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TikTok challenge hits Taco Bell right in its ‘Stuft Nacho’
Losing weight for TikTok: Taco Bell edition
There are many reasons why a person would want to lose weight. Too numerous to list. Losing weight to improve your health, however, doesn’t bring in a few hundred thousand TikTok subscribers. Losing weight to convince Taco Bell to bring back an obscure menu item, on the other hand ...
Chris Sandberg, a 37-year-old man from San Francisco, has struggled with his weight for years, losing and gaining hundreds of pounds in an endless cycle of feast and famine. In an unrelated development, at the start of the pandemic he also started making videos on TikTok. As the pandemic wore on, he realized that his excess weight put him at increased risk for severe COVID, as well as other chronic diseases, and he resolved to lose weight. He decided to turn his weight-loss journey into a TikTok challenge but, as we said, losing weight for its own sake isn’t enough for the almighty algorithm. He needed a different goal, preferably something offbeat and a little silly.
Back in 2013, Taco Bell introduced the Grilled Stuft Nacho, “a flour tortilla, shaped like a nacho, stuffed with beef, cheesy jalapeño sauce, sour cream and crunchy red strips,” according to its website. Mr. Sandberg discovered the item in 2015 and instantly fell in love, purchasing one every day for a week. After that first week, however, he discovered, to his horror, that the Grilled Stuft Nacho had been discontinued.
That loss haunted him for years, until inspiration struck in 2021. He pledged to work out every day on TikTok until Taco Bell brought back the Grilled Stuft Nacho. A bit incongruous, exercising for notoriously unhealthy fast food, but that’s kind of the point. He began the challenge on Jan. 4, 2021, and has continued it every day since, nearly 500 days. Over that time, he’s lost 87 pounds (from 275 at the start to under 190) and currently has 450,000 TikTok subscribers.
A year into the challenge, a local Taco Bell made Mr. Sandberg his beloved Grilled Stuft Nacho, but since the challenge was to exercise until Taco Bell brings the item back to all its restaurants, not just for him, the great journey continues. And we admire him for it. In fact, he’s inspired us: We will write a LOTME every week until it receives a Pulitzer Prize. This is important journalism we do here. Don’t deny it!
Episode XIX: COVID strikes back
So what’s next for COVID? Is Disney going to turn it into a series? Can it support a spin-off? Did James Cameron really buy the movie rights? Can it compete against the NFL in the all-important 18-34 demographic? When are Star Wars characters going to get involved?
COVID’s motivations and negotiations are pretty much a mystery to us, but we can answer that last question. They already are involved. Well, one of them anyway.
The Chinese government has been enforcing a COVID lockdown in Shanghai for over a month now, but authorities had started letting people out of their homes for short periods of time. A recent push to bring down transmission, however, has made residents increasingly frustrated and argumentative, according to Reuters.
A now-unavailable video, which Reuters could not verify, surfaced on Chinese social media showing police in hazmat suits arguing with people who were being told that they were going to be quarantined because a neighbor had tested positive.
That’s when the Force kicks in, and this next bit comes directly from the Reuters report: “This is so that we can thoroughly remove any positive cases,” one of the officers is heard saying. “Stop asking me why, there is no why.”
There is no why? Does that remind you of someone? Someone short and green, with an odd syntax? That’s right. Clearly, Yoda it is. Yoda is alive and working for the Chinese government in Shanghai. You read it here first.
Your coffee may be guilty of sexual discrimination
How do you take your coffee? Espresso, drip, instant, or brewed from a regular old coffee machine? Well, a recent study published in Open Heart suggests that gender and brewing method can alter your coffee’s effect on cholesterol levels.
Besides caffeine, coffee beans have naturally occurring chemicals such as diterpenes, cafestol, and kahweol that raise cholesterol levels in the blood. And then there are the various brewing methods, which are going to release different amounts of chemicals from the beans. According to Consumer Reports, an ounce of espresso has 63 mg of caffeine and an ounce of regular coffee has 12-16 mg. That’s a bit deceiving, though, since no one ever drinks an ounce of regular coffee, so figure 96-128 mg of caffeine for an 8-ounce cup. That’s enough to make anyone’s heart race.
Data from 21,083 participants in the seventh survey of the Tromsø Study who were aged 40 and older showed that women drank a mean of 3.8 cups per day while men drank 4.9 cups. Drinking six or more cups of plunger-brewed coffee was associated with increased cholesterol in both genders, but drinking three to five cups of espresso was significantly associated with high cholesterol in men only. Having six or more cups of filtered coffee daily raised cholesterol in women, but instant coffee increased cholesterol levels in both genders, regardless of how many cups they drank.
People all over the planet drink coffee, some of us like our lives depend on it. Since “coffee is the most frequently consumed central stimulant worldwide,” the investigators said, “even small health effects can have considerable health consequences.”
We’ll drink to that.
Have you ever dreamed of having a clone?
When will science grace us with the ability to clone ourselves? It sounds like a dream come true. Our clones can do the stuff that we don’t want to do, like sit in on that 3-hour meeting or do our grocery shopping – really just all the boring stuff we don’t want to do.
In 1996, when a sheep named Dolly became the first mammal cloned successfully, people thought it was the start of an amazing cloning era, but, alas, we haven’t made it to cloning humans yet, as LiveScience discovered when it took a look at the subject.
The idea of cloning was quite exciting for science, as people looked forward to eradicating genetic diseases and birth defects. Research done in 1999, however, countered those hopes by suggesting that cloning might increase birth defects.
So why do you think we haven’t advanced to truly cloning humans? Ethics? Time and effort? Technological barriers? “Human cloning is a particularly dramatic action, and was one of the topics that helped launch American bioethics,” Hank Greely, professor of law and genetics at Stanford (Calif.) University, told LiveScience.
What if the clones turned evil and were bent on destroying the world?
We might imagine a clone of ourselves being completely identical to us in our thoughts, actions, and physical looks. However, that’s not necessarily true; a clone would be its own person even if it looks exactly like you.
So what do the professionals think? Is it worth giving human cloning a shot? Are there benefits? Mr. Greely said that “there are none that we should be willing to consider.”
The dream of having a clone to help your son with his math homework may have gone down the drain, but maybe it’s best not to open doors that could lead to drastic changes in our world.
Losing weight for TikTok: Taco Bell edition
There are many reasons why a person would want to lose weight. Too numerous to list. Losing weight to improve your health, however, doesn’t bring in a few hundred thousand TikTok subscribers. Losing weight to convince Taco Bell to bring back an obscure menu item, on the other hand ...
Chris Sandberg, a 37-year-old man from San Francisco, has struggled with his weight for years, losing and gaining hundreds of pounds in an endless cycle of feast and famine. In an unrelated development, at the start of the pandemic he also started making videos on TikTok. As the pandemic wore on, he realized that his excess weight put him at increased risk for severe COVID, as well as other chronic diseases, and he resolved to lose weight. He decided to turn his weight-loss journey into a TikTok challenge but, as we said, losing weight for its own sake isn’t enough for the almighty algorithm. He needed a different goal, preferably something offbeat and a little silly.
Back in 2013, Taco Bell introduced the Grilled Stuft Nacho, “a flour tortilla, shaped like a nacho, stuffed with beef, cheesy jalapeño sauce, sour cream and crunchy red strips,” according to its website. Mr. Sandberg discovered the item in 2015 and instantly fell in love, purchasing one every day for a week. After that first week, however, he discovered, to his horror, that the Grilled Stuft Nacho had been discontinued.
That loss haunted him for years, until inspiration struck in 2021. He pledged to work out every day on TikTok until Taco Bell brought back the Grilled Stuft Nacho. A bit incongruous, exercising for notoriously unhealthy fast food, but that’s kind of the point. He began the challenge on Jan. 4, 2021, and has continued it every day since, nearly 500 days. Over that time, he’s lost 87 pounds (from 275 at the start to under 190) and currently has 450,000 TikTok subscribers.
A year into the challenge, a local Taco Bell made Mr. Sandberg his beloved Grilled Stuft Nacho, but since the challenge was to exercise until Taco Bell brings the item back to all its restaurants, not just for him, the great journey continues. And we admire him for it. In fact, he’s inspired us: We will write a LOTME every week until it receives a Pulitzer Prize. This is important journalism we do here. Don’t deny it!
Episode XIX: COVID strikes back
So what’s next for COVID? Is Disney going to turn it into a series? Can it support a spin-off? Did James Cameron really buy the movie rights? Can it compete against the NFL in the all-important 18-34 demographic? When are Star Wars characters going to get involved?
COVID’s motivations and negotiations are pretty much a mystery to us, but we can answer that last question. They already are involved. Well, one of them anyway.
The Chinese government has been enforcing a COVID lockdown in Shanghai for over a month now, but authorities had started letting people out of their homes for short periods of time. A recent push to bring down transmission, however, has made residents increasingly frustrated and argumentative, according to Reuters.
A now-unavailable video, which Reuters could not verify, surfaced on Chinese social media showing police in hazmat suits arguing with people who were being told that they were going to be quarantined because a neighbor had tested positive.
That’s when the Force kicks in, and this next bit comes directly from the Reuters report: “This is so that we can thoroughly remove any positive cases,” one of the officers is heard saying. “Stop asking me why, there is no why.”
There is no why? Does that remind you of someone? Someone short and green, with an odd syntax? That’s right. Clearly, Yoda it is. Yoda is alive and working for the Chinese government in Shanghai. You read it here first.
Your coffee may be guilty of sexual discrimination
How do you take your coffee? Espresso, drip, instant, or brewed from a regular old coffee machine? Well, a recent study published in Open Heart suggests that gender and brewing method can alter your coffee’s effect on cholesterol levels.
Besides caffeine, coffee beans have naturally occurring chemicals such as diterpenes, cafestol, and kahweol that raise cholesterol levels in the blood. And then there are the various brewing methods, which are going to release different amounts of chemicals from the beans. According to Consumer Reports, an ounce of espresso has 63 mg of caffeine and an ounce of regular coffee has 12-16 mg. That’s a bit deceiving, though, since no one ever drinks an ounce of regular coffee, so figure 96-128 mg of caffeine for an 8-ounce cup. That’s enough to make anyone’s heart race.
Data from 21,083 participants in the seventh survey of the Tromsø Study who were aged 40 and older showed that women drank a mean of 3.8 cups per day while men drank 4.9 cups. Drinking six or more cups of plunger-brewed coffee was associated with increased cholesterol in both genders, but drinking three to five cups of espresso was significantly associated with high cholesterol in men only. Having six or more cups of filtered coffee daily raised cholesterol in women, but instant coffee increased cholesterol levels in both genders, regardless of how many cups they drank.
People all over the planet drink coffee, some of us like our lives depend on it. Since “coffee is the most frequently consumed central stimulant worldwide,” the investigators said, “even small health effects can have considerable health consequences.”
We’ll drink to that.
Have you ever dreamed of having a clone?
When will science grace us with the ability to clone ourselves? It sounds like a dream come true. Our clones can do the stuff that we don’t want to do, like sit in on that 3-hour meeting or do our grocery shopping – really just all the boring stuff we don’t want to do.
In 1996, when a sheep named Dolly became the first mammal cloned successfully, people thought it was the start of an amazing cloning era, but, alas, we haven’t made it to cloning humans yet, as LiveScience discovered when it took a look at the subject.
The idea of cloning was quite exciting for science, as people looked forward to eradicating genetic diseases and birth defects. Research done in 1999, however, countered those hopes by suggesting that cloning might increase birth defects.
So why do you think we haven’t advanced to truly cloning humans? Ethics? Time and effort? Technological barriers? “Human cloning is a particularly dramatic action, and was one of the topics that helped launch American bioethics,” Hank Greely, professor of law and genetics at Stanford (Calif.) University, told LiveScience.
What if the clones turned evil and were bent on destroying the world?
We might imagine a clone of ourselves being completely identical to us in our thoughts, actions, and physical looks. However, that’s not necessarily true; a clone would be its own person even if it looks exactly like you.
So what do the professionals think? Is it worth giving human cloning a shot? Are there benefits? Mr. Greely said that “there are none that we should be willing to consider.”
The dream of having a clone to help your son with his math homework may have gone down the drain, but maybe it’s best not to open doors that could lead to drastic changes in our world.
Losing weight for TikTok: Taco Bell edition
There are many reasons why a person would want to lose weight. Too numerous to list. Losing weight to improve your health, however, doesn’t bring in a few hundred thousand TikTok subscribers. Losing weight to convince Taco Bell to bring back an obscure menu item, on the other hand ...
Chris Sandberg, a 37-year-old man from San Francisco, has struggled with his weight for years, losing and gaining hundreds of pounds in an endless cycle of feast and famine. In an unrelated development, at the start of the pandemic he also started making videos on TikTok. As the pandemic wore on, he realized that his excess weight put him at increased risk for severe COVID, as well as other chronic diseases, and he resolved to lose weight. He decided to turn his weight-loss journey into a TikTok challenge but, as we said, losing weight for its own sake isn’t enough for the almighty algorithm. He needed a different goal, preferably something offbeat and a little silly.
Back in 2013, Taco Bell introduced the Grilled Stuft Nacho, “a flour tortilla, shaped like a nacho, stuffed with beef, cheesy jalapeño sauce, sour cream and crunchy red strips,” according to its website. Mr. Sandberg discovered the item in 2015 and instantly fell in love, purchasing one every day for a week. After that first week, however, he discovered, to his horror, that the Grilled Stuft Nacho had been discontinued.
That loss haunted him for years, until inspiration struck in 2021. He pledged to work out every day on TikTok until Taco Bell brought back the Grilled Stuft Nacho. A bit incongruous, exercising for notoriously unhealthy fast food, but that’s kind of the point. He began the challenge on Jan. 4, 2021, and has continued it every day since, nearly 500 days. Over that time, he’s lost 87 pounds (from 275 at the start to under 190) and currently has 450,000 TikTok subscribers.
A year into the challenge, a local Taco Bell made Mr. Sandberg his beloved Grilled Stuft Nacho, but since the challenge was to exercise until Taco Bell brings the item back to all its restaurants, not just for him, the great journey continues. And we admire him for it. In fact, he’s inspired us: We will write a LOTME every week until it receives a Pulitzer Prize. This is important journalism we do here. Don’t deny it!
Episode XIX: COVID strikes back
So what’s next for COVID? Is Disney going to turn it into a series? Can it support a spin-off? Did James Cameron really buy the movie rights? Can it compete against the NFL in the all-important 18-34 demographic? When are Star Wars characters going to get involved?
COVID’s motivations and negotiations are pretty much a mystery to us, but we can answer that last question. They already are involved. Well, one of them anyway.
The Chinese government has been enforcing a COVID lockdown in Shanghai for over a month now, but authorities had started letting people out of their homes for short periods of time. A recent push to bring down transmission, however, has made residents increasingly frustrated and argumentative, according to Reuters.
A now-unavailable video, which Reuters could not verify, surfaced on Chinese social media showing police in hazmat suits arguing with people who were being told that they were going to be quarantined because a neighbor had tested positive.
That’s when the Force kicks in, and this next bit comes directly from the Reuters report: “This is so that we can thoroughly remove any positive cases,” one of the officers is heard saying. “Stop asking me why, there is no why.”
There is no why? Does that remind you of someone? Someone short and green, with an odd syntax? That’s right. Clearly, Yoda it is. Yoda is alive and working for the Chinese government in Shanghai. You read it here first.
Your coffee may be guilty of sexual discrimination
How do you take your coffee? Espresso, drip, instant, or brewed from a regular old coffee machine? Well, a recent study published in Open Heart suggests that gender and brewing method can alter your coffee’s effect on cholesterol levels.
Besides caffeine, coffee beans have naturally occurring chemicals such as diterpenes, cafestol, and kahweol that raise cholesterol levels in the blood. And then there are the various brewing methods, which are going to release different amounts of chemicals from the beans. According to Consumer Reports, an ounce of espresso has 63 mg of caffeine and an ounce of regular coffee has 12-16 mg. That’s a bit deceiving, though, since no one ever drinks an ounce of regular coffee, so figure 96-128 mg of caffeine for an 8-ounce cup. That’s enough to make anyone’s heart race.
Data from 21,083 participants in the seventh survey of the Tromsø Study who were aged 40 and older showed that women drank a mean of 3.8 cups per day while men drank 4.9 cups. Drinking six or more cups of plunger-brewed coffee was associated with increased cholesterol in both genders, but drinking three to five cups of espresso was significantly associated with high cholesterol in men only. Having six or more cups of filtered coffee daily raised cholesterol in women, but instant coffee increased cholesterol levels in both genders, regardless of how many cups they drank.
People all over the planet drink coffee, some of us like our lives depend on it. Since “coffee is the most frequently consumed central stimulant worldwide,” the investigators said, “even small health effects can have considerable health consequences.”
We’ll drink to that.
Have you ever dreamed of having a clone?
When will science grace us with the ability to clone ourselves? It sounds like a dream come true. Our clones can do the stuff that we don’t want to do, like sit in on that 3-hour meeting or do our grocery shopping – really just all the boring stuff we don’t want to do.
In 1996, when a sheep named Dolly became the first mammal cloned successfully, people thought it was the start of an amazing cloning era, but, alas, we haven’t made it to cloning humans yet, as LiveScience discovered when it took a look at the subject.
The idea of cloning was quite exciting for science, as people looked forward to eradicating genetic diseases and birth defects. Research done in 1999, however, countered those hopes by suggesting that cloning might increase birth defects.
So why do you think we haven’t advanced to truly cloning humans? Ethics? Time and effort? Technological barriers? “Human cloning is a particularly dramatic action, and was one of the topics that helped launch American bioethics,” Hank Greely, professor of law and genetics at Stanford (Calif.) University, told LiveScience.
What if the clones turned evil and were bent on destroying the world?
We might imagine a clone of ourselves being completely identical to us in our thoughts, actions, and physical looks. However, that’s not necessarily true; a clone would be its own person even if it looks exactly like you.
So what do the professionals think? Is it worth giving human cloning a shot? Are there benefits? Mr. Greely said that “there are none that we should be willing to consider.”
The dream of having a clone to help your son with his math homework may have gone down the drain, but maybe it’s best not to open doors that could lead to drastic changes in our world.
Fecal transfer could be the transplant of youth
Fecal matter may be in the fountain of youth
Yes, you read that headline correctly. New research by scientists at Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia, both in Norwich, England, supports the claim that transferring fecal microbes might actually have some positive effects on reversing the aging process in the eyes, brain, and gut.
How do they know? Mice, of course. In the study, scientists took the gut microbes from older mice and transferred them into the younger mince. The young mice displayed inflamed signs of aging in their guts, brains, and eyes, which, we all know, decline in function as we age. What happens is a chronic inflammation of cells as we get older that can be found in the brain or gut that leads to a degenerative state over time.
When the older mice received the gut microbes from younger mice, the investigators saw the reverse: Gut, brain, and eye functionality improved. In a way, minimizing the inflammation.
There’s tons of research out there that suggests gut health is the key to a healthy life, but this study points directly to an improvement in brain and vision functionality as a result of the transfer.
Now, we’re not insinuating you get a poo transfer as you reach old age. And the shift to human studies on microbiota replacement therapy is still in the works. But this definitely is a topic to watch and could be a game changer in the age-old quest to bottle youth or at least improve quality of life as we age.
For now, the scientists did find some connections between the beneficial bacteria in the transplants and the human diet that could have similar effects, like changes in the metabolism of certain fats and vitamin that could have effects on the inflammatory cells in the eye and brain.
The more you know!
It’s not lying, it’s preemptive truth
Lying is bad. Bold statement, we know, but a true one. After all, God spent an entire commandment telling people not to do the whole bearing false witness thing, and God is generally known for not joking around. He’s a pretty serious dude.
In case you’ve been wandering around the desert for a while and haven’t had wifi, we have a bit of a misinformation problem these days. People lie all the time about a lot of things, and a lot of people believe the lies. According to new research, however, there are also a lot of people who recognize the lies but accept them anyway because they believe that the lies will become true in the future.
Imagine the following scenario: A friend gets a job he’s not qualified for because he listed a skill he doesn’t have. That’s bad, right? And the people the researchers interviewed agreed, at least initially. But when informed that our friend is planning on obtaining the skill in summer classes in the near future, the study participants became far more willing to excuse the initial lie.
A friend jumping the gun on training he doesn’t have yet is fairly innocuous as far as lying goes, but as the researchers found, this willingness to forgive lies because they could become true extends far further. For example, millions of people do not vote illegally in U.S. elections, nor do White people get approved for mortgages at rates 300% higher than minorities, but when asked to imagine scenarios in which those statements could be true, study participants were less likely to condemn the lie and prevent it from spreading further, especially if their political viewpoints aligned with the respective falsehood.
It seems, then, that while we may aspire to not tell lies, we take after another guy with magic powers who spent too much time in the desert: “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view.”
It tastes like feng shui, but it’s not
You know about biomes. You’ve read about various microbiomes. Allow us to introduce you to the envirome,
The envirome “includes all the natural and man-made elements of our environment throughout the lifespan, notably the built environment,” said Robert Schneider, dean of the College of Integrative Medicine at Maharishi International University. Located in – you guessed it – Fairfield, Iowa, and home of the Fighting Transcendentalists. MAHARISHI RULES!
[Editor’s note: You made that up, right? Well, it really is in Iowa, but they don’t seem to have an athletic program.]
In an effort to maximize the envirome’s potential to improve quality of life, Dr. Schneider and his associates systematically integrated the principles of Maharishi Vastu architecture (MVA) into a comprehensive building system. MVA is “a holistic wellness architectural system that aligns buildings with nature’s intelligence, creating balanced, orderly, and integrated living environments with the goal of improving occupants’ lives,” the university explained in a written statement.
Since “modern medicine now recognizes the powerful effects of the ‘envirome’ on health,” Dr. Schneider said in that statement, the researchers reviewed 40 years’ worth of published studies on MVA’s benefits – an analysis that appears in Global Advances in Health and Medicine.
As far as our homes are concerned, here are some of the things MVA says we should be doing:
- The headboard of a bed should be oriented to the east or south when you sleep. This will improve mental health.
- While sitting at a desk or work area, a person should face east or north to improve brain coherence.
- The main entrance of a house should face east because morning light is superior to afternoon light.
And you were worried about feng shui. Well, forget feng shui. Feng shui is for amateurs. MVA is the way to go. MVA is the GOAT. MAHARISHI RULES!
Fecal matter may be in the fountain of youth
Yes, you read that headline correctly. New research by scientists at Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia, both in Norwich, England, supports the claim that transferring fecal microbes might actually have some positive effects on reversing the aging process in the eyes, brain, and gut.
How do they know? Mice, of course. In the study, scientists took the gut microbes from older mice and transferred them into the younger mince. The young mice displayed inflamed signs of aging in their guts, brains, and eyes, which, we all know, decline in function as we age. What happens is a chronic inflammation of cells as we get older that can be found in the brain or gut that leads to a degenerative state over time.
When the older mice received the gut microbes from younger mice, the investigators saw the reverse: Gut, brain, and eye functionality improved. In a way, minimizing the inflammation.
There’s tons of research out there that suggests gut health is the key to a healthy life, but this study points directly to an improvement in brain and vision functionality as a result of the transfer.
Now, we’re not insinuating you get a poo transfer as you reach old age. And the shift to human studies on microbiota replacement therapy is still in the works. But this definitely is a topic to watch and could be a game changer in the age-old quest to bottle youth or at least improve quality of life as we age.
For now, the scientists did find some connections between the beneficial bacteria in the transplants and the human diet that could have similar effects, like changes in the metabolism of certain fats and vitamin that could have effects on the inflammatory cells in the eye and brain.
The more you know!
It’s not lying, it’s preemptive truth
Lying is bad. Bold statement, we know, but a true one. After all, God spent an entire commandment telling people not to do the whole bearing false witness thing, and God is generally known for not joking around. He’s a pretty serious dude.
In case you’ve been wandering around the desert for a while and haven’t had wifi, we have a bit of a misinformation problem these days. People lie all the time about a lot of things, and a lot of people believe the lies. According to new research, however, there are also a lot of people who recognize the lies but accept them anyway because they believe that the lies will become true in the future.
Imagine the following scenario: A friend gets a job he’s not qualified for because he listed a skill he doesn’t have. That’s bad, right? And the people the researchers interviewed agreed, at least initially. But when informed that our friend is planning on obtaining the skill in summer classes in the near future, the study participants became far more willing to excuse the initial lie.
A friend jumping the gun on training he doesn’t have yet is fairly innocuous as far as lying goes, but as the researchers found, this willingness to forgive lies because they could become true extends far further. For example, millions of people do not vote illegally in U.S. elections, nor do White people get approved for mortgages at rates 300% higher than minorities, but when asked to imagine scenarios in which those statements could be true, study participants were less likely to condemn the lie and prevent it from spreading further, especially if their political viewpoints aligned with the respective falsehood.
It seems, then, that while we may aspire to not tell lies, we take after another guy with magic powers who spent too much time in the desert: “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view.”
It tastes like feng shui, but it’s not
You know about biomes. You’ve read about various microbiomes. Allow us to introduce you to the envirome,
The envirome “includes all the natural and man-made elements of our environment throughout the lifespan, notably the built environment,” said Robert Schneider, dean of the College of Integrative Medicine at Maharishi International University. Located in – you guessed it – Fairfield, Iowa, and home of the Fighting Transcendentalists. MAHARISHI RULES!
[Editor’s note: You made that up, right? Well, it really is in Iowa, but they don’t seem to have an athletic program.]
In an effort to maximize the envirome’s potential to improve quality of life, Dr. Schneider and his associates systematically integrated the principles of Maharishi Vastu architecture (MVA) into a comprehensive building system. MVA is “a holistic wellness architectural system that aligns buildings with nature’s intelligence, creating balanced, orderly, and integrated living environments with the goal of improving occupants’ lives,” the university explained in a written statement.
Since “modern medicine now recognizes the powerful effects of the ‘envirome’ on health,” Dr. Schneider said in that statement, the researchers reviewed 40 years’ worth of published studies on MVA’s benefits – an analysis that appears in Global Advances in Health and Medicine.
As far as our homes are concerned, here are some of the things MVA says we should be doing:
- The headboard of a bed should be oriented to the east or south when you sleep. This will improve mental health.
- While sitting at a desk or work area, a person should face east or north to improve brain coherence.
- The main entrance of a house should face east because morning light is superior to afternoon light.
And you were worried about feng shui. Well, forget feng shui. Feng shui is for amateurs. MVA is the way to go. MVA is the GOAT. MAHARISHI RULES!
Fecal matter may be in the fountain of youth
Yes, you read that headline correctly. New research by scientists at Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia, both in Norwich, England, supports the claim that transferring fecal microbes might actually have some positive effects on reversing the aging process in the eyes, brain, and gut.
How do they know? Mice, of course. In the study, scientists took the gut microbes from older mice and transferred them into the younger mince. The young mice displayed inflamed signs of aging in their guts, brains, and eyes, which, we all know, decline in function as we age. What happens is a chronic inflammation of cells as we get older that can be found in the brain or gut that leads to a degenerative state over time.
When the older mice received the gut microbes from younger mice, the investigators saw the reverse: Gut, brain, and eye functionality improved. In a way, minimizing the inflammation.
There’s tons of research out there that suggests gut health is the key to a healthy life, but this study points directly to an improvement in brain and vision functionality as a result of the transfer.
Now, we’re not insinuating you get a poo transfer as you reach old age. And the shift to human studies on microbiota replacement therapy is still in the works. But this definitely is a topic to watch and could be a game changer in the age-old quest to bottle youth or at least improve quality of life as we age.
For now, the scientists did find some connections between the beneficial bacteria in the transplants and the human diet that could have similar effects, like changes in the metabolism of certain fats and vitamin that could have effects on the inflammatory cells in the eye and brain.
The more you know!
It’s not lying, it’s preemptive truth
Lying is bad. Bold statement, we know, but a true one. After all, God spent an entire commandment telling people not to do the whole bearing false witness thing, and God is generally known for not joking around. He’s a pretty serious dude.
In case you’ve been wandering around the desert for a while and haven’t had wifi, we have a bit of a misinformation problem these days. People lie all the time about a lot of things, and a lot of people believe the lies. According to new research, however, there are also a lot of people who recognize the lies but accept them anyway because they believe that the lies will become true in the future.
Imagine the following scenario: A friend gets a job he’s not qualified for because he listed a skill he doesn’t have. That’s bad, right? And the people the researchers interviewed agreed, at least initially. But when informed that our friend is planning on obtaining the skill in summer classes in the near future, the study participants became far more willing to excuse the initial lie.
A friend jumping the gun on training he doesn’t have yet is fairly innocuous as far as lying goes, but as the researchers found, this willingness to forgive lies because they could become true extends far further. For example, millions of people do not vote illegally in U.S. elections, nor do White people get approved for mortgages at rates 300% higher than minorities, but when asked to imagine scenarios in which those statements could be true, study participants were less likely to condemn the lie and prevent it from spreading further, especially if their political viewpoints aligned with the respective falsehood.
It seems, then, that while we may aspire to not tell lies, we take after another guy with magic powers who spent too much time in the desert: “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view.”
It tastes like feng shui, but it’s not
You know about biomes. You’ve read about various microbiomes. Allow us to introduce you to the envirome,
The envirome “includes all the natural and man-made elements of our environment throughout the lifespan, notably the built environment,” said Robert Schneider, dean of the College of Integrative Medicine at Maharishi International University. Located in – you guessed it – Fairfield, Iowa, and home of the Fighting Transcendentalists. MAHARISHI RULES!
[Editor’s note: You made that up, right? Well, it really is in Iowa, but they don’t seem to have an athletic program.]
In an effort to maximize the envirome’s potential to improve quality of life, Dr. Schneider and his associates systematically integrated the principles of Maharishi Vastu architecture (MVA) into a comprehensive building system. MVA is “a holistic wellness architectural system that aligns buildings with nature’s intelligence, creating balanced, orderly, and integrated living environments with the goal of improving occupants’ lives,” the university explained in a written statement.
Since “modern medicine now recognizes the powerful effects of the ‘envirome’ on health,” Dr. Schneider said in that statement, the researchers reviewed 40 years’ worth of published studies on MVA’s benefits – an analysis that appears in Global Advances in Health and Medicine.
As far as our homes are concerned, here are some of the things MVA says we should be doing:
- The headboard of a bed should be oriented to the east or south when you sleep. This will improve mental health.
- While sitting at a desk or work area, a person should face east or north to improve brain coherence.
- The main entrance of a house should face east because morning light is superior to afternoon light.
And you were worried about feng shui. Well, forget feng shui. Feng shui is for amateurs. MVA is the way to go. MVA is the GOAT. MAHARISHI RULES!
Nap length linked to cognitive changes
No wonder we feel worse after naps
Some of us have hectic schedules that may make a nap feel more necessary. It’s common knowledge that naps shouldn’t be too long – maybe 20 minutes or so – but if you frequently take 3-hour naps and wake up thinking you’re late for school even though you’re 47 and have your PhD, this LOTME is for you.
Studies have shown that there is a link between napping during the day and Alzheimer’s/cognitive decline, but now we’ve got a double whammy for you: Longer and more frequent napping is linked to worse cognition after a year, and in turn, those with cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s are known to nap longer and more frequently during the day.
“We now know that the pathology related to cognitive decline can cause other changes in function,” he said. “It’s really a multisystem disorder, also including difficulty sleeping, changes in movement, changes in body composition, depression symptoms, behavioral changes, etc.,” coauthor Aron Buchman, MD, said in a statement from Rush University Medical Center.
The investigators monitored 1,400 patients over the course of 14 years with wrist bracelets that recorded when a person was not active during the day and considered that a nap.
At the beginning of the study, 75% of the study subjects had no cognitive impairment, 19.5% had some cognitive impairment, and approximately 4% had Alzheimer’s. Napping during the day only increased about 11 minutes a year for those with no signs of cognitive impairment, but those who showed significantly more signs of cognitive decline doubled their nap time and those actually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s tripled theirs.
The investigators did not imply that napping causes Alzheimer’s, but they noted that people who are older and nap more than an hour a day are 40% more likely to be at risk. It is something to consider and monitor.
Sometimes, after all, a nap seems like the best idea ever, but more often than not we wake up feeling 10 times worse. Our bodies may be giving us a heads up.
Pokemon Go away depression
The summer of 2016 was a great time if you happened to be a fan of Pokemon. Which is quite a lot of people. For almost 20 years millions have enjoyed the games and animated series, but Pokemon Go brought the thrill of catching Pokemon to life in a whole new way. For the first time, you could go out into the world and pretend you were a real Pokemon trainer, and everywhere you went, there would be others like you.
The ability to chase after Pikachu and Charizard in real life (well, augmented reality, but close enough) seemed to bring people a lot of joy, but seemed is never good enough for science. Can’t have anecdotes, we need data! So researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science conducted a study into how Pokemon Go affected local Internet search rates of depression as the game was released slowly around the world.
Through analyzing Google Trend data of words like “depression,” “anxiety,” and “stress,” the researchers found that the release of Pokemon Go was significantly associated with a noticeable, though short-term, drop in depression-related Internet searches. Location-based augmented reality games may alleviate symptoms of mild depression, the researchers said, as they encourage physical activity, face-to-face socialization, and exposure to nature, though they added that simply going outside is likely not enough to combat clinical cases of severe depression.
Still, augmented reality games represent a viable target for public health investment, since they’re easy to use and inexpensive to make. That said, we’re not sure we want the FDA or CDC making a new Pokemon Go game. They’d probably end up filling the streets with Mr. Mime. And no one would leave their house for that.
And now a word from our sponsor
How many times has this happened to you? You need to repair a jet engine, inspect a nuclear reactor cooling system, AND perform bowel surgery, but you can’t carry around all the heavy, old-fashioned tools needed for those jobs.
Well, we’ve got one tool that can do it all! And that tool is a snake. No, it’s a robot.
It’s both! It’s the COntinuum roBot for Remote Applications. COBRA is the robot that looks like a snake! A snake that’s 5 meters long but only as thick as a pencil (about 9 mm in diameter). A robot with “extraordinary manoeuvrability and responsiveness due to … a compliant-joint structure and multiple continuous sections that enable it to bend at around 90 degrees,” according to the team at the University of Nottingham (England) that developed it.
COBRA comes equipped with a stereovision camera and a miniature cutting tool to perform complex industrial repair, but other devices can be interchanged for possible medical use.
COBRA and its joystick-like controller were designed to be easy to use. Dr. Oladejo Olaleye, the ear, nose, and throat and robotic surgeon at University Hospitals of Leicester who is directing its surgical development, was able to use COBRA on a dummy after just 5 minutes of training. He called it “the future of diagnostic endoscopy and therapeutic surgery.”
Don’t be the last aircraft engineer/nuclear technician/surgeon on your block to have this ultraslender, ultramaneuverable reptilian repair robot. Get your COBRA now! Operators are standing by.
Disclaimer: Robot is still under development and not yet on sale.
Rule, (worm) Britannia!
As long as there have been people, there have been parasitic worms living in their guts. Helminth infection is a continuing and largely ignored crisis in poor, tropical nations, though worm-based diseases have been basically eliminated from wealthier countries.
This wasn’t always the case, however, as a study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases (now there’s a specific topic) has found. The researchers detail the glorious history of helminth infestation in the United Kingdom from the Victorian era all the way back to prehistory, scouring hundreds of skeletons found in 17 sites across the country for eggs, which can remain intact for thousands of years.
The researchers found that two eras in particular had very high rates of infection. Unsurprisingly, the late medieval era was one of them, but the other is less obvious. The Romans were famous for their hygiene, their baths, and their plumbing, but maybe they also should be famous for the abundance of worms in their bellies. That doesn’t make sense at first: Shouldn’t good hygiene lower infection? The benefits of a good sewer system, however, are lessened when the waste containing said infectious organisms is used to fertilize crops. Recycling is generally a good thing, but less so when you’re recycling parasitic worms.
Curiously, of the three sites from the industrial age, only the one in London had high levels of worm infestation. Considering how dirty and cramped 19th-century British cities were, one might expect disease to run rampant (tuberculosis certainly did), but the sites in Oxford and Birmingham were almost devoid of worms. The researchers theorized that this was because of access to clean well water. Or maybe worms just have a thing for London. [Editor’s note: It’s probably not that.]
No wonder we feel worse after naps
Some of us have hectic schedules that may make a nap feel more necessary. It’s common knowledge that naps shouldn’t be too long – maybe 20 minutes or so – but if you frequently take 3-hour naps and wake up thinking you’re late for school even though you’re 47 and have your PhD, this LOTME is for you.
Studies have shown that there is a link between napping during the day and Alzheimer’s/cognitive decline, but now we’ve got a double whammy for you: Longer and more frequent napping is linked to worse cognition after a year, and in turn, those with cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s are known to nap longer and more frequently during the day.
“We now know that the pathology related to cognitive decline can cause other changes in function,” he said. “It’s really a multisystem disorder, also including difficulty sleeping, changes in movement, changes in body composition, depression symptoms, behavioral changes, etc.,” coauthor Aron Buchman, MD, said in a statement from Rush University Medical Center.
The investigators monitored 1,400 patients over the course of 14 years with wrist bracelets that recorded when a person was not active during the day and considered that a nap.
At the beginning of the study, 75% of the study subjects had no cognitive impairment, 19.5% had some cognitive impairment, and approximately 4% had Alzheimer’s. Napping during the day only increased about 11 minutes a year for those with no signs of cognitive impairment, but those who showed significantly more signs of cognitive decline doubled their nap time and those actually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s tripled theirs.
The investigators did not imply that napping causes Alzheimer’s, but they noted that people who are older and nap more than an hour a day are 40% more likely to be at risk. It is something to consider and monitor.
Sometimes, after all, a nap seems like the best idea ever, but more often than not we wake up feeling 10 times worse. Our bodies may be giving us a heads up.
Pokemon Go away depression
The summer of 2016 was a great time if you happened to be a fan of Pokemon. Which is quite a lot of people. For almost 20 years millions have enjoyed the games and animated series, but Pokemon Go brought the thrill of catching Pokemon to life in a whole new way. For the first time, you could go out into the world and pretend you were a real Pokemon trainer, and everywhere you went, there would be others like you.
The ability to chase after Pikachu and Charizard in real life (well, augmented reality, but close enough) seemed to bring people a lot of joy, but seemed is never good enough for science. Can’t have anecdotes, we need data! So researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science conducted a study into how Pokemon Go affected local Internet search rates of depression as the game was released slowly around the world.
Through analyzing Google Trend data of words like “depression,” “anxiety,” and “stress,” the researchers found that the release of Pokemon Go was significantly associated with a noticeable, though short-term, drop in depression-related Internet searches. Location-based augmented reality games may alleviate symptoms of mild depression, the researchers said, as they encourage physical activity, face-to-face socialization, and exposure to nature, though they added that simply going outside is likely not enough to combat clinical cases of severe depression.
Still, augmented reality games represent a viable target for public health investment, since they’re easy to use and inexpensive to make. That said, we’re not sure we want the FDA or CDC making a new Pokemon Go game. They’d probably end up filling the streets with Mr. Mime. And no one would leave their house for that.
And now a word from our sponsor
How many times has this happened to you? You need to repair a jet engine, inspect a nuclear reactor cooling system, AND perform bowel surgery, but you can’t carry around all the heavy, old-fashioned tools needed for those jobs.
Well, we’ve got one tool that can do it all! And that tool is a snake. No, it’s a robot.
It’s both! It’s the COntinuum roBot for Remote Applications. COBRA is the robot that looks like a snake! A snake that’s 5 meters long but only as thick as a pencil (about 9 mm in diameter). A robot with “extraordinary manoeuvrability and responsiveness due to … a compliant-joint structure and multiple continuous sections that enable it to bend at around 90 degrees,” according to the team at the University of Nottingham (England) that developed it.
COBRA comes equipped with a stereovision camera and a miniature cutting tool to perform complex industrial repair, but other devices can be interchanged for possible medical use.
COBRA and its joystick-like controller were designed to be easy to use. Dr. Oladejo Olaleye, the ear, nose, and throat and robotic surgeon at University Hospitals of Leicester who is directing its surgical development, was able to use COBRA on a dummy after just 5 minutes of training. He called it “the future of diagnostic endoscopy and therapeutic surgery.”
Don’t be the last aircraft engineer/nuclear technician/surgeon on your block to have this ultraslender, ultramaneuverable reptilian repair robot. Get your COBRA now! Operators are standing by.
Disclaimer: Robot is still under development and not yet on sale.
Rule, (worm) Britannia!
As long as there have been people, there have been parasitic worms living in their guts. Helminth infection is a continuing and largely ignored crisis in poor, tropical nations, though worm-based diseases have been basically eliminated from wealthier countries.
This wasn’t always the case, however, as a study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases (now there’s a specific topic) has found. The researchers detail the glorious history of helminth infestation in the United Kingdom from the Victorian era all the way back to prehistory, scouring hundreds of skeletons found in 17 sites across the country for eggs, which can remain intact for thousands of years.
The researchers found that two eras in particular had very high rates of infection. Unsurprisingly, the late medieval era was one of them, but the other is less obvious. The Romans were famous for their hygiene, their baths, and their plumbing, but maybe they also should be famous for the abundance of worms in their bellies. That doesn’t make sense at first: Shouldn’t good hygiene lower infection? The benefits of a good sewer system, however, are lessened when the waste containing said infectious organisms is used to fertilize crops. Recycling is generally a good thing, but less so when you’re recycling parasitic worms.
Curiously, of the three sites from the industrial age, only the one in London had high levels of worm infestation. Considering how dirty and cramped 19th-century British cities were, one might expect disease to run rampant (tuberculosis certainly did), but the sites in Oxford and Birmingham were almost devoid of worms. The researchers theorized that this was because of access to clean well water. Or maybe worms just have a thing for London. [Editor’s note: It’s probably not that.]
No wonder we feel worse after naps
Some of us have hectic schedules that may make a nap feel more necessary. It’s common knowledge that naps shouldn’t be too long – maybe 20 minutes or so – but if you frequently take 3-hour naps and wake up thinking you’re late for school even though you’re 47 and have your PhD, this LOTME is for you.
Studies have shown that there is a link between napping during the day and Alzheimer’s/cognitive decline, but now we’ve got a double whammy for you: Longer and more frequent napping is linked to worse cognition after a year, and in turn, those with cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s are known to nap longer and more frequently during the day.
“We now know that the pathology related to cognitive decline can cause other changes in function,” he said. “It’s really a multisystem disorder, also including difficulty sleeping, changes in movement, changes in body composition, depression symptoms, behavioral changes, etc.,” coauthor Aron Buchman, MD, said in a statement from Rush University Medical Center.
The investigators monitored 1,400 patients over the course of 14 years with wrist bracelets that recorded when a person was not active during the day and considered that a nap.
At the beginning of the study, 75% of the study subjects had no cognitive impairment, 19.5% had some cognitive impairment, and approximately 4% had Alzheimer’s. Napping during the day only increased about 11 minutes a year for those with no signs of cognitive impairment, but those who showed significantly more signs of cognitive decline doubled their nap time and those actually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s tripled theirs.
The investigators did not imply that napping causes Alzheimer’s, but they noted that people who are older and nap more than an hour a day are 40% more likely to be at risk. It is something to consider and monitor.
Sometimes, after all, a nap seems like the best idea ever, but more often than not we wake up feeling 10 times worse. Our bodies may be giving us a heads up.
Pokemon Go away depression
The summer of 2016 was a great time if you happened to be a fan of Pokemon. Which is quite a lot of people. For almost 20 years millions have enjoyed the games and animated series, but Pokemon Go brought the thrill of catching Pokemon to life in a whole new way. For the first time, you could go out into the world and pretend you were a real Pokemon trainer, and everywhere you went, there would be others like you.
The ability to chase after Pikachu and Charizard in real life (well, augmented reality, but close enough) seemed to bring people a lot of joy, but seemed is never good enough for science. Can’t have anecdotes, we need data! So researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science conducted a study into how Pokemon Go affected local Internet search rates of depression as the game was released slowly around the world.
Through analyzing Google Trend data of words like “depression,” “anxiety,” and “stress,” the researchers found that the release of Pokemon Go was significantly associated with a noticeable, though short-term, drop in depression-related Internet searches. Location-based augmented reality games may alleviate symptoms of mild depression, the researchers said, as they encourage physical activity, face-to-face socialization, and exposure to nature, though they added that simply going outside is likely not enough to combat clinical cases of severe depression.
Still, augmented reality games represent a viable target for public health investment, since they’re easy to use and inexpensive to make. That said, we’re not sure we want the FDA or CDC making a new Pokemon Go game. They’d probably end up filling the streets with Mr. Mime. And no one would leave their house for that.
And now a word from our sponsor
How many times has this happened to you? You need to repair a jet engine, inspect a nuclear reactor cooling system, AND perform bowel surgery, but you can’t carry around all the heavy, old-fashioned tools needed for those jobs.
Well, we’ve got one tool that can do it all! And that tool is a snake. No, it’s a robot.
It’s both! It’s the COntinuum roBot for Remote Applications. COBRA is the robot that looks like a snake! A snake that’s 5 meters long but only as thick as a pencil (about 9 mm in diameter). A robot with “extraordinary manoeuvrability and responsiveness due to … a compliant-joint structure and multiple continuous sections that enable it to bend at around 90 degrees,” according to the team at the University of Nottingham (England) that developed it.
COBRA comes equipped with a stereovision camera and a miniature cutting tool to perform complex industrial repair, but other devices can be interchanged for possible medical use.
COBRA and its joystick-like controller were designed to be easy to use. Dr. Oladejo Olaleye, the ear, nose, and throat and robotic surgeon at University Hospitals of Leicester who is directing its surgical development, was able to use COBRA on a dummy after just 5 minutes of training. He called it “the future of diagnostic endoscopy and therapeutic surgery.”
Don’t be the last aircraft engineer/nuclear technician/surgeon on your block to have this ultraslender, ultramaneuverable reptilian repair robot. Get your COBRA now! Operators are standing by.
Disclaimer: Robot is still under development and not yet on sale.
Rule, (worm) Britannia!
As long as there have been people, there have been parasitic worms living in their guts. Helminth infection is a continuing and largely ignored crisis in poor, tropical nations, though worm-based diseases have been basically eliminated from wealthier countries.
This wasn’t always the case, however, as a study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases (now there’s a specific topic) has found. The researchers detail the glorious history of helminth infestation in the United Kingdom from the Victorian era all the way back to prehistory, scouring hundreds of skeletons found in 17 sites across the country for eggs, which can remain intact for thousands of years.
The researchers found that two eras in particular had very high rates of infection. Unsurprisingly, the late medieval era was one of them, but the other is less obvious. The Romans were famous for their hygiene, their baths, and their plumbing, but maybe they also should be famous for the abundance of worms in their bellies. That doesn’t make sense at first: Shouldn’t good hygiene lower infection? The benefits of a good sewer system, however, are lessened when the waste containing said infectious organisms is used to fertilize crops. Recycling is generally a good thing, but less so when you’re recycling parasitic worms.
Curiously, of the three sites from the industrial age, only the one in London had high levels of worm infestation. Considering how dirty and cramped 19th-century British cities were, one might expect disease to run rampant (tuberculosis certainly did), but the sites in Oxford and Birmingham were almost devoid of worms. The researchers theorized that this was because of access to clean well water. Or maybe worms just have a thing for London. [Editor’s note: It’s probably not that.]
The Empire strikes out against one physician’s homemade star fighter
The force is with Ukraine, always
Of all the things we could want from Star Wars, a lightsaber is at the top of the list. And someone is working on that. But second is probably the iconic X-wing. It was used to blow up the Death Star after all: Who wouldn’t want one?
A real-life star fighter may be outside our technological capabilities, but Dr. Akaki Lekiachvili of Atlanta has done the next best thing and constructed a two-thirds scale model to encourage kids to enter the sciences and, with the advent of the war in Ukraine, raise money for medical supplies to assist doctors in the embattled country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. Lekiachvili, originally from Georgia (the country, former Soviet republic, and previous target of Russian aggression in 2008), takes a dim view toward the invasion of Ukraine: “Russia is like the Evil Empire and Ukraine the Rebel Alliance.”
It’s been a long road finishing the X-Wing, as Dr. Lekiachvili started the project in 2016 and spent $60,000 on it, posting numerous updates on social media over that time, even attracting the attention of Luke Skywalker himself, actor Mark Hamill. Now that he’s done, he’s brought his model out to the public multiple times, delighting kids and adults alike. It can’t fly, but it has an engine and wheels so it can move, the wings can lock into attack position, the thrusters light up, and the voices of Obi-Wan Kenobi and R2-D2 guide children along as they sit in the cockpit.
Dr. Lekiachvili hopes to auction off his creation to a collector and donate the proceeds to Ukrainian charities, and we’re sure he’ll receive far more than the $60,000 he spent building his masterpiece. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to raid our bank accounts. We have a Death Star to destroy.
I’m a doctor, not a hologram
Telemedicine got a big boost during the early phase of the pandemic when hospitals and medical offices were off limits to anyone without COVID-19, but things have cooled off, telemedically speaking, since then. Well, NASA may have heated them up again. Or maybe it was Starfleet. Hmm, wait a second while we check. … No, it was NASA.
The space agency used the Microsoft Hololens Kinect camera and a personal computer with custom software from Aexa Aerospace to “holoport” NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid up to the International Space Station, where he had a conversation with European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who wore an augmented reality headset that allowed him to see, hear, and interact with a 3D representation of the earthbound medical provider.
“Holoportation has been in use since at least 2016 by Microsoft, but this is the first use in such an extreme and remote environment such as space,” NASA said in a recent written statement, noting that the extreme house call took place on Oct. 8, 2021.
They seem to be forgetting about Star Trek, but we’ll let them slide on that one. Anyway, NASA didn’t share any details of the medical holoconversation – which may have strained the limits of HIPAA’s portability provisions – but Dr. Schmid described it as “a brand-new way of human exploration, where our human entity is able to travel off the planet. Our physical body is not there, but our human entity absolutely is there.”
Boldly doctoring where no doctor has gone before, you might say. You also might notice from the photo that Dr. Schmid went full Trekkie with a genuine Vulcan salute. Live long and prosper, Dr. Schmid. Live long and prosper.
Add electricity for umami
Salt makes everything taste better. Unfortunately, excess salt can cause problems for our bodies down the line, starting with high blood pressure and continuing on to heart disease and strokes. So how do we enjoy our deliciously salty foods without putting ourselves at risk? One answer may be electricity.
Researchers at Meiji University in Tokyo partnered with food and beverage maker Kirin to develop a set of electric chopsticks to boost the taste of salt in foods without the extra sodium. According to codeveloper and Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita, the device, worn like a watch with a wire attached to one of the chopsticks, “uses a weak electrical current to transmit sodium ions from food, through the chopsticks, to the mouth where they create a sense of saltines,” Reuters said.
In a country like Japan, where a lot of food is made with heavily sodium-based ingredients like miso and soy sauce, the average adult consumes 10 g of salt a day. That’s twice the recommended amount proposed by the World Health Organization. To not sacrifice bland food for better health, this device, which enhances the saltiness of the food consumed by 1.5 times, offers a fairly easy solution to a big public health crisis.
The chopsticks were tested by giving participants reduced-sodium miso soup. They told the researchers that the food was improved in “richness, sweetness, and overall tastiness,” the Guardian said.
Worried about having something electric in your mouth? Don’t worry. Kirin said in a statement that the electricity is very weak and not enough to affect the body.
The chopsticks are still in a prototype stage, but you may be able to get your pair as soon as next year. Until then, maybe be a little mindful of the salt.
Pet poop works in mysterious ways
We usually see it as a burden when our pets poop and pee in the house, but those bodily excretions may be able to tell us something about cancer-causing toxins running rampant in our homes.
Those toxins, known as aromatic amines, can be found in tobacco smoke and dyes used in make-up, textiles, and plastics. “Our findings suggest that pets are coming into contact with aromatic amines that leach from products in their household environment,” lead author Sridhar Chinthakindi, PhD, of NYU Langone Health, said in a statement from the university. “As these substances have been tied to bladder, colorectal, and other forms of cancer, our results may help explain why so many dogs and cats develop such diseases.”
Tobacco smoke was not the main source of the aromatic amines found in the poop and urine, but 70% of dogs and 80% of cats had these chemicals in their waste. The researchers looked for 30 types of aromatic amines plus nicotine in the sample and found 8. The chemical concentrations were much higher in cats than in dogs, possibly because of differences in exposure and metabolism between the two species, they suggested.
“If [pets] are getting exposed to toxins in our homes, then we had better take a closer look at our own exposure,” said senior author Kurunthachalam Kannan, PhD, of NYU Langone.
So the next time your pet poops or pees in the house, don’t get mad. Maybe they’re just trying to help you out by supplying some easy-to-collect samples.
The force is with Ukraine, always
Of all the things we could want from Star Wars, a lightsaber is at the top of the list. And someone is working on that. But second is probably the iconic X-wing. It was used to blow up the Death Star after all: Who wouldn’t want one?
A real-life star fighter may be outside our technological capabilities, but Dr. Akaki Lekiachvili of Atlanta has done the next best thing and constructed a two-thirds scale model to encourage kids to enter the sciences and, with the advent of the war in Ukraine, raise money for medical supplies to assist doctors in the embattled country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. Lekiachvili, originally from Georgia (the country, former Soviet republic, and previous target of Russian aggression in 2008), takes a dim view toward the invasion of Ukraine: “Russia is like the Evil Empire and Ukraine the Rebel Alliance.”
It’s been a long road finishing the X-Wing, as Dr. Lekiachvili started the project in 2016 and spent $60,000 on it, posting numerous updates on social media over that time, even attracting the attention of Luke Skywalker himself, actor Mark Hamill. Now that he’s done, he’s brought his model out to the public multiple times, delighting kids and adults alike. It can’t fly, but it has an engine and wheels so it can move, the wings can lock into attack position, the thrusters light up, and the voices of Obi-Wan Kenobi and R2-D2 guide children along as they sit in the cockpit.
Dr. Lekiachvili hopes to auction off his creation to a collector and donate the proceeds to Ukrainian charities, and we’re sure he’ll receive far more than the $60,000 he spent building his masterpiece. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to raid our bank accounts. We have a Death Star to destroy.
I’m a doctor, not a hologram
Telemedicine got a big boost during the early phase of the pandemic when hospitals and medical offices were off limits to anyone without COVID-19, but things have cooled off, telemedically speaking, since then. Well, NASA may have heated them up again. Or maybe it was Starfleet. Hmm, wait a second while we check. … No, it was NASA.
The space agency used the Microsoft Hololens Kinect camera and a personal computer with custom software from Aexa Aerospace to “holoport” NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid up to the International Space Station, where he had a conversation with European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who wore an augmented reality headset that allowed him to see, hear, and interact with a 3D representation of the earthbound medical provider.
“Holoportation has been in use since at least 2016 by Microsoft, but this is the first use in such an extreme and remote environment such as space,” NASA said in a recent written statement, noting that the extreme house call took place on Oct. 8, 2021.
They seem to be forgetting about Star Trek, but we’ll let them slide on that one. Anyway, NASA didn’t share any details of the medical holoconversation – which may have strained the limits of HIPAA’s portability provisions – but Dr. Schmid described it as “a brand-new way of human exploration, where our human entity is able to travel off the planet. Our physical body is not there, but our human entity absolutely is there.”
Boldly doctoring where no doctor has gone before, you might say. You also might notice from the photo that Dr. Schmid went full Trekkie with a genuine Vulcan salute. Live long and prosper, Dr. Schmid. Live long and prosper.
Add electricity for umami
Salt makes everything taste better. Unfortunately, excess salt can cause problems for our bodies down the line, starting with high blood pressure and continuing on to heart disease and strokes. So how do we enjoy our deliciously salty foods without putting ourselves at risk? One answer may be electricity.
Researchers at Meiji University in Tokyo partnered with food and beverage maker Kirin to develop a set of electric chopsticks to boost the taste of salt in foods without the extra sodium. According to codeveloper and Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita, the device, worn like a watch with a wire attached to one of the chopsticks, “uses a weak electrical current to transmit sodium ions from food, through the chopsticks, to the mouth where they create a sense of saltines,” Reuters said.
In a country like Japan, where a lot of food is made with heavily sodium-based ingredients like miso and soy sauce, the average adult consumes 10 g of salt a day. That’s twice the recommended amount proposed by the World Health Organization. To not sacrifice bland food for better health, this device, which enhances the saltiness of the food consumed by 1.5 times, offers a fairly easy solution to a big public health crisis.
The chopsticks were tested by giving participants reduced-sodium miso soup. They told the researchers that the food was improved in “richness, sweetness, and overall tastiness,” the Guardian said.
Worried about having something electric in your mouth? Don’t worry. Kirin said in a statement that the electricity is very weak and not enough to affect the body.
The chopsticks are still in a prototype stage, but you may be able to get your pair as soon as next year. Until then, maybe be a little mindful of the salt.
Pet poop works in mysterious ways
We usually see it as a burden when our pets poop and pee in the house, but those bodily excretions may be able to tell us something about cancer-causing toxins running rampant in our homes.
Those toxins, known as aromatic amines, can be found in tobacco smoke and dyes used in make-up, textiles, and plastics. “Our findings suggest that pets are coming into contact with aromatic amines that leach from products in their household environment,” lead author Sridhar Chinthakindi, PhD, of NYU Langone Health, said in a statement from the university. “As these substances have been tied to bladder, colorectal, and other forms of cancer, our results may help explain why so many dogs and cats develop such diseases.”
Tobacco smoke was not the main source of the aromatic amines found in the poop and urine, but 70% of dogs and 80% of cats had these chemicals in their waste. The researchers looked for 30 types of aromatic amines plus nicotine in the sample and found 8. The chemical concentrations were much higher in cats than in dogs, possibly because of differences in exposure and metabolism between the two species, they suggested.
“If [pets] are getting exposed to toxins in our homes, then we had better take a closer look at our own exposure,” said senior author Kurunthachalam Kannan, PhD, of NYU Langone.
So the next time your pet poops or pees in the house, don’t get mad. Maybe they’re just trying to help you out by supplying some easy-to-collect samples.
The force is with Ukraine, always
Of all the things we could want from Star Wars, a lightsaber is at the top of the list. And someone is working on that. But second is probably the iconic X-wing. It was used to blow up the Death Star after all: Who wouldn’t want one?
A real-life star fighter may be outside our technological capabilities, but Dr. Akaki Lekiachvili of Atlanta has done the next best thing and constructed a two-thirds scale model to encourage kids to enter the sciences and, with the advent of the war in Ukraine, raise money for medical supplies to assist doctors in the embattled country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. Lekiachvili, originally from Georgia (the country, former Soviet republic, and previous target of Russian aggression in 2008), takes a dim view toward the invasion of Ukraine: “Russia is like the Evil Empire and Ukraine the Rebel Alliance.”
It’s been a long road finishing the X-Wing, as Dr. Lekiachvili started the project in 2016 and spent $60,000 on it, posting numerous updates on social media over that time, even attracting the attention of Luke Skywalker himself, actor Mark Hamill. Now that he’s done, he’s brought his model out to the public multiple times, delighting kids and adults alike. It can’t fly, but it has an engine and wheels so it can move, the wings can lock into attack position, the thrusters light up, and the voices of Obi-Wan Kenobi and R2-D2 guide children along as they sit in the cockpit.
Dr. Lekiachvili hopes to auction off his creation to a collector and donate the proceeds to Ukrainian charities, and we’re sure he’ll receive far more than the $60,000 he spent building his masterpiece. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to raid our bank accounts. We have a Death Star to destroy.
I’m a doctor, not a hologram
Telemedicine got a big boost during the early phase of the pandemic when hospitals and medical offices were off limits to anyone without COVID-19, but things have cooled off, telemedically speaking, since then. Well, NASA may have heated them up again. Or maybe it was Starfleet. Hmm, wait a second while we check. … No, it was NASA.
The space agency used the Microsoft Hololens Kinect camera and a personal computer with custom software from Aexa Aerospace to “holoport” NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid up to the International Space Station, where he had a conversation with European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who wore an augmented reality headset that allowed him to see, hear, and interact with a 3D representation of the earthbound medical provider.
“Holoportation has been in use since at least 2016 by Microsoft, but this is the first use in such an extreme and remote environment such as space,” NASA said in a recent written statement, noting that the extreme house call took place on Oct. 8, 2021.
They seem to be forgetting about Star Trek, but we’ll let them slide on that one. Anyway, NASA didn’t share any details of the medical holoconversation – which may have strained the limits of HIPAA’s portability provisions – but Dr. Schmid described it as “a brand-new way of human exploration, where our human entity is able to travel off the planet. Our physical body is not there, but our human entity absolutely is there.”
Boldly doctoring where no doctor has gone before, you might say. You also might notice from the photo that Dr. Schmid went full Trekkie with a genuine Vulcan salute. Live long and prosper, Dr. Schmid. Live long and prosper.
Add electricity for umami
Salt makes everything taste better. Unfortunately, excess salt can cause problems for our bodies down the line, starting with high blood pressure and continuing on to heart disease and strokes. So how do we enjoy our deliciously salty foods without putting ourselves at risk? One answer may be electricity.
Researchers at Meiji University in Tokyo partnered with food and beverage maker Kirin to develop a set of electric chopsticks to boost the taste of salt in foods without the extra sodium. According to codeveloper and Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita, the device, worn like a watch with a wire attached to one of the chopsticks, “uses a weak electrical current to transmit sodium ions from food, through the chopsticks, to the mouth where they create a sense of saltines,” Reuters said.
In a country like Japan, where a lot of food is made with heavily sodium-based ingredients like miso and soy sauce, the average adult consumes 10 g of salt a day. That’s twice the recommended amount proposed by the World Health Organization. To not sacrifice bland food for better health, this device, which enhances the saltiness of the food consumed by 1.5 times, offers a fairly easy solution to a big public health crisis.
The chopsticks were tested by giving participants reduced-sodium miso soup. They told the researchers that the food was improved in “richness, sweetness, and overall tastiness,” the Guardian said.
Worried about having something electric in your mouth? Don’t worry. Kirin said in a statement that the electricity is very weak and not enough to affect the body.
The chopsticks are still in a prototype stage, but you may be able to get your pair as soon as next year. Until then, maybe be a little mindful of the salt.
Pet poop works in mysterious ways
We usually see it as a burden when our pets poop and pee in the house, but those bodily excretions may be able to tell us something about cancer-causing toxins running rampant in our homes.
Those toxins, known as aromatic amines, can be found in tobacco smoke and dyes used in make-up, textiles, and plastics. “Our findings suggest that pets are coming into contact with aromatic amines that leach from products in their household environment,” lead author Sridhar Chinthakindi, PhD, of NYU Langone Health, said in a statement from the university. “As these substances have been tied to bladder, colorectal, and other forms of cancer, our results may help explain why so many dogs and cats develop such diseases.”
Tobacco smoke was not the main source of the aromatic amines found in the poop and urine, but 70% of dogs and 80% of cats had these chemicals in their waste. The researchers looked for 30 types of aromatic amines plus nicotine in the sample and found 8. The chemical concentrations were much higher in cats than in dogs, possibly because of differences in exposure and metabolism between the two species, they suggested.
“If [pets] are getting exposed to toxins in our homes, then we had better take a closer look at our own exposure,” said senior author Kurunthachalam Kannan, PhD, of NYU Langone.
So the next time your pet poops or pees in the house, don’t get mad. Maybe they’re just trying to help you out by supplying some easy-to-collect samples.
Woman who faked medical degree practiced for 3 years
Who needs medical degrees anyway?
It’s no secret that doctors make a fair chunk of change. It’s a lucrative profession, but that big fat paycheck is siloed behind long, tough years of medical school and residency. It’s not an easy path doctors walk. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be. Anything’s easy if you’re willing to lie.
That brings us to Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from northern France with a bachelor’s degree in real estate management who wasn’t bringing in enough money for her three children, at least not to her satisfaction. Naturally, the only decision was to forge some diplomas from the University of Strasbourg, as well as a certificate from the French Order of Physicians. Sonia got hired as a general practitioner by using the identities of two doctors who shared her name. She had no experience, had no idea what she was doing, and was wearing a GPS tagging bracelet for an unrelated crime, so she was quickly caught and exposed in October 2021, after, um, 3 years of fake doctoring, according to France Live.
Not to be deterred by this temporary setback, Sonia proceeded to immediately find work as an ophthalmologist, a career that requires more than 10 years of training, continuing her fraudulent medical career until recently, when she was caught again and sentenced to 3 years in prison. She did make 70,000 euros a year as a fake doctor, which isn’t exactly huge money, but certainly not bad either.
We certainly hope she’s learned her lesson about impersonating a doctor, at this point, but maybe she should just go to medical school. If not, northern France might just end up with a new endocrinologist or oncologist floating around in 3 years.
No need to ‘guess what size horse you are’
Is COVID-19 warming up for yet another surge? Maybe. That means it’s also time for the return of its remora-like follower, ivermectin. Our thanks go out to the Tennessee state legislature for bringing the proven-to-be-ineffective treatment for COVID back into our hearts and minds and emergency rooms.
Both the state House and Senate have approved a bill that allows pharmacists to dispense the antiparasitic drug without a prescription while shielding them “from any liability that could arise from dispensing ivermectin,” Nashville Public Radio reported.
The drug’s manufacturer, Merck, said over a year ago that there is “no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from preclinical studies … and a concerning lack of safety data.” More recently, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that ivermectin treatment had no important benefits in patients with COVID.
Last week, the bill’s Senate sponsor, Frank Niceley of Strawberry Plains, said that it was all about safety, as he explained to NPR station WPLN: “It’s a lot safer to go to your pharmacist and let him tell you how much ivermectin to take than it is to go to the co-op and guess what size horse you are.”
And on that note, here are a few more items of business that just might end up on the legislature’s calendar:
- Horses will be allowed to “share” their unused ivermectin with humans and other mammals.
- An apple a day not only keeps the doctor away, but the IRS and the FDA as well.
- Colon cleansing is more fun than humans should be allowed to have.
- TikTok videos qualify as CME.
Who needs medical degrees anyway?
It’s no secret that doctors make a fair chunk of change. It’s a lucrative profession, but that big fat paycheck is siloed behind long, tough years of medical school and residency. It’s not an easy path doctors walk. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be. Anything’s easy if you’re willing to lie.
That brings us to Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from northern France with a bachelor’s degree in real estate management who wasn’t bringing in enough money for her three children, at least not to her satisfaction. Naturally, the only decision was to forge some diplomas from the University of Strasbourg, as well as a certificate from the French Order of Physicians. Sonia got hired as a general practitioner by using the identities of two doctors who shared her name. She had no experience, had no idea what she was doing, and was wearing a GPS tagging bracelet for an unrelated crime, so she was quickly caught and exposed in October 2021, after, um, 3 years of fake doctoring, according to France Live.
Not to be deterred by this temporary setback, Sonia proceeded to immediately find work as an ophthalmologist, a career that requires more than 10 years of training, continuing her fraudulent medical career until recently, when she was caught again and sentenced to 3 years in prison. She did make 70,000 euros a year as a fake doctor, which isn’t exactly huge money, but certainly not bad either.
We certainly hope she’s learned her lesson about impersonating a doctor, at this point, but maybe she should just go to medical school. If not, northern France might just end up with a new endocrinologist or oncologist floating around in 3 years.
Speak louder, I can’t see you
With the introduction of FaceTime and the pandemic pushing work and social events to Zoom, video calls have become ubiquitous. Along the way, however, we’ve had to learn to adjust to technical difficulties. Often by yelling at the screen when the video quality is disrupted. Waving our hands and arms, speaking louder. Sound like you?
Well, a new study published in Royal Society Open Science shows that it sounds like a lot of us.
James Trujillo of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was lead author of the paper, said on Eurekalert that “previous research has shown that speech and gestures are linked, but ours is the first to look into how visuals impact our behavior in those fields.”
He and his associates set up 40 participants in separate rooms to have conversations in pairs over a video chat. Over the course of 40 minutes, the video quality started to deteriorate from clear to extremely blurry. When the video quality was affected, participants started with gestures but as the quality continued to lessen the gestures increased and so did the decibels of their voices.
Even when the participants could barely see each other, they still gestured and their voices were even louder, positively supporting the idea that gestures and speech are a dynamically linked when it comes to communication. Even on regular phone calls, when we can’t see each other at all, people make small movements and gestures, Mr. Trujillo said.
So, the next time the Wifi is terrible and your video calls keep cutting out, don’t worry about looking foolish screaming at the computer. We’ve all been there.
Seek a doctor if standing at attention for more than 4 hours
Imbrochável. In Brazil, it means “unfloppable” or “flaccid proof.” It’s also a word that Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro likes to use when referring to himself. Gives you a good idea of what he’s all about. Imagine his embarrassment when news recently broke about more than 30,000 pills of Viagra that had been secretly distributed to the Brazilian military.
The military offered a simple and plausible explanation: The Viagra had been prescribed to treat pulmonary hypertension. Fair, but when a Brazilian newspaper dug a little deeper, they found that this was not the case. The Viagra was, in general, being used for its, shall we say, traditional purpose.
Many Brazilians reacted poorly to the news that their tax dollars were being used to provide Brazilian soldiers with downstairs assistance, with the standard associated furor on social media. A rival politician, Ciro Gomes, who is planning on challenging the president in an upcoming election, had perhaps the best remark on the situation: “Unless they’re able to prove they’re developing some kind of secret weapon – capable of revolutionizing the international arms industry – it’ll be tough to justify the purchase of 35,000 units of a erectile dysfunction drug.”
Hmm, secret weapon. Well, a certain Russian fellow has made a bit of a thrust into world affairs recently. Does anyone know if Putin is sitting on a big Viagra stash?
Who needs medical degrees anyway?
It’s no secret that doctors make a fair chunk of change. It’s a lucrative profession, but that big fat paycheck is siloed behind long, tough years of medical school and residency. It’s not an easy path doctors walk. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be. Anything’s easy if you’re willing to lie.
That brings us to Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from northern France with a bachelor’s degree in real estate management who wasn’t bringing in enough money for her three children, at least not to her satisfaction. Naturally, the only decision was to forge some diplomas from the University of Strasbourg, as well as a certificate from the French Order of Physicians. Sonia got hired as a general practitioner by using the identities of two doctors who shared her name. She had no experience, had no idea what she was doing, and was wearing a GPS tagging bracelet for an unrelated crime, so she was quickly caught and exposed in October 2021, after, um, 3 years of fake doctoring, according to France Live.
Not to be deterred by this temporary setback, Sonia proceeded to immediately find work as an ophthalmologist, a career that requires more than 10 years of training, continuing her fraudulent medical career until recently, when she was caught again and sentenced to 3 years in prison. She did make 70,000 euros a year as a fake doctor, which isn’t exactly huge money, but certainly not bad either.
We certainly hope she’s learned her lesson about impersonating a doctor, at this point, but maybe she should just go to medical school. If not, northern France might just end up with a new endocrinologist or oncologist floating around in 3 years.
No need to ‘guess what size horse you are’
Is COVID-19 warming up for yet another surge? Maybe. That means it’s also time for the return of its remora-like follower, ivermectin. Our thanks go out to the Tennessee state legislature for bringing the proven-to-be-ineffective treatment for COVID back into our hearts and minds and emergency rooms.
Both the state House and Senate have approved a bill that allows pharmacists to dispense the antiparasitic drug without a prescription while shielding them “from any liability that could arise from dispensing ivermectin,” Nashville Public Radio reported.
The drug’s manufacturer, Merck, said over a year ago that there is “no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from preclinical studies … and a concerning lack of safety data.” More recently, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that ivermectin treatment had no important benefits in patients with COVID.
Last week, the bill’s Senate sponsor, Frank Niceley of Strawberry Plains, said that it was all about safety, as he explained to NPR station WPLN: “It’s a lot safer to go to your pharmacist and let him tell you how much ivermectin to take than it is to go to the co-op and guess what size horse you are.”
And on that note, here are a few more items of business that just might end up on the legislature’s calendar:
- Horses will be allowed to “share” their unused ivermectin with humans and other mammals.
- An apple a day not only keeps the doctor away, but the IRS and the FDA as well.
- Colon cleansing is more fun than humans should be allowed to have.
- TikTok videos qualify as CME.
Who needs medical degrees anyway?
It’s no secret that doctors make a fair chunk of change. It’s a lucrative profession, but that big fat paycheck is siloed behind long, tough years of medical school and residency. It’s not an easy path doctors walk. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be. Anything’s easy if you’re willing to lie.
That brings us to Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from northern France with a bachelor’s degree in real estate management who wasn’t bringing in enough money for her three children, at least not to her satisfaction. Naturally, the only decision was to forge some diplomas from the University of Strasbourg, as well as a certificate from the French Order of Physicians. Sonia got hired as a general practitioner by using the identities of two doctors who shared her name. She had no experience, had no idea what she was doing, and was wearing a GPS tagging bracelet for an unrelated crime, so she was quickly caught and exposed in October 2021, after, um, 3 years of fake doctoring, according to France Live.
Not to be deterred by this temporary setback, Sonia proceeded to immediately find work as an ophthalmologist, a career that requires more than 10 years of training, continuing her fraudulent medical career until recently, when she was caught again and sentenced to 3 years in prison. She did make 70,000 euros a year as a fake doctor, which isn’t exactly huge money, but certainly not bad either.
We certainly hope she’s learned her lesson about impersonating a doctor, at this point, but maybe she should just go to medical school. If not, northern France might just end up with a new endocrinologist or oncologist floating around in 3 years.
Speak louder, I can’t see you
With the introduction of FaceTime and the pandemic pushing work and social events to Zoom, video calls have become ubiquitous. Along the way, however, we’ve had to learn to adjust to technical difficulties. Often by yelling at the screen when the video quality is disrupted. Waving our hands and arms, speaking louder. Sound like you?
Well, a new study published in Royal Society Open Science shows that it sounds like a lot of us.
James Trujillo of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was lead author of the paper, said on Eurekalert that “previous research has shown that speech and gestures are linked, but ours is the first to look into how visuals impact our behavior in those fields.”
He and his associates set up 40 participants in separate rooms to have conversations in pairs over a video chat. Over the course of 40 minutes, the video quality started to deteriorate from clear to extremely blurry. When the video quality was affected, participants started with gestures but as the quality continued to lessen the gestures increased and so did the decibels of their voices.
Even when the participants could barely see each other, they still gestured and their voices were even louder, positively supporting the idea that gestures and speech are a dynamically linked when it comes to communication. Even on regular phone calls, when we can’t see each other at all, people make small movements and gestures, Mr. Trujillo said.
So, the next time the Wifi is terrible and your video calls keep cutting out, don’t worry about looking foolish screaming at the computer. We’ve all been there.
Seek a doctor if standing at attention for more than 4 hours
Imbrochável. In Brazil, it means “unfloppable” or “flaccid proof.” It’s also a word that Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro likes to use when referring to himself. Gives you a good idea of what he’s all about. Imagine his embarrassment when news recently broke about more than 30,000 pills of Viagra that had been secretly distributed to the Brazilian military.
The military offered a simple and plausible explanation: The Viagra had been prescribed to treat pulmonary hypertension. Fair, but when a Brazilian newspaper dug a little deeper, they found that this was not the case. The Viagra was, in general, being used for its, shall we say, traditional purpose.
Many Brazilians reacted poorly to the news that their tax dollars were being used to provide Brazilian soldiers with downstairs assistance, with the standard associated furor on social media. A rival politician, Ciro Gomes, who is planning on challenging the president in an upcoming election, had perhaps the best remark on the situation: “Unless they’re able to prove they’re developing some kind of secret weapon – capable of revolutionizing the international arms industry – it’ll be tough to justify the purchase of 35,000 units of a erectile dysfunction drug.”
Hmm, secret weapon. Well, a certain Russian fellow has made a bit of a thrust into world affairs recently. Does anyone know if Putin is sitting on a big Viagra stash?
Who needs medical degrees anyway?
It’s no secret that doctors make a fair chunk of change. It’s a lucrative profession, but that big fat paycheck is siloed behind long, tough years of medical school and residency. It’s not an easy path doctors walk. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be. Anything’s easy if you’re willing to lie.
That brings us to Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from northern France with a bachelor’s degree in real estate management who wasn’t bringing in enough money for her three children, at least not to her satisfaction. Naturally, the only decision was to forge some diplomas from the University of Strasbourg, as well as a certificate from the French Order of Physicians. Sonia got hired as a general practitioner by using the identities of two doctors who shared her name. She had no experience, had no idea what she was doing, and was wearing a GPS tagging bracelet for an unrelated crime, so she was quickly caught and exposed in October 2021, after, um, 3 years of fake doctoring, according to France Live.
Not to be deterred by this temporary setback, Sonia proceeded to immediately find work as an ophthalmologist, a career that requires more than 10 years of training, continuing her fraudulent medical career until recently, when she was caught again and sentenced to 3 years in prison. She did make 70,000 euros a year as a fake doctor, which isn’t exactly huge money, but certainly not bad either.
We certainly hope she’s learned her lesson about impersonating a doctor, at this point, but maybe she should just go to medical school. If not, northern France might just end up with a new endocrinologist or oncologist floating around in 3 years.
No need to ‘guess what size horse you are’
Is COVID-19 warming up for yet another surge? Maybe. That means it’s also time for the return of its remora-like follower, ivermectin. Our thanks go out to the Tennessee state legislature for bringing the proven-to-be-ineffective treatment for COVID back into our hearts and minds and emergency rooms.
Both the state House and Senate have approved a bill that allows pharmacists to dispense the antiparasitic drug without a prescription while shielding them “from any liability that could arise from dispensing ivermectin,” Nashville Public Radio reported.
The drug’s manufacturer, Merck, said over a year ago that there is “no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from preclinical studies … and a concerning lack of safety data.” More recently, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that ivermectin treatment had no important benefits in patients with COVID.
Last week, the bill’s Senate sponsor, Frank Niceley of Strawberry Plains, said that it was all about safety, as he explained to NPR station WPLN: “It’s a lot safer to go to your pharmacist and let him tell you how much ivermectin to take than it is to go to the co-op and guess what size horse you are.”
And on that note, here are a few more items of business that just might end up on the legislature’s calendar:
- Horses will be allowed to “share” their unused ivermectin with humans and other mammals.
- An apple a day not only keeps the doctor away, but the IRS and the FDA as well.
- Colon cleansing is more fun than humans should be allowed to have.
- TikTok videos qualify as CME.
Who needs medical degrees anyway?
It’s no secret that doctors make a fair chunk of change. It’s a lucrative profession, but that big fat paycheck is siloed behind long, tough years of medical school and residency. It’s not an easy path doctors walk. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be. Anything’s easy if you’re willing to lie.
That brings us to Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from northern France with a bachelor’s degree in real estate management who wasn’t bringing in enough money for her three children, at least not to her satisfaction. Naturally, the only decision was to forge some diplomas from the University of Strasbourg, as well as a certificate from the French Order of Physicians. Sonia got hired as a general practitioner by using the identities of two doctors who shared her name. She had no experience, had no idea what she was doing, and was wearing a GPS tagging bracelet for an unrelated crime, so she was quickly caught and exposed in October 2021, after, um, 3 years of fake doctoring, according to France Live.
Not to be deterred by this temporary setback, Sonia proceeded to immediately find work as an ophthalmologist, a career that requires more than 10 years of training, continuing her fraudulent medical career until recently, when she was caught again and sentenced to 3 years in prison. She did make 70,000 euros a year as a fake doctor, which isn’t exactly huge money, but certainly not bad either.
We certainly hope she’s learned her lesson about impersonating a doctor, at this point, but maybe she should just go to medical school. If not, northern France might just end up with a new endocrinologist or oncologist floating around in 3 years.
Speak louder, I can’t see you
With the introduction of FaceTime and the pandemic pushing work and social events to Zoom, video calls have become ubiquitous. Along the way, however, we’ve had to learn to adjust to technical difficulties. Often by yelling at the screen when the video quality is disrupted. Waving our hands and arms, speaking louder. Sound like you?
Well, a new study published in Royal Society Open Science shows that it sounds like a lot of us.
James Trujillo of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was lead author of the paper, said on Eurekalert that “previous research has shown that speech and gestures are linked, but ours is the first to look into how visuals impact our behavior in those fields.”
He and his associates set up 40 participants in separate rooms to have conversations in pairs over a video chat. Over the course of 40 minutes, the video quality started to deteriorate from clear to extremely blurry. When the video quality was affected, participants started with gestures but as the quality continued to lessen the gestures increased and so did the decibels of their voices.
Even when the participants could barely see each other, they still gestured and their voices were even louder, positively supporting the idea that gestures and speech are a dynamically linked when it comes to communication. Even on regular phone calls, when we can’t see each other at all, people make small movements and gestures, Mr. Trujillo said.
So, the next time the Wifi is terrible and your video calls keep cutting out, don’t worry about looking foolish screaming at the computer. We’ve all been there.
Seek a doctor if standing at attention for more than 4 hours
Imbrochável. In Brazil, it means “unfloppable” or “flaccid proof.” It’s also a word that Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro likes to use when referring to himself. Gives you a good idea of what he’s all about. Imagine his embarrassment when news recently broke about more than 30,000 pills of Viagra that had been secretly distributed to the Brazilian military.
The military offered a simple and plausible explanation: The Viagra had been prescribed to treat pulmonary hypertension. Fair, but when a Brazilian newspaper dug a little deeper, they found that this was not the case. The Viagra was, in general, being used for its, shall we say, traditional purpose.
Many Brazilians reacted poorly to the news that their tax dollars were being used to provide Brazilian soldiers with downstairs assistance, with the standard associated furor on social media. A rival politician, Ciro Gomes, who is planning on challenging the president in an upcoming election, had perhaps the best remark on the situation: “Unless they’re able to prove they’re developing some kind of secret weapon – capable of revolutionizing the international arms industry – it’ll be tough to justify the purchase of 35,000 units of a erectile dysfunction drug.”
Hmm, secret weapon. Well, a certain Russian fellow has made a bit of a thrust into world affairs recently. Does anyone know if Putin is sitting on a big Viagra stash?
Bellies up to the bar, the weight gain is on us
I’d do anything for weight loss (but I won’t do that)
Weight loss isn’t a multibillion-dollar industry for nothing. How many people step onto the scale in the morning and sigh, wishing they could lose that last 10 pounds?
Alcohol also isn’t a multibillion-dollar industry for nothing. If there’s one thing more universal than wishing you could lose weight, it’s drinking to forget your woes about being unable to lose weight.
Naturally, and unfortunately for those of us who rather enjoy a good beer, one of the best ways to lose weight is to stop drinking. Alcohol is almost the definition of empty calories. So, which wins out: The unstoppable force of wanting to lose weight, or the immovable object of alcohol? According to a survey from DrugAbuse.com, it’s alcohol, and it’s not even close.
Even in a state with as health conscious a reputation as California, not only are people not willing to give up alcohol to lose weight, they’re willing to gain a noticeable amount of weight in order to continue drinking. It’s 14 pounds for Californians, which is in the middle of the road for America, which overall averaged 13 pounds to keep drinking. Hawaiians, South Dakotans, Utahns, and Vermonters were at the bottom, willing to add only 8 pounds to keep booze in their diet. At the other end of the scale, willing to add 28 whole pounds to keep the beer flowing, is humble little Rhode Island, followed by Wyoming at 23 pounds, Maryland at 22, and Tennessee at 21.
Obviously, that’s a lot of weight to gain, but to drive home the exact quantity of just how much weight, KRON-TV noted that adding the U.S. average of 13 pounds to your body is the equivalent of strapping 224 slices of bacon to yourself, which, to us, is just the poorest choice of comparison. If there’s one thing we’re less willing to give up than alcohol, it’s probably bacon. Or if you’re feeling especially ambitious, you could go for bacon-scented beer from the Waffle House. Now that’s a drink.
This looks like a job for the ‘magnetic slime robot’
What’s that? While you were in the process of gaining 14 pounds so you could keep drinking alcohol you swallowed something that you shouldn’t have? Did you swallow a lot of aggression?
You swallowed a what? An ear bud? But how did you manage that? No, never mind, we don’t really want to hear about your personal life. Lucky for you, though, today’s LOTME phrase that pays is “magnetic turd” and it’s just the thing for the busy executive/child with a foreign object stuck in their … whatever.
Yes, we said magnetic turd. Or, if you prefer, a “magnetic slime robot.” The black-brown–colored blob/robot/turd in question is an investigational substance that can be controlled magnetically to move through very narrow spaces and encircle small objects that have been accidentally swallowed, its cocreator, Li Zhang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the Guardian.
It’s made by combining the polymer polyvinyl alcohol with borax and particles of neodymium magnet. And since those neodymium particles are not particularly friendly to humans, Dr. Zhang and the research team coated the slime with silica to seal in the toxicity. The slime has the consistency of custard and exhibits “visco-elastic properties,” Dr. Zhang said, meaning that “sometimes it behaves like a solid, sometimes it behaves like a liquid.”
We could go on, telling you about the substance’s self-healing ability and electrical conductivity and how it does look very, very turd-like. Instead, we offer this link to the team’s really freaky video.
We’re going to be seeing that in our nightmares.
Fish: More than meets the fry?
When you think of fish, intelligence isn’t usually the first thing to pop into your head. Their short memory spans, which can be as little as 3 seconds, probably don’t help their cause.
Recently, though, it has become apparent that fish can be trained to do simple math problems like adding and subtracting. Research conducted in Germany has shown that cichlids – tropical fish often found in home aquariums – and stingrays can observe small quantities and know how many things are there without actually counting, kind of like how a human can look at a bowl of apples and know about how many are in it.
Fish, once thought to be not very smart, may be on the same level of intelligence as birds, suggested Vera Schluessel, PhD, of the University of Bonn’s Institute of Zoology, and associates.
“Successful fish showed abilities far above chance level, specifically in the stingrays. Again, this raises the question of what abilities fish may be capable of if being asked the ‘right’ question,” the researchers said in Scientific Reports.
They tried to teach the cichlids and stingrays how to add and subtract by recognizing colors: Blue meant to add one and yellow meant to subtract one. Gates were set up and when the fish chose a correct answer, they were rewarded with food. Although it took many sessions for the fish to completely catch on, they did figure it out eventually.
If fish are smarter than we thought, maybe we can stop paying for math tutors for our kids and just have the family goldfish do it.
For earthworms, not all plastics are created equal
Everything living on the earth has to deal with pollution in some way, including earthworms. Not only have they have adapted to eating plastics found in soil, they have preferences.
The earthworm is a little creature with a big job. The materials and minerals they munch on as they go through the earth get recycled through their tiny bodies to create more fertile soil for things to grow – making them the hidden heroes of every garden. But what about soil that’s full of microscopic plastic pieces? Well, turns out earthworms will eat that too, investigators from Nankai University in Tianjin, China, reported in Environmental Science & Technology.
The researchers looked at how these eating machines were digesting the plastic and found that they actually have preferences. Soils with bio-based polylactic acid (PLA) or petroleum-derived polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles were a hit. Another test showed that the worms broke the PLA particles down into smaller fragments than the PET ones. So at least the “healthier” option agreed with them more. More work is needed, however, to determine if the worms are being harmed by all the waste they’re digesting.
So what does this mean for the evolution or even survival of this unsung hero of the planet? Scientists still need to dig into that question. No pun intended.
I’d do anything for weight loss (but I won’t do that)
Weight loss isn’t a multibillion-dollar industry for nothing. How many people step onto the scale in the morning and sigh, wishing they could lose that last 10 pounds?
Alcohol also isn’t a multibillion-dollar industry for nothing. If there’s one thing more universal than wishing you could lose weight, it’s drinking to forget your woes about being unable to lose weight.
Naturally, and unfortunately for those of us who rather enjoy a good beer, one of the best ways to lose weight is to stop drinking. Alcohol is almost the definition of empty calories. So, which wins out: The unstoppable force of wanting to lose weight, or the immovable object of alcohol? According to a survey from DrugAbuse.com, it’s alcohol, and it’s not even close.
Even in a state with as health conscious a reputation as California, not only are people not willing to give up alcohol to lose weight, they’re willing to gain a noticeable amount of weight in order to continue drinking. It’s 14 pounds for Californians, which is in the middle of the road for America, which overall averaged 13 pounds to keep drinking. Hawaiians, South Dakotans, Utahns, and Vermonters were at the bottom, willing to add only 8 pounds to keep booze in their diet. At the other end of the scale, willing to add 28 whole pounds to keep the beer flowing, is humble little Rhode Island, followed by Wyoming at 23 pounds, Maryland at 22, and Tennessee at 21.
Obviously, that’s a lot of weight to gain, but to drive home the exact quantity of just how much weight, KRON-TV noted that adding the U.S. average of 13 pounds to your body is the equivalent of strapping 224 slices of bacon to yourself, which, to us, is just the poorest choice of comparison. If there’s one thing we’re less willing to give up than alcohol, it’s probably bacon. Or if you’re feeling especially ambitious, you could go for bacon-scented beer from the Waffle House. Now that’s a drink.
This looks like a job for the ‘magnetic slime robot’
What’s that? While you were in the process of gaining 14 pounds so you could keep drinking alcohol you swallowed something that you shouldn’t have? Did you swallow a lot of aggression?
You swallowed a what? An ear bud? But how did you manage that? No, never mind, we don’t really want to hear about your personal life. Lucky for you, though, today’s LOTME phrase that pays is “magnetic turd” and it’s just the thing for the busy executive/child with a foreign object stuck in their … whatever.
Yes, we said magnetic turd. Or, if you prefer, a “magnetic slime robot.” The black-brown–colored blob/robot/turd in question is an investigational substance that can be controlled magnetically to move through very narrow spaces and encircle small objects that have been accidentally swallowed, its cocreator, Li Zhang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the Guardian.
It’s made by combining the polymer polyvinyl alcohol with borax and particles of neodymium magnet. And since those neodymium particles are not particularly friendly to humans, Dr. Zhang and the research team coated the slime with silica to seal in the toxicity. The slime has the consistency of custard and exhibits “visco-elastic properties,” Dr. Zhang said, meaning that “sometimes it behaves like a solid, sometimes it behaves like a liquid.”
We could go on, telling you about the substance’s self-healing ability and electrical conductivity and how it does look very, very turd-like. Instead, we offer this link to the team’s really freaky video.
We’re going to be seeing that in our nightmares.
Fish: More than meets the fry?
When you think of fish, intelligence isn’t usually the first thing to pop into your head. Their short memory spans, which can be as little as 3 seconds, probably don’t help their cause.
Recently, though, it has become apparent that fish can be trained to do simple math problems like adding and subtracting. Research conducted in Germany has shown that cichlids – tropical fish often found in home aquariums – and stingrays can observe small quantities and know how many things are there without actually counting, kind of like how a human can look at a bowl of apples and know about how many are in it.
Fish, once thought to be not very smart, may be on the same level of intelligence as birds, suggested Vera Schluessel, PhD, of the University of Bonn’s Institute of Zoology, and associates.
“Successful fish showed abilities far above chance level, specifically in the stingrays. Again, this raises the question of what abilities fish may be capable of if being asked the ‘right’ question,” the researchers said in Scientific Reports.
They tried to teach the cichlids and stingrays how to add and subtract by recognizing colors: Blue meant to add one and yellow meant to subtract one. Gates were set up and when the fish chose a correct answer, they were rewarded with food. Although it took many sessions for the fish to completely catch on, they did figure it out eventually.
If fish are smarter than we thought, maybe we can stop paying for math tutors for our kids and just have the family goldfish do it.
For earthworms, not all plastics are created equal
Everything living on the earth has to deal with pollution in some way, including earthworms. Not only have they have adapted to eating plastics found in soil, they have preferences.
The earthworm is a little creature with a big job. The materials and minerals they munch on as they go through the earth get recycled through their tiny bodies to create more fertile soil for things to grow – making them the hidden heroes of every garden. But what about soil that’s full of microscopic plastic pieces? Well, turns out earthworms will eat that too, investigators from Nankai University in Tianjin, China, reported in Environmental Science & Technology.
The researchers looked at how these eating machines were digesting the plastic and found that they actually have preferences. Soils with bio-based polylactic acid (PLA) or petroleum-derived polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles were a hit. Another test showed that the worms broke the PLA particles down into smaller fragments than the PET ones. So at least the “healthier” option agreed with them more. More work is needed, however, to determine if the worms are being harmed by all the waste they’re digesting.
So what does this mean for the evolution or even survival of this unsung hero of the planet? Scientists still need to dig into that question. No pun intended.
I’d do anything for weight loss (but I won’t do that)
Weight loss isn’t a multibillion-dollar industry for nothing. How many people step onto the scale in the morning and sigh, wishing they could lose that last 10 pounds?
Alcohol also isn’t a multibillion-dollar industry for nothing. If there’s one thing more universal than wishing you could lose weight, it’s drinking to forget your woes about being unable to lose weight.
Naturally, and unfortunately for those of us who rather enjoy a good beer, one of the best ways to lose weight is to stop drinking. Alcohol is almost the definition of empty calories. So, which wins out: The unstoppable force of wanting to lose weight, or the immovable object of alcohol? According to a survey from DrugAbuse.com, it’s alcohol, and it’s not even close.
Even in a state with as health conscious a reputation as California, not only are people not willing to give up alcohol to lose weight, they’re willing to gain a noticeable amount of weight in order to continue drinking. It’s 14 pounds for Californians, which is in the middle of the road for America, which overall averaged 13 pounds to keep drinking. Hawaiians, South Dakotans, Utahns, and Vermonters were at the bottom, willing to add only 8 pounds to keep booze in their diet. At the other end of the scale, willing to add 28 whole pounds to keep the beer flowing, is humble little Rhode Island, followed by Wyoming at 23 pounds, Maryland at 22, and Tennessee at 21.
Obviously, that’s a lot of weight to gain, but to drive home the exact quantity of just how much weight, KRON-TV noted that adding the U.S. average of 13 pounds to your body is the equivalent of strapping 224 slices of bacon to yourself, which, to us, is just the poorest choice of comparison. If there’s one thing we’re less willing to give up than alcohol, it’s probably bacon. Or if you’re feeling especially ambitious, you could go for bacon-scented beer from the Waffle House. Now that’s a drink.
This looks like a job for the ‘magnetic slime robot’
What’s that? While you were in the process of gaining 14 pounds so you could keep drinking alcohol you swallowed something that you shouldn’t have? Did you swallow a lot of aggression?
You swallowed a what? An ear bud? But how did you manage that? No, never mind, we don’t really want to hear about your personal life. Lucky for you, though, today’s LOTME phrase that pays is “magnetic turd” and it’s just the thing for the busy executive/child with a foreign object stuck in their … whatever.
Yes, we said magnetic turd. Or, if you prefer, a “magnetic slime robot.” The black-brown–colored blob/robot/turd in question is an investigational substance that can be controlled magnetically to move through very narrow spaces and encircle small objects that have been accidentally swallowed, its cocreator, Li Zhang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the Guardian.
It’s made by combining the polymer polyvinyl alcohol with borax and particles of neodymium magnet. And since those neodymium particles are not particularly friendly to humans, Dr. Zhang and the research team coated the slime with silica to seal in the toxicity. The slime has the consistency of custard and exhibits “visco-elastic properties,” Dr. Zhang said, meaning that “sometimes it behaves like a solid, sometimes it behaves like a liquid.”
We could go on, telling you about the substance’s self-healing ability and electrical conductivity and how it does look very, very turd-like. Instead, we offer this link to the team’s really freaky video.
We’re going to be seeing that in our nightmares.
Fish: More than meets the fry?
When you think of fish, intelligence isn’t usually the first thing to pop into your head. Their short memory spans, which can be as little as 3 seconds, probably don’t help their cause.
Recently, though, it has become apparent that fish can be trained to do simple math problems like adding and subtracting. Research conducted in Germany has shown that cichlids – tropical fish often found in home aquariums – and stingrays can observe small quantities and know how many things are there without actually counting, kind of like how a human can look at a bowl of apples and know about how many are in it.
Fish, once thought to be not very smart, may be on the same level of intelligence as birds, suggested Vera Schluessel, PhD, of the University of Bonn’s Institute of Zoology, and associates.
“Successful fish showed abilities far above chance level, specifically in the stingrays. Again, this raises the question of what abilities fish may be capable of if being asked the ‘right’ question,” the researchers said in Scientific Reports.
They tried to teach the cichlids and stingrays how to add and subtract by recognizing colors: Blue meant to add one and yellow meant to subtract one. Gates were set up and when the fish chose a correct answer, they were rewarded with food. Although it took many sessions for the fish to completely catch on, they did figure it out eventually.
If fish are smarter than we thought, maybe we can stop paying for math tutors for our kids and just have the family goldfish do it.
For earthworms, not all plastics are created equal
Everything living on the earth has to deal with pollution in some way, including earthworms. Not only have they have adapted to eating plastics found in soil, they have preferences.
The earthworm is a little creature with a big job. The materials and minerals they munch on as they go through the earth get recycled through their tiny bodies to create more fertile soil for things to grow – making them the hidden heroes of every garden. But what about soil that’s full of microscopic plastic pieces? Well, turns out earthworms will eat that too, investigators from Nankai University in Tianjin, China, reported in Environmental Science & Technology.
The researchers looked at how these eating machines were digesting the plastic and found that they actually have preferences. Soils with bio-based polylactic acid (PLA) or petroleum-derived polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles were a hit. Another test showed that the worms broke the PLA particles down into smaller fragments than the PET ones. So at least the “healthier” option agreed with them more. More work is needed, however, to determine if the worms are being harmed by all the waste they’re digesting.
So what does this mean for the evolution or even survival of this unsung hero of the planet? Scientists still need to dig into that question. No pun intended.
Adding immunotherapy to chemo in lung cancer improves patient outcomes, new data show
according to an analysis presented at the annual European Lung Cancer Congress (ELCC) on March 30.
“Overall, it is very clear that chemotherapy plus immunotherapy prolongs the time to symptom deterioration and actually improves symptoms” in this patient population, said study discussant Luis Paz-Ares, MD, PhD, chair of medical oncology at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Madrid, who was not involved in the research.
Last September, investigators reported efficacy outcomes from the phase 3 POSEIDON trial, which randomized 1,013 patients with EGFR/ALK wild-type mNSCLC to one of three first-line options: chemotherapy alone, chemotherapy plus the checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab, or chemotherapy plus two check-point inhibitors, durvalumab and tremelimumab. The analysis showed improved progression-free survival in both immunotherapy arms as well as a significant 2.3-month overall survival advantage with dual immunotherapy and a nonsignificant 1.6-month advantage with single agent durvalumab.
At the ELCC meeting, study presenter and lead investigator Edward Garon, MD, reported the latest data on the trial’s secondary endpoints: patient-reported outcomes. Global health status, functioning, and symptom scores were assessed using two questionnaires, the EORTC QLQ-C30 and EORTC QLQ-LC13.
Overall, Dr. Garon and colleagues reported a longer time to deterioration in all three areas – global health status, functioning, and symptoms – for patients who received immunotherapy versus chemotherapy alone, with similar results in both immunotherapy arms.
Time to deterioration in global health status, for instance, was a median of about 8 months on both immunotherapy regimens versus 5.6 months with chemotherapy alone. The positive findings held for many patient-reported treatment side effects, including dyspnea, hemoptysis, nausea/vomiting, and insomnia, but the benefits of adding immunotherapy weren’t always statistically significant.
Adding one or both checkpoint inhibitors to chemotherapy “improved efficacy while delaying deterioration in symptoms, functioning, and [health-related quality of life] versus chemotherapy alone in patients with mNSCLC,” concluded Dr. Garon, a thoracic medical oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Plus, he added, “the pattern was observed across nearly all prespecified symptoms and domains of interest.”
According to study discussant Dr. Paz-Ares, “the data seem to be very consistent with all the trials asking similar questions.” The important thing here is figuring out the ideal candidates for dual inhibitor therapy, he said.
With positive efficacy and patient-reported outcomes for single and dual immunotherapy in this trial, it’s a “relatively straightforward” decision to add immunotherapy to chemotherapy for patients with mNSCLC, Massimo Di Maio, a medical oncologist at the University of Turin, Italy, said in an editorial on the ELCC’s news site.
However, that’s not always the case for every cancer type, which makes patient-reported outcomes “crucial” for determining the right treatment for each patient. Some might opt for a modest survival benefit regardless of the side effects, while others might favor a less toxic approach, even it means not living quite as long, he said.
The problem, he stressed, is that trials often release efficacy data well before patient-reported outcomes, which makes weighing the benefits and risks of a treat-ment option more difficult. The delay between efficacy and patient-reported outcome data was about 6 months in the POSEIDON trial.
“Timing is key when it comes to using [patient reported outcomes] for decision-making in oncology,” Dr. Di Maio said. “In fact, to enable a full assessment of a treatment, results should be published concurrently with the efficacy and safety data. Unfortunately, this is generally not the case.”
POSEIDON was funded by AstraZeneca, which markets durvalumab and is developing tremelimumab. Dr. Garon reported grants from the company. Dr. Paz-Ares reported honoraria and institutional research grants from AstraZeneca. Dr. Di Maio is a consultant for AstraZeneca and reported receiving honoraria and personal fees from the company.
according to an analysis presented at the annual European Lung Cancer Congress (ELCC) on March 30.
“Overall, it is very clear that chemotherapy plus immunotherapy prolongs the time to symptom deterioration and actually improves symptoms” in this patient population, said study discussant Luis Paz-Ares, MD, PhD, chair of medical oncology at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Madrid, who was not involved in the research.
Last September, investigators reported efficacy outcomes from the phase 3 POSEIDON trial, which randomized 1,013 patients with EGFR/ALK wild-type mNSCLC to one of three first-line options: chemotherapy alone, chemotherapy plus the checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab, or chemotherapy plus two check-point inhibitors, durvalumab and tremelimumab. The analysis showed improved progression-free survival in both immunotherapy arms as well as a significant 2.3-month overall survival advantage with dual immunotherapy and a nonsignificant 1.6-month advantage with single agent durvalumab.
At the ELCC meeting, study presenter and lead investigator Edward Garon, MD, reported the latest data on the trial’s secondary endpoints: patient-reported outcomes. Global health status, functioning, and symptom scores were assessed using two questionnaires, the EORTC QLQ-C30 and EORTC QLQ-LC13.
Overall, Dr. Garon and colleagues reported a longer time to deterioration in all three areas – global health status, functioning, and symptoms – for patients who received immunotherapy versus chemotherapy alone, with similar results in both immunotherapy arms.
Time to deterioration in global health status, for instance, was a median of about 8 months on both immunotherapy regimens versus 5.6 months with chemotherapy alone. The positive findings held for many patient-reported treatment side effects, including dyspnea, hemoptysis, nausea/vomiting, and insomnia, but the benefits of adding immunotherapy weren’t always statistically significant.
Adding one or both checkpoint inhibitors to chemotherapy “improved efficacy while delaying deterioration in symptoms, functioning, and [health-related quality of life] versus chemotherapy alone in patients with mNSCLC,” concluded Dr. Garon, a thoracic medical oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Plus, he added, “the pattern was observed across nearly all prespecified symptoms and domains of interest.”
According to study discussant Dr. Paz-Ares, “the data seem to be very consistent with all the trials asking similar questions.” The important thing here is figuring out the ideal candidates for dual inhibitor therapy, he said.
With positive efficacy and patient-reported outcomes for single and dual immunotherapy in this trial, it’s a “relatively straightforward” decision to add immunotherapy to chemotherapy for patients with mNSCLC, Massimo Di Maio, a medical oncologist at the University of Turin, Italy, said in an editorial on the ELCC’s news site.
However, that’s not always the case for every cancer type, which makes patient-reported outcomes “crucial” for determining the right treatment for each patient. Some might opt for a modest survival benefit regardless of the side effects, while others might favor a less toxic approach, even it means not living quite as long, he said.
The problem, he stressed, is that trials often release efficacy data well before patient-reported outcomes, which makes weighing the benefits and risks of a treat-ment option more difficult. The delay between efficacy and patient-reported outcome data was about 6 months in the POSEIDON trial.
“Timing is key when it comes to using [patient reported outcomes] for decision-making in oncology,” Dr. Di Maio said. “In fact, to enable a full assessment of a treatment, results should be published concurrently with the efficacy and safety data. Unfortunately, this is generally not the case.”
POSEIDON was funded by AstraZeneca, which markets durvalumab and is developing tremelimumab. Dr. Garon reported grants from the company. Dr. Paz-Ares reported honoraria and institutional research grants from AstraZeneca. Dr. Di Maio is a consultant for AstraZeneca and reported receiving honoraria and personal fees from the company.
according to an analysis presented at the annual European Lung Cancer Congress (ELCC) on March 30.
“Overall, it is very clear that chemotherapy plus immunotherapy prolongs the time to symptom deterioration and actually improves symptoms” in this patient population, said study discussant Luis Paz-Ares, MD, PhD, chair of medical oncology at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Madrid, who was not involved in the research.
Last September, investigators reported efficacy outcomes from the phase 3 POSEIDON trial, which randomized 1,013 patients with EGFR/ALK wild-type mNSCLC to one of three first-line options: chemotherapy alone, chemotherapy plus the checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab, or chemotherapy plus two check-point inhibitors, durvalumab and tremelimumab. The analysis showed improved progression-free survival in both immunotherapy arms as well as a significant 2.3-month overall survival advantage with dual immunotherapy and a nonsignificant 1.6-month advantage with single agent durvalumab.
At the ELCC meeting, study presenter and lead investigator Edward Garon, MD, reported the latest data on the trial’s secondary endpoints: patient-reported outcomes. Global health status, functioning, and symptom scores were assessed using two questionnaires, the EORTC QLQ-C30 and EORTC QLQ-LC13.
Overall, Dr. Garon and colleagues reported a longer time to deterioration in all three areas – global health status, functioning, and symptoms – for patients who received immunotherapy versus chemotherapy alone, with similar results in both immunotherapy arms.
Time to deterioration in global health status, for instance, was a median of about 8 months on both immunotherapy regimens versus 5.6 months with chemotherapy alone. The positive findings held for many patient-reported treatment side effects, including dyspnea, hemoptysis, nausea/vomiting, and insomnia, but the benefits of adding immunotherapy weren’t always statistically significant.
Adding one or both checkpoint inhibitors to chemotherapy “improved efficacy while delaying deterioration in symptoms, functioning, and [health-related quality of life] versus chemotherapy alone in patients with mNSCLC,” concluded Dr. Garon, a thoracic medical oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Plus, he added, “the pattern was observed across nearly all prespecified symptoms and domains of interest.”
According to study discussant Dr. Paz-Ares, “the data seem to be very consistent with all the trials asking similar questions.” The important thing here is figuring out the ideal candidates for dual inhibitor therapy, he said.
With positive efficacy and patient-reported outcomes for single and dual immunotherapy in this trial, it’s a “relatively straightforward” decision to add immunotherapy to chemotherapy for patients with mNSCLC, Massimo Di Maio, a medical oncologist at the University of Turin, Italy, said in an editorial on the ELCC’s news site.
However, that’s not always the case for every cancer type, which makes patient-reported outcomes “crucial” for determining the right treatment for each patient. Some might opt for a modest survival benefit regardless of the side effects, while others might favor a less toxic approach, even it means not living quite as long, he said.
The problem, he stressed, is that trials often release efficacy data well before patient-reported outcomes, which makes weighing the benefits and risks of a treat-ment option more difficult. The delay between efficacy and patient-reported outcome data was about 6 months in the POSEIDON trial.
“Timing is key when it comes to using [patient reported outcomes] for decision-making in oncology,” Dr. Di Maio said. “In fact, to enable a full assessment of a treatment, results should be published concurrently with the efficacy and safety data. Unfortunately, this is generally not the case.”
POSEIDON was funded by AstraZeneca, which markets durvalumab and is developing tremelimumab. Dr. Garon reported grants from the company. Dr. Paz-Ares reported honoraria and institutional research grants from AstraZeneca. Dr. Di Maio is a consultant for AstraZeneca and reported receiving honoraria and personal fees from the company.
FROM ELCC 2022
Fingers take the fight to COVID-19
Pointing a finger at COVID-19
The battle against COVID-19 is seemingly never ending. It’s been 2 years and still we struggle against the virus. But now, a new hero rises against the eternal menace, a powerful weapon against this scourge of humanity. And that weapon? Finger length.
Before you break out the sad trombone, hear us out. One of the big questions around COVID-19 is the role testosterone plays in its severity: Does low testosterone increase or decrease the odds of contracting severe COVID-19? To help answer that question, English researchers have published a study analyzing finger length ratios in both COVID-19 patients and a healthy control group. That seems random, but high testosterone in the womb leads to longer ring fingers in adulthood, while high estrogen leads to longer index fingers.
According to the researchers, those who had significant left hand–right hand differences in the ratio between the second and fourth digits, as well as the third and fifth digits, were significantly more likely to have severe COVID-19 compared with those with more even ratios. Those with “feminized” short little fingers were also at risk. Those large ratio differences indicate low testosterone and high estrogen, which may explain why elderly men are at such high risk for severe COVID-19. Testosterone naturally falls off as men get older.
The results add credence to clinical trials looking to use testosterone-boosting drugs against COVID-19, the researchers said. It also gives credence to LOTME’s brand-new 12-step finger strength fitness routine and our branded finger weights. Now just $19.95! It’s the bargain of the century! Boost your testosterone naturally and protect yourself from COVID-19! We promise it’s not a scam.
Some emergencies need a superhero
Last week, we learned about the most boring person in the world. This week just happens to be opposite week, so we’re looking at a candidate for the most interesting person. Someone who can swoop down from the sky to save the injured and helpless. Someone who can go where helicopters fear to tread. Someone with jet engines for arms. Superhero-type stuff.
The Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS), a charitable organization located in the United Kingdom, recently announced that one of its members has completed training on the Gravity Industries Jet Suit. The suit “has two engines on each arm and a larger engine on the back [that] provide up to 317 pounds of thrust,” Interesting Engineering explained.
GNAAS is putting the suit into operation in England’s Lake District National Park, which includes mountainous terrain that is not very hospitable to helicopter landings. A paramedic using the suit can reach hikers stranded on mountainsides much faster than rescuers who have to run or hike from the nearest helicopter landing site.
“Everyone looks at the wow factor and the fact we are the world’s first jet suit paramedics, but for us, it’s about delivering patient care,” GNAAS’ Andy Mawson told Interesting Engineering. Sounds like superhero-speak to us.
So if you’re in the Lake District and have taken a bit of a tumble, you can call a superhero on your cell phone or you can use this to summon one.
Why we’re rejecting food as medicine
Humans have been using food to treat ailments much longer than we’ve had the advances of modern medicine. So why have we rejected its worth in our treatment processes? And what can be done to change that? The Center for Food as Medicine and the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center just released a 335-page report that answers those questions.
First, the why: Meals in health care settings are not medically designed to help with the specific needs of the patient. Produce-prescription and nutrition-incentive programs don’t have the government funds to fully support them. And a lot of medical schools don’t even require students to take a basic nutrition course. So there’s a lack of knowledge and a disconnect between health care providers and food as a resource.
Then there’s a lack of trust in the food industry and their validity. Social media uses food as a means of promoting “pseudoscientific alternative medicine” or spreading false info, pushing away legitimate providers. The food industry has had its fingers in food science studies and an almost mafia-esque chokehold on American dietary guidelines. No wonder food for medicine is getting the boot!
To change the situation, the report offers 10 key recommendations on how to advance the idea of incorporating food into medicine for treatment and prevention. They include boosting the funding for research, making hospitals more food-as-medicine focused, expanding federal programs, and improving public awareness on the role nutrition can play in medical treatment or prevention.
So maybe instead of rejecting food outright, we should be looking a little deeper at how we can use it to our advantage. Just a thought: Ice cream as an antidepressant.
Being rude is a good thing, apparently
If you’ve ever been called argumentative, stubborn, or unpleasant, then this LOTME is for you. Researchers at the University of Geneva have found that people who are more stubborn and hate to conform have brains that are more protected against Alzheimer’s disease. That type of personality seems to preserve the part of the brain that usually deteriorates as we grow older.
The original hypothesis that personality may have a protective effect against brain degeneration led the investigators to conduct cognitive and personality assessments of 65 elderly participants over a 5-year period. Researchers have been attempting to create vaccines to protect against Alzheimer’s disease, but these new findings offer a nonbiological way to help.
“For a long time, the brain is able to compensate by activating alternative networks; when the first clinical signs appear, however, it is unfortunately often too late. The identification of early biomarkers is therefore essential for … effective disease management,” lead author Panteleimon Giannakopoulos, MD, said in a Study Finds report.
You may be wondering how people with more agreeable and less confrontational personalities can seek help. Well, researchers are working on that, too. It’s a complex situation, but as always, we’re rooting for you, science!
At least now you can take solace in the fact that your elderly next-door neighbor who yells at you for stepping on his lawn is probably more protected against Alzheimer’s disease.
Pointing a finger at COVID-19
The battle against COVID-19 is seemingly never ending. It’s been 2 years and still we struggle against the virus. But now, a new hero rises against the eternal menace, a powerful weapon against this scourge of humanity. And that weapon? Finger length.
Before you break out the sad trombone, hear us out. One of the big questions around COVID-19 is the role testosterone plays in its severity: Does low testosterone increase or decrease the odds of contracting severe COVID-19? To help answer that question, English researchers have published a study analyzing finger length ratios in both COVID-19 patients and a healthy control group. That seems random, but high testosterone in the womb leads to longer ring fingers in adulthood, while high estrogen leads to longer index fingers.
According to the researchers, those who had significant left hand–right hand differences in the ratio between the second and fourth digits, as well as the third and fifth digits, were significantly more likely to have severe COVID-19 compared with those with more even ratios. Those with “feminized” short little fingers were also at risk. Those large ratio differences indicate low testosterone and high estrogen, which may explain why elderly men are at such high risk for severe COVID-19. Testosterone naturally falls off as men get older.
The results add credence to clinical trials looking to use testosterone-boosting drugs against COVID-19, the researchers said. It also gives credence to LOTME’s brand-new 12-step finger strength fitness routine and our branded finger weights. Now just $19.95! It’s the bargain of the century! Boost your testosterone naturally and protect yourself from COVID-19! We promise it’s not a scam.
Some emergencies need a superhero
Last week, we learned about the most boring person in the world. This week just happens to be opposite week, so we’re looking at a candidate for the most interesting person. Someone who can swoop down from the sky to save the injured and helpless. Someone who can go where helicopters fear to tread. Someone with jet engines for arms. Superhero-type stuff.
The Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS), a charitable organization located in the United Kingdom, recently announced that one of its members has completed training on the Gravity Industries Jet Suit. The suit “has two engines on each arm and a larger engine on the back [that] provide up to 317 pounds of thrust,” Interesting Engineering explained.
GNAAS is putting the suit into operation in England’s Lake District National Park, which includes mountainous terrain that is not very hospitable to helicopter landings. A paramedic using the suit can reach hikers stranded on mountainsides much faster than rescuers who have to run or hike from the nearest helicopter landing site.
“Everyone looks at the wow factor and the fact we are the world’s first jet suit paramedics, but for us, it’s about delivering patient care,” GNAAS’ Andy Mawson told Interesting Engineering. Sounds like superhero-speak to us.
So if you’re in the Lake District and have taken a bit of a tumble, you can call a superhero on your cell phone or you can use this to summon one.
Why we’re rejecting food as medicine
Humans have been using food to treat ailments much longer than we’ve had the advances of modern medicine. So why have we rejected its worth in our treatment processes? And what can be done to change that? The Center for Food as Medicine and the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center just released a 335-page report that answers those questions.
First, the why: Meals in health care settings are not medically designed to help with the specific needs of the patient. Produce-prescription and nutrition-incentive programs don’t have the government funds to fully support them. And a lot of medical schools don’t even require students to take a basic nutrition course. So there’s a lack of knowledge and a disconnect between health care providers and food as a resource.
Then there’s a lack of trust in the food industry and their validity. Social media uses food as a means of promoting “pseudoscientific alternative medicine” or spreading false info, pushing away legitimate providers. The food industry has had its fingers in food science studies and an almost mafia-esque chokehold on American dietary guidelines. No wonder food for medicine is getting the boot!
To change the situation, the report offers 10 key recommendations on how to advance the idea of incorporating food into medicine for treatment and prevention. They include boosting the funding for research, making hospitals more food-as-medicine focused, expanding federal programs, and improving public awareness on the role nutrition can play in medical treatment or prevention.
So maybe instead of rejecting food outright, we should be looking a little deeper at how we can use it to our advantage. Just a thought: Ice cream as an antidepressant.
Being rude is a good thing, apparently
If you’ve ever been called argumentative, stubborn, or unpleasant, then this LOTME is for you. Researchers at the University of Geneva have found that people who are more stubborn and hate to conform have brains that are more protected against Alzheimer’s disease. That type of personality seems to preserve the part of the brain that usually deteriorates as we grow older.
The original hypothesis that personality may have a protective effect against brain degeneration led the investigators to conduct cognitive and personality assessments of 65 elderly participants over a 5-year period. Researchers have been attempting to create vaccines to protect against Alzheimer’s disease, but these new findings offer a nonbiological way to help.
“For a long time, the brain is able to compensate by activating alternative networks; when the first clinical signs appear, however, it is unfortunately often too late. The identification of early biomarkers is therefore essential for … effective disease management,” lead author Panteleimon Giannakopoulos, MD, said in a Study Finds report.
You may be wondering how people with more agreeable and less confrontational personalities can seek help. Well, researchers are working on that, too. It’s a complex situation, but as always, we’re rooting for you, science!
At least now you can take solace in the fact that your elderly next-door neighbor who yells at you for stepping on his lawn is probably more protected against Alzheimer’s disease.
Pointing a finger at COVID-19
The battle against COVID-19 is seemingly never ending. It’s been 2 years and still we struggle against the virus. But now, a new hero rises against the eternal menace, a powerful weapon against this scourge of humanity. And that weapon? Finger length.
Before you break out the sad trombone, hear us out. One of the big questions around COVID-19 is the role testosterone plays in its severity: Does low testosterone increase or decrease the odds of contracting severe COVID-19? To help answer that question, English researchers have published a study analyzing finger length ratios in both COVID-19 patients and a healthy control group. That seems random, but high testosterone in the womb leads to longer ring fingers in adulthood, while high estrogen leads to longer index fingers.
According to the researchers, those who had significant left hand–right hand differences in the ratio between the second and fourth digits, as well as the third and fifth digits, were significantly more likely to have severe COVID-19 compared with those with more even ratios. Those with “feminized” short little fingers were also at risk. Those large ratio differences indicate low testosterone and high estrogen, which may explain why elderly men are at such high risk for severe COVID-19. Testosterone naturally falls off as men get older.
The results add credence to clinical trials looking to use testosterone-boosting drugs against COVID-19, the researchers said. It also gives credence to LOTME’s brand-new 12-step finger strength fitness routine and our branded finger weights. Now just $19.95! It’s the bargain of the century! Boost your testosterone naturally and protect yourself from COVID-19! We promise it’s not a scam.
Some emergencies need a superhero
Last week, we learned about the most boring person in the world. This week just happens to be opposite week, so we’re looking at a candidate for the most interesting person. Someone who can swoop down from the sky to save the injured and helpless. Someone who can go where helicopters fear to tread. Someone with jet engines for arms. Superhero-type stuff.
The Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS), a charitable organization located in the United Kingdom, recently announced that one of its members has completed training on the Gravity Industries Jet Suit. The suit “has two engines on each arm and a larger engine on the back [that] provide up to 317 pounds of thrust,” Interesting Engineering explained.
GNAAS is putting the suit into operation in England’s Lake District National Park, which includes mountainous terrain that is not very hospitable to helicopter landings. A paramedic using the suit can reach hikers stranded on mountainsides much faster than rescuers who have to run or hike from the nearest helicopter landing site.
“Everyone looks at the wow factor and the fact we are the world’s first jet suit paramedics, but for us, it’s about delivering patient care,” GNAAS’ Andy Mawson told Interesting Engineering. Sounds like superhero-speak to us.
So if you’re in the Lake District and have taken a bit of a tumble, you can call a superhero on your cell phone or you can use this to summon one.
Why we’re rejecting food as medicine
Humans have been using food to treat ailments much longer than we’ve had the advances of modern medicine. So why have we rejected its worth in our treatment processes? And what can be done to change that? The Center for Food as Medicine and the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center just released a 335-page report that answers those questions.
First, the why: Meals in health care settings are not medically designed to help with the specific needs of the patient. Produce-prescription and nutrition-incentive programs don’t have the government funds to fully support them. And a lot of medical schools don’t even require students to take a basic nutrition course. So there’s a lack of knowledge and a disconnect between health care providers and food as a resource.
Then there’s a lack of trust in the food industry and their validity. Social media uses food as a means of promoting “pseudoscientific alternative medicine” or spreading false info, pushing away legitimate providers. The food industry has had its fingers in food science studies and an almost mafia-esque chokehold on American dietary guidelines. No wonder food for medicine is getting the boot!
To change the situation, the report offers 10 key recommendations on how to advance the idea of incorporating food into medicine for treatment and prevention. They include boosting the funding for research, making hospitals more food-as-medicine focused, expanding federal programs, and improving public awareness on the role nutrition can play in medical treatment or prevention.
So maybe instead of rejecting food outright, we should be looking a little deeper at how we can use it to our advantage. Just a thought: Ice cream as an antidepressant.
Being rude is a good thing, apparently
If you’ve ever been called argumentative, stubborn, or unpleasant, then this LOTME is for you. Researchers at the University of Geneva have found that people who are more stubborn and hate to conform have brains that are more protected against Alzheimer’s disease. That type of personality seems to preserve the part of the brain that usually deteriorates as we grow older.
The original hypothesis that personality may have a protective effect against brain degeneration led the investigators to conduct cognitive and personality assessments of 65 elderly participants over a 5-year period. Researchers have been attempting to create vaccines to protect against Alzheimer’s disease, but these new findings offer a nonbiological way to help.
“For a long time, the brain is able to compensate by activating alternative networks; when the first clinical signs appear, however, it is unfortunately often too late. The identification of early biomarkers is therefore essential for … effective disease management,” lead author Panteleimon Giannakopoulos, MD, said in a Study Finds report.
You may be wondering how people with more agreeable and less confrontational personalities can seek help. Well, researchers are working on that, too. It’s a complex situation, but as always, we’re rooting for you, science!
At least now you can take solace in the fact that your elderly next-door neighbor who yells at you for stepping on his lawn is probably more protected against Alzheimer’s disease.
Boring is good. Boring is right. Boring is … interesting
Can you keep it down? I’m trying to be boring
He chides his friends for not looking both ways before crossing the road. He is never questioned by the police because they fall asleep listening to him talk. He has won the office’s coveted perfect attendance award 10 years running. Look out, Dos Equis guy, you’ve got some new competition. That’s right, it’s the most boring man in the world.
For this boring study (sorry, study on boredom) conducted by English researchers and published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people were surveyed on various jobs and hobbies, ranking them by how exciting or boring they are, as well as how competent someone with those jobs/hobbies would be, their willingness to avoid someone with those jobs/hobbies, and how much they’d need to be paid to spend time with someone who had an undesirable job/hobby.
According to the British public, the most boring person in the world is a religious data analyst who likes to sleep and lives in a small town. In fact, spending time with this person is almost a full-time job on its own: To make it worth their while, survey subjects wanted 35 pounds a day. The boring person also was viewed as less competent, as is anyone with a boring job.
Now, there probably aren’t a lot of religious data analysts out there, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other boring jobs – accounting, tax/insurance, cleaning, and banking rounded out the top five (apparently people don’t like finances) – and hobbies – watching TV, observing animals, and mathematics filled out the top five. In case you’re curious, performing artists, scientists, journalists, health professionals, and teachers were viewed as having exciting jobs; exciting hobbies included gaming, reading, domestic tasks (really?), gardening, and writing.
Lead researcher Wijnand Van Tilburg, PhD, made an excellent point about people with boring jobs: They “have power in society – perhaps we should try not to upset them and stereotype them as boring!”
We think they should lean into it and make The Most Boring Man in the World ads: “When I drive a car off the lot, its value increases because I used the correct lending association. Batman trusts me with his Batmobile insurance. I can make those Cuban cigars tax exempt. Stay financially solvent, my friends.”
Fungi, but make it fashion
Fashion is an expensive and costly industry to sustain. Cotton production takes a toll on the environment, leather production comes with environmental and ethical/moral conundrums, and thanks to fast fashion, about 85% of textiles are being thrown away in the United States.
Researchers at the University of Borås in Sweden, however, have found a newish solution to create leather, cotton, and other textiles. And as with so many of the finer things, it starts with unsold bread from the grocery store.
Akram Zamani, PhD, and her team take that bread and turn it into breadcrumbs, then combine it with water and Rhizopus delemar, a fungus typically found in decaying food. After a couple of days of feasting on the bread, the fungus produces natural fibers made of chitin and chitosan that accumulate in the cell walls. After proteins, lipids, and other byproducts are removed, the team is left with a jelly-like substance made of those fibrous cell walls that can be spun into a fabric.
The researchers started small with very thin nonpliable sheets, but with a little layering by using tree tannins for softness and alkali for strength, their fungal leather is more like real leather than competing fungal leathers. Not to mention its being able to be produced in a fraction of the time.
This new fungal leather is fast to produce, it’s biodegradable, and it uses only natural ingredients to treat the materials. It’s the ultimate environmental fashion statement.
Who’s afraid of cancer? Not C. elegans
And now, we bring you part 2 of our ongoing series: Creatures that can diagnose cancer. Last week, we discovered that ants are well on their way to replacing dogs in our medical labs and in our hearts. This week, we present the even-more-lovable nematode.
The soil-dwelling nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which is less than 1 mm long, is known to be “attracted or repelled by certain odors, so we came up with an idea that the roundworm could be used to detect lung cancer,” Shin Sik Choi, PhD, of Myongji University in South Korea, who is the project’s principal investigator, said in a statement on Eurekalert.
Dr. Choi’s team created a “worm-on-a-chip” that allowed the nematodes to choose between a drop of culture media from lung cancer cells and media from normal lung fibroblasts. An hour after being placed in the chip’s central chamber, more nematodes had crawled toward the lung cancer media than the normal-cell sample.
The investigators estimate that the device is about 70% effective at detecting cancer cells, but “they hope to increase both the accuracy and sensitivity of the method by using worms that were previously exposed to cancer cell media and therefore have a ‘memory’ of cancer-specific odor molecules,” according to the statement from the American Chemical Society.
Since C. elegans is easy to grow in a lab and, apparently, easy to train, the researchers hope that the worm-on-a-chip can become a quick, easy, economical, and noninvasive cancer screen.
So watch out cancer, because we never bet against the creepy crawlies.
Mosquitoes have us figured out
We are nearing mosquito season; quite possibly the most annoying and itchy time of the year. We stock up on bottles of bug spray, but somehow we still get bite after bite. It appears that mosquitoes are basically able to ignore our bug sprays, which explains why we’re still covered in bites after the Fourth of July fireworks. It turns out mosquitoes are more complex than we thought for such tiny creatures.
There’s plenty of research on the best ways to keep mosquitoes away, because not only are they incredibly annoying, but they also carry potentially harmful diseases. In a recent experiment, researchers used mosquitoes that were genetically modified to have an excessive amount of an odor receptor called AgOR2, which responds to the smell of humans.
“AgOR2 overexpression threw a wrench in the whole system by inactivating olfactory receptors in these mosquitoes,” Christopher Potter, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, said in a written statement.
After testing how these genetically modified mosquitoes reacted to some of the common smells of bug spray such as lemongrass, they discovered that it’s easy for the mosquitoes to ignore the smell. We wish it were that easy for us to ignore that chemically fruity smell.
Researchers continue to work hard to figure out how to repel mosquitoes and we’re rooting for them as summer approaches, despite the mosquito’s status as a creepy crawly.
Can you keep it down? I’m trying to be boring
He chides his friends for not looking both ways before crossing the road. He is never questioned by the police because they fall asleep listening to him talk. He has won the office’s coveted perfect attendance award 10 years running. Look out, Dos Equis guy, you’ve got some new competition. That’s right, it’s the most boring man in the world.
For this boring study (sorry, study on boredom) conducted by English researchers and published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people were surveyed on various jobs and hobbies, ranking them by how exciting or boring they are, as well as how competent someone with those jobs/hobbies would be, their willingness to avoid someone with those jobs/hobbies, and how much they’d need to be paid to spend time with someone who had an undesirable job/hobby.
According to the British public, the most boring person in the world is a religious data analyst who likes to sleep and lives in a small town. In fact, spending time with this person is almost a full-time job on its own: To make it worth their while, survey subjects wanted 35 pounds a day. The boring person also was viewed as less competent, as is anyone with a boring job.
Now, there probably aren’t a lot of religious data analysts out there, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other boring jobs – accounting, tax/insurance, cleaning, and banking rounded out the top five (apparently people don’t like finances) – and hobbies – watching TV, observing animals, and mathematics filled out the top five. In case you’re curious, performing artists, scientists, journalists, health professionals, and teachers were viewed as having exciting jobs; exciting hobbies included gaming, reading, domestic tasks (really?), gardening, and writing.
Lead researcher Wijnand Van Tilburg, PhD, made an excellent point about people with boring jobs: They “have power in society – perhaps we should try not to upset them and stereotype them as boring!”
We think they should lean into it and make The Most Boring Man in the World ads: “When I drive a car off the lot, its value increases because I used the correct lending association. Batman trusts me with his Batmobile insurance. I can make those Cuban cigars tax exempt. Stay financially solvent, my friends.”
Fungi, but make it fashion
Fashion is an expensive and costly industry to sustain. Cotton production takes a toll on the environment, leather production comes with environmental and ethical/moral conundrums, and thanks to fast fashion, about 85% of textiles are being thrown away in the United States.
Researchers at the University of Borås in Sweden, however, have found a newish solution to create leather, cotton, and other textiles. And as with so many of the finer things, it starts with unsold bread from the grocery store.
Akram Zamani, PhD, and her team take that bread and turn it into breadcrumbs, then combine it with water and Rhizopus delemar, a fungus typically found in decaying food. After a couple of days of feasting on the bread, the fungus produces natural fibers made of chitin and chitosan that accumulate in the cell walls. After proteins, lipids, and other byproducts are removed, the team is left with a jelly-like substance made of those fibrous cell walls that can be spun into a fabric.
The researchers started small with very thin nonpliable sheets, but with a little layering by using tree tannins for softness and alkali for strength, their fungal leather is more like real leather than competing fungal leathers. Not to mention its being able to be produced in a fraction of the time.
This new fungal leather is fast to produce, it’s biodegradable, and it uses only natural ingredients to treat the materials. It’s the ultimate environmental fashion statement.
Who’s afraid of cancer? Not C. elegans
And now, we bring you part 2 of our ongoing series: Creatures that can diagnose cancer. Last week, we discovered that ants are well on their way to replacing dogs in our medical labs and in our hearts. This week, we present the even-more-lovable nematode.
The soil-dwelling nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which is less than 1 mm long, is known to be “attracted or repelled by certain odors, so we came up with an idea that the roundworm could be used to detect lung cancer,” Shin Sik Choi, PhD, of Myongji University in South Korea, who is the project’s principal investigator, said in a statement on Eurekalert.
Dr. Choi’s team created a “worm-on-a-chip” that allowed the nematodes to choose between a drop of culture media from lung cancer cells and media from normal lung fibroblasts. An hour after being placed in the chip’s central chamber, more nematodes had crawled toward the lung cancer media than the normal-cell sample.
The investigators estimate that the device is about 70% effective at detecting cancer cells, but “they hope to increase both the accuracy and sensitivity of the method by using worms that were previously exposed to cancer cell media and therefore have a ‘memory’ of cancer-specific odor molecules,” according to the statement from the American Chemical Society.
Since C. elegans is easy to grow in a lab and, apparently, easy to train, the researchers hope that the worm-on-a-chip can become a quick, easy, economical, and noninvasive cancer screen.
So watch out cancer, because we never bet against the creepy crawlies.
Mosquitoes have us figured out
We are nearing mosquito season; quite possibly the most annoying and itchy time of the year. We stock up on bottles of bug spray, but somehow we still get bite after bite. It appears that mosquitoes are basically able to ignore our bug sprays, which explains why we’re still covered in bites after the Fourth of July fireworks. It turns out mosquitoes are more complex than we thought for such tiny creatures.
There’s plenty of research on the best ways to keep mosquitoes away, because not only are they incredibly annoying, but they also carry potentially harmful diseases. In a recent experiment, researchers used mosquitoes that were genetically modified to have an excessive amount of an odor receptor called AgOR2, which responds to the smell of humans.
“AgOR2 overexpression threw a wrench in the whole system by inactivating olfactory receptors in these mosquitoes,” Christopher Potter, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, said in a written statement.
After testing how these genetically modified mosquitoes reacted to some of the common smells of bug spray such as lemongrass, they discovered that it’s easy for the mosquitoes to ignore the smell. We wish it were that easy for us to ignore that chemically fruity smell.
Researchers continue to work hard to figure out how to repel mosquitoes and we’re rooting for them as summer approaches, despite the mosquito’s status as a creepy crawly.
Can you keep it down? I’m trying to be boring
He chides his friends for not looking both ways before crossing the road. He is never questioned by the police because they fall asleep listening to him talk. He has won the office’s coveted perfect attendance award 10 years running. Look out, Dos Equis guy, you’ve got some new competition. That’s right, it’s the most boring man in the world.
For this boring study (sorry, study on boredom) conducted by English researchers and published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people were surveyed on various jobs and hobbies, ranking them by how exciting or boring they are, as well as how competent someone with those jobs/hobbies would be, their willingness to avoid someone with those jobs/hobbies, and how much they’d need to be paid to spend time with someone who had an undesirable job/hobby.
According to the British public, the most boring person in the world is a religious data analyst who likes to sleep and lives in a small town. In fact, spending time with this person is almost a full-time job on its own: To make it worth their while, survey subjects wanted 35 pounds a day. The boring person also was viewed as less competent, as is anyone with a boring job.
Now, there probably aren’t a lot of religious data analysts out there, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other boring jobs – accounting, tax/insurance, cleaning, and banking rounded out the top five (apparently people don’t like finances) – and hobbies – watching TV, observing animals, and mathematics filled out the top five. In case you’re curious, performing artists, scientists, journalists, health professionals, and teachers were viewed as having exciting jobs; exciting hobbies included gaming, reading, domestic tasks (really?), gardening, and writing.
Lead researcher Wijnand Van Tilburg, PhD, made an excellent point about people with boring jobs: They “have power in society – perhaps we should try not to upset them and stereotype them as boring!”
We think they should lean into it and make The Most Boring Man in the World ads: “When I drive a car off the lot, its value increases because I used the correct lending association. Batman trusts me with his Batmobile insurance. I can make those Cuban cigars tax exempt. Stay financially solvent, my friends.”
Fungi, but make it fashion
Fashion is an expensive and costly industry to sustain. Cotton production takes a toll on the environment, leather production comes with environmental and ethical/moral conundrums, and thanks to fast fashion, about 85% of textiles are being thrown away in the United States.
Researchers at the University of Borås in Sweden, however, have found a newish solution to create leather, cotton, and other textiles. And as with so many of the finer things, it starts with unsold bread from the grocery store.
Akram Zamani, PhD, and her team take that bread and turn it into breadcrumbs, then combine it with water and Rhizopus delemar, a fungus typically found in decaying food. After a couple of days of feasting on the bread, the fungus produces natural fibers made of chitin and chitosan that accumulate in the cell walls. After proteins, lipids, and other byproducts are removed, the team is left with a jelly-like substance made of those fibrous cell walls that can be spun into a fabric.
The researchers started small with very thin nonpliable sheets, but with a little layering by using tree tannins for softness and alkali for strength, their fungal leather is more like real leather than competing fungal leathers. Not to mention its being able to be produced in a fraction of the time.
This new fungal leather is fast to produce, it’s biodegradable, and it uses only natural ingredients to treat the materials. It’s the ultimate environmental fashion statement.
Who’s afraid of cancer? Not C. elegans
And now, we bring you part 2 of our ongoing series: Creatures that can diagnose cancer. Last week, we discovered that ants are well on their way to replacing dogs in our medical labs and in our hearts. This week, we present the even-more-lovable nematode.
The soil-dwelling nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which is less than 1 mm long, is known to be “attracted or repelled by certain odors, so we came up with an idea that the roundworm could be used to detect lung cancer,” Shin Sik Choi, PhD, of Myongji University in South Korea, who is the project’s principal investigator, said in a statement on Eurekalert.
Dr. Choi’s team created a “worm-on-a-chip” that allowed the nematodes to choose between a drop of culture media from lung cancer cells and media from normal lung fibroblasts. An hour after being placed in the chip’s central chamber, more nematodes had crawled toward the lung cancer media than the normal-cell sample.
The investigators estimate that the device is about 70% effective at detecting cancer cells, but “they hope to increase both the accuracy and sensitivity of the method by using worms that were previously exposed to cancer cell media and therefore have a ‘memory’ of cancer-specific odor molecules,” according to the statement from the American Chemical Society.
Since C. elegans is easy to grow in a lab and, apparently, easy to train, the researchers hope that the worm-on-a-chip can become a quick, easy, economical, and noninvasive cancer screen.
So watch out cancer, because we never bet against the creepy crawlies.
Mosquitoes have us figured out
We are nearing mosquito season; quite possibly the most annoying and itchy time of the year. We stock up on bottles of bug spray, but somehow we still get bite after bite. It appears that mosquitoes are basically able to ignore our bug sprays, which explains why we’re still covered in bites after the Fourth of July fireworks. It turns out mosquitoes are more complex than we thought for such tiny creatures.
There’s plenty of research on the best ways to keep mosquitoes away, because not only are they incredibly annoying, but they also carry potentially harmful diseases. In a recent experiment, researchers used mosquitoes that were genetically modified to have an excessive amount of an odor receptor called AgOR2, which responds to the smell of humans.
“AgOR2 overexpression threw a wrench in the whole system by inactivating olfactory receptors in these mosquitoes,” Christopher Potter, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, said in a written statement.
After testing how these genetically modified mosquitoes reacted to some of the common smells of bug spray such as lemongrass, they discovered that it’s easy for the mosquitoes to ignore the smell. We wish it were that easy for us to ignore that chemically fruity smell.
Researchers continue to work hard to figure out how to repel mosquitoes and we’re rooting for them as summer approaches, despite the mosquito’s status as a creepy crawly.
Is cancer testing going to the dogs? Nope, ants
The oncologist’s new best friend
We know that dogs have very sensitive noses. They can track criminals and missing persons and sniff out drugs and bombs. They can even detect cancer cells … after months of training.
And then there are ants.
Cancer cells produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can be sniffed out by dogs and other animals with sufficiently sophisticated olfactory senses. A group of French investigators decided to find out if Formica fusca is such an animal.
First, they placed breast cancer cells and healthy cells in a petri dish. The sample of cancer cells, however, included a sugary treat. “Over successive trials, the ants got quicker and quicker at finding the treat, indicating that they had learned to recognize the VOCs produced by the cancerous cells, using these as a beacon to guide their way to the sugary delight,” according to IFL Science.
When the researchers removed the treat, the ants still went straight for the cancer cells. Then they removed the healthy cells and substituted another type of breast cancer cell, with just one type getting the treat. They went for the cancer cells with the treat, “indicating that they were capable of distinguishing between the different cancer types based on the unique pattern of VOCs emitted by each one,” IFL Science explained.
It’s just another chapter in the eternal struggle between dogs and ants. Dogs need months of training to learn to detect cancer cells; ants can do it in 30 minutes. Over the course of a dog’s training, Fido eats more food than 10,000 ants combined. (Okay, we’re guessing here, but it’s got to be a pretty big number, right?)
Then there’s the warm and fuzzy factor. Just look at that picture. Who wouldn’t want a cutie like that curling up in the bed next to you?
Console War II: Battle of the Twitter users
Video games can be a lot of fun, provided you’re not playing something like Rock Simulator. Or Surgeon Simulator. Or Surgeon Simulator 2. Yes, those are all real games. But calling yourself a video gamer invites a certain negative connotation, and nowhere can that be better exemplified than the increasingly ridiculous console war.
For those who don’t know their video game history, back in the early 90s Nintendo and Sega were the main video game console makers. Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic, and everyone had an opinion on which was best. With Sega now but a shell of its former self and Nintendo viewed as too “casual” for the true gaming connoisseur, today’s battle pits Playstation against Xbox, and fans of both consoles spend their time trying to one-up each other in increasingly silly online arguments.
That brings us nicely to a Twitter user named “Shreeveera,” who is very vocal about his love of Playstation and hatred of the Xbox. Importantly, for LOTME purposes, Shreeveera identified himself as a doctor on his profile, and in the middle of an argument, Xbox enthusiasts called his credentials into question.
At this point, most people would recognize that there are very few noteworthy console-exclusive video games in today’s world and that any argument about consoles essentially comes down to which console design you like or which company you find less distasteful, and they would step away from the Twitter argument. Shreeveera is not most people, and he decided the next logical move was to post a video of himself and an anesthetized patient about to undergo a laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
This move did prove that he was indeed a doctor, but the ethics of posting such a video with a patient in the room is a bit dubious at best. Since Shreeveera also listed the hospital he worked at, numerous Twitter users review bombed the hospital with one-star reviews. Shreeveera’s fate is unknown, but he did take down the video and removed “doctor by profession” from his profile. He also made a second video asking Twitter to stop trying to ruin his life. We’re sure that’ll go well. Twitter is known for being completely fair and reasonable.
Use your words to gain power
We live in the age of the emoji. The use of emojis in texts and emails is basically the new shorthand. It’s a fun and easy way to chat with people close to us, but a new study shows that it doesn’t help in a business setting. In fact, it may do a little damage.
The use of images such as emojis in communication or logos can make a person seem less powerful than someone who opts for written words, according to Elinor Amit, PhD, of Tel Aviv University and associates.
Participants in their study were asked to imagine shopping with a person wearing a T-shirt. Half were then shown the logo of the Red Sox baseball team and half saw the words “Red Sox.” In another scenario, they were asked to imagine attending a retreat of a company called Lotus. Then half were shown an employee wearing a shirt with an image of lotus flower and half saw the verbal logo “Lotus.” In both scenarios, the individuals wearing shirts with images were seen as less powerful than the people who wore shirts with words on them.
Why is that? In a Eurekalert statement, Dr. Amit said that “visual messages are often interpreted as a signal for desire for social proximity.” In a world with COVID-19, that could give anyone pause.
That desire for more social proximity, in turn, equals a suggested loss of power because research shows that people who want to be around other people more are less powerful than people who don’t.
With the reduced social proximity we have these days, we may want to keep things cool and lighthearted, especially in work emails with people who we’ve never met. It may be, however, that using your words to say thank you in the multitude of emails you respond to on a regular basis is better than that thumbs-up emoji. Nobody will think less of you.
Should Daylight Savings Time still be a thing?
This past week, we just experienced the spring-forward portion of Daylight Savings Time, which took an hour of sleep away from us all. Some of us may still be struggling to find our footing with the time change, but at least it’s still sunny out at 7 pm. For those who don’t really see the point of changing the clocks twice a year, there are actually some good reasons to do so.
Sen. Marco Rubio, sponsor of a bill to make the time change permanent, put it simply: “If we can get this passed, we don’t have to do this stupidity anymore.” Message received, apparently, since the measure just passed unanimously in the Senate.
It’s not clear if President Biden will approve it, though, because there’s a lot that comes into play: economic needs, seasonal depression, and safety.
“I know this is not the most important issue confronting America, but it’s one of those issues where there’s a lot of agreement,” Sen. Rubio said.
Not total agreement, though. The National Association of Convenience Stores is opposed to the bill, and Reuters noted that one witness at a recent hearing said the time change “is like living in the wrong time zone for almost eight months out of the year.”
Many people, however, seem to be leaning toward the permanent spring-forward as it gives businesses a longer window to provide entertainment in the evenings and kids are able to play outside longer after school.
Honestly, we’re leaning toward whichever one can reduce seasonal depression.
The oncologist’s new best friend
We know that dogs have very sensitive noses. They can track criminals and missing persons and sniff out drugs and bombs. They can even detect cancer cells … after months of training.
And then there are ants.
Cancer cells produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can be sniffed out by dogs and other animals with sufficiently sophisticated olfactory senses. A group of French investigators decided to find out if Formica fusca is such an animal.
First, they placed breast cancer cells and healthy cells in a petri dish. The sample of cancer cells, however, included a sugary treat. “Over successive trials, the ants got quicker and quicker at finding the treat, indicating that they had learned to recognize the VOCs produced by the cancerous cells, using these as a beacon to guide their way to the sugary delight,” according to IFL Science.
When the researchers removed the treat, the ants still went straight for the cancer cells. Then they removed the healthy cells and substituted another type of breast cancer cell, with just one type getting the treat. They went for the cancer cells with the treat, “indicating that they were capable of distinguishing between the different cancer types based on the unique pattern of VOCs emitted by each one,” IFL Science explained.
It’s just another chapter in the eternal struggle between dogs and ants. Dogs need months of training to learn to detect cancer cells; ants can do it in 30 minutes. Over the course of a dog’s training, Fido eats more food than 10,000 ants combined. (Okay, we’re guessing here, but it’s got to be a pretty big number, right?)
Then there’s the warm and fuzzy factor. Just look at that picture. Who wouldn’t want a cutie like that curling up in the bed next to you?
Console War II: Battle of the Twitter users
Video games can be a lot of fun, provided you’re not playing something like Rock Simulator. Or Surgeon Simulator. Or Surgeon Simulator 2. Yes, those are all real games. But calling yourself a video gamer invites a certain negative connotation, and nowhere can that be better exemplified than the increasingly ridiculous console war.
For those who don’t know their video game history, back in the early 90s Nintendo and Sega were the main video game console makers. Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic, and everyone had an opinion on which was best. With Sega now but a shell of its former self and Nintendo viewed as too “casual” for the true gaming connoisseur, today’s battle pits Playstation against Xbox, and fans of both consoles spend their time trying to one-up each other in increasingly silly online arguments.
That brings us nicely to a Twitter user named “Shreeveera,” who is very vocal about his love of Playstation and hatred of the Xbox. Importantly, for LOTME purposes, Shreeveera identified himself as a doctor on his profile, and in the middle of an argument, Xbox enthusiasts called his credentials into question.
At this point, most people would recognize that there are very few noteworthy console-exclusive video games in today’s world and that any argument about consoles essentially comes down to which console design you like or which company you find less distasteful, and they would step away from the Twitter argument. Shreeveera is not most people, and he decided the next logical move was to post a video of himself and an anesthetized patient about to undergo a laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
This move did prove that he was indeed a doctor, but the ethics of posting such a video with a patient in the room is a bit dubious at best. Since Shreeveera also listed the hospital he worked at, numerous Twitter users review bombed the hospital with one-star reviews. Shreeveera’s fate is unknown, but he did take down the video and removed “doctor by profession” from his profile. He also made a second video asking Twitter to stop trying to ruin his life. We’re sure that’ll go well. Twitter is known for being completely fair and reasonable.
Use your words to gain power
We live in the age of the emoji. The use of emojis in texts and emails is basically the new shorthand. It’s a fun and easy way to chat with people close to us, but a new study shows that it doesn’t help in a business setting. In fact, it may do a little damage.
The use of images such as emojis in communication or logos can make a person seem less powerful than someone who opts for written words, according to Elinor Amit, PhD, of Tel Aviv University and associates.
Participants in their study were asked to imagine shopping with a person wearing a T-shirt. Half were then shown the logo of the Red Sox baseball team and half saw the words “Red Sox.” In another scenario, they were asked to imagine attending a retreat of a company called Lotus. Then half were shown an employee wearing a shirt with an image of lotus flower and half saw the verbal logo “Lotus.” In both scenarios, the individuals wearing shirts with images were seen as less powerful than the people who wore shirts with words on them.
Why is that? In a Eurekalert statement, Dr. Amit said that “visual messages are often interpreted as a signal for desire for social proximity.” In a world with COVID-19, that could give anyone pause.
That desire for more social proximity, in turn, equals a suggested loss of power because research shows that people who want to be around other people more are less powerful than people who don’t.
With the reduced social proximity we have these days, we may want to keep things cool and lighthearted, especially in work emails with people who we’ve never met. It may be, however, that using your words to say thank you in the multitude of emails you respond to on a regular basis is better than that thumbs-up emoji. Nobody will think less of you.
Should Daylight Savings Time still be a thing?
This past week, we just experienced the spring-forward portion of Daylight Savings Time, which took an hour of sleep away from us all. Some of us may still be struggling to find our footing with the time change, but at least it’s still sunny out at 7 pm. For those who don’t really see the point of changing the clocks twice a year, there are actually some good reasons to do so.
Sen. Marco Rubio, sponsor of a bill to make the time change permanent, put it simply: “If we can get this passed, we don’t have to do this stupidity anymore.” Message received, apparently, since the measure just passed unanimously in the Senate.
It’s not clear if President Biden will approve it, though, because there’s a lot that comes into play: economic needs, seasonal depression, and safety.
“I know this is not the most important issue confronting America, but it’s one of those issues where there’s a lot of agreement,” Sen. Rubio said.
Not total agreement, though. The National Association of Convenience Stores is opposed to the bill, and Reuters noted that one witness at a recent hearing said the time change “is like living in the wrong time zone for almost eight months out of the year.”
Many people, however, seem to be leaning toward the permanent spring-forward as it gives businesses a longer window to provide entertainment in the evenings and kids are able to play outside longer after school.
Honestly, we’re leaning toward whichever one can reduce seasonal depression.
The oncologist’s new best friend
We know that dogs have very sensitive noses. They can track criminals and missing persons and sniff out drugs and bombs. They can even detect cancer cells … after months of training.
And then there are ants.
Cancer cells produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can be sniffed out by dogs and other animals with sufficiently sophisticated olfactory senses. A group of French investigators decided to find out if Formica fusca is such an animal.
First, they placed breast cancer cells and healthy cells in a petri dish. The sample of cancer cells, however, included a sugary treat. “Over successive trials, the ants got quicker and quicker at finding the treat, indicating that they had learned to recognize the VOCs produced by the cancerous cells, using these as a beacon to guide their way to the sugary delight,” according to IFL Science.
When the researchers removed the treat, the ants still went straight for the cancer cells. Then they removed the healthy cells and substituted another type of breast cancer cell, with just one type getting the treat. They went for the cancer cells with the treat, “indicating that they were capable of distinguishing between the different cancer types based on the unique pattern of VOCs emitted by each one,” IFL Science explained.
It’s just another chapter in the eternal struggle between dogs and ants. Dogs need months of training to learn to detect cancer cells; ants can do it in 30 minutes. Over the course of a dog’s training, Fido eats more food than 10,000 ants combined. (Okay, we’re guessing here, but it’s got to be a pretty big number, right?)
Then there’s the warm and fuzzy factor. Just look at that picture. Who wouldn’t want a cutie like that curling up in the bed next to you?
Console War II: Battle of the Twitter users
Video games can be a lot of fun, provided you’re not playing something like Rock Simulator. Or Surgeon Simulator. Or Surgeon Simulator 2. Yes, those are all real games. But calling yourself a video gamer invites a certain negative connotation, and nowhere can that be better exemplified than the increasingly ridiculous console war.
For those who don’t know their video game history, back in the early 90s Nintendo and Sega were the main video game console makers. Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic, and everyone had an opinion on which was best. With Sega now but a shell of its former self and Nintendo viewed as too “casual” for the true gaming connoisseur, today’s battle pits Playstation against Xbox, and fans of both consoles spend their time trying to one-up each other in increasingly silly online arguments.
That brings us nicely to a Twitter user named “Shreeveera,” who is very vocal about his love of Playstation and hatred of the Xbox. Importantly, for LOTME purposes, Shreeveera identified himself as a doctor on his profile, and in the middle of an argument, Xbox enthusiasts called his credentials into question.
At this point, most people would recognize that there are very few noteworthy console-exclusive video games in today’s world and that any argument about consoles essentially comes down to which console design you like or which company you find less distasteful, and they would step away from the Twitter argument. Shreeveera is not most people, and he decided the next logical move was to post a video of himself and an anesthetized patient about to undergo a laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
This move did prove that he was indeed a doctor, but the ethics of posting such a video with a patient in the room is a bit dubious at best. Since Shreeveera also listed the hospital he worked at, numerous Twitter users review bombed the hospital with one-star reviews. Shreeveera’s fate is unknown, but he did take down the video and removed “doctor by profession” from his profile. He also made a second video asking Twitter to stop trying to ruin his life. We’re sure that’ll go well. Twitter is known for being completely fair and reasonable.
Use your words to gain power
We live in the age of the emoji. The use of emojis in texts and emails is basically the new shorthand. It’s a fun and easy way to chat with people close to us, but a new study shows that it doesn’t help in a business setting. In fact, it may do a little damage.
The use of images such as emojis in communication or logos can make a person seem less powerful than someone who opts for written words, according to Elinor Amit, PhD, of Tel Aviv University and associates.
Participants in their study were asked to imagine shopping with a person wearing a T-shirt. Half were then shown the logo of the Red Sox baseball team and half saw the words “Red Sox.” In another scenario, they were asked to imagine attending a retreat of a company called Lotus. Then half were shown an employee wearing a shirt with an image of lotus flower and half saw the verbal logo “Lotus.” In both scenarios, the individuals wearing shirts with images were seen as less powerful than the people who wore shirts with words on them.
Why is that? In a Eurekalert statement, Dr. Amit said that “visual messages are often interpreted as a signal for desire for social proximity.” In a world with COVID-19, that could give anyone pause.
That desire for more social proximity, in turn, equals a suggested loss of power because research shows that people who want to be around other people more are less powerful than people who don’t.
With the reduced social proximity we have these days, we may want to keep things cool and lighthearted, especially in work emails with people who we’ve never met. It may be, however, that using your words to say thank you in the multitude of emails you respond to on a regular basis is better than that thumbs-up emoji. Nobody will think less of you.
Should Daylight Savings Time still be a thing?
This past week, we just experienced the spring-forward portion of Daylight Savings Time, which took an hour of sleep away from us all. Some of us may still be struggling to find our footing with the time change, but at least it’s still sunny out at 7 pm. For those who don’t really see the point of changing the clocks twice a year, there are actually some good reasons to do so.
Sen. Marco Rubio, sponsor of a bill to make the time change permanent, put it simply: “If we can get this passed, we don’t have to do this stupidity anymore.” Message received, apparently, since the measure just passed unanimously in the Senate.
It’s not clear if President Biden will approve it, though, because there’s a lot that comes into play: economic needs, seasonal depression, and safety.
“I know this is not the most important issue confronting America, but it’s one of those issues where there’s a lot of agreement,” Sen. Rubio said.
Not total agreement, though. The National Association of Convenience Stores is opposed to the bill, and Reuters noted that one witness at a recent hearing said the time change “is like living in the wrong time zone for almost eight months out of the year.”
Many people, however, seem to be leaning toward the permanent spring-forward as it gives businesses a longer window to provide entertainment in the evenings and kids are able to play outside longer after school.
Honestly, we’re leaning toward whichever one can reduce seasonal depression.