For the baby, that is. According to a study conducted in Toronto, babies who received a pin prick blood screening and were then breastfed felt less pain than babies who were ’swaddled, given a pacifier, or a placebo’.
I think the results of this study are pretty shaky to say the least. How do they know the pain-relief effect was caused by breastfeeding specifically? Maybe it was just caused by the baby being busy consuming food (although the ‘pacifier’ option may cover this). Or maybe it was caused by simple physical closeness to the mother.
A decent study would have also done controls with babies who were:
- fed breastmilk from a bottle;
- fed formula milk from a bottle;
- just held by the mother, without actually breastfeeding.
Unfortunately they don’t say what the ‘placebo’ was. I reckon if they’d used formula milk, they would have explicitly said so. As it is, the study can only make some pretty vague conclusions.
I get edgy enough just upgrading the firmware on my routers and Bluetooth adaptors. Imagine doing a remote upgrade of the Mars rover software.
These two ads from the industry-funded ‘Competitive Enterprise Institute’ in America (where else?) would be hey-laaar-ious if it weren’t for the depressing fact that they’re genuine.
“They call it pollution. We call it life.”
They’re pro-CO2 ads. Apparently all that stuff about how bad carbon dioxide is, and how it’s causing global warming, is all lies! For instance, did you know that we breathe out CO2, and plants breathe it in?! How could it possibly be bad?!
I mean, come on. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t try to avoid tsunamis because water is good for us.
Space Colony Art from the 1970s. “A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.”
Believe it or not: The battle over certainty. A nice column by Lisa Jardine, a historian, on how science is not about certainty. She describes how creationists who demand science to ‘prove’ evolution are barking up the wrong tree, and that (more pressingly) we can’t wait for ‘certain proof’ of pending disasters like global warming before taking action. “We are going to have to learn how to participate in debates which are not about certainties.”