Science – Page 5 – Slugger O'Toole

How should we deal with pharmacists who make mistakes?

Soapbox on December 18, 2016, 6:14 pm

| Readers 5283

On 6th February 2014, Mrs Ethna Walsh, a 67-year-old grandmother, was prescribed Prednisolone Tablets 5mg by her doctor. Having taken the first dose of 8 tablets she became ill, collapsed, was rushed to hospital and was dead within two hours. She had been dispensed propranolol 40mg tablets by mistake. Martin White, her pharmacist, fully cooperated with the investigation and admitted that he had been responsible for all steps involved in dispensing the medicine. He is an experienced pharmacist and …

Getting screwed by Big Pharma – Female Passion is not something that can easily be medicalised…

Soapbox on December 3, 2016, 7:00 am

| Readers 1121

A customer complaint that his Viagra had not been dispensed led me, with the help of my street-facing CCTV camera, to discover his wife had dumped his Viagra tablets into the street wastepaper bin as she left the pharmacy with his monthly medicines. I’m not sure how common this phenomenon might be. Nor am I sure how the average, long suffering, partner of a 60-year-old, overweight male with minimal personal hygiene and bearing a strong resemblance to a church …

Mercury in motion

Pete Baker on May 10, 2016, 4:23 pm

| Readers 242

If you missed yesterday’s rare Mercury transit across the Sun – the last was in 2006, the next in 2019 – then where were you! [Busy… – Ed] But even if you were paying attention you’re unlikely to have had as wondrous a view as that of Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. They’ve helpfully released a stunning time-lapse video compressing the entire 7 hour spectacle into a digestible couple of minutes. I recommend switching to full screen mode and cranking up the volume. Enjoy! [Video …

Another view…

Pete Baker on May 4, 2016, 10:33 pm

| Readers 372

Vote… don’t vote… In the meantime, here’s another in an occasional series of wondrous views from the International Space Station, via the Nasa Crew Earth Observations videos – Sunglint over the Ocean. [Video courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center] This video was taken by the Expedition 47 crew on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots was taken on March 25, 2016 from 11:45:02 to 11:57:17 GMT on a pass over …

Torture and Cognitive Dissonance

Robert Campbell on January 15, 2016, 9:43 am

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When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir? —JM Keynes A couple of recent, unrelated articles caught my eye. The New Scientist carried a review of ‘Why Torture doesn’t work’, a forthcoming book by Shane O’Mara, an academic at Trinity, Dublin. The scientific answer is that torture doesn’t work, in the sense of getting at ‘truth’, for people will say anything in an attempt to end their torment. People will falsely confess, something that’s “alarmingly …

Pastor McConnell judgement: “It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances…”

Mick Fealty on January 5, 2016, 1:47 pm

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SOFT SANDS: The acquittal of Pastor James McConnell is not the first case of alleged offence to hit to soft sands after a long bout of social media outrage and the deliberation of the DDP’s office, which at the very least suggests there is a substantial difference between public understanding and the law itself.

“You see the colour of nebulae with your naked eye”

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on December 10, 2015, 10:18 am

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SPACE LAUNCH – “When you look at the Earth it looks really unique, isolated, finite” said Jean-François Clervoy remembering his time in space ahead of the first launch of a UK astronaut in over 20 years. ESA astronaut Clervoy will be in Belfast on Tuesday at W5 as part of events marking the Soyuz launch to ISS.

Perhaps it is no surprise that people are not fixated on constitutional issues…

Derek Mooney on November 6, 2015, 1:07 pm

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You can almost hear the conversation between the Government Spin Doctors on Wednesday afternoon… “It’s only a pointless TV poll about the North… Who cares? No one in the South knows who Stephen Nolan is. Let’s send out Jimmy Deenihan… sure, what harm can he do…” To be fair to MoS Jimmy Deenihan his “No, really” reply to the question if the Republic could afford Northern Ireland if there was unity tomorrow has not done any real or lasting harm. …

Who is Colum Eastwood?

David McCann on September 27, 2015, 2:42 pm

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Colum Eastwood, you may not know that much about him, but he is the man set to take on the sitting SDLP leader, Alasdair McDonnell. If memory serves me right, I think he is the first person to challenge a sitting SDLP leader. I know Patsy McGlone was preparing to challenge Ritchie in 2011 but she stepped aside before anything got going. Eastwood has been active in elected politics for a decade now, being elected to Derry City Council in …

“The point all this misses is that the Conservatives won…”

Mick Fealty on September 12, 2015, 2:46 pm

| Readers 803

Ah, one more wee gem (literally) in the wake of the Corbyn effect as Simon Wren Lewis was finishing Can Labour Win?: Perhaps part of the problem is that a great deal of this analysis comes from Labour party people who are, quite rightly, really interested in policy. So all the analysis is about which policies were wrong and which way policy should move as a result. We get into territory that these people are comfortable with: what policy should be. …

A Brief History of Time

Gerry Lynch on August 9, 2015, 8:15 pm

| Readers 1737

In what is claimed to be a blow against one of the last remnants of Japanese Imperialism, North Korea will move to a new time zone on 15 August, the 70th Anniversary of the surrender of Japanese forces on the Peninsula at the end of World War Two. Clocks will move back by half an hour next Saturday, taking the hermit state half an hour behind Seoul and Tokyo (GMT +9) and half an hour ahead of Beijing (GMT +8). …

New Horizons: Live Briefing

Pete Baker on July 15, 2015, 8:10 pm

| Readers 275

Having survived yesterday’s fly-by, follow the live-briefing from the Nasa New Horizons mission to Pluto as they reveal the first hi-resolution images from the dwarf planet system nearly 5 billion km away. Adds The big news is that Pluto, and Charon, may still be geologically active. There are 3,500metre (11,000feet) high water-ice mountains on the surface of Pluto in a region now called Tombaugh Regio after Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh – some of his ashes are on-board the New Horizons …

New Horizons: Countdown to Pluto

Pete Baker on July 12, 2015, 6:32 pm

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Nasa’s New Horizons mission spacecraft is now within two days journey time to the dwarf planet Pluto and its complex system of 5 moons. [Image credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)] Travelling at 14km/s, New Horizons’ swift fly-by of the dwarf planet is scheduled to take place on Tuesday 14 July, at exactly 11:49:59 GMT (12:49:59 BST; 07:49:59 EDT), when it will be a mere 12,500km from the surface. At a distance of 4.7 billion km, New …

ISS Night-time Compilation

Pete Baker on July 7, 2015, 8:36 pm

| Readers 162

A brief musical interlude, accompanied by a selection of wondrous time-lapse videos, old and new, from the International Space Station, by NASACrewEarthObs. Full-screen mode recommended. Enjoy! [Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.] The final video clip shows the surprisingly robust sun-grazing Comet Lovejoy as it emerged triumphant from its close encounter with Sol in December 2011. Pete Baker

Do we live too long? Science allows us to keep people alive longer, but is it the right thing to do?

Soapbox on July 3, 2015, 9:27 am

| Readers 573

“In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society.” Friedrich Nietzsche 1860. Not much fun that boy Nietzsche. Certainly not much fun if you are as Yeats phrased it “old and grey and full of sleep and nodding by the fire” but then maybe you would be totally …

Life, death and heartbeats…

Robert Campbell on July 2, 2015, 5:40 am

| Readers 437

The diagnosis of death is mostly straightforward; the medical practitioner looks for somatic, cardio-respiratory and neurological features. Clearly, someone with rigor mortis is dead. Someone with no spontaneous breathing, no heartbeat and no pulse, and whose pupils are fixed and dilated presents the classical features of death. This is usually enough to diagnose most cases of ‘death’, though as the Victorians had a morbid dread of being buried alive, the tradition of requesting a surgeon to open an artery persisted …

A quick guide to carbon monoxide poisoning – the silent killer…

Robert Campbell on June 10, 2015, 8:46 pm

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All organic matter contains carbon which has the chemical symbol C. When burnt in the presence of adequate air, fuels such as wood, peat, coal, oil and gas produce carbon dioxide in the chemical process. There is about 21% oxygen in air. The chemical symbol for oxygen is O though in air it exists as O₂. Carbon dioxide has the chemical formula CO₂. If there is inadequate ventilation and therefore inadequate oxygen, carbon monoxide (CO) is formed. In the lungs, …

Fly Over Dwarf Planet Ceres

Pete Baker on June 8, 2015, 11:04 pm

| Readers 285

In March Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft became the first man-made object to go into orbit around a dwarf planet – Ceres, at 950km across, the largest object in the main asteroid belt. As I mentioned at the time… [Image credit: Nasa/JPL] Using images taken during Dawn’s first mapping orbit at Ceres, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have produced this stunning, and eerie, animation of flyover views of the heavily cratered world. A new video animation of dwarf planet Ceres, based on images taken …

Antimicrobial (antibiotic) resistance

Robert Campbell on May 19, 2015, 4:21 pm

| Readers 288

The control of infectious disease in the 20th century was very largely due to public health measures, such as vaccination programmes in the population, and to the use of antibiotics in the individual. In the past, lobar pneumonia was a major killer of otherwise healthy you adults; and the progression of this illness was often inexorable, unless with a rising temperature and rising delirium, the patient came to a ‘crisis’ with a sudden, marked improvement—the ‘crisis’ had passed. I have …