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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 ...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) ...Disease-Hunting Scientists: Jonathan Epstein and the search for SARS
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/jonathan-epstein-and-sars.mp3[/podcast] My next book, due out this summer from Enslow Publishers, is entitled Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases. Each of its chapters focuses on one particular scientist whose work is related to hunting disease. The chapters are much longer than these science columns, but I thought in honour of the book’s release, I’d try over the next little while to boil down some of those chapters into columns. Call it the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books Version—not just condensed, but extremely condensed! One chapter focuses on Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian epidemiologist with the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. In 2005, he led the first of five expeditions into China that eventually determined that bats were the “natural reservoir” of the ...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, ...The old gray hair, she ain’t what she used to be
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/gray-hair.mp3[/podcast] Look, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you’re growing older. Every second. Even worse, so am I. There are many manifestations of the aging process, most of which are far too depressing to go into, especially on a morning in late February. Still, we must all face facts sooner or later, and for many of us, the “sooner” arrives when we look in a mirror and notice...a gray hair. It’s the advance scout of an army of pale invaders to our scalp, and it’s been the focus of speculation and research for a long, long time. Now a new paper has been published that claims to have solved the mystery of why we go gray. The culprit, ...Myths of the season
If there’s one thing science has taught us, it’s that just because “everybody knows” something is true, that doesn’t mean it’s true.Just in time for Christmas, two doctors, Aaron Carroll and Rachel Vreeman, both associate professors of pediatrics at Indiana University and practicing pediatricians at Riley Hospital for Children, have published a study taking a hard scientific look at some of the things “everybody knows” about topics associated with the holidays...and finding once again that a lot of things “everybody knows” simply aren’t so.At the top of their list? “Sugar makes kids hyperactive.”I’m the father of a seven-year-old girl, and I’ve heard some variation of this belief more times than I can count. But ...Seizing appetite by the NAPE
’Tis the season to begin newspaper columns with the phrase “’Tis the season,” and who am I to resist?Failing to resist that particular temptation is of little moment, of course. Failing to resist another temptation endemic to this time of year is not: the temptation to eat...and eat...and eat.Why do we eat more food than we need to survive, with consequences that range from the annoying (clothes now too snug for comfort) to the serious (diabetes, heart disease, etc.)?Because as a species, until the last century or so, we’ve been more likely to be short of food than not, and so we are hardwired to eat whatever is put before us--particularly fatty foods ...I itch, therefore I scratch
Before you read any further, let me warn you: today’s column may cause itching.It’s got nothing to do with the ink it’s printed with, either, or mysterious radiation from your computer monitor. It’s simply because I’m going to write about the science of itching, and one of the peculiar things about itching is that talking about it can cause it.You would think that such a universally experienced sensation would be well understood by now, but you’d be wrong.Itching was in the news recently because Zhou-Feng Chen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, announced at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington that he and his colleagues had discovered ...The cold facts
We are, alas, heading into winter, which is not only the cold (Brrr!) season, but also the cold (Ah-choo!) season.We all get colds. That’s not surprising, because, as the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University in the U.K. likes to point out, we breathe in some 15,000 litres of germ-laden air every day.Which is why New Scientist magazine’s Brussels correspondent Debora MacKenzie did us all (and especially me, since I got this column out of it) a favor last week by posting “Eight Cold Facts” on the New Scientist Short Sharp Science Blog. She presented eight statements you’ve probably heard about colds, and then detailed whether they’re scientifically accurate.First off: “Colds are caused ...
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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.
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…
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.
