Butterflies

160,000 People Complained to Delta

Domenica Rohrborn contacted me a few weeks ago.  Did I realize, she asked, what's been going on?  I confess I don't always realize what's going on. Perhaps that's because I rely on Twitter to inform me at all times.  Rohrborn, however, wanted me to focus. She explained that something was going on in the airline world, something that had been going on for a long time.

You see, when you get on a plane, expecting the flight attendant to smile at you, welcome you, and maybe even offer you a drink -- if you're munificent or flying on corporate dollars -- the flight attendant isn't being paid.  "I've started a petition," Rohborn, a former flight attendant explained.

A petition? Oh, that's going to work, I thought. How many times do people start petitions and nothing ever happens? (Most of the time.) But I clicked on the link and there were 120,000 people complaining about this situation, which hails back to the times of railroads.

Yes, flight attendant schedules mimicked railroad schedules. Hence, as Rohrborn explained: "We only get clocked for our flight times. When the pilots pull the breaks. Not when we have customers on board or delays or mechanicals. Even though we are required by the FAA to complete specific job-related safety procedures and interact with customers."

This may seem slightly ludicrous. It may also be something of which airlines took advantage for decades.  Which made a Delta Air Lines announcement last week so very strange. Suddenly, from the bright blue skies, Delta declared it would now pay flight attendants for boarding.  This isn't full pay, you understand. The airline will pay 50% of the standard hourly rate for boarding. Which is 50% more than the nothing they were paid before.

Naturally, I asked Rohrborn what she thought. Did I mention her petition now has more than 160,000 signatures?  She told me this was "an absolutely historic win."

However, she added: "The rules for this new boarding pay scale aren't completely ideal -- flight attendants still have unpaid time and have to be at the aircraft earlier. There's not much clarity about other incentives that they usually see.

It doesn't cover mechanicals or delays or airport sits. Really, we should be paid 100% of our hourly rate for this time since we are 100% present and working, and are 100% able to be terminated.  And then there's the possibility that something will be taken from the flight attendants as a twisted balancing act. READ MORE...

Rolling Ball

 

High Marijuana Use Linked to Heart Attacks

Smoking marijuana at least once a month is linked to an elevated risk of heart attack, according to a new study among nearly 160,000 people in the U.K.

The research, published Friday in the journal Cell, looked at more than 11,000 people between ages 40 and 69 who said they smoked marijuana at least once a month. The scientists then compared that group to 122,000 other people in the same age bracket who did not smoke marijuana at all, and nearly 23,000 more who smoked less frequently.


The study authors controlled for age, gender and body mass index — three factors that influence the risk of heart disease — and found that people who smoked marijuana frequently were more likely than people who did not to have a first heart attack before age 50. Having one heart attack increases the lifelong risk of having another or developing heart failure.

The findings align with other similar research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already warns that smoking marijuana could lead to an increased risk of heart disease, and a 2021 study identified an association between heart attacks and marijuana use in young adults. But the new study goes a step further, since it also attempts to figure out why smoking weed can lead to heart problems.

To investigate that, the researchers studied how THC affects both human stem cells and mice stem cells. It's already known that when people smoke marijuana, THC binds with a receptor in the brain, which is what gives the feeling of being high. In their lab studies, the team found that THC also binds to that receptor in blood vessels.

So the researchers suggested that using THC frequently could activate that receptor in a way that leads to inflammation in blood vessels, which in turn can accelerate a buildup of plaque in the arteries that can lead to a heart attack.  READ MORE...

Deer & Kittens

 

Counter Brain Aging

Summary: Using whole-brain virtual models, researchers simulate the effects of non-invasive neurostimulation on the aging brain. The computational models shed light on the dynamics of brain changes as a result of aging.

Source: Human Brain Project

Human Brain Project researchers have used whole-brain virtual models to simulate what happens when neurostimulation is applied to aging human brains.

These models provide new insight into how the dynamics of a healthy brain change as it grows old, and crucially, could help identify new targets and strategies for therapeutic neurostimulation.

As the brain ages, it “reorganizes” itself: its neurodynamics and the connections between neurons change dramatically, often resulting in a decrease of cognitive functions. Noninvasive brain stimulation techniques, such as applying electrical or magnetic currents, have recently emerged as possible treatments for neurological and degenerative disorders, contrasting and mitigating the natural effects of aging.

However, large scale experimental studies on healthy human brains have obvious ethical implications. A group of Spanish researchers, led by Gustavo Deco from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, were able to overcome these limitations with the help of modeling and simulation.

Their study was published in Cerebral Cortex and used neuroimaging data of 620 healthy adults, collected during previous research – half of them aged over 65 years, the other half below 65 years.

The team looked for key differences between the brain states of the two groups, and identified a brain state similar to the so-called “rich club” region, a network of 12 brain hubs well connected with each other.  READ MORE...

Card Shuffling

Hello

Time Does Not Exist (?)

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock.

But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously.

How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: Even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual.

A crisis in physics
Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the Universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics describes how things work in the incredibly tiny world of particles and particle interactions. General relativity describes the big picture of gravity and how objects move.

Both theories work extremely well in their own right, but the two are thought to conflict with one another. Though the exact nature of the conflict is controversial, scientists generally agree both theories need to be replaced with a new, more general theory.

Physicists want to produce a theory of "quantum gravity" that replaces general relativity and quantum mechanics, while capturing the extraordinary success of both. Such a theory would explain how gravity's big picture works at the miniature scale of particles.

Time in quantum gravity
It turns out that producing a theory of quantum gravity is extraordinarily difficult.

One attempt to overcome the conflict between the two theories is string theory. String theory replaces particles with strings vibrating in as many as 11 dimensions.  READ MORE...

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

 

When Parents Take Antibiotics

Summary: Zebrafish study finds antibiotics can have detrimental effects on the descendants of those exposed to them, including weaker immune systems.

Source: University of Southern Denmark

Antibiotics have once proclaimed the salvation of the world. Today, researchers fear that antibiotics could become a threat to public health and the natural environment.

Since its invention, we have used antibiotics in such large doses and so often that more and more of us become resistant, and thus otherwise common and harmless infections can become life-threatening for us.

In recent years, research has also shown that just being exposed to antibiotics can have a negative effect; both on the organism being exposed and on the offspring of the organism.

Always in our water

And we are many, both humans and animals, who are exposed to antibiotics. Antibiotics are often found in wastewater, groundwater, surface water, and even bottled water and are thus difficult not to come into contact with.

“The half-life of antibiotics is quite short – it is out of the water again after hours or days – but since large amounts are continuously released into our water, we consider antibiotics as pseudo persistent water pollution,” says Elvis Genbo Xu, who is an expert in ecotoxicology and assistant professor at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark.

He is the co-corresponding author of a new study on the undesirable effects of antibiotics, published in Environmental Science & Technology.  READ MORE...

An Itch

 

Hybernation in Space

Sending humans virtually anywhere in space beyond the Moon pushes logistics of health, food, and psychology to limits we're only just beginning to grasp.

A staple solution to these problems in science fiction is to simply put the void-travelers to bed for a while. In a sleep-like state akin to hibernation or torpor, metabolism drops, and the mind is spared the boredom of waiting out endless empty hours.

Unlike faster-than-light travel and wormholes, the premise of putting astronauts into a form of hibernation feels like it's within grasp. Enough so that even the European Space Agency is seriously looking into the science behind it.

Implications of a new study by a trio of researchers from Chile now reveal a mathematical hurdle to turning the potential of long-term human stasis into reality, one that might mean it's as forever beyond our reach.

Roberto F. Nespolo and Carlos Mejias from the Millennium Institute for Integrative Biology and Francisco Bozinovic from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile set out to unravel the relationship between body mass and energy expenditure in animals that hibernate.

They discovered a minimum level of metabolism that allows cells to persist under cold, low-oxygen conditions. For relatively heavy animals like us, the energy savings we might expect from entering a deep, hibernation-like state would be negligible.

In fact, we'd probably be better off just napping our days away the old-fashioned way.

The word hibernation often invokes images of a bear tucked away in a den for a long winter's rest.  READ MORE...

Flash

 

All Nighter

 

All About the Democrats

Flashy

 

Free Speech or Disinformation?

In a Friday piece for Time magazine, the outlet’s national correspondent Charlotte Alter dismissed Elon Musk’s quest for free speech on Twitter as a white male "obsession," and merely an entrepreneurial way to acquire influence and power in the world.

She also claimed that Musk’s idea of free speech is about the right to spread "disinformation" and has nothing to do with the Founding Fathers' original intent.

Alter began her piece by insinuating that Musk should have put his $44 billion into something more worthwhile than what he sees as "free speech," a phrase she put in scare quotes throughout the piece.

She wrote, "They say that something is worth what someone will pay for it. If that’s true, then protecting ‘free speech,’ which Elon Musk has cited as a central reason he agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion this week, may be worth twice as much as solving America’s homelessness problem, and seven times as much as solving world hunger."

She added, "It’s worth more (to him, at least) than educating every child in nearly 50 countries, more than the GDP of Serbia, Jordan, or Paraguay."

The author then proceeded to wonder why a rich techie like Musk would even care about freedom of speech and how it "had become paramount concern of the techno-moral universe."

She asked, "Why does Musk care so much about this? Why would a guy who has pushed the boundaries of electric-vehicle manufacturing and plumbed the limits of commercial space flight care about who can say what on Twitter?"

She then cited professor of communication at Stanford University Fred Turner for the answer, who agreed, "It does seem to be a dominant obsession with the most elite." He stated, "[F]ree speech seems to be much more of an obsession among men," and part of "the entrepreneurial push: I did it in business, I did it in space, and now I’m going to do it in the world."  READ MORE...

Timelapse

 

Wealth Literacy VERSUS Financial Literacy

In today’s society, there is much discussion about how young individuals are financially illiterate, as if financial knowledge were sufficient to enable them to accumulate money.

However, despite the fact that millions of individuals have read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” one of the best financial literacy books available, there is a disconnect between the basic ideas of financial literacy and their application in the pursuit of financial independence. There is still a bridge to wealth-building that novels such as “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” have failed to cross, and it is somewhere out there.

This is not a bridge of financial literacy, but rather a bridge of financial wealth literacy. In the event that I were the president of a university, I would make certain that my business program included the following courses:

(1) What is Leverage and How Does It Work?

(2) The Four Pillars of Financial Success

(3) How to Make Money Investing

(4) Cryptocurrency , Gold and Precious Metals

(5) How to Make the Most of Your Time

(6) Exposing and dispelling common investment myths; and

(7) Networking

Following the completion of the fundamental curriculum, I would deliver numerous more classes, including the following:

(1) The Relationship Between Politics and Investing; and (2) The Relationship Between Politics and Investing
in
(2) Taking Advantage of Technology to Increase Wealth

The knowledge gained from all of these courses would provide an adequate basis for building wealth without the need for considerable trial and error, hardship, or outright failure on the part of young adults. Instead, traditional institutions of higher learning do not provide such courses at any level and instead remain entrenched in curricula that are geared toward theory rather than application, such as statistics, economics 101, marketing, and financial management.  READ MORE...