Miles Kimball

Hangovers are not healthy. So it is not only unpleasant to drink when using disulfiram, it is bad for your health. That wasn’t fully understood in the early days of disulfiram, which tarnished its reputation somewhat. Such...

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Joseph Kimball and Becky Porter Kimball My sister Sarah died a little over a month ago from complications from a car accident. (See “My Sister Sarah.”) Now my sister-in-law Becky has died after a long battle with cancer. My brother Chris expresses my feelings better than...

You would not know it from the headlines, but today we're living through one of the most peaceful times in human history. This great chart from Oxford's Max Roser — which shows the global death rate from war over the past 600-plus years — shows just how lucky we are. The red line in Roser's chart shows the worldwide rate of war deaths per 100,000 people, streamlined over a 15-year moving average. Each red dot shows an individual war or episode of killing; larger dots mean more people died....

I get so mad when the people in charge don’t seem to do the obvious logical reasoning from the facts. But it is actually often even worse that that. Too often, even if they do know what logic requires, they won’t follow through on the conclusions that those facts and logic implied. For the latest case in point,  consider the following: We now have some really good evidence that a single dose of mRNA vaccines convey really good immunity...

I have done my share of complaining about human subjects review by “Institutional Review Boards.” They can sometimes get worried about things that pose no real danger to experimental subjects or survey respondents. But if I were on a human subjects review board myself, I would be skeptical about a challenge trial with a placebo arm. Given the...

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I heard it claimed that nuts were inflammatory. It is not easy to google up any evidence to back that idea up; conversely, it is easy to google up evidence that nuts are either anti-inflammatory or have no...

Link Copied The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful...

Before its ratification, one of the big objections to the proposed Constitution of the United States was that it allowed a standing army in time of peace. Superficially, the idea of prohibiting a standing army in time of peace was attractive. Having begun to address the issue in previous numbers of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton continues...