NY Times:
Early in his career, a scientist named Mario J. Molina was pulled into seemingly obscure research about strange chemicals being spewed into the atmosphere. Within a year, he had helped discover a global environmental emergency, work that would ultimately win a Nobel Prize.
Now, at 70, Dr. Molina is trying to awaken the public to an even bigger risk. He spearheaded a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, which released a stark report Tuesday on global warming.
Primary Colors:
The Primary Colors algorithm was created primarily to identify low-value Democrats in safe districts for primary challenges — but it can show us other things as well.
When we assign each member of Congress an expected score, it’s based on their colleagues’ scores in districts with similar partisan profiles.
Obviously we’d expect Democratic politicians to vote more conservative the more conservative their district gets, and more liberal the more liberal their district gets. And by-and-large, they do.
But Republicans don’t really follow that trend, as you can see in red on the graph below:
If you only take away one thing from this graph, it should be that the expected value for Republicans is nearly a perfect horizontal line. Translated into plain English, that means Republicans vote conservative almost no matter what. It doesn’t matter what type of districts they represent.
More policy and politics below the fold.
NBC News:
U.S. headache sufferers are racking up nearly a $1 billion a year on brain scans — and the vast majority of them are probably unnecessary, a new analysis finds.
About one in every eight visits to a doctor for an uncomplicated headache or migraine from 2007 to 2010 resulted in the patient getting an MRI or a CT scan, according to a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
And the number of imaging procedures is going up, not down, nearly tripling from 5.1 percent to 14.7 of all visits, despite national guidelines that recommend against routine use. Experts say that brain scans detect serious problems in only a fraction — 1 percent to 3 percent — of all headache cases.
And you ask why US health care costs so much?
Phil Plait:
Jenny McCarthy Asks; the Internet Slam Dunks
By now you know about anti-vaccination mouthpiece Jenny McCarthy. I’ve written about her many times: how she claims vaccines cause autism (they don’t), how she “cured” her son of autism with a gluten-free diet (she didn’t), how she rails about vaccines being full of toxins (they aren’t) while literally injecting her face with the single most toxic protein known to science.
Yeah, that Jenny McCarthy. It’s possible she’s more well-known in the general public for being a comedian, host of the The View, and of course a Playboy model, but on the ‘Net she’s widely understood to be a voice for frankly dangerous anti-vax nonsense.
On Thursday, McCarthy asked a question of her fans on Twitter to see what they’d say. What she got was a dose of the reality she helped spawn.
Alexandra Sifferlin:
Measles has made a comeback, at least in New York City, where as many as 19 cases have been confirmed.
New York City isn’t an anomaly, though. Diseases that are and have been avoidable in the U.S. thanks to vaccines, are resurfacing all across the country. Measles, for instance, was considered wiped out in 2000, but there have been several outbreaks in the past few years. This map shows outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases since 2008 (click on “Map” and select which diseases and regions you want to see).
Alec MacGillis:
When there is still snow on the ground past St. Patrick’s Day, thoughts turn longingly to the beach. Say, the Jersey Shore. Which in turn brings to mind the extreme yet comically ham-handed efforts of Governor Chris Christie’s administration to keep secret the process that led to the controversial selection exactly one year ago of a firm to run a $25 million ad campaign for last summer’s tourist season touting the Shore’s comeback from Superstorm Sandy.
Paul Mulshine:
Chris Christie pulls the plug on Tesla - and his political career
Toast? He's burnt toast.