I’m officially back home in Massachusetts after being away for 9 months. Well, technically, I got home at the end of May, but with summer travel, it’s felt too chaotic to really feel like I’m fully back home. But now, for real, I’m home. It just doesn’t look like it because half my stuff is still in boxes (it turns out I have a lot of stuff! some would say too much stuff!).
The important thing though is that I’ve been making stuff that I keep forgetting to talk about, so here is some of that stuff:
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The History and Controversy Around Depression (Podcast)
For Tiny Matters, Sam and I took on the very complicated and mysterious subject of depression, including the history of treatments that people have tried over the years and the progress scientists are making as we better understand the intricacies and challenges of depression.
David Hellerstein:To my mind, the real challenge is finding treatments that are more effective, work more quickly, have fewer side effects or toxicities. And that can treat the really high level of psychiatric suffering that we see in our current society. There's a lot of essentially rehashing of how well were those studies done in the 1980s and nineties, and how many negative studies were there? … To me that's sort of a rear guard action and I'm really more interested, as a researcher and as a clinician, in how do you make medications that are more effective? How do you use existing medicines to the optimal degree possible? And how can we really make progress in something that is really a devastating, really almost epidemic condition. If you look at depression rates, especially with the covid epidemic, suicide rates, and other kinds of impairment, it’s just such a common and increasing problem that we're facing in our society, I think rather than hashing out how well these medicines work, let's find better ones.
The Cryptic Origins of Yogurt (Video)
For Journey to the Microcosmos, I wrote and hosted an episode all about yogurt, and the ways that microbiologists have been fascinated by the microbes that make it all possible.
Life is, after all, just relationships, individual entities fighting and tolerating and partnering in tiny little dramas, each of which build upon one another like strokes of paint in an epic tableau of ecology, epidemics…and yogurt?
Numbers (Video + Podcast)
For Scishow Tangents, I made a guest appearance to talk about numbers with Sam and Ceri, and to make them play a game based on my new favorite wikipedia entry simply titled “List of Numbers”
At my college, one of the traditions we had is that if you went out to eat with people, the youngest non-math-major had to split the bill because you can’t trust math majors with numbers.
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