al-mofhariz

Historians of science and medicine debate whether it is possible to re-diagnose diseases manifested in the past with modern terms. But what about "diseases of the past" that come back today. Note this 'graf from a Chicago Tribune article on vaccination and the resurfacing of now uncommon diseases: Bonwit said medical schools must do a better job of teaching young doctors the history of medicine, which is largely the history of disease and death, he said. Archival footage of children with measles or whooping cough, for instance, should be teaching tools to help students identify diseases and understand their severity, he said. Via Hope Leman. See below.

It has little to do with America directly, but I am fascinated by the New York Times ' coverage of India's new nation-wise statistical and biometric registry: "Aadhaar"---which translates, in an Asimovian twist, to "foundation." The project aims to assign a 12-digit ID to every Indian---that's 1.2 billion IDs---and link those IDs to names, fingerprints, and iris-scans. As Lydia Polgreen, the Times reporter, notes: "It is a project of epic proportions." It also promises to make the Indian government into the world's most important aggregator of biometric data, surpassing the US-Visit program by an order of magnitude. Nandan M. Nilekani, the former chairman of Infosys and Aadhaar's head, explained the necessity of the system in terms that made it sound like a natural governmental activity: "What we are creating is as important as a road." It is, in other words, a kind of infrastructure: statistical infrastructure. That's a...

While we anxiously await a closer telling of the geologists in Afghanistan tale, there are some fascinating moments of science in action to be found in this gripping tale of Deepwater Horizon's last hours and immediate aftermath. I had no idea how ridiculously huge and complex these drilling rigs are. I know that the federal government pitched deep sea exploration as a kind of parallel to space exploration in the second half of the twentieth century: exploring inner space. Sean Flynn draws on a similar metaphor: "Deep-sea drilling is a risky and complicated process, of course—the oil industry's equivalent of a moon shot—and it's vulnerable to all sorts of delays." The scientists, as opposed to the engineers and technicians, only make a cameo here and they are set up against BP's official pronouncements on the volume of the leak. The problem of knowledge becomes: how do we settle on a measurement of oil flow at a mile and one half (8,000 feet) below the Gulf...

The New York Times gives the barest outline to a truly momentous piece of archival work, albeit one done by historians of another sort than usually reads here at Americanscience. This document digging will certainly raise the stakes for the US military, the Afghan government, and perhaps the Taliban as well. Cell phone battery manufacturers may be holding their breath too: In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989. During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them...