Week of July 22, 2024
Our younger son is, at age 17, still working on getting his driver's license. This weekend, his [slightly older but licensed] brother helped him practice parking. I was proud to learn he employed psychological tactics as part of these efforts. My older son (standing outside the car judging line alignment and centering in the space) passed chocolate chips, like dog treats, through the driver's side window for each successful parking attempt. I will be sad when they stop coming home for the summer.
You will note that this 2020 article (which describes how the average age of first-time licensed drivers is rising) does not mention using operant conditioning to encourage earlier driving.
https://www.statista.com/chart/18682/percentage-of-the-us-population-holding-a-drivers-license-by-age-group/
BY THE WAY - Please help me improve! This email marks the 420th issue since March 2020. Please click the link below to a scientifically constructed, anonymous, 6-question, 1-minute reader survey.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/C8BFZYC
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COVID test positivity, E.D. visits, hospitalizations, and deaths are still rising.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
Forward-looking forecasts based on wastewater suggest a plateauing number of infected individuals in the coming weeks.
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
https://pmc19.com/data/
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
Wastewater Scan offers a multi-organism wastewater dashboard with an excellent visual display of individual treatment plant-level data.
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
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COVID articles
Immunologist Marc Veldhoen attempts to address whether influenza or coronavirus is a "worse virus." I believe it is an unnecessary distinction; both can be awful, with a chance of death and disability. However, his post does an excellent job of comparing and contrasting how these viruses evolve and impact humans. He also links to several articles supporting his assertions.
https://x.com/marc_veld/status/1814735071456206888
I am sending my kids to college with air filters for their dorm rooms since they will live with two or more roommates. (At least I am not trying to convince them to wear them around their necks.). Harvard School of Public Health environmental engineer Joseph Allen writes about his research indicating that portable air cleaners can significantly reduce airborne viruses (and other particulate matter). The cleaner's airflow rate, the airflow discharge direction, and the filter's placement in the room all matter.
https://x.com/j_g_allen/status/1814269220089217356
Article behind paywall
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2024/em/d4em00114a
Medical Trends and Technology
Sleep medicine specialists from various institutions measured the impact of patient exposure to light at night. Approximately 85,000 wore light monitors for one week, measuring their exposure to daytime and nighttime light. Patients exposed to more nighttime light seemed to be at higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes. The authors hypothesized that disruption of circadian rhythms altered glucose control mechanisms.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00110-8/fulltext
and
https://x.com/AyusWellness/status/1813478858810597877
I suspect we will all be on GLP-1s at some point. Go Ozempic (and other GLP-1 drugs)! GLP-1 exerts direct and indirect actions to reduce glucose and body weight. GLP-1 attenuates inflammation indirectly through weight loss and neuronal GLP-1R activation and directly through GLP-1R activation on T cells while reducing complications by targeting GLP-1R in multiple organs. Originally shown to reduce blood glucose and body weight, subsequent trials demonstrated that GLP-1 medicines reduce the cardiorenal complications of metabolic disease.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn4128
and
https://x.com/EricTopol/status/1814002270222287343
While still experimental, I love to find articles talking about combining technologies to improve therapeutic options. In this instance, researchers have attached engineered viruses to T-cells engineered to target receptors on some types of cancer cells. The T-cells help fight cancer but synergize the impact by delivering viruses designed to disrupt cancer cell reproduction. The research is an excellent example of how layering new and innovative technologies offers innovative therapy.
https://x.com/SamuelBHume/status/1814018041916661800
Infographics
Compound Interest celebrated National Tattoo Day (July 17) by revisiting their summer 2020 infographic on tattooing inks. Tattoos are generally considered safe.
https://www.compoundchem.com/2020/07/17/tattoos/
Things I learned this week
After cleaning out my parent's house, my wife sold my voluminous childhood collection of Choose Your Own Adventure book collection on eBay. The article from Open Culture is the first semi-literary analysis of this genre. I was specifically struck by the sentence, "The volumes from the late seventies and early eighties, [offered an] exotically passé aesthetic and relatively unsanitized content." It is validating to learn you were retrospectively hip.
https://www.openculture.com/2024/07/how-choose-your-own-adventure-books-became-beloved-among-generations-of-readers.html
See the book covers from my childhood:
https://www.joeydevilla.com/2006/03/13/66-choose-your-own-adventure-book-covers/?ref=blog.codinghorror.com
More evidence of life on Venus! The need to distinguish between Venetian, Venutian, and Venusian continues. Unless you are a Venusian who has emigrated to Venice, in which case you are a Venusian Venetian.
(FYI Venutian is not a real word.)
https://futurism.com/scientists-possible-sign-life-venus
Living with A.I.
I've had numerous conversations about how artificial intelligence impacts pharmaceutical development. This article from the Broad Institute (an MIT and Harvard-affiliated research organization) discusses how A.I. improves drug development.
https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/de-risking-drug-discovery-predictive-ai
A.I. art of the week (A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter).
A salivating dog is parking a car. An alien from Venus is ringing a bell and handing the dog a treat through the driver's side window. There is green gas coming off the alien. A cat in the car's passenger seat is reading a book with a Cover in the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure series style.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hwVFk95eY_uPn8La1W3gK7uVkgE9sGEI/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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