Blog archives for May, 2009

There is a new “take charge of your health care” carnival at Health Plans Plus, including this post on Bioblog.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is sometimes conflated with other agricultural programs that subsidize people not to grow crops on historical farmland. Some of these programs have a deserved bad rap because the payments, which were originally intended to help sustain farmers through fluctuating crop prices and decrease overproduction, have gone to people who [...]

No one would try to defend politics as a rational process, although some like to agonize over phenomena such as the conundrum of people who do not vote for their economic self-interest (e.g. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America).
People from both extreme ends of the political spectrum [...]

A recent Bioblog post was included in this week’s Carnival of the Green, hosted by Ethical Superstore.
You will also find another Bioblog post at the Scientia Pro Publica carnival, hosted by the Primate Dairies.

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Jonathan Oberlander writes about the difficulties of healthcare funding. We want to provide universal health care (wingnuts excepted, perhaps) but who’s going to pay for it? The cost is said to be maybe $1 trillion or more. That money is portrayed by some to have to come out of thin air.
But what [...]

It is so rare that we see a medical study that is controlled, reasonably-sized, and actually shows a mechanism for a process. The usual paper these days seems to need 100,000 participants to find a statistically significant result, about whose mechanism the authors speculate at length without any actual data to support their pontifications.
The [...]

Biofuels (= ethanol) remain a massive part of our quest for “renewable energy” because subsidizing ethanol benefits agribusiness, despite the fact that it adds to our environmental problems. The latest attempt to raise the maximum percentage of ethanol in gasoline from 10% to 15% shows that we are still letting agribusiness call the engergy-policy [...]

One might expect the above to be the next headline about a study touting the benefits of lactation. We already know breast milk to be a miracle drug in so many other ways.
At least that’s the latest propaganda. It’s funny how cultural fads insist on swinging from extreme to extreme instead of [...]

Two current health blog carnivals include posts from Bioblog. Check out Drugs and Pharmacology #15, and Cancer Research Carnival #21.