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Bitcoin:
$11k and counting

Posted by on December 5, 2017 at 2:18 pm

Last week, digital asset broker Coinbase’s vice president and general manager of GDAX Adam White took the podium at the Consensus Invest Conference in New York City to extoll the performance of cryptocurrency. Later that evening, the news was everywhere: Bitcoin had surpassed the $10,000 mark. Of course, that’s old news. As I was preparing […]

Of placebos,
wine, and Eeyore

Posted by on November 30, 2017 at 2:57 pm

Most people know about the placebo response. Tell patients to expect to feel better following what they don’t know is a sham treatment, and, often, they will. Less known but equally powerful is the nocebo response, where telling patients they’ll feel worse can be just as self-fulfilling. Non-medical products can induce placebo and nocebo responses, […]

Grateful Act of Congress

Posted by on November 20, 2017 at 10:29 pm

THE FOURTH THURSDAY of November is a legal holiday in the United States. Designated as a national day of thanks, it is named, appropriately enough, Thanksgiving. Observing Thanksgiving in autumn has been around since the early 17th century. An act of Congress signed on October 6, 1941 established it as a legal holiday and designated […]

The “War on Cash”
(A Report from the Front)

Posted by on November 17, 2017 at 3:29 pm

DON’T THROW AWAY your cash just yet. If the International Currency Association (ICA) has its way, cash will never be found on the abandoned products pile next to the likes of eight-track tapes, dot matrix printers, and 16 ounces of coffee for under six bucks. The ICA, which came into existence last year and sometimes […]

DNA and the woman
behind the mag stripe

Posted by on November 2, 2017 at 12:56 pm

MOST PEOPLE COULDN’T tell you what DNA stands for (hint: deoxyribonucleic acid), much less pronounce it (dē-ˈäk … on second thought, never mind). But since its discovery in 1953, DNA has become a household initialism. It’s no wonder, then, that the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Francis Harry Compton Crick, James […]