Baby Dancers

Microplastics & Human Health

Scientists are certain that humans around the world are ingesting tiny pieces of plastic on a regular basis. Now, they are seeking to understand how the wide distribution of microplastics affects human health and the environment as a whole.

Eating a credit card's worth of plastic — a comparison often used to illustrate estimates that people consume about 5 grams of microplastics a week on average — sounds unhealthy on a very visceral level. Learning that those pieces of plastic could later show up in your lungs is even scarier.

Investigations into microplastics exposure and human health have confirmed that not all plastic ingested by humans comes out the other end; at least in some cases, microplastics can be absorbed into the bloodstream or trapped in the lungs.

But scientists don't yet know how the presence of microplastics in the body affects overall health, especially compared to exposures to other environmental chemicals and contaminants.

You may have heard that plastics never fully decompose. In fact, plastic waste slowly breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, creating microplastics that are so light they can be swept up by the wind.

Microplastics are defined as particles measuring no more than 5 millimeters across, which is about the size of a grain of rice. In the 20-odd years since they were named, scientists have found microplastics in virtually every environment, from ocean floors to mountain peaks, National Geographic reported.  READ MORE...

Yawn

 

Charging Electric Cars

Electric vehicles are widely seen as the future.

Ford will soon start delivering its shiny new F-150 Lightning, the electric version of its pickup truck, and other auto makers are racing to electrify their most popular models.

But many drivers considering switching to electric vehicles cite a similar concern: the hypothetical nightmare of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere without any battery left.

The Biden administration has an ambitious plan to address that. It wants to build tons of chargers so that they become as common as a gas station, and closer to the ease and speed of pumping gas.

Here's how the plan would work – and what it would mean for electric car owners and prospective buyers.
What's the plan?

The federal government will spend $5 billion dollars to build 500,000 chargers. The money will go to states, who have until late summer to submit their plans to the federal government.

The funding comes with strings attached – strings intended to ensure that this network of chargers is fast, reliable, and convenient.  READ MORE...

Duck & Cat

 

The Beginning of Outer Space

When mountaineers climb Mount Everest, they routinely carry oxygen cylinders, devices that allow them to breathe freely at high altitudes. This is necessary because the closer you get to the edge of Earth's atmosphere, the less oxygen there is available compared with the plentiful amounts found at sea level.

This is just one example of how variable Earth's atmosphere is and showcases the elemental makeup of its layers, from the troposphere, near sea level, to the exosphere, in its outermost regions. Where each layer ends and begins is defined by four key traits, according to the National Weather Service: temperature change, chemical composition, density and the movement of the gases within it.

So, with this in mind, where does Earth's atmosphere actually end? And where does space begin?

Each of the atmosphere's layers plays a role in ensuring our planet can host all manner of life, doing everything from blocking cancer-causing cosmic radiation to creating the pressure required to produce water, according to NASA.

"As you get farther from Earth, the atmosphere becomes less dense," Katrina Bossert, a space physicist at Arizona State University, told Live Science in an email. "The composition also changes, and lighter atoms and molecules begin to dominate, while heavy molecules remain closer to the Earth's surface."

As you move up in the atmosphere, the pressure, or the weight of the atmosphere above you, weakens rapidly. Even though commercial planes have pressurized cabins, rapid changes in altitude can affect the slim eustachian tubes connecting the ear with the nose and throat. "This is why your ears may pop during takeoff in an airplane," said Matthew Igel, an adjunct professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Davis.  READ MORE...

Weaving

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...