Lindsay Patterson

I’m so, so excited to share this. With the arrival of Localore’s Austin Music Map in town, I’ve had the opportunity to record some of Austin’s greatest sounds and places.

The Minor Mishap Marching Band has been one of my favorite, must-see Austin bands for a few years now. I’ve seen them start spontaneous, riotous dance parties in parking lots, parade through my neighborhood, and rise up with a big brass sound from the escalator beneath Whole Foods and proceed to march around the store. I love them. So when Delaney, the producer of Austin Music Map, asked for off-the-grid musical experiences, I pretty much called dibs on Minor Mishap. She said okay.

It was fortuitous that when Delaney asked about their next show, it was in the works to be the most ambitious Minor Mishap show yet. Twenty-five members of a brass band would be playing in canoes, underneath Barton Creek bridge, while aerialists dangled and danced over the water.

Yes, it was as amazing as it sounds. I got a front seat ride, with Datri, the ebullient band leader, in her canoe . And that was the single moment when I felt most affirmed in my career choices.

This was my first non-narrated piece, and Delaney helped with its shape and final sound. I always feel like making radio is like putting pieces of an audio puzzle together, but there’s no edges and no one picture to create. It’s a blobby and vague puzzle.

The radio story, which is hitting Morning Edition, Texas Music Matters, and All Things Considered is paired with a beautiful video by KUT’s Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon.

My most recent feature article for dailyRx. Interestingly, there hasn’t been a lot of regular reporting on the influence of HIV on aging. But it’s an expanding area of research and care as as people who survived the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s and 90s reach their 50s and 60s.

Doctors are seeing the traditional diseases of old age show up about 10 years earlier, on average. And their cells actually LOOK 10 years older, under the microscope. It’s not yet known why this is happening. 

I got a nice little shoutout in this interview I just stumbled across with Christina Agapakis on yourwildlife.org. I interviewed and worked with Christina on her project bacterially.org, which I prefer to call the “human cheese project” but unfortunately that is far less linkable. I’m actually supposed to be working on the script right now…. but instead I’m on tumblr.

Do  you think this study is sponsored by Big Chocolate?

Dark chocolate may be an inexpensive way to help prevent cardiovascular events in patients at risk for heart disease, researchers found.

A modeling study predicts that patients with metabolic syndrome who eat dark chocolate every day could have 85 fewer events per 10,000 population over 10 years, Chris Reid, PhD, of Monash University in Melbourne, and colleagues reported online in BMJ.

At a cost of only $42 per year, treatment with dark chocolate falls into an acceptable category of cost-effectiveness, at an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $50,000 per years of life saved.

“Chocolate benefits from being by and large a pleasant, and hence sustainable, treatment option,” they wrote. “Evidence to date suggests that the chocolate would need to be dark and of at least 60% to 70% cocoa, or formulated to be enriched with polyphenols.”

This is my most recent feature article for DailyRx, the health news website I write for. I think you should read it because it features an interview with one of my favorite science communicators, biologist Rob Dunn.

I think I’ve already gushed about how much I love his book, “The Wild Life of Our Bodies.” (Go read it!) One of the wildest parts (pun intended) was the section about the mysterious cause of Crohn’s disease. More and more people, primarily in developed countries, are being diagnosed with this incurable disease.

In his book, Dunn tells fascinating stories about how scientists are trying to unravel Crohn’s and how people are taking steps to treat themselves. They both have to do with germs and parasites. (I recently posted about pharmaceutical companies investing in whipworm eggs.)

Recently, studies about how it’s good to get your kid exposed to dirt, germs, and worms have been in the news. The theory is that our first-world environments have been scrubbed clean of the microbes that our bodies “learned on” and educated our immune systems about stuff that is normal and stuff that is bad.

In Crohn’s disease, the body is confused about what’s bad and attacks healthy tissue in the gut for no good reason. I keep thinking about my former neighbors’ little boy who always had a stick in his mouth and a face smeared with dirt by the time I came home from work. I’d put money on a bet that he doesn’t develop a case of inflammatory bowel disease. Anyone want to take that bet?

Companies are springing up to sell parasites as therapy for Crohn’s disease. Right now, infecting yourself with parasites for relief from chronic diseases is mostly DIY.

Its probiotic treatment consists of “Trichuris suis ova (TSO),” or non-infectious porcine whipworm eggs, to quell inflammation and abnormal immune function that causes such autoimmune diseases as multiple sclerosis (MS), inflammatory bowel disease, and type 1 diabetes.