Big Think Blog

The words “still on the table” have become a mantra for manliness, (and that includes you, Hillary), as the presidential candidates try to prove their toughness over the course of the campaign. While Senators Clinton, Obama and McCain refer to the possibility of a nuclear strike against Iran, “still on the table” also apparently applies to nuclear energy, a subject once considered closed by many anti-nuclear activists. For example, the pro-nuclear overtures initiated by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have led to the abandonment of Italy’s 1987 referendum banning nuclear power: the country’s first nuclear power plant will open in 2017. Now that flowers push through the concrete at Chernobyl, the fear of nuclear power seems to have waned; Big Think recently interviewed Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and director of the EPA under George W. Bush. Since leaving that less-than-desirable position, she has co-founded CASE (Clean and Safe Energy) an organization “dedicated to giving citizens the facts about nuclear energy.”

Weirdly, campaigns once dedicated to citizen vigilance against Nuclear have faded from consciousness. Films such as Groundspark’s “Deadly Deception,” the Academy Award-winning film that fueled a boycott against energy giant General Electric are now eighteen years old. (Watch a Quicktime clip, or go to their site.) The morose resignation of the farmer pointing out the homes of his cancerous neighbors seems to belie Whitman’s statement that “the closer you live to a nuclear reactor the more support you have for it.” Moral of the story: Keep your fingers crossed that the nuclear option really has become safer in the past twenty years, because it is definitely staying on the table.

The last thing Jawed Ahmad, a BBC and Canadian television journalist who translated for American special forces in Afghanistan, expected was to end up in confinement at Bagram Air Base for past eleven months. Accused of colluding with the Taliban, Ahmad reports having been made to stand with little clothing in the snow and kept awake for nine days. A Times article mentioning Mr. Ahmad’s incarceration resulted in solitary confinement. The US military has said they cannot corroborate any mistreatment, but Mr. Ahmad aims to seek justice one way or another. The rancor over the legality of detention sites and CIA black operations got its latest punch from the American Psychological Association. Over 8,700 member psychologists defined their official line on working in detention settings this month as unethical when conditions are in violation international law. NPR’s Talk of the Nation covered the divided organization throughout the debate, and we talked to Mahvish Khan, a legal expert and writer, who visited to tell us about her experiences defending detainees at Guantanamo.

On the same day it was revealed that she is hooking up with a 21 year-old star of Gossip Girl, Ed Westwick, the star of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Drew Barrymore spoke a press conference alongside World Bank President Robert Zoellick, musician and activist Wyclef Jean, and executive director of the World Food Program, Jozette Sheeran, at the Clinton Global Initiative. During the conference, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Education expert Gene Sperling announced that a coalition of sponsors, including Yum! Brands, will provide school feeding and deworming programs to 20 million children in 30 countries. Barrymore, who looked fabulous, said that working with the World Food Program has helped her find “her beautiful, soulful purpose in this world.” Here’s Wyclef Jean, who told Barrymore that he was a fan and hugged her so that “it could appear on YouTube,” talking about Celebrity Do-goodism.

Are you an organ donor? Which of your organs do you imagine being most useful to medical science? If you did not say “my brain,” the Quebec Suicide Brain Bank at the Douglas Hospital Research Center would like you to re-evaluate that position, reports the McGill University Newsroom blog. Although many organ donors may feel less comfortable with the idea of their brain being harvested after their death than, for example, their kidneys, the paucity of brain tissue available for study makes it that much more difficult to find treatments for our most complex organ. When Jim Hackett, the Chairman and CEO of Anadarko Petroleum spoke with Big Think, he said that a trauma experienced by his daughter highlighted the importance of a holistic approach to healthcare and as well as the indivisibility of mental and physical wellness. Hackett acknowledged that his family had “close to unlimited resources,” but recognized that few families would have had the money necessary for such extensive therapy. While Hackett’s answer to the problem has been to include mental health benefits for Anadarko’s employees, it is possible that if more were known about the brain, it would become less time-consuming and less expensive to conduct treatment.

Hospitals in India have a few things they want to teach hospitals in the U.S., according to an interdisciplinary team from Duke University’s schools of business, law and medicine, whose work was published in a recent issue of Health Affairs. Certain attributes “severely lacking in the U.S. market,” it turns out, like price and quality competition, innovation that improves quality and reduces costs, and affordable care to middle-class budgets, are present in many Indian hospitals,” according to the research. For example, open heart surgery performed by U.S.-trained surgeons can cost as little as $6,000 in India, as compared with $100,000 in the states, the authors say. Why all the innovation in India? “Cost-based competition and a growing middle-class with increasing but limited resources to purchase health services.” And innovations range from customer service to labor practices to manufacturing. The result? Greater choice of providers at reasonable prices as hospitals seek to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. According to Kevin Schulman, professor of medicine and business administration at Duke, “As we search for policy solutions to the health care crisis in the United States, it’s critical to find examples of solutions in other markets. With these data, we can have the courage to reassess some of our traditional frameworks as we try to re-engineer our system.” Here’s Harvard Medical School professor George Blackburn on other ways to reform health care in America.

Author and journalist Kurt Pitzer tells Big Think his most shocking story from covering the war in Afghanistan. Check it out below.

Last week, a report in The Archives of Internal Medicine, as digested by the New York Times, compared weight and cardiovascular risk factors among a representative sample of over 5,000 adults. Surprisingly, half of the overweight people and one-third of obese people are “metabolically healthy,” the Times explains. “That means that despite their excess pounds, many overweight and obese adults have healthy levels of ‘good’ cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose and other risks for heart disease.” Weirdly, the report also showed about one out of four slim people — those who fall into the “healthy” weight range — actually have at least two cardiovascular risk factors typically associated with obesity. So what’s the real skinny on obesity? Here’s one of the nation’s leading health experts Robert Rubino on the impact of obesity on, especially, women’s health.

In The Huffington Post, filmmaker and political blogger Bob Cesca takes on presidential candidate Senator John McCain for cracking a joke about how exporting cigarettes to Iran could be a way of killing Iranian civilians.

If you find yourself cringing at any mention of Iran, that’s because an armed conflict isn’t out of the question. Or it could be the two packs you smoked last night.

Vali Nasar, an Iranian-American professor at Tufts University says that the US is only one of several countries who would consider using military might to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power.




Why do countries who have the bomb want to keep Iran from getting one of their own? Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalia-born Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, thinks that any country with the potential for committing genocide should be kept from having the tools to carry it out with the push of a button. Unlike leaders of the US, Russia and China, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, has already declared his intentions to actually use a nuclear bomb, when he has the chance.

I guess it’s going to be a long, hot summer!

Robert Butler, the President and CEO of the International Longevity Center, told Big Think that 100 years from now, we still won’t be able to completely stop the affects of aging, but our descendants will be celebrating their 120th birthdays by going out dancing.

Butler doesn’t expect any magic pills, but believes that medical advances will allow us to slow the aging process and delay the onset of disease. Exposure to sun and smoking will still cause wrinkles, he adds, so we’ll still have to take care of ourselves.

The sci fi blog io9 writes about a BBC News story that shows that the greatest advances in medicine in the past 60 years are commonplace procedures now, but were the stuff of science fiction back in 1948. Just as cochlear implants and reconstructive surgery made the leap from writers’ imaginations to reality, the idea of healthy, active 120 year olds won’t seem so unusual to our grand kids.

news:light last week carries a story from the Daily Telegraph about a nursing home in Germany that keeps their Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off by installing a fake bus stop in front of the building.

This comes in handy when patients decide to make a break for it. They stand there waiting for a bus that never arrives, and when they forget why they were waiting for a bus in the first place, a staff member invites them back inside.

This might sound like a mean trick, but it’s a lot less traumatic for the patient than sneaking across town or being rounded up by the police, reasons the Benrath Senior Centre in Düsseldorf.

Robert Butler, the President and CEO of the International Longevity Center spoke with Big Think about how America’s treatment of the elderly stacks up against the rest of the world.