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My department is named for Edward A. Doisy, who shared the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery of vitamin K. He was the founding chair of my department, which was 100 years old in 2024. Naturally, I have more than average appreciation for this discovery and its medical impact. “The rate of newborns not receiving the vitamin K shot within a day of birth in hospitals jumped more than 57% from January through June, a review of health records for more than 1 ​million births nationwide by health data and analytics company Truveta revealed. “While vitamin K refusals have been on the rise for years, the Truveta analysis shows that in the first half of 2026, the rate of non-receipt was 2.5 times higher than the average rate from 2019 to 2024. It was 1.4 times higher than in 2025.”   OK, but so what? “ Babies are born with very low levels of vitamin K, which helps blood to clot, and are unprotected up until about six months of age, according to the Centers for Dise...

“President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration previously called on conservatives to create new academic journals and to fund science that would explicitly back right-wing policy goals. “Heidi Overton made the comments in a December 2023 appearance on The Tank, a podcast by the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute. Overton, who has a medical degree and is now a White House aide, was previously chief policy officer at the think tank. There she led health care policy and was director of the institute’s Center for a Healthy America.   “In the 2023 interview, Overton called for new science journals that would be dedicated to “conservative-based” science and described a 20-year vision for changing the infrastructure of funding and research to make it more aligned with conservative policy. This vision included “alternate systems” for publishing research.”   I’m an actual, you know, scientist. Real science is evidence-based. What she's ad...

What happens when Claude talks to Claude? Peak AI. Click the link and find out! https://www.thisamericanlife.org/896/i-know-what-you-need/act-two-2?fbclid=IwY2xjawUCXcZwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5kLIBRB2pTfjTJRPk8HY6qA1Gn6GpC_5NJkD5AGYV9XTdHeaqCaDfxy49BuA_aem_uSCafsocyeOPBJe9Ud4iAQ

“. . . applying tariffs means that we are insisting now on paying more for the things that we used to get for less. It’s like going to the grocery store with reverse coupons and insisting that, because you are mad that you have to pay money for things, you will now insist on paying more money for those same things.” ~Timothy Snyder

“President  Donald Trump  has been fixated on how he’ll be remembered in history as advisers try to shift his attention to other matters, like the economy, and  Republicans  express concerns that he’s hurting their chances in the midterms,  The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday .”   Probably something like Benito Mussolini   https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-officials-legacy-mode-wsj-report_n_6a9458dee4b0e9dbd39bc800?origin=home-latest-news-unit

I just finished reading “G-man,” Beverly Gage’s Pulizer-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover. During his lifetime, Hoover became synonymous with the FBI, the agency he founded, developed and controlled until his death. In the beginning, Hoover conceived of the FBI as a purely investigative agency, apolitical and devoted to the most up-to-date technologies of crime-solving and record-keeping. Early on, he created a huge database of fingerprint, a database that proved key in, among other cases, the identification of James Earl Ray as Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin. Hoover accepted the FBI role in law enforcement only grudgingly. Much of his career he was consumed with his war on communism. It began with the first red scare at the end of WWI, then flared again in the 1950s with the McCarthy era. Hoover was deeply conservative, sexist and racist. He hired blacks and women only for menial jobs, never as agents. He maintained a life-long association with the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which ...