Over the past quarter-century, opponents of physician-assisted death have argued against the practice on the grounds that vulnerable groups—the very old, the poor, and the mentally ill, to name three—would turn to, or be pushed toward, such deaths in disproportionate numbers. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

  A review of records from Oregon and the Netherlands undermines that argument.

Instead, people who receive help dying tend to be better educated and better off than the general

http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com  Nate Silver was bored. He’d graduated from the University of Chicago in economics and gone on to a typical consulting job, but it didn’t interest him much. Not as much as baseball, that’s for sure.

The job came with one nice perk, though: access to a cool, geeky statistics software package. It was just the thing for analyzing baseball data. Before long, Silver could use it to predict how good a baseball player’s season would be — and he

Mercury, the solar system’s forgotten planet, is finally getting its place in the sun.

An analysis of data collected during the January flyby of the spacecraft MESSENGER — which will begin a year-long orbit of Mercury in 2011 — has revealed the origin of the planet’s magnetic field, discovered evidence of early volcanic activity and provided a first look at the planet’s surface composition.http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com

Researchers describe their findings in the July 4 Science.

Although