An article in the New York Times reminds us that, especially with the way people consume information today, a scientific, evidence-based recommendation is not sufficient to change a policy.  A well-constructed PR campaign is also required.

See:  Mammogram Math regarding the recent brouhaha that resulted from a recommendation to reduce mammogram screening frequency in not-at-risk populations.

From Op-Ed Contributor – Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think – NYTimes.com

Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.

Notice that the children are more likely to use the yellow block. I wonder how powerful the effect is and if it varies much from baby to baby or at different ages or gestational lengths.

Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals. In a well-known experiment, adults saw a video of several people tossing a ball to one another. The experimenter told them to count how many passes particular people made. In the midst of this, a person in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the middle of the video. A surprising number of adults, intent on counting, didn’t even seem to notice the unexpected gorilla.

…

Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting– a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.

Interesting in how these generalities play out to different extents in adults as to how goal-oriented they are, being explorative or exploitative.

More recently, researchers determined that the spleen is like an elaborate wetlands, a Mississippi bayou for filtering and freshening the blood. In other organs, blood flows through an interconnected mesh of increasingly narrow arteries, veins and capillaries. The spleen, by contrast, has a so-called noncapillary circulatory system: as the blood flows in, it is dumped into puddle-like sinusoids, and to get back out it must squeeze between cells. That dumping and squeezing help filter out blood-borne parasites, aging blood cells too brittle for compression and the little oxidized pellets, the BB’s, with which red blood cells are often pocked. The spleen has often been called a graveyard for red blood cells, but it is more of a recycling center, for the iron and other components are plucked out of the cells and used to stock new hemoglobin cages.

Filtration, cannibalization, and now — serious monocyte cultivation. In the new study, the researchers began by looking at monocytes, the largest of the body’s white blood cells. “It was recognized that these cells are the major repair workers after a heart attack,” Dr. Nahrendorf said. “They remove dead muscle cells, they start rebuilding stable scar tissue, they stimulate the generation of new blood vessels.”

via Basics – Finally, the Spleen Gets Some Respect – NYTimes.com.

Not just for black bile anymore…

The typical human is home to a vast array of microbes. If you were to count them, you’d find that microbial cells outnumber your own by a factor of 10. On a cell-by-cell basis, then, you are only 10 percent human. For the rest, you are microbial. (Why don’t you see this when you look in the mirror? Because most of the microbes are bacteria, and bacterial cells are generally much smaller than animal cells. They may make up 90 percent of the cells, but they’re not 90 percent of your bulk.)

This much has been known for a long time. Yet it’s only now, with the revolution in biotechnology, that we’re able to do detailed studies of which microbes are there, which genes they have, and what they’re doing. We’re just at the start, and there are far more questions than answers. But already, the results are astonishing, and the implications profound.

Even on your skin, the diversity of bacteria is prodigious. If you were to have your hands sampled, you’d probably find that each fingertip has a distinct set of residents; your palms probably also differ markedly from each other, each home to more than 150 species, but with fewer than 20 percent of the species the same. And if you’re a woman, odds are you’ll have more species than the man next to you. Why should this be? So far, no one knows.

via Microbes ‘R’ Us – Olivia Judson Blog – NYTimes.com.

An interesting article on the continuing discoveries of the inner life of the human body.  Of particular interest:

Moreover, whereas humans are extremely similar to one another at the level of the genome, the microbiome appears to differ markedly from one person to the next.

and

Diet has some effect: a diet rich in sugars and fats reduces the diversity of gut bacteria, and shifts the balance towards those that are more efficient at extracting energy. Start eating more plants and you can shift the balance back, and increase the diversity of your gut microbes.

and

First, during your lifetime, your bacteria can change their genes even though you cannot change yours….It may be that gut bacteria evolve in response to short-term changes in the environment, especially exposure to food-borne diseases. They may thus act as an evolving supplement to the immune system.

…Because bacteria can evolve so fast, it may be that some of what we think of as human evolution — like the ability to digest new diets that accompanied the invention of agriculture — is actually bacterial evolution.