Is a dog more similar to a chicken or an eagle? Is a penguin noisy? Is a whale friendly?

Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, say these absurd-sounding questions might help us better understand what’s at the heart of some of society’s most vexing arguments.

Research published online Thursday in the journal Open Mind shows that our concepts about and associations with even the most basic words vary widely. At the same time, people tend to significantly overestimate how many others hold the same conceptual beliefs — the mental groupings we create as shortcuts for understanding similar objects, words or events.

It’s a mismatch that researchers say gets at the heart of the most heated debates, from the courtroom to the dinner table.

“The results offer an explanation for why people talk past each other,” said Celeste Kidd, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the study’s principal investigator. “When people are disagreeing, it may not always be about what they think it is. It could be stemming from something as simple as their concepts not being aligned.”

Simple questions like, “What do you mean?” can go a long way in preventing a dispute from going off the rails, Kidd said. In other words, she said, “Just hash it out.”

[…]

But measuring just how much those concepts vary is a long-standing mystery.

To help understand it a bit better, Kidd’s team recruited more than 2,700 participants for a two-phase project. Participants in the first phase were divided in half and asked to make similarity judgements about whether one animal — a finch, for example — was more similar to one of two other animals, like a whale or a penguin. The other half were asked to make similarity judgments about U.S. politicians, including George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. The researchers chose those two categories because people are more likely to view common animals similarly; they’d have more shared concepts. Politicians, on the other hand, might generate more variability, since people have distinct political beliefs.

But they found significant variability in how people conceptualized even basic animals.

Take penguins. The probability that two people selected at random will share the same concept about penguins is around 12%, Kidd said. That’s because people are disagreeing about whether penguins are heavy, presumably because they haven’t lifted a penguin.

“If people’s concepts are totally aligned, then all of those similarity judgments should be the same,” Kidd said. “If there’s variability in those judgments, that tells us that there’s something compositionally that’s different.”

Researchers also asked participants to guess what percentage of people would agree with their individual responses. Participants tended to believe — often incorrectly — that roughly two-thirds of the population would agree with them. In some examples, participants believed they were in the majority, even when essentially nobody else agreed with them.

It’s a finding befitting of a society of people convinced they’re right, when they’re actually wrong.

Overall, two people picked at random during the study timeframe of 2019-2021 were just as likely to have agreed as disagreed with their answers. And, perhaps unsurprisingly in a polarized society, political words were far less likely to have a single meaning — there was more disagreement — than animal words.

[…]

In a second phase of the project, participants listed 10 single-word adjectives to describe the animals and the politicians. Participants then rated the animals’ and politicians’ features — “Is a finch smart?” was an example of a question they were asked.

Again, researchers found that people differed radically in how they defined basic concepts, like about animals. Most agreed that seals are not feathered, but are slippery. However, they disagreed about whether seals are graceful. And while most people were in agreement that Trump is not humble and is rich, there was significant disagreement about whether he is interesting.

This research is significant, Kidd said, because it further shows how most people we meet will not have the exact same concept of ostensibly clear-cut things, like animals. Their concepts might actually be radically different from each other. The research transcends semantic arguments, too. It could help track how public perceptions of major public policies evolve over time and whether there’s more alignment in concepts or less.

“When people are disagreeing, it may not always be about what they think it is,” Kidd said. “It could be stemming from something as simple as their concepts not being aligned.”

Source: I say dog, you say chicken? New study explores why we disagree so often | Berkeley News

Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction.

The advance could ultimately pave the way for treatments for severe forms of infertility, as well as raising the tantalising prospect of same-sex couples being able to have a biological child together in the future.

“This is the first case of making robust mammal oocytes from male cells,” said Katsuhiko Hayashi, who led the work at Kyushu University in Japan and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of lab-grown eggs and sperm.

[…]

The technique could also be applied to treat severe forms of infertility, including women with Turner’s syndrome, in whom one copy of the X chromosome is missing or partly missing, and Hayashi said this application was the primary motivation for the research.

[…]

The study, which has been submitted for publication in a leading journal, relied on a sequence of intricate steps to transform a skin cell, carrying the male XY chromosome combination, into an egg, with the female XX version.

Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome “borrowed” from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes.

“The trick of this, the biggest trick, is the duplication of the X chromosome,” said Hayashi. “We really tried to establish a system to duplicate the X chromosome.”

Finally, the cells were cultivated in an ovary organoid, a culture system designed to replicate the conditions inside a mouse ovary. When the eggs were fertilised with normal sperm, the scientists obtained about 600 embryos, which were implanted into surrogate mice, resulting in the birth of seven mouse pups. The efficiency of about 1% was lower than the efficiency achieved with normal female-derived eggs, where about 5% of embryos went on to produce a live birth.

The baby mice appeared healthy, had a normal lifespan, and went on to have offspring as adults. “They look OK, they look to be growing normally, they become fathers,” said Hayashi.

He and colleagues are now attempting to replicate the creation of lab-grown eggs using human cells.

[…]

Source: Scientists create mice with two fathers after making eggs from male cells | Genetics | The Guardian

Bruce Campbell may not be appearing in Evil Dead Rise (though the once and forever Ash Williams is producing the movie, which hits theaters in April), but the much-loved horror icon is still finding a way to interact with the masses this spring: “Bruce-O-Rama,” an evening of entertainment hitting up 22 cities nationwide.

A favorite at comic and horror conventions—he’s charming as hell, and he truly appreciates his fans—Campbell’s jaunt starts April 5 in Greenville, South Carolina, hitting venues mostly around the East Coast and Midwest. The event is described by a press release as “a two-part evening of indulgent fun;” it will feature an installment of the Campbell-hosted interactive game show Last Fan Standing, which quizzes the audience on trivia “about the things that really matter: fantasy, horror, sci-fi, superheroes, and gaming.” That tracks. Then, Campbell will introduce “a cult film favorite he’s starred in” (no specific titles mentioned, but you could pick probably any movie on his resume that doesn’t contain the words “Spider-Man” to narrow it down), with a Q&A and “a lively half-hour of anecdotes, insults, and random cash giveaways.”

Check out all the tour dates and ticket info (including VIP tickets that get you a photo with the Chin, and at some locations, the option to get your very own chainsaw autographed by the star) at the event website here.

Source: Bruce Campbell Announces “Bruce-O-Rama” 22-City Tour

Chess experts make more mistakes when air pollution is high, a study has found.

Experts used computer models to analyse the quality of games played and found that with a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players would make an error increased by 2.1 percentage points, and the magnitude of those errors increased by 10.8%.

The paper, published in the journal Management Science, studied the performance of 121 chess players in three seven-round tournaments in Germany in 2017, 2018, and 2019, comprising more than 30,000 chess moves. The researchers compared the actual moves the players made against the optimal moves determined by the powerful chess engine Stockfish.

In the tournament venues, the researchers attached three web-connected air quality sensors to measure carbon dioxide, PM2.5 concentrations, and temperature. Each tournament lasted eight weeks, meaning players faced a variety of air conditions.

[…]

Researchers looked at historical data to see if their findings were replicated, using data from 20 years of games from the first division of the German chess league. After accounting for other causes such as noise, temperature changes and carbon dioxide concentrations, they found air pollution accounted for dips in player performance.

“It’s pure random exposure to air pollution that is driving these people’s performance,” Palacios said. “Against comparable opponents in the same tournament round, being exposed to different levels of air quality makes a difference for move quality and decision quality.”

[…]

Source: Air pollution causes chess players to make more mistakes, study finds | Air pollution | The Guardian

With the rapid pickup of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered federated social media, there has been some movement among those in the media to make better use of the platform themselves. For example, most recently, the German news giant Heise announced it was setting up its own Mastodon server, where it will serve up its own content, and also offer accounts to any of the company’s employees, should they choose to use them. Medium, the publication tool, has similarly set up its own Mastodon server as well. At some point, Techdirt is going to do that as well, though we’ve been waiting while a bunch of new developments and platforms are being built before committing to a specific plan.

However, recently, the Financial Times posted a very bizarre article in which it talks about how it had set up a Mastodon server for its FT Alphaville back in November, but has now decided to shut it down because, according to the headline “it was awful.” What’s kinda bizarre is that they clearly set it up without much thought, and admitted as much in their kickoff blog post, admitting they didn’t quite know what to do with it, and asking people if they had any ideas. They also clearly recognized that there are some potential liability questions about running your own social media platform, because they described it this way (note the strikethrough, which is in the original):

If you have a smart idea about how we could use our newfound moderation liability platform, please let us know.

Which is kinda why the reasoning for shutting down the platform… is somewhat incomprehensible. They basically don’t talk about any of the problems with actually running Mastodon. They outline all of the stupid policies in place (mostly in the UK) that make it scary to run a social media network. The “awfulness” seemed to have nothing to do with running the server, and a lot to do with how the UK (and other parts of the world) have really dreadful laws that suck if you want to setup a site that hosts third-party speech.

If anything, the decision to shut it down is a primary lesson in how important Section 230 is if we want social media to survive (and allow for smaller competitors to exist). While they say that running the Mastodon server was “more hassle than it’s worth,” what they really seem to mean is that the UK laws, both existing and those on the way, make it ridiculously burdensome to do this:

The legal side is all that again times a thousand. Take, for instance, the UK Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Diligent people have spent years figuring out how its imprecise wordings apply to media organisations. Do these same conclusions hold for a sort-of-but-not-really decentralised silo of user generated content? Dunno. The only place to find out for sure would be in court, and we’d really rather not.

Seems like the kinda thing that, I don’t know, a publication like the FT might have spoken out about in the years and months prior to the Investigatory Powers Act coming into effect?

Then there’s the defamation liability thing. Which, you know, is a big part of why Section 230 is so important in the US. This one paragraph alone should make it clear why the UK will never become a social media powerhouse:

Do Mastodon server owners wear any responsibility for their users’ defamations? It’s unlikely but, because libel involves judges, not impossible. Again, the value in finding out is outweighed by the cost of finding out.

They name some other laws as well:

What about GDPR? Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedowns? Electronic Commerce Regulations? CAN-SPAM? FTAV treats user data with a combination of disinterest and uninterest, but that’s not enough to guarantee compliance with all relevant global laws and regulations.

And laws to come:

This headline:

And, look, it’s absolutely true that there are legal risks to running a Mastodon instance. EFF has put up a really fantastic legal primer for anyone looking to set up their own Mastodon server. And there are, certainly, some technical and logistical issues in doing it as well. And, basically all that says is that you shouldn’t set up a server on a whim.

But, what this really seems to demonstrate is the importance of good regulations like Section 230 that help make it possible for anyone to set up just such a server, as well as the horrific nature of UK laws like the Investigatory Powers Act and the upcoming Online Safety Bill, and how they make it next to impossible for there to ever be a UK-created social media platform.

But, in some ways, it’s even dumber, because… most of these laws already apply to FT and its website, because the FT… allows comments. Anyone who allows comments on their website already has a kind of social media offering already. And, indeed, some people raised that very point in the comments on this story.

[…]

Source: Financial Times Sets Up Mastodon Server, Realizes Laws Exist (Which It Was Already Subject To), Pulls Down Mastodon Server | Techdirt

I disagree with the conclusion of the article as the writer doesn’t realise that adding more stuff to moderate in different systems is a larger pain in the butt than just having one system to moderate.

A woman who released audio of her rapist’s confession said she wanted to show how “manipulative” abusers can be.

Ellie Wilson, 25, secretly captured Daniel McFarlane admitting to his crimes by setting her phone to record in her handbag.

McFarlane was found guilty of two rape charges and sentenced to five years in prison in July last year.

Ms Wilson said that despite audio and written confessions being used in court, the verdict was not unanimous.

The attacks took place between December 2017 and February 2018 when McFarlane was a medical student at the University of Glasgow.

Since the conviction Ms Wilson, who waived her anonymity, has campaigned on behalf of victims.

Earlier this week Ms Wilson, who was a politics student and champion athlete at the university at the time, released audio on Twitter of a conversation with McFarlane covertly captured the year after the attacks.

In the recording she asks him: “Do you not get how awful it makes me feel when you say ‘I haven’t raped you’ when you have?”

McFarlane replies: “Ellie, we have already established that I have. The people that I need to believe me, believe me. I will tell them the truth one day, but not today.”

When asked how he feels about what he has done, he says: “I feel good knowing I am not in prison.”

The tweet has been viewed by more than 200,000 people.

Ms Wilson told BBC Scotland’s The Nine she had released the clip because many people wondered what evidence she had to secure a rape conviction.

She said the reaction had been “overwhelmingly positive” although a small minority had been very unkind.

And even with the recording of the confession being posted online some people were still saying ‘he didn’t do it’, Ms Wilson said.

In addition to the audio confession, Ms Wilson had text messages that pointed to McFarlane’s guilt yet she said she was still worried that it would not be enough to secure a conviction.

“The verdict was not unanimous,” she said.

“You can literally have a written confession, an audio confession and not everyone on the jury is going to believe you. I think that says a lot about society.”

Ms Wilson has previously said the experience she had in court was appalling.

She said she was subjected to personal attacks by the defence advocate and felt blamed for being assaulted.

[…]

Source: Rape survivor secretly recorded her abuser’s confession – BBC News

People living near airports that service piston-engine aircraft are disproportionately exposed to lead, a dangerous neurotoxin.

A study published this week in PNAS Nexus found that children living near the Reid-Hillview Airport in Santa Clara County, California, had elevated blood lead levels. They’ve pinpointed piston-engine aircrafts at airports like the one in California as a source of lead exposure for children.

Overall blood lead levels in U.S. children have gone down significantly in the last half century. Since the 1970s, policymakers have removed lead from everyday items like pipes, food cans, and vehicle gasoline. But despite those efforts, airports that house and service piston-engine aircraft, which mainly use leaded aviation fuel, continue to pollute the air. These are small, single- or two-propeller airplanes, such as training Cessna airplanes, small commercial aircraft, and the planes commonly seen trailing advertisement banners.

“Lead-formulated aviation gasoline (avgas) is the primary source of lead emissions in the United States today, consumed by over 170,000 piston-engine aircraft,” according to the new paper.

The researchers analyzed 14,000 blood samples, taken from 2011 to 2020 from children under 6 years old living near the California airport, to gauge exposure to lead. They found that blood lead levels increased the closer the children lived to the airport. Blood lead levels were also 2.18 times higher than a health department threshold of 4.5 micrograms per deciliter in children who lived east, or downwind, of the airport, according to the study.

[…]

Source: American Kids Are Being Exposed to Lead From Airports

[…]

The care minister Helen Whately said stopping relatives from visiting loved ones in care homes as a precaution against the spread of Covid-19 showed “a lack of humanity”. Legislation is being planned to give care home residents and hospital patients the legal right to see guests, according to the Times, prompting fury from the care sector.

[…]

While official visiting restrictions in England have been lifted, some care homes and hospitals are refusing to allow visitors or are imposing stringent Covid-19 conditions. One care home has even stopped phone calls between residents and loved ones for fear that handsets could get infected.

[…]

“There are lots of complicated things around the edges, but at the centre there’s this clear message that people should not be separated from those that they love during times of their greatest need.

“And Covid has shown why that needs to be enshrined in law. It’s very easy to sweep away these human rights.”

[…]

Source: Care homes in England ‘risk being vilified’ if forced to allow visitors | Social care | The Guardian

International migrants who seek protection also participate in the economy. Thus the policy of the United States to drastically reduce refugee and asylum-seeker arrivals from 2017 to 2020 might have substantial and ongoing economic consequences. This paper places conservative bounds on those effects by critically reviewing the research literature. It goes beyond prior estimates by including ripple effects beyond the wages earned or taxes paid directly by migrants. The sharp reduction in US refugee admissions starting in 2017 costs the overall US economy today over $9.1 billion per year ($30,962 per missing refugee per year, on average) and costs public coffers at all levels of government over $2.0 billion per year ($6,844 per missing refugee per year, on average) net of public expenses. Large reductions in the presence of asylum seekers during the same period likewise carry ongoing costs in the billions of dollars per year. These estimates imply that barriers to migrants seeking protection, beyond humanitarian policy concerns, carry substantial economic costs.

Source: economic and fiscal effects on the United States from reduced numbers of refugees and asylum seekers | Oxford Review of Economic Policy | Oxford Academic

[…] Writing in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, a Duke University-led team says they have created the first gel-based cartilage substitute that is even stronger and more durable than the real thing.

Mechanical testing reveals that the Duke team’s hydrogel—a material made of water-absorbing polymers—can be pressed and pulled with more force than natural cartilage, and is three times more resistant to wear and tear.

[…]

To make this material, the Duke team took thin sheets of cellulose fibers and infused them with a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol—a viscous goo consisting of stringy chains of repeating molecules—to form a gel.

The cellulose fibers act like the collagen fibers in natural cartilage, Wiley said—they give the gel strength when stretched. The polyvinyl alcohol helps it return to its original shape. The result is a Jello-like material, 60% water, which is supple yet surprisingly strong.

Natural cartilage can withstand a whopping 5,800 to 8,500 pounds per inch of tugging and squishing, respectively, before reaching its breaking point. Their lab-made version is the first hydrogel that can handle even more. It is 26% stronger than natural cartilage in tension, something like suspending seven grand pianos from a key ring, and 66% stronger in compression—which would be like parking a car on a postage stamp.

[…]

In the past, researchers attempting to create stronger hydrogels used a freeze-thaw process to produce crystals within the gel, which drive out water and help hold the polymer chains together. In the new study, instead of freezing and thawing the hydrogel, the researchers used a heat treatment called annealing to coax even more crystals to form within the polymer network.

By increasing the crystal content, the researchers were able to produce a gel that can withstand five times as much stress from pulling and nearly twice as much squeezing relative to freeze-thaw methods.

The improved strength of the annealed gel also helped solve a second design challenge: securing it to the joint and getting it to stay put.

Cartilage forms a thin layer that covers the ends of bones so they don’t grind against one another. Previous studies haven’t been able to attach hydrogels directly to bone or cartilage with sufficient strength to keep them from breaking loose or sliding off. So the Duke team came up with a different approach.

Their method of attachment involves cementing and clamping the hydrogel to a titanium base. This is then pressed and anchored into a hole where the damaged cartilage used to be. Tests show the design stays fastened 68% more firmly than natural cartilage on bone.

[…]

In wear tests, the researchers took artificial cartilage and natural cartilage and spun them against each other a million times, with a pressure similar to what the knee experiences during walking. Using a high-resolution X-ray scanning technique called micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), the scientists found that the surface of their lab-made version held up three times better than the real thing. Yet because the hydrogel mimics the smooth, slippery, cushiony nature of real cartilage, it protects other joint surfaces from friction as they slide against the implant.

[…]

From the lab, the first cartilage-mimicking gel that’s strong enough for knees

---

More information: Jiacheng Zhao et al, A Synthetic Hydrogel Composite with a Strength and Wear Resistance Greater than Cartilage, Advanced Functional Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202205662

Journal information: Advanced Functional Materials

Source: Stiff, achy knees? Lab-made cartilage gel outperforms the real thing

Toxic discussions on open-source GitHub projects tend to involve entitlement, subtle insults, and arrogance, according to an academic study. That contrasts with the toxic behavior – typically bad language, hate speech, and harassment – found on other corners of the web.

Whether that seems obvious or not, it’s an interesting point to consider because, for one thing, it means technical and non-technical methods to detect and curb toxic behavior on one part of the internet may not therefore work well on GitHub, and if you’re involved in communities on the code-hosting giant, you may find this research useful in combating trolls and unacceptable conduct.

It may also mean systems intended to automatically detect and report toxicity in open-source projects, or at least ones on GitHub, may need to be developed specifically for that task due to their unique nature.

[…]

Courtney Miller, Sophie Cohen, Daniel Klug, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Christian Kästner – describe their findings in a paper [PDF] titled, “‘Did You Miss My Comment or What?’ Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions,” that was presented last month at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In a video explainer, Miller, a doctoral student at CMU’s Institute for Software Research and lead author on the paper, says the project adopted the definition of toxicity proposed by those working on Google’s Perspective API: “rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion.”

[…]

The open source community’s long tradition of blunt interaction has led many projects to adopt codes of conduct, the paper notes. The reason for doing so is to encourage contributors to join open source projects and to keep them from being driven away by trolling and other forms of hostility.

The researchers acknowledge that “toxicity in open source is often written off as a naturally occurring if not necessary facet of open source culture.” And while there are those who defend a more rough-and-tumble mode of online interaction, there are consequences for angry interactions. Witness the departures in the Perl community over hostility.

“Toxicity is different in open-source communities,” Miller said in a CMU news release. “It is more contextual, entitled, subtle and passive-aggressive.”

[…]

many open source contributors have cited toxic and continuously negative behavior as their reason for disengaging (see Section 2 of our paper for more details). Because of this, it was important to consider toxicity that could be considered toxic to a wide spectrum of open source contributors.”

Toxicity in open source projects is relatively rare – the researchers in previous work found only about six per 1,000 GitHub issues to be toxic. That meant a random sampling of issues wouldn’t serve the research objective, so the group adopted several strategies for identifying toxic issues and comments: a language-based detector, finding mentions of “codes of conduct” and locked threads, and threads that had been deleted.

The result was a data set of 100 toxic issues on GitHub. What the researchers found was that toxicity on the Microsoft-owned website has its own particular characteristics.

[….]

The computer scientists note that GitHub Issues, while they include insults, arrogance, and trolling seen elsewhere, do not exhibit the severe language common on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Beyond milder language, GitHub differs in its abundance of entitled comments – people making demands as if their expectations were based on a contract or payment.

[…]

The researchers identify a variety of triggers for toxic behavior, which mostly occur in large, popular projects. These include: trouble using software, technical disagreements, politics/ideology, and past interactions.

[…]

“The harms of toxicity were outside the scope of this project, but informally we observed that one thing that seemed to be an efficient way of curbing toxicity was for maintainers to cite their project’s code of conduct and lock the thread as too heated,” said Miller. “This seemed to help reduce the amount of time and emotional labor involved with dealing with the toxicity.”

[…]

Source: ‘Toxic’ open source GitHub discussions analyzed in study

the finalists of this year’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest aren’t going to leave your brain feeling any less raddled, confused, or exhausted as we quickly approach the new year. As they do every year, a group of talented neurologists, visual scientists, ophthalmologists, and artists have come together to create and celebrate the best optical illusions of the year, and once again their creations will make you wonder if your brain really is completely broken.

Source: The 10 Best Illusions of the Year

Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed.

The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning “there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards” to health.

Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.

People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease.

Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

“We did not expect to find the highest number of particles in the lower regions of the lungs, or particles of the sizes we found,” said Laura Sadofsky at Hull York medical school in the UK,a senior author of the study. “It is surprising as the airways are smaller in the lower parts of the lungs and we would have expected particles of these sizes to be filtered out or trapped before getting this deep.”

[…]

Source: Microplastics found deep in lungs of living people for first time | Plastics | The Guardian

Scientists have discovered microplastics in human blood for the first time, warning that the ubiquitous particles could also be making their way into organs.

The tiny pieces of mostly invisible plastic have already been found almost everywhere else on Earth, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains as well as in the air, soil and food chain.

A Dutch study published in the Environment International journal on Thursday examined blood samples from 22 anonymous, healthy volunteers and found microplastics in nearly 80 percent of them.

Half of the blood samples showed traces of PET plastic, widely used to make drink bottles, while more than a third had polystyrene, used for disposable food containers and many other products.

[…]

“Where is it going in your body? Can it be eliminated? Excreted? Or is it retained in certain organs, accumulating maybe, or is it even able to pass the blood-brain barrier?”

The study said the microplastics could have entered the body by many routes: via air, water or food, but also in products such as particular toothpastes, lip glosses and tattoo ink.

[…]

 

Source: Scientists find microplastics in blood for first time

[…] Beginning on Jan. 31, hosts will only see the initials of guests’ first names until they confirm a booking request, Airbnb announced in a December news announcement spotted by the Verge. After a host confirms the booking, the guest’s full name will appear. The change to how names are displaced will be in place for at least two years.

“While we have made progress, we have much more to do and continue working with our Hosts and guests, and with civil rights leaders to make our community more inclusive,” Airbnb said.

In its announcement, the company said the update is consistent with the voluntary settlement agreement it reached with individuals in Oregon in 2019 “who raised concerns regarding the way guests’ names are displayed when they seek to book a listing.”

According to the Oregonian, in 2017 Portland resident Patricia Harrington filed a lawsuit against Airbnb. She claimed that because Airbnb requires guests to disclose their full name and include a photo, which hosts’ review before they accept a booking, the company was allowing hosts to discriminate against Black guests. This constituted a violation of Oregon’s public accommodation laws, she alleged.

Airbnb settled the lawsuit, which included two more Black women in Oregon, in 2019. By that time, Harrington had died.

The lawsuit’s claims weren’t wrong. Black guests have been sounding the alarm about discrimination on the platform for years and even created a hashtag: #AirbnbWhileBlack. In 2016, a Harvard Business School study even found that requests from guests with African American names were roughly 16% less likely to be accepted by hosts than identical guests with distinctively white names.

[…]

“Given that the impact of this change is unknown, the implementation will be limited,” Airbnb spokesperson Liz DeBold Fusco said in an email. “We will evaluate the impact of this change to understand if there are learnings from this work that can inform future efforts to fight bias.”

[…]

Source: Airbnb Hides Guest First Names in Oregon to Stop Discrimination