Actress Reese Witherspoon's Dad is an Otolaryngologist!

It has recently come to my attention that actress Reese Witherspoon's dad is an eminent otolaryngologist!

John Witherspoon, MD has practiced with a Nashville, TN otolaryngology group for over 30 years and is an instructor in this specialty at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

He went to medical school at University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine and completed his residency at Tulane University Hospitals and Clinics.

He unfortunately has come under recent scrutiny from the media which hopefully will pass over quickly!

I wonder if Reese Witherspoon used her dad as a role model in the romantic comedy movie "Just Like Heaven" when she played Elizabeth, a workaholic doctor.

Movie Sets are Dangerous to Ears!

First it was Maggie Q, and now I learn that there are other celebrities with hearing loss due to movie set loud noise exposure.

Leonard Nimoy (Spock of Star Trek fame) suffers from right ear tinnitus due to hearing damage from a special effects explosion during filming of Star Trek episode "Arena".

Similarly, Steve Martin suffers from tinnitus due to hearing damage sustained during filming of a pistol-shooting scene for "¡Three Amigos!" in 1986.

Here is a full list of celebrities with hearing problems.

Natalie Portman, Scientific Genius in REAL Life!

The New York Times published a great article about the serious scientific credentials of some of hollywood's most celebrated stars, Natalie Portman among them.

As a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel Science Talent Search competition. Her project was a new “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy. She also went to Harvard University and studied neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

Ms. Portman apparently is not the only actor with serious scientific credentials.

Hedy Lamarr, the actress considered the "most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping,” which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track.

Danica McKellar, who has appeared on such shows as “The Wonder Years,” “The West Wing,” “NYPD Blue” and “Young Justice,” graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she helped devise a mathematical proof for certain properties of magnetic fields — a theorem that bears her name along with those of her collaborators.

Mayim Bialik plays the adorably frumpy-nerdy neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler on the "Big Bang Theory" sitcom. In real life, she also has a Ph.D. from U.C.L.A. in neurobiology.

Read this great story in the NYT here.