But the disaster for any individual science writer may not be so bad for the person on the other end–the one reading about science. Twenty-five years ago, a reader who wanted to keep up with developments in science didn’t have much choice beyond the coverage in the local paper. But now it’s possible to read stories online from all over the world.

This change in technology, from paper to Internet, may mean that our collective hunger for news about science can be met by fewer science writers. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be a demand for good local science writing–a demand that will come from both local and international audiences. But the precise number of science writers left in 10 years will not be decided by a technocrat at the National Science Foundation.

Let’s imagine that indeed all science journalists around the world spontaneously combusted, leaving behind the bloggers to write about science. Instead of people who research and report articles on a range of subjects, a network of experts would collaborate do the job. Advances in climate research handled by climatologists; advances in studies on spiders handled by arachnologists; and so on.

Will

A more realistic question is this: how many of the millions of people who read about science in magazines and newspapers will shift their attention over to blogs written by scientists?

I think there could be a modest shift at best. We can’t know for sure what a world of science bloggers would look like. But we do know what a world of proto-bloggers looks like. Before scientists could blog, they wrote reviews for magazines like Scientific American. Scientific American has since moved to a mix of stories–some written by journalists, and some written by scientists but then edited by non-scientists and then illustrated and designed by professionals. Today, there are still some magazines that capture that proto-blogger spirit. But they have very modest readerships. American Scientist, for example, has a circulation of 144,000.

You can’t write a story like this with a bit of embedded code. You can’t write it after spending half an hour reading over a paper in Geophysical Research Letters. You have to go to Cooper Island and stay there, you have to read and talk, you have to write and rewrite.

Frey couldn’t have written the story without back-up: an organization that paid for his plane tickets, that employed editors who helped him make the story better and fact-checkers to search for errors and photographers to add arresting images. The story benefited from being printed in ink on paper–a medium that lets you read several thousand words without feeling as if your eyes are going to fall out of your head. To get the ink on millions of pages, Frey also depended on people running massive printing presses. He depended on the people who sold subscriptions to the paper and wooed advertisers into buying ads. An army stood behind him.

I for one want to read stories like “George Divoky’s Planet” in the future. I wouldn’t mind writing a few of them myself. But if we must say goodbye to the old networks that made these stories possible, we won’t get to read them unless new networks rise to take their place. I don’t know what a new network would look like. They might be slightly retooled versions of the newspapers and magazines we see on the newsstand and online today. Or perhaps writers will end up working as entrepreneurs, selling their stories for all to read on Kindles

Watching the testosterone crash in anxious men who lose a contest.

The marriage was not particularly happy for Sophia. She'd grown up in a cosmopolitan, aristocratic world, and after marrying Tolstoy, she had to live on a rural estate where her husband lived almost like a peasant. His house was extraordinarily simple, with no upholstered furniture and no carpets on the floor. He even wore peasant clothes, when he wasn't entertaining guests.

But for Tolstoy, the early years of his marriage were some of the happiest of his life. The regularity of married life let him settle down to work more steadily than ever before. And in the midst of that happiness, he wrote his first masterpiece, War and Peace (1863). It was the longest and most ambitious novel he'd ever written, and he was only willing to attempt it because he now had his wife to work as his secretary. When he would scribble corrections all over a rough draft, she was the only person who could decipher what his corrections said. Even he couldn't read his own handwriting. She ultimately copied by hand the 1400-page manuscript for War and Peace (1863) four times.

While he was working on War and Peace, free love was becoming fashionable among the Russian upper classes, and everyone started to think of marriage as old-fashioned and silly. Tolstoy was disgusted. In 1872, he heard about a woman who had thrown herself in front of a train after the end of an affair, and he went to view the body at the train station. He never forgot what he saw that day, and it gave him an idea for a novel about a woman whose life is destroyed by adultery.

That novel was Anna Karenina (1877), in which the story of the romance between Konstantin Levin and a young woman named Kitty was based almost entirely on Tolstoy's own marriage. When it was published, most critics said Anna Karenina was inferior to War and Peace, but it is now considered one of the greatest novels ever written. It begins, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Fish Tale Has DNA Hook: Students Find Bad Labels








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Migration of Doctors and Nurses from Developing to Developed Countries

Is the "brain drain" of doctors and nurses from poor to rich countries hurting health care in those developing lands? Is the massive inflow of donor dollars to pay for HIV/AIDS treatment in poor countries diverting resources away from other health concerns in those already underserved places?

Economist Michael Clemens from the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., suggested that fixes, such as forcing Western nations to stop recruiting or hiring these health professionals, would be unwise.

There is no evidence that the international movement of health professionals, in and of itself, causes substantial degradation of health systems in Africa, said Clemens. That movement, and weak health systems, are caused by much deeper problems that are not solved by stopping movement alone

He's a breath of fresh air," said Amir Attaran, a biologist and lawyer at the University of Ottawa who has accused the W.H.O., the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria of squandering millions on old, useless drugs.

"You need to talk tough," he added. "There has been absolute incoherence on fundamental issues."

Dr. Attaran, a longtime W.H.O. critic, also praised Dr. Kochi for being one of the first at the agency to realize that AIDS could be treated in Africa with standard regimens of cheap drugs and simple blood tests, instead of Western-level care costing tens of thousands of dollars a year.

In the 90 days before his deadline expired, Dr. Kochi met with generic drug-makers, many of whom are trying to shift from duplicating Western drugs to researching new ones. He told them, he said, that they would face a public relations fiasco if they made malaria worse.

Caroline Jansen, a member of the family that owns Dafra Pharma, a Belgian company that supplies about 25 percent of Africa's private market for malaria drugs, said her company had agreed to stop selling monotherapy and was developing pills mixing artemisinin with lumefantrine, amodiaquine and other drugs.

Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative Oklahoma Republican who took up malaria as a cause and has demanded that taxpayer dollars be spent on drugs and nets rather than consultants, said he was "very impressed" on meeting Dr. Kochi.

"He's not abrasive compared to me," Senator Coburn, who is also a doctor, said. "A million people are going to die this year. What's more important — having a politically correct strategy or a public health strategy that works

The war on malaria — in theory more winnable than the war on AIDS because a cure exists — is instead being lost, Dr. Kochi says. In the 1960's, malaria was considered potentially eradicable: DDT and chloroquine, a synthetic form of quinine, had been invented, and much of the tropics were under colonial rulers who, whatever their other faults, were good at killing mosquitoes.

Since then, DDT has been withdrawn because of its environmental damage, chloroquine and its successor, Fansidar, have become all but useless and the health systems in most of Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America have collapsed.

In January, he attacked the drug industry, naming 18 companies that were selling artemisinin in single-pill form, and giving them 90 days to stop. Monotherapy encourages resistance, and if artemisinin was lost, he said, "it will be at least 10 years before a drug that good is discovered — basically, we're dead."

If the companies refused to conform, he said, he would disrupt sales of all their drugs by getting the W.H.O. to refuse to certify any drug they made for poor countries

At the 2006
International AIDS Conference, former U.S. President Bill Clinton suggested that
HIV/AIDS programs would end up helping all other health initiatives. "If you first
develop the health infrastructure throughout the whole country, particularly in
Africa, to deal with AIDS," Clinton argued, "you will increase the infrastructure
of dealing with maternal and child health, malaria, and TB. Then I think you have
to look at nutrition, water, and sanitation. All these things, when you build it
up, you'll be helping to promote economic development and alleviate poverty."

But the experience of bringing ARV
treatment to Haiti argues against Clinton's analysis. The past several years have
witnessed the successful provision of antiretroviral treatment to more than 5,000
needy Haitians, and between 2002 and 2006, the prevalence of HIV in the country
plummeted from six percent to three percent. But during the same period, Haiti actually
went backward on every other health indicator

The revolution started at an international
AIDS meeting in Vancouver, Canada, in 1996. Scientists presented exhilarating evidence
that a combination of anti-HIV drugs (known as antiretrovirals, or ARVs) could dramatically
reduce the spread of the virus inside the bodies of infected people and make it
possible for them to live long lives. Practically overnight, tens of thousands of
infected men and women in wealthy countries started the new treatments, and by mid-1997,
the visible horrors of AIDS had almost disappeared from the United States and Europe.

But the drugs, then priced at about
$14,000 per year and requiring an additional $5,000 a year for tests and medical
visits, were unaffordable for most of the world's HIV-positive population. So between
1997 and 2000, a worldwide activist movement slowly developed to address this problem
by putting pressure on drug companies to lower their prices or allow the generic
manufacture of the new medicines.

Dr. Thomas Insel, the top psychiatric researcher at the National Institute for Mental Health, recently reported that more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may die from suicide than from combat in the wars. Although mental health challenges among veterans have been well documented, Dr. Insel pointed out that these problems may be especially acute among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans due to extended deployments and decreased leave time. These additional pressures are taking a powerful toll.

As New Hampshire veterans, we are gravely concerned by the looming crisis of suicide among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. We are further disturbed by the fact that our two U.S. senators, John Sununu and Judd Gregg, have refused to support increased mental health care for veterans. For example, they both voted against a 2005 measure to provide $500 million per year specifically for veterans' mental health care. Now that the troubling rate of mental illness among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is known, we urge our senators to change course and stand up for our veterans.

Early identification of personnel with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder may lead to a smaller burden of the disorder in the years to come if appropriate and timely treatments are provided. In this study, the prevalence of new onset self reported symptoms or diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder varied from 1% to 10% from baseline to follow-up.

Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1992, my colleagues and I reported that families of veterans with PTSD were more likely to suffer domestic violence than the families of veterans without PTSD. In addition, the study found that children of the veterans with PTSD manifested significantly higher levels of behavioral and emotional problems than children of veterans without PTSD, and that more than one third of veterans with PTSD had a child with behavioral or emotional problems.