Just in case you were too busy stacking the corpses littering the streets to notice: the H1N1 pandemic is officially over. Final death toll in the U.S. is estimated to be between 8000-18000, and it will only ever be an estimate because the CDC stopped officially counting when it became evident that people weren’t dropping like flies. They cite the mid-range figure of just over 12,000 as the probable actual tally. To put this into perspective, about 42,000 people in the U.S. die every year in automobile accidents.
It seems like we can’t get through a single daily news cycle without some amazing breakthrough in the research on Alzheimer’s Disease being reported. Just last week there was this story about how a recent discovery of biological markers in spinal fluid that might help diagnose the disease early on came about due to an unprecedented effort by researchers to more effectively share their data . Yet, this Singularity Hub post explains why it seems like very few therapies actually make their way into clinical use.
At it’s core, science is about developing reliable, repeatable, quantifiable mechanisms for explaining and defining the universe, yet there are some basic things that have either eluded scientific attempts at analysis or have simply been overlooked in favor of better targets. Here’s a Discover article from May of this year that talks about work being done by a researcher in Israel to develop a quantifiable approach to analyzing smells. And here’s a video by a psychologist who has come up with a scale of “evil”:
