There’s nothing like a good fright to spark people into action. Tell someone that they need to have a triple bypass and they’re likely to finally get around to exercise and healthy eating; diagnose a person with lung cancer and they might finally stop smoking. A good enough scare can get people to stop drinking, [...]
Being an Iranian nuclear scientist has become a high-risk occupation. The recent death of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the 32 year-old deputy director of one of Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities, brings the total of assassinations to five among what was a small group of people to begin with. There are two aspects to this act – [...]
North American wolves were hunted to near-extinction because they preyed on livestock. In recent years, after decades of recovery efforts, wolves have again become plentiful enough in some areas that predation is again a concern – to stave off ranchers’ demands to hunt wolves in order to reduce the numbers of lost livestock, meat is [...]
In the first radiological news story of 2012 Bed, Bath, & Beyond announced on January 12 that it had received a shipment of steel tissue holders (manufactured in India) that were contaminated with radioactive cobalt-60. As of this writing it is not quite certain exactly where the Co-60 came from, although there are some guesses (more [...]
My kids look perfectly normal – in my humble opinion maybe even a tad better than normal. This became an issue, actually, in the months following the 2002 arrest of Jose Padilla on charges he was plotting to set off a “dirty bomb.” How it became an issue is that I was interviewed by a [...]
Imagine trying to describe the world without using units. As I write today I’m watching football on TV – I’d never really paid much attention before, but now that the topic is on my mind I am amazed by the welter of units being bandied about by the commentators. Describing a player as “big and [...]
Some of you might remember a short-lived television series called Dark Angel, which aired on the Fox network for two seasons (2000-2002). The series’ backstory included the premise that a terrorist group set off a high-altitude nuclear burst that destroyed most of the United States’ electronic and communications infrastructure, plunging the nation into chaos. Recently, [...]
One of my favorite movies is Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, and one of my favorite scenes is at the Art Institute of Chicago. Beginning with a close-up of a bunch of dots of paint, the camera zooms out to show, first, a low-resolution face and, eventually, a painting (“Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La [...]
By Dr. Y In 1987, scrap metal scavengers in Goiania, Brazil, a city of about a million people, found a strange machine in an abandoned cancer clinic. Salvaging and dismantling the device, they found a small and enigmatic metal cylinder that aroused their curiosity – opening it up they found a fine blue powder. What [...]
This last April I traveled with two colleagues to Japan to help train physicians from the Tokushukai Medical Assistance Team (TMAT) - we gave a total of 8 lectures to over 1200 physicians and emergency responders during our visit, discussing how to safely care for patients who might have been exposed to radiation or who might [...]