Archives
I get a box full of disease detectives!
Oh, all right, not the actual detectives themselves, but my latest book from Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Disease. That's the cover at left. Here's the blurb from the back: Working from high-tech labs in Canada or remote villages in Africa, epedemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases. Learn how these "disease detectives" are coming up with new wayts to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too! I'd seen that before. What I hadn't seen, until the books arrived today, was this very nice cover quote from Jonathan M. Samet, MD, Professor ...Stop that stretching!
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Stretching.mp3[/podcast] There’s a perception that science is always reversing itself. If you don’t like what science has to say about, say, the health benefits or risks of a particular food (eggs, for example, or coffee), you only have to wait awhile until a contradictory study comes out. That’s because science progresses in fits and starts. Researchers put forward a possible explanation, a hypothesis, for the results of an experiment. Other researchers attempt to duplicate their results and refine the hypothesis. Sometimes the hypothesis is completely discarded, and a new hypothesis gains sway. But in the media, this slow process is seldom reported. It’s much easier to pick up on the report of a single study—particularly if it has startling results—and present the hypotheses ...Are cognitive shortcuts making us fat?
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/Cognitive-Shortcuts-to-Obesity.mp3[/podcast] When we think about how we make decisions, we tend to imagine that we consider the facts of a situation carefully and logically, in a straightforward, step-by-step manner. But that process is, indeed, imaginary. The truth is that our brains prefer to do as little actual thinking as possible. They like shortcuts—and sometimes those shortcuts can get us into trouble. Take, for instance, what psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania call "Unit Bias," which, they say, “causes people to ignore vital, obvious information in their decision-making process, points to a fundamental flaw in the modern, evolved mind, and may also play a role in the American population's 30 years of weight gain.” The researchers conducted several studies with college-age participants. In one, the ...Disease-Hunting Scientist: Marta Guerra and Ebola
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/marta-guerra-and-ebola.mp3[/podcast] Here's one last column condensed from a chapter in my new children's book Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases (Enslow Publishers): In the movie Outbreak, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have to figure out how to stop a kind of super-Ebola virus from ravaging the U.S. In 1995, the same year Outbreak came out, Marta Guerra, who already had her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree and was finishing her master's degree in public health. "I remember seeing that movie and thinking, 'Wow, that's what I want to do!'" Five years later, Guerra, now with a Ph.D. in epidemiology and a brand-new officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) ...An instantaneous, universal, programmable vaccine?
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/a-universal-instant-vaccine.mp3[/podcast] Efforts to immunize people against disease go back to at least 600 B.C., when the Chinese attempted to immunize people against smallpox by putting smallpox material in their nostrils (the permitting of which, I would think, would require a great deal of faith in your doctor). Modern immunization began in 1796 when a British physician, Edward Jenner, noting that people who had had the much-less-deadly cowpox did not catch smallpox, inserted material from cowpox sores into the arm of a healthy eight-year-old boy. The boy caught cowpox, but when he was exposed to smallpox eight weeks later, he did not contract the often-fatal disease. Vaccines have since become a mainstay of public health. Their impact has been enormous. Consider measles: in 2007, ...From tennis elbow to hot-tub lung
Once upon a time, most of the injuries people suffered were the result of the hard physical labor they had to perform day-in and day-out to survive. Today we have a whole new set of injuries and ailments that are the result, not of hard work, but of recreation. Take hot-tub long, for instance. This recently identified ailment causes flu-like symptoms and fatigue. Apparently hot tubs, especially when the jets are turned on, can give off a mist laden with a germ called Mycobacterium avium. If the hot tub is indoors, that mist hangs around the hot tub and can infect those using it. To make matters worse, people who don’t feel well because of hot-tub ...Joint replacement: what’s a nice joint like you doing in a dame like this?
"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology." So began each episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. Twenty-some years after that TV series aired, we still don't have bionic people capable of superhuman feats of strength and speed, but we do have lots of people walking around with artificial parts: especially, artificial joints. My own "bionic Mom" is among them; she has two artificial knees and, as of last week, an artificial shoulder. A joint is formed by the ends of two or more bones connected by thick tissues. Some are basically hinges, like the knee; others have a ball-and-socket construction, like the hip. In a normal joint, the bone ends are covered with a smooth ...Yet another column about tea
Tea is not only the most popular beverage in the world, it's also good for you. Over the past 20 years, scientists have discovered potential benefits from tea against cancer, high blood pressure and infection. Now comes a report that tea may be an effective weapon in the fight against diabetes. First, some basic tea facts: Tea is what you get when you pour boiling water over the leaves of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to Southeast Asia. According to legend, the Chinese emperor Shen-Nung learned how to brew tea in 2737 BC when a few leaves from the plant accidentally fell into water he was boiling. Tea eventually spread from ...Ebola
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is in the news again, due to an outbreak in Gabon. Ebola is always news because, unlike most rare tropical diseases, it's part of pop culture, thanks to Richard Preston's 1994 best-seller The Hot Zone and Dustin Hoffman's 1995 movie Outbreak. As a result, many people follow news of Ebola outbreaks with bated breath, wondering if the disease will break out of Africa and spread unstoppably across the world. After all, didn't Preston write that Ebola can be seen as Earth's attempt "to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite"? Well, if that's what Ebola is, it's a pretty pitiful attempt. Ebola hemorrhagic fever has killed fewer than 1,000 people since 1976. Pneumonia ...Sneezing and coughing
If you've been to a concert or play recently, you know 'tis the season for coughing and sneezing--usually during the quietest moments. Both coughing and sneezing are reflex actions (sneezing more so than coughing--you can cough deliberately, but it's almost impossible to fake a sneeze.) And as the proud father of a five-and-a-half-month-old baby girl, I can tell you we know how to cough and sneeze from infancy--in fact, Alice sneezed as I typed this sentence. Both sneezing and coughing are intended to expel unwanted material from the airway. Sneezes begin with an irritation in your nose. This excites the trigeminal nerve, which sends impulses to the "sneezing center," a set of neurons in the ...
Edward Willett is a The Shards of Excalibur, Book 1: Song of the Sword
My new YA fantasy novel, coming in October from Lobster Press
Before the Lady called her, Ariane’s life was a mess. Two years ago, her mother disappeared. She bounced around different foster homes until her aunt finally took her in. The meanest clique at her new high school has decided to make Ariane their prime target. And to top it all off, she is having frightening premonitions, and they are becoming more intense. The moment water touches her skin, she sees visions of a lake, a lady, and a sword. When a staircase opens up in the middle of Wascana Lake and the water begins singing to her, she has no choice but to answer the call….
Marseguro
Winner of the 2009 Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English
Water world Marseguro is home to the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from human DNA. When an unmodified human seeks revenge on a Selkie by activating a distress beacon taken from the remains of the original colony ship, a strikeforce is sent from Earth to eradicate the genetic abomination. Yet Marseguro will not prove as easy to conquer as the Earth force anticipates…
Terra Insegura
Finalist for the 2010 Prix Aurora Award for Best Novel in English
Marseguro, a water world far from Earth, is home to a colony of humans and the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from modified human DNA. For seventy years the colony has lived in peace. Then Earth discovers Marseguro, and a strike force is sent to eradicate this “abomination.” But Marseguro has created a genetically tailored plague to use against Earth’s Holy Warriors. With the enemy defeated, the people of Marseguro feel they are safe. But Chris Keating, the traitor who signaled Marseguro’s location to the Holy Warriors, has fled to Earth, unknowingly carrying the deadly plague within him. The people of Marseguro feel they must send a ship to Earth with a life-saving vaccine. Only time will tell what awaits them when they reach their destination.
Lost in Translation
Kathryn was a human empath whose world and life had been destroyed when the alien S’sinn slaughtered her parents before her very eyes. Jarrikk was a young S’sinn, an unproven warrior who’d seen his flight mates slaughtered by the humans who’d sought to colonize his world.
As humans and S’sinn found themselves on the brink of war, these two Translators had to work together to find a common ground and avert catastrophe. But whether their Translators’ oath and training could overcome the enemies leagued against them was very much in doubt…
Archives
Historic Walks of Regina and Moose Jaw
Ten walks to points of historic and architectural interest in the cities of Regina and Moose Jaw (eight walks for Regina, two for Moose Jaw).
Disease-Hunting Scientist
The true stories of six real disease hunters. Epidemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases—from high-tech labs in Canada to remote villages in Africa. Learn how these “disease detectives” are coming up with new ways to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too!
The Bounty Mutiny
The Bounty was a British ship visiting Tahiti in 1789 when some of the crew overthrew the captain, William Bligh, and set him adrift in a tiny boat with sailors loyal to him. The mutiny resulted in a number of trials–both of the men who mutinied and of Bligh for losing command of his ship. These fascinating events have been the source for numerous Hollywood movies, most recently The Bounty. The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie explores the famous case and the movies it inspired.
