Do yourself a favor and buy or download The Holy Family. It’s a story that follows a man on his path from faith to unbelief, and shows eloquently how he manages to live and love with triumph and tragedy, just like any other person. Even if it hadn’t been written by a friend of mine, I’d be telling you to read it.

A pharmacist weighs in on the (lack of) benefits of dietary supplements.

Researchers have a new tool to help find the genetic causes of disease. Edit the genome of a stem cell and see if it gets sick. . .sounds crazy, but it seems to have potential!

Right after reading an essay by neuropsychologist Vaughn Bell about how the human brain is not as simple as we think, which talks about how neuroscience findings are being dumbed down and twisted to confirm folk wisdom even when they don’t. . .there’s an example of this very thing in action. Athena Andreadis writes in a Scientific American blog about a language gene study being misinterpreted as scientific confirmation that women talk more than men. (N.B., that’s not what it says. . .) Which, of course, brings me back to Dr. Steven Novella’s excellent post from December about why people turn to alternative medicine. Confirmation bias trumps cognitive dissonance every time.

CAT IN A BUBBLE BATH!!