![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lots of goodies this week...
Mind: When All You Have Left Is Your Pride
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
Look around you. On the train platform, at the bus stop, in the car pool lane: these days someone there is probably faking it, maintaining a job routine without having a job to go to.
The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day.
“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine.”
The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ.
( Read more... )
Answering Baseball’s What-Ifs
By ALAN SCHWARZ, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
You can learn a lot during a major league baseball game. Like Ukrainian, if it is a particularly slow nine innings.
As for the science of baseball strategy, one game teaches precious little. A well-timed sacrifice bunt can backfire and lose the game; a foolish steal can appear brilliant. The vagaries of randomness — the way Sandy Koufax got battered occasionally and a pipsqueak named Bucky Dent hit one of the most famous home runs ever — camouflage the game’s inner forces, which for 150 years have operated somewhere between fact and fable.
One game has little meaning. A thousand seasons can take a while. Thank goodness for quad-core processors.
( Read more... )
Empire State Building Plans Environmental Retrofit
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
Once the world’s tallest building, the Empire State Building is striving for another milestone: It is going green.
Owners of the New York City landmark announced on Monday that they will be beginning a renovation this summer expected to reduce the skyscraper’s energy use by 38 percent a year by 2013, at an annual savings of $4.4 million. The retrofit project will add $20 million to the $500 million building makeover already under way that aims to attract larger corporate occupants at higher rents.
( Read more... )
DNA Test Outperforms Pap Smear
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, April 7, 2009
A new DNA test for the virus that causes cervical cancer does so much better than current methods that some gynecologists hope it will eventually replace the Pap smear in wealthy countries and cruder tests in poor ones.
Not only could the new test for human papillomavirus, or HPV, save lives; scientists say that women over 30 could drop annual Pap smears and instead have the DNA test just once every 3, 5 or even 10 years, depending on which expert is asked.
( Read more... )
Scratching Relieves Itch by Quieting Nerve Cells
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
As common as it is, scratching to relieve an itch has long been considered a biological mystery: Are cells at the surface of the skin somehow fatigued, in need of outside stimulation? Or is the impulse, and its relief, centered in the brain?
Perhaps neither one, a new study suggests. Neuroscientists at the University of Minnesota report that specialized cells in the spinal cord appear to be critically involved in producing the sensation of itch and the feeling of relief after the application of fingernails, at least in healthy individuals. The study appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
( Read more... )
House Dust Yields Clue to Asthma: Roaches
By ELISSA ELY, M.D, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood, one that strikes the poor disproportionately. Up to one-third of children living in inner-city public housing have allergic asthma, in which a specific allergen sets off a cascade of events that cause characteristic inflammation, airway constriction and wheezing.
Now, using an experimental model that required leaving the pristine conditions of the lab for the messier ones of life, a team of scientists from the Boston University School of Medicine have discovered what that allergen is.
“For inner-city children,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Daniel G. Remick, a professor of pathology, “the major cause of asthma is not dust mites, not dog dander, not outdoor air pollen. It’s allergies to cockroaches.”
( Read more... )
Mind: When All You Have Left Is Your Pride
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
Look around you. On the train platform, at the bus stop, in the car pool lane: these days someone there is probably faking it, maintaining a job routine without having a job to go to.
The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day.
“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine.”
The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ.
( Read more... )
Answering Baseball’s What-Ifs
By ALAN SCHWARZ, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
You can learn a lot during a major league baseball game. Like Ukrainian, if it is a particularly slow nine innings.
As for the science of baseball strategy, one game teaches precious little. A well-timed sacrifice bunt can backfire and lose the game; a foolish steal can appear brilliant. The vagaries of randomness — the way Sandy Koufax got battered occasionally and a pipsqueak named Bucky Dent hit one of the most famous home runs ever — camouflage the game’s inner forces, which for 150 years have operated somewhere between fact and fable.
One game has little meaning. A thousand seasons can take a while. Thank goodness for quad-core processors.
( Read more... )
Empire State Building Plans Environmental Retrofit
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
Once the world’s tallest building, the Empire State Building is striving for another milestone: It is going green.
Owners of the New York City landmark announced on Monday that they will be beginning a renovation this summer expected to reduce the skyscraper’s energy use by 38 percent a year by 2013, at an annual savings of $4.4 million. The retrofit project will add $20 million to the $500 million building makeover already under way that aims to attract larger corporate occupants at higher rents.
( Read more... )
DNA Test Outperforms Pap Smear
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, April 7, 2009
A new DNA test for the virus that causes cervical cancer does so much better than current methods that some gynecologists hope it will eventually replace the Pap smear in wealthy countries and cruder tests in poor ones.
Not only could the new test for human papillomavirus, or HPV, save lives; scientists say that women over 30 could drop annual Pap smears and instead have the DNA test just once every 3, 5 or even 10 years, depending on which expert is asked.
( Read more... )
Scratching Relieves Itch by Quieting Nerve Cells
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
As common as it is, scratching to relieve an itch has long been considered a biological mystery: Are cells at the surface of the skin somehow fatigued, in need of outside stimulation? Or is the impulse, and its relief, centered in the brain?
Perhaps neither one, a new study suggests. Neuroscientists at the University of Minnesota report that specialized cells in the spinal cord appear to be critically involved in producing the sensation of itch and the feeling of relief after the application of fingernails, at least in healthy individuals. The study appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
( Read more... )
House Dust Yields Clue to Asthma: Roaches
By ELISSA ELY, M.D, The New York Times, April 7, 2009
Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood, one that strikes the poor disproportionately. Up to one-third of children living in inner-city public housing have allergic asthma, in which a specific allergen sets off a cascade of events that cause characteristic inflammation, airway constriction and wheezing.
Now, using an experimental model that required leaving the pristine conditions of the lab for the messier ones of life, a team of scientists from the Boston University School of Medicine have discovered what that allergen is.
“For inner-city children,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Daniel G. Remick, a professor of pathology, “the major cause of asthma is not dust mites, not dog dander, not outdoor air pollen. It’s allergies to cockroaches.”
( Read more... )
