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Category: Health

‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research

‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research

The Guardian reports: World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth. The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections. Although…

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A new theory of placebos reframes the mind-body problem

A new theory of placebos reframes the mind-body problem

Dien Ho writes: When healthcare researchers test potential new treatments, they use randomized clinical trials. Since the 1950s, placebos have been crucial parts of these trials. The placebo is made to resemble the treatment being tested, but lacks the experimental ingredients. For the treatment to be deemed efficacious, it must outperform the placebo, which is given to a control group. Otherwise, the treatment’s positive effects may be “mere” placebo effects. Advocates of evidence-based medicine consider double-blind randomized clinical trials with…

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A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

Zeynep Tufekci writes: I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder [that of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson] in this country has been so openly celebrated. The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication…

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Sick animals suggest COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market

Sick animals suggest COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market

Nature reports: The quest to understand where the COVID-19 pandemic started has revealed fresh clues. Researchers have re-analysed data collected from a market in Wuhan, China, during the early days of the pandemic and found that animals there were infected with a virus – although they could not confirm what exactly caused the infection. “The conclusion is convincing that there was infection in the animals,” says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Tokyo. The results, which have…

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Will Joe Biden’s legacy not only be another Trump term but also another pandemic?

Will Joe Biden’s legacy not only be another Trump term but also another pandemic?

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Almost five years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck. And with the advent of flu season, that luck may well be running out. The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not…

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Trump blocks RFK Jr’s hoped for influence over the agricultural industry

Trump blocks RFK Jr’s hoped for influence over the agricultural industry

Politico reports: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent weeks lobbying Donald Trump to nominate an Agriculture secretary who would be his ally in a war with the sugar, soybean, corn and other farm commodity interests he argues are poisoning Americans. Working largely from his home in California, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services even meticulously vetted and put forward his own list of candidates to run the massive agency responsible for the country’s farm and food…

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Big pharma is the only reason anyone still dies from HIV

Big pharma is the only reason anyone still dies from HIV

Charlotte Kilpatrick writes: The year is 1998. While antiviral drugs to treat HIV had been approved a decade earlier, only five out of 33 million people who carried the virus were receiving the life-saving treatment. Nowhere was the situation worse than in South Africa. The country had the highest global prevalence of the disease with nearly one in five people infected and 200,000 children orphaned. Treatment options were limited. That year, the Minister of Health released a report outlining the…

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As climate change melts permafrost, microbes that we have never been exposed to will emerge

As climate change melts permafrost, microbes that we have never been exposed to will emerge

Valerie Brown writes: The popular image of the Arctic is as a “frozen North,” which it was for all of human history until a couple of centuries ago. In that view, intrepid explorers and scientists clatter over tundra and ice roads in dogsleds and decrepit trucks, risking everything to bring back important samples and wild tales of howling winds. But this vision is growing passé. The Arctic is warming four times as fast as the global average. While there are…

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The growing enthusiasm among tech elites for genetically engineering their children

The growing enthusiasm among tech elites for genetically engineering their children

Emily R. Klancher Merchant writes: In the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to which some parents will go to ensure their children’s acceptance into places like Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and USC. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, bribed athletic coaches to recruit their children for sports they did not play. Actress Felicity Huffman…

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Why walking helps us think

Why walking helps us think

Ferris Jabr writes: In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by…

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How Elon Musk muzzled government employees from talking about xAI’s new supercomputer

How Elon Musk muzzled government employees from talking about xAI’s new supercomputer

Forbes reports: Nearly six months ago in Memphis, before residents or even city councilors knew that Elon Musk was building “the world’s largest supercomputer” in their backyard, the billionaire’s team met secretly with a host of local and national law enforcement agencies including the sheriff’s office, Memphis Police Department, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigations. The covert meeting, which has not been previously reported, concerned Musk’s growing AI startup xAI, according to the Greater Memphis Chamber,…

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Trump picks RFK Jr. to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services

Trump picks RFK Jr. to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services

NPR reports: President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a former independent presidential candidate who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories, including about vaccines — to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a statement on Truth Social. “The Safety and Health of…

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The next pandemic?

The next pandemic?

Fortune reports: Almost from the beginning of the spread of H5N1 bird flu among farms and ranches in the U.S. earlier this year, experts and researchers warned that a critical lag in the blood testing of exposed workers might lead to an underestimation of the virus’s potential transmission to humans. Those warnings have proved prophetic. And the federal Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) now finds itself not only trying to blunt the spread of the virus, but also…

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A pregnant teenager died after trying to get care in three visits to Texas emergency rooms

A pregnant teenager died after trying to get care in three visits to Texas emergency rooms

By Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana This story was originally published by ProPublica Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023. Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before….

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A Texas woman died after the hospital said it would be a ‘crime’ to intervene in her miscarriage

A Texas woman died after the hospital said it would be a ‘crime’ to intervene in her miscarriage

By Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana This story was originally published by ProPublica Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy. The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should…

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Can AI be blamed for a teen’s suicide?

Can AI be blamed for a teen’s suicide?

Kevin Roose reports: On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.” “I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote. “I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied. Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters…

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