Day: 8 November 2007

Vaccine to Quell Wanting Nicotine

Smoking is obviously very bad for your health, tobacco cultivators, and even the environment. WIth that in mind, it’s great to see that research into a nicotine vaccine is underway and is seeing some success.

Rennard said patients who produced the most anti-nicotine antibodies were also the ones most likely to stop smoking for longer. And if they did not quit, they smoked less — 10 cigarettes on average a day, compared with 20 before they got the vaccine.

“This development is key for the field of smoking cessation research and could have a significant impact on how we treat patients with nicotine addiction,” said Rennard, who presented his findings to a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.

Satire Can Help With Icky issues

The CBC has a neat article about the use of satire to deal with complicated issues, primarily armed conflict, and how satire can help us reason through the complexity. A neat way to approach news, that’s for sure.

Indeed, most satires of war don’t lampoon the enemy; rather, the central characters inevitably question their own side. In Catch-22, the Germans — the nominal foe — are barely mentioned; Heller’s true target is the U.S. army apparatus. The point is mordantly demonstrated in the fact that the more missions bomber pilot (and protagonist) John Yossarian flies, the more he has to complete before being allowed to go home. The comic preoccupation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove (1964) was not the Soviet Union, but the United States’ Cold War paranoia.