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GM debate will never be resolved unless the public is consulted properly. The UK Council for Science and Technology recently called on prime minister David Cameron to reassess EU rules on GM crops. Two days later the Observer published an editorial bluntly declaring: “There’s no choice; we must grow GM crops now”. There is a high risk that a new round of the shouting match that mired the debate 15 years ago will begin again, with little real progress.

But research since the first failure of the debate on GM crops in the EU suggests there is a better way. Our GM-Futuros project has recently explored the GM debates in depth at national and local levels in India, Mexico and Brazil – highlighting some stark lessons for the EU and UK. Both of the recent UK publications call for a positive move towards GM agricultural technology. Troubled technologies Some technology stirs up emotional opposition more than others, and this happens differently across cultures. Public interests Engagement done properly Building trust. Oui, la publication de Séralini est un poison. Même retiré, ses effets toxiques pour l’expertise scientifique persistent. Le contexte Les études scientifiques et les expériences de terrain confirment la sécurité sanitaire des OGM.

Plutôt que de débattre de leur projet politique agricole, les anti-OGM poursuivent leurs allégations de dangerosité des OGM, ce qui est bien plus payant médiatiquement. Le décryptage politique complet du dossier OGM est présenté dans mon livre récent « OGM, la question politique ». Ainsi, le groupe anti-OGM de Séralini et collaborateurs avait affirmé à tort la toxicité du maïs NK603 sur des rats. Pour rappel, lire la marée de réfutation de Séralini et coll. Cette publication a été logiquement retirée par le journal Food and Chemical Toxicology en novembre 2013. Le lobby écologiste obsédé par le retrait de documents qui lui déplaisent Il a ainsi demandé (en vain) le retrait par Food and Chemical Toxicology d’un article d’un groupe chinois (Zhu et coll.) paru en même temps que celui de Seralini et coll. Minimum pricing for alcohol helps poorer, heavy drinkers.

When the UK Government abandoned its proposal to introduce minimum unit pricing for alcohol in July 2013, it argued there was a lack of concrete evidence that the policy would reduce the harm caused by alcohol without penalising responsible drinkers. In research published this week in the Lancet, the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group show minimum unit pricing avoids penalising moderate drinkers on low incomes and would contribute to the reduction of health inequalities. Minimum unit pricing sets a threshold below which a unit of alcohol cannot be sold to consumers. Under a 45p price, a pint of beer containing two units would need to cost at least 90p and a bottle of wine containing nine units at least £4.05. Since heavier drinkers typically pay less per unit for their alcohol than moderate drinkers, and of course buy more units in the first place, this means that heavier drinkers would be affected the most by minimum unit pricing.

The impact on the poor Reducing health inequalities. The Standard American Diet in 3 Simple Charts. US obesity and diabetes rates are among the globe's very highest. Why? On her blog, the NYU nutritionist and food-politics expert Marion Nestle recently pointed (hat-tip, RealFood.org) to this telling chart on how we spend our grocery money, from the USDA's Amber Waves publication: So, we do a pretty good job eating enough potatoes.

But the healthier, more brightly colored vegetables like kale and carrots, no so much. We spend four times the amount on refined grains the USDA thinks is proper, and about a fifth of the target expenditure in whole grains. That chart deals with at-home expenditures. And while the article doesn't offer comparable data to the above at-home chart about expenditures outside the home, it does deliver evidence that our eating out habits are pretty dire as well: Why do we eat such crap food? But it never pauses top consider the food industry's vast marketing budget. Dr. Lester Grinspoon on David Brooks' Pot Takedown. The Harvard professor emeritus and author of Marihuana Reconsidered responds to the New York Times columnist’s anti-pot polemic.

Lester Grinspoon Last week the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece, “Weed Been There, Done That,” which slammed the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and other states and labeled users stupid at worst and indolent at best. Among other criticisms, he wrote that cannabis is “not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.” In making his case, Brooks cited long-debunked research and relied on old stereotypes that serious scholars discredited decades ago. One of the leading thinkers on the topic is Dr.

Lester Grinspoon, Harvard psychiatrist and author of the 1971 classic, Marihuana Reconsidered, an exhaustive study of the scientific, medical, cultural and legal arguments against the plant. Lester, how did you react to Brooks’ takedown of cannabis? Let’s start at the top. I like it both ways. The System of Rice Intensification. How to feed nine billion people, and feed them well.

Resource-intensive agriculture, despite its productivity, nevertheless has failed to feed the world’s current population, never mind the nine billion people expected by 2050. This system that currently fails both people and planet is ripe for revision. We need to be more ambitious, to go beyond simply producing more. We need to produce more of what’s good – not just cereal staples, but nutrition-dense foods – in ways that can prevent or even reverse land degradation, encourage biodiversity, conserve water, and allow the world’s poor more equal access to land, food, and markets than has historically been the case.

There is a significant “triple burden” of malnutrition. Some 850m people don’t have enough to eat. Perversely some 1.4 billion people are overweight, 600m of them obese. Both groups suffer from micronutrient malnutrition, a lack of key vitamins and minerals. And despite its failures, agriculture’s costs are high. More, but more of what? Seeing past the status quo. Silly ambulance call-outs are just the tip of the iceberg. We expect just as much from our ambulance services as we do from accident and emergency departments. But under-resourced and overstretched health systems mean ambulance staff are increasingly under pressure to deliver timely quality care.

They also feel the knock on effect of emergency department congestion, hospital overcrowding and escalating demand, and even recent reports in the UK that some patients were being forced to wait in ambulances for several hours before being seen. Calling an ambulance for non-urgent issue just adds more pressure to what could well be untenable in the near future. We’ve no doubt heard some of the incredible call-outs that ambulances sometimes publicise to deter people from calling for no reason.

They include cigarette smoke blown at a woman’s eye at a bar, a patient with a nosebleed and a call for help to get a ring off a finger. Most people show common sense But in reality, the majority of people show common sense and these are unusual. Deeper problem. Ly | Dreamshot's scatter chart of Per Capita Healthcare Spending vs. Average Life Expectancy <br> OECD Countries 2011. The Mysterious History Of 'Marijuana' : Code Switch.

Hide captionOne of the many, many forms of cannabis. "it was 3 a.m. "/via Flickr One of the many, many forms of cannabis. We've decided to take a weekly look at a word or phrase that's caught our attention, whether for its history, usage, etymology, or just because it has an interesting story. Marijuana has been intertwined with race and ethnicity in America since well before the word "marijuana" was coined. Throughout the 19th century, news reports and medical journal articles almost always use the plant's formal name, cannabis. A common version of the story of the criminalization of pot goes like this: Cannabis was outlawed because various powerful interests (some of which have economic motives to suppress hemp production) were able to craft it into a bogeyman in the popular imagination, by spreading tales of homicidal mania touched off by consumption of the dreaded Mexican "locoweed.

" Let's start with the race question. In 1937, U.S. The Turn Of The 20th Century. Big Snow Buffalo Lodge Closes For Good After Co-Owner Yoni David Is Shot. In the west wing of Bellevue Hospital, Yoni David sits dazed in a hospital bed. His shattered left arm is in what the doctor calls an elevation dressing, a cheesecloth-like tube that keeps his hand raised. He's been here since he was shot at the Bushwick/East Williamsburg DIY arts venue he co-managed, Big Snow Buffalo Lodge, last Wednesday.

He'll spend his 24th birthday--July 24th--in this bed. The hospital staff just weaned him from Morphine to Dilantin. As a result of the shooting, Yoni and his partners at Big Snow Buffalo Lodge--Jeremy Aquilino, RJ Gordon, and Daniel Arnes--have decided to end their run as one of north Brooklyn's DIY venues, this one known for everything from grungy rock to borderline acid-house, girded by an unpretentious, welcoming air. The team announced Big Snow's closure via Twitter Saturday. Concerns over heightened security, the safety of Big Snow patrons, and the stigma of the shooting all led to the decision. Many shouted in confusion. 03/06 > BE République Tchèque 28 > Une infirmière robotisée à domicile !

RobotiqueUne infirmière robotisée à domicile ! Une équipe scientifique internationale, composée de chercheurs tchèques [1], autrichiens [2], néerlandais [3], italiens [4] et estoniens [5], a mis au point un robot "infirmier" pouvant assister les personnes âgées ou les patients ayant subi une intervention chirurgicale. Robo M.D., de son nom, est capable de détecter la survenue d'un évènement anormal chez un individu, d'en évaluer la gravité et, si nécessaire, d'alerter les services médicaux compétents. Le système est en fait constitué de trois parties : un capteur, que la personne porte sur elle, une unité de contrôle qui reçoit et analyse les signaux envoyés par le capteur et le robot qui, sur commande de l'unité de contrôle, peut aller jusqu'à la chambre du patient et lui poser des questions préprogrammées afin d'évaluer son état de santé. Marijuana-revenue-by-states.jpg (Image JPEG, 864x1580 pixels)

Pourquoi tant de garçons? Demandez à l'Occident. - Un garçon fait de la gymnastique en Inde en 2010. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui - POURQUOI MANQUE-T-IL plus de 160 millions de femmes en Asie? La réponse est connue: c’est le résultat de la sélection du sexe des enfants à naître (en général, une échographie, suivie d’un avortement si le fœtus s’avère être de sexe féminin). Mais, au-delà de cela, les raisons expliquant ce fossé démographique dont la taille est proche de la moitié de la population américaine sont rarement bien comprises. Je ne les comprenais d’ailleurs pas moi-même avant d’écrire un livre sur le sujet. Je pensais que j’allais me concentrer sur la manière dont la discrimination sexuelle a perduré en dépit du développement économique. Publicité Dans certaines cultures, les garçons sont en charge de rituels importants liés aux funérailles et au culte des ancêtres. Toutefois, cela n’explique pas pourquoi la sélection du sexe s’est étendue au-delà des frontières religieuses et culturelles.

Lire la suite de l'article Devenez fan sur. How An Age-Old Chart Is Redefining Health Care. In a world where organ transplants and MRIs are commonplace, pediatric growth charts don’t sound very exciting. But after spending 30 illuminating minutes on the phone with Harvard researcher Dr. Isaac Kohane, a passionate intellectual who speaks with an infectious urgency, I’m a convert. “For everything from a rare brain tumor to common garden variety obesity, the growth chart is probably the single-most useful tool to monitor the growth of kids,” Kohane tells me.

And then he tells me something else. That with the advent of electronic medical records, the growth chart’s timeless utility has given way to the clumsy hand of clueless programmers, rather than doctors backed by smart designers. So Dr. Why Growth Charts Matter The growth chart is essentially a few line graphs on the same piece of paper. Even slight deviations from the norms are critical, as after the age of three, children follow very precise developmental trajectories. Why They Weren’t Fixed Already. How Much Hospitals Charge Medicare - Interactive Feature. Disparity in medical billing.