Democratic star Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett goes viral with a fiery speech about why every patriotic American must vote for Kamala Harris this election — and what’s really at stake.
This is how it’s done…
“This is a very real thing. This isn’t about games for me. It’s not about games for the Harris-Walz ticket. We are literally trying to save lives because we’re losing them,” Crockett said during an appearance on MSNBC.
“Whether we’re talking about the storms that are caused because we have people that want to pretend as if climate change isn’t real,” she continued. “They don’t want to make the investments and make sure that we can protect our environment.”
“Or whether we’re talking about women that have been degraded to second rate citizens in this country, that will not have an opportunity to number one determine whether or not they can live,” she said.
“Number two, determine whether or not they bring forth a family when they can afford one,” she continued. “Or determine that when they have been victimized, whether or not the government will then seek to victimize them again.”
“This isn’t a game for us because we know what lies on the other side,” she went on. “We know that we weren’t necessarily born with $400 million that was given to use and therefore we may end up in a situation where even if there’s a national abortion ban, there’s people on Trump’s side that can always go somewhere else. That’s not a reality for all of us, and honestly, we shouldn’t have to leave our states.”
“We should have elected officials that will take care of us because that is what they have promised to do,” added Crockett. “Once you swear that oath, you are supposed to protect and defend against all enemies. And right now it definitely feels as if we have a lot of people that are working against us and not for us.”
We couldn’t agree more. If you care about the future of this country, you have a moral duty to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz! Together, we can defeat MAGA fascism.
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! And happy autumn. I hope you’re enjoying some lovely crisp sweater weather wherever you are right now. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup. But before we get into some of the science stories you might have missed last week, we’ve actually got a special little segment to share with you —so let’s just dive right in.
The SciAm multimedia team spent part of last week at the General Assembly of the United Nations, we were hanging out to hear updates on the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. I got to chat with the U.N.’s undersecretary-general for global communications Melissa Fleming, who shared her thoughts on how misinformation and distrust in science are impacting global well-being—plus, what we can do about it. Here’s our conversation:
Feltman: Melissa, thanks so much for taking the time to chat.
Melissa Fleming: It’s great to be with you.
Feltman: What’s your sense of how public trust of science has changed in recent years?
Melissa Fleming: Well, I think with the rise of social media and the potential for anyone to claim to know science or to communicate science, it’s really in trouble because science can be uncomfortable, especially when it relates to a global pandemic and youre having to give guidelines to people who don’t want to receive it or around climate, for example, and actions that people are afraid to take. So it’s easier for certain actors to say #climatescam and climate change isn’t real than it is for a scientist to say, “Yes, manmade climate change is real.”
The challenge for scientists is going to be, now, not just how do we navigate in this toxic information ecosystem where we have an infodemic of good information mixed with bad information, and people finding it impossible to navigate, and how do we communicate more effectively as scientists?
Feltman: And so, what is the U.N. doing? What tactics have you found success with?
Fleming: Well, we study the disinformation trends and we design our communications not to debunk those trends or to fact check them because if they’re already out there, nobody really pays attention to your correction. What we can do is look at where that information is traveling and to also be in those spaces as an alternative source of information.
And then we also work with influencers, similar to what disinformation actors do. And there are so many out there who wanted to help be forces for spreading good information, information you can trust, information that will help inform people, get them to care about the issues that really matter to them, and also to get them to act.
So we have people, you know, communicating in languages that people speak, all over the world, trying to help us just deliver information that we think is really needed.
Feltman: Yeah, and what are the ways that misinformation and distrust in science is impacting people in their everyday lives?
Fleming: Well, I mean, we saw this very clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic, but I mean, I remember I had breast cancer and one of the first things I did was go online. And one of the first websites I encountered in my search was one called The Truth About Cancer. It had a million followers in this group on Facebook, and it was all over the Internet.
By age 11, Kassondra Ola had been prescribed the following psychiatric medications at one point or another: Zoloft, Concerta, Celexa, Lexapro, risperidone, Neurontin, Depakote, Seroquel, lithium, Topamax, Trileptal, Abilify, and Adderall. It’s a mix of antidepressants, antipsychotics, a stimulant, and a few things for seizures.
Growing up in northern Virginia, Ola was a skinny and anxious preteen. She got good grades, but she was withdrawn and easily distracted. She ate little; the textures of some foods did not seem right. Internally, she was processing the rift between her parents that would eventually lead to their divorce, as well as the aftermath of a childhood trauma. Her parents got her into mental health treatment, and when she was 10, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder.
The meds he prescribed made her sleepy and caused tremors and body pains. They brought on a mental haze, and the frustration of struggling against it led to more moodiness and outbursts, Ola recalls. She once yelled at a teacher that she was in so much pain she didn’t want to live anymore.
“The medications seemed to induce more behavioral problems than they helped,” said Ola. “I was always in trouble for something, and they were always adjusting the meds or sticking me in the psychiatric unit for something.” She felt as if she had little self-esteem or even a sense of identity.
By age 20, Ola was living with her grandmother and muddling through community college classes. At church, she met someone who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a condition that today would be considered autism spectrum disorder. He noted that, like him, she had trouble socializing and experienced sensory aversions. They even had the same slow, precise speech pattern.
After a neuropsychological test, Ola was diagnosed with Asperger’s too. Her signs of maladjustment as a preteen? Maybe they were how a neuroatypical kid dealt with stress.
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Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Jessica Ticozzelli/Pexels.
Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by the Cincinnati Reds, the team with which he spent most of his career. No cause was given.
For millions of baseball fans, Rose will be known mainly for a number, 4,256, his total of hits, the most for any player in the history of the game. But he was a deeply compromised champion.
Few sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.
Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined him.
A lifelong adrenaline junkie who often operated out of sheer gall, Rose was long known to baseball officials as a fevered horse player with a network of unsavory associates and a rumored out-of-control gambling habit. During his nonpareil career as a player, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown team, he was warned repeatedly by major league officials to curtail his gambling, and in the late 1980s, Rose, then the Reds manager, was investigated by baseball to determine if any of his activity was illegal.
The report by the investigator, John Dowd, revealed that Rose had bet regularly with bookmakers on a variety of sports, and though Rose vehemently denied it, baseball included. In August 1989, he was banned from the game by the commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, and he was subsequently declared ineligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which would otherwise have been a certainty.
One of the tawdrier episodes in baseball history and one of the most public — Rose’s farewell news conference was televised nationally — it was also, for Rose, monumentally costly. Not only did he lose his livelihood; he subsequently spent several months in jail for evasion of taxes related to his gambling income as well as his baseball memorabilia sales and autograph appearances. (For Giamatti, a former president of Yale who had served as baseball commissioner for only five months, the aftermath was far worse. A heavy smoker, he died at 51 a week after announcing his decision, the stress of the Rose case possibly contributing to the heart attack that killed him.)
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Pete Rose sliding into home during a Reds game against the Giants in 1972. Credit…Bettmann/Getty Image
In June of 2021, Aaron James experienced a terrible accident while working as an electrical lineman. The 46-year-old military veteran and Arkansas resident lost much of the left side of his face—including his left eye—to severely disfiguring electrical burns that also destroyed his left arm.
Two years later, James received the first-ever partial face and whole-eye transplant, performed by surgeons at NYU Langone Health in New York City. And now, more than a year after that, James has made a strong recovery with no evidence of tissue rejection, his medical team reported in a paper published on Monday in JAMA. He still lacks any vision in the transplanted eye, but the eye itself has maintained its shape and blood flow—and there is evidence of electrical activity in the retina in response to light.
Other researchers say the findings represent a step toward successful whole-eye transplants while illustrating the challenge of regenerating the optic nerve after a major injury.
“It’s a delightful surprise that the surgery has worked so well, that the patient is so happy, that the aesthetic or cosmetic outcome has worked so well. The eyeball itself has stayed alive and is able to stay in that space and can continue to contribute to the overall success of hemifacial transplant,” says Jeffrey Goldberg, a professor, and chair of ophthalmology at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary on it that was published in the same issue of JAMA.
The lack of restored vision was not unexpected, Goldberg says, because preclinical studies in animals have shown the difficulty of regrowing an optic nerve. He notes that the surgical team’s technique of injecting the tissue surrounding the optic nerve with stem cells from James’s bone marrow has not been validated in animals and could pose a safety risk if the cells grew into a tumor. Fortunately, there is no evidence of this happening to date. Another risk was that if the donor eye’s optic nerve had regrown, it could have compromised the vision in James’s other eye because of the way input from the two eyes can interact in the brain. There is no sign of this complication either, however. This exciting first case helps lay the groundwork to push whole-eye transplant into a vision-restoring reality, Goldberg says.
Whole-eye transplants have long been a dream among doctors and scientists seeking to treat people with serious eye injuries or blindness. The first corneal transplant took place in 1905. But efforts to transplant an entire eye have been thwarted by the devilish difficulty of regrowing the optic nerve, which carries signals from the eye’s light-sensitive retina to the brain’s visual centers, where they are perceived as sight. While there had previously been limited success in efforts to regenerate the optic nerve in some animals, no one had succeeded in transplanting a whole eye into a human until now.
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Aaron James a little over a year after receiving a whole-eye and partial face transplant. Haley Ricciardi/NYU Langone Health
It’s a question that’s been reverberating around TikTok as users flood the platform with videos of themselves balancing on shaking vibration plates, bodies quivering, often in an attempt to hawk the devices as the latest cure-all.
Their efforts have certainly made waves. Online searches for vibration plates — which look like a hybrid between a griddle and a trembling surfboard — have sharply increased since April, and products on TikTok Shop have racked up tens of thousands of sales.
People use them in different ways. Some focus on standing upright while the plate shakes them; others go further and engage in various exercises like squats or pushups.
The purported health benefits of whole-body vibration range from weight loss and increasing bone density to promoting lymphatic drainage, improving circulation, and beyond.
But what does the evidence actually say?
Do vibration plates have health benefits?
“It’s not a silver bullet, but it has its certain merits,” said Dr. Jörn Rittweger, head of the division of muscle and bone metabolism at the German Aerospace Center and a professor of space physiology at the University of Cologne in Germany.
He said the calorie-burning and cardiovascular benefits are similar to “brisk walking for the same amount of time.”
It also matters how much exercise you’re already getting in. “If people don’t do anything” in terms of exercise, Rittweger said, “then the effects are moderate or even better. For the general public, if they’re exercising already, the effect is marginal or nonexistent.”
For example, Rittweger said he uses the device in the children’s rehabilitation unit to help ward off muscle atrophy in kids who can’t walk.
What about strengthening bones? Rittweger says the evidence is mixed. “The effects are probably not tremendous,” he said.
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Some users do exercises like squats while balancing on vibration plates. Others just focusing on staying upright. Claudia Chanhoi for NBC News
On some days, worries can cloud the typically upbeat mood at the Synval Santos Day Center, a modest care facility for the elderly with Alzheimer’s disease, in Volta Redonda, the old steel town 60 miles west of Rio de Janeiro. But Danielle Freire knows just what to do.
Freire, a psychologist, and the center’s coordinator, takes the anguished “patron” (no “patients” here, please!) by the arm and coaxes her (8 of 10 clients are female) to the faux “bus stop” in an arbored patio. There, they sit, chat, and reminisce about childhood and the old days, until the panic subsides, as they wait for a bus that never comes.
Years of trial and error have taught Freire’s team of 22 caretakers at Synval Santos how to manage sundown syndrome—a pique of late afternoon distress or the sudden urge to flee that is common to Alzheimer’s patients. Nimble intervention, one-on-one attention, patience, and a gentle sleight of hand is the routine for the facility’s 75 elderly patrons, who have moderate stage Alzheimer’s. (At the facility, which is part of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative’s Healthcare System Preparedness Program, patients come for the day and go home in the evenings.)
“If you show concern, stay calm, and never argue,” Freire told me on a recent visit to the Center, “the stress passes, and even those anxious to flee soon forget their troubles.”
Brazil is a country the size of a continent, with staggering inequalities, where the wealthy enjoy world-class private health services and the poor languish at understaffed public hospitals. Synval Santos Day Center, however, is a rare exception in Latin America: a publicly financed and managed social service that works.
The institution’s decade-long record of caring for those with Alzheimer’s is already a beacon for Brazil and elsewhere. Its success makes it a magnet for people from surrounding towns and even out of state.
Volta Redonda, however, is atypical. It is one of just 106 towns among Brazil’s 5,568 municipalities to provide no-fee services—workshops, exercise, and cognitive calisthenics—for the elderly. The city boasts Brazil’s first and perhaps its only public center dedicated to Alzheimer’s. It’s much the same across Latin America, where the number of people with dementia is expected to soar from 7.8 million in 2013 to more than 27 million by 2050.
Many poor nations have islands of excellence in medicine and clinical care, but only for the well-off. Just 25 percent of Brazilians have private health insurance and access to top-tier treatment. In theory, Brazil’s Universal Health System (SUS, in Portuguese) tends to the other three-quarters through a nationwide network of free neighborhood clinics and hospitals. The system proved vital during the pandemic, treating COVID emergencies and administrating vaccines to millions, even as the central government downplayed the contagion and dismissed the advice of public-health experts.
But SUS is plagued by chronic underfunding, red tape, and patchy services that vary according to the agendas of local officials and national political class.
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Patrons of the Synval Santos Day Center waiting at the “bus stop.” Image courtesy of Synval Santos Day Center
If sciatica symptoms prevent you from working, exercising, or performing daily tasks easily, try these 3 core exercises for sciatica and lower back pain.
When you have sciatica, finding core exercises to build a stronger torso can be challenging — even some of the best abs exercises are off the table. That’s why Dr. Grant Elliot of Rehab Fix suggests these three exercises to help alleviate pain instead.
I recommend performing these moves using one of the best yoga mats to ensure your back gets the most support possible. If you’ve already got the kit you need, check out each exercise below, the benefits, and how to perform them.
“Say goodbye to sciatica pain with our expert guidance on selecting the right core exercises,” says Dr. Elliott. “We understand the challenges that come with managing sciatica, and that’s why we’re here to provide you with safe and effective options.
Our video walks you through three carefully chosen core exercises that are specifically designed to bring relief to those struggling with sciatica.”
Whether you struggle with a tight lower back and want to relieve tension, build core strength, or ease the trickier symptoms of sciatica, these tailored exercises are explained in the video below step by step, allowing you to incorporate them into your routine at your own pace.
Before you get started, it’s worth briefly explaining why some core exercises aren’t working for you. Dr. Elliott says some exercises can push or pull against the sciatic nerve, which exacerbates symptoms in the lower back, glutes, or legs.
Imagine you filmed a time-lapse video of a garden over the course of a year: you’d see details of flowers transitioning from day to night and season to season. Scientists would love to watch similar transitions on a molecular scale, but the intense light used to snap microscopic pictures of plants disrupts the processes biologists want to observe—especially at night. Writing in the journal Optica, physicist Duncan Ryan of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and his colleagues recently demonstrated a tool for imaging live plant tissues while exposing them to less light than they’d receive under the stars.
A technique called ghost imaging, first demonstrated in 1995, involves splitting a light source to create two different-wavelength photons at precisely the same time and location. The photons are entangled—a quantum phenomenon that allows researchers to infer information about one particle in a pair by measuring the other. Thus, a sample can be probed at one wavelength and imaged at another.
For plants, that means researchers can image the objects with visible-light photons and get knowledge about infrared photons that interact with water-rich molecules that are important to biological functions. To do so in the new study, the team directed a stream of infrared photons at a plant in a transparent box with a photon counter behind it while aiming the visible counterparts to those particles at an empty box at the same distance with a camera behind it. Each visible photon directed at the empty box hit a pixel and was detected in its precise location—a measurement that was much more precise than an infrared camera could achieve. Meanwhile, the infrared photons traveled to the plant box, but not all of them were counted: the plant absorbed some percentage of photons at a given spot. A computer logged the position of a pixel only when a photon hit both the camera and the counter simultaneously. This way, the researchers could construct an image of a leaf of the plant using photons that never touched it, essentially forming an infrared image on a visible camera. “It’s like a game of Battleship,” Ryan says.
Ghost imaging has proved successful in capturing pictures of simpler test designs. But for low-light-transmission samples such as plants, microscopic features often differ in absorption by just a few percent. The trick lies in an extremely sensitive detector developed at LANL that tracks the arrival of each infrared photon with trillionth-of-a-second precision—letting them map leaf tissues and peer into live plants’ nighttime activities. “We saw [leaf pores called] stomata closing as the plants reacted to darkness,” Ryan says.
Ghost imaging “creates possibilities for long-timescale dynamic imaging that does not damage live samples,” says laser spectroscopy and quantum optics researcher Audrey Eshun of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who calls the new investigation a “truly innovative study.”
Observations like these make it possible to track how plants use water and sunlight throughout their circadian cycle. “We’re watching plants react to their environment,” Ryan says, “and not to our observations of them.”
Mindfulness is everywhere. Everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to the US military has extolled the virtues of this ancient spiritual practice.
But what, exactly, is mindfulness? And can it help us deal with the stress of everyday life?
Or should we be skeptical about its secularization and commercialization?
A psychiatry researcher, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and a practitioner-turned-scholar all have different answers.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness and meditation — two different but interconnected practices — are present in several ancient faiths, including Hinduism and Jainism.
But mindfulness, which dates back 2,500 years, is most commonly associated with Buddhism.
According to the Venerable Thubten Dondrub, a resident teacher at Adelaide’s Buddha House, the practice is about keeping your mind focused on an object — and that could be your breath or a “virtuous” thought.
“[It’s about asking] ‘Is my mind on the object or not? Is it fully on the object?'” he tells ABC Radio National’s Soul Search.
He says it’s also about abandoning negative behaviors and states of mind, such as anger.
Of course, this level of focus can be incredibly difficult to maintain.
Our brains naturally race at a million miles an hour, with ideas, memories, anxieties, and other thoughts constantly popping up.
But Ven Dondrub says to achieve mindfulness, you must keep reining your thoughts back in.
“If my mind keeps wandering off the topic — the object of meditation — then I’m not going to get anywhere,” he says.
“I can be sitting … so-called meditating for an hour, but most of the time my mind’s everywhere. It’s not all that beneficial.”
It should be noted that ‘mind wandering’ can also be constructive. It’s thought to play a role in generating new ideas, planning goals and helping unlock creativity.
So don’t feel deterred if you start off trying to be mindful, but your mind ends up wandering instead.
What are the benefits?
The physiological and psychological benefits of mindfulness have been studied for decades.
American professor and scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn is a leading figure in this field.
In 1979, he pioneered an eight-week program known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) for people living with chronic pain.
The course drew on Dr Kabat-Zinn’s experience with Zen meditation and yoga, and it offered a secular, rather than spiritual, version of mindfulness.
Multiple studies have shown MBSR can reduce experiences of anxiety, depression, and stress among participants, and increase levels of self-compassion.
This is something that Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar has long been fascinated by, ever since a physical therapist recommended she try yoga.
“After two or three classes, it really had a profound impact on me,” she says.
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Is mindfulness simply awareness? Or something deeper? (Pexels: Karolina Grabowska)
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American
Thomas Fuchs
James' World 2 