Orchid Children (Web Title: The Science of Success)

In The Atlantic, December 2009:

IN 2004, MARIAN Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults.

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Delivering a Virus Imposter Quicker

In Technology Review, October 2009:

As the current race between H1N1 and vaccine deliveries makes painfully clear, it's hard to produce a flu vaccine fast enough to outrun a pandemic. But, with two new flu vaccine candidates beginning clinical trials this month, the "virus-like particle," or VLP, vaccine may be about to fulfill a long-heralded potential as a flu vaccine that arrives more quickly.

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To Boost or Not to Boost: The United States' swine flu vaccines will leave millions worldwide unprotected

In Slate, September 2009:

In the race between vaccine makers and the swine flu virus they hope to knock off track, the results of the first heat—the vaccine trials published last week—brought great news: The vaccines now entering the production pipeline appear to be fast, effective, and (so far as a standard trial can tell) safe. The best of this news is that the vaccines appear to work well even at single standard seasonal-flu doses of 15 micrograms—rather than requiring a 30-microgram dose or, worse yet, two 30-microgram doses spaced over two to four weeks, as officials had feared would be necessary to produce a strong antibody response to this new virus.

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The PTSD Trap

In Scientific American, April 2009:

Swine Flu and the Mexico Mystery: Why does swine flu seem to be more deadly in Mexico?

In Slate, April 2009:

Two weeks ago, no one had heard of this strain of swine flu. Now it's on every front page and almost every continent. Is this the deadly global pandemic we've been worrying about?

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Scientist at Work: Claudius Conrad, a musician who performs with a scalpel

In The New York Times, May 2008:

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.

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To Disclose or Not to Disclose: A renowned radio show's conflict-of-interest blunder underscores the need for transparency

In Colombia Journalism Review, May 2008:

A few weeks ago, Frank Rich wrote a sharp column on the Clinton campaign’s failure to see the danger of peddling her Bosnia bullet-ducking story. Rich argued that at a time when the new, million-headed media made a YouTube video contradiction of her tale almost inevitable, Clinton had failed to see that a politician could not get away with myth-making autobiographical fibs of the sort that would fly only four years earlier. “A new bottom-up culture,” he argued, “is challenging any candidate’s control of a message.”

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An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality

In Wired, June 2008:

One of the problems with virtual reality has always been that you had to either confine yourself to a joystick or strap into some crazy Lawnmower Man-style harness. Hardly natural. This April, however, a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, unveiled the CyberWalk, an omnidirectional treadmill designed to serve as a VR-capable movement platform.

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The Wild Salmon Debate: or Why I Swore Off the Farmed Stuff

In Eating Well, March/April 2008:

Eric Kandel: From Mind to Brain and Back Again

Scientific American Mind, Oct/Nov 2007:

The sea slug Aplysia californica is not unlike an eggplant. It is big, up to a foot long and six pounds, and bruise-purple from gorging on seaweed. Harass one and it will emit “a very fine purplish-red fluid,“ as Charles Darwin found long ago, “which stains the water for the space of a foot around.”  Hardly a jewel of the sea. 

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