The 'Right to Repair' Movement Is Being Led by Farmers

A major national group has adopted a policy to fight for the right to repair electronics, but it might not be the one you’d expect: farmers.

The right to repair movement is an effort to loosen laws to allow consumers to be able to fix technology without sending it back to the original manufacturer. Right now, replacement parts and diagnostic tools are carefully guarded by the manufacturer, and right to repair supporters believe they should be available to the public. The effort has largely been driven by the consumer tech sector—like people who want to be able to fix their iPhone instead of buying a new one—but the lack of access to repair materials has greatly impacted farmers, too.

Modern farm equipment is high tech and includes onboard computers, but the majority of farming equipment manufacturers refuse to allow access to the software, claiming it’s proprietary information. That means farmers are stuck waiting for a John Deere technician to swap a tiny sensor when it misfires and shuts down the entire tractor.

They’d rather just fix it themselves or, at the very least, take it to someone locally who can do the job. But right now, that’s not possible.

“John Deere is behaving exactly as Apple is behaving, in a wholly different market: they’re selling equipment and then they’re not allowing anybody to fix it except them,” said Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of Repair.org, a lobbying group that pushes for right the repair legislation.

This has been particularly frustrating for farmers, who have a legacy of fixing and maintaining their own equipment. It can cause havoc during busy seasons like harvest—if a machine goes down and the farmer has to wait days for a repair, it means thousands of dollars in lost revenue. But now the farmers are fighting back.

Read more: Five States Are Considering Bills to Legalize the 'Right to Repair' Electronics

The American Farm Bureau Federation is a non-profit that uses grassroots input to lobby for better agricultural legislation across the country. It’s the largest farmer organization in the country, with affiliates in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, and it just threw its weight behind the right to repair movement by adopting a new policy specifically addressing a farmer’s right to fix his or her own damn tractor.

The Farm Bureau is pushing to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (behind which companies like Apple and John Deere hide) to require manufacturers to provide access to “the same agricultural equipments diagnostic and repair information made available to the manufacturer’s’ dealers.”

John Deere and other manufacturers have opposed right to repair movements, saying that allowing too much access to the software could make the machinery less effective or less safe.

“John Deere makes print and digital versions of our operational, diagnostic, and technical repair manuals available to the public,” the company wrote in a statement to Motherboard. “The embedded code within the controllers and processors on our equipment [...] is designed so that our machines operate as intended, in a safe and reliable manner, and meet all appropriate safety and emissions regulations.”

Some state legislatures have considered bills that would open up the right to repair for farmers specifically, while other have looked at a more broad approach that would cover all electronics, from combines to laptops. But the Farm Bureau has found this issue to be of high enough importance to its members that it’s taking it to the federal level.

“[Our members] believe they bought the tractor, or the combine, or the sprayer, and they should be able to adjust it,” said Mary-Kay Thatcher, the Farm Bureau’s senior director of congressional relations. “They don’t want to mess up intellectual property rights. They know how much it costs companies to develop that stuff. But they want to be able to get in and fix it themselves.”

from The 'Right to Repair' Movement Is Being Led by Farmers

Heat and Ashes: The Untold Story of the Apollo 1 Fire

Fifty years ago, Henry Rogers stepped off an elevator into an inferno.

A quality control inspector at NASA, Rogers had been working during a routine launch simulation test for Apollo 1, the first manned Apollo mission, at Cape Canaveral in Florida. But while he was in the elevator, a fire had broken out in the spacecraft cabin. By the time Rogers stepped out into the white room—the area of the shuttle tower that connects with the cabin—flames were erupting and black smoke filled the room.

“He could have gotten back on the elevator and escaped to safety, knowing the dangers involved, but he didn't hesitate,” the late Stephen Clemmons, a spacecraft mechanical technician who was also there that night, wrote in a 2004 essay. “Instead he made his way through the smoke and fire and began to help any way he could. He had not been trained on how to get the hatches off, but he tried.”

Rogers and five other men including Clemmons, put their lives at risk to try to rescue Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, the three astronauts trapped inside the burning spacecraft. Though they eventually pried the hatches off, it was too late. All three astronauts had died. Years later, many at NASA believed their deaths were the one thing that saved the program, but in the wake of tragedy, the future of the fledgling Apollo program became uncertain.

The legacy of the Apollo fire of 1967 is preserved in history books and lengthy documentaries. But the sheer horror and emotional intensity of having three colleagues—for many in the program, three close friends—suffocate in a burning capsule while scrambling to save them, hasn’t been as well preserved. The severity of that moment has become a footnote in the public consciousness, faded by the decades that have passed and overshadowed by the incredible achievements of the Apollo program that followed.

But for those like Henry Rogers who experienced the tragedy firsthand, the trauma of January 27, 1967 left scars, and a deep sense of regret that’s difficult to capture all these years later.

"We felt very responsible.”

Rogers’s actions that night earned him, and the other men who attempted the rescue, the NASA Medal for Exceptional Bravery, a rare honor given “for exemplary and courageous handling of an emergency by an individual who, independent of personal danger, has acted to prevent the loss of human life.” But he never spoke about the fire at home with his family. He marched forward stoically, the way so many from that generation seemed to do, and continued to work on the Apollo program until its conclusion, in 1975.

Rogers was a veteran who served in WWII and the Korean War. He was a proud member of the team that put the first human on the moon. He was a husband, and father to three boys.

He was also my grandfather.

*

January 27, 1967, was a Friday, the end of another grueling week ramping up to the Apollo I launch date, mere weeks away: February 21, 1967. The mission was to carry Grissom, White, and Chaffee into Earth’s orbit, allowing them to test out the Apollo launch and flight systems—in particular the Command Service Module—making sure the technology used on the eventual moon landing would be up to the task.

At this point, the Apollo program was in its sixth year. The ambitious human spaceflight program had been launched in response to President John F. Kennedy’s goal, set in 1961, of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade. A great deal of progress had been made since the first manned spaceflight programs, Gemini and Mercury. But the space race with the USSR, combined with Kennedy’s public goal of a moon landing, created a growing sense of urgency to advance the Apollo program at a breakneck pace. As a result, everyone on the Apollo team felt a personal responsibility to put in marathon time.

Happier days: in June 1966, the Apollo 1 crew practices water egress procedures with a full scale boilerplate model of the spacecraft. Image: NASA

“What I remember is that they were really pushing people, and dad was working a lot of overtime,” Ron Rogers, my uncle and Henry’s youngest son, told me. “They were really pushing the pedal on this because there was so much politics involved.”

Henry “Buck” Rogers was born on March 25, 1923, along with his twin sister, Betty, in Charlotte, North Carolina. His parents later moved the family—the twins and sister Jean—to the small town of White, Georgia. They grew up poor; Henry once had to wear his sister’s old shoes because the family couldn’t afford new ones for him. Other times he went to school barefoot. As a boy, Henry would pick cotton or sell boiled peanuts at baseball games to help make ends meet.

“He would talk with a fake lisp to try to make people feel sorry for him to sell more peanuts,” my father, his oldest son Randy, told me recently.

Henry was 16 when WWII broke out, and he joined the Navy immediately, lying about his age and binging on bananas in order to gain enough weight to enlist. It meant dropping out of school, but he later earned his high school diploma during his time in the service. He fought at Pearl Harbor, and in the Battle of Midway.

Henry Rogers, with wife Doreen and sons Randy and Tim (in arms), circa 1951.

After years of war tours, Henry was in a stopover in Detroit, sometime around 1943. There, at a five and dime store, he met a fiery redhead Canadian girl from across the river in Windsor, working as a cashier. Even though he would be leaving in the next few days, he asked her out, and they started dating long distance, writing letters to each other. In 1944, they were married and two years later, at the tender age of 23, Henry became a father—though he was away on duty at the time. The first of three sons, my dad, was born in December 1946.

Henry served in the Navy for 15 years, followed by a five-year stint in the Air Force, before retiring from service. But his time in the military gave him valuable skills in engineering and maintenance, which opened the door for him to work at the Martin Marietta Corporation, a company that built rockets and later became Lockheed Martin. In 1965, he made the leap from Martin to NASA, where he spent the rest of his career.

As a quality control inspector, Henry’s job was to make sure materials and elements of the spacecraft were up to snuff, to report any damage or defects, and to look for possible improvements. NASA, today, describes this role as having the “utmost importance,” because QC inspectors “support the space program and safeguard the lives of our astronauts.”

The night of the fire, Henry was on his way up to the white room to assist on the final simulation, an emergency escape. The team had spent the day conducting a standard last check of all the systems called a “plugs out” test. It consisted of a full countdown rehearsal, followed by disconnecting the ground systems (that’s the “plugs out” part) to see if the systems on the launch vehicle and the shuttle worked on their own. The white room attached to a swing arm that connected it to the spacecraft. To reach it, you had to take an elevator up 200 feet to level A8, where an open air platform connected the control tower to the white room.

A diagram of the spacecraft and control tower from the investigation report. The blacked out passage at the top connected the spacecraft, white room, and tower. Image: NASA

The test had gotten underway around 1 PM. Though it was mostly business as usual, there had been some issues with the communications connections. It was difficult for mission control to make out what the crew was saying inside the shuttle, and vice versa, leading Grissom to famously ponder after hours of static: “how are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?”

At 6:20 PM, the decision was made to take a 10 minute break to try to sort out the communications issues before the emergency evacuation simulation.

Suddenly, at 6:31 PM, a call over the comms line:

“Fire.”

Henry heard the call while he ascended the elevator. But unbeknownst to him, the scene in the white room where he was heading intensified rapidly in just a matter of seconds.

“All of a sudden someone, we believe it was Grissom, said ‘fire,’” John Tribe, the spacecraft propulsion manager for Apollo, who was in the control room in a separate building that night, told me. “That was followed, shortly thereafter, by Chaffee saying ‘we’ve got a fire in the cockpit.’”

At that moment, the team in the white room sprung into action. Jim Gleaves, the lead technician, ran towards the spacecraft to try to open the hatch and get the crew out. Meanwhile, Don Babbitt, the pad leader for North American Aviation—the company that made the Apollo spacecraft—moved to pick up the phone and call for help.

Exterior of the spacecraft in the white room, following the fire. Image: NASA

“As he turned, there was a venting sound, a sort of WHOOOOSH!, followed by what seemed to Babbitt to be a sheet of flame shooting from the spacecraft and arching over his head, charring the papers on his desk,” Catherine Bly Cox and Charles A. Murray recount in their seminal history on the Apollo program, Apollo: Race to the Moon.

As a formal investigation into the fire would conclude, the heat shield on the spacecraft had ruptured, and the fire exploded onto the swing arm, blasting Gleaves back against the door and flooding the room—and the men—with fresh flames and thick smoke. During this time, the workers in the control room were stunned, listening to the astronaut’s distraught communications and helpless to do anything.

“There was a 10 second pause, and then an anguished cry from Chaffee: ‘Get us out of here! We’re burning up!’” Tribe told me. “And then there was a scream. And then it was all over.”

From the time of the first announcement of fire to the heat shield blowing out, a mere 18 seconds elapsed: just enough time for Henry to ascend up the tower. At this point, Gleaves, Babbitt, Clemmons—as well as L. D. Reece and Jerry W. Hawkins, two other men who had been working in the white room—had already been trying to fight the flames and pull the astronauts out to safety.

"All we felt was heat and ashes.”

The fire reached the ceiling and sent “burning chunks of Teflon” flying off the spacecraft, Clemmons wrote in his essay. Along with immediate threat of the flames, there was a looming danger overhead: the 9000 lb escape rocket attached to the tower. If the fire reached it, it could ignite and explode. The five men engaged the only two fire extinguishers on that level to douse the flames closest to the hatch.

“The smoke was so thick that Jim couldn't see the spacecraft, but could only feel around for the [hatch],” Clemmons wrote. “He was now nearly blind from the acrid smoke. Jerry was almost as bad off. Both were so hoarse they couldn't talk.”

When Henry arrived, without hesitation, he plunged into the fiery chaos unfolding in front of him. He pulled off his jacket to offer to another man to cover his face. He helped dig up some air masks, and then joined the men trying to open the three-layer hatch.

“The hatch was loose but they couldn't get it out,” Henry said in his testimony as part of the year-long investigation into the fire. “We had it pushed down enough where we could barely see inside the command module and there was a lot of smoke and heat coming from the inside of the spacecraft. We [looked] in and we couldn't see anything, so we reached in to see if we could feel anything. All we felt was heat and ashes.”

*

NASA published the results of an official investigation of the Apollo fire in 1968. According to the 200-page report, Grissom, Chaffee, and White had died of cardiac arrest from inhaling too much carbon monoxide and falling asleep. All three astronauts were gone long before they sustained burns. It was a horrific way to go nonetheless, and the waves of grief affected everyone in the program.

Grissom, White, and Chaffee's names are carved on the Space Mirror Memorial for astronauts who died on the job, at Cape Canaveral. Image: NASA

“As members of the launch team, we felt we had lost three of our own and we felt very responsible,” Tribe, the propulsion manager, told me. “How the hell could we have put three guys into those conditions?”

The investigation revealed a number of small missteps that had added up to disaster. The most glaring was that the atmosphere inside the cabin was pure oxygen. This may sound like an obvious mistake, but as Cox and Murray point out in their chronicle of the Apollo program, pure oxygen is necessary in orbit. With only a third of the cabin pressure as Earth, normal air—which is about 78 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen—wouldn’t be capable of sustaining life while in orbit. But while doing ground tests, it proved disastrous to put astronauts into a capsule of pure, pressurized oxygen.

Read more: Seeing Earth from Space Is the Key to Saving Our Species from Itself

There were also some design flaws that enabled the initial spark to ignite, and go unnoticed, and to incinerate nearby, highly-flammable materials, causing the fire to grow out of control in mere seconds. Then there was the hatch itself: designed to open inward (nearly impossible to do if the cabin pressure increases), and three-layered, making it a slow, burdensome process to open, and delaying the rescue efforts.

Each of these errors provided an important lesson for the Apollo program moving forward, and resulted in major improvements to the spacecraft design. These lessons may not have been learned without such a tragedy, and they helped American astronauts win the race to the moon in 1969 with Apollo 11.

Grissom, White, and Chaffee did not die in vain, Tribe said.

“I have a personal feeling that, without their loss in 1967, we might not have gotten to the moon, literally, because what we learned from that accident made a safer program,” he told me.

If the fire hadn’t happened when it did, where it did, these dangerous design flaws may have gone unnoticed until it was too late, and we may have sent astronauts into orbit—or worse, to the moon—doomed to their deaths. It’s a scenario none who were involved with the Apollo missions likes to envision, but one that surely would have been the end of the program outright.

Instead, 18 months after the fire, NASA launched Apollo 7, completing the mission intended for Apollo 1. Eight months and three missions later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon.

And in 1971, the crew of Apollo 15 secretly carried a small statue of a fallen astronaut, and a plaque, to the lunar surface. It was a memorial to the astronauts who lost their lives in the pursuit of space exploration, who paved the way for crews like Apollo 15 to visit the moon, and return safely back home.

The "fallen astronaut" plaque and statue, as photographed on the lunar surface. Image: NASA

Somewhere on the surface of the moon today, this plaque still sits, with eight names carved into it. Among the names listed: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

As for my grandfather, I never got a chance to meet him. After leaving NASA at the conclusion of the Apollo program in 1975, he enjoyed just four years of retirement before he died from pancreatic cancer. But in my family home, in Canada, there’s a memorial of our own: to Henry, and to the men he tried to save. We keep his medal, for exceptional bravery, in a humble wooden frame.

from Heat and Ashes: The Untold Story of the Apollo 1 Fire

What the Heck Is Neurofeedback Technology, Betsy DeVos’s Pet Project?

Conflicts of interest have been a major theme for President Donald Trump’s administration and Trump’s pick to head the Department of Education, wealthy investor and private education advocate Betsy DeVos, is no exception.

DeVos and her husband are major investors in Neurocore, a Michigan-based company that specializes in a drug-free, brain-training treatment called neurofeedback. It's used to treat everything from ADHD to depression and anxiety, DeVos has promoted it as a way to help students perform better in school. According to filings with the Office of Government Ethics, DeVos has agreed to step down from the Neurocore board, but refuses to divest her estimated $5 million to $25 million stake in the company.

While the questions around conflict of interest remain open, there’s another question lingering in the air: what exactly is neurofeedback technology?

Biofeedback is the process of measuring certain functions in our body, from our heart rate to our brain waves, and using that data to adjust those functions when things go awry. Neurofeedback specifically refers to using brainwaves, measured by an electroencephalogram or EEG, to gain insight and provide treatment for everything from ADHD, to depression, to addiction, or even just sharpen focus. Elite athletes, business leaders, or artists sometimes use neurofeedback to excel in their field.

It’s been touted as an effective treatment for a wide range of conditions, including autism, but the scientific community is conflicted over whether there’s enough evidence to make such claims. There are lots of promising studies showing success with neurofeedback for treating conditions like ADHD and depression. But systematic reviews of the research are less concrete, showing some flaws in the data and big differences in methodology between studies.

Read More: Jeff Sessions Failed to Disclose Oil He Owns Under a Federal Wildlife Refuge

Here’s how the treatment works. The first step is to get a quantitative EEG: a map of your resting brain waves that is compared to a huge database of other typical brainwaves. From there, a neuroscientist can analyze this pattern and identify anything that’s different from the norm.

“If you see an excess of theta brain waves, for example, that’s a classic indicator of hyperactive or compulsive ADHD,” said Andrew Hill, a cognitive neuroscientist and the CEO of the Peak Brain Institute, a biofeedback treatment center. “Then we try to decide if the patterns that show up match the person’s experience.”

An example of an EEG with prominent resting state alpha rhythm. Image: WikiMedia Commons

Once a pattern associated with the patient’s symptoms has been identified, they use specialized software to “train” the brain to alter these patterns: so, someone with excess theta activity associated with ADHD will be trying to dial those theta wave down. During a 30-minute session, electrodes attached to the scalp measure the brain’s activity in real time. The software uses this information to run a game that rewards the desired brain activity.

“When something we want to change moves in ‘right’ direction, we make something happen on a screen: so the spaceship flies faster, or music gets louder, maybe an animation unfolds,” Hill explained. “When the brain moves in the ‘wrong’ direction, the game stops. The brain finds that kind of annoying. Over several days, the brain starts to learn to produce activity that was rewarded by the increase in stimulation.”

Neurocore offers two types of treatments in particular, each lasting 45 minutes: One is biofeedback training, which involves watching your heart rate and respiratory rate on a monitor and learning to breath to achieve consistency in these rates. The other is neurofeedback, and for Neurocore's version, this involves watching movies that pause when your brainwaves are not in your pre-determined "therapeutic range."

Hill told me patients typically require between 30 to 40 sessions, a few times a week, but that they start to see results within just a few weeks. Few insurance companies cover this kind of treatment, and sessions cost upwards of $100 each. Hill told me he’s seen some incredible success stories, but the science is not perfect.

Hill said part of the problem with research is that because neurofeedback treatment is highly personalized and relies on EEG data, it makes it much more challenging to do a classic, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. He has worked with software developers to create blinded versions of the software and said there is more rigorous research happening at the moment, but that it’s tough to get funding for a massive, gold-standard study.

“It’s profoundly effective on many things that there’s a lot of money behind,” Hill said. “Big Pharma isn’t able to patent or control neurofeedback in such a way that it makes sense to spend the $5 million it would take to run a clinical study.”

There’s still mixed opinions among the scientific community on the effectiveness of neurofeedback. But clearly, Betsy DeVos is convinced.

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from What the Heck Is Neurofeedback Technology, Betsy DeVos’s Pet Project?

A Psychologist Explains What the Crowds at the Inauguration Say About America

The inauguration of President Donald Trump has attracted huge crowds to the nation’s capital—but many people are there in protest, not celebration.

With thousands of people cheering, while thousands of others chant, the tension is rising. There’s a lot of folk psychology around the groupthink that can happen in large crowds, but what does the actual science say, and what can it tell us about the groups descending on D.C.?

I reached out to Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behavior and a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to talk about whether crowds really make us lose our inhibitions, whether violence is an inevitability, and how these groups show we’re more divided than ever:

What does research tell us about crowd psychology?
There are two versions of crowd psychology. The traditional view is the notion that what happens in crowds is people lose their sense of self, their sense of rationality, and they turn into a mob. But most recent research argues that what happens in crowds is, in a sense, we switch from our sense of self as an individual to our sense of selves as members of particular groups, and act within the values and norms of those groups.

What can that tell us about these groups: the Trump supporters and the Trump protesters?
It’s not that all crowds behave in one way or another, but crowds tell you something about the cultures of groups. What it’s telling you, in part, in the United States at the moment is that you have a very divided culture. You have two cultures, and those cultures aren’t coming together.

Is that anything new, though?
In the past, those cultures were transcended—at least temporarily—for the inauguration. When you look at the approval ratings for nearly every president, they go sky-high briefly around the inauguration. With Trump, what is remarkable is his approval ratings have gone down. There is not a sense that people are coming together to say, ‘whatever you think of him as an individual, whatever you think of him as representing a particular party, you can come together to support him as president.’ That moment has not occurred on this occasion because, I think, of profound senses of illegitimacy.

Rioters and police are clashing during Trump’s inauguration BuzzFeed News January 20, 2017

A sense that Trump is illegitimate?
This is very emblematic. Those who are anti-Trump, they see Trump himself, and his supporters, as illegitimate—racist, misogynist, irrational. But equally for Trump supporters, those who protest are disrespecting not just Trump but the office of president, and they have proved themselves to be un-American and therefore are apart from a legitimate community of debate.

We’re seeing some reports of rioting, and smashing windows—why does this seem to so often happen with large groups?
The problem is we think the conflict lies in the very nature of groups, that crowds are inherently violent. But if you were to have 100 games of football on a Saturday afternoon and there was violence at one, but no violence at 99, which one would appear in the media the next day? ‘Small Crowd, No Violence’ is not a headline. So we radically overestimate the levels of conflict.

And you can find examples of crowds being incredibly non-violent, not all crowds are violent and it’s not even clear that crowds are more likely to be violent than people on their own. You need to look much more specifically at the norms and the beliefs associated with particular groups.

So what can we take away from all of this?
Don’t dismiss crowds as simply mad. Don’t say that they are mindless because they don’t do what you think people should do. Often, we understand our society, our culture, and its problems very deeply by looking at crowds. They tell us something. It might be unwelcome, but if we ignore it, those problems come back to haunt us.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

from A Psychologist Explains What the Crowds at the Inauguration Say About America

Scientists Are Tweeting Their Research in Opposition of Trump’s Inauguration

As one of the most anti-science presidents in recent memory is sworn into office, scientists on Twitter are fighting back. Using the hashtag #USofScience, researchers are flooding Twitter with their work today in an effort to remind the public that science is essential to America's future:

In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring which raised awareness about humans

Katherine O January 20, 2017

Running a gel! checking yesterday

Ginger January 20, 2017

Meanwhile on Mars, the nearly 13 year old rover Opportunity drove 25.6m on Sol 4618 continuing exploration of Endeavour Crater Mike Seibert January 20, 2017

“A lot of people are feeling hopeless with President-elect Trump’s stance on science, and this is sort of an uplifting way to get people to share their science and let people know scientists are here, we’re watching, and we’re ready to fight for what we believe in,” said Ashley Hall, a naturalist and science educator, who came up with the idea Thursday morning.

Jacquelyn Gill, an assistant professor of Paleoecology & Plant Ecology at the University of Maine, suggested the hashtag in response to Hall’s suggestion, and soon both tweets racked up hundreds of retweets.

Read more: Researchers Are Preparing for Trump to Delete Government Science From the Web

Trump and his cabinet picks have raised concerns in the scientific community for their anti-evidence stances on everything from climate change to vaccines. Some climate change scientists are even working to store publicly available scientific research for fear that the Trump administration might start removing evidence from government sites. There are worries that government funding for scientific research could be slashed, or that scientific organizations within the government might be downsized.

Hall told me the Twitter blitz is an attempt to engage the public with the work scientists do and garner support in the face of these uncertainties.

“People really need to realize that science is important, and I think a lot of people do,” Hall said. “Research is not going away anytime soon.”

from Scientists Are Tweeting Their Research in Opposition of Trump’s Inauguration

Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Shop Has Sold Out of Its Jade Vagina Eggs

Taking inspiration from “Chinese concubines and royalty in antiquity,” Gwyneth Paltrow’s new-age “health” brand Goop recently started hawking $66 egg-shaped lumps of jade designed to be inserted in the vagina. And as of Thursday afternoon, they’re sold out.

Goop claims the eggs, when inserted in the vagina and worn daily, work to “increase chi, orgasms, vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy in general.” The idea is similar to doing kegels—exercises that strengthen the pelvic floor muscles—but with the addition of a weight. Plus, like, the power of crystals or something.

The chi/energy/feminine power nonsense is not based in any science, but is there anything wrong with using a weight to add some extra oomph to your kegels? Well, when they’re jade eggs, there is actually, according to Dr. Jennifer Gunter, an OB/GYN. Gunter wrote on her blog that because jade is porous, it could house bacteria, which could lead to infection or even toxic shock syndrome. And overdoing it on kegels can cause pain or damage to your muscle, Gunter wrote.

But apparently enough customers were convinced to buy into Paltrow’s latest health hoax and sell out of the eggs. Hopefully Goop’s next product has antibacterial “properties” to help fight off the bouts of bacterial vaginosis.

from Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Shop Has Sold Out of Its Jade Vagina Eggs

Sixty Percent of the World’s Primates Are Threatened with Extinction

Primates are humans’ closest relatives, and according to a new study, we’re systematically wiping them off the face of the planet.

The vast study, authored by 31 leading experts in primates and conservation, found that 60 percent of all non-human primate species are threatened with extinction due to destructive human activities. The most significant impact is habitat destruction caused by tearing down forests to expand farm fields, logging, and hunting. The researchers found that, without action to find more sustainable solutions, we’re at risk of losing more than half of our closest relatives within decades.

“It is daunting and, if you ask me, it’s hard to imagine we’re not going to witness the extinction of many taxa in the next 10 to 20 years,” said Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, an anthropologist at Yale University and one of the co-authors of the study, which was published Wednesday in Science Advances. “It’s going to happen.”

Non-human primates play an important role in their local ecosystems, and in allowing for important research about human evolution, biology, and health. The pressures on primate conservation have been well-documented, but this study marks the first time that the entire global impact has been measured and evaluated. It takes a holistic look at the numerous problems facing primate conservation, but identifies that there’s no single, simple solution.

Read more: The Man Trying to Save the Philippine Tarsier from the Black Market

There are more than 500 primate species living across 90 countries, which means there are different problems in each region. Rubber tree plantations have driven the decline of the Northern white-cheeked crested gibbon in southwest China, while palm oil farming has been a bigger threat to Sumatran and Bornean orangutan. Fernandez-Duque told me there are many issues intertwined: a growing global population demands more food to feed everyone, which leads to deforestation to expand farmers' fields. Everything from access to reproductive health care to the choices about what furniture we buy can impact these conservation efforts.

“All things considered, I have it easy in Argentina [where I work], I don’t have starving people at the borders of the national park,” Fernandez-Duque said. “Unless we address people’s needs, we won’t be able to address primate needs.”

But it’s not hopeless. The study outlines a number of strategies to help protect our primate cousins before they disappear, from expanded protected conservation areas to finding more sustainable farming practices that don’t require clear-cutting an entire forest. Fernandez-Duque told me it’s not just a government issue, either. Individuals can make an impact by being more thoughtful about their purchases, whether it be avoiding products with palm oil in them, or doing a bit more research to make sure furniture isn’t made using tropical wood.

“Put you money where it can help,” Fernandez-Duque said. “And connect with nature. I really believe in the power of getting people to feel connected to these things.”

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from Sixty Percent of the World’s Primates Are Threatened with Extinction

Trump’s Pick for Health Secretary Doesn’t Believe in Basic Science

Republican Senator Pat Roberts joked that it was an “anger management session.” But Wednesday’s senate hearing for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the secretary of Health and Human Services, Congressman Tom Price (R-Ga.), was largely par for the course.

GOP senators lobbed question-shaped praise while Democrats grilled the controversial nominee on drug prices and repealing Obamacare, sometimes forgetting to ask a question at all. But there was one moment that was particularly revealing when it comes to what kind of health leader Price will be if confirmed, and it wasn’t a question about health policy. It was a question about climate change.

Even after the hearing, we still don’t have much information about how he would serve as health secretary. As a seasoned politician, Price is skilled at dodging questions and, during his hearing, frequently deferred questions related to what his specific positions would be, saying that much of the questions have to do with legislation, not administration. But as the head of HHS, Price would oversee everything from the Centers for Disease Control to the National Institutes of Health, and a strong relationship with scientific evidence is crucial for leading these major institutions.

Read more: The 2016 Election Has Failed the Future

Like many of Trump’s cabinet picks, Price—an orthopedic surgeon—is a climate change skeptic. As a House Representative for Georgia, he has a track record of voting against measures to curb the US’s greenhouse gas emissions, and has said that there have been “errors and obfuscation in the allegedly ‘settled science' of global warming.”

On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), raised the issue, noting that major medical associations—including the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, National Medical Association—have taken a clear stance on climate change. Seventeen of these groups, last year, signed a joint declaration on climate change and health, sounding the alarm on the effects climate change has on our health.

“These major shifts in weather and environment have disastrous consequences for public health, including worsened symptoms of lung disease and other chronic illnesses; higher risk of heatstroke and heat exhaustion; new threats of food- and waterborne diseases; and increased hospital admissions for cardiovascular and kidney disorders,” the declaration read.

Whitehouse asked Price to briefly comment on his climate change beliefs, in light of the connection to health. Price responded in a skeptical fashion.

“The climate is always changing. It’s continuously changing,” Price said. “The question, from a scientific standpoint, is what effect does human behavior and human activity have on that, and what we can do to mitigate that. I believe that’s a question that needs to be studied and evaluated.”

It’s worth noting that Whitehouse is correct: the science on climate change is, in fact, settled, and humans activity is a major driving force behind it.

Beyond the impacts of climate change on health, Price’s skepticism is also troubling because it demonstrates an anti-evidence perspective.

Price’s relationship to evidence-based medicine has been called into question before due to his membership in an anti-evidence group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

As Whitehouse asked: “If we can’t trust you on science that is as settled as climate science, how can we trust you on public health science issues, where there’s a big special interest on the other side?”

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from Trump’s Pick for Health Secretary Doesn’t Believe in Basic Science

Congress Just Missed an Opportunity to Give Americans Access to Cheaper Drugs

Senator Bernie Sanders quoted President-elect Donald Trump on the floor of Congress Wednesday night. The Democratic senator from Vermont admitted Trump is “a guy I don’t quote very often,” but the President-elect’s comments from earlier that day actually aligned nicely with an amendment Sanders was co-sponsoring.

“[Trump] said that ‘pharma gets away with murder.’ That’s what Trump said. He’s right,” Sanders said. “The pharmaceutical industry makes more and more money and the American people pay higher and higher prices. The time has come for us to stand up to the drug companies. Let’s do it tonight.”

Sanders’ amendment to the budget bill would have made it legal to import prescription drugs from other countries, like Canada, where they’re much cheaper than in the US. It was voted down, including by several Democratic senators, raising the eyebrows of some of their supporters. This was as the senate debated a provision in the budget bill that would set up the groundwork for repealing the Affordable Care Act—a provision that did pass, leaving many Americans more anxious than ever about healthcare accessibility.

Read More: Repealing Obamacare Will Seriously Disrupt How Doctors Work

It makes sense, then, that many Americans would think that importing cheaper drugs sounds like a great idea, now more than ever. But there’s more to the story: two other amendments were proposed that also addressed drug prices Wednesday night, one of which got full Democratic support. That’s because importing drugs is a complicated issue, and there are concerns with using it as a lever to lower drug prices in the US.

It’s not a radical idea to import medication from Canada, where they pay a lot less for the exact same drugs. 72% of Americans support it. Bernie Sanders January 12, 2017

In other countries, the government sets a price cap or negotiates lower prices with drug manufacturers, which is why the same medication can sometimes be half or a third of the price in countries like Canada and Denmark. In the US, pharmaceutical companies are free to set their own prices, and patent laws mean there’s often a long period where a company has a monopoly over a certain drug, allowing them to set sky-high prices. Importing drugs from other countries is currently illegal. Maine once tried to legalize it, but a federal judge overturned the law.

Allowing pharmacists and patients with a prescription to buy drugs back at half the price from Canada is touted as a way to force US companies to roll back their prices to stay competitive. But there’s a concern that wholesalers, such as websites that already sell Canadian drugs to US consumers under the table, might not be subject to the same quality and safety checks that a licensed pharmacy would be.

“If you were to go to Canada and buy a drug that would be sold to a Canadian patient, you’d be just fine,” said Peter Rice, a pharmacist and a professor at the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “But the regulations allowing drugs to be imported to Canada and then sold to somebody in another country doesn’t necessarily [impose] the same quality controls.”

This is one of the biggest concerns with using imported drugs as a way to try to force US drug companies to lower prices. Democratic Senator Bob Casey said on Twitter that that’s why he couldn’t support Sanders’ amendment.

Senator Bob Casey January 12, 2017

Instead, Casey and the rest of the Democratic senate voted in favor of a different amendment—one that would more broadly prioritize lowering drug prices—but it was blocked by Republican senators.

Another common concern is that any attempt to lower drug prices in the US would do such damage to pharmaceutical companies’ bottom lines that they would no longer be able to afford the financial investment required to bring new drugs to market. But Rice, and many others, argue that there are ways to ensure that doesn’t happen, such as relaxing regulations on experimental drug trials to help manufacturers get to market sooner. It just might not be as simple as opening up a pill pipeline from Canada.

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from Congress Just Missed an Opportunity to Give Americans Access to Cheaper Drugs

How Trump Could Change America's Vaccine Policies

President-elect Donald Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a notorious anti-vaxxer, on Tuesday. Kennedy said Trump asked him to “chair a commission on vaccine safety,” which Kennedy accepted, a move that was nearly unanimously decried by the public health community.

A Trump spokesperson told Motherboard* "no decisions have been made at this time," but said the commission would specifically focus on autism. The fact that Kennedy described the commission as relating to vaccines, and Trump's team described it as related to autism, suggests a link that has been thoroughly debunked by science.

"The President-elect is exploring the possibility of forming a commission on autism, which affects so many families," Hope Hicks, a spokesperson for the Presidential Transition Team, wrote in an email. "The President-elect looks forward to continuing the discussion about all aspects of autism with many groups and individuals."

Allowing an anti-fact, anti-evidence individual to have any kind of advisory role in the government’s health care decisions is disturbing on a philosophical level. It also has the potential to politicize a debate that has largely stayed on the fringes for both parties. But it’s important to keep these moves in perspective. Here are the ways Trump could influence vaccine programs, and what the limitations are:

Robert F Kennedy JR says Trump asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety and he agreed. Has lobbied for vaccine exemptions.

Ginger Gibson January 10, 2017

“Everybody ought to be able to be assured that the vaccines that we have — he’s very pro-vaccine, as am I — but they’re as safe as they possibly can be,” Kennedy told reporters Tuesday after the meeting.

But the notion that Kennedy is “pro vaccine,” is dubious at best. If you’re unfamiliar, Kennedy was once best-known for his work in environmental conservation, but in recent years he gained notoriety for stubbornly clinging to the notion that vaccines can cause autism—even though scientific analysis has debunked any connection between the two. Kennedy’s even gone so far as to claim a massive government cover-up hiding the link between vaccines and autism, so you can add conspiracy theorist to his resume.

The pairing isn’t altogether surprising: Trump has repeated misleading claims about vaccines and autism for years, including throughout the presidential election. But the president-elect has also had a habit of reversing course on some campaign claims, so it’s troubling to see him staying on this particular path. I reached out to Trump’s transition team, but have not yet heard back.

But there’s a limit to how much can really change. Vaccine mandates are determined at the state level, and all 50 states have some kind of vaccine mandate in place: in order for children to attend public school in the state, they have to be up-to-date on their shots.

There are exemptions, and some states are looser than others on what a parent needs to do to avoid shots. Some stricter states, like Mississippi and, as of last year, California, will only grant exceptions for medical reasons—if a child has a documented allergy to a specific vaccine ingredient, for instance. Others allow religious or “personal belief” exemptions, which lets anti-vaxx parents claim whatever they want to avoid getting a shot.

Still, the mandates do a lot to ensure a majority of kids are protected from vaccine-preventable diseases, and aren’t going to infect vulnerable populations like newborn babies. And the federal government can’t force states to change these laws. But there are a few things the feds could do that would be worrisome for vaccine proponents. Congress could incentivize loosening up vaccine mandates, for example, giving states a reason to keep or add personal belief exemptions.

Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn

Donald J. Trump March 28, 2014

Trump could also potentially appoint a vaccine-unfriendly head of the Centers for Disease Control to replace current director Dr. Thomas Frieden, who has said he will resign on inauguration day. The CDC sets recommendations for vaccines that many states choose to follow, and may make changes under the direction of an anti-vaxx head. But neither of these routes would likely dramatically shake up states that believe in strong vaccine mandates.

Another area that’s maybe more likely to be influenced by the likes of Kennedy is the National Vaccine Injury Compensation (NVIC) Program. Rarely, vaccines can cause adverse events, like an allergic reaction that causes anaphylactic shock. In those events, the parents can seek compensation from the government through the NVIC program, paid for through a surcharge on vaccines.

I spoke with Dr. David Gorski, a surgeon and the managing editor of the blog Science-Based Medicine, last year about Representative Tom Price, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (who is in a group that promotes anti-vaccine views, among other anti-evidence beliefs). Gorski explained that the compensation program would be a potential target for an anti-vaccine administration.

“Win or lose, parents get their legal costs taken care of and it has a certain set of table injuries where compensation is pretty much automatic,” Gorski said. “The thing [anti-vaccinationists] don’t like about it is that autism is not a table injury and they don’t get compensated for autism, because the evidence is overwhelming that vaccines are not associated with autism.”

Congress could conceivably amend the injury table to include autism, forcing the government to pay out compensation to anti-vaxxer parents that claim a shot gave their child autism, even without the support of science. Or it could get rid of the court altogether.

“That would actually be very bad for parents of children who really have been injured by vaccines because it’s way more difficult to be compensated in regular, run-of-the-mill civil court,” Gorski told me.

Tapping an anti-vaccine proponent to advise on medical policy legitimizes a viewpoint that’s dangerous, and could send out waves that shift state-level thinking. When state mandates are softened, it opens the door for not only anti-vaxxers, but also to any parents who are under informed, or frankly just really busy, to skip vaccinations for their kids. And when too few kids are vaccinated, outbreaks can occur, and people die from diseases that should have been long defeated.

There are limits to how much Trump, or Kennedy, can actually alter vaccine policy. But there’s no limit to how much this ideology can ripple out across the country, and that’s a dangerous prospect.

*This story was updated after it was first published to include response from Trump's transition team.

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from How Trump Could Change America's Vaccine Policies

Twitter Finally Cracked Down on ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Twitter has suspended Martin Shkreli, the wealthy pharmaceutical CEO who drew attention and ire in 2015 after acquiring, then jacking up the price of, an HIV drug.

Over the last few days, Shkreli had been tweeting about magazine journalist Lauren Duca, sending her messages, and decorating his twitter profile with altered images of him with Duca, including an image of Shkreli’s face Photoshopped over Duca’s husband’s. Duca documented the harassment on her own account, tweeting directly to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey with screengrabs of Shkreli’s profile:

I would rather eat my own organs Lauren Duca January 5, 2017

How is this allowed Lauren Duca January 8, 2017

Duca rose to prominence last year after penning a viral op-ed for Teen Vogue titled: “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” where she argued that the president-elect’s proclivity to deny proven facts amounts to psychological manipulation. She has received threats and harassment since, according to her tweets:

I am truly Lauren Duca January 9, 2017

Meanwhile, Shkreli is a high-profile character in his own right, drawing attention for his drug price hike, but also for his live stream videos, and being arrested and charged with fraud for allegedly operating what investigators dubbed a “Ponzi-like scheme” through his hedge fund companies. He has also has a documented history of trolling on Twitter, such as the time he tried to tease actor Patton Oswalt.

That Twitter finally decided to take away his privileges is a sign of the times. The company has faced criticism for not doing enough to protect users being harassed, and has struggled to find the right approach to curbing abuse on the platform.

Read More: So Milo's Banned. Now Will Twitter Start Working on Harassment?

Taking on Pharma’s biggest troll is their latest move, and a step in the right direction. But having famous, or at least infamous, people involved most likely pushed this case over the edge.

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from Twitter Finally Cracked Down on ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Really Big Propellers Are Powering Greener, Smarter Ships

There’s something about really big machines that makes the child in any of us wonderstruck. Case in point: really big ships, and their equally huge propellers.

An inspector checks out the propeller on cruise ship Oasis of the Seas. Image: ABB

We’ve had colossal propellers since the days of the Titanic, with its solid bronze, ten-foot-blade props. But these days, large ships require not just bigger propellers, but smarter, nimbler, greener propellers.

“The digital age arrived in the marine sector, too,” said Markus Gamper, media relations manager for ABB Ltd., a Swedish-Swiss conglomerate that manufacturers large marine propellers. “There's a technological shift happening and software development controlling drives and propellers keeps advancing.”

The trouble with really big propellers is that they’re usually attached to really big, energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing boats, such as cruise ships, container ships, and icebreakers. But Gamper told me massive propellers can actually play a role in making these behemoth machines a little greener.

The Yamal icebreaker ship. Image: ABB

He pointed to ABB’s Azipod thrusters, propellers of up to 20 feet that combine an entire propulsion system. Traditionally, Gamper explained, propellers would be connected to a long shaft line and powered by a mechanical diesel motor to move the ship. All the steering was left up to a series of rudders. But the Azipods have their own electric motor, and can spin 360 degrees, meaning they can be used for steering, too.

“The electrical propeller motors are controlled by drives that control the speed of the propellers,” Gamper explained. “The electric propulsion system is therefore able to run the diesel engines at or close to their optimum efficiency point regardless of the vessel's speed. This results in significant fuel savings.”

It also makes it easier for massive ships to adopt greener fuels, such as Polaris, the world’s first natural-gas-powered ice breaker.

Other players in the big propeller market have taken similar strides in improving technology. Mecklenburger Metallguss GmbH—which manufactured a 34-foot propeller that is very likely the largest on the seas currently—also uses an integrated drive system in its “5D” props, which the company claims can cut fuel usage by 14 per cent. And modern propellers are integrated with smart, data-collecting sensors that help track how a ship is moving and make more efficient decisions, while also tracking any maintenance needs.

Really big ships are never going to be the most green machines on the planet, but it’s nice to know that the industry is serious about reducing the carbon footprint of these vehicles, starting with arguably the coolest part: really fucking big propellers.

from Really Big Propellers Are Powering Greener, Smarter Ships

Scientists Hacked an Old Brain-Zapping Treatment for Parkinson’s

Image: Val Altounian / Science Translational Medicine (2017)

Zapping the deepest corners of the brain with high frequency electrical pulses has been used to treat advanced Parkinson’s disease for years. Scientists just figured out how to make it better.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is very effective at relieving some of the worst symptoms of the hard-to-treat disease, such as tremors, but there are some drawbacks to the treatment, including frequent surgeries to replace the device delivering the electric pulses. That’s why researchers at Duke University recently used a computer model to hack deep brain stimulation, making it more efficient and safer, according to a study published in Science Translational Medicine this week.

DBS requires electrodes to be implanted in the brain through a small opening in the skull, and connected by an insulated wire to a small, battery-operated device called a neurostimulator. The neurostimulator looks a bit like a pacemaker and is implanted under the skin, usually near the collarbone, and controlled using a handheld remote. The neurostimulator delivers a constant stream of high-frequency pulses, typically 130- to 185-Hz. Early research found that lower frequency pulses weren’t effective (and could even make symptoms worse), and randomly alternating pulses also had no effect.

But constantly barraging the brain with high-frequency pulses has side effects, including headaches and confusion. It also quickly drains the DBS device’s battery—individuals using DBS need to have their batteries changed every two to five years, and swapping out batteries requires surgery, which comes with a risk of infection.

A team of researchers at Duke Medical led by David Brocker have come up with a possible improvement to DBS: alternating the frequency of the electrical pulses, not in a random way, but using a pattern generated by an advanced computer model. They created the model to calculate a pattern that would reduce the average frequency and use less energy, without losing the overall effect.

Brocker and his team then tested that pattern in devices implanted in mice with Parkinson’s and in eight patients with Parkinson’s, with promising results. The patients were tasked with performing a finger-tapping exercise to measure their symptoms, and the computer-generated pattern of electrical pulses was just as effective as the standard, constant-blast approach.

And it did so while using less energy: the researchers estimated patients would get an additional 3.9 years of battery life using the computer’s pattern versus the typical, constant stream approach. They also suggested the model could be used to customize patterns to target specific symptoms in individuals, giving each patient their own personal pattern that suits their brain best.

It’s an exciting example of how combining different disciplines can solve some of the trickiest problems when treating complex diseases like Parkinson’s.

from Scientists Hacked an Old Brain-Zapping Treatment for Parkinson’s

These Tiny Jelly Robots Can Precisely Deliver Medicine in the Body

If you’ve ever seen anybody endure chemotherapy, you know that it can be a grueling process, to say the least. But new research on tiny, 3D-printed, jelly-like robots could provide an alternative to flooding the body with poison: popping the robots inside the body to target the cancer directly. It’s an exciting development that shows the possibilities of robots that can both run automatically and deliver medicine more precisely than current methods.

Samuel Sia and his colleagues at Columbia University wanted to create an implantable device that was totally biocompatible—made of materials that don’t disrupt or damage living tissue—according to the research published in Science Robotics this week. They decided to use hydrogels, a type of synthetic material that has a high water content and can be adjust to be soft like human tissue or stiffer like rubber. Devices like this have been made before, but they usually also include some non-biocompatible parts to make the whole thing run, like batteries. But these little robots were designed to be totally biocompatible and self-sufficient: no batteries required.

First, the researchers had to create a method of production, so they built a custom 3D printer that could easily build up layers of hydrogels to make the little robots. A typical 3D printer would take hours to make a similar device, because the hydrogel material is a bit sloppy to work with. But their hydrogel printer made a complex mechanism in just 30 minutes.

They made several designs but the one they tested most thoroughly was a hydrogel Geneva drive: a type of gear used in watchmaking that precisely ticks along at certain degrees:

Image: WikiMedia Commons

Instead of a battery powered motor, the device can be activated by a magnet placed on the skin, which tugs on a very tiny amount of gel-coated iron in the center of the drive. The idea is that a doctor could implant the device exactly where a patient needs medicine delivered, but no doses would come out until the doctor or patient activated the gear with a magnet.

To test out whether this would be feasible in an actual living creature, the researchers loaded the Geneva drive with tiny doses of doxorubicin—a chemotherapy drug used to treat bone cancer—and inserted it under the skin of lab mice that had cancerous bone tumors. They found that, compared to mice that received a standard treatment of chemotherapy, the Geneva drive was more effective at slowing growth of the tumor, killing tumor cells, and caused less damage to healthy cells.

Though it’s only been tested in mice so far, Sia’s research marks a number of exciting advancements, from the speedy 3D printing technique, to the fully biocompatible device, that could open the door for all kinds of new medical devices. Sia’s team even writes that the device could be made biodegradable, meaning a doctor wouldn’t need to extract it when treatment is over: the robot could just dissolve away.

Compared to the way we douse patients with chemotherapy now, a little jelly robot would be a major upgrade.

from These Tiny Jelly Robots Can Precisely Deliver Medicine in the Body

After Escaping War, Syrian Refugees Are Left Facing ‘Silent Killers'

In Jordan, about 9 percent of the adult population has diabetes—similar to the rates in the US. But at one Doctors Without Borders clinic in the city of Irbid, roughly half of the refugee patients are diabetic.

“We have in our clinic about 4,000 patients and over 2,000 of them have diabetes,” Dr. Paul van den Bosch, a supervising physician at the Irbid clinics, told me over the phone. About 70 percent of the clinic’s patients are refugees, while the rest are Jordanian.

“It’s the single greatest problem, and many of them also have high blood pressure,” van den Bosch said.

Non-communicable disease—illnesses that aren’t transferred person-to-person, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma—are a global health concern. But among many populations of Syrian refugees, these diseases have become an even greater threat. After escaping war, they’re left facing what are often dubbed “silent killers,” and have unique challenges to getting treatment and care, van den Bosch told me. Though we often think of war injuries and emergency care when it comes to refugee health, these longer term ailments can be just as serious.

Jordan is home to over 650,000 registered Syrian refugees, according to the United Nations refugee agency. These individuals were once allowed to access Jordan’s public health care system for free, but in 2014, the government cut access and required refugees to pay fees to access health care.

Most refugees in Jordan are also unable to obtain work permits, according to the International Labour Organization, making it especially difficult to access necessary care. A survey by CARE, a humanitarian nonprofit, found that almost a third of Syrian families living in Jordan said they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor.

Doctors Without Borders provides care to refugees free of charge, but van den Bosch told me the lack of employment only exacerbates the challenges of treating non-communicable diseases.

“Many of them are not in the position to do the things we would normally encourage our diabetic patients to do,” van den Bosch explained. “Medication is obviously very important, but these are conditions where you need people to change their behavior. But they can’t afford gym memberships. They can’t afford to eat the good food: fruit and vegetables are more expensive. Bread is subsidized. Sugar is very cheap.”

He said mental health issues are also prevalent—many of his refugee patients have lost their homes, their possessions, and even family members. Some have family members back home still, and the stress takes a toll on their mental health, which in turn limits their ability to improve their physical health.

The clinics in Jordan have tried to find ways to work around these obstacles: they’ll do house calls for patients who have had strokes or heart attacks, or have depression, and the clinics offering psychological counseling. But van den Bosch told me it’s frustrating to not be able to do more to help patients who are suffering. Short of top-level political solutions, he said he’s not sure what more can be done.

“In the clinic you see people sitting and you think they look okay, but very often if you ask with any kind of sensitivity how they feel, they burst into tears,” van den Bosch said. “Our capacity to help people is limited, but it’s something.”

from After Escaping War, Syrian Refugees Are Left Facing ‘Silent Killers'

2017 Will Be the Year We Decide Whether to Put a Call Out to Aliens

The search for extraterrestrial intelligent life in the universe may sound like science fiction to some, but it’s been a legitimate and active part of astronomy research for decades. Now, some researchers want to take the next step, from looking for signs of life to sending out signals and telling any aliens out there: “Hey, we’re down here!”

This idea has drawn criticism from the likes of Stephen Hawking and launched a debate that will come to a head this year as a young organization rolls out its plan to craft a message to blast out to potential aliens some time in 2018. METI International, launched in 2015, is a nonprofit research group that plans to start messaging by the end of next year. Their name means “messaging extraterrestrial intelligence” (a play on SETI, the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence”).

“One of the big questions has been: is this dangerous, to be transmitting to extraterrestrials?” said Douglas Vakoch, the president of METI International. “Maybe they’re having a bad millennium and they’re feeling malevolent. But if that’s the case, they can come anyway.”

The main criticism that arises is how little we know about any potential life forms out there, and if they’re unfriendly, alerting them to our existence could be fatal. They might decide to attack our planet for resources, or eliminate our entire species just for fun. Or, if they’re like the heptapods in Arrival, just trying to help unite us.

“We have almost zero idea of whether aliens are likely to be dangerous,” wrote Mark Buchanan, a physicist, in an issue of Nature Physics last summer. “The single history of evolving biological life that we know of — here on Earth — carries a strong theme of violent conflict, perpetual battle for resources and the oppression of weaker groups by stronger ones.”

We’re not exactly an optimistic case study. But those in favor of reaching out, like Vakoch, believe if these unfriendly life forms are out there, and have the scientific advancement to travel to us, they would have already been able to find us: the Earth has been leaking radio waves for decades, which have reached the nearest 7,000 stars.

Vakoch has a PhD in psychology but has been grappling with the question of whether to try to communicate with intelligent life in the universe—and what to say if we do—since the late 90s with the SETI Institute. He told me part of the METI mission is to test out a challenge to the Fermi paradox—which questions why, if the universe is theoretically teeming with life, we still haven’t met any aliens.

One theory is that intelligent alien life surrounds us, but is keeping itself hidden from us plebeian life forms. The only way to get their attention would be to reach out first. (Fellow Star Trek fans will recognize this theory as fitting in nicely with the Prime Directive.)

It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve deliberately sent messages into space: NASA has done it, with its golden record on Voyager, plaques on Pioneer 10 & 11, and (for some reason) a Beatles song it beamed out in 2008. But the difference is that these messages were tangential to the real mission: great, if some aliens stumble across them, but they were not directed at a planet where we think life might exist. METI, by contrast, would be very deliberately sending messages to specific locations, such as Proxima B, an Earthlike planet in the habitable zone near our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri. That message could travel to Proxima B in just over four years, meaning we could have a response (if there is indeed intelligent life there) just over eight years after sending the message.

But if you’re still siding with Stephen Hawking with this one and are worried it’s too risky, don’t panic yet. Vakoch told me METI will be hosting three important meetings this year to continue this debate. One meeting, in St. Louis in May, will specifically consider the potential risks and benefits of alerting other possible life forms to our existence, and may in fact convince the group to hold off on sending out messages.

“That’s possible,” Vakoch said. “We want to hear from people who do have concerns and we want to look for a method that will let us find common ground.”

And even if METI goes forward with its plan to send out a message in 2018, it will need either the permission of one of Earth’s existing large radio telescopes, or enough funding to build their own, so there’s no guarantee either will happen.

Whatever side of the debate you fall on, it’s pretty fascinating to see the different arguments unfold. The possibility of intelligent life in the universe is so real, it’s causing some of our greatest scientists to freak out over whether or not we want to find it.

from 2017 Will Be the Year We Decide Whether to Put a Call Out to Aliens

A Scientific Explanation for Why Everyone Hates New Year’s Eve

Image: Pixabay

The countdown is on for one of the year’s most hated holidays: New Year’s Eve.

For a celebration that mostly involves drinking champagne and wearing sequins, lots of people have some really strong opinions about New Year’s Eve. Comedian John Oliver once compared the evening to the death of a pet: “You know it’s going to happen but somehow you’re never really prepared for how truly awful it is.”

It turns out there’s actually a scientific explanation for why so many people aren’t fans of the holiday, and understanding it can help us have a better time ringing in the new year. And a lot of it has to do with managing expectations.

“Expectations are just as important as what actually happens to us,” said Robb Rutledge, a senior research associate at University College London who studies decision making and happiness. “In general, our happiness doesn’t increase unless something exceeds our expectations.”

This is a well-worn adage—happiness is reality minus expectations—but it’s bolstered by research, including a study Rutledge led published in 2014. Rutledge and his team had a small group of people play a decision making game where they’d win points or money, and measured their happiness moment-to-moment through survey questions and MRI brain scans.

They found that a person’s expectation of the results of their decision—like, “if I choose this option, I’ll win more money”—had a greater impact on their happiness than what actually happened to them (winning money or not). They were able to accurately predict people’s happiness by making a mathematical equation that matched this expectation-reality exchange.

Basically, when reality meets our expectations, our happiness doesn’t increase. If it surpasses our expectations, our happiness grows, and if it’s below our expectations? That’s when we find disappointment.

“Our brains aren’t really there to make us happy or feel good,” Rutledge explained. “What’s useful for you for survival is making good decisions and learning about your environment. Those are the things human brains have been trying to do for hundreds of thousands of years, and happiness can be useful in that but it’s not the goal.”

This is true of all kinds of situations in modern life, but New Year’s Eve seems to be an especially common date when one’s reality doesn’t meet one’s expectations. A 1999 study demonstrated that the higher someone’s expectations were for their New Year’s Eve plans, the more likely they were to be disappointed after the fact.

Rutledge told me there are a few reasons why New Year’s so often ends up disappointing. For one, it’s the kind of holiday that everyone is celebrating, which means if you do want to go out, you probably have to make plans of some kind. This might mean choosing which party to go to, or buying tickets to an event, or booking a hotel room. All of this planning makes us, naturally, start to set up some expectations.

Rutledge has also found evidence that other people’s experiences can impact our moment-to-moment happiness and on New Year’s, everyone is celebrating at the same time. These days, they’re probably also posting on social media—the constant comparison to other people’s seemingly-magical evenings could impact how happy we are with our own.

So what’s the solution? Should you just tell yourself New Year’s Eve is going to be a dumpster fire, and then anything above that will seem like a win?

“No, no, no, that is a common response to this slightly depressing news, but it’s more that people should have realistic expectations,” Rutledge said. “Make plans but realize that not everything goes perfectly, and then just see what happens.”

It can be hard to fight against our natural instincts to plan and predict, but if you tend to be less than thrilled with your New Year’s Eve celebrations, try keeping this in mind this year as you make plans. Considering we’re bidding adieu to what is arguable one of the worst years ever, whatever you end up doing, it should be a Happy New Year.

from A Scientific Explanation for Why Everyone Hates New Year’s Eve