12/9/13 not here
12/10/13
At her heaviest in 2009, Mia weighed close to 540 pounds. Evelyn had also battled obesity her entire life. Late-night binges, empty bags of chips and emotional eating were common in their house.A lot of people think once you're in a wheelchair, you're just nothing," she says. "The doctors said, 'There, there, good fat person.' And I said, 'Screw that'.Mia ditched her motorized wheelchair and built a new one from a few broken chairs she got off Craigslist. Her "Frankenchair," as she called it, had a sporty design that allowed her to move more efficiently.In the first month, she lost 50 pounds. By the time she had lost 100 pounds, she was pushing herself a mile every morning. By April 2011 she weighed 325 pounds.Mia now weighs 265 pounds and is still losing weight. Her cholesterol and blood pressure levels are normal, and she no longer has type 2 diabetes. She's gone from wearing a size 36 dress to wearing a size 16
12/11/13
A new study of pediatric care finds wide regional variations in the kinds of treatment and medication children receive, which is "raising troubling questions," according to its authors.Back then, scientists discovered a wide variety of care for children with throat problems. The 1970s study found 60% of the children who lived in Morrisville, Vermont, had their tonsils out by the age of 15. In other communities, fewer than 20% of kids in that same age group did.Researchers wanted to revisit the same issue using current data to see if the regional variations in care continued. Again, they found a wide variety in the quantity and quality of children's care
12/12/13
Interested to read a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggesting that the act of taking photos may actually diminish what we remember about objects being photographed."People just pull out their cameras," says study author Linda Henkel, researcher in the department of psychology at Fairfield University in Connecticut. "They just don't pay attention to what they're even looking at, like just capturing the photo is more important than actually being there."Henkel's father is a photographer, so she has been hanging around photos and taking photos all her life. She wanted to see if snapping photos of objects would impact people's memories of what they saw at a museum
12/13/13
Elaine was the life of the party, the girl who urged you to stay for just one more drink, a journalist who could splash life into a good story. She was also, as it turned out, an alcoholic whose drinking was so severe it corroded her liver until it just stopped working.Just a few weeks before her October 26 d**h from cirrhosis, she looked out the window of her condo in the Bronx at a stunning view of the crowds whooping it up at Yankee Stadium.Elaine, 54 when she died, was a well-educated Latina who had devoted her career to reporting on the neglect of poor, ethnic communities. Now she'd ended her life like the anecdotal lead to one of her stories -- this one on how Latinos are dying from alcoholism-related cirrhosis at higher rates than other ethnic or racial groups, and no one seems to know precisely why.Elaine's friends and family gather will Saturday to celebrate her life and work and raise money for a scholarship fund for poor, minority journalism students devoted to continuing her work