Attention: The Great American Adderall Drought by Moe Tkacik (The Fix): Recently, the amount of Adderall in US pharmacies has plummeted - people with ADD and ADHD simply can’t find any, unless they look pretty hard. Reason? The company that makes Adderall has a shiny new drug which does a similar thing, and so they’ve reduced the amount of Adderall they make in order to get people to move to the new (and quite a lot more expensive) drug. During the biggest economic downturn in the US since the 1930s. Capitalism at its finest. [via]
Enough With The Slut Gene, Already: Behaviours Ain’t Traits by David Dobbs (Neuron Culture): Dobbs here uses the popular media’s fixation on ‘the slut gene’ as a teachable moment: there is a difference between psychological traits and behaviour. And your genes might influence your traits, but they don’t cause your behaviour. Sleeping around is a behaviour (and not necessarily a bad one, for that matter). And there aren’t any genes that cause promiscuity. However, genes do seem to be associated with psychological things like curiosity, the desire to take risks, and distractability. All of which could make you more likely to be promiscuous in the context of some situations in a particular culture. (Note how many equivocating words there are in that last sentence: “could”, “more likely”, “in the context of”, “some situations”.)
Swapping Germs by Maryn McKenna (Scientific American): Turns out that there’s a treatment which is highly successful at curing a variety of colon-related complaints. Except that it’s difficult to get funding for further studies investigating it, because it doesn’t quite fit into the usual categories of medical treatment. Why? Because it involves injecting someone else’s shit into your colon.
Sorry, Strivers - Talent Matters by David Z. Hambrick & Elizabeth J. Meinz (New York Times): This New York Times article has something of a point - that there is something that looks like talent out there - but it really does exaggerate it. For example, the study they cite shows that practice accounts for about 50% of a pianist’s ability to sight-read. In contrast, working memory ability (i.e., the amount of stuff you can hold in your head at once - that is, something more like talent than hard work) accounts for about 7% of the pianist’s ability. Thus, they argue that a pianist with a large working memory might have the edge over another pianist who tries a little harder but doesn’t have as much memory to work with. Still, 7% isn’t that much. And my personal experience is that having talent can actually hinder you - if you’re the kind of person who coasts on talent, there still inevitably comes a point where you need to work hard to get better, and people who coast on talent have often never learnt how to work hard.
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