Week of October 14, 2024
Both our kids were home for the Jewish holiday this weekend. I am happy to report that my visions of warm and erudite family dinner conversations discussing their college courses and academic plans, came true. Also true - waking up on the couch to a 19-year-old mocking "old men who fall asleep in front of the T.V." is a good reminder that, college or not, maturation is a process.
BY THE WAY - Google's Notebook L.M. allows users to create an A.I.-generated podcast with two "hosts" discussing text, linked materials, and pictures. For readers who would rather be listeners, check out What Adam is Reading, the unsettlingly good (and creepy) A.I. Podcast edition.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UIcsV1ShiW5SDNxfuWHSQE1KyRcLbSe9/view
About Notebook L.M.: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/
---
The PMC data (wastewater) forecast indicates COVID prevalence will be trending up heading into Thanksgiving. I strongly recommend getting this season's Flu and COVID vaccines in the coming week or two if you have not yet done so.
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/
------
COVID articles
Data linking COVID infections to increased risk of cardiovascular events (heart attacks, strokes, and the onset of diabetes) makes me wonder if COVID is unique or just so prevalent that we can see trends more clearly. (In other words, do other viral infections confer similar risk of complications?) Either way, these trends in the COVID data drive my ongoing encouragement to avoid getting infected (vaccines, nasal spray use, air filters, and selective masking- like on airplanes, when I see patients, or visit hospitals).
"An analysis of U.K. Biobank health data that included adults who had mild to severe COVID-19 before vaccines were available found an increased risk of heart attack, stroke and death among those adults during the nearly three-year follow-up period after COVID infection."
https://scitechdaily.com/the-long-haul-how-covid-continues-to-threaten-your-heart-years-after-infection/
A recent Forbes article highlights a great COVID-related logical fallacy and why a thoughtful approach to news consumption is critical. On social media, I found commentators using the article below to assert that long-term COVID patients ("people are no longer tolerating alcohol") are driving the "the alcohol [industries ongoing] decline since the pandemic." However, the Forbes article reports trends in U.S. alcohol sales without mention of causation. (The article felt like an ad for the company that publishes the data, SipSource.) More digging indicates that declining alcohol sales pre-date the pandemic. (However, the trend has not been linear and varies amongst alcohol price and type segments - see the 2022 academic journal article below). A bit more digging yields data associating legalized cannabis use with decreased alcohol sales. Though these data are interesting, they do not provide some fantastic insight. However, it is a good reminder not to confuse correlation and causation and not to over-simplify complex, multi-variate interactions.
The Forbes article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemicallef/2024/10/10/the-post-covid-decline-of-wines-and-spirits-sales-is-accelerating/
2022 Reflection on pre and intra-pandemic trends in alcohol use:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717736/
Data on consumer sentiment in cannabis-legal states and territories:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/legal-cannabis-sales-eat-into-beer-revenue-survey-data-shows-ce7a125d
Medical Trends and Technology
Break out your Off! The Atlantic published an interesting update on the acquired immune-based allergy to mammal-based protein (alpha-gal syndrome) - often triggered after being bitten by a lone-star tick. Not only are individuals no longer able to eat mammal-based protein (symptoms of severe G.I. distress with meats like lamb, beef, and pork), but there are now individuals who cannot be around animals or animal by-products. "For those [impacted], anything of mammalian origin is off the table: dairy, wool, gelatin, lanolin, and even more obscure products such as magnesium stearate, a fat derivative often found in pills and drug capsules. [E]ven the fumes from manure, dander, and amniotic fluid can set off reactions [in affected farmers]." I have at least one patient with this syndrome - the tick is most prevalent east of the Mississippi River.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/10/ticks-meat-allergy-alpha-gal-farming/680159/?gift=wRB5v0WyIdmVLiiSUSDcYSVJo96MzAWfxPyqLfplrsg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
This week (as part of my ongoing cajoling of my office patients to move more), I found several articles on positive associations in muscle and glucose control for those engaged in routine exercise:
Resistance training reduces depression symptoms in young adults:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37429171/
Brief "exercise snacks," (performing ten bodyweight squats every 45 minutes during 8.5 hours of sitting) improve blood sugar regulation better than a single 30-minute walk in overweight men.
https://x.com/fmfclips/status/1844476684268896472
and
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sms.14628
and
Short‐duration resistance training is associated with increased muscle mass and improved blood sugar in younger, overweight adult males:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30697876/
and
commentary https://x.com/Mangan150/status/1844350354252759528
Infographics
Some of us had more excited oxygen than others last week. I prefer my oxygen calm, and well-disciplined. Here is a Northern Lights infographic:
https://x.com/NWSIWX/status/1844562273043612143/photo/1
Things I learned this week
I learned there is data on the cognitive bias of confidence in the face of ignorance (not being aware of unknown unknowns). Researchers divided participants into groups, some receiving complete information and others only partial information about a hypothetical topic: a school facing a water shortage. Follow-up interviews soliciting participant opinions on the school's situation indicated that participants with only partial, biased information felt as confident in their decision-making as those with complete information about the hypothetical topic. The research highlights a critical cognitive bias - evidence that people presume they possess adequate information—even when they lack half the relevant information and alternate points of view.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310216
Despite the authors employing my favorite Don Rumsfeld quote, "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." (And who amongst us does not have a list of favorite Rumsfeldian quips?) I found the research paper difficult to read. Popular Science offered a well-written summary:
https://www.popsci.com/health/why-we-think-we-are-right/
I learned that angry-looking scary mushrooms are a thing (cue my Last of Us PTSD here.)
https://x.com/annethegnome/status/1843453788310675616
and
https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/13-creepy-plants-fungi
I learned one can rent inflatable vinyl people for background crowds in movies and commercials. The original market leader (The Inflatable Crowd Company) has gone out of business. However, Crowd in a Box is still around. I suspect A.I.-generated video will replace these vinyl extras shortly, even if the inflatable people demand "No water, no food, no bathroom breaks and no 'I have to leave early.'"
https://x.com/historyinmemes/status/1843825960703144272
and
https://www.thelocationguide.com/2011/08/rent-a-crowd-filming-on-location-with-inflatable-extras/
and
http://crowdinabox.com/index.html
Living with A.I.
Machine Learning is accelerating the design of nuclear fusion reactors. Thanks to ChatGPT, X, and some articles, I learned more about the problems of containing plasma in magnetic fields than seems necessary (for my day job).
Background:
https://chatgpt.com/share/670bd466-25b0-8013-946b-eea37e00320f
Article on ML in fusion: https://www.pppl.gov/news/2024/using-artificial-intelligence-speed-and-improve-most-computationally-intensive-aspects
A fascinating deep-dive on stellarator fusion reactors, where twisted magnetic fields confine plasma without requiring current-driven stabilization.
https://x.com/andercot/status/1844892115865829691?s=42
My takeaway from this article is not to drink lake water (and, also, machine learning helps sort large volumes of data). "Researchers have used artificial intelligence (A.I.) to uncover 70,500 viruses previously unknown to science many of them weird and nothing like known species. The RNA viruses were identified using metagenomics, in which scientists sample all the genomes in the environment without culture individual viruses. The method shows the potential of A.I. to explore the 'dark matter' of the RNA virus universe." Also, the article introduced me to the word "virosphere" - referring to the pool of viruses that occurs in all hosts and all environments.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03320-6
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virosphere
A.I. art of the week (A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter).
In a run-down city, there is a Thunderdome-like cage (with a sign that says Virosphere). Inside the giant cage, an anthropomorphized, angry-looking mushroom and a giant tick are fighting with a large staff. There is a crowd of inflatable viruses watching the battle. Northern lights are visible in the sky above. Please make it in the style of a medieval tapestry.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yh1p0l1VMHdNIWqSw2879Pn66tDysomv/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
Comments
Post a Comment