Saturday, Mar 02, 2013
1. BRAIN ACTIVITY: COMING UP IN THE FY 2014 BUDGET REQUEST.
Although sequestration goes into effect today I cant seem to remember why. In his 2013 State of the Union address last month President Obama cited brain research on Alzheimer's disease as an example of government investment in the best ideas. This month, Congress gets the presidents budget request "Every dollar we invested in mapping the human genome," President Obama pointed out, "returned $140 to our economy." A week later on the front page of the New York Times, John Markoff described the Brain Activity Map Project as a greater challenge than the Human Genome Project. Still, it would be a remarkably bold proposal in the midst of an epic partisan dispute over the sequestration fiasco.
2. VITAL STATISTICS: THE IMPORTANCE OF HEALTH METRICS.
A recent Nature editorial (Nature 494, 281, 2013) characterized the failure of much of the world to continuously gather data on births and causes of death as a "scandal." According to the Nature editorial, the World Health Organization (WHO) dissolved the Health Metrics Network (HMN), created with $50 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to correct the problems. It should have been the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that the WHO dissolved. The IARC incorrectly labeled cell phone radiation as "possibly carcinogenic," which it clearly cannot be, as pointed out in J Natl Cancer Inst (2001) 93 (3): 166-167.
3. INSPIRATION MARS: WHATEVER TURNS YOU ON.
Dennis Tito, who became the first private space tourist when he paid the Russians $20m for a ticket to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2001, created Inspiration Mars to send a "couple" on a flyby of Mars if he can find other obscenely-wealthy space junkies to share the cost. Diversity standards raise questions about what Tito means by a "couple." The trip would take advantage of the alignment of heavenly bodies in January 2018 to do a flyby of Mars and return to Earth in the relatively short time of 501 days. The struggles a private cargo capsule had trying to reach the space station Friday reinforce the notion that spaceflight remains a challenging proposition
Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.