Some local scientists, using new computer dating methods (no, not that kind!), claim to have tracked links back more than 300 years between HIV, and a similar virus found in chimpanzees.
Pooh is obsessive-compulsive, Eeyore is chronically depressed, Piglet needs medication, Roo is a juvenile delinquent in-the-making, and Christopher Robin has gender issues. That's what Canadian doctors are saying anyway.
I’ve cut myself over packaging many times too. Damn you plastic shells from hell!
The constant gardener isn’t just fiction.
There are now more fat people in world than there are starving ones.
Has Coke become the new McDonald’s?
An interesting article that goes some way into explaining why people don't change even when faced with overwhelming evidence they're heading at full speed towards an unstable if not deadly future.
An interesting article that goes some way into explaining why people don’t change even when faced with overwhelming evidence they’re heading at full speed towards an unstable if not deadly future.
What happens to your body if you drink a Coke right now?
Inside your car you inhale 5 times more smog than outside.
Organic food is better for our health. On the flipside, some of it is less energy efficient, producing more emissions.
Biofuel may actually increase ozone levels.
Drinking Pepsi and other soft drinks may switch off vital parts of your DNA. I’m not sure what to think here, it sounds like something straight out of apocalyptic fiction.
Update : I checked several cans including Pepsi Max and saw no mention of Sodium Benzoate/E211, maybe it’s country-specific?
The truth is out – cyclists shave their legs to look good. Like anyone ever bought the aerodynamics story.
The health effects of shipping fuel fumes have been under the radar for a long time but statistics are starting to show up. No mention of the port of Antwerp in there, but considering its size, I imagine there must be consequences to the local population.
I always try to take stairs instead of elevators and escalators when I can, although some places make it near impossible. It seems planners have noticed.
How habit-forming advertising techniques are used to improve public health in the developing world.
How habit-forming advertising techniques are used to improve public health in the developing world.
A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas.
Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?
Sitting is killing you.
Why don't we get cancer every day?
Why a group of longtime vegetarians and vegans converted to the idea that flesh and other food from animals can be healthful, environmentally appropriate, and ethical.
How doctors die. It's not like the rest of us, but it should be.
Mainstream media continues down the clickbait-laden path of laziness.
I didn’t know about these parks. I would love to experience one. Added to the bucket list.
Amazing. And shared with the world.
Taking photos of an event rather than being immersed in it has been shown to lead to poorer recall of the actual event – we get distracted in the process.
We've been inundated with articles about the dangers of phone addiction. This one takes it a step further by linking it to stress hormone levels. Not a surprise.
Basically, there's no noise isolation at all, even less than with standard earbuds. You push the volume up to compensate for noise and damage your ears. Take away: use them at home or in quiet places, don't use them in the street, subway, or other loud environments.
This quote says it all:
In a way, the Chernobyl disaster reveals the true extent of our environmental impact on the planet. Harmful as it was, the nuclear accident was far less destructive to the local ecosystem than we were.
It's always been incredibly difficult for me to get a fair view of nuclear energy. Mostly due to the absurdly obvious amount of lobbying from the industry. This article on the consequences of Chernobyl and other incidents shows that lobbying to be even more insidious than I thought.
A detailed down-to-earth article on the real path to wellness versus the industry's mostly worthless solutions.
I'm not going to start posting a ton of things about the current pandemic but I wanted to point to Dr. John Campbell's YouTube channel which has been rational and informative throughout the whole thing and well worth a watch.
I've been surprised at how little the possibility of Covid-19 aerosol transmission features in official rules or discussion despite more and more published proof. I can't tell if they know something I don't, they're deliberately ignoring the data because it would mean painfully strict rules or they simply aren't aware.
Whatever the case, Kottke points to what seems to be a clear case of aerosol transmission in a spinning studio where all official hygiene and distancing rules were followed.
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.
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.
A quite technical but fascinating look into how the BioNTech/Pfizer mRNA vaccine is built and works.
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.
“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.
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.
