If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
MIT researchers make hydrogen fuel from soda cans, seawater, caffeine (Kapil Kajal, 7/25/24, Interesting Engineering)
MIT engineers have discovered that when pure aluminum from soda cans is exposed to seawater, it creates bubbles and naturally generates hydrogen.
This type of gas can be used to power an engine or fuel cell without producing carbon emissions.
U.S. Air Force successfully completes test flights of all-electric aircraft: ‘It’s going to make things faster and simpler’ (Stephen Proctor, August 20, 2024, The Cool Down)
The series of test flights evaluated the plane’s performance in real-world scenarios like resupply, cargo delivery, and personnel transport, including during combat. The plane can carry up to five people or 500 pounds of cargo, has a range of 288 miles, and can be recharged in less than an hour.
Scientists make incredible breakthrough with new aircraft technology (Leslie Sattler, August 19, 2024, The Cool Down)
Exciting news for the future of air travel: A groundbreaking study from Swedish scientists suggests that most flights within a 750-mile radius could be powered by hydrogen as soon as 2045.
Hard-to-treat traumas and painful memories may be treatable with EMDR – a trauma therapist explains why it is gaining popularity (Laurel Niep, 8/16/24, The Conversation)
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing was developed in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro after she discovered that moving her eyes from her left foot to her right as she walked – in other words, tracking her feet with each step – resulted in lower levels of negative emotions connected with difficult memories, both from the more recent frustrations of the day and deeper events from her past.Conventional treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, rely on extensive verbal processing to address a client’s symptoms and struggles. Such therapy may take months or even years.
Depending on the trauma, EMDR can take months or years too – but generally, it resolves issues much more quickly and effectively. It is effective for both adults and children, and can be done remotely.
Any distracxtion works.
Are We Thinking Ourselves Sick? (River Page, August 7, 2024, Free Press)
This problem was only made worse in 1980 with the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a sort of psychiatrists’ bible. Before then, psychiatrists had only a paragraph of descriptions of mental illnesses to rely on. In the DSM-III, more detailed criteria were listed. Dr. Edward Shorter, who studies the history of medicine, and appears in the film, says the thinking went something like this: “Well, we’re going to have a set of operational criteria in order to qualify, for example, depression. There are plenty of symptoms you could have. If you can check five boxes and you’ve had these symptoms for two weeks, then you qualify for the diagnosis of depression.”
“This sounds like science,” Shorter says. “In fact, it’s not really.”
Then, in the early ’90s, the DSM-IV updated its autism criteria, allowing, for the first time, individuals without significant language or intellectual incapacities to be diagnosed. Additionally, it lowered the number of traits required for a diagnosis from eight to six.
Last year, Dr. Allen Frances, a world-renowned-psychiatrist who helped loosen the definition of autism for the DSM-IV, told the New York Post he regretted his decision: “More clinicians began labeling both normal diversity and a variety of other psychological problems as autistic.” Dr. Frances estimated that his changes would triple the rate of autism. According to the CDC, it has more than quadrupled since 2000.
It drives business.
What worked to stop the spread of COVID-19? (Kevin Drim, 8/07/24, Jabberworking)
A recent paper by Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia quantifies the value of various efforts to combat COVID-19 in the US. The headline result is a composite score for different states based on what kinds of restrictions they imposed, but I found the detailed national breakdown more interesting. Here are his estimates of how various interventions affected death rates:
Stricter Covid mask rules could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives, new study finds
Restrictions in Northeastern states likely ‘saved many lives’ say researchers (Josh Marcus, 7/28/24, The Independent)
The US could have avoided almost 250,000 Covid-19 deaths if every state had adopted stricter mask and vaccine requirements seen in the Northeast during the height of the pandemic, according to a new study.Researchers say that the country, which saw more than 1.1 million Covid deaths, could have been spared an estimated 118,000 to 248,000 more lives.
The “Deaths of Despair” narrative is wrong: It’s time to be a little ruder about this (Matthew Yglesias, Oct 10, 2023, Slow Boring)
Over the past few years, Anne Case and Angus Deaton have unleashed upon the world a powerful meme that seems to link together America’s troublingly bad life expectancy outcomes with a number of salient social and political trends like the unexpected rise of Donald Trump.
Their “deaths of despair” narrative linking declining life expectancy to populist-right politics and to profound social and economic decay has proven to be extremely powerful. But their analysis suffers from fundamental statistical flaws that critics have been pointing out for years and that Case and Deaton just keep blustering through as if the objections don’t matter. Beyond that, they are operating within the confines of a construct — “despair” — that has little evidentiary basis. The rise in deaths of despair turns out to overwhelmingly be a rise in opioid overdoses. This increase is not happening in European countries that have not only been buffeted by the same broad economic trends as the United States, but are also seeing the rise of right-populist backlash politics. […]
Novosad, Rafkin, and Asher have provided a compelling analysis of a very concentrated problem of worsening health outcomes for the worst-off Americans. Case and Deaton, by contrast, have delivered a very misleading portrait of worsening health outcomes for the majority of Americans that (because they mistakenly think it’s a majority) they attribute to broad economic forces that exist internationally but which for some reason only cause “despair” in the United States. And then it gets worse, because as Matthews argues (citing Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights Project data), the growing disparities are located in specific parts of the country:
While it’s true that rich people in America live significantly longer than poor people, that’s much less true in New York City. It’s not true in California as a whole. Heavily urban areas with high education levels see a modest relationship between income and death rates. More-rural, less-educated areas, by contrast, see a very strong relationship between the two.
Areas with smaller mortality gaps tend to be places, the researchers find, with lower rates of smoking and higher rates of exercise, which makes sense when you consider that the variation in death rates between cities is driven not by factors like car crashes or suicide but conditions like heart disease and cancer, which are themselves driven in part by lifestyle conditions. Local unemployment rates and other indicators of the health of the local labor market did not seem to be associated with longevity, nor did income inequality. These aren’t firmly causal findings, to be clear, but they might be suggestive of potential causes to investigate.
Conveniently, there’s a new piece out in the Washington Post by Lauren Weber, Dan Diamond, and Dan Keating that I think explains this geographic variation very well: Places that adopt nanny state policies to improve public health get better public health.
Who’s Afraid of the Placebo Effect?: New research into the healing power of placebos could upend our understanding of medicine, if the medical industry is willing to listen (Josh Sims, July 26, 2024, Inside Hook)
The placebo effect involves the release of feel-good neurotransmitters, plus increased activity in parts of the brain related to mood and emotions. It appears to be the product of our positive expectations and some Pavlovian conditioning.
Looking for Long Covid: A Clash of Definition and Study Design (SARA TALPOS, 07.25.2024, UnDark)
Few experts dispute that long Covid can be debilitating, or that it warrants careful study. But in interviews with Undark, a number of experts said that it is misleading to frame long Covid as an increasing threat. The best data, they say, suggest that most people recover from the disorder and that long Covid rates will decline as people develop immunity. (A July study by the VA St. Louis team also found that rates of long Covid declined over the course of the pandemic.)
The work produced by Al-Aly and his colleagues, which relies on electronic health records of U.S. veterans, is also a key point of contention. In interviews, several experts questioned the VA St. Louis’ methods. At the request of Undark, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch reviewed the group’s first long Covid study and raised a range of concerns. Many of them related to the handling of negative controls, a statistical technique that, when deployed properly, can help researchers detect problems in the analysis of their dataset. Some of the negative controls “are simply misused in the paper,” Lipsitch wrote in an email to Undark.Additionally, some experts suggested that the VA St. Louis studies are not truly measuring long Covid. “They’re not studying post-viral illness, in my opinion, in these VA studies,” said Anders Hviid, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Department of Epidemiology Research at the Statens Serum Institut. Post-viral syndromes, said Hviid, are relatively rare and are usually characterized by fatigue and cognitive difficulties. Al-Aly’s research, meanwhile, looks at what Hviid described as a gamut of outcomes: dementia, thromboembolisms, psychiatric diseases, kidney diseases — “everything under the sun,” he said.
At best, the studies are detecting health problems known to occur when people with poor baseline health experience a severe infection of any kind, said Hviid. At worst, the findings simply reflect bias in the study design, and are picking up on symptoms that are not caused by Covid-19 at all. “It’s a disappointment that not more U.S. scientists have spoken up about this,” said Hviid.
Heck, they still pretend fibromyalgia is a thing.