Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Via Instapundit comes a story about the return of a once-vanquished nutritional disease, rickets, due to people not watching their children’s nutrition because they assumed that breast feeding would supply all the nutrients needed. This fits a similar pattern in which health concerns that disappeared in most of the West by the 1960s have begun to reemerge.
In all these cases, the cause is an exaggerated concern for an unrelated health matter that generates unintended side effects.
So, a mere 50 years after the development of the technology, the FDA has graciously allowed us all to purchase produce irradiated to kill pathogens. Hooray!
Too bad so many people had to die needlessly in the last 50 years, and in the last two years in particular.
The long saga of irradiation fits the mold of a more general phenomenon: The willingness of many leftists to tolerate very real, actual deaths today in exchange for the hypothetical risk of deaths tomorrow.
First the good news:
Eating broccoli could reverse the damage caused by diabetes to heart blood vessels, research suggests.
A University of Warwick team believe the key is a compound found in the vegetable, called sulforaphane.
…
Lead researcher Professor Paul Thornalley said: “Our study suggests that compounds such as sulforaphane from broccoli may help counter processes linked to the development of vascular disease in diabetes…”
Now the bad news: It’s broccoli.
[See update at end]
Instapundit links to an EEtimes story that claims that MIT researchers have created a catalyst that can electrolyze water at 100% efficiency, meaning that 100% of the electricity that goes across the electrodes goes into breaking the bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the water.
If this pans out, this is big, I am talking discovery of nuclear fission big. For one thing, it means the end to concerns about anthropogenic global warming.
The MIT breakthrough is the equivalent of someone finding the means to improve a car’s miles-per-gallon rating from 30 to 150.
It’s big!
