Question: What do you get if you place some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the fields of technology innovation, risk and sustainability in the same room for two days? Answer: one whopping headache! Not because of the confusion and cacophony, but because of the overwhelming volume of information, ideas and insights that emerge. [...]
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Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. It turns out that the NFL Players Association and the owners have reached an agreement and the 2011 NFL football season will go on. And, college football began last week. Stop crying, America! We will still have something to do over the weekends this fall. It has all worked [...]
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Blockbuster movies aren’t usually noted for their scientific accuracy and education potential. But since its release last week, Steven Soderburgh’s Contagion seems to be challenging the assumption that Hollywood can’t do science. The other day I posted a piece about how director Steven Soderburgh and screenwriter Scott Z Burns’ attention to detail and plausibility left [...]
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The September 2011 edition of the Risk Science Center newsletter is now available. Contents: Message from the Director, New Faculty Join the Risk Science Center, A World of Surprises, 2011 Risk Science Symposium, Risk Science Summer Fellows, Risk Science Unplugged and Risk Science on the Web
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Like many others this weekend, I watched Steven Soderbergh’s epidemic disaster movie Contagion. Unlike many other viewers I suspect, I came away feeling surprisingly optimistic. Not about the threat of a devastating pandemic, but over Soderbergh’s informed and plausible treatment of the subject, and the eventual triumph of humanity over adversity. Contagion topped the US [...]
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In the last few days, the temperature in Ann Arbor plummeted 35 degrees. On Friday, September 2, 2011, the high temperature was a balmy and humid 95oF. On Monday, September 5, 2011, the high was a (seemingly) chilly 60oF. After this change, I started to feel a slight scratchiness in the back of my throat, [...]
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In researching this blog post, I never anticipated the breadth of public health-oriented movies that have been made in the last three decades or so. Stanford University even offers a freshman seminar course entitled “Infectious Disease: Fact or Fiction” which asks students to spend a semester picking apart the accuracy and appropriateness of the science [...]
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In a recent letter to the journal Nature (Nature 476; 399), Hermann Stamm of the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Health and Consumer Protection (JRC-IHCP) defended the need to define engineered nanomaterials for regulatory purposes. The letter, titled “Nanomaterials should be defined”, was a direct response to my earlier commentary in Nature “Don’t [...]
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Last week’s ACS webinar on nanoscale science and engineering which I moderated has been posted on YouTube, and can be watched below, or by following this link. This was a very broad introduction to nanoscale science and engineering by Paul – Director of California NanoSystems Institute and editor of ACS Nano. As Dexter Johnson wrote [...]
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Okay, it’s official – I am fabulous at procrastinating. I have an apartment to pack, furniture to put into storage, and what seems like an endless pile of forms (courtesy of the US Government) to deal with over the next week or so. But rather than implementing my ‘one box and one form at time’ [...]
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New Plates on the Table: The Harvard Healthy Eating Plate
by Colleen Davis on September 24, 2011
Colleen Davis is a Master of Public Health Candidate for 2012 at UMSPH, and holds a B.S. in Biology from Hillsdale College. She is a member of the Environmental Health Sciences Department, specializing in Human Nutrition and Dietetics. In the field of nutrition, I’m constantly wading through conflicting advice and recommendations. On any given day, [...]
Tagged as: Harvard School of Public Health, Healthy Eating Plate, MyPlate, MyPyramid
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