DailyDirt: Winning A Nobel Prize And Thinking Differently

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

A fairly sizable list of Nobel laureates suffer from Nobel disease -- a phenomenon in which respected scientists publicly espouse somewhat crazy ideas. Perhaps just being famous also causes this affliction...? Or maybe there should be more research on this topic, worthy of an Ig Nobel award. In any case, here are a few links on some Nobel prize winners that demonstrate these people are still human.

• Nobel laureate James Watson, famous for eludicating the helical structure of DNA, recently auctioned off his medal for over $4 million. The winning bid came from Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov who says he'll return the medal to Watson. [url]
• Nobel laureates in Chemistry seem to like giving advice to others. Ada Yonath had some sage advice: "Go into science if you are curious and have passion for it. If not, find something else." [url]
• Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR who won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993, supported research suggesting that AIDS is not caused by HIV. The scientific evidence is overwhelming against the assertion that HIV and AIDS are unrelated, but Mullis isn't convinced. [url]
• Linus Pauling won not just one, but TWO Nobel prizes. However, these credentials didn't prevent him from spouting some crazy unsupported statements, such as asserting that megadoses of vitamin C can prevent colds and death from cancers. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: james watson, kary mullis, linus pauling, megadose, nobel disease, nobel prize, vitamin c

DailyDirt: Eating The Right Stuff

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've all heard the phrase, "you are what you eat" as advice to avoid junk foods (even ethically-shady foods). It does make some intuitive sense that the foods we consume have a significant impact on our health, but it's often difficult to separate the fact from fiction for what constitutes heathy eating. There are raw food trends and diet fads to avoid just about any conceivable food category. Here are just a few interesting links on the topic of the things we eat having some rational health benefit.

• Cooking food allowed our ancestors to grow bigger brains since we didn't have to spend as much energy on hunting and gathering. Big brains need a lot of calories, consuming about 20% of the calories we ingest even though the brain is only about 2% of our body mass. [url]
• There's a common myth that taking vitamins can produce almost magical health benefits, but more scientific studies are finding that vitamins aren't necessarily a boon to society. Linus Pauling, the famous chemist who won two Nobel prizes, promoted the idea that vitamin C was particularly beneficial... but the science doesn't quite back him up. [url]
• Iodine has been added to dietary salt since 1924, originally to prevent goiter, but there's some evidence that iodine also plays a critical role in brain development. Economists studying the differences between areas of low iodine consumption versus higher iodine intake have found that people in areas that avoided iodine deficiencies have gotten smarter and may explain part of the Flynn Effect (which observes that developed countries saw a rise in IQ scores of 3 points per decade throughout the 20th century). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: cooking, flynn effect, food, healthy, intelligence, iodine, iq, linus pauling, nutrients, vitamin c, vitamins