May 13, 2024
Mohenjo
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The last pandemic was bad, but COVID-19 is only one of many infectious diseases that emerged since the turn of this century.
Since 2000, the world has experienced 15 novel Ebola epidemics, the global spread of a 1918-like influenza strain and major outbreaks of three new and unusually deadly coronavirus infections: SARS, MERS and, of course, COVID-19. Every year, researchers discover two or three entirely new pathogens: the viruses, bacteria and microparasites that sicken and kill people.
While some of these discoveries reflect better detection methods, genetic studies confirm that most of these pathogens are indeed new to the human species. Even more troubling, these diseases are appearing at an increasing rate.
Despite the novelty of these particular infectiprimarily ons, the primary factors that led to their emergence are quite ancient. Working in the field of anthropology, I have found that these are human factors: the ways we feed ourselves, the ways we live together, and the ways we treat one another. In a forthcoming book, “Emerging Infections: Three Epidemiological Transitions from Prehistory to the Present,” my colleagues and I examine how these same elements have influenced disease dynamics for thousands of years. Twenty-first century technologies have served only to magnify ancient challenges.
Neolithic Infections
The first major wave of newly emerging infections occurred with the start of the Neolithic revolution about 12,000 years ago, when people began shifting from foraging to farming as their primary means of subsistence.
Before then, human infections tended to be mild and chronic in nature, manageable burdens of long-term parasites that people carried around from place to place. But full-time agrarian living brought the kinds of acute and virulent infections that we are familiar with today. This global shift was humanity’s first epidemiological transition.
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May 12, 2024
Mohenjo
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In the weeks since the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a bird flu outbreak in dairy cows that had gone undiagnosed for months, bystanders have wondered why it took so long to identify. Experts say there are key scientific and political reasons why the dairy industry was caught off guard by the H5N1 avian influenza virus—and that understanding those factors will be vital to controlling the disease on dairy farms and preventing an outbreak in humans.
“The dairy industry has never had to deal with something like this before,” says Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and a former dairy veterinarian. “This is probably going to be the most important outbreak in my professional career.”
After weeks of uncertainty—fueled by the unnerving revelation that the outbreak likely began last December and took months to recognize—the federal government is taking some action. The USDA has mandated testing for lactating cows that are being transported across state lines in the hopes of squashing the spread of the virus, which has so far been confirmed in 36 herds across nine states. One human case has been reported this year, but the infection was mild, and more than a month has passed with no new cases confirmed. Epidemiologists have called for more human testing to better monitor the situation, however. Meanwhile, Food and Drug Administration testing has shown that viral particles that were found in pasteurized milk were not infectious, suggesting little threat to consumers.
Authorities’ scramble to understand and control the situation is particularly concerning because scientists have long worried about the potential for an H5N1 strain to jump into humans and cause a pandemic. And bird flu has been devastating poultry farms around the world for years now. Veterinarians and epidemiologists have been on high alert since 2022, when a new strain began tearing through wild birds and even mammals, killing or forcing U.S. farmers to cull some 90 million domestic birds. How could it take months to notice the same virus was spreading in dairy cows?
One reason the outbreak went undetected for so long is that people thought it was unlikely that the virus would jump into cows. Avian influenza is, after all, most common in birds, whereas flus in general have been rare in cows. “The chances of it going from migratory birds to cows were so low,” Poulsen says. “And then it happened.”
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May 12, 2024
Mohenjo
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Men are punching random women on the streets of New York City. As usual with these kinds of diffuse and chaotic stories, there’s much that is unknown, including how often this is happening, how many people are involved, or whether it’s at all coordinated. But what we do know is already alarming. CNN reports that dozens of women have discussed being victims on social media, and formally interviewed six of them. NBC News reports there have been at least 3 arrests. CBS News reports that NYPD released images last week of a fourth man wanted for allegedly punching a woman in Union Square. Even reality TV star Bethany Frankel says she’s been victimized.
Women report being assaulted by men of different races and ages. Still, across the different stories, a couple of similarities pop out: The alleged victims are mostly young and pretty, and most of them say they were minding their own business when they were attacked. Some were on their phones or reading on tablets. Others were speaking to friends or daydreaming. Whatever they were doing, they were just living their lives, and that, it seems, is what enraged their assailants.
The alleged victims are mostly young and pretty, and most of them say they were minding their own business when they were attacked.
Whatever the scale of this problem eventually turns out to be, it’s not surprising that these stories have gone viral and captured the public’s imagination. While it rarely turns to violence, most women who spend much time walking around in public have experience with men who berate them for paying attention to something other than the man who is now, often out of nowhere, spewing invectives. In our modern era, that often manifests with men who are infuriated at women for looking at their phones. But I’m old enough to remember when I would get yelled at for reading books in public.
Whatever the excuse the angry man concocts, the impetus is always the same: The eyes of a woman are directed at someone or something that is not him, and he is indignant over it. So he will make sure she has no choice but to look at him, either by getting in her face or — in these alarming New York cases — punching her. If he cannot capture her adoring gaze, well, he will make her stare at him in fear.
These stories resonate, as well, because the nation is having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury at women for daring to have lives that are centered around something other than catering to a man’s every whim. Unleashed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, there’s an upswell of loud male entitlement shouting at us from every corner.
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People eat in a restaurant sidewalk shed on Mott Street in Little Italy in New York City. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)
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May 12, 2024
Mohenjo
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The second and third sentiments are from ‘WeAllWeGot~Family First’, they are great!
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May 11, 2024
Mohenjo
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CLIMATEWIRE | BRUSSELS — The best way to cut greenhouse gas emissions from flying is to fly less — but that’s a nonstarter for the industry and millions of passengers.
Instead, the sector is hunting for a tech fix that would allow airplanes to keep flying while polluting less — and one idea is to use hydrogen. But there are big questions over whether this is a workable solution.
Here are five challenges facing hydrogen-powered aviation.
1. Sourcing clean hydrogen won’t be easy
Hydrogen can be very clean or very dirty — it all depends on how it’s produced.
Most hydrogen on the market today is so-called gray hydrogen, made by splitting natural gas — which emits a lot of CO2. Blue hydrogen captures those greenhouse gases, but it costs more and there are worries about where to store CO2. The rarest, and most expensive, is green hydrogen, made by using renewable power to split water.
“Hydrogen planes will only be as sustainable as the energy that powers them,” said Carlos López de la Osa, aviation manager with green group Transport & Environment (T&E).
“Most hydrogen for transportation is not zero emission today. It’s not green hydrogen,” said Val Miftakhov, CEO of ZeroAvia, a British-American manufacturer that aims to deliver its first hydrogen-electric aircraft with 40 to 80 seats by 2027.
2. Hydrogen could cut aircraft range
Hydrogen is the lightest element, but it has a much lower energy density than kerosene, meaning aircraft powered by it instead of fossil fuels would actually weigh more.
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May 11, 2024
Mohenjo
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Police and federal agencies are responding to a massive breach of personal data linked to a facial recognition scheme that was implemented in bars and clubs across Australia. The incident highlights emerging privacy concerns as AI-powered facial recognition becomes more widely used everywhere from shopping malls to sporting events.
The affected company is Australia-based Outabox, which also has offices in the United States and the Philippines. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Outabox debuted a facial recognition kiosk that scans visitors and checks their temperature. The kiosks can also be used to identify problem gamblers who enrolled in a self-exclusion initiative. This week, a website called “Have I Been Outaboxed” emerged, claiming to be set up by former Outabox developers in the Philippines. The website asks visitors to enter their name to check whether their information had been included in a database of Outabox data, which the site alleges had lax internal controls and was shared in an unsecured spreadsheet. It claims to have more than 1 million records.
The incident has rankled privacy experts who have long set off alarm bells over the creep of facial recognition systems in public spaces such as clubs and casinos.
“Sadly, this is a horrible example of what can happen as a result of implementing privacy-invasive facial recognition systems,” Samantha Floreani, head of policy for Australia-based privacy and security nonprofit Digital Rights Watch, tells WIRED. “When privacy advocates warn of the risks associated with surveillance-based systems like this, data breaches are one of them.”
According to the Have I Been Outaboxed website, the data includes “facial recognition biometric, driver license [sic] scan, signature, club membership data, address, birthday, phone number, club visit timestamps, slot machine usage.” It claims Outabox exported the “entire membership data” of IGT, a supplier of gambling machines. IGT vice president of global communications Phil O’Shaughnessy tells WIRED that “the data affected by this incident has not been obtained from IGT,” and that the firm would work with Outabox and law enforcement.
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Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images
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May 10, 2024
Mohenjo
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David Austin Walsh’s new book, “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” had its origins in his experience as a college student editing a roundtable on Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” for History News Network. In several senses, Walsh’s book is the polar opposite of Goldberg’s: It’s history, not polemics; it locates actual fascists on the right, where they actually were, and — most fundamentally — it meticulously includes the sort of messy, contradictory information that Goldberg’s polemic thoroughly excluded.
For instance, legendary conservative William F. Buckley Jr. is a central presence in Walsh’s book, and it’s undeniable that Buckley tried to purge the American conservative movement of its most extreme elements. Indeed, he did so over and over again, because no clean break was ever really possible — there was simply too much common ground. Buckley overtly rejected what he called a “popular front” approach of accommodating the far right, even as he aimed for a “big tent” conservatism that implicitly welcomed it.
“Taking America Back” fits fairly comfortably within the framework of Edmund Fawcett’s “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition” (author interview here), which traces the contested history of conservative politics across four countries and more than 200 years as “one overarching battle between hardcore resisters of liberal modernity — those Fawcett calls the ‘hard right’ — and those seeking accommodation, whom he calls ‘liberal conservatives.’” Walsh deals more specifically with a purely American 20th-century slice of that history, which still sprawls across generations, illuminating the pattern of internal conflicts that today’s “never Trump” conservatives would like to pretend never happened. In fact, there’s no way to fully understand the rise of the MAGA movement, or its conquest of the Republican Party, without reckoning with the history Walsh describes.
My conversation with Walsh has been edited for clarity and length.
You write that 20th-century conservatism evolved out of a popular front with fascist and quasi-fascist elements, and that while William F. Buckley explicitly tried to reject or expel the far right, his actions and associations reveal a more complicated reality. If that’s fair, how would you characterize that more complicated reality?
I would characterize the complicated reality as one of deep intertwinedness. Buckley does explicitly reject the so-called popular-front approach with the far right in the mid-1960s. He comes to this position over time, it’s not something he starts out with in the 1950s. He comes to it less, I would say, on principle and more because the far right is — at the time, at least — an electoral loser. Barry Goldwater goes down in 1964 in large part because of his association with the far right, because the John Birch Society is providing organizational muscle behind his campaign.
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William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
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May 10, 2024
Mohenjo
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Time heals all wounds, as the saying goes. But any medical professional can tell you that the hours required for recovery after an injury can vary widely. A person’s age, lifestyle, and level of social support, for example, are all known influences on how quickly their body heals.
Their thoughts can play a remarkably powerful role as well. In a recent experiment, we tested whether expectations about the time it takes to heal can affect how long it actually takes to recover. We found that people’s perception of the passage of time influenced how quickly their wounds healed. The work is just the latest in a larger collection of evidence—documented in a new book written by one of us (Langer), The Mindful Body—that underscores the unity of mind and body, an idea with profound implications for health and well-being.
For the past 45 years, members of the Langer Lab have studied the ways in which the mind shapes the physiology of the body, or what our lab refers to as mind-body unity. The basic idea is simple: when people conceive of the mind and the body as a single entity rather than separable units, they can see how the mind has enormous control over health and well-being. Wherever we put our mind, so too will be our body.
The first test of this concept was the counterclockwise experiment, which one of us (Langer) designed and ran in 1979. In that study, elderly men lived in a retreat that was retrofitted to appear as if it had existed 20 years earlier and had vintage furniture, appliances, and magazines. We asked the men to live as their younger self. They discussed past events in the present tense as if they were currently unfolding. The results were astonishing. Without any medical intervention, their hearing, vision, memory, and strength improved. They also were perceived to look noticeably younger in photographs by the end of the week.
Since that time, the Langer Lab has found further confirmation of mind-body unity. We have discovered that expecting fatigue can cause people to feel more tired, and that thinking you will catch a cold is associated with an increased likelihood of doing so. In another study, people who anticipated certain benefits such as weight loss from daily exercise did see those benefits, even as other people doing the same activities without those expectations saw no such changes.
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May 9, 2024
Mohenjo
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Nearly 40 percent of U.S. homes have gas stoves, which spew a host of compounds that are harmful to breathe, such as carbon monoxide, particulate matter, benzene, and high quantities of nitrogen dioxide.
Decades of well-established research have linked nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, to respiratory conditions such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which especially affect children and older adults. This harmful link is so well established that some states have begun banning gas appliances in new construction. And now a new study has shown in stark detail just how long and far this gas spreads and lingers in a home. By sampling homes across the U.S., the researchers found that in many, levels of exposure to NO2 can soar above the World Health Organization’s one-hour exposure limit for multiple hours—even in the bedroom that is farthest from the kitchen.
“The concentrations [of NO2] we measured from stoves led to dangerous levels down the hall in bedrooms … and they stayed elevated for hours at a time. That was the biggest surprise for me,” says Rob Jackson, a sustainability researcher at Stanford University and senior author of the study, which was published on May 3 in Science Advances.
The researchers collected real-world data on NO2 concentrations before, during, and for several hours after the use of gas and propane stoves in houses and apartments in California, Colorado, Texas, New York State, and Washington, D.C. In six homes, they tested the levels of NO2 in the bedroom farthest from the kitchen for a basic “bread baking” scenario: they set the gas or propane oven to 475 degrees Fahrenheit (245 degrees Celsius) and left it on for an hour and a half. The team continued sampling the air for up to six hours after the oven was turned off.
In all six homes, the NO2 concentration in the bedroom quickly exceeded the WHO’s chronic exposure guideline of about five parts per billion by volume. And in three of the bedrooms, the levels soared even above the Environmental Protection Agency’s and the WHO’s respective one-hour exposure guidelines, which both set the limit at about 100 parts per billion by volume. (The EPA’s guidelines are intended for outdoor air exposure because the agency does not regulate indoor air pollution.)
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May 9, 2024
Mohenjo
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I first got started with online focus groups back in 2020. A friend posted an Instagram story about how research participants were needed for a study.
I had no idea what it was, but I clicked on the link and filled out the survey.
These days I make between $2,000 and $3,000 each month participating in focus groups. Over the past six months, I’ve made an average of $2,845 a month. I then created my own business, teaching others how to make money from focus groups.
I wondered why I would be paid to share my opinion
About two days after I filled out that initial survey in 2020, I got a call from a recruiter. She confirmed my answers and told me a little more about what the research study was. It was going to be about social media, and I would be paid $175 for spending 90 minutes on a Zoom call.
It was me, four other participants, and a moderator. The conversation just flew by, and it honestly felt like just a normal chat geared toward social media.
Two weeks later, I got a check in the mail for $175, and I was like, “Okay, so this was legit!” While it didn’t necessarily sound like a scam, I wondered how and why I would get paid to do something as fun as sharing my opinion on a specific topic.
I quit my retail job in search of more flexibility
At the time, I was working as a store manager. I had a decent job with benefits and stability, but the work had started to take a toll on my mental health, and I wanted more flexibility and freedom.
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Filipe
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