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Richard Franki is the associate editor who writes and creates graphs. He started with the company in 1987, when it was known as the International Medical News Group. In his years as a journalist, Richard has worked for Cap Cities/ABC, Disney, Harcourt, Elsevier, Quadrant, Frontline, and Internet Brands. In the 1990s, he was a contributor to the ill-fated Indications column, predecessor of Livin' on the MDedge.
James Bond taken down by an epidemiologist
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die
Movie watching usually requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and it’s safe to say James Bond movies require this more than most. Between the impossible gadgets and ludicrous doomsday plans, very few have ever stopped to consider the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Now, however, Bond, James Bond, has met his most formidable opponent: Wouter Graumans, a graduate student in epidemiology from the Netherlands. During a foray to Burkina Faso to study infectious diseases, Mr. Graumans came down with a case of food poisoning, which led him to wonder how 007 is able to trot across this big world of ours without contracting so much as a sinus infection.
Because Mr. Graumans is a man of science and conviction, mere speculation wasn’t enough. He and a group of coauthors wrote an entire paper on the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Doing so required watching over 3,000 minutes of numerous movies and analyzing Bond’s 86 total trips to 46 different countries based on current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice for travel to those countries. Time which, the authors state in the abstract, “could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues or forms of relaxation that are more acceptable in academic circles.”
Naturally, Mr. Bond’s line of work entails exposure to unpleasant things, such as poison, dehydration, heatstroke, and dangerous wildlife (everything from ticks to crocodiles), though oddly enough he never succumbs to any of it. He’s also curiously immune to hangovers, despite rarely drinking anything nonalcoholic. There are also less obvious risks: For one, 007 rarely washes his hands. During one movie, he handles raw chicken to lure away a pack of crocodiles but fails to wash his hands afterward, leaving him at risk for multiple food-borne illnesses.
Of course, we must address the elephant in the bedroom: Mr. Bond’s numerous, er, encounters with women. One would imagine the biggest risk to those women would be from the various STDs that likely course through Bond’s body, but of the 27% who died shortly after … encountering … him, all involved violence, with disease playing no obvious role. Who knows, maybe he’s clean? Stranger things have happened.
The timing of this article may seem a bit suspicious. Was it a PR stunt by the studio? Rest assured, the authors addressed this, noting that they received no funding for the study, and that, “given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.” We love when a punchline writes itself.
How to see Atlanta on $688.35 a day
The world is always changing, so we have to change with it. This week, LOTME becomes a travel guide, and our first stop is the Big A, the Big Peach, Dogwood City, Empire City of the South, Wakanda.
There’s lots to do in Atlanta: Celebrate a World Series win, visit the College Football Hall of Fame or the World of Coca Cola, or take the Stranger Things/Upside Down film locations tour. Serious adventurers, however, get out of the city and go to Emory Decatur Hospital in – you guessed it – Decatur (unofficial motto: “Everything is Greater in Decatur”).
Find the emergency room and ask for Taylor Davis, who will be your personal guide. She’ll show you how to check in at the desk, sit in the waiting room for 7 hours, and then leave without seeing any medical personnel or receiving any sort of attention whatsoever. All the things she did when she went there in July for a head injury.
Ms. Davis told Fox5 Atlanta: “I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all.”
But wait! There’s more! By booking your trip through LOTMEgo* and using the code “Decatur,” you’ll get the Taylor Davis special, which includes a bill/cover charge for $688.35 from the hospital. An Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee told Ms. Davis that “you get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen.”
If all this has you ready to hop in your car (really?), then check out LOTMEgo* on Twittbook and InstaTok. You’ll also find trick-or-treating tips and discounts on haunted hospital tours.
*Does not actually exist
Breaking down the hot flash
Do you ever wonder why we scramble for cold things when we’re feeling nauseous? Whether it’s the cool air that needs to hit your face in the car or a cold, damp towel on the back of your neck, scientists think it could possibly be an evolutionary mechanism at the cellular level.
Motion sickness it’s actually a battle of body temperature, according to an article from LiveScience. Capillaries in the skin dilate, allowing for more blood flow near the skin’s surface and causing core temperature to fall. Once body temperature drops, the hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, tries to do its job by raising body temperature. Thus the hot flash!
The cold compress and cool air help fight the battle by counteracting the hypothalamus, but why the drop in body temperature to begin with?
There are a few theories. Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, told LiveScience that the lack of oxygen needed in body tissue to survive at lower temperatures could be making it difficult to get oxygen to the body when a person is ill, and is “more likely an adaptive response influenced by poorly understood mechanisms at the cellular level.”
Another theory is that the nausea and body temperature shift is the body’s natural response to help people vomit.
Then there’s the theory of “defensive hypothermia,” which suggests that cold sweats are a possible mechanism to conserve energy so the body can fight off an intruder, which was supported by a 2014 study and a 2016 review.
It’s another one of the body’s many survival tricks.
Teachers were right: Pupils can do the math
Teachers liked to preach that we wouldn’t have calculators with us all the time, but that wound up not being true. Our phones have calculators at the press of a button. But maybe even calculators aren’t always needed because our pupils do more math than you think.
The pupil light reflex – constrict in light and dilate in darkness – is well known, but recent work shows that pupil size is also regulated by cognitive and perceptual factors. By presenting subjects with images of various numbers of dots and measuring pupil size, the investigators were able to show “that numerical information is intrinsically related to perception,” lead author Dr. Elisa Castaldi of Florence University noted in a written statement.
The researchers found that pupils are responsible for important survival techniques. Coauthor David Burr of the University of Sydney and the University of Florence gave an evolutionary perspective: “When we look around, we spontaneously perceive the form, size, movement and colour of a scene. Equally spontaneously, we perceive the number of items before us. This ability, shared with most other animals, is an evolutionary fundamental: It reveals immediately important quantities, such as how many apples there are on the tree, or how many enemies are attacking.”
Useful information, indeed, but our pupils seem to be more interested in the quantity of beers in the refrigerator.
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die
Movie watching usually requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and it’s safe to say James Bond movies require this more than most. Between the impossible gadgets and ludicrous doomsday plans, very few have ever stopped to consider the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Now, however, Bond, James Bond, has met his most formidable opponent: Wouter Graumans, a graduate student in epidemiology from the Netherlands. During a foray to Burkina Faso to study infectious diseases, Mr. Graumans came down with a case of food poisoning, which led him to wonder how 007 is able to trot across this big world of ours without contracting so much as a sinus infection.
Because Mr. Graumans is a man of science and conviction, mere speculation wasn’t enough. He and a group of coauthors wrote an entire paper on the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Doing so required watching over 3,000 minutes of numerous movies and analyzing Bond’s 86 total trips to 46 different countries based on current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice for travel to those countries. Time which, the authors state in the abstract, “could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues or forms of relaxation that are more acceptable in academic circles.”
Naturally, Mr. Bond’s line of work entails exposure to unpleasant things, such as poison, dehydration, heatstroke, and dangerous wildlife (everything from ticks to crocodiles), though oddly enough he never succumbs to any of it. He’s also curiously immune to hangovers, despite rarely drinking anything nonalcoholic. There are also less obvious risks: For one, 007 rarely washes his hands. During one movie, he handles raw chicken to lure away a pack of crocodiles but fails to wash his hands afterward, leaving him at risk for multiple food-borne illnesses.
Of course, we must address the elephant in the bedroom: Mr. Bond’s numerous, er, encounters with women. One would imagine the biggest risk to those women would be from the various STDs that likely course through Bond’s body, but of the 27% who died shortly after … encountering … him, all involved violence, with disease playing no obvious role. Who knows, maybe he’s clean? Stranger things have happened.
The timing of this article may seem a bit suspicious. Was it a PR stunt by the studio? Rest assured, the authors addressed this, noting that they received no funding for the study, and that, “given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.” We love when a punchline writes itself.
How to see Atlanta on $688.35 a day
The world is always changing, so we have to change with it. This week, LOTME becomes a travel guide, and our first stop is the Big A, the Big Peach, Dogwood City, Empire City of the South, Wakanda.
There’s lots to do in Atlanta: Celebrate a World Series win, visit the College Football Hall of Fame or the World of Coca Cola, or take the Stranger Things/Upside Down film locations tour. Serious adventurers, however, get out of the city and go to Emory Decatur Hospital in – you guessed it – Decatur (unofficial motto: “Everything is Greater in Decatur”).
Find the emergency room and ask for Taylor Davis, who will be your personal guide. She’ll show you how to check in at the desk, sit in the waiting room for 7 hours, and then leave without seeing any medical personnel or receiving any sort of attention whatsoever. All the things she did when she went there in July for a head injury.
Ms. Davis told Fox5 Atlanta: “I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all.”
But wait! There’s more! By booking your trip through LOTMEgo* and using the code “Decatur,” you’ll get the Taylor Davis special, which includes a bill/cover charge for $688.35 from the hospital. An Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee told Ms. Davis that “you get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen.”
If all this has you ready to hop in your car (really?), then check out LOTMEgo* on Twittbook and InstaTok. You’ll also find trick-or-treating tips and discounts on haunted hospital tours.
*Does not actually exist
Breaking down the hot flash
Do you ever wonder why we scramble for cold things when we’re feeling nauseous? Whether it’s the cool air that needs to hit your face in the car or a cold, damp towel on the back of your neck, scientists think it could possibly be an evolutionary mechanism at the cellular level.
Motion sickness it’s actually a battle of body temperature, according to an article from LiveScience. Capillaries in the skin dilate, allowing for more blood flow near the skin’s surface and causing core temperature to fall. Once body temperature drops, the hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, tries to do its job by raising body temperature. Thus the hot flash!
The cold compress and cool air help fight the battle by counteracting the hypothalamus, but why the drop in body temperature to begin with?
There are a few theories. Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, told LiveScience that the lack of oxygen needed in body tissue to survive at lower temperatures could be making it difficult to get oxygen to the body when a person is ill, and is “more likely an adaptive response influenced by poorly understood mechanisms at the cellular level.”
Another theory is that the nausea and body temperature shift is the body’s natural response to help people vomit.
Then there’s the theory of “defensive hypothermia,” which suggests that cold sweats are a possible mechanism to conserve energy so the body can fight off an intruder, which was supported by a 2014 study and a 2016 review.
It’s another one of the body’s many survival tricks.
Teachers were right: Pupils can do the math
Teachers liked to preach that we wouldn’t have calculators with us all the time, but that wound up not being true. Our phones have calculators at the press of a button. But maybe even calculators aren’t always needed because our pupils do more math than you think.
The pupil light reflex – constrict in light and dilate in darkness – is well known, but recent work shows that pupil size is also regulated by cognitive and perceptual factors. By presenting subjects with images of various numbers of dots and measuring pupil size, the investigators were able to show “that numerical information is intrinsically related to perception,” lead author Dr. Elisa Castaldi of Florence University noted in a written statement.
The researchers found that pupils are responsible for important survival techniques. Coauthor David Burr of the University of Sydney and the University of Florence gave an evolutionary perspective: “When we look around, we spontaneously perceive the form, size, movement and colour of a scene. Equally spontaneously, we perceive the number of items before us. This ability, shared with most other animals, is an evolutionary fundamental: It reveals immediately important quantities, such as how many apples there are on the tree, or how many enemies are attacking.”
Useful information, indeed, but our pupils seem to be more interested in the quantity of beers in the refrigerator.
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die
Movie watching usually requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and it’s safe to say James Bond movies require this more than most. Between the impossible gadgets and ludicrous doomsday plans, very few have ever stopped to consider the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Now, however, Bond, James Bond, has met his most formidable opponent: Wouter Graumans, a graduate student in epidemiology from the Netherlands. During a foray to Burkina Faso to study infectious diseases, Mr. Graumans came down with a case of food poisoning, which led him to wonder how 007 is able to trot across this big world of ours without contracting so much as a sinus infection.
Because Mr. Graumans is a man of science and conviction, mere speculation wasn’t enough. He and a group of coauthors wrote an entire paper on the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Doing so required watching over 3,000 minutes of numerous movies and analyzing Bond’s 86 total trips to 46 different countries based on current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice for travel to those countries. Time which, the authors state in the abstract, “could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues or forms of relaxation that are more acceptable in academic circles.”
Naturally, Mr. Bond’s line of work entails exposure to unpleasant things, such as poison, dehydration, heatstroke, and dangerous wildlife (everything from ticks to crocodiles), though oddly enough he never succumbs to any of it. He’s also curiously immune to hangovers, despite rarely drinking anything nonalcoholic. There are also less obvious risks: For one, 007 rarely washes his hands. During one movie, he handles raw chicken to lure away a pack of crocodiles but fails to wash his hands afterward, leaving him at risk for multiple food-borne illnesses.
Of course, we must address the elephant in the bedroom: Mr. Bond’s numerous, er, encounters with women. One would imagine the biggest risk to those women would be from the various STDs that likely course through Bond’s body, but of the 27% who died shortly after … encountering … him, all involved violence, with disease playing no obvious role. Who knows, maybe he’s clean? Stranger things have happened.
The timing of this article may seem a bit suspicious. Was it a PR stunt by the studio? Rest assured, the authors addressed this, noting that they received no funding for the study, and that, “given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.” We love when a punchline writes itself.
How to see Atlanta on $688.35 a day
The world is always changing, so we have to change with it. This week, LOTME becomes a travel guide, and our first stop is the Big A, the Big Peach, Dogwood City, Empire City of the South, Wakanda.
There’s lots to do in Atlanta: Celebrate a World Series win, visit the College Football Hall of Fame or the World of Coca Cola, or take the Stranger Things/Upside Down film locations tour. Serious adventurers, however, get out of the city and go to Emory Decatur Hospital in – you guessed it – Decatur (unofficial motto: “Everything is Greater in Decatur”).
Find the emergency room and ask for Taylor Davis, who will be your personal guide. She’ll show you how to check in at the desk, sit in the waiting room for 7 hours, and then leave without seeing any medical personnel or receiving any sort of attention whatsoever. All the things she did when she went there in July for a head injury.
Ms. Davis told Fox5 Atlanta: “I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all.”
But wait! There’s more! By booking your trip through LOTMEgo* and using the code “Decatur,” you’ll get the Taylor Davis special, which includes a bill/cover charge for $688.35 from the hospital. An Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee told Ms. Davis that “you get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen.”
If all this has you ready to hop in your car (really?), then check out LOTMEgo* on Twittbook and InstaTok. You’ll also find trick-or-treating tips and discounts on haunted hospital tours.
*Does not actually exist
Breaking down the hot flash
Do you ever wonder why we scramble for cold things when we’re feeling nauseous? Whether it’s the cool air that needs to hit your face in the car or a cold, damp towel on the back of your neck, scientists think it could possibly be an evolutionary mechanism at the cellular level.
Motion sickness it’s actually a battle of body temperature, according to an article from LiveScience. Capillaries in the skin dilate, allowing for more blood flow near the skin’s surface and causing core temperature to fall. Once body temperature drops, the hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, tries to do its job by raising body temperature. Thus the hot flash!
The cold compress and cool air help fight the battle by counteracting the hypothalamus, but why the drop in body temperature to begin with?
There are a few theories. Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, told LiveScience that the lack of oxygen needed in body tissue to survive at lower temperatures could be making it difficult to get oxygen to the body when a person is ill, and is “more likely an adaptive response influenced by poorly understood mechanisms at the cellular level.”
Another theory is that the nausea and body temperature shift is the body’s natural response to help people vomit.
Then there’s the theory of “defensive hypothermia,” which suggests that cold sweats are a possible mechanism to conserve energy so the body can fight off an intruder, which was supported by a 2014 study and a 2016 review.
It’s another one of the body’s many survival tricks.
Teachers were right: Pupils can do the math
Teachers liked to preach that we wouldn’t have calculators with us all the time, but that wound up not being true. Our phones have calculators at the press of a button. But maybe even calculators aren’t always needed because our pupils do more math than you think.
The pupil light reflex – constrict in light and dilate in darkness – is well known, but recent work shows that pupil size is also regulated by cognitive and perceptual factors. By presenting subjects with images of various numbers of dots and measuring pupil size, the investigators were able to show “that numerical information is intrinsically related to perception,” lead author Dr. Elisa Castaldi of Florence University noted in a written statement.
The researchers found that pupils are responsible for important survival techniques. Coauthor David Burr of the University of Sydney and the University of Florence gave an evolutionary perspective: “When we look around, we spontaneously perceive the form, size, movement and colour of a scene. Equally spontaneously, we perceive the number of items before us. This ability, shared with most other animals, is an evolutionary fundamental: It reveals immediately important quantities, such as how many apples there are on the tree, or how many enemies are attacking.”
Useful information, indeed, but our pupils seem to be more interested in the quantity of beers in the refrigerator.
Children and COVID: A look at the pace of vaccination
With children aged 5-11 years about to enter the battle-of-the-COVID-vaccine phase of the war on COVID, there are many questions. MDedge takes a look at one: How long will it take to get 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated?
Previous experience may provide some guidance. The vaccine was approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the closest group in age, 12- to 15-year-olds, on May 12, 2021, and according to data from the CDC.
(Use of the 5% figure acknowledges the uneven start after approval – the vaccine became available to different age groups at different times, even though it had been approved for all adults aged 18 years and older.)
The 16- to 17-year-olds, despite being a smaller group of less than 7.6 million individuals, took 120 days to go from 5% to 50% coverage. For those aged 18-24 years, the corresponding time was 132 days, while the 24- to 36-year-olds took longer than any other age group, 135 days, to reach the 50%-with-at-least-one-dose milestone. The time, in turn, decreased for each group as age increased, with those aged 75 and older taking just 41 days to get at least one dose in 50% of individuals, the CDC data show.
That trend also applies to full vaccination, for the most part. The oldest group, 75 and older, had the shortest time to 50% being fully vaccinated at 69 days, and the 25- to 39-year-olds had the longest time at 206 days, with the length rising as age decreased and dropping for groups younger than 25-39. Except for the 12- to 15-year-olds. It has been 160 days (as of Nov. 2) since the 5% mark was reached on May 17, but only 47.4% of the group is fully vaccinated, making it unlikely that the 50% mark will be reached earlier than the 169 days it took the 16- to 17-year-olds.
So where does that put the 5- to 11-year-olds?
The White House said on Nov. 1 that vaccinations could start the first week of November, pending approval from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which meets on Nov. 2. “This is an important step forward in our nation’s fight against the virus,” Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, said in a briefing. “As we await the CDC decision, we are not waiting on the operations and logistics. In fact, we’ve been preparing for weeks.”
Availability, of course, is not the only factor involved. In a survey conducted Oct. 14-24, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 27% of parents of children aged 5-11 years are planning to have them vaccinated against COVID-19 “right away” once the vaccine is available, and that 33% would “wait and see” how the vaccine works.
“Parents of 5-11 year-olds cite a range of concerns when it comes to vaccinating their children for COVID-19, with safety issues topping off the list,” and “two-thirds say they are concerned the vaccine may negatively impact their child’s fertility in the future,” Kaiser said.
With children aged 5-11 years about to enter the battle-of-the-COVID-vaccine phase of the war on COVID, there are many questions. MDedge takes a look at one: How long will it take to get 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated?
Previous experience may provide some guidance. The vaccine was approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the closest group in age, 12- to 15-year-olds, on May 12, 2021, and according to data from the CDC.
(Use of the 5% figure acknowledges the uneven start after approval – the vaccine became available to different age groups at different times, even though it had been approved for all adults aged 18 years and older.)
The 16- to 17-year-olds, despite being a smaller group of less than 7.6 million individuals, took 120 days to go from 5% to 50% coverage. For those aged 18-24 years, the corresponding time was 132 days, while the 24- to 36-year-olds took longer than any other age group, 135 days, to reach the 50%-with-at-least-one-dose milestone. The time, in turn, decreased for each group as age increased, with those aged 75 and older taking just 41 days to get at least one dose in 50% of individuals, the CDC data show.
That trend also applies to full vaccination, for the most part. The oldest group, 75 and older, had the shortest time to 50% being fully vaccinated at 69 days, and the 25- to 39-year-olds had the longest time at 206 days, with the length rising as age decreased and dropping for groups younger than 25-39. Except for the 12- to 15-year-olds. It has been 160 days (as of Nov. 2) since the 5% mark was reached on May 17, but only 47.4% of the group is fully vaccinated, making it unlikely that the 50% mark will be reached earlier than the 169 days it took the 16- to 17-year-olds.
So where does that put the 5- to 11-year-olds?
The White House said on Nov. 1 that vaccinations could start the first week of November, pending approval from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which meets on Nov. 2. “This is an important step forward in our nation’s fight against the virus,” Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, said in a briefing. “As we await the CDC decision, we are not waiting on the operations and logistics. In fact, we’ve been preparing for weeks.”
Availability, of course, is not the only factor involved. In a survey conducted Oct. 14-24, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 27% of parents of children aged 5-11 years are planning to have them vaccinated against COVID-19 “right away” once the vaccine is available, and that 33% would “wait and see” how the vaccine works.
“Parents of 5-11 year-olds cite a range of concerns when it comes to vaccinating their children for COVID-19, with safety issues topping off the list,” and “two-thirds say they are concerned the vaccine may negatively impact their child’s fertility in the future,” Kaiser said.
With children aged 5-11 years about to enter the battle-of-the-COVID-vaccine phase of the war on COVID, there are many questions. MDedge takes a look at one: How long will it take to get 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated?
Previous experience may provide some guidance. The vaccine was approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the closest group in age, 12- to 15-year-olds, on May 12, 2021, and according to data from the CDC.
(Use of the 5% figure acknowledges the uneven start after approval – the vaccine became available to different age groups at different times, even though it had been approved for all adults aged 18 years and older.)
The 16- to 17-year-olds, despite being a smaller group of less than 7.6 million individuals, took 120 days to go from 5% to 50% coverage. For those aged 18-24 years, the corresponding time was 132 days, while the 24- to 36-year-olds took longer than any other age group, 135 days, to reach the 50%-with-at-least-one-dose milestone. The time, in turn, decreased for each group as age increased, with those aged 75 and older taking just 41 days to get at least one dose in 50% of individuals, the CDC data show.
That trend also applies to full vaccination, for the most part. The oldest group, 75 and older, had the shortest time to 50% being fully vaccinated at 69 days, and the 25- to 39-year-olds had the longest time at 206 days, with the length rising as age decreased and dropping for groups younger than 25-39. Except for the 12- to 15-year-olds. It has been 160 days (as of Nov. 2) since the 5% mark was reached on May 17, but only 47.4% of the group is fully vaccinated, making it unlikely that the 50% mark will be reached earlier than the 169 days it took the 16- to 17-year-olds.
So where does that put the 5- to 11-year-olds?
The White House said on Nov. 1 that vaccinations could start the first week of November, pending approval from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which meets on Nov. 2. “This is an important step forward in our nation’s fight against the virus,” Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, said in a briefing. “As we await the CDC decision, we are not waiting on the operations and logistics. In fact, we’ve been preparing for weeks.”
Availability, of course, is not the only factor involved. In a survey conducted Oct. 14-24, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 27% of parents of children aged 5-11 years are planning to have them vaccinated against COVID-19 “right away” once the vaccine is available, and that 33% would “wait and see” how the vaccine works.
“Parents of 5-11 year-olds cite a range of concerns when it comes to vaccinating their children for COVID-19, with safety issues topping off the list,” and “two-thirds say they are concerned the vaccine may negatively impact their child’s fertility in the future,” Kaiser said.
The devil in the (masking) details
The Devil’s own face covering?
It’s been over a year and a half since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in the United States, and we’ve been starting to wonder what our good friend SARS-CoV-2 has left to give. The collective cynic/optimist in us figures that the insanity can’t last forever, right?
Maybe not forever, but …
A group of parents is suing the Central Bucks (Pa.) School District over school mask mandates, suggesting that the district has no legal authority to enforce such measures. Most of their arguments, Philadelphia Magazine says, are pretty standard stuff: Masks are causing depression, anxiety, and discomfort in their children; masks are a violation of their constitutional rights; and “masks are being used as a control mechanism over the population.”
There are some unusual claims, though. One of the parents, Shannon Harris, said that “wearing masks interferes with their religious duty to spread the word of God and forces them to participate in a satanic ritual,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Magazine decided to check on that “satanic ritual” claim by asking an expert, in this case a spokesperson for the Church of Satan. The Reverend Raul Antony said that “simply ‘wearing a mask’ is not a Satanic ritual, and anyone that genuinely thinks otherwise is a blithering idiot,” adding that the group’s rituals were available on its website.
COVID, you never let us down.
You’re the (hurricane) wind beneath my wings
Marriage isn’t easy. From finances to everyday stressors like work and children, maintaining a solid relationship is tough. Then a natural disaster shows up on top of everything else, and marriages actually improve, researchers found.
In a study published by Psychological Science, researchers surveyed 231 newlywed couples about the satisfaction of their marriage before and after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They found after the hurricane couples had a “significant boost” in the satisfaction of their relationship.
One would think something like this would create what researchers call a “stress spillover,” creating a decrease in relationship satisfaction. Destruction to your home or even displacement after a natural disaster seems pretty stressful. But, “a natural disaster can really put things in perspective. People realize how important their partner is to them when they are jolted out of the day-to-day stress of life,” said Hannah Williamson, PhD, the lead author of the study.
And although everyone saw an increase, the biggest jumps in relationship satisfaction belonged to the people who were most unhappy before the hurricane. Unfortunately, the researchers also found that the effects were only temporary and the dissatisfaction came back within a year.
Dr. Williamson thinks there may be something to these findings that can be beneficial from a therapy standpoint where “couples can shift their perspective in a similar way without having to go through a natural disaster.”
Let’s hope she’s right, because the alternative is to seek out a rampaging hurricane every time your relationship is on the rocks, and that just seems impractical after the second or third year.
Not-so-essential oils
Many people use essential oils as a way to unwind and relax. Stressed? Can’t sleep? There’s probably an essential oil for that. However, it seems like these days a lot of things we love and/or think are good for us have a side that’s not so.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman from Georgia died from a rare bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei. There have been three previous infections in Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas throughout 2021; two of the four infections were in children. Melioidosis, the disease caused by B. pseudomallei, is usually found in southeast Asia and isn’t obvious or easy to diagnose, especially in places like decidedly untropical Minnesota.
The Georgia case was the real break in this medical mystery, as the infection was traced back to a Walmart product called “Better Homes and Gardens Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones” (a very pithy name). The bacteria were in the lavender and chamomile scent. The CDC is investigating all other product scents, and Walmart has recalled all lots of the product.
If you’ve got that particular essential oil, it’s probably for the best that you stop using it. Don’t worry, we’re sure there’s plenty of other essential oil–infused aromatherapy room sprays with gemstones out there for your scent-based needs.
Welcome to the Ministry of Sleep-Deprived Walks
Walking is simple, right? You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’re walking out the door. Little kids can do it. Even zombies can walk, and they don’t even have brains.
Research from MIT and the University of São Paulo has shown that walking is a little trickier than we might think. One researcher in particular noticed that student volunteers tended to perform worse toward the end of semesters, as project deadlines and multiple exams crashed over their heads and they were deprived of solid sleep schedules.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, our intrepid walking researchers had a collection of students monitor their sleep patterns for 2 weeks; on average, the students got 6 hours per night, though some were able to compensate on weekends. On the final day of a 14-day period, some students pulled all-nighters while the rest were allowed to sleep as usual. Then all students performed a walking test involving keeping time with a metronome.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the students who performed all-nighters before being tested walked the worst, but between the other students, the ones who compensated for sleep deprivation on weekends did better than those who got 6 hours every night, despite getting a similar amount of sleep overall. This effect persisted even when the compensating students performed their walking tests late in the week, just before they got their weekend beauty sleep.
The moral of the story? Sleep is good, and you should get more of it. But if you can’t, sleep in on weekends. Science has given you permission. All those suburban dads looking to get their teenagers up at 8 in the morning must be sweating right now.
The Devil’s own face covering?
It’s been over a year and a half since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in the United States, and we’ve been starting to wonder what our good friend SARS-CoV-2 has left to give. The collective cynic/optimist in us figures that the insanity can’t last forever, right?
Maybe not forever, but …
A group of parents is suing the Central Bucks (Pa.) School District over school mask mandates, suggesting that the district has no legal authority to enforce such measures. Most of their arguments, Philadelphia Magazine says, are pretty standard stuff: Masks are causing depression, anxiety, and discomfort in their children; masks are a violation of their constitutional rights; and “masks are being used as a control mechanism over the population.”
There are some unusual claims, though. One of the parents, Shannon Harris, said that “wearing masks interferes with their religious duty to spread the word of God and forces them to participate in a satanic ritual,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Magazine decided to check on that “satanic ritual” claim by asking an expert, in this case a spokesperson for the Church of Satan. The Reverend Raul Antony said that “simply ‘wearing a mask’ is not a Satanic ritual, and anyone that genuinely thinks otherwise is a blithering idiot,” adding that the group’s rituals were available on its website.
COVID, you never let us down.
You’re the (hurricane) wind beneath my wings
Marriage isn’t easy. From finances to everyday stressors like work and children, maintaining a solid relationship is tough. Then a natural disaster shows up on top of everything else, and marriages actually improve, researchers found.
In a study published by Psychological Science, researchers surveyed 231 newlywed couples about the satisfaction of their marriage before and after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They found after the hurricane couples had a “significant boost” in the satisfaction of their relationship.
One would think something like this would create what researchers call a “stress spillover,” creating a decrease in relationship satisfaction. Destruction to your home or even displacement after a natural disaster seems pretty stressful. But, “a natural disaster can really put things in perspective. People realize how important their partner is to them when they are jolted out of the day-to-day stress of life,” said Hannah Williamson, PhD, the lead author of the study.
And although everyone saw an increase, the biggest jumps in relationship satisfaction belonged to the people who were most unhappy before the hurricane. Unfortunately, the researchers also found that the effects were only temporary and the dissatisfaction came back within a year.
Dr. Williamson thinks there may be something to these findings that can be beneficial from a therapy standpoint where “couples can shift their perspective in a similar way without having to go through a natural disaster.”
Let’s hope she’s right, because the alternative is to seek out a rampaging hurricane every time your relationship is on the rocks, and that just seems impractical after the second or third year.
Not-so-essential oils
Many people use essential oils as a way to unwind and relax. Stressed? Can’t sleep? There’s probably an essential oil for that. However, it seems like these days a lot of things we love and/or think are good for us have a side that’s not so.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman from Georgia died from a rare bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei. There have been three previous infections in Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas throughout 2021; two of the four infections were in children. Melioidosis, the disease caused by B. pseudomallei, is usually found in southeast Asia and isn’t obvious or easy to diagnose, especially in places like decidedly untropical Minnesota.
The Georgia case was the real break in this medical mystery, as the infection was traced back to a Walmart product called “Better Homes and Gardens Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones” (a very pithy name). The bacteria were in the lavender and chamomile scent. The CDC is investigating all other product scents, and Walmart has recalled all lots of the product.
If you’ve got that particular essential oil, it’s probably for the best that you stop using it. Don’t worry, we’re sure there’s plenty of other essential oil–infused aromatherapy room sprays with gemstones out there for your scent-based needs.
Welcome to the Ministry of Sleep-Deprived Walks
Walking is simple, right? You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’re walking out the door. Little kids can do it. Even zombies can walk, and they don’t even have brains.
Research from MIT and the University of São Paulo has shown that walking is a little trickier than we might think. One researcher in particular noticed that student volunteers tended to perform worse toward the end of semesters, as project deadlines and multiple exams crashed over their heads and they were deprived of solid sleep schedules.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, our intrepid walking researchers had a collection of students monitor their sleep patterns for 2 weeks; on average, the students got 6 hours per night, though some were able to compensate on weekends. On the final day of a 14-day period, some students pulled all-nighters while the rest were allowed to sleep as usual. Then all students performed a walking test involving keeping time with a metronome.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the students who performed all-nighters before being tested walked the worst, but between the other students, the ones who compensated for sleep deprivation on weekends did better than those who got 6 hours every night, despite getting a similar amount of sleep overall. This effect persisted even when the compensating students performed their walking tests late in the week, just before they got their weekend beauty sleep.
The moral of the story? Sleep is good, and you should get more of it. But if you can’t, sleep in on weekends. Science has given you permission. All those suburban dads looking to get their teenagers up at 8 in the morning must be sweating right now.
The Devil’s own face covering?
It’s been over a year and a half since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in the United States, and we’ve been starting to wonder what our good friend SARS-CoV-2 has left to give. The collective cynic/optimist in us figures that the insanity can’t last forever, right?
Maybe not forever, but …
A group of parents is suing the Central Bucks (Pa.) School District over school mask mandates, suggesting that the district has no legal authority to enforce such measures. Most of their arguments, Philadelphia Magazine says, are pretty standard stuff: Masks are causing depression, anxiety, and discomfort in their children; masks are a violation of their constitutional rights; and “masks are being used as a control mechanism over the population.”
There are some unusual claims, though. One of the parents, Shannon Harris, said that “wearing masks interferes with their religious duty to spread the word of God and forces them to participate in a satanic ritual,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Magazine decided to check on that “satanic ritual” claim by asking an expert, in this case a spokesperson for the Church of Satan. The Reverend Raul Antony said that “simply ‘wearing a mask’ is not a Satanic ritual, and anyone that genuinely thinks otherwise is a blithering idiot,” adding that the group’s rituals were available on its website.
COVID, you never let us down.
You’re the (hurricane) wind beneath my wings
Marriage isn’t easy. From finances to everyday stressors like work and children, maintaining a solid relationship is tough. Then a natural disaster shows up on top of everything else, and marriages actually improve, researchers found.
In a study published by Psychological Science, researchers surveyed 231 newlywed couples about the satisfaction of their marriage before and after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They found after the hurricane couples had a “significant boost” in the satisfaction of their relationship.
One would think something like this would create what researchers call a “stress spillover,” creating a decrease in relationship satisfaction. Destruction to your home or even displacement after a natural disaster seems pretty stressful. But, “a natural disaster can really put things in perspective. People realize how important their partner is to them when they are jolted out of the day-to-day stress of life,” said Hannah Williamson, PhD, the lead author of the study.
And although everyone saw an increase, the biggest jumps in relationship satisfaction belonged to the people who were most unhappy before the hurricane. Unfortunately, the researchers also found that the effects were only temporary and the dissatisfaction came back within a year.
Dr. Williamson thinks there may be something to these findings that can be beneficial from a therapy standpoint where “couples can shift their perspective in a similar way without having to go through a natural disaster.”
Let’s hope she’s right, because the alternative is to seek out a rampaging hurricane every time your relationship is on the rocks, and that just seems impractical after the second or third year.
Not-so-essential oils
Many people use essential oils as a way to unwind and relax. Stressed? Can’t sleep? There’s probably an essential oil for that. However, it seems like these days a lot of things we love and/or think are good for us have a side that’s not so.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman from Georgia died from a rare bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei. There have been three previous infections in Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas throughout 2021; two of the four infections were in children. Melioidosis, the disease caused by B. pseudomallei, is usually found in southeast Asia and isn’t obvious or easy to diagnose, especially in places like decidedly untropical Minnesota.
The Georgia case was the real break in this medical mystery, as the infection was traced back to a Walmart product called “Better Homes and Gardens Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones” (a very pithy name). The bacteria were in the lavender and chamomile scent. The CDC is investigating all other product scents, and Walmart has recalled all lots of the product.
If you’ve got that particular essential oil, it’s probably for the best that you stop using it. Don’t worry, we’re sure there’s plenty of other essential oil–infused aromatherapy room sprays with gemstones out there for your scent-based needs.
Welcome to the Ministry of Sleep-Deprived Walks
Walking is simple, right? You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’re walking out the door. Little kids can do it. Even zombies can walk, and they don’t even have brains.
Research from MIT and the University of São Paulo has shown that walking is a little trickier than we might think. One researcher in particular noticed that student volunteers tended to perform worse toward the end of semesters, as project deadlines and multiple exams crashed over their heads and they were deprived of solid sleep schedules.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, our intrepid walking researchers had a collection of students monitor their sleep patterns for 2 weeks; on average, the students got 6 hours per night, though some were able to compensate on weekends. On the final day of a 14-day period, some students pulled all-nighters while the rest were allowed to sleep as usual. Then all students performed a walking test involving keeping time with a metronome.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the students who performed all-nighters before being tested walked the worst, but between the other students, the ones who compensated for sleep deprivation on weekends did better than those who got 6 hours every night, despite getting a similar amount of sleep overall. This effect persisted even when the compensating students performed their walking tests late in the week, just before they got their weekend beauty sleep.
The moral of the story? Sleep is good, and you should get more of it. But if you can’t, sleep in on weekends. Science has given you permission. All those suburban dads looking to get their teenagers up at 8 in the morning must be sweating right now.
Transgender use of dermatologic procedures has strong gender tilt
, according to the results of a recent survey.
Transfeminine persons – those assigned male at birth – were much more likely to report a previous dermatologic procedure, compared with transmasculine respondents, by a margin of 64.9%-7.5%, Laura Ragmanauskaite, MD, and associates reported.
“Hair removal was the most frequently reported procedure type, with electrolysis being more common than laser hair removal,” they said, noting that “previous research on hair removal treatments among gender minority persons did not detect differences in the use of electrolysis and laser hair removal.”
Just under one-third of all respondents (32.9%) said that they had undergone electrolysis and 4.6% reported previous laser hair removal. For electrolysis, that works out to 59.4% of transfeminine and 6.1% of transmasculine respondents, while 9.1% of all transfeminine and no transmasculine persons had received laser hair removal, Dr. Ragmanauskaite of the department of dermatology, Emory University, Atlanta, and her coauthors said.
Those who had undergone gender-affirming surgery were significantly more likely to report electrolysis (78.6%) than were persons who had received no gender-affirming surgery or hormone therapy alone (47.4%), a statistically significant difference (P < .01). All of the other, less common procedures included in the online survey – 696 responses were received from 350 transfeminine and 346 transmasculine persons participating in the Study of Transition, Outcomes, and Gender – were reported more often by the transfeminine respondents. The procedure with the closest gender distribution was body contouring, reported by nine transfeminine and six transmasculine persons, the researchers said.
Use of dermal fillers was even less common (2.8% among all respondents, all transfeminine persons), with just 11 reporting having received silicone and 8 reporting having received collagen, although the survey did not ask about how the injections were obtained. In a previous study, the prevalence of illicit filler injection in transgender women was 16.9%, they pointed out.
These types of noninvasive, gender-affirming procedures “may contribute to higher levels of self-confidence and [reduce] gender dysphoria. Future studies should examine motivations, barriers, and optimal timing” for such procedures in transgender persons, Dr. Ragmanauskaite and associates wrote.
The authors reported that they had no relevant disclosures.
, according to the results of a recent survey.
Transfeminine persons – those assigned male at birth – were much more likely to report a previous dermatologic procedure, compared with transmasculine respondents, by a margin of 64.9%-7.5%, Laura Ragmanauskaite, MD, and associates reported.
“Hair removal was the most frequently reported procedure type, with electrolysis being more common than laser hair removal,” they said, noting that “previous research on hair removal treatments among gender minority persons did not detect differences in the use of electrolysis and laser hair removal.”
Just under one-third of all respondents (32.9%) said that they had undergone electrolysis and 4.6% reported previous laser hair removal. For electrolysis, that works out to 59.4% of transfeminine and 6.1% of transmasculine respondents, while 9.1% of all transfeminine and no transmasculine persons had received laser hair removal, Dr. Ragmanauskaite of the department of dermatology, Emory University, Atlanta, and her coauthors said.
Those who had undergone gender-affirming surgery were significantly more likely to report electrolysis (78.6%) than were persons who had received no gender-affirming surgery or hormone therapy alone (47.4%), a statistically significant difference (P < .01). All of the other, less common procedures included in the online survey – 696 responses were received from 350 transfeminine and 346 transmasculine persons participating in the Study of Transition, Outcomes, and Gender – were reported more often by the transfeminine respondents. The procedure with the closest gender distribution was body contouring, reported by nine transfeminine and six transmasculine persons, the researchers said.
Use of dermal fillers was even less common (2.8% among all respondents, all transfeminine persons), with just 11 reporting having received silicone and 8 reporting having received collagen, although the survey did not ask about how the injections were obtained. In a previous study, the prevalence of illicit filler injection in transgender women was 16.9%, they pointed out.
These types of noninvasive, gender-affirming procedures “may contribute to higher levels of self-confidence and [reduce] gender dysphoria. Future studies should examine motivations, barriers, and optimal timing” for such procedures in transgender persons, Dr. Ragmanauskaite and associates wrote.
The authors reported that they had no relevant disclosures.
, according to the results of a recent survey.
Transfeminine persons – those assigned male at birth – were much more likely to report a previous dermatologic procedure, compared with transmasculine respondents, by a margin of 64.9%-7.5%, Laura Ragmanauskaite, MD, and associates reported.
“Hair removal was the most frequently reported procedure type, with electrolysis being more common than laser hair removal,” they said, noting that “previous research on hair removal treatments among gender minority persons did not detect differences in the use of electrolysis and laser hair removal.”
Just under one-third of all respondents (32.9%) said that they had undergone electrolysis and 4.6% reported previous laser hair removal. For electrolysis, that works out to 59.4% of transfeminine and 6.1% of transmasculine respondents, while 9.1% of all transfeminine and no transmasculine persons had received laser hair removal, Dr. Ragmanauskaite of the department of dermatology, Emory University, Atlanta, and her coauthors said.
Those who had undergone gender-affirming surgery were significantly more likely to report electrolysis (78.6%) than were persons who had received no gender-affirming surgery or hormone therapy alone (47.4%), a statistically significant difference (P < .01). All of the other, less common procedures included in the online survey – 696 responses were received from 350 transfeminine and 346 transmasculine persons participating in the Study of Transition, Outcomes, and Gender – were reported more often by the transfeminine respondents. The procedure with the closest gender distribution was body contouring, reported by nine transfeminine and six transmasculine persons, the researchers said.
Use of dermal fillers was even less common (2.8% among all respondents, all transfeminine persons), with just 11 reporting having received silicone and 8 reporting having received collagen, although the survey did not ask about how the injections were obtained. In a previous study, the prevalence of illicit filler injection in transgender women was 16.9%, they pointed out.
These types of noninvasive, gender-affirming procedures “may contribute to higher levels of self-confidence and [reduce] gender dysphoria. Future studies should examine motivations, barriers, and optimal timing” for such procedures in transgender persons, Dr. Ragmanauskaite and associates wrote.
The authors reported that they had no relevant disclosures.
FROM DERMATOLOGIC SURGERY
The compass that points toward food
The new breakfast of champions
We love a good ranking system here at LOTME world headquarters, especially the food-based ones. Luckily for us (and our readers), a new study published in Nature Food offers a food-based ranking system.
Sadly, unlike the last food-related ranking we covered, the Food Compass doesn’t tell you how much life you gain or lose from each food you eat down to the precise minute. Instead, it favors a more simple rating system from 1 to 100, with healthier foods scoring higher, and even incorporates mixed foods, not just single ingredients. This makes it better at assessing and comparing food combinations, rather than trying to mix and match the many ingredients that go into even relatively simple recipes.
The top and bottom of the rankings contain the usual suspects. Legumes and nuts, at 78.6, had the highest average score among the broad food groups, followed by fruits and then vegetables. Rounding out the bottom were sweets and savory snacks at 16.4. Among the individual foods, there were perfect scores in both directions: 100 for raw raspberries, while instant noodle soup and nonchocolate, ready-to-eat, nonfat pudding (very specific there) each earned a 1.
There are a few surprises in between. Nonfat cappuccino received a green light from the investigators, great news for the coffee drinkers out there. A serving of sweet potato chips scored better than a simple grilled chicken breast, and a slice of pizza, loaded up with extra meat and a thick crust, is still more nutritious than a bowl of corn flakes.
Neither is good for you, of course, but we’re still going to take this as a sign that pizza is the ideal breakfast food. Add that to your morning coffee, and you’re ready to start the day. Move over Wheaties, there’s a new breakfast of champions.
COVID-19 resisters, please step forward
Some people have all the luck with good genes, both inside and out.
Genetically speaking, humans are 99.9% the same, but that 0.1% is where things get interesting. Because of that 0.1% difference, some people are more likely to contract diseases such as HIV, while others might be more resistant. These small differences in genetic code could be the key to finding treatments for COVID-19.
“The introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to a naive population, on a global scale, has provided yet another demonstration of the remarkable clinical variability between individuals in the course of infection, ranging from asymptomatic infections to life-threatening disease,” the researchers said in Nature Immunology.
The investigators have been scouring the world to find people who might be resistant to SARS-CoV-2 and have enrolled over 400 individuals in a “dedicated resistance study cohort,” according to ScienceAlert.
The investigators are looking at households in which families were infected but one member did not show severe symptoms, or for individuals who have been around the virus multiple times and haven’t contracted it. They are also looking at blood types.
Enrollment is ongoing, so if you’ve been in contact with COVID-19 multiple times and have not gotten sick, scientists would like to hear from you.
Better living through parasitization
How would you like to triple your life span, while maintaining a youthful appearance and gaining special social standing and privileges?
Sounds pretty good, right, so what’s the catch? Well, you have to be infected with a tapeworm ... and you have to be an ant.
If you are an ant, here’s the deal: Workers of the species Temnothorax nylanderi that have tapeworms live much longer than uninfected workers, and while living out those longer lives they do less work and receive gifts of food.
In a study conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, infected ants’ metabolic rates and lipid levels were similar to those of younger ants, and they appeared to remain in a permanent juvenile stage as a result of the infection, the investigators reported.
They tracked Temnothorax colonies for 3 years, at which point 95% of the uninfected workers had died but over half of the infected ants were still alive. Pretty great, right? Wrong. There was no joy in antville, for the uninfected workers had struck out. “Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free,” according to an article in the Atlantic.
Does this situation seem just a wee bit familiar? A small group lives longer, healthier lives and enjoys special privileges while the majority of that society works harder to support them? We’ll put it into the form of a chicken-and-egg argument: Which came first, the tapeworms or the one-percenters?
Laughing the pandemic stress away
Doomscrolling on social media has become one of the world’s favorite pastimes during the pandemic, but research shows that those memes about COVID-19 might combat the doom and gloom of the outside world.
A study recently published in Psychology of Popular Media showed that viewing memes, specifically those that were COVID-19 related, actually lessened the stress of the pandemic.
The researchers conducted a survey of 748 people aged 18-88 years. Each participant viewed three memes with text or three memes with text but no images. All three memes had similar cuteness levels (baby or adult), subject (animal or human), and caption (COVID-19–related or not). The participants were then asked to report on their stress levels and feelings before and after the memes.
The people who looked at memes felt less stressed and a higher humor level, especially the participants who received the COVID-19 memes. Study Finds said that they had more “pandemic-coping confidence” than those who got regular memes.
“While the World Health Organization recommended that people avoid too much COVID-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about COVID-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic,” lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, said in a written statement. “The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer and therefore better able to pay attention to the underlying messages related to health threats.”
So if you think you’ve been wasting time looking at memes during this pandemic, think again. It actually might keep you sane. Keep on scrolling!
Giving the gift of stress reduction
It’s a big week here at LOTME. You’ve just read our 100th edition, and to help celebrate that milestone – along with Count Your Buttons Day, Celebration of the Mind Day, and the International Day of the Nacho – we’re presenting an extra-special bonus feature, courtesy of Sad and Useless: The most depressive humor site on the Internet.
We hope you’ll stop your doomscrolling long enough to enjoy this stress-reducing meme. Thanks for reading!
The new breakfast of champions
We love a good ranking system here at LOTME world headquarters, especially the food-based ones. Luckily for us (and our readers), a new study published in Nature Food offers a food-based ranking system.
Sadly, unlike the last food-related ranking we covered, the Food Compass doesn’t tell you how much life you gain or lose from each food you eat down to the precise minute. Instead, it favors a more simple rating system from 1 to 100, with healthier foods scoring higher, and even incorporates mixed foods, not just single ingredients. This makes it better at assessing and comparing food combinations, rather than trying to mix and match the many ingredients that go into even relatively simple recipes.
The top and bottom of the rankings contain the usual suspects. Legumes and nuts, at 78.6, had the highest average score among the broad food groups, followed by fruits and then vegetables. Rounding out the bottom were sweets and savory snacks at 16.4. Among the individual foods, there were perfect scores in both directions: 100 for raw raspberries, while instant noodle soup and nonchocolate, ready-to-eat, nonfat pudding (very specific there) each earned a 1.
There are a few surprises in between. Nonfat cappuccino received a green light from the investigators, great news for the coffee drinkers out there. A serving of sweet potato chips scored better than a simple grilled chicken breast, and a slice of pizza, loaded up with extra meat and a thick crust, is still more nutritious than a bowl of corn flakes.
Neither is good for you, of course, but we’re still going to take this as a sign that pizza is the ideal breakfast food. Add that to your morning coffee, and you’re ready to start the day. Move over Wheaties, there’s a new breakfast of champions.
COVID-19 resisters, please step forward
Some people have all the luck with good genes, both inside and out.
Genetically speaking, humans are 99.9% the same, but that 0.1% is where things get interesting. Because of that 0.1% difference, some people are more likely to contract diseases such as HIV, while others might be more resistant. These small differences in genetic code could be the key to finding treatments for COVID-19.
“The introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to a naive population, on a global scale, has provided yet another demonstration of the remarkable clinical variability between individuals in the course of infection, ranging from asymptomatic infections to life-threatening disease,” the researchers said in Nature Immunology.
The investigators have been scouring the world to find people who might be resistant to SARS-CoV-2 and have enrolled over 400 individuals in a “dedicated resistance study cohort,” according to ScienceAlert.
The investigators are looking at households in which families were infected but one member did not show severe symptoms, or for individuals who have been around the virus multiple times and haven’t contracted it. They are also looking at blood types.
Enrollment is ongoing, so if you’ve been in contact with COVID-19 multiple times and have not gotten sick, scientists would like to hear from you.
Better living through parasitization
How would you like to triple your life span, while maintaining a youthful appearance and gaining special social standing and privileges?
Sounds pretty good, right, so what’s the catch? Well, you have to be infected with a tapeworm ... and you have to be an ant.
If you are an ant, here’s the deal: Workers of the species Temnothorax nylanderi that have tapeworms live much longer than uninfected workers, and while living out those longer lives they do less work and receive gifts of food.
In a study conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, infected ants’ metabolic rates and lipid levels were similar to those of younger ants, and they appeared to remain in a permanent juvenile stage as a result of the infection, the investigators reported.
They tracked Temnothorax colonies for 3 years, at which point 95% of the uninfected workers had died but over half of the infected ants were still alive. Pretty great, right? Wrong. There was no joy in antville, for the uninfected workers had struck out. “Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free,” according to an article in the Atlantic.
Does this situation seem just a wee bit familiar? A small group lives longer, healthier lives and enjoys special privileges while the majority of that society works harder to support them? We’ll put it into the form of a chicken-and-egg argument: Which came first, the tapeworms or the one-percenters?
Laughing the pandemic stress away
Doomscrolling on social media has become one of the world’s favorite pastimes during the pandemic, but research shows that those memes about COVID-19 might combat the doom and gloom of the outside world.
A study recently published in Psychology of Popular Media showed that viewing memes, specifically those that were COVID-19 related, actually lessened the stress of the pandemic.
The researchers conducted a survey of 748 people aged 18-88 years. Each participant viewed three memes with text or three memes with text but no images. All three memes had similar cuteness levels (baby or adult), subject (animal or human), and caption (COVID-19–related or not). The participants were then asked to report on their stress levels and feelings before and after the memes.
The people who looked at memes felt less stressed and a higher humor level, especially the participants who received the COVID-19 memes. Study Finds said that they had more “pandemic-coping confidence” than those who got regular memes.
“While the World Health Organization recommended that people avoid too much COVID-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about COVID-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic,” lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, said in a written statement. “The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer and therefore better able to pay attention to the underlying messages related to health threats.”
So if you think you’ve been wasting time looking at memes during this pandemic, think again. It actually might keep you sane. Keep on scrolling!
Giving the gift of stress reduction
It’s a big week here at LOTME. You’ve just read our 100th edition, and to help celebrate that milestone – along with Count Your Buttons Day, Celebration of the Mind Day, and the International Day of the Nacho – we’re presenting an extra-special bonus feature, courtesy of Sad and Useless: The most depressive humor site on the Internet.
We hope you’ll stop your doomscrolling long enough to enjoy this stress-reducing meme. Thanks for reading!
The new breakfast of champions
We love a good ranking system here at LOTME world headquarters, especially the food-based ones. Luckily for us (and our readers), a new study published in Nature Food offers a food-based ranking system.
Sadly, unlike the last food-related ranking we covered, the Food Compass doesn’t tell you how much life you gain or lose from each food you eat down to the precise minute. Instead, it favors a more simple rating system from 1 to 100, with healthier foods scoring higher, and even incorporates mixed foods, not just single ingredients. This makes it better at assessing and comparing food combinations, rather than trying to mix and match the many ingredients that go into even relatively simple recipes.
The top and bottom of the rankings contain the usual suspects. Legumes and nuts, at 78.6, had the highest average score among the broad food groups, followed by fruits and then vegetables. Rounding out the bottom were sweets and savory snacks at 16.4. Among the individual foods, there were perfect scores in both directions: 100 for raw raspberries, while instant noodle soup and nonchocolate, ready-to-eat, nonfat pudding (very specific there) each earned a 1.
There are a few surprises in between. Nonfat cappuccino received a green light from the investigators, great news for the coffee drinkers out there. A serving of sweet potato chips scored better than a simple grilled chicken breast, and a slice of pizza, loaded up with extra meat and a thick crust, is still more nutritious than a bowl of corn flakes.
Neither is good for you, of course, but we’re still going to take this as a sign that pizza is the ideal breakfast food. Add that to your morning coffee, and you’re ready to start the day. Move over Wheaties, there’s a new breakfast of champions.
COVID-19 resisters, please step forward
Some people have all the luck with good genes, both inside and out.
Genetically speaking, humans are 99.9% the same, but that 0.1% is where things get interesting. Because of that 0.1% difference, some people are more likely to contract diseases such as HIV, while others might be more resistant. These small differences in genetic code could be the key to finding treatments for COVID-19.
“The introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to a naive population, on a global scale, has provided yet another demonstration of the remarkable clinical variability between individuals in the course of infection, ranging from asymptomatic infections to life-threatening disease,” the researchers said in Nature Immunology.
The investigators have been scouring the world to find people who might be resistant to SARS-CoV-2 and have enrolled over 400 individuals in a “dedicated resistance study cohort,” according to ScienceAlert.
The investigators are looking at households in which families were infected but one member did not show severe symptoms, or for individuals who have been around the virus multiple times and haven’t contracted it. They are also looking at blood types.
Enrollment is ongoing, so if you’ve been in contact with COVID-19 multiple times and have not gotten sick, scientists would like to hear from you.
Better living through parasitization
How would you like to triple your life span, while maintaining a youthful appearance and gaining special social standing and privileges?
Sounds pretty good, right, so what’s the catch? Well, you have to be infected with a tapeworm ... and you have to be an ant.
If you are an ant, here’s the deal: Workers of the species Temnothorax nylanderi that have tapeworms live much longer than uninfected workers, and while living out those longer lives they do less work and receive gifts of food.
In a study conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, infected ants’ metabolic rates and lipid levels were similar to those of younger ants, and they appeared to remain in a permanent juvenile stage as a result of the infection, the investigators reported.
They tracked Temnothorax colonies for 3 years, at which point 95% of the uninfected workers had died but over half of the infected ants were still alive. Pretty great, right? Wrong. There was no joy in antville, for the uninfected workers had struck out. “Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free,” according to an article in the Atlantic.
Does this situation seem just a wee bit familiar? A small group lives longer, healthier lives and enjoys special privileges while the majority of that society works harder to support them? We’ll put it into the form of a chicken-and-egg argument: Which came first, the tapeworms or the one-percenters?
Laughing the pandemic stress away
Doomscrolling on social media has become one of the world’s favorite pastimes during the pandemic, but research shows that those memes about COVID-19 might combat the doom and gloom of the outside world.
A study recently published in Psychology of Popular Media showed that viewing memes, specifically those that were COVID-19 related, actually lessened the stress of the pandemic.
The researchers conducted a survey of 748 people aged 18-88 years. Each participant viewed three memes with text or three memes with text but no images. All three memes had similar cuteness levels (baby or adult), subject (animal or human), and caption (COVID-19–related or not). The participants were then asked to report on their stress levels and feelings before and after the memes.
The people who looked at memes felt less stressed and a higher humor level, especially the participants who received the COVID-19 memes. Study Finds said that they had more “pandemic-coping confidence” than those who got regular memes.
“While the World Health Organization recommended that people avoid too much COVID-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about COVID-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic,” lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, said in a written statement. “The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer and therefore better able to pay attention to the underlying messages related to health threats.”
So if you think you’ve been wasting time looking at memes during this pandemic, think again. It actually might keep you sane. Keep on scrolling!
Giving the gift of stress reduction
It’s a big week here at LOTME. You’ve just read our 100th edition, and to help celebrate that milestone – along with Count Your Buttons Day, Celebration of the Mind Day, and the International Day of the Nacho – we’re presenting an extra-special bonus feature, courtesy of Sad and Useless: The most depressive humor site on the Internet.
We hope you’ll stop your doomscrolling long enough to enjoy this stress-reducing meme. Thanks for reading!
Children and COVID: Vaccinations lower than ever as cases continue to drop
As the COVID-19 vaccine heads toward approval for children under age 12 years, the number of older children receiving it dropped for the 10th consecutive week, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over 47% of all children aged 12-17 years – that’s close to 12 million eligible individuals – have not received even one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and less than 44% (about 11.1 million) were fully vaccinated as of Oct. 18, the CDC reported on its COVID Data Tracker.
, when eligibility expanded to include 12- to 15-year-olds, according to the CDC data, which also show that weekly vaccinations have never been lower.
Fortunately, the decline in new cases also continued, as the national total fell for a 6th straight week. There were more than 130,000 child cases reported during the week of Oct. 8-14, compared with 148,000 the previous week and the high of almost 252,000 in late August/early September, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association said in their weekly COVID-19 report.
That brings the cumulative count to 6.18 million, with children accounting for 16.4% of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic. For the week of Oct. 8-14, children represented 25.5% of all COVID-19 cases in the 46 states with up-to-date online dashboards, the AAP and CHA said, noting that New York has never reported age ranges for cases and that Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas stopped reporting over the summer.
Current data indicate that child cases in California now exceed 671,000, more than any other state, followed by Florida with 439,000 (the state defines a child as someone aged 0-14 years) and Illinois with 301,000. Vermont has the highest proportion of COVID-19 cases occurring in children (24.3%), with Alaska (24.1%) and South Carolina (23.2%) just behind. The highest rate of cases – 15,569 per 100,000 children – can be found in South Carolina, while the lowest is in Hawaii (4,838 per 100,000), the AAP and CHA reported.
The total number of COVID-related deaths in children is 681 as of Oct. 18, according to the CDC, with the AAP/CHA reporting 558 as of Oct. 14, based on data from 45 states, New York City, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The CDC reports 65,655 admissions since Aug. 1, 2020, in children aged 0-17 years, and the AAP/CHA tally 23,582 since May 5, 2020, among children in 24 states and New York City.
As the COVID-19 vaccine heads toward approval for children under age 12 years, the number of older children receiving it dropped for the 10th consecutive week, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over 47% of all children aged 12-17 years – that’s close to 12 million eligible individuals – have not received even one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and less than 44% (about 11.1 million) were fully vaccinated as of Oct. 18, the CDC reported on its COVID Data Tracker.
, when eligibility expanded to include 12- to 15-year-olds, according to the CDC data, which also show that weekly vaccinations have never been lower.
Fortunately, the decline in new cases also continued, as the national total fell for a 6th straight week. There were more than 130,000 child cases reported during the week of Oct. 8-14, compared with 148,000 the previous week and the high of almost 252,000 in late August/early September, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association said in their weekly COVID-19 report.
That brings the cumulative count to 6.18 million, with children accounting for 16.4% of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic. For the week of Oct. 8-14, children represented 25.5% of all COVID-19 cases in the 46 states with up-to-date online dashboards, the AAP and CHA said, noting that New York has never reported age ranges for cases and that Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas stopped reporting over the summer.
Current data indicate that child cases in California now exceed 671,000, more than any other state, followed by Florida with 439,000 (the state defines a child as someone aged 0-14 years) and Illinois with 301,000. Vermont has the highest proportion of COVID-19 cases occurring in children (24.3%), with Alaska (24.1%) and South Carolina (23.2%) just behind. The highest rate of cases – 15,569 per 100,000 children – can be found in South Carolina, while the lowest is in Hawaii (4,838 per 100,000), the AAP and CHA reported.
The total number of COVID-related deaths in children is 681 as of Oct. 18, according to the CDC, with the AAP/CHA reporting 558 as of Oct. 14, based on data from 45 states, New York City, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The CDC reports 65,655 admissions since Aug. 1, 2020, in children aged 0-17 years, and the AAP/CHA tally 23,582 since May 5, 2020, among children in 24 states and New York City.
As the COVID-19 vaccine heads toward approval for children under age 12 years, the number of older children receiving it dropped for the 10th consecutive week, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over 47% of all children aged 12-17 years – that’s close to 12 million eligible individuals – have not received even one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and less than 44% (about 11.1 million) were fully vaccinated as of Oct. 18, the CDC reported on its COVID Data Tracker.
, when eligibility expanded to include 12- to 15-year-olds, according to the CDC data, which also show that weekly vaccinations have never been lower.
Fortunately, the decline in new cases also continued, as the national total fell for a 6th straight week. There were more than 130,000 child cases reported during the week of Oct. 8-14, compared with 148,000 the previous week and the high of almost 252,000 in late August/early September, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association said in their weekly COVID-19 report.
That brings the cumulative count to 6.18 million, with children accounting for 16.4% of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic. For the week of Oct. 8-14, children represented 25.5% of all COVID-19 cases in the 46 states with up-to-date online dashboards, the AAP and CHA said, noting that New York has never reported age ranges for cases and that Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas stopped reporting over the summer.
Current data indicate that child cases in California now exceed 671,000, more than any other state, followed by Florida with 439,000 (the state defines a child as someone aged 0-14 years) and Illinois with 301,000. Vermont has the highest proportion of COVID-19 cases occurring in children (24.3%), with Alaska (24.1%) and South Carolina (23.2%) just behind. The highest rate of cases – 15,569 per 100,000 children – can be found in South Carolina, while the lowest is in Hawaii (4,838 per 100,000), the AAP and CHA reported.
The total number of COVID-related deaths in children is 681 as of Oct. 18, according to the CDC, with the AAP/CHA reporting 558 as of Oct. 14, based on data from 45 states, New York City, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The CDC reports 65,655 admissions since Aug. 1, 2020, in children aged 0-17 years, and the AAP/CHA tally 23,582 since May 5, 2020, among children in 24 states and New York City.
Stay tuned for CSI: Olive oil
Cracking down on food fraud
How do you know the olive oil in your pantry is from Greece? Or that the avocados on your toast are from Mexico? The label, right? Well, maybe not. False claims of origin are a huge problem in the food industry, costing over $30 billion in economic damage annually.
Fear not, citizens, because botanists are on the job, and they’ve found a cheaper and more efficient way to expose that non-Greek olive oil.
How? Florian Cueni, PhD, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and associates developed a new model to simulate oxygen isotope ratios in plants from a specific region, based on the temperature, precipitation, growing season information, and humidity data. Previously, botanists had to collect reference data from the claimed origin country and from other regions to validate where the product actually came from.
“With minor adjustments to the parameters, our model can be used to determine all plant products,” said senior investigator Ansgar Kahmen. This can open up the door for even more plant forensics, including drug confiscations and illegal timber logging, with information that will hold up in court.
Why pay Greek-olive prices for olives from California?
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to unhelpful online reviews
And reading angry online reviews leads to hate and suffering. We may have co-opted Master Yoda’s wise words ever so slightly, but anyone who’s done any shopping online (so everyone) knows that the review section of any product can be downright villainous. Do these reviews affect what we buy?
The angry online product review was the subject of a recent study published in MIS Quarterly. In a series of experiments, participants were shown a series of realistic online reviews with varying amounts of anger but with similar amounts of information. After reading the reviews, participants rated helpfulness, their personal opinion of the product/retailer, and whether or not they would buy the product.
Participants overwhelmingly rated calmly written reviews as more helpful than angrily written ones. One would expect, then, that those unhelpful angry reviews would have little effect on the participant’s view or willingness to buy a product, but the study investigators found the opposite. Reading angry reviews made the participants more likely to reject the product, even though they didn’t think the angry review was useful. And when you think about it, it does make sense. Anger means drama, and we can’t resist a juicy bit of drama.
So while we should all aspire to be Yoda and rise above anger and hatred, in reality we seem to be channeling Emperor Palpatine. We let the hate flow through us, and in our anger, we ignore perfectly good products. On the plus side, now we can shoot lightning out of our hands, so that’s pretty cool.
Health care is heading to the hall of fame
We couldn’t be happier here at LOTME because it’s that time of year again.
No, we’re not talking about Healthcare Security and Safety Week or National Metric Week, although those are both kind of important. Hmm, maybe we should talk about health care security or the metric system. After all, in this country, medicine is one of the metric system’s biggest customers. And who doesn’t love picograms? They’re the unit-of-measurement equivalent of a koala.
So we’re doing the metric system, then? Nah.
We’re excited because the 2022 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame were just announced, and, as usual, the world of health care is well represented.
First up is the surprisingly relevant (thanks to the party guest that won’t leave, SARS-CoV-2) pair of Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, who worked together in the early 2000s to modify mRNA “so it could avoid immediate immune detection, remain active longer and efficiently instruct cells to create antigens to protect against severe disease.” Their discoveries eventually led to the use of modified mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The second, albeit posthumous, physician-inductee is Patricia Bath, MD, who was the first Black female physician to receive a U.S. patent for a medical invention. The laserphaco device and technique to remove cataracts “performed all steps of cataract removal: making the incision, destroying the lens, and vacuuming out the fractured pieces.”
Two other inductees have somewhat tenuous connections to medical care. Lonnie Johnson invented the Super Soaker, a powerful squirt gun that has been criticized by psychologists for encouraging violence, and Carl Benz invented the automobile, which sort of means he invented the ambulance, so there you go.
The induction ceremony takes place on May 5, 2022, in Washington, DC. If you’re attending the black-tie dinner at The Anthem, let us know and we’ll split an Uber. It’s our only night to be fancy.
Cracking down on food fraud
How do you know the olive oil in your pantry is from Greece? Or that the avocados on your toast are from Mexico? The label, right? Well, maybe not. False claims of origin are a huge problem in the food industry, costing over $30 billion in economic damage annually.
Fear not, citizens, because botanists are on the job, and they’ve found a cheaper and more efficient way to expose that non-Greek olive oil.
How? Florian Cueni, PhD, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and associates developed a new model to simulate oxygen isotope ratios in plants from a specific region, based on the temperature, precipitation, growing season information, and humidity data. Previously, botanists had to collect reference data from the claimed origin country and from other regions to validate where the product actually came from.
“With minor adjustments to the parameters, our model can be used to determine all plant products,” said senior investigator Ansgar Kahmen. This can open up the door for even more plant forensics, including drug confiscations and illegal timber logging, with information that will hold up in court.
Why pay Greek-olive prices for olives from California?
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to unhelpful online reviews
And reading angry online reviews leads to hate and suffering. We may have co-opted Master Yoda’s wise words ever so slightly, but anyone who’s done any shopping online (so everyone) knows that the review section of any product can be downright villainous. Do these reviews affect what we buy?
The angry online product review was the subject of a recent study published in MIS Quarterly. In a series of experiments, participants were shown a series of realistic online reviews with varying amounts of anger but with similar amounts of information. After reading the reviews, participants rated helpfulness, their personal opinion of the product/retailer, and whether or not they would buy the product.
Participants overwhelmingly rated calmly written reviews as more helpful than angrily written ones. One would expect, then, that those unhelpful angry reviews would have little effect on the participant’s view or willingness to buy a product, but the study investigators found the opposite. Reading angry reviews made the participants more likely to reject the product, even though they didn’t think the angry review was useful. And when you think about it, it does make sense. Anger means drama, and we can’t resist a juicy bit of drama.
So while we should all aspire to be Yoda and rise above anger and hatred, in reality we seem to be channeling Emperor Palpatine. We let the hate flow through us, and in our anger, we ignore perfectly good products. On the plus side, now we can shoot lightning out of our hands, so that’s pretty cool.
Health care is heading to the hall of fame
We couldn’t be happier here at LOTME because it’s that time of year again.
No, we’re not talking about Healthcare Security and Safety Week or National Metric Week, although those are both kind of important. Hmm, maybe we should talk about health care security or the metric system. After all, in this country, medicine is one of the metric system’s biggest customers. And who doesn’t love picograms? They’re the unit-of-measurement equivalent of a koala.
So we’re doing the metric system, then? Nah.
We’re excited because the 2022 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame were just announced, and, as usual, the world of health care is well represented.
First up is the surprisingly relevant (thanks to the party guest that won’t leave, SARS-CoV-2) pair of Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, who worked together in the early 2000s to modify mRNA “so it could avoid immediate immune detection, remain active longer and efficiently instruct cells to create antigens to protect against severe disease.” Their discoveries eventually led to the use of modified mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The second, albeit posthumous, physician-inductee is Patricia Bath, MD, who was the first Black female physician to receive a U.S. patent for a medical invention. The laserphaco device and technique to remove cataracts “performed all steps of cataract removal: making the incision, destroying the lens, and vacuuming out the fractured pieces.”
Two other inductees have somewhat tenuous connections to medical care. Lonnie Johnson invented the Super Soaker, a powerful squirt gun that has been criticized by psychologists for encouraging violence, and Carl Benz invented the automobile, which sort of means he invented the ambulance, so there you go.
The induction ceremony takes place on May 5, 2022, in Washington, DC. If you’re attending the black-tie dinner at The Anthem, let us know and we’ll split an Uber. It’s our only night to be fancy.
Cracking down on food fraud
How do you know the olive oil in your pantry is from Greece? Or that the avocados on your toast are from Mexico? The label, right? Well, maybe not. False claims of origin are a huge problem in the food industry, costing over $30 billion in economic damage annually.
Fear not, citizens, because botanists are on the job, and they’ve found a cheaper and more efficient way to expose that non-Greek olive oil.
How? Florian Cueni, PhD, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and associates developed a new model to simulate oxygen isotope ratios in plants from a specific region, based on the temperature, precipitation, growing season information, and humidity data. Previously, botanists had to collect reference data from the claimed origin country and from other regions to validate where the product actually came from.
“With minor adjustments to the parameters, our model can be used to determine all plant products,” said senior investigator Ansgar Kahmen. This can open up the door for even more plant forensics, including drug confiscations and illegal timber logging, with information that will hold up in court.
Why pay Greek-olive prices for olives from California?
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to unhelpful online reviews
And reading angry online reviews leads to hate and suffering. We may have co-opted Master Yoda’s wise words ever so slightly, but anyone who’s done any shopping online (so everyone) knows that the review section of any product can be downright villainous. Do these reviews affect what we buy?
The angry online product review was the subject of a recent study published in MIS Quarterly. In a series of experiments, participants were shown a series of realistic online reviews with varying amounts of anger but with similar amounts of information. After reading the reviews, participants rated helpfulness, their personal opinion of the product/retailer, and whether or not they would buy the product.
Participants overwhelmingly rated calmly written reviews as more helpful than angrily written ones. One would expect, then, that those unhelpful angry reviews would have little effect on the participant’s view or willingness to buy a product, but the study investigators found the opposite. Reading angry reviews made the participants more likely to reject the product, even though they didn’t think the angry review was useful. And when you think about it, it does make sense. Anger means drama, and we can’t resist a juicy bit of drama.
So while we should all aspire to be Yoda and rise above anger and hatred, in reality we seem to be channeling Emperor Palpatine. We let the hate flow through us, and in our anger, we ignore perfectly good products. On the plus side, now we can shoot lightning out of our hands, so that’s pretty cool.
Health care is heading to the hall of fame
We couldn’t be happier here at LOTME because it’s that time of year again.
No, we’re not talking about Healthcare Security and Safety Week or National Metric Week, although those are both kind of important. Hmm, maybe we should talk about health care security or the metric system. After all, in this country, medicine is one of the metric system’s biggest customers. And who doesn’t love picograms? They’re the unit-of-measurement equivalent of a koala.
So we’re doing the metric system, then? Nah.
We’re excited because the 2022 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame were just announced, and, as usual, the world of health care is well represented.
First up is the surprisingly relevant (thanks to the party guest that won’t leave, SARS-CoV-2) pair of Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, who worked together in the early 2000s to modify mRNA “so it could avoid immediate immune detection, remain active longer and efficiently instruct cells to create antigens to protect against severe disease.” Their discoveries eventually led to the use of modified mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The second, albeit posthumous, physician-inductee is Patricia Bath, MD, who was the first Black female physician to receive a U.S. patent for a medical invention. The laserphaco device and technique to remove cataracts “performed all steps of cataract removal: making the incision, destroying the lens, and vacuuming out the fractured pieces.”
Two other inductees have somewhat tenuous connections to medical care. Lonnie Johnson invented the Super Soaker, a powerful squirt gun that has been criticized by psychologists for encouraging violence, and Carl Benz invented the automobile, which sort of means he invented the ambulance, so there you go.
The induction ceremony takes place on May 5, 2022, in Washington, DC. If you’re attending the black-tie dinner at The Anthem, let us know and we’ll split an Uber. It’s our only night to be fancy.
Children and COVID-19: U.S. adds latest million cases in record time
The United States just passed the 6-million mark in COVID-19 cases among children, with the last million cases taking less time to record than any of the first five, according to new data from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.
The five-millionth case was reported during the week of Aug. 27 to Sept. 2, and case number 6 million came during the week of Oct. 1-7, just 5 weeks later, compared with the 6 weeks it took to go from 1 million to 2 million last November and December, the AAP and CHA said in their weekly COVID-19 report.
New cases continued to drop, however, and that weekly count was down by 14.6% from the previous week and by 41.1% from the peak of almost 252,000 reached in early September, the two groups said while also noting limitations to the data, such as three states (Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas) that are no longer updating their COVID-19 dashboards.
Other metrics show similar drops in recent weeks. Among children aged 0-11 years, emergency department visits involving a COVID-19 diagnosis dropped from 4.1% of all ED visits in late August to 1.4% of ED visits on Oct. 6. ED visits with a COVID-19 diagnosis fell from a peak of 8.5% on Aug. 22 to 1.5% on Oct. 6 for 12- to 15-year-olds and from 8.5% to 1.5% in those aged 16-17 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The rate of new hospital admissions for children aged 0-17 years was down to 0.26 per 100,000 population on Oct. 9 after reaching 0.51 per 100,000 on Sept. 4. Hospitalizations in children totaled just over 64,000 from Aug. 1, 2020, to Oct. 9, 2021, which is just over 2% of all COVID-19–related admissions over that time period, the CDC said on its COVID Data Tracker.
That pattern, unfortunately, also applies to vaccinations. “The number of children receiving their first COVID-19 vaccine this week [Sept. 30 to Oct. 6], about 156,000, was the lowest number since vaccines were available,” the AAP said in a separate report on vaccination trends, adding that “the number of children receiving their first dose has steadily declined from 8 weeks ago when 586,000 children received their initial dose the week ending Aug. 11.”
The United States just passed the 6-million mark in COVID-19 cases among children, with the last million cases taking less time to record than any of the first five, according to new data from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.
The five-millionth case was reported during the week of Aug. 27 to Sept. 2, and case number 6 million came during the week of Oct. 1-7, just 5 weeks later, compared with the 6 weeks it took to go from 1 million to 2 million last November and December, the AAP and CHA said in their weekly COVID-19 report.
New cases continued to drop, however, and that weekly count was down by 14.6% from the previous week and by 41.1% from the peak of almost 252,000 reached in early September, the two groups said while also noting limitations to the data, such as three states (Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas) that are no longer updating their COVID-19 dashboards.
Other metrics show similar drops in recent weeks. Among children aged 0-11 years, emergency department visits involving a COVID-19 diagnosis dropped from 4.1% of all ED visits in late August to 1.4% of ED visits on Oct. 6. ED visits with a COVID-19 diagnosis fell from a peak of 8.5% on Aug. 22 to 1.5% on Oct. 6 for 12- to 15-year-olds and from 8.5% to 1.5% in those aged 16-17 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The rate of new hospital admissions for children aged 0-17 years was down to 0.26 per 100,000 population on Oct. 9 after reaching 0.51 per 100,000 on Sept. 4. Hospitalizations in children totaled just over 64,000 from Aug. 1, 2020, to Oct. 9, 2021, which is just over 2% of all COVID-19–related admissions over that time period, the CDC said on its COVID Data Tracker.
That pattern, unfortunately, also applies to vaccinations. “The number of children receiving their first COVID-19 vaccine this week [Sept. 30 to Oct. 6], about 156,000, was the lowest number since vaccines were available,” the AAP said in a separate report on vaccination trends, adding that “the number of children receiving their first dose has steadily declined from 8 weeks ago when 586,000 children received their initial dose the week ending Aug. 11.”
The United States just passed the 6-million mark in COVID-19 cases among children, with the last million cases taking less time to record than any of the first five, according to new data from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.
The five-millionth case was reported during the week of Aug. 27 to Sept. 2, and case number 6 million came during the week of Oct. 1-7, just 5 weeks later, compared with the 6 weeks it took to go from 1 million to 2 million last November and December, the AAP and CHA said in their weekly COVID-19 report.
New cases continued to drop, however, and that weekly count was down by 14.6% from the previous week and by 41.1% from the peak of almost 252,000 reached in early September, the two groups said while also noting limitations to the data, such as three states (Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas) that are no longer updating their COVID-19 dashboards.
Other metrics show similar drops in recent weeks. Among children aged 0-11 years, emergency department visits involving a COVID-19 diagnosis dropped from 4.1% of all ED visits in late August to 1.4% of ED visits on Oct. 6. ED visits with a COVID-19 diagnosis fell from a peak of 8.5% on Aug. 22 to 1.5% on Oct. 6 for 12- to 15-year-olds and from 8.5% to 1.5% in those aged 16-17 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The rate of new hospital admissions for children aged 0-17 years was down to 0.26 per 100,000 population on Oct. 9 after reaching 0.51 per 100,000 on Sept. 4. Hospitalizations in children totaled just over 64,000 from Aug. 1, 2020, to Oct. 9, 2021, which is just over 2% of all COVID-19–related admissions over that time period, the CDC said on its COVID Data Tracker.
That pattern, unfortunately, also applies to vaccinations. “The number of children receiving their first COVID-19 vaccine this week [Sept. 30 to Oct. 6], about 156,000, was the lowest number since vaccines were available,” the AAP said in a separate report on vaccination trends, adding that “the number of children receiving their first dose has steadily declined from 8 weeks ago when 586,000 children received their initial dose the week ending Aug. 11.”
Anxiety, depression symptoms rose and fell with new COVID cases
Anxiety and depression symptoms increased in adults last winter as COVID-19 surged in the United States but declined in the spring as COVID activity approached its nadir, according to an analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The relative increases and decreases in frequency of reported symptoms of anxiety and depression at both the national and state levels mirrored the national weekly number of new COVID-19 cases during the same period,” Haomiao Jia, PhD, and associates wrote in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
In a national survey conducted Aug. 19-31, 2020, the average anxiety severity score was 2.0 and the average depression score was 1.6 among adults in all 50 states. Those scores rose to 2.3 (+13.0%) and 2.0 (+14.8%), respectively, by Dec. 9-21, but then fell to 1.7 (–26.8%) and 1.4 (–24.8%) during the survey conducted from May 26 to June 7, 2021, the investigators reported.
Despite that decrease in the spring, however, “the frequency of symptoms ... in June 2021 remained elevated compared with estimates from” 2019, said Dr. Jia of Columbia University, New York, and associates. Data from the National Health Interview Survey put the prepandemic severity scores at 0.63 for anxiety and 0.51 for depression.
Weekly symptom frequency in the Household Pulse Survey, which began in April 2020, was assessed with the four-item Patient Health Questionnaire, which includes two questions on anxiety and two on depression. Each answer scored on a scale from 0 (no symptoms at all) to 3 (symptoms nearly every day), making a total of 6 possible for each severity score, they explained. Sample sizes for the biweekly surveys ranged from 58,729 to 110,019.
Among the states, there was something of a pattern involving the drop in scores during the fall and the rise over the winter and spring months. “States with larger increases in severity scores during August–December 2020 also tended to have larger decreases during January–June 2021,” the researchers noted.
That group includes Minnesota, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah for anxiety and Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin for depression, the survey data show.
Florida and New York had the smallest increases in depression and anxiety scores, respectively, from August to December, and New York had the smallest decrease in both anxiety and depression from January to June, Dr. Jia and associates said.
“ during national emergencies. The observed differences in severity score magnitude and peaks across states in this study indicate that these efforts are important at both the national and state levels,” they wrote.
Anxiety and depression symptoms increased in adults last winter as COVID-19 surged in the United States but declined in the spring as COVID activity approached its nadir, according to an analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The relative increases and decreases in frequency of reported symptoms of anxiety and depression at both the national and state levels mirrored the national weekly number of new COVID-19 cases during the same period,” Haomiao Jia, PhD, and associates wrote in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
In a national survey conducted Aug. 19-31, 2020, the average anxiety severity score was 2.0 and the average depression score was 1.6 among adults in all 50 states. Those scores rose to 2.3 (+13.0%) and 2.0 (+14.8%), respectively, by Dec. 9-21, but then fell to 1.7 (–26.8%) and 1.4 (–24.8%) during the survey conducted from May 26 to June 7, 2021, the investigators reported.
Despite that decrease in the spring, however, “the frequency of symptoms ... in June 2021 remained elevated compared with estimates from” 2019, said Dr. Jia of Columbia University, New York, and associates. Data from the National Health Interview Survey put the prepandemic severity scores at 0.63 for anxiety and 0.51 for depression.
Weekly symptom frequency in the Household Pulse Survey, which began in April 2020, was assessed with the four-item Patient Health Questionnaire, which includes two questions on anxiety and two on depression. Each answer scored on a scale from 0 (no symptoms at all) to 3 (symptoms nearly every day), making a total of 6 possible for each severity score, they explained. Sample sizes for the biweekly surveys ranged from 58,729 to 110,019.
Among the states, there was something of a pattern involving the drop in scores during the fall and the rise over the winter and spring months. “States with larger increases in severity scores during August–December 2020 also tended to have larger decreases during January–June 2021,” the researchers noted.
That group includes Minnesota, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah for anxiety and Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin for depression, the survey data show.
Florida and New York had the smallest increases in depression and anxiety scores, respectively, from August to December, and New York had the smallest decrease in both anxiety and depression from January to June, Dr. Jia and associates said.
“ during national emergencies. The observed differences in severity score magnitude and peaks across states in this study indicate that these efforts are important at both the national and state levels,” they wrote.
Anxiety and depression symptoms increased in adults last winter as COVID-19 surged in the United States but declined in the spring as COVID activity approached its nadir, according to an analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The relative increases and decreases in frequency of reported symptoms of anxiety and depression at both the national and state levels mirrored the national weekly number of new COVID-19 cases during the same period,” Haomiao Jia, PhD, and associates wrote in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
In a national survey conducted Aug. 19-31, 2020, the average anxiety severity score was 2.0 and the average depression score was 1.6 among adults in all 50 states. Those scores rose to 2.3 (+13.0%) and 2.0 (+14.8%), respectively, by Dec. 9-21, but then fell to 1.7 (–26.8%) and 1.4 (–24.8%) during the survey conducted from May 26 to June 7, 2021, the investigators reported.
Despite that decrease in the spring, however, “the frequency of symptoms ... in June 2021 remained elevated compared with estimates from” 2019, said Dr. Jia of Columbia University, New York, and associates. Data from the National Health Interview Survey put the prepandemic severity scores at 0.63 for anxiety and 0.51 for depression.
Weekly symptom frequency in the Household Pulse Survey, which began in April 2020, was assessed with the four-item Patient Health Questionnaire, which includes two questions on anxiety and two on depression. Each answer scored on a scale from 0 (no symptoms at all) to 3 (symptoms nearly every day), making a total of 6 possible for each severity score, they explained. Sample sizes for the biweekly surveys ranged from 58,729 to 110,019.
Among the states, there was something of a pattern involving the drop in scores during the fall and the rise over the winter and spring months. “States with larger increases in severity scores during August–December 2020 also tended to have larger decreases during January–June 2021,” the researchers noted.
That group includes Minnesota, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah for anxiety and Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin for depression, the survey data show.
Florida and New York had the smallest increases in depression and anxiety scores, respectively, from August to December, and New York had the smallest decrease in both anxiety and depression from January to June, Dr. Jia and associates said.
“ during national emergencies. The observed differences in severity score magnitude and peaks across states in this study indicate that these efforts are important at both the national and state levels,” they wrote.
FROM THE MMWR
Web of antimicrobials doesn’t hold water
Music plus mushrooms equals therapy
Magic mushrooms have been used recreationally and medicinally for thousands of years, but researchers have found adding music could be a game changer in antidepressant treatment.
The ingredient that makes these mushrooms so magical is psilocybin. It works well for the clinical treatment of mental health conditions and some forms of depression because the “trip” can be contained to one work day, making it easy to administer under supervision. With the accompaniment of music, scientists have found that psilocybin evokes emotion.
This recent study, presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Lisbon, tested participants’ emotional response to music before and after the psilocybin. Ketanserin, an antihypertensive drug, was used to test against the effects of psilocybin. The scientist played Mozart and Elgar and found that participants on psilocybin had an emotional response increase of 60%. That response was even greater, compared with ketanserin, which actually lessened the emotional response to music.
“This shows that combination of psilocybin and music has a strong emotional effect, and we believe that this will be important for the therapeutic application of psychedelics if they are approved for clinical use,” said lead researcher Dea Siggaard Stenbæk of the University of Copenhagen.
Professor David J. Nutt of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study, said that it supports the use of music for treatment efficacy with psychedelics and suggested that the next step is to “optimise this approach probably through individualising and personalising music tracks in therapy.”
Cue the 1960s LSD music montage.
Chicken ‘white striping is not a disease’
Have you ever sliced open a new pack of chicken breasts to start dinner and noticed white fatty lines running through the chicken? Maybe you thought it was just some extra fat to trim off, but the Humane League calls it “white striping disease.”
Chicken is the No. 1 meat consumed by Americans, so it’s not surprising that chickens are factory farmed and raised to be ready for slaughter quickly, according to CBSNews.com, which reported that the Humane League claims white striping is found in 70% of the chicken in popular grocery stores. The league expressed concern for the chickens’ welfare as they are bred to grow bigger quickly, which is causing the white striping and increasing the fat content of the meat by as much as 224%.
The National Chicken Council told CBS that the league’s findings were unscientific. A spokesperson said, “White striping is not a disease. It is a quality factor in chicken breast meat caused by deposits of fat in the muscle during the bird’s growth and development.” He went on to say that severe white striping happens in 3%-6% of birds, which are mostly used in further processed products, not in chicken breast packages.
Somehow, that’s not making us feel any better.
The itsy bitsy spider lets us all down
Most people do not like spiders. That’s too bad, because spiders are generally nothing but helpful little creatures that prey upon annoying flies and other pests. Then there’s the silk they produce. The ancient Romans used it to treat conditions such as warts and skin lesions. Spiders wrap their eggs in silk to protect them from harmful bacteria.
Of course, we can hardly trust the medical opinions of people from 2,000 years ago, but modern-day studies have not definitively proved whether or not spider silk has any antimicrobial properties.
To settle the matter once and for all, researchers from Denmark built a silk-harvesting machine using the most famous of Danish inventions: Legos. The contraption, sort of a paddle wheel, pulled the silk from several different species of spider pinned down by the researchers. The silk was then tested against three different bacteria species, including good old Escherichia coli.
Unfortunately for our spider friends, their silk has no antimicrobial activity. The researchers suspected that any such activity seen in previous studies was actually caused by improper control for the solvents used to extract the silk; those solvents can have antimicrobial properties on their own. As for protecting their eggs, rather than killing bacteria, the silk likely provides a physical barrier alone.
It is bad news for spiders on the benefit-to-humanity front, but look at the bright side: If their silk had antimicrobial activity, we’d have to start farming them to acquire more silk. And that’s no good. Spiders deserve to roam free, hunt as they please, and drop down on your head from the ceiling.
Anxiety and allergies: Cause, effect, confusion
We’re big fans of science, but as longtime, totally impartial (Science rules!) observers of science’s medical realm, we can see that the day-to-day process of practicing the scientific method occasionally gets a bit messy. And no, we’re not talking about COVID-19.
We’re talking allergies. We’re talking mental health. We’re talking allergic disease and mental health.
We’re talking about a pair of press releases we came across during our never-ending search for material to educate, entertain, and astound our fabulously wonderful and loyal readers. (We say that, of course, in the most impartial way possible.)
The first release was titled, “Allergies including asthma and hay fever not linked to mental health traits” and covered research from the University of Bristol (England). The investigators were trying to determine if “allergic diseases actually causes mental health traits including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, or vice versa,” according to the release.
What they found, however, was “little evidence of a causal relationship between the onset of allergic disease and mental health.” Again, this is the press release talking.
The second release seemed to suggest the exact opposite: “Study uncovers link between allergies and mental health conditions.” That got our attention. A little more reading revealed that “people with asthma, atopic dermatitis, and hay fever also had a higher likelihood of having depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or neuroticism.”
One of the investigators was quoted as saying, “Establishing whether allergic disease causes mental health problems, or vice versa, is important to ensure that resources and treatment strategies are targeted appropriately.”
Did you notice the “vice versa”? Did you notice that it appeared in quotes from both releases? We did, so we took a closer look at the source. The second release covered a group of investigators from the University of Bristol – the same group, and the same study, in fact, as the first one.
So there you have it. One study, two press releases, and one confused journalist. Thank you, science.
Music plus mushrooms equals therapy
Magic mushrooms have been used recreationally and medicinally for thousands of years, but researchers have found adding music could be a game changer in antidepressant treatment.
The ingredient that makes these mushrooms so magical is psilocybin. It works well for the clinical treatment of mental health conditions and some forms of depression because the “trip” can be contained to one work day, making it easy to administer under supervision. With the accompaniment of music, scientists have found that psilocybin evokes emotion.
This recent study, presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Lisbon, tested participants’ emotional response to music before and after the psilocybin. Ketanserin, an antihypertensive drug, was used to test against the effects of psilocybin. The scientist played Mozart and Elgar and found that participants on psilocybin had an emotional response increase of 60%. That response was even greater, compared with ketanserin, which actually lessened the emotional response to music.
“This shows that combination of psilocybin and music has a strong emotional effect, and we believe that this will be important for the therapeutic application of psychedelics if they are approved for clinical use,” said lead researcher Dea Siggaard Stenbæk of the University of Copenhagen.
Professor David J. Nutt of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study, said that it supports the use of music for treatment efficacy with psychedelics and suggested that the next step is to “optimise this approach probably through individualising and personalising music tracks in therapy.”
Cue the 1960s LSD music montage.
Chicken ‘white striping is not a disease’
Have you ever sliced open a new pack of chicken breasts to start dinner and noticed white fatty lines running through the chicken? Maybe you thought it was just some extra fat to trim off, but the Humane League calls it “white striping disease.”
Chicken is the No. 1 meat consumed by Americans, so it’s not surprising that chickens are factory farmed and raised to be ready for slaughter quickly, according to CBSNews.com, which reported that the Humane League claims white striping is found in 70% of the chicken in popular grocery stores. The league expressed concern for the chickens’ welfare as they are bred to grow bigger quickly, which is causing the white striping and increasing the fat content of the meat by as much as 224%.
The National Chicken Council told CBS that the league’s findings were unscientific. A spokesperson said, “White striping is not a disease. It is a quality factor in chicken breast meat caused by deposits of fat in the muscle during the bird’s growth and development.” He went on to say that severe white striping happens in 3%-6% of birds, which are mostly used in further processed products, not in chicken breast packages.
Somehow, that’s not making us feel any better.
The itsy bitsy spider lets us all down
Most people do not like spiders. That’s too bad, because spiders are generally nothing but helpful little creatures that prey upon annoying flies and other pests. Then there’s the silk they produce. The ancient Romans used it to treat conditions such as warts and skin lesions. Spiders wrap their eggs in silk to protect them from harmful bacteria.
Of course, we can hardly trust the medical opinions of people from 2,000 years ago, but modern-day studies have not definitively proved whether or not spider silk has any antimicrobial properties.
To settle the matter once and for all, researchers from Denmark built a silk-harvesting machine using the most famous of Danish inventions: Legos. The contraption, sort of a paddle wheel, pulled the silk from several different species of spider pinned down by the researchers. The silk was then tested against three different bacteria species, including good old Escherichia coli.
Unfortunately for our spider friends, their silk has no antimicrobial activity. The researchers suspected that any such activity seen in previous studies was actually caused by improper control for the solvents used to extract the silk; those solvents can have antimicrobial properties on their own. As for protecting their eggs, rather than killing bacteria, the silk likely provides a physical barrier alone.
It is bad news for spiders on the benefit-to-humanity front, but look at the bright side: If their silk had antimicrobial activity, we’d have to start farming them to acquire more silk. And that’s no good. Spiders deserve to roam free, hunt as they please, and drop down on your head from the ceiling.
Anxiety and allergies: Cause, effect, confusion
We’re big fans of science, but as longtime, totally impartial (Science rules!) observers of science’s medical realm, we can see that the day-to-day process of practicing the scientific method occasionally gets a bit messy. And no, we’re not talking about COVID-19.
We’re talking allergies. We’re talking mental health. We’re talking allergic disease and mental health.
We’re talking about a pair of press releases we came across during our never-ending search for material to educate, entertain, and astound our fabulously wonderful and loyal readers. (We say that, of course, in the most impartial way possible.)
The first release was titled, “Allergies including asthma and hay fever not linked to mental health traits” and covered research from the University of Bristol (England). The investigators were trying to determine if “allergic diseases actually causes mental health traits including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, or vice versa,” according to the release.
What they found, however, was “little evidence of a causal relationship between the onset of allergic disease and mental health.” Again, this is the press release talking.
The second release seemed to suggest the exact opposite: “Study uncovers link between allergies and mental health conditions.” That got our attention. A little more reading revealed that “people with asthma, atopic dermatitis, and hay fever also had a higher likelihood of having depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or neuroticism.”
One of the investigators was quoted as saying, “Establishing whether allergic disease causes mental health problems, or vice versa, is important to ensure that resources and treatment strategies are targeted appropriately.”
Did you notice the “vice versa”? Did you notice that it appeared in quotes from both releases? We did, so we took a closer look at the source. The second release covered a group of investigators from the University of Bristol – the same group, and the same study, in fact, as the first one.
So there you have it. One study, two press releases, and one confused journalist. Thank you, science.
Music plus mushrooms equals therapy
Magic mushrooms have been used recreationally and medicinally for thousands of years, but researchers have found adding music could be a game changer in antidepressant treatment.
The ingredient that makes these mushrooms so magical is psilocybin. It works well for the clinical treatment of mental health conditions and some forms of depression because the “trip” can be contained to one work day, making it easy to administer under supervision. With the accompaniment of music, scientists have found that psilocybin evokes emotion.
This recent study, presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Lisbon, tested participants’ emotional response to music before and after the psilocybin. Ketanserin, an antihypertensive drug, was used to test against the effects of psilocybin. The scientist played Mozart and Elgar and found that participants on psilocybin had an emotional response increase of 60%. That response was even greater, compared with ketanserin, which actually lessened the emotional response to music.
“This shows that combination of psilocybin and music has a strong emotional effect, and we believe that this will be important for the therapeutic application of psychedelics if they are approved for clinical use,” said lead researcher Dea Siggaard Stenbæk of the University of Copenhagen.
Professor David J. Nutt of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study, said that it supports the use of music for treatment efficacy with psychedelics and suggested that the next step is to “optimise this approach probably through individualising and personalising music tracks in therapy.”
Cue the 1960s LSD music montage.
Chicken ‘white striping is not a disease’
Have you ever sliced open a new pack of chicken breasts to start dinner and noticed white fatty lines running through the chicken? Maybe you thought it was just some extra fat to trim off, but the Humane League calls it “white striping disease.”
Chicken is the No. 1 meat consumed by Americans, so it’s not surprising that chickens are factory farmed and raised to be ready for slaughter quickly, according to CBSNews.com, which reported that the Humane League claims white striping is found in 70% of the chicken in popular grocery stores. The league expressed concern for the chickens’ welfare as they are bred to grow bigger quickly, which is causing the white striping and increasing the fat content of the meat by as much as 224%.
The National Chicken Council told CBS that the league’s findings were unscientific. A spokesperson said, “White striping is not a disease. It is a quality factor in chicken breast meat caused by deposits of fat in the muscle during the bird’s growth and development.” He went on to say that severe white striping happens in 3%-6% of birds, which are mostly used in further processed products, not in chicken breast packages.
Somehow, that’s not making us feel any better.
The itsy bitsy spider lets us all down
Most people do not like spiders. That’s too bad, because spiders are generally nothing but helpful little creatures that prey upon annoying flies and other pests. Then there’s the silk they produce. The ancient Romans used it to treat conditions such as warts and skin lesions. Spiders wrap their eggs in silk to protect them from harmful bacteria.
Of course, we can hardly trust the medical opinions of people from 2,000 years ago, but modern-day studies have not definitively proved whether or not spider silk has any antimicrobial properties.
To settle the matter once and for all, researchers from Denmark built a silk-harvesting machine using the most famous of Danish inventions: Legos. The contraption, sort of a paddle wheel, pulled the silk from several different species of spider pinned down by the researchers. The silk was then tested against three different bacteria species, including good old Escherichia coli.
Unfortunately for our spider friends, their silk has no antimicrobial activity. The researchers suspected that any such activity seen in previous studies was actually caused by improper control for the solvents used to extract the silk; those solvents can have antimicrobial properties on their own. As for protecting their eggs, rather than killing bacteria, the silk likely provides a physical barrier alone.
It is bad news for spiders on the benefit-to-humanity front, but look at the bright side: If their silk had antimicrobial activity, we’d have to start farming them to acquire more silk. And that’s no good. Spiders deserve to roam free, hunt as they please, and drop down on your head from the ceiling.
Anxiety and allergies: Cause, effect, confusion
We’re big fans of science, but as longtime, totally impartial (Science rules!) observers of science’s medical realm, we can see that the day-to-day process of practicing the scientific method occasionally gets a bit messy. And no, we’re not talking about COVID-19.
We’re talking allergies. We’re talking mental health. We’re talking allergic disease and mental health.
We’re talking about a pair of press releases we came across during our never-ending search for material to educate, entertain, and astound our fabulously wonderful and loyal readers. (We say that, of course, in the most impartial way possible.)
The first release was titled, “Allergies including asthma and hay fever not linked to mental health traits” and covered research from the University of Bristol (England). The investigators were trying to determine if “allergic diseases actually causes mental health traits including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, or vice versa,” according to the release.
What they found, however, was “little evidence of a causal relationship between the onset of allergic disease and mental health.” Again, this is the press release talking.
The second release seemed to suggest the exact opposite: “Study uncovers link between allergies and mental health conditions.” That got our attention. A little more reading revealed that “people with asthma, atopic dermatitis, and hay fever also had a higher likelihood of having depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or neuroticism.”
One of the investigators was quoted as saying, “Establishing whether allergic disease causes mental health problems, or vice versa, is important to ensure that resources and treatment strategies are targeted appropriately.”
Did you notice the “vice versa”? Did you notice that it appeared in quotes from both releases? We did, so we took a closer look at the source. The second release covered a group of investigators from the University of Bristol – the same group, and the same study, in fact, as the first one.
So there you have it. One study, two press releases, and one confused journalist. Thank you, science.