New research shows that sweat has the potential to extract chemical additives from synthetics that are contained in sports technical clothing. We often worry about chemicals in food, but they could infiltrate our bodies in other ways.
“Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat.” The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar, he said, might be happening with the changes in our attention.
Johann Hari believes we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds and I definitely agree. I've felt this theft of my attention too.
Charles Stross on our inner representation of Covid-19:
COVID19 infects human (and a few other mammalian species—mink, deer) cells: it doesn't recognize or directly interact with the superorganisms made of those cells.
By antropomorphising it and acting defiantly through mask or vaccination refusal, there's a will to be defiant in the face of some imaginary, sentient, enemy rather than the faceless, emotionless, little spiky blob it is.
People construct supernatural explanations for observed phenomena, and COVID19 is an observable phenomenon, so we get propitiatory or defiant/adversarial responses, not rational ones.
A quite technical but fascinating look into how the BioNTech/Pfizer mRNA vaccine is built and works.
Four years ago, Clientearth and several Brussels citizens took the regional government to court over its lack of any air quality improvement plan. In the final hearing this week, all the government's lawyers managed to do to defend themselves was put the quality of their own pollution measurements into question. It's depressing.
On the contrary, rather than admitting that there is a problem and committing to solve it, the Brussels lawyers in court today have gone as far as discrediting the reliability of air quality measurements carried out by the government’s own environmental agency. In doing so, they expose the residents and workers of this city to unacceptable health risks in their day to day lives.
Someone with a one-hour commute in a car needs to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone with a short walk to work. On the other hand, researchers found that if someone shifts from a long commute to a walk, their happiness increases as much as if they’d fallen in love.
Walkable cities have so many benefits.
