June 3, 2015
(BBC) – When she penned comedies like Bhaji on the Beach and Goodness Gracious Me, Meera Syal looked to her own family’s experiences to tell stories about the lives of Asian women. But it was a chance viewing of a … Read More
May 27, 2015
(Discover Magazine) – Furiosa has already been hailed by many as one of the strongest female action heroines to grace the silver screen in years. But “Mad Max: Fury Road” is also drawing praise for how it depicts Furiosa as the wearer of an artificial limb without … Read More
May 25, 2015
(New York Times) – “The Farewell Party,” an Israeli comedy about euthanasia, steers a careful course between humor and pathos while playing down overtly political and religious arguments for and against assisted suicide. The first feature of its creative team, … Read More
May 13, 2015
(Bloomberg) – The Nazis timed concentration camp inmates as they struggled in the snow to see how long humans could endure the cold. Not much later, in Macon County, Alabama, black men with syphilis were deprived of penicillin when it … Read More
April 17, 2015
(Times Higher Education) – Bioethics is in an age of renaissance. In this thoughtful consideration of an important issue in the field, Katrien Devolder embraces the challenge of darting between disciplines to offer articulate and lively insight into the workings … Read More
April 16, 2015
(The Atlantic) – From this point of view, Ex Machina feels less like a sci-fi thriller and more like a survival story whose exploration of artificial intelligence has more in common with ethical debates about animal rights than it does … Read More
April 10, 2015
(U.S.A. Today) – When sci-fi hits that sweet spot, it can be endlessly thought-provoking. Such is the case with the stylish, tense and terrifically acted Ex Machina, a complex drama about artificial intelligence (*** ½ out of four; rated R; … Read More
April 7, 2015
(Daily Mail) – When reports first emerged from China in 2006 that state-run hospitals were killing prisoners of conscience to sell their organs, it seemed too horrible to be true. However, a new documentary is about to blow the lid … Read More
March 19, 2015
(The Guardian) – “In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire,” wrote the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1969, excited that the invention was already upturning “age-old beliefs, practices and institutions”. The … Read More
March 17, 2015
(The Wall Street Journal) – The South by Southwest festival of tech, film and music features lively debates over the benefits, and risks, or artificial intelligence. Which made it a good setting for the North American debut of “Ex Machina,” … Read More
March 6, 2015
(Medical Xpress) – In a new book published this week, Murderous Contagion, the historian of medicine Mary Dobson examines 30 of the biggest killers in the history of humankind, from scourges like the Black Death of the 14th century, to … Read More
February 10, 2015
(The Guardian) – Pincus, Rock, and two remarkable women – the birth control pioneers Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick – are at the heart of this brilliant book by American journalist Jonathan Eig. It opens with a meeting in New … Read More
January 26, 2015
(The Guardian) – At a key moment in novelist-turned-film-maker Alex Garland’s provocative sci-fi flick, a naive young computer programmer asks the Colonel Kurtz-like creator of an impressively human artificial intelligence why he chose to sexualise his robot; to give it … Read More
January 6, 2015
(Medical Xpress) – Infectious diseases are one of the many health issues that worry the organizers of mass gatherings, such as the Hajj and the World Cup. Geographers’ tools of the trade can help event organizers to better plan, monitor … Read More
January 2, 2015
(The Epoch Times) – Where can you go for a no-questions-asked organ transplant? If you said China, you win a free kidney, symbolically speaking of course. However, the dodgy Chinese hospital that Yoo-ri’s father has been referred to has a … Read More
December 19, 2014
(WAMC) – The Massachusetts Medical Society has published a guidebook for healthcare providers on how to identify, assess and respond to victims of human trafficking. The 44-page guidebook is the result of a three-year research collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital … Read More
December 12, 2014
(Phys.org) – Future technology will be more intelligent and more living than most people can imagine today. We need clear guidelines on how to implement and use technology, or else citizens will lose their rights to their identity and their … Read More
December 5, 2014
(Times Higher Education) – What has led to “adversarial relationships” between social scientists and the regulatory regimes they operate within – and how can they be made more harmonious? These are key themes in Research Ethics and Integrity for Social … Read More
December 2, 2014
(Washington Post) – Ten years ago, journalist Karen Masterson was taking a course on making effective use of the records at the National Archives in College Park. For an assignment, she was searching for records on World War II-era blood … Read More
December 1, 2014
(Forbes) – You don’t often hear of books dedicated to patient advocacy in the stem cell field. But Inevitable Collision, by Tory Williams, may inspire more. Williams, at one time a school teacher, single mother, and aspiring novelist, has pledged to … Read More
November 24, 2014
(The Guardian) – As Sue Armstrong points out at the beginning of her book, while we may naively wonder why so many people get cancer, researchers are asking “Why so few?”. Every time a cell divides – skin and digestive-tract … Read More
November 17, 2014
(Washington Post) – Despite its deceptively bland title, “Internal Medicine,” Terrence Holt’s new collection of stories, captures the feelings of a young doctor’s three-year hospital residency — the powerlessness, the exhaustion, the chaotic and seemingly endless shifts, and above all, … Read More
November 14, 2014
(New York Times) – But if the show had its flaws, the medical themes it raises are much the same as those I encounter as a physician: Are primary-care doctors more true to their profession than specialists? How bad is … Read More
November 3, 2014
(The Guardian) – In Being Mortal, the surgeon and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande recalls being asked the same question and not really understanding it: doctors, he explains, have medicalised old age to such an extent that they no longer … Read More
October 27, 2014
(The Epoch Times) – U.S. author Ethan Gutmann’s new book, The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem, is a riveting inside account of China’s booming organ transplant business and gives a glimpse into the … Read More
