It’s well-established that, on the whole, Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries. For instance, an analysis from 2022 found that the average life expectancy of someone born in Switzerland or Spain in 2019 was 84 years. Meanwhile, the average US life expectancy was 78.8, lower than nearly all other high-income countries, including Canada’s, which was 82.3 years. And this was before the pandemic, which only made things worse for the US.

[…]

It is true that money buys you a longer life in the US. In fact, the link between wealth and mortality may be stronger in the US than in any other high-income country. But, if you think American wealth will put life expectancy in league with Switzerland, you’re dead wrong, according to a study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

A stark finding

The study, led by researchers at Brown University, found that the wealthiest Americans lived shorter lives than the wealthiest Europeans. In fact, wealthy Northern and Western Europeans had death rates 35 percent lower than the wealthiest Americans, whose lifespans were more like the poorest in Northern and Western Europe—which includes countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

“The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the US contributing to lower life expectancy, such as economic inequality or risk factors like stress, diet or environmental hazards,” lead study author Irene Papanicolas, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown, said in a news release.

The study looked at health and wealth data of more than 73,000 adults across the US and Europe who were 50 to 85 years old in 2010. There were more than 19,000 from the US, nearly 27,000 from Northern and Western Europe, nearly 19,000 from Eastern Europe, and nearly 9,000 from Southern Europe. For each region, participants were divided into wealth quartiles, with the first being the poorest and the fourth being the richest. The researchers then followed participants until 2022, tracking deaths.

The US had the largest gap in survival between the poorest and wealthiest quartiles compared to European countries. America’s poorest quartile also had the lowest survival rate of all groups, including the poorest quartiles in all three European regions.

While less access to health care and weaker social structures can explain the gap between the wealthy and poor in the US, it doesn’t explain the differences between the wealthy in the US and the wealthy in Europe, the researchers note. There may be other systemic factors at play that make Americans uniquely short-lived, such as diet, environment, behaviors, and cultural and social differences.

“If we want to improve health in the US, we need to better understand the underlying factors that contribute to these differences—particularly amongst similar socioeconomic groups—and why they translate to different health outcomes across nations,” Papanicolas said.

Source: Wealthy Americans have death rates on par with poor Europeans – Ars Technica

Meniscus tears are common knee injuries that have long frustrated patients and doctors due to limited repair options.A new 3D-printed hydrogel made from cow meniscus could transform how these injuries heal, according to results of a pre-clinical study published in Bioactive Materials. from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The meniscus is a complex structure that serves as a critical shock absorber in the knee. and one-size-fits-all treatments aren’t always effective. Through creating a treatment adaptable to the different needs of patients, the researchers believe they may have unlocked a better fix no matter where the injury occurs in a meniscus.

“We developed a hydrogel that can be adjusted based on the patient’s age and the stiffness requirements of the injured tissue, which is important because the meniscus has different biochemical and biomechanical properties that vary depending upon the location in the tissue,” said the study’s senior author, Su Chin Heo, PhD, an assistant professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in the McKay Orthopaedic Research Lab at Penn. “Current treatments, including graft-base methods, do not fully recreate these complex differences, leading to poor healing.”

[…]

“In our animal studies, we’ve seen the hydrogel integrate well with the surrounding tissue, potentially offering patients a more complete recovery,” said the study’s first author Se-Hwan Lee, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow in the McKay Lab. “It’s a more precise, biologically matched solution. We believe this could outperform current treatments.”

The team is now transitioning from small mammal studies to large animal models.

“Our first clinical goal will be to treat smaller, localized meniscus tears,” Heo said. “Once we have success there, I believe we could expand to more complex injuries in the meniscus.”

[…]

Source: Meniscus injuries may soon be treated by customizable hydrogel | ScienceDaily

Volkswagen is bringing back physical buttons to all its vehicles after pivoting to touch screens in recent years. In an interview with Autocar, Andreas Mindt, design chief at the German auto giant, called the decision to remove these buttons “a mistake.”

“From the ID 2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light – below the screen,” he explained, adding: “It’s not a phone: it’s a car.”

However, not the radio station selection buttons, which are a must.

This doesn’t mean touch screens are set to disappear on new Volkswagens, just that drivers will now have the option of physical controls for their most used day-to-day tasks. The new controls are set to make their debut in the ID.2all, a small, budget EV set to debut in Europe.

Last year, Hyundai promised to keep physical controls for its important functions, like volume adjustments and air conditioning, with its head of design highlighting the safety benefits of having an easy-to-use physical button.

In 2022, a study by Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare found that drivers were better able to perform simple tasks like tuning the radio to a specific channel or raising the car temperature using old-school buttons.

Source: Volkswagen to Bring Back Physical Buttons to All Vehicles | PCMag

I guess it’s a start. And only 10 or 15 years late.

[…]

In the study, published in Nature, the scientists say that discovering the mechanism will support ongoing clinical trials, and could lead to the targeted use of aspirin to prevent the spread of susceptible types of cancer, and to the development of more effective drugs to prevent cancer metastasis.

The scientists caution that, in some people, aspirin can have serious side-effects and clinical trials are underway to determine how to use it safely and effectively to prevent cancer spread, so people should consult their doctor before starting to take it.

Studies of people with cancer have previously observed that those taking daily low-dose aspirin have a reduction in the spread of some cancers, such as breast, bowel, and prostate cancers, leading to ongoing clinical trials. However, until now it wasn’t known exactly how aspirin could prevent metastases.

[…]

The researchers previously screened 810 genes in mice and found 15 that had an effect on cancer metastasis. In particular, they found that mice lacking a gene which produces a protein called ARHGEF1 had less metastasis of various primary cancers to the lungs and liver.

The researchers determined that ARHGEF1 suppresses a type of immune cell called a T cell, which can recognise and kill metastatic cancer cells.

To develop treatments to take advantage of this discovery, they needed to find a way for drugs to target it. The scientists traced signals in the cell to determine that ARHGEF1 is switched on when T cells are exposed to a clotting factor called thromboxane A2 (TXA2).

This was an unexpected revelation for the scientists, because TXA2 is already well-known and linked to how aspirin works.

TXA2 is produced by platelets — a cell in the blood stream that helps blood clot, preventing wounds from bleeding, but occasionally causing heart attacks and strokes. Aspirin reduces the production of TXA2, leading to the anti-clotting effects, which underlies its ability to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

This new research found that aspirin prevents cancers from spreading by decreasing TXA2 and releasing T cells from suppression. They used a mouse model of melanoma to show that in mice given aspirin, the frequency of metastases was reduced compared to control mice, and this was dependent on releasing T cells from suppression by TXA2.

[…]

In the future, the researchers plan to help the translation of their work into potential clinical practice by collaborating with Professor Ruth Langley, of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London, who is leading the Add-Aspirin clinical trial, to find out if aspirin can stop or delay early stage cancers from coming back. Professor Langley, who was not involved in this study, commented: “This is an important discovery. It will enable us to interpret the results of ongoing clinical trials and work out who is most likely to benefit from aspirin after a cancer diagnosis.

“In a small proportion of people, aspirin can cause serious side-effects, including bleeding or stomach ulcers. Therefore, it is important to understand which people with cancer are likely to benefit and always talk to your doctor before starting aspirin.”

[…]

Source: Scientists discover how aspirin could prevent some cancers from spreading | ScienceDaily

Rutgers Health researchers have made discoveries about brown fat that may open a new path to helping people stay physically fit as they age.

A team from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School found that mice lacking a specific gene developed an unusually potent form of brown fat tissue that expanded lifespan and increased exercise capacity by roughly 30%. The team is working on a drug that could mimic these effects in humans.

“Exercise capacity diminishes as you get older, and to have a technique that could enhance exercise performance would be very beneficial for healthful aging,” said Stephen Vatner, university professor and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute in the medical school’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study in Aging Cell. “This mouse model performs exercise better than their normal littermates.”

Unlike white fat, which stores energy, brown fat burns calories and helps regulate body temperature. This study revealed brown fat also plays a crucial role in exercise capacity by improving blood flow to muscles during physical activity.

The genetically modified mice produced unusually high amounts of active brown fat and showed about 30% better exercise performance than normal mice, both in speed and time to exhaustion.

The discovery emerged from broader research into healthy aging. The modified mice, which lack a protein called RGS14, live about 20% longer than normal mice, with females living longer than males — similar to the pattern seen in humans. Even at advanced ages, they maintain a healthier appearance, avoiding the typical signs of aging, such as loss of hair and graying that appear in normal elderly mice. Their brown adipose tissue also protects them from obesity, glucose intolerance, cardiovascular disorders, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, in addition to reduced exercise tolerance.

To test whether the brown fat — rather than some other result from the missing genes -accounted for the benefits, the researchers transplanted the brown fat to normal mice. They noted that the recipients gained similar benefits within days. Transplants using regular brown fat from normal mice, by contrast, took eight weeks to produce much milder improvements.

The discovery could eventually improve human lifespans — the total time when people enjoy good mental and physical health.

“With all the medical advances, aging and longevity have increased in humans, but unfortunately, healthful aging hasn’t,” Vatner said. “There are a lot of diseases associated with aging — obesity, diabetes, myocardial ischemia, heart failure, cancer — and what we have to do is find new drugs based on models of healthful aging.”

Rather than develop a treatment that addresses aging broadly, which poses regulatory challenges, Vatner said his team plans to test for specific benefits such as improved exercise capacity and metabolism. This approach builds on their previous success in developing a drug based on a different mouse healthful longevity model.

“We’re working with some people to develop this agent, and hopefully, in another year or so, we’ll have a drug that we can test,” Vatner said.

In the meantime, techniques such as deliberate cold exposure can increase brown fat naturally. Studies have found such efforts to produce short-term benefits that range from enhanced immune system function to improved metabolic health, but Vatner said none of the studies have run long enough to find any effect on healthful aging.

He added that most people would prefer to increase brown fat levels by taking pills rather than ice baths and is optimistic about translating the newest finding into an effective medication.

Source: Special type of fat tissue could promote healthful longevity and help maintain exercise capacity in aging | ScienceDaily

The measles outbreak in Texas has now turned deadly. Texas and federal health officials have just reported the first deaths attributed to the still-growing outbreak, which has sickened over a hundred people.

The Texas Department of State Health Services reported the tragic death of an unvaccinated “school-aged” child Wednesday morning. In the first cabinet meeting of the second Trump Administration held Wednesday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, stated that two deaths from measles have occurred so far, though he provided no further details. At least 124 cases and 18 hospitalizations have been documented so far, and even vaccine-hesitant families in the region are now rushing to get their measles shots.

The measles outbreak has been ongoing since at least mid-January. It’s largely affected people living in Mennonite communities along the rural South Plains region of western Texas, many of whom are unvaccinated against the highly contagious virus. Health officials have previously attributed the low vaccination rate in these communities mostly to a lack of interaction with the wider health care system, rather than to an explicit anti-vaccination attitude among residents.

A week ago, with only 48 cases reported, the measles outbreak had already become the largest seen in the state in nearly 30 years. Dozens more cases have been documented since, in both western Texas and a bordering county of New Mexico, and officials fear that hundreds of residents have or will ultimately become infected. The fatality reported by the Texas Department of State Health Services is the first measles death documented in the U.S. since 2015.

While this outbreak may not be tied to the anti-vaccination movement, it has convinced some people in the area to change their minds about the value of the highly effective measles vaccine—which is taken in combination with vaccines for mumps and rubella. Vaccine-hesitant parents in Lubbock County, one of the areas hit hard by the outbreak, have reportedly started to send their children to get their shots. Lubbock County is also where the child who died from measles was hospitalized.

“We’ve vaccinated multiple kids that have never been vaccinated before, some from families that didn’t believe in vaccines,” Katherine Wells, director of public health at Lubbock’s health department, told NBC News Tuesday.

In the U.S., measles has been locally eliminated for over two decades. But outbreaks can still occur, particularly in places with vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold (around 94% of a population). Worldwide, measles remains a major public health threat. In 2023, an estimated 10 million cases of measles were reported worldwide, up 20% from the previous year, as well as over 100,000 deaths that year. Measles infection is also thought to sap people’s immune memory to other common infections.

Source: Measles Outbreak in Texas Turns Deadly as Parents Scramble for Shots

Microscopic particles emitted from brake pads can be more toxic than those emitted in diesel vehicle exhaust, a study has found.

This research shows that even with a move to electric vehicles, pollution from cars may not be able to be eradicated.

The researchers found that a higher concentration of copper in some commonly used brake pads was associated with increased harmful effects on sensitive cells from people’s lungs, as a result of particles being breathed in.

Exposure to pollution generated by cars, vans and lorries has been previously been linked to an increased risk of lung and heart disease. While past attention has mainly concentrated on exhaust emissions, particles are also released into the air from tyre, road and brake pad wear.

These emissions are largely unregulated by legislation and the study found that these “non-exhaust” pollution sources are now responsible for the majority of vehicle particulate matter emissions in the UK and parts of Europe, with brake dust the main contributor among them.

Dr James Parkin, from the University of Southampton and lead author of the study published in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology, said: “People generally associate pollution from cars as being from exhaust pipes and think of electric vehicles as having zero emissions. However, electric vehicles still produce particulate matter due to friction and wear of the road, tyres, and brakes.

[…]

Results showed that of the four types of brake pads, non-asbestos organic pads were the most potent at inducing inflammation and other markers of toxicity, and were found to be more toxic to human lung cells than diesel exhaust particles. Ceramic pads were the second most toxic.

Dr Ian Mudway, senior lecturer at the school of public health at Imperial College London, said that while the research appeared sound it was premature to conclude that emissions from brake pad wear were worse than diesel exhaust.

He said: “Too many variables remain uncontrolled: brake disc types [a highly varied category], diesel exhaust particle composition, and chosen endpoints, among others. While this paper focuses on brakes, tyre wear and road dust resuspension should also be considered. This has significant policy implications, as it suggests that policies solely targeting exhaust emissions will not fully mitigate the risks of traffic-related pollutants.”

The project supervisor Prof Matthew Loxham said this was “a fair comment” but said the brake wear particles were generated on a test rig according to a standard braking cycle, different types and speed of braking, which is used for brake testing, “therefore one would expect the particles to be representative of general real world brake wear particles”.

“Although there may well be differences to the particles from each of these sources caused by changes in braking or engine parameters, I think it would be fair to hypothesise that these differences would be rather less than the differences due to the individual sources,” he said.

[…]

Source: Brake pad dust can be more toxic than exhaust emissions, study says | Automotive emissions | The Guardian

Eating from plastic takeout containers may significantly increase the chance of congestive heart failure, a new study finds, and researchers suspect they have identified why: changes to gut biome cause inflammation that damages the circulatory system.

The novel two part, peer-reviewed study from Chinese researchers adds to mounting evidence of the risks associated with eating from plastic, and builds on previous evidence linking plastic chemicals to heart disease.

The authors used a two-part approach, first looking into the frequency with which over 3,000 people in China ate from plastic takeout containers, and whether they had heart disease. They then exposed rats to plastic chemicals in water that was boiled and poured in carryout containers to extract chemicals.

Reduce, reuse, refuse: tips to cut down plastic use in your kitchen

Read more

“The data revealed that high-frequency exposure to plastics is significantly associated with an increased risk of congestive heart failure,” the authors wrote.

Plastic can contain any of about 20,000 chemicals, and many of them, such as BPA, phthalates and Pfas, present health risks. The chemicals are often found in food and food packaging, and are linked to a range of problems from cancer to reproductive harm.

While researchers in the new paper didn’t check which specific chemicals were leaching from the plastic, they noted the link between common plastic compounds and heart disease, and a previous link between gut biome and heart disease.

They put boiling water in the containers for one, five or 15 minutes because plastic chemicals leach at much higher rates when hot contents are placed in containers – the study cited previous research that found as many as 4.2m microplastic particles per sq cm can leach from plastic containers that are microwaved.

The authors then gave rats the water contaminated with leachate to drink for several months, then analyzed the gut biome and metabolites in the feces. It found notable changes.

“It indicated that ingestion of these leachates altered the intestinal microenvironment, affected gut microbiota composition, and modified gut microbiota metabolites, particularly those linked to inflammation and oxidative stress,” the authors wrote.

Thousands of toxins from food packaging found in humans – research

Read more

They then checked the rats’ heart muscle tissue and found it had been damaged. The study did not find a statistical difference in the changes and damage among rats that were exposed to water that had been in contact with plastic for one minute versus five or fifteen.

The study does not make recommendations on how consumers can protect themselves. But public health advocates say to avoid microwaving or adding hot food to plastic containers at home, or cooking anything in plastic. Replacing plastic utensils or packaging at home with glass, wood or stainless steel alternatives is also helpful.

It is more difficult to avoid plastic when getting carryout. One can bring their own glass packaging or transfer food to glass packaging when one gets home.

Source: Eating from plastic takeout containers can increase heart failure risk – study | US news | The Guardian

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark. The “ending in shit” kind. The issues are complicated, the reasons diverse, but there are a few culprits who have been making themselves extremely visible.

Alongside those holding political office, tech gragillionnaires (I had to invent a new number) like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg obviously wield huge global influence with their computers and numbers and whatnot. There has been a lot written about them and there will be more, as they continue to shape the world and win favour with Donald Trump. Big, scary, probably ruinous things lie ahead. But I’m here to discuss the smaller part. The insult to injury, the sprinkling of salt in the wound.

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

[…]

Musk’s clear desperation, even as he holds this much wealth and power in his hands, to be thought of as cool. There are endless examples of him embarrassing himself while attempting to be funny or to gain respect. Unfortunately, while you may be able to buy power, it’s impossible to buy a good personality. Watching his Nigel-no-friends attempts to be popular, his endless pathetic tweets that read as though they come from the brain of an 11-year-old poser, has made me start to believe we should bring back bullying. If yet another humiliating report in the last couple of days is to be believed, he appears even to have lost the respect of some of his gamer audience, who the report claims suspect that he may have been lying about his achievements in hardcore gaming (cursed sentence).

Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton. His physical makeover for Maga reasons, performing music because no one will stop him, trying to look cool on a surfboard – all these are extremely difficult to watch. He has been trying to suck up to Trump, going on Joe Rogan’s show to say society has been “neutered” and companies need “more masculine energy”.

Putting on what is clearly a bro disguise to join the boys’ club and sit at the big boy table – it should feel humiliating. This came as Zuckerberg rolled back hate speech and factchecking rules at Meta, in a clear swerve to the right before Trump’s inauguration. What could be more masculine and cool than selling out vulnerable communities and women to impress the alpha male?

Climate crises keep coming, genocides continue, women keep getting murdered, art is being strangled to death by AI, bigotry is on the rise, social progress is being rolled back … AND these men insist on being cringe? It’s a rotten cherry on top. This combination of evil and embarrassment is a unique horror, one that science fiction has failed to prepare us for. The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

Peterson is a big voice in men’s rights – well, a small Kermit’s voice in men’s rights – and he’s also an embarrassment. So much so that he has his own Know Your Meme page, which covers that time he reportedly retweeted an image from a fetish film, apparently believing it was a Chinese communist “sperm extraction” facility. He deleted it shortly afterwards.

Tate is facing human trafficking charges but rose to fame as a voice for young men, a misogynist in bad outfits who does really cool things like smoking cigars, wearing sunnies inside and trying to drag human rights back 100 years.

Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.

I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight. Now they are in my face daily, not only influencing the world for the worse but making me nauseous at how uncool and pathetic they are, on top of their other sins. It’s too much, I can’t take it, there needs to be a change.

It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.

Source: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw | The Guardian

Meta isn’t stopping at moderation changes. According to both Axios and The New York Times, the company is also pulling the plug on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. That includes removing diversity hiring goals, eliminating the chief diversity officer position and no longer prioritizing minority-owned businesses as vendors, per The Times‘ reporting.

When asked to comment on ending DEI initiatives, Meta confirmed the reporting was accurate.

Internally, the company is apparently pinning the decision on a shifting “legal and policy landscape,” according to a memo to employees Axios acquired.

“The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s VP of Human Resources says in the memo. “The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

The current Supreme Court is not exactly friendly towards systemic attempts to address issues of race, gender and sexuality, but in the context of Meta’s other recent changes, it seems like there’s more going on than the company being afraid of a possible lawsuit.

At the same time that Mark Zuckerberg was announcing that Meta was abandoning third-party fact checking and changing what kind of speech it allows on its platform, 404 Media reports that the company removed the Trans and Non-binary themes from Messenger, and posts it made announcing them. The company also added Trump supporter and UFC CEO Dana White to its board this week, a confirmation of Zuckerberg’s continuing UFC fandom but also a signal that it’s eager to listen to conservative voices. It all seems to add up to less of a reaction to the current climate and more like the way people in charge want to be doing business going forward.

Source: Meta’s right-wing reinvention also includes an end to DEI programs and trans Messenger themes

Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with X-style “community notes” where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users.

In a video posted alongside a blog post by the company on Tuesday, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said third-party moderators were “too politically biased” and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression”.

The move comes as Zuckerberg and other tech executives seek to improve relations with US President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office later this month.

Trump and his Republican allies have criticised Meta for its fact-checking policy, calling it censorship of right-wing voices.

Speaking after the changes were announced, Trump told a news conference he was impressed by Zuckerberg’s decision and that Meta had “come a long way”.

Asked whether Zuckerberg was “directly responding” to threats Trump had made to him in the past, the incoming US president responded: “Probably”.

[…]

Source: Meta to replace ‘biased’ fact-checkers with moderation by users

So apart from donating money to the Oligarchy, now there will be a kind of “free speech” where Trump amigo’s and nutjobs can cry all they like whilst silencing actual intelligence. I wonder how fast people will leave FB for Bluesky.

[…] In 2022, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows.

“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Social media users, if they don’t know the word, will viscerally understand the concept, the way trolls and extremists and bullshitters and the criminally vacuous have overtaken the platforms.

[…]

Doctorow wrote that this decay was a three-stage process.

“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves,” he wrote.

[…]

Source: ‘What many of us feel’: why ‘enshittification’ is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year | Language | The Guardian

Following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say, we’re pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’.

Our language experts created a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape the past year. After two weeks of public voting and widespread conversation, our experts came together to consider the public’s input, voting results, and our language data, before declaring ‘brain rot’ as the definitive Word of the Year for 2024.

[…]

‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.

Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.

The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

The term has taken on new significance in the digital age, especially over the past 12 months. Initially gaining traction on social media platform—particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities—’brain rot’ is now seeing more widespread use, such as in mainstream journalism, amidst societal concerns about the negative impact of overconsuming online content.

[…]

Find out more about our Word of the Year shortlist for 2024

Source: ‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024

The oxford list contained brain rot, demure, dynamic pricing, lore, romantasy and slop. No ideas how they got to this list, maybe they didn’t want anything with a swear word in it? Maybe they were afraid of offending anyone? Well, it definitely shows the enshittification of the Oxford word list.

Education should promote deep inquiry and individual autonomy, but often, it has been used as a vehicle for indoctrination. That’s what Agustina S. Paglayan, a UC San Diego assistant professor of political science in the School of Social Sciences and the School of Global Policy and Strategy, argues in her new book, “Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education.”

Paglayan uses evidence from both the past and the present to argue that schools around the world are failing to cultivate critical thinking skills in students—and that these institutions are actually designed to promote conformity. The book has already been praised by 2024 Nobel Laureate James Robinson as “path-breaking and iconoclastic,” and Paglayan’s perspective promises to open new debates in politics and education.

[…]

Primary education was created well before the arrival of democracy, sometimes under oligarchic or absolutist regimes. That made me doubt the conventional wisdom that democracy was the main driver behind the expansion of primary education.

[…]

the majority of children in most countries gained access to primary schooling long before democracy took root. This is true not only for countries like China or Russia, but also for most Western countries.

[…]

Mass education was really crafted as a clever system to instill obedience to the state and its laws. Schools used rewards and punishments to enforce rules, moral education dominated the curriculum and even basic reading and writing exercises taught compliance, like when students were asked to spell words like “duty” and “order.”

School routines—following schedules, marching in lines, asking permission—all reinforced discipline. The entire system, from teacher training to school inspections, aimed to create citizens who wouldn’t question authority or disrupt the status quo.

Governments saw schools as essential to maintaining internal security, viewing primary education less as a means to reduce poverty or promote industrialization than as a way to prevent social disorder.

The timing of when primary education expanded is revealing: It often followed episodes of mass violence or rebellion. Prussia created its public primary education system after peasant revolts, Massachusetts passed its first education law after Shays’ Rebellion in the late 1780s, and Colombia accelerated education access after La Violencia, which lasted from 1948 to 1958.

In each case, internal threats heightened elites’ anxieties about mass violence and the breakdown of social order, intensifying their fear of the masses and driving them to support mass education to transform “unruly” and “savage” children into compliant, law-abiding citizens

[…]

The anti-critical race theory curriculum reforms and textbook bans of the last four years and Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he’ll promote “patriotic education” and prohibit “radicalized” ideas from entering the classroom—while these may sound unprecedented—are no anomaly. They fit the cross-national pattern I uncover in the book. For the last 200 years, politicians in Western societies have become especially interested in teaching children that the status quo is okay following episodes of mass uprising against existing institutions.

This is precisely what has happened in the U.S. The Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 made Republican politicians especially anxious about institutional reform. Then-President Trump responded by setting up the 1776 Commission to strengthen patriotic education and to prevent children’s exposure to the concept of institutionalized racism. Republican state legislators and governors followed suit with curriculum reforms in red states, and the president-elect has made it clear he intends to extend these efforts to blue states too.

A key lesson from my book is that curriculum reforms tend to stick around for a very long time, outlasting the government that adopted them. It’s important for people to be aware of this fact. If you care about the content of education, now is the time to become involved in shaping the curriculum.

[…]

Roughly a third of children remain unable to read a simple sentence even after four years of schooling. This deficit of skills disproportionately affects low-income students. It exists in both developing and developed countries, and the problem has been recognized by numerous international organizations.

In the U.S., for example, children from high-income families enter kindergarten with much stronger literacy skills than low-income children, and K-12 schools fail to close that gap. I argue that these problems are rooted in the very origins of modern education systems, which were not designed to promote skills or equity.

[…]

For public schools to live up to their promise, education systems need to be deeply transformed. The systems we have today were inherited from a time when promoting compliance was the goal, a time when critical thinking was considered dangerous. In the 21st century, critical thinking skills are essential to safeguard liberal democracy, to get a good job and to remain internationally competitive.

The task ahead is not about fine-tuning the specific subjects taught. The challenge is to reimagine K-12 public schools as spaces that genuinely foster critical inquiry and creative, independent thought.

[…]

Source: Q&A: Mass education was designed to quash critical thinking, argues researcher

Tiny fragments of microplastics are making their way deep inside our bodies in concerning quantities, significantly through our food and drink.

Scientists have recently found a simple and effective means of removing them from water.

[…]

In some cases, up to 90 percent of the NMPs were removed by the boiling and filtering process, though the effectiveness varied based on the type of water.

Of course the big benefit is that most people can do it using what they already have in their kitchen.

“This simple boiling water strategy can ‘decontaminate’ NMPs from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human intake of NMPs through water consumption,” write biomedical engineer Zimin Yu from Guangzhou Medical University and colleagues.

A greater concentration of NMPs was removed from samples of hard tap water, which naturally forms a build-up of limescale (or calcium carbonate) as it is heated.

Commonly seen inside kitchen kettles, the chalky substance forms on the plastic’s surface as changes in temperature force the calcium carbonate out of solution, effectively trapping the plastic fragments in a crust.

[…]

Even in soft water, where less calcium carbonate is dissolved, roughly a quarter of the NMPs were snagged from the water.

[…]

The team behind this latest study wants to see more research into how boiled water could keep artificial materials out of our bodies – and perhaps counter some of the alarming effects of microplastics that are emerging.

[…]

Source: There’s a Surprisingly Easy Way to Remove Microplastics From Drinking Water

“Habits play a central role in our daily lives, from making that first cup of coffee in the morning, to the route we take to work, and the routine we follow to prepare for bed. Our research reveals why these automatic behaviours are so powerful — and how we can harness our brain’s mechanisms to change them. We bring together decades of research from laboratory studies as well as research from real-world settings to get a picture of how habits work in the human brain.”

Our habits are shaped by two brain systems — one that triggers automatic responses to familiar cues and another that enables goal-directed control. So for example, scrolling through social media when you are bored is the result of automatic response system, and putting your phone away to focus on work is enabled by the goal-directed control brain system.

It is precisely the imbalance between these two brain systems that is key. The research found that such imbalance can lead to everyday action slips such as inadvertently entering an old password instead of the current one. In more extreme cases, Professor Gillan’s research has shown that it can even contribute to compulsive behaviours seen in conditions such as obsessive compulsivedisorder, substance use disorders, and eating disorders.

Habits happen when automatic responses outweigh our ability to consciously control them. Good and bad habits are two sides of the same coin — both arise when automatic responses overpower goal-directed control. By understanding this dynamic, we can start to use it to our own advantage, to both make and break habits.

The new framework describes several factors that can influence the balance between automatic responses and goal-directed control:

• Repetition and reinforcement are essential to making our habits stick. Repeating a behaviour builds strong associations between environmental cues and responses, while rewarding the behaviour makes it more likely to be repeated. In leveraging the same mechanism to break habits, we can replace old behaviours with new ones to create competing automatic responses.
• The environment also plays a key role in habit change. Adjusting your surroundings can help; making desired behaviours easier to access encourages good habits, while removing cues that trigger unwanted behaviour disrupts bad habits.
• Knowing how to engage your own goal-directed system can help strengthen and weaken habits. Disengaging from effortful control, such as listening to a podcast while exercising, accelerates habit formation. However, stress, time pressure, and fatigue can trigger a return to old patterns, so staying mindful and intentional is key when trying to break them.

Dr Buabang explains, “Our research provides a new ‘playbook’ for behaviour change by connecting brain science with practical, real-world applications. We include effective strategies like implementation intentions, so-called, if-then plans (“if situation X occurs, then I will do Y”), and also integrate clinical interventions such as exposure therapy, habit reversal therapy, contingency management, and brain stimulation. It is important that our framework not only captures existing interventions but also provides targets for the development of new ones.”

This research also opens new possibilities for personalising treatments based on how different people form and break habits, making interventions more effective.

Source: Researchers discover new cognitive blueprint for making and breaking habits | ScienceDaily

Formula 1 drivers have urged the sport’s governing body to treat them like adults after Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc were punished for swearing.

The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (GPDA) has also criticised FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem for his “tone and language” when addressing the topic.

An open letter from the GPDA said: “There is a difference between swearing intended to insult others and more casual swearing, such as you might use to describe bad weather, or indeed an inanimate object such as an F1 car, or a driving situation.

“We urge the FIA president to consider his own tone and language when talking to our member drivers, or indeed about them, whether in a public forum or otherwise.

“Further, our members are adults. They do not need to be given instructions by the media about matters as trivial as the wearing of jewellery or underpants.”

[…]

Source: Formula 1 drivers ask FIA to treat them like adults after swearing punishments – BBC Sport

Formula 1 has seen a crackdown on explicit language—the latest in a string of regulations enforced by the FIA in recent seasons. From restrictions on jewelry to mandates on underwear, F1’s governing body, the FIA, has implemented rules that some drivers feel have strayed too far into “trivial” territory.

In the wake of penalties imposed on drivers like Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc for swearing, drivers are openly questioning the FIA’s governance, urging the organization to treat them as professionals and adults. They’re also calling for greater transparency, asking pointedly, “How are the FIA’s financial fines allocated and where are the funds spent?”

[…]

At the Singapore Grand Prix press conference, Max Verstappen used a swear word to bluntly describe what the car felt like, his frustrations deep. Within a day, the FIA summoned him, citing a violation of the International Sporting Code, ultimately imposing a community service penalty.

[…]

Even Lewis Hamilton weighed in, saying Verstappen should refuse the community service requirement because his penalty was too harsh. “I think it’s a bit of a joke, to be honest,” said Hamilton. “This is the pinnacle of the sport. Mistakes are made…I certainly [wouldn’t] be doing it and I hope Max doesn’t do it,” said the Briton.

[…]

Most recently, Charles Leclerc also found himself in hot water after he swore during a press conference post-Mexican Grand Prix. The Monegasque apologized immediately after so was let off with a fine of €10,000, half of which will be suspended for a year and no community service.

[…]

Perhaps the move for stricter decorum in Formula 1 also has to do with wider broadcast decency standards. With Formula 1’s recent reportedly $90 million per year broadcast deal with ESPN, the sport is increasingly aligning with the United States’ strict media standards, where explicit language is heavily monitored—a move indicating that the sport is trying to align with American market demands and more conservative media norms.

[…]

Source: F1 Drivers Draw A Line: What’s Behind The FIA’s Swearing Crackdown?

Remember, the drivers voices are not broadcast real time and the swearing is usually bleeped out (which is disappointing as well)

[…] RSV vaccination provided approximately 80 percent protection against severe disease and hospitalization, Intensive Care Unit admission and death due to a respiratory infection as well as similar protection against less severe disease in adults who visited an emergency department but did not require hospitalization, ages 60 and older. Of this population, those ages 75 and older — were at highest risk of severe disease and were the most likely to be hospitalized.

[…]

In the U.S., respiratory disease season typically commences in late September or early October and continues through March or early April.

RSV affects the nose, throat and lungs, causing substantial illness and death among older adults during these seasonal epidemics. In years prior to the availability of an RSV vaccine, an estimated 60,000 to 160,000 RSV-associated hospitalizations and 6,000 to 10,000 RSV-associated deaths occurred annually among U.S. adults aged 65 years and older, according to the CDC.

[…]

Dr. Dixon added “Studies like this one are critical to understanding the effects of prevention techniques like vaccination. The annual cost of RSV hospitalization for adults in the U.S. is estimated to be between $1.2 and $5 billion. Preventing up to 80 percent of hospitalizations could result in major savings for consumers and the health system.”

[…]

Source: Big data, real world, multi-state study finds RSV vaccine highly effective in protecting older adults against severe disease, hospitalization and death | ScienceDaily