NewsTrust - Health - Most Recent Stories

Radiation: It's just what the doctor ordered | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

thebulletin.org - By Dawn Stover - May. 24 (Special Report) - "Thirty years ago, these sources accounted for approximately 15 percent of the public's total radiation exposure. Today, that figure has more than tripled, so that nearly 50 percent of the public's overall radiation exposure can be attributed to medical sources."

NewsTrust Rating: Not rated yet - See Info » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Well: Sleep Apnea Tied to Increased Cancer Risk

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Anahad O'connor - May. 21 (Opinion) - Two new studies associate a common disorder of sleep that causes pauses in breathing with a higher risk of cancer.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

With the Affordable Care Act Hanging by a Thread, It's Time for Single-Payer

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Pearl Korn - May. 21 (Opinion) - Co-written by Jonathan Stone While the Affordable Care Act is being deliberated in the Supreme Court -- with no decision expected until the end of June -- progressives and all other rational human beings should ramp up their efforts to build the movement

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Tailoring Treatments for Alcoholics

Mon, 21 May 2012 16:44:01 -0700

New York Times - May. 21 -

NewsTrust Rating: 2.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

How Crazy Is Wall Street, New York Times?

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By Edward Jay Epstein - May. 20 (Opinion) - The New York Times published an opinion piece on May 12, 2012, concerning the question of whether the rich, from a moral standpoint, are good or bad. The story reported, “A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are ‘clinical psychopaths’ and that they exhibit an ‘unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.’ ” The vivid term “clinical psychopath” brings to mind the berserk buzz-saw-wielding investment banker played by Christian Bale in the film American Psycho. Since some 3.9 million people work in the financial-services industry, a clinically diagnosed horde of lunatics numbering almost 400,000 people would certainly be a matter of public concern, though it might only confirm some journalists’ view of American capitalism.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

This week in the War on Women: Damn broads are greedy, lying whores

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Kos - By rss@dailykos.com (Kaili Joy Gray) - May. 20 (Opinion) - Praise great Gaia for the awesome perks of being a woman! Sure, we women may have once been second-class citizens, but ever since the radical feminists destroyed the patriarchal structure of our society and totally ended sexism forever, usurping all the levers of power in the public and private sector, it's been a non-stop gravy train of government handouts and free rides, as we enjoy our superior status in society by lording it over the oppressed menfolk. Am I right? No, of course not, but that's the mindset of the Republican Party, as it continues to wage war against women's rights and privileges. Damn broads have too many rights nowadays, and those excessive rights infringe on the more-important-rights of Catholic bishops who think women's health care restricts their religious liberty; the rights of men who abuse their wives and girlfriends because sometimes that's the only way to keep them in line; and the rights of Republican taxpayers to ensure that their money is not spent on ...

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Pacific Ocean Is Dying

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - May. 18 (Special Report) - Just prior to the Supermoon of March 18th, 2011, the world witnessed a natural and manmade disaster of epic proportions. What transpired off the coast of Honshu Island, Japan on March 11 has forever altered the planet and irremediably affected the global environment.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Howard Rheingold - May. 13 (Opinion) - Use the following methods and tools to protect yourself from toxic bad info. Use them and then pass them along to others. Promote the notion that more info literacy is a practical answer to the growing info pollution. Be the change you want to see. Although the Web undermines authority (by enabling anybody to publish), authority is still useful as one clue to credibility in a detective hunt that accounts for many other clues. Claims to authority, however, need to be questioned. I might add credibility to my assessment if a source is a verified professor at a known institution of higher learning, an authentic MD or PhD, but I would not subtract it from people without credentials whose expertise seems authentic. If you are going to grant credibility to people whose expertise is based on being a professor of something, make sure that assertion is accurate. Don't stop at simply verifying that the claim to be a professor is valid if you are looking for scientific credibility. The next step is to use the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index that derives a score from the scholar's publications, citations by other scholars, grants, honors, and awards. If you want to get even more serious, download a free copy of Publish or Perish software, which analyzes scientific citations from Google Scholar according to multiple criteria. Or use the h-index to calculate how many times other scientists have cited a particular source. Again, don't trust just one source; triangulate.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

How the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Nieman Journalism Lab - By Justin Ellis - May. 13 (News Report) - Howard Rheingold isn’t too concerned about whether Google is making us stupid or if Facebook is making us lonely. Those kind of criticisms, Rheingold says, miscalculate the ability humans have to change their behavior, particularly when it comes to how we use social media and the Internet more broadly. “If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool,” Rheingold said Thursday. Rheingold was visiting the MIT Media Lab to talk about his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which examines how people can use the Internet not just to better themselves, but also society as a whole. Rheingold has a longer online history than most, going back to The WELL, one of the first online forums back in the 1980s. Ever since writing about that experience, Rheingold has developed a habit for dropping the kind of book that not just probes what it means to be online, but charts what that means for all of us.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Mitt Romney, the Unlikable Presidential Candidate

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By Michael Tomasky - May. 13 (Opinion) - It’s been a long time since the country elected a man as personally unappealing as Mitt Romney. Will Americans overlook their deeply held conviction that he’s a jerk? Very few votes are going to be cast on the basis of what Mitt Romney did or didn’t do to John Lauber in 1965. So that, per se, isn’t Romney’s problem. But this is: The story lands as another brick on pile of evidence amassing that he’s just a disagreeable human being. A few days ago I wrote about Barack Obama’s biggest problem, which is that despite all the many areas in which Americans rate him higher than Romney, the one on which they give Romney the edge happens to be pretty important: handling the economy. Now we get to Romney’s biggest problem. The likability factor. He ain’t got it. And he ain’t got much of a way to get it.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Role Reversal: Why TV Is Replacing Movies As Elite Entertainment

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Hollywood Economist - By Edward Jay Epstein - May. 13 (News Analysis) - Once upon a time, over a generation ago, The television set was commonly called the “boob tube” and looked down on by elites as a purveyors of mind-numbing entertainment. Movie theaters, on the other hand, were considered a venue for, if not art, more sophisticated dramas and comedies. Not any more. The multiplexes are now primarily a venue for comic-book inspired action and fantasy movies, whereas television, especially the pay and cable channels, is increasingly becoming a venue for character-driven adult programs, such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire. This role reversal, rather than a momentary fluke, proceeds directly from the new economic realities of the entertainment business. Consider what happened to Pay-TV. Back in the 1970s, HBO provided something home viewers could not get elsewhere: movies uninterrupted by commercials. It was, as a HBO executive put it, “the only game in town,” so its subscribers paid a monthly fee, no matter how little or often they watch it, to their local cable provider who in turn forked over a share to HBO. As the cable systems grew, so did HBO. By 2010, it had (including its Cinemax unit) over 40 million subscribers, and just the monthly fees produced cash flow of over $1.5 billion a year. Getting new movies was no problem. HBO simply licensed them from a few major studios for an exclusive period (which began a few months after they were released on video and DVD) in so-called “output deals.” To continue to harvest this immense bounty, HBO had merely to stop subscribers from ending their service.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By William Deresiewicz - May. 12 (Opinion) - is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

JP Morgan trader blows $13bn hole in bank

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jill Treanor, Simon Neville - May. 12 (News Report) - Shockwaves spread across markets after $2bn trading loss at US bank, which had campaigned to water down regulations The City trader at the centre of a $2bn trading loss at JP Morgan Chase had returned to his home in Paris on Friday as the repercussions of the loss spread across the markets. Some $13bn was wiped off the value of America's largest bank after it admitted the scale of the trading activities of Bruno Iksil – nicknamed the London Whale for his bullish trading – and his colleagues in the bank's little known "chief investment office". The US Securities and Exchange financial watchdog was said to have begun reviewing the losses, the rating agency Standard & Poor's revised its outlook on the bank from stable to negative and Fitch Ratings downgraded it from A-plus to AA-minus. Contacted by the Guardian, Iksil was reluctant to comment. He was thought to be in Paris and said: "I cannot talk about it. You will have to speak to the bank's representatives." The banker, who is ...

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Global push to guarantee health coverage leaves U.S. behind

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Noam N. Levey - May. 12 (News) - Even as Americans debate whether to scrap President Obama's healthcare law and its promise of guaranteed health coverage, many far less affluent nations are moving in the opposite direction — to provide medical insurance to all citizens. China, after years of underfunding healthcare, is on track to complete a three-year, $124-billion initiative projected to cover more than 90% of the nation's residents.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge, in our native language

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - By Bangor University via Science Daily - May. 08 (Research) - Psychologists believe that they have glimpsed for the first time, a process that takes place deep within our unconscious brain, where primal reactions interact with higher mental processes. They have identified a reaction to negative language inputs which shuts down unconscious processing. The psychologists extrapolate this from their most recent findings working with bilingual people.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The PolitiFact guide to Medicare attack lines

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

PolitiFact - By Angie Drobnic Holan, Louis Jacobson - May. 06 (Fact Check) - Barack Obama has slashed Medicare by $500 billion. Mitt Romney and House Republicans want to end Medicare. And a new board is going to ration care so Washington can waste more money. Believe any of that? You shouldn’t. But it’s what the political ads likely will be saying between now and Election Day in November. We have some advice for voters sorting out the claims: Believe nothing you hear in a 30-second TV ad. Here are a few facts about Medicare: • It’s the government-run health insurance for Americans over age 65. • It’s a Canada-style, single-payer system. Liberals love that; conservatives don’t. • It has approximately 50 million people on its rolls. • That 50 million will grow to 80 million as baby boomers retire. Paying for that will be a challenge. Those realities about Medicare have sparked a full-fledged political brawl for 2012.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Scientists show how a gene duplication helped our brains become 'human'

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - By The Scripps Research Institute - May. 03 (Research) - ScienceDaily (May 3, 2012) A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has shown that an extra copy of a brain-development gene, which appeared in our ancestors' genomes about 2.4 million years ago, allowed maturing neurons to migrate farther and develop more connections.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Op-Ed Columnist: How Chemicals Change Us

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - May. 02 (Opinion) - Scientists warn that chemicals we’re exposed to every day can cause genital deformities and even breast cancer. Is our government paying attention?

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why Is the Conservative Brain More Fearful? The Alternate Reality Right-Wingers Inhabit Is Terrifying

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Joshua Holland - May. 02 (News Analysis) - Consider for a moment just how terrifying it must be to live life as a true believer on the right. Reality is scary enough, but the alternative reality inhabited by people who watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele Bachmann isn't a joke must be nothing less than horrifying. Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

US sees sharp rise in newborns with opiate withdrawal - BBC News

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:56:42 -0700

BBC News - Apr. 30 - BBC NewsUS sees sharp rise in newborns with opiate withdrawalBBC NewsThe number of babies born in the US showing symptoms of opiate withdrawal increased threefold in the 10 years up to 2009, a medical study has found. The number of pregnant women testing positive for illegal or legal opiates increased fivefold in the ...Number of US newborns with drug addictions triplesThe Seattle TimesMore US babies born to mothers who abuse painkillersChicago TribuneNumber of painkiller-addicted newborns soarsUSA TODAYKY3 -Fox Newsall 190 news articles »

NewsTrust Rating: 4.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Art of Getting Net Smart

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Shel Israel, Howard Rheingold - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - Howard Rheingold is a teacher, thinker, futurist and grower of the tallest sunflowers I have ever seen. He’s one the most profound thinkers of what happens online and how it changes the world. Just about every ten years, he checks in with a new book that seems to chart the course for the next decade or so. In 1993, he wrote The Virtual Community , which portended a world where people would share friendship and information with each other online, just as the first browser for the worldwide web was being popularized.

NewsTrust Rating: Not rated yet - See Info » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Stony Brook University - By Michael Restivo, Arnout van de Rijt - Apr. 29 (Research) - We test the effects of informal rewards in online peer production. Using a randomized, experimental design, we assigned editing awards or “barnstars” to a subset of the 1% most productive Wikipedia contributors. Comparison with the control group shows that receiving a barnstar increases productivity by 60% and makes contributors six times more likely to receive additional barnstars from other community members, revealing that informal rewards significantly impact individual effort.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

'Junk DNA' can sense viral infection: Promising tool in the battle between pathogen and host

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - By American Friends of Tel Aviv University - Apr. 24 (Research) - ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2012) Once considered unimportant "junk DNA," scientists have learned that non-coding RNA (ncRNA) -- RNA molecules that do not translate into proteins -- play a crucial role in cellular function.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Poor economy worsens Social Security's finances

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Stephen Ohlemacher, Ricardo Alonso Zaldivar - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - High energy prices and an economy that has been slow to rebound are worsening Social Security's finances, shortening the life of the trust funds that support program by three years, the government said Monday.

NewsTrust Rating: 1.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Gulf Oil Spill: BP Execs Escape Punishment as Fallout From Disaster Continues To Impact Sea life

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 23 (Special Report) - Two years since the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, we look at its impact on the Gulf of Mexico's residents and wildlife even as no BP officials have faced criminal prosecution for the disaster. Eleven workers died when the Deepwater Horizon well exploded and almost five million barrels of crude oil leaked into the ocean before the well was plugged after 51 days. BP maintains the Gulf is rapidly recovering thanks to the company's efforts, but Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail describes how scientists say shrimp, fish and crabs in the Gulf of Mexico have been deformed by oil and chemicals released during the spill clean-up effort. Meanwhile, ProPublica’s environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten says the company failed to learn from past mistakes that could have helped avoid the explosion. He is the author of the new book, “Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster.” [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

NewsTrust Rating: 4.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer