Image via Wikipedia

As detailed in a post last week, there’s no credible evidence that vaccines increase the risk for children contracting autism.What is significant, however, is the age of the parents when they conceive said child.Via the NY Times:

In a study published online on Monday in the journal Autism Research, the researchers analyzed almost five million births in California during the 1900s and 12,159 cases of autism diagnosed in those children–a sample large enough to examine how the risk of autism was affected when one parent was a specific age and the other was the same age or considerably older or younger.

What’s interesting about this study is that it shows how the relation in age between mother and father can also affect autism risk, so that men over 40 who have children with women under 30 have a 59 percent higher risk for having an autistic baby than if the man was younger.

Moreover, the UC Davis study showed that every five-year increase in a mother’s age meant a rise of 18 percent in terms of the risk of having an autistic child.

continue »

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

Just one more reason to re-consider drinking soda. Researchers in Singapore followed 60,542 people over the course of 14 years. They found that of those who drank two or more sodas per week had double the risk of developing pancreatic cancer than those who did not. If you drank fruit juice instead of soda, you showed no sign of elevated risk.

That’s the correlation. The cause? It could be the elevated sugar level in soda.

…the higher levels of sugar found in soft drinks may be resulting in the raised level of insulin in the body, which is believed to contribute to the cell growth in pancreatic cancer.

Getting pancreatic cancer is no walk in the park. Only five percent of those diagnosed with the disease live more than five years.

For years now, we’ve known that drinking lots of soda poses an increased risk for developing diabetes. And we know that soda consumption is directly linked with higher obesity rates. We also know that soda cans are lined with BPA, which acts as an endocrine inhibitor that may help cause both diabetes and higher levels of obesity. High soda consumption for children can lead to a host of problems, including an allergy to penicillin, lower calcium levels that leads to deformed bone growth in the short term, and osteoporosis in the long.  Add a greater risk for developing pancreatic cancer, and, at this point, you’d have to be a little crazy not to wonder whether cracking open that next Coke or Pepsi is really worth it.

If people really start paying attention, it could be that soda will be the cigarettes of the future, and we’ll look back and say, really, we drank that stuff?

Courtesy of the House Democratic Leadership, here is a handy chart that compares the rate of job losses from the last year of the Bush administration with those in the first year under Obama. It’s not hard to see that the rate of losses is slowing now. Today’s unemployment numbers showed as much, dropping back down below 10 percent.While it is true that the overall unemployment rate edged higher under Obama than it was under Bush, the rate of job losses peaked while Bush was in office, and has been going down (with a few hiccups along the way) since Obama took over.

H/T: TPM

Everybody loves Facebook. Teens, young adults, the middle aged, senior citizens. It now has more registered users than the United States has residents. In just the past two months alone, the social networking site added 50 million of them. Just five months ago it had a mere 300 million members.

Why is it so popular? Multi-functionality. Some people use it to blog. Some to communicate via instant message. Others treat Facebook as though it were Twitter, firing off a near continuous stream of passing thoughts. For many, Facebook is simply a very efficient, modern-day Rolodex of contacts. Still others have used Facebook to replace their old e-mail accounts.

This isn’t to say that Facebook is better than Twitter. They do different things. To my mind, Twitter is best used as a search engine, but its functionality remains a mystery to many users. I know lots of people who have signed up for Twitter who still don’t know why or how they should use it. No such mystery on Facebook. Maybe that’s why the number of Twitter users has stalled while Facebook continues its astronomical growth.

In honor of its 6th birthday, Facebook got a facelift this week. The page re-design is a welcome change to my eyes, making it easier to see who is currently online and when you have new messages. So, Happy Birthday, Facebook. Enjoy your place at the top of the heap while it lasts.

Honor killings are all too common in the Muslim world. But the case of Turkish 16-year-old Medine Memi is truly beyond comprehension.

A coroner said that Medine has been discovered bound and lifeless in sitting position in a 2m hole dug beneath a chicken coop outside the family’s house in the town of Kahta in Southeastern Turkey, 40 days after she had disappeared. The hole had been cemented over.

The girl had been buried alive, medical examiners concluded. According to the Times, she had repeatedly gone to the police to report beatings at the hands of her father and grandfather in the days leading up to her killing.

Why did her family turn on her?

“She has male friends,” her father explained. “We are uneasy about that.”

Reuters has a picture of the hole where Memi’s life was ended. The father and the grandfather will now stand trial for the murder. Sentencing in honor killings in Turkey is notoriously slight, perhaps 5 or 7 years behind bars, if a sentence is meted out at all. What kind of society finds more dishonor in friendship between members of the opposite sex than it does in filicide?

continue »