COVID RESTRICTIONS WERE TOO LAX:

Estimating the population-level effects of nonpharmaceutical interventions when transmission rates of COVID-19 vary by orders of magnitude from one contact to another (Richard P. Sear, 12/03/24, Phys. Rev. E )

Statistical physicists have long studied systems where the variable of interest spans many orders of magnitude, the classic example is the relaxation times of glassy materials, which are often found to follow power laws. A power-law dependence has been found for the probability of transmission of COVID-19, as a function of length of time a susceptible person is in contact with an infected person. This is in data from the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 app. The amount of virus in infected people spans many orders of magnitude. Inspired by this, I assume that the power-law behavior found in COVID-19 transmission is due to the effective transmission rate varying over orders of magnitude from one contact to another. I then use a model from statistical physics to estimate that if a population all wear FFP2/N95 masks, this reduces the effective reproduction number for COVID-19 transmission by a factor of approximately nine.

WHAT HAVE VACCINES EVER DONE FOR US?:

Cervical cancer deaths are plummeting among young U.S. women: The findings could be a preview of what’s to come if HPV vaccination rates improve (Andrea Tamayo, November 27, 2024, Science News)

“We had a hypothesis that since it’s been almost 16 years, that maybe we might be starting to see [the] initial impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer deaths,” says Ashish Deshmukh, an epidemiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “And that’s exactly what we observed.”

Just another reason for the incel Right to hate vaccines.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN FOSSIL FUELS:

Lead Exposure Drove a Hidden Mental Health Crisis in the U.S., Study Reveals (Ed Cara, December 4, 2024, Gizmodo)

Scientists at Duke University and Florida State University conducted the study, building on their past research of lead’s impact on our health. They estimated that childhood lead exposure—particularly during the decades when it was most found in gasoline—has directly contributed to 151 million more cases of psychiatric disorder among Americans over the past 75 years. The findings indicate that lead has been even more dangerous to humanity than we knew.

Car manufacturers began to add lead to gasoline in the 1920s, aiming to reduce wear and tear on the engines.

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

The End of Oil (Ryan Kellogg, November 2024, NBER: Working Paper 33207)

It is now plausible to envision scenarios in which global demand for crude oil falls to essentially zero by the end of this century, driven by improvements in clean energy technologies, adoption of stringent climate policies, or both. This paper asks what such a demand decline, when anticipated, might mean for global oil supply. One possibility is the well-known “green paradox”: because oil is an exhaustible resource, producers may accelerate near-term extraction in order to beat the demand decline. This reaction would increase near-term CO2 emissions and could possibly even lead the total present value of climate damages to be greater than if demand had not declined at all. However, because oil extraction requires potentially long-lived investments in wells and other infrastructure, the opposite may occur: an anticipated demand decline reduces producers’ investment rates, decreasing near-term oil production and CO2 emissions.

remember Peak Oil? That was hilarious.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Even People Who Hate AI Art Appear to Actually Prefer AI Art in a Blind Test (frank Landmore, 11/23/24, Futurism)

To the untrained eye, it seems that AI-generated images are more than just passable; in some cases, they seem to match up to the old masters themselves.

That at least appears to be the findings of a recent blind test conducted by the blog Astral Star Codex, which found that the readers who took part incorrectly distinguished between AI images and human art 40 percent of the time.

But perhaps the most striking takeaway was that overall, the participants slightly preferred the AI creations to human ones, with six of the top ten most-liked images being AI-generated, and the top two slots going to the AI paintings.

This preference was even the case among participants who identified as having a profound distaste for AI illustrations — perhaps demonstrating the unnerving capabilities of the technology.

NOT JUST SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

New 3D Bioprinter Could Build Replicas of Human Organs, Offering a Boost for Drug Discovery (Margherita Bassi, November 19, 2024, Smithsonian)

Currently, scientists have only limited ways to create tissue for testing pharmaceutical therapies, such as using lab-grown samples or by relying on traditional 3D bioprinting, per Popular Science’s Andrew Paul. However, cultivating organs in a lab is complex and expensive—and printing them is currently slow and prone to errors, such as positioning cells incorrectly.

“Incorrect cell positioning is a big reason most 3D bioprinters fail to produce structures that accurately represent human tissue,” David Collins, head of the Collins BioMicrosystems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne and a co-author of the study, says in a statement.

“But with our new approach,” Collins and two other researchers write in an article for Pursuit, “not only can we position cells with precision, we can also fabricate at a scale of single cells.”

THAT WAS EASY:

Techno-optimism: clean and free energy (jan Bosch, 18 November 2024, Bits & Chips)

First, renewable energy. Sometime in recent years, we crossed the point where solar energy became the cheapest form of energy. Cheaper than oil, gas and any other non-renewable energy source. This is quite incredible as it means that research has been driving down the cost per watt incredibly fast. In fact, the price of solar panels measured in watts per dollar follows Moore’s Law, meaning that the cost of solar energy is halved every 18 months.

We also have wind power, tidal power and several other forms of renewable energy. The cost per watt for all of them is dropping rapidly as well. Although humans naturally think linearly instead of exponentially, the cost of these renewable sources of energy is dropping exponentially toward zero due to technological innovation and economies of scale.

The main challenge is of course energy storage. Progress in battery technology is rapid but slower than for generation. But also here, the rapid electrification of vehicles is driving economies of scale that are driving down the cost of storage as well. Already now, battery systems are becoming available for stationary purposes that often have had a previous life as part of a vehicle. This allows for high cost-effectiveness as the economic life of batteries is extended significantly.

This brings us to the second main development in energy: nuclear is on the way back. New generations of nuclear reactors are available that are truly safe, much smaller and much more cost-effective than the traditional reactors. According to the research I’ve seen, nuclear actually has the lowest environmental impact of all energy sources, including solar and wind, and the lowest number of attributable deaths. Using nuclear to fill the gaps in energy generation by renewables and to address the storage challenges will be critical if we want to stop using fossil fuels.

Kind of amusing that MAGA think they can make everyone spend more on energy in perpetuity just because that hate Greens.

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

He’ll try, but Trump can’t stop the clean energy revolution (Matt Simon, Nov 11, 2024, Grist)

A core irony of climate change is that markets incentivized the wide-scale burning of fossil fuels beginning in the Industrial Revolution, creating the mess humanity is mired in, and now those markets are driving the Green Revolution that will help fix it. Coal, oil, and gas are commodities whose prices fluctuate. As natural resources that humans pull from the ground, there’s really no improving on them — engineers can’t engineer new versions of coal.

By contrast, solar panels, wind turbines, and appliances like induction stoves only get better — more efficient and cheaper — with time. Energy experts believe solar power, the price of which fell 90 percent between 2010 and 2020, will continue to proliferate across the landscape. (Last year, the United States added three times as much solar capacity as natural gas.) Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S., due in part to government incentives. Last year, Maine announced it had reached its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule, in part thanks to state rebates.

NEVER “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”:

Book Review: Why the Medical Establishment Often Gets It Wrong (Lola Butcher, 11.01.2024, UnDark)

“Much of what the public is told about health is medical dogma — an idea or practice given incontrovertible authority because someone decreed it to be true based on a gut feeling,” Makary writes.

Makary’s assertions are supported by hundreds of footnotes as he builds each indictment, but that doesn’t mean all physicians and researchers are nodding in agreement. One example: When a research team analyzed 13 studies comparing antibiotics to appendectomy, it found almost a third of the patients initially treated with antibiotics had an appendectomy within the year. Although the other two-thirds did not, the researchers called the evidence that antibiotics are better “very uncertain.” So surgeons who choose to operate immediately are not necessarily doing something wrong.

Makary, one of medicine’s most prolific iconoclasts, has been poking at America’s health care system since at least 1998 when, as a medical student, his article calling on hospitals, medical schools, and health insurance companies to divest their tobacco stocks was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

A few years later, ignoring criticism from his colleagues, Makary created a checklist to improve surgery safety; after proving that safe surgery checklists reduced surgical errors and deaths, they are now used in most operating rooms around the world. His 2012 book, “Unaccountable,” demanded that hospitals reveal their infection rates and medical errors. A few years later, Medicare began requiring public reporting of those and other indicators of health care quality. His 2019 book, “The Price We Pay,” documented hospitals’ price-gouging practices and called for all hospitals to post cash prices for certain services — which is now required by law. […]

He does not call the medical establishment nefarious; rather, he accuses it of frequently embracing a narrative — that stress causes ulcers, for instance — without evidence, ignoring scientific findings that do not support the idea, and blackballing those who question their position.

HATING GREENS WON’T STOP THE LAWS OF ECONOMICS:

The Expedia of solar panels confirms new rooftop panels are more powerful than ever — and it’s leading to enormous savings: It has fueled the adoption of solar energy on an unprecedented scale. (Elijah McKee, October 28, 2024, The Cool Down)

[T]he technology is more powerful than ever, with a single cell capable of producing over 400 watts. And get this: 97% of them do exactly that — another huge step up from just four years ago, when most panels performed below that mark, according to a marketplace report by EnergySage.

This colossal evolution of solar power is not just a cool fact. It has also fueled the adoption of solar energy on an unprecedented scale and had real impacts on the financial benefits of switching residential and commercial fuse boxes over to solar.

For example, the lifetime energy savings after installing rooftop panels can now be as high as $33,000, Forbes reported.