Tag Archives: massachusetts

Time for a new medical specialty: GLBT

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Photo: David Shankbone/Flickr CC

Gay men are svelter than straight guys. Lesbian women are more likely to be overweight.

Northeastern and Harvard researchers this week said they’ve found huge disparities in several measures of health and heart disease risk, between straight and gay populations.

Indeed, the gaps between straight and gay people are so great– lesbian women are 50 percent more likely than straight women to be obese, for example — I believe it is time that medical schools consider training docs to specialize in the primary care of GLBT patients.

More from the study:

• Gay men and women were more likely to be current smokers compared to their heterosexual counterparts.• Lesbian women and bisexuals were more likely to report having multiple risk factors for heart disease.• Sexual minorities as a whole were more likely to report experiencing some form of sexual assault during their lifetime.

via Study Correlates Sexual Orientation and Health Disparities.

Rehab: Northeastern's "smart gloves" retrain hands, fingers

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Photo: Horia Varlan/Flickr CC

From my Boston Globe column this week, Northeastern’s latest robotic-mechatronic assistive aid (a breathtaking amount of GNR –genetics, nanotechnology and robotics — research, here):

“Given America’s growing ranks of aging boomers and wounded vets, it looks like the folks at Biomedical Mechatronics Laboratory (www.robots.neu.edu) at Northeastern University have a moneymaker on their hands.

Last week, the lab reported progress on its smart-gloves technology, the ATLAS Bimanual Rehabilitation System, which stroke patients can use to retrain their arms, hands, and fingers.”

via Smart gloves help patients regain control (below the fold).

Freemasons in the child "chipping" business

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Update: The Freemasons’ child-tracking system is now available in Canada.

The program is called Masonichip, and it is meant to help parents cope with one of their worst nightmares — having their children snatched from their beds in the dead of night — by taking casts of the kids’ teeth, as well as other biometric recordings.

The “chip” in Masonichip, is an acronym for “Child Identification Program.” There is no microchipping involved in the process of creating a dossier for any child.

But the name of the program is provocative enough, particularly when it is meant to  solve a type of crime that is extremely rare (link opens the PDF version of a US government report).

This, from an uncritical piece in a local paper, south of Boston:

The program, MY C.H.I.P., Masonic Youth Childhood Identification Program, is free. Each kit includes fingerprints, tooth impressions and a video recording of the child.Jon Bond, a lodge member, said each child stands before a screen with height markings and is asked a few questions while their responses are recorded on video.

via Parents can get ID kits for children – Quincy, MA – The Patriot Ledger.

http://www.masonichip.org/index.php/component/content/article/57-masonichip-expands-to-canada.html

MIT lab helps designers reimagine video games – The Boston Globe

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Lab might do for video games, what USC did for film:

GAMBIT’s researchers, a collaboration of artists, historians, writing instructors, and educators, are mostly interested in breaking away from gaming conventions: the princess who needs rescuing, the shady merchant with the weapon you must get to survive the next chapter, the mushroom power-up.

They are also focused on teaching courses with heady titles like “Making Deep Games’’ and publishing papers such as “Bioshock: A Critical Historical Perspective.’’

“Everything done in the lab is based on some sort of research interest,’’ said Eitan Glinert, who was GAMBIT’s first graduate student, in 2007.

via MIT lab helps designers reimagine video games – The Boston Globe.

Comic teaches you an esoteric thing, or two

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Find your way to the whole comic, by Andy Carolan, at Binnall of America. (Click on the image to get to the BoA site. You will find a link to the column at the lower right-hand side of the page.)

The latest installment of Andy Carolan’s web comic, Disclosure,  is dedicated to Hub esotericist and podcasting sensation, Tim Binnall.

It tells the story of the discovery of an anomalous, narrow-beam radio signal detected by Earth-based observers in the early 1970s.

via binnallofamerica.com.

Mars in a month: now doable

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Well, make that a month, a week, and a weekend, thanks to a plasma rocket developed by this MIT physicist and former astronaut:

A journey from Earth to Mars could soon take just 39 days, cutting current travel time nearly six times, a rocket scientist who has the ear of the US space agency NASA has said.

via Scientist eyes 39-day voyage to Mars.

Non Event threatened with nonexistence

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Felix Kubin, live at the Goethe-Institut. Photo: Tom Worster/Non Event/Flick CC

The Heretic’s charter from Blast Magazine is to “keep it weird” for the Hub’s esotericists and mad scientists.

But I couldn’t do my job without the inspiration I get listening to the artists associated with Non Event, who — through their live performances — have reached tens of thousands of Bostonians.

Please consider this appeal:

We are now faced with a funding shortfall that calls for a unique solution. Last year, our funding partner shifted its priorities away from live music, and so we no longer receive any outside support. Despite losing this funding, we have strived to maintain the level of performances you have always been accustomed to, but now we have reached the end of our funding cushion.

via Non-Event Year-End Appeal.

Macs' "Custer" brought low by Capitol Hill foes

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Ngozi Pole told me in 2002 (less than a year before he started pilfering from Kennedy’s office, the government alleges) that he had enemies — “trying to ruin (his) reputation” on the Hill.

As the sole Apple fan in the Senate, he seemed all cool-like to me, ’cause he was, like, “thinking different.” And everyone in at the Sergeant at Arms Office hated him.

I even called Ngozi a rebel (from a piece I wrote for Wired earlier this century):

The rebel’s name is Ngozi Pole. He is the office and systems administer at Kennedy’s Boston and Washington offices. He got Dungan and the other staffers their iBooks during the anthrax scare. And for years, Pole has been locking horns with anti-Mac administrators at the Senate Office of the Sergeant at Arms.

“Instead of seriously considering my suggestions, (the SAA has) tried to ruin my reputation,” Pole complained.

via Macs’ Last Stand on Capitol Hill.

GSN loved him, too.

He may have merely been a charmer. But I look forward to hearing his defense.

High-hatted medical writers forget government, Big Pharma evils

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Science writers, several of whom are flogging their entries into the genre I hereby dub, science backlash, complain that mainstream research is becoming a tough sell, as consumers re-discover the efficacy of folk medicine and a healthy diet.

But one Knight Science Fellow at MIT (I thought these lucky bastards were barred from publishing while doing their $60K fellowships) identifies the real reason that people don’t trust mainstream medicine:

the real source of this irrational behavior lies not in public ignorance but rather in an understandable reaction against the problems with our health care system and the documented abuses and profiteering of some pharmaceutical companies.

via: Slate

Here’s a a link to one Globe op-ed that got me thinking about this issue:

I was astounded…to read recently, in a popular newsletter for pediatricians, a column by a pediatrician stating that he would not recommend the vaccine to his patients. His arguments were that the illness was relatively mild and the vaccine might not be safe.

via: Boston Globe

Also, check out: Book review: A coffee enema for a health writer « Boston Health News.

Rossellini shows there is nothing sexier than nature

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I enjoyed a chat this afternoon with two of my wonderful neighborhood pals, in a suitably natural setting: beside Pine Tree Brook in Milton. I was telling my friends about this:

Isabella Rossellini talked with Tom Ashbrook yesterday about her series of 18 shorts, Green Porno. It’s a great interview about these gorgeous little pieces, which feature simple sets and cool, paper costumes.

Five hundred magazine covers — Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair. Famous screen roles — “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “30 Rock.” Famous parents — Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini. Famous lovers — David Lynch, Martin Scorsese.

Now Isabella Rossellini has taken her talents, humor, and iconoclasm to the sex lives of the animal kingdom.

Click here to see the Sundance page with Rossellini’s sexy science videos.

As for whether these are NSFW, well, I don’t know what to tell you.