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Kas Thomas

Big Think Contributor

Kas Thomas is a longtime cognitive dissident and menace to sacred-cow-kind. A graduate of the University of California at Irvine and Davis (with degrees in biology and microbiology) and a former University of California Regents' Fellow, He has been a Technology Evangelist for Adobe Systems and currently operates Author-Zone.com, a resource site for indie authors.

Follow @kasthomas on Twitter.


It wouldn’t seem as if leprosy, tuberculosis, and Crohn’s disease would have much in common. But increasing evidence points to all three diseases being caused by closely related species of […]
Caloric restriction (CR) has long been known to increase longevity (often dramatically) in a number of eukaryotic models, including yeast, fruit flies, nematodes, mice, and rhesus monkeys. It’s also well […]
Research into the health effects of cannabis have yielded a mixed bag (so to speak) of results. Predictably, studies that have looked for harmful effects have found them. But there […]
If you post something that others read, you should get paid. If you’re spied on, you should get paid. Conversely, if you access the work of others, you should pay.
It is known that diabetes brings with it a greatly elevated risk for a number of comorbidities. To this list, we now have to add elevated risk of cancer, as well.
Many characteristics of the sociopathic personality—charm, ambition and impatience, an ability to attack problems with cold-hearted logic (not letting emotions get in the way)—are useful to society.
New research suggests that gut bacteria may very well play a role in the development of rheumatoid arthritis and also underscores the importance of gut bacteria (which outnumber human cells ten-to-one) in keeping our bodies healthy.
Kas Thomas: The evidence is substantial enough that people should start thinking about taking substantial amounts of vitamin D as prophylaxis against cancers of all kinds. 
There is a new treatment for C. diff infection that’s safe, effective, and has no known down side except that it’s disgusting to think about.
Drug companies are allowed to use (and do often use) active placebos in their studies. An active placebo is one that is biologically active, rather than inert.
The link between periodontal disease and heart disease is so well documented at this point as to not need further discussion, but evidence is also accumulating, and has been for […]
It’s not so well known that being overweight (not merely obese) brings with it a cancer risk.
If you can’t make it in The Land of the Free, you’re defective—that’s the default assumption, the core belief that allows Americans who aren’t hurting, who aren’t unhappy with their lot, to cling to quaint mid-twentieth-century Walt Disney notions about the inherent wonderfulness of American life.
Even as the U.S. government continues to spend huge sums of money underwriting cancer research, public health agencies are failing to make people aware of a proven, well-tolerated, low-cost anti-cancer drug: aspirin.
Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as part of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, released a report saying that menthol cigarettes likely pose a greater public health risk […]
If you read popular articles about antidepressants, it’s easy to get the impression that drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, Cymbalta, Luvox, etc. are primarily psychoactive drugs that specifically alter […]
If degree-of-blindness is measurable (which it is), then researchers should, in fact, measure it and disclose it as part of any study that’s purported to be “blinded.”
Modern technology has done nothing to make humans more humble. Quite the contrary. So secure are we in our confidence of our superiority to ancient cultures that discoveries like the […]
Very early in my writing career I was fortunate to be able to spend three hours interviewing Linus Pauling (above), the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel […]