Tag: health

Circadian desynchrony and the blue light special

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
December 10, 2012
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/Circadian-Deosynchrony-and-the-Blue-Light-Special.mp3[/podcast] We’re coming up on the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere: at the latitude I live at, in Regina, Saskatchewan, that means that today the sun rose at 8:49 a.m. and will set at 4:54 p.m. We’ll lose a few more minutes yet before the winter solstice. That’s not a lot …

The case for coffee consumption

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
December 3, 2012
6 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/The-Case-for-Coffee-Consumption_01.mp3[/podcast]I first wrote about coffee in a science column back in the dawn of time, so long ago that it began, “Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t drink coffee…” Since as I type this I am on my second…or maybe third… good-sized cup (oh, all right, mug) of the stuff, something has clearly changed …

Pop! goes nutrition

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
March 26, 2012
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/03/Popcorn-Nutrition.mp3[/podcast] There’s nothing quite like the smell of popcorn. It makes you think of movie theatres, the circus, the midway. It makes you long for a handful. Or two. Or better yet, a whole bucket. And best of all, just this week some research results were released that indicate popcorn is also a very healthy …

Of mice and man-flu

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
October 17, 2011
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/10/Of-Mice-and-Man-Flu.mp3[/podcast] As any wife will tell you, men are lousy at being sick. They swear they’re on death’s door when it is quite apparent to their long-suffering significant other that in fact they are suffering from nothing more than a cold, nowhere near as bad as the one she had the week before when she …

Stretching: the truth

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
March 4, 2011
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/03/Stretching-the-Truth.mp3[/podcast] Exercise is good for you. It’s a shame, since I personally find the whole sweating/breathing hard/ hurting thing a (literal) pain, but I don’t believe I can mount a successful argument as to why sitting on your rear end eating junk food all day is actually better for you, even though evolution seems to …

Confessions of a cyberchondriac

By Edward Willett in Blog
January 7, 2011
5 mins to read
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A few years ago I wrote several children’s books for the Diseases and People series put out by Enslow Publishers. It’s amazing when you’re writing about disease how easy it is to convince yourself you’ve got the symptoms of whatever you’re writing about. The first book was Meningitis. Stiff neck? You bet. Of course, I …

It’s past your bedtime!

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
January 5, 2011
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/Its-Past-Your-Bedtime.mp3[/podcast] Ah, New Year’s. A time for resolutions, typically focused on living more healthily. Apparently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, not trusting us to do it ourselves, has decided to make our resolutions for us: it’s started 2011 with a series of stories lecturing Canadians on how unhealthy their lifestyle is, and started something called the …

I get a box full of disease detectives!

By Edward Willett in Blog
July 10, 2009
2 mins to read
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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 …

Stop that stretching!

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
July 7, 2009
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://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. …

Are cognitive shortcuts making us fat?

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
June 17, 2009
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://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 …

Disease-Hunting Scientist: Marta Guerra and Ebola

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
June 9, 2009
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://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 …

An instantaneous, universal, programmable vaccine?

By Edward Willett in Science Columns
March 24, 2009
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://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 …