They Did It

They were off by about 17 meters.

Shooting a BB at a boxcar from almost 7 million miles away, they missed dead center by just 50 feet.

Out-fucking-standing.

Today's ÜberNerds

⚠️

This is a test - this is only a test.

Had this been an actual emergency,

you would've been advised to sit down,

put your head between your knees,

and kiss your ass goodbye.

Cuz maybe this works

and maybe it doesn't.

The DART spacecraft should impact with Dimorphos,

a small asteroid orbiting the larger Didymos asteroid,

on September 26, 2022, about 7 million miles from Earth -

nowhere near close enough to harm our planet.

"Defense is great, but you do need to score points."

I think it's gonna work. I have great confidence in these folks. And once they've got Proof Of Concept, they'll tweak it so it'll be useful in a variety of scenarios.

All we have to do keep assholes like Vlad Putin from blowing everything up, so the nerds can keep the asteroids from blowing everything up.

I love it when we all work together.

ARPA-H

I guess we need to be ready for some pretty dazzling shit once this thing gets up and running.

Even a jaded - borderline cynical - Ezra Klein is willing to say nice things about it. Of course, there's a razor blade in that apple - cuz there's always a razor blade in the apples we get from NYT.

(pay wall)

What Joe Biden Knows That No One Expected Him To

We need better technologies to enable a better politics. But we need better politics to create better technologies. Maybe, just maybe, we’re on the verge of getting both.

On Monday, President Biden announced that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, a biotech executive who previously worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, would be the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health, ARPA-H. The alphabet soup here obscures the ambition. Darpa is the defense research agency that was critical in creating the internet, stealth technology, GPS navigation, drones and mRNA vaccines, to name but a few. The record is remarkable, and it’s built on the agency’s ability to do something unusual in Washington: Make big, risky bets.

Shortly after winning the presidency, Biden persuaded Congress to fund an analogue focused on medical technology: ARPA-H. Why do we need an ARPA-H when the National Institutes of Health already exists? Because the N.I.H., for all its rigor and marvels, is widely considered too cautious. ARPA-H will — in a move some lament — be housed at the Institutes, but its explicit mandate is to take the kind of gambles that Darpa takes, and the N.I.H. sometimes lets go. Wegrzyn, Biden promised, is “going to bring the legendary Darpa attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need.”

Here, two facets of the Biden administration reveal themselves, one of which I don’t think gets enough credit, the other which I worry doesn’t receive enough critique. The first is that the Biden administration has put technological advance at the very center of its agenda. Every big bill Biden has passed has carried a theory of how better policy could lead to better technologies that could lead to a better world. The second is that the Biden administration’s technological optimism is paired with an institutional conservatism: Too many Washington agencies proved too cautious during the pandemic, and little has been done to make them more daring.

Let’s start with Biden’s ambition. Four major bills have passed during his presidency: The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Every one of them, at a core level, is about creating or deploying new technologies to solve ongoing problems.

The American Rescue Plan deployed vaccines and widespread testing and genomic surveillance to stifle the pandemic; the infrastructure bill is thick with ideas to make broadband access universal and develop next-generation energy and transportation technologies; CHIPS is an effort to break our reliance on Taiwanese and South Korean semiconductor manufacturing and keep ahead of China in fields of the future like artificial intelligence and quantum computing; and the Inflation Reduction Act uses tax breaks and loan guarantees to supercharge the wind and solar industries, build up advanced battery manufacturing, develop cost-effective carbon capture systems, and give the auto and home-heating industries reasons to go entirely electric.

Much attention, in recent years, has revolved around how technology can coarsen politics and denude communities. Look no further than the disinformation enabled by social media or the factories closed and towns wrecked by the communication and shipping advances that supercharged globalization. But new technologies can also create new possibilities. The politics of climate change would be impossible if solar panel costs hadn’t fallen by 89 percent and onshore wind costs by 70 percent in 10 years. California’s decision to ban the sale of cars running on internal combustion engines after 2035 would be unthinkable without the rapid advances in battery technology. Vaccination can curb the threat of disease in ways that social distancing can’t, as vaccinations can be sustained, but lockdowns become economically, politically and educationally ruinous.

And we are far from either the political or technological frontier. Take Covid, where the miracles and calamities coexist. The Biden administration’s vaccination effort started strong and then foundered on the shoals of political polarization, widespread misinformation and terrible messaging about booster shots. The money to upgrade school ventilation proved hard to spend. The F.D.A. dragged its feet on allowing rapid tests, which left us without anything near the tools we needed when the Omicron wave began.

Some problems persist: I have spoken to some of the researchers working on universal coronavirus vaccines and I’m stunned by how little help they’re getting. One described months of delay trying to find the monkeys needed for trials. You might think the U.S. government, with all its power and might, would name a point person that the teams working on these vaccines could call if they needed something, anything. Instead, many of our most brilliant virologists spend their work days trying to find lab animals and figure out how to conduct due diligence of manufacturing facilities.

When will the pandemic end? We asked three experts — two immunologists and an epidemiologist — to weigh in on this and some of the hundreds of other questions we’ve gathered from readers recently, including how to make sense of booster and test timing, recommendations for children, whether getting covid is just inevitable and other pressing queries.

How concerning are things like long covid and reinfections? That’s a difficult question to answer definitely, writes the Opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, because of the lack of adequate research and support for sufferers, as well as confusion about what the condition even is. She has suggestions for how to approach the problem. Regarding another ongoing Covid danger, that of reinfections, a virologist sets the record straight: “There has yet to be a variant that negates the benefits of vaccines.”

How will the virus continue to change? As a group of scientists who study viruses explains, “There’s no reason, at least biologically, that the virus won’t continue to evolve.” From a different angle, the science writer David Quammen surveys some of the highly effective tools and techniques that are now available for studying Covid and other viruses, but notes that such knowledge alone won’t blunt the danger.

What could endemic Covid look like? David Wallace Wells writes that by one estimate, 100,000 Americans could die each year from the coronavirus. Stopping that will require a creative effort to increase and sustain high levels of vaccination. The immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki writes that new vaccines, particular those delivered through the nose, may be part of the answer.

And I have been puzzled by the Biden administration’s disinterest in building on the Trump administration’s central success: The Operation Warp Speed program that sped the vaccines into development. We could have Warp Speeds for so much more (and we are far from done with vaccines). I’ve asked this question of top Biden staffers, and I cannot say the answers I’ve heard have made much sense. I suspect the problem here relates more to crediting the Trump administration than with the possibilities of the Warp Speed program. Trump wasn’t exactly eager to build on Obama administration successes, either. But that doesn’t explain why Biden hasn’t launched Warp Speed-like policies under a new brand. Call them Moonshots. Call them Biden Bets. It doesn’t matter.

But what we have not done should not distract from what we have done. Vaccines, treatments like Paxlovid, improvements in hospitalization protocols and rapid testing — along, of course, with post-infection immunity — have uncoupled caseloads from death rates. The pandemic still exerts a terrible toll — hundreds still die each day from the disease — but it is far less than what it would be otherwise, and it could be far better were boosters more widely taken and therapeutics more widely used. Something like normalcy is possible for many people today, and pharmaceutical innovation and deployment is a driving cause.

What is true for Covid is true for many diseases that don’t receive as much daily coverage. Cost dominates Washington’s debates over health care. What we actually get for all that spending is a much more distant concern. It’s cliché, at this point, for politicians to brandish charts showing the stunning rise in projected health spending over the next 40 or 75 years. But those charts have always bugged me. Doesn’t what we get for that spending matter? You tell me if we’re living healthy lives until age 175, and then I’ll tell you whether spending a hefty share of G.D.P. on medical care is a scandal or a bargain.

The Inflation Reduction Act allows Medicare to negotiate down certain drug prices. Every other rich country lets the government negotiate drug prices, and for good reason. Pharmaceuticals are not a normal kind of market good. If you can’t afford the flat screen TV you want, you leave the store. If you can’t afford the last-ditch cancer treatment that might give your spouse 10 more years of life, you sell anything, you mortgage everything, to get it. Drug companies can charge whatever they want, and so they do. The median price of a year’s supply of a drug launched in 2021 was an eye-popping $180,000. Only governments have the negotiating power to curb those cost increases. Other governments do. Citizens of countries like Canada and Britain pay far less for drugs that were developed here, oftentimes built on publicly funded research.

The counterargument to this is that the high drug costs borne by Americans are subsidizing pharmaceutical innovation for the entire world — and as frustrating as it is, it’s worth it. I’ve never found this convincing. Should we then pay 50 percent more for drugs to wring even more innovation out of the system?

But the underlying idea — pharmaceutical innovation matters, and we should move heaven and earth to encourage it — is right. The way we treated the Covid vaccines should be a model. We made their development a national priority and we ensured that the profits of those who developed them were guaranteed. But we also made sure the vaccines would be available and affordable to all Americans — we did not allow pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever they thought the market would bear, or insurance companies to pile on the co-pays. Equity and innovation are often pitted against each other in our politics. The success of Warp Speed shows what can happen when they are paired.

Democrats should braid policies to make drugs cheaper with policies to make drug innovation easier and, in some cases, more profitable. I spent some time this week talking to Heidi Williams, an economist at Stanford who studies drug development, and the point she made is so obvious it’s a wonder we haven’t done more about it. We spend a lot on the beginning of drug development — basic science and research — and even more on the products that ultimately get developed. But we neglect the middle: All the unglamorous, difficult infrastructure needed to turn a promising molecule into a miraculous treatment.

One example: Much of the difficulty and risk of drug development comes in running clinical trials. One reason clinical trials are hard to run — as we saw during Covid — is that it’s hard to find the patients needed to run trials that will generate good data, fast. Years ago, we created a national registry for cancer patients that made it much easier to run cancer studies in the United States — and now, compared with drugs for other diseases, far more cancer trials are run in the United States. We could, and should, scale that model.

Bernie Sanders used to promote an idea for creating a system of prizes to run parallel to the patents we normally use to make drug development profitable. The government could identify, say, 12 conditions that it wants to see a drug developed for. The first group to develop and prove out such a drug would get a princely sum — $100 million, or $500 million, or a billion dollars, depending on the condition and the efficacy. In return, that drug would be immediately off-patent, available for any generic drug producer to manufacture for a pittance (and available for other countries, particularly poor countries, to produce immediately).

More money might be good — particularly spent in new ways, like for prizes or ARPA-H — but Washington spends tens of billions of dollars now on medical research, and it’s worth asking if that is all well spent. A thoughtful report from New Science backs up a complaint I’ve heard privately for years: The N.I.H. is a remarkable institution beset by a deep internal conservatism. ARPA-H is an admission of this problem, even as it is located within the N.I.H.: If the N.I.H. were making the kinds of bets ARPA-H is designed to make, there’d be no reason for ARPA-H at all. But that raises the obvious question of whether the N.I.H. should be more daring at its core.

There are, to be fair, good reasons for caution, and they are political, not just scientific or economic. The same Republicans who lambaste government for being too conventionally minded and slow-moving weaponize failed grants and odd gambles as wastes of taxpayer money, creating the incentives for the precise bureaucratic caution they then condemn.

But the pandemic should leave no one convinced of the infallibility of our health agencies. The N.I.H. proved unable to shift focus quickly when the pandemic hit — only 2 percent of its 2020 budget went to Covid research, one study found. The F.D.A. was excruciatingly slow to approve the same rapid tests that Europe was using long before us. The C.D.C. was, flatly, a mess. Yet none of the failures we witnessed in real time led to major reforms of these agencies. That can’t be right.

These are institutions full of brilliant, hard-working people who are doing their best within the strictures placed around them. Those strictures should, fairly often, be revisited, or at least reviewed. But in Washington, the need to defend treasured institutions like the N.I.H. from budget cuts and political interference leads to believers in the organization becoming defenders rather than improvers. That’s how you get an odd situation like ARPA-H, which is clearly meant to operate radically differently than the N.I.H., being made part of the N.I.H., over the objections of many of its early proponents.

Last week, I wrote about how much of Biden’s agenda relied on building, and what it would take to make that much building possible, at the speed it needs to happen. But Biden’s agenda is just as reliant on inventing — and just as much needs to be done to make the government a dearer friend to invention.

Still, this is an unexpectedly thrilling side of Biden’s presidency. A liberalism that is as ambitious about solving problems through invention as it is through redistribution would be powerful indeed.

Coupla questions for Mr Klein:

1. When you complain about how Biden hasn't continued the Warp Speed development thing - are you under the impression that there exists an inexhaustible supply of virologists and researchers who are eager to be doxxed and then harassed and threatened by anti-vaxxers and MAGA thugs, and then get beat up in committee by some asshole like Rand Paul?
2. Do you think lab animals are peddled by the boxful with no push back from PETA and ASPCA et al?
3. With all this fervor for government involvement, there couldn't possibly be some prick Republican who'll stand in the doorway and shout, "Hell no"

I get it - sometimes you show your love by pokin' 'em with a stick. I just think it works better if you save the shit-talk for the people who're in the way and making it harder to do the things you seem to believe will just magically appear if you cry about it loud enough.

The Democrats are not

the fucking problem.

All Or Nothing At All

I've long maintained that there's something wrong with the polling, and I think it has to be obvious there's a lot that's wrong with the reporting.

When Biden (eg) has gotten more done in 2 years than most presidents manage in 4, but his approval rating is still underwater, there's something wrong with the way we're doing things.

Here's a hint at the problem form Sage Journals:

Losing Sight of Piecemeal Progress: People Lump and Dismiss Improvement Efforts That Fall Short of Categorical Change—Despite Improving

Abstract

Fourteen experiments (N = 10,556 adult participants, including more than 20,000 observed choices across 25 issues) documented how people perceive and respond to relative progress out in the world, revealing a robust “negative-lumping” effect.

As problematic entities worked to better their ways, participants shifted to dismiss them if they fell short of categorical reform—despite distinctions in improvement.

This increased dismissal of relative gains as “all the same” was driven by the belief that falling short signals an eschewal of doing the bare minimum and lacking serious intent to change, making these gains seem less deserving of recognition.

Critically, participants then “checked out”: They underrewarded and underinvested in efforts toward “merely” incremental improvement.

Finally, in all experiments, participants lumped together absolute failures but not absolute successes, highlighting a unique blindness to gradations of badness. When attempts to eradicate a problem fail, people might dismiss smaller but critical steps that were and can still be made.

References

Stay Outa The Rain

Great - now we're learning that we've fucked up the planet to the point that even the rain is trying to kill us off.

EcoWatch:

Most Rainwater on Earth Contains PFAS Exceeding Safe Levels, Study Finds

New research from Stockholm University shows that PFAS in rainwater around the world are exceeding safe levels. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are chemical pollutants, often called “forever chemicals” present in many everyday items, like food packaging and clothing. The chemicals leach into the environment, affecting everything from the air we breathe to even rainfall.

The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, tested four selected perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs): perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS), and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA) in rainwater, soil, and surface waters in different locations globally.

The researchers concluded that PFOA and PFOS levels in rainwater “greatly exceed” the Lifetime Drinking Water Health Advisory levels from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study also noted that all four of the tested PFAAs in rainwater were often above the Danish drinking water limits, and PFOS levels were usually higher than the Environmental Quality Standard for Inland European Union Surface Water.

Rainwater wasn’t the only problem, either. “Atmospheric deposition also leads to global soils being ubiquitously contaminated and to be often above proposed Dutch guideline values,” the study said.

As such, the authors said there is really no way to avoid these chemicals on Earth anymore.

“We argue here that we’re not within this safe operating space anymore, because we now have these chemicals everywhere, and these safety advisories, we can’t achieve them anymore,” said Ian Cousins, lead author of the study and professor at Stockholm University. “I’m not saying that we’re all going to die of these effects. But we’re in a place now where you can’t live anywhere on the planet, and be sure that the environment is safe.”

PFAS earned the name “forever chemicals” due to their inability to break down in the environment. The CDC noted that these pollutants move through soils and waters in the environment and can bioaccumulate in wildlife. Humans can also breathe in PFAS, and the pollutants can also get into the bloodstream.

While more studies on the effects of PFAS on human health are needed, existing studies suggest there could be links between “forever chemicals” and certain types of cancer, reproductivity issues and developmental delays.

Scientists are concerned that the increasing amounts of PFAS in drinking water could show an increase in health complications in the future, though.

“In this background rain, the levels are higher than those environmental quality criteria already. So that means that over time, we are going to get a statistically significant impact of those chemicals on human health,” Crispin Halsall, a professor at the University of Lancaster who was not involved with the study, told the BBC. “And how that will manifest itself? I’m not sure but it’s going come out over time, because we’re exceeding those concentrations which are going to cause some harm, because of exposure to humans in their drinking water.”

Some governments are creating more relaxed PFAS limits as well. With the prominence of PFAS, strict limits on PFAS levels have halted construction projects, leading some places to loosen the guidelines to avoid impacting economic activities.

The other option is to remove these pervasive pollutants from water and soil. Current methods of removing PFAS are expensive, although some scientists are developing sustainable, low-cost ways to remove PFAS from the environment.

             ⬋

Also EcoWatch:

Scientists Develop New Material to Clean Up Forever Chemicals

Researchers from Texas A&M AgriLife of Texas A&M University have developed a new bioremediation technology using plant-based material and fungi that could take care of cleaning up per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. These pollutants, also called “forever chemicals” or PFAS, are found in soil, water, and even human and animal blood and may be harmful to humans and other species.

PFAS are found just about everywhere, from food wrappers and dental floss to clothing and electrical wire insulation. While more research is needed on health implications from PFAS exposure, the CDC notes that these chemicals may affect development, reproduction and the immune system and may cause liver damage. Extremely high exposures of PFAS may also be linked to cancer.

“PFAS do not degrade easily in the environment and are toxic even at trace level concentrations,” said Susie Dai, associate professor in the Texas A&M Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology. “They must be removed and destroyed to prevent human exposure and negative impacts on the ecosystem. PFAS are so stable because they are composed of a chain of carbon and fluorine atoms linked together, and the carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest chemical bonds. They can occur in water at a very low concentration and you have to concentrate them and then destroy them.”

The only way to actually get rid of these “forever chemicals” is by burning them, which is a lengthy and expensive process. After incineration, other products, like active carbon, are used to finally clean up the PFAS.

But Texas A&M researchers have found a new way to use a plant-based material that adsorbs the pollutants. As explained by ScienceDirect, adsorption is “The use of solids for removing substances from either gaseous or liquid solutions.” The adsorbent material is then consumed by microbial fungi. The team recently published their findings for the process framework, which they call Renewable Artificial Plant for In-situ Microbial Environmental Remediation (RAPIMER), in Nature.

“The plant’s cell wall material serves as a framework to adsorb the PFAS,” Dai explained. “Then this material and the adsorbed chemical serve as food for a microbial fungus. The fungus eats it, it’s gone, and you don’t have the disposal problem. Basically, the fungus is doing the detoxification process.”

This sustainable PFAS clean-up system could scale for commercial use, leading to a better way to remove these chemical pollutants from the environment. It could also come in handy as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers creating PFAS thresholds to its water quality standards, which will require municipal water treatment plants to find cost-effective solutions to monitor and remove PFAS from the water if necessary.

Time For An Oldie

We are a species that's survived because we got very very good at pattern recognition.

And of course, eventually some asshole politician figured out how to manipulate us because of it.

Michael Schermer from about 9 years ago.

Nerd Love

There's no such thing as "empty space".

Dr Becky - University of Warwick

Today's Nerds

Score a big one for the nerds.

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Region 3324 of the Carina Nebula

Stephen's Quintet

You might recognize this one from

"It's A Wonderful Life"

Wouldn't it be nice if we could get a bit more of this kind of beauty and human achievement, and a lot less of the kinda shit people do to each other with guns and petty ambitions.

Go Nerds

Technology (along with some pretty fucked up policy) got us into this mess, and technology (along with policy that just has to be a little less fucked up) will have to help us get out of it.

TED-Ed - Tierney Thys and Christian Sardet

LEAF BRANCH COMPOST CUTINASIS

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

The political commentators can't even get the political commentary right - their field of study.

When the subject is vaccination, why the fuck would you take their word over doctors?

Real Tired Of This Shit

Scientific American, Eric W. Fleegler, Lois K. Lee :

Pediatric Gun Deaths Are a Massive Problem in the U.S.

Thoughts and prayers do not stop bullets. We must do better for our children

School shootings feel random in their location yet predictable in their occurrence. Killers target elementary, high school and college students in urban, suburban and rural communities. The children killed are Hispanic, white, Black, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, transgender and cisgender.

This year school shootings have occurred more than weekly on average with 27 in 2022 (so far). Many go virtually unmentioned on the national stage, however, until the “unthinkable” happens, and 19 nine- to 11-year-old children and two teachers die unspeakable deaths at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Yet these killings aren’t unthinkable. We’ve been here before—at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and too many other schools.

We are researchers and pediatric emergency medicine physicians who study firearm injuries. After many hard, politically fraught years of investigating this subject, we believe that it is our collective responsibility to address, head on, the interlinked issues of gun availability, gun safety, gun regulations and gun violence prevention research—and, dare we say it, the politicization of guns taking priority over public health. With thousands of children killed each year in the U.S. by firearms, we must, as a country, ultimately reckon with the essential question of what is most important: Is it the narrow focus on individuals’ rights or the broader vision of societal responsibility?

Are pediatric gun deaths really a problem in the U.S.? Our work and others’ show the answer is unequivocally yes. Guns kill more U.S. children and adolescents between one and 19 years old than any other means. Guns kill more children than motor vehicle collisions, cancer, infections or any other disease. And this is a uniquely American problem. Though horrifying and sensational, school deaths represent only a small fraction of firearm deaths. Most firearm injuries and deaths happen in homes or neighborhoods. In 2020 10,197 children and young adults age zero to 24 year old died by guns, a 55 percent increase over the decade prior.

Gun deaths are also a health disparity issue. Over the past decade, Black teenage boys died by guns at rates about five times higher than those of white teenage boys, though their names rarely register in the national consciousness.

There are at least 400 million guns in the U.S. We don’t really know how many because most states don’t track gun sales or require gun registration, thanks to successful lobbying by the gun industry and progun politicians. Last year 18.9 million guns were sold in the U.S. And between the beginning of 2019 and middle of 2021, an estimated 7.5 million people became first-time gun owners. This includes 5.4 million people who previously lived in homes without guns. Twenty years ago a majority of gun owners used guns for hunting and sports. Today 88 percent of them state they own their guns for self-protection. Most of those owners say having a gun at home makes them feel safer, and about 40 percent keep one loaded and “easily accessible” at all times. In 2021 four in 10 children, representing approximately 30 million kids, had at least one gun in the home. Even in homes with children, 73 percent of these guns were stored unlocked and/or loaded, putting those children at risk of injury and death. If you keep a gun in your home, storing it unloaded and keeping the gun and ammunition locked away separately can decrease the risk.

Unlike cars and virtually every product sold in the U.S., there are no regulatory safety requirements for guns. That bears repeating: guns are exempt from safety standards set by the federal Consumer Product Safety Act. Between 2015 and 2021, there were 2,446 unintentional child shootings, resulting in 923 deaths and 1,603 injuries. Thus, while pill bottle makers, hair dryer producers and motor vehicle companies constantly work to improve their products’ safety, the U.S. government has decreed gun manufactures do not need to consider whether a two-year-old should be able to pull the trigger on a gun or whether a teenager should be able to fire a gun they don’t own.

Beyond these lack of safety requirements, in 2006 Congress passed the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” which shields firearm manufactures against liability for any injuries or deaths from guns. Thus, gunmakers have minimal incentive to improve gun safety technology, despite the development of safer gun technology over the last decade in the form of personalized “smart” guns, which use fingerprint technology (like your cell phone, radio-frequency identification (RFID), or other methods) to allow only the authorized user to fire the gun. This simple fix would prevent curious children, suicidal individuals, and unauthorized people from finding a gun and shooting the weapon. It would save countless lives each year.

We know that states with stronger firearm laws are associated with lower firearm deaths. We also know no one law or strategy will address the problem of U.S. gun violence. We need a multipronged strategy, and we need it to encompass all states.

One approach would treat owning guns like owning cars: meaningful age limits for purchase and possession and licensing, registration and insurance requirements. Some states, including New York, Connecticut and California, do have meaningful age limits and licensing and registration requirements. Other states, including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Rhode Island, specifically prohibit gun registries. Nearly two thirds of Americans, including 53 percent of Republicans, support moderate or strong regulation of gun ownership. And after every school shooting, federal firearm legislation, such as universal background checks or raising the legal age to buy a long-gun from 18 to 21, is proposed once again. It is the most practical start to decreasing firearm deaths, yet the most quickly dismissed. So we are left with “thoughts and prayers.”

We also need laws to minimize access to firearms among individuals at risk of harming themselves or others (such as people who have been charged with domestic violence or who have homicidal ideation). These needed measures include universal background checks (supported by 81 percent of Americans) and extreme risk protection order (“red flag”) laws that allow a judge to prohibit at-risk individuals’ purchase or possession of a firearm for a time limited period. Nineteen states plus Washington, D.C., have red flag laws. These laws are frequently passed by bipartisan consensus in Republican-led states. Yet people slip through the cracks, so we need to both increase awareness of the laws in the states that have them and to have more states pass them.

As pediatric emergency physicians, we specifically concern ourselves with children accessing their parents’ guns. Strong child access prevention laws, currently in 34 states and Washington, D.C., hold adult gun owners liable if a child can or does access a firearm. However, we and others have concerns about criminalizing grieving families and non-discriminatory applications of these laws. Another approach would be to incentivize gun owners to store their firearms more safely.

And then there is funding. Because of a dearth of federal research funding, there are substantial gaps in knowledge about the victims and perpetrators of gun violence, as well as effective interventions. There was no Congressional federal funding for firearm research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after Congress passed the Dickey Amendment in 1996—and no such funding for the National Institutes of Health after the amendment was extended to that agency in late 2011—until 2019, when $25 million was appropriated. This is a drop in the bucket, compared with the number of people affected by gun violence. In contrast, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has a budget of $3.8 billion to support research related to conditions such as heart disease and cancer.

But while we consider these approaches, we must remember these names. They are sons and daughters, children whose parents had hopes and dreams for them, youth with goals and aspirations for themselves:

Nevaeh Bravo

Jacklyn “Jackie” Cazares

Makenna Lee Elrod

Jose Flores, Jr.

Eliana “Ellie” Garcia

Irma Garcia

Uziyah Garcia

Amerie Jo Garza

Xavier Lopez

Jayce Luevanos

Tess Marie Mata

Maranda Mathis

Eva Mireles

Alithia Ramirez

Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez

Maite Yuleana Rodriguez

Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio

Layla Salazar

Jailah Nicole Silguero

Eliahana Cruz Torres

Rojelio Torres

And never again should we have to list the names of innocent children shot and killed in their elementary school. Yet history, and a contemptuous lack of action from our elected officials, predicts we will. We must demand more, especially when there are actions we can take. We must do better for our children, our youth and our society. We must.

Today In Nerd Things

Go places and see things. It might surprise you how doing that makes you less inclined to fuck with people.

Babies

It wasn't your fault.

Know that.

Take it in, and just know it.

It wasn't your fault.

I fucking love me some nerds.

BioSpace:

Researchers Pinpoint Reason Infants Die From SIDS

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) accounts for about 37% of sudden unexpected infant deaths a year in the U.S., and the cause of SIDS has remained largely unknown. On Saturday, researchers from The Children's Hospital Westmead in Sydney released a study that confirmed not only how these infants die, but why.

SIDS refers to the unexplained deaths of infants under a year old, and it usually occurs while the child is sleeping. According to Mayo Clinic, many in the medical community suspected this phenomenon could be caused by a defect in the part of the brain that controls arousal from sleep and breathing. The theory was that if the infant stopped breathing during sleep, the defect would keep the child from startling or waking up.

The Sydney researchers were able to confirm this theory by analyzing dried blood samples taken from newborns who died from SIDS and other unknown causes. Each SIDS sample was then compared with blood taken from healthy babies. They found the activity of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) was significantly lower in babies who died of SIDS compared to living infants and other non-SIDS infant deaths. BChE plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway, explaining why SIDS typically occurs during sleep.

Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. So, when SIDS still occurred, parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.

Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Harrington explained what she was told about the cause of her child’s death.

"Nobody could tell me. They just said it's a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn't sit well with my scientific brain.”

Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.

"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault," she said.

In the study, the researchers wrote, “This finding represents the possibility for the identification of infants at risk for SIDS infants prior to death and opens new avenues for future research into specific interventions.”

As the cause is now known, researchers can turn their attention to a solution. In the next few years, those in the medical community who have studied SIDS will likely work on a screening test to identify babies who are at risk for SIDS and hopefully prevent it altogether.

New From JAMA

We know gun violence and guns kinda go together.

And now we know that when you expand the rationale for using a gun, you increase the motivation to use a gun, and that leads to more gun violence.

When certain shit happens, some other shit's gonna happen as a result.

Funny how that works, ain't it?

JAMA:

Analysis of “Stand Your Ground” Self-defense Laws and Statewide Rates of Homicides and Firearm Homicides

Key Points

Question: Are “stand your ground” (SYG) laws associated with increases in violent deaths, and does this vary by US state?

Findings: In this cohort study assessing 41 US states, SYG laws were associated with an 8% to 11% national increase in monthly rates of homicide and firearm homicide. State-level increases in homicide and firearm homicide rates reached 10% or higher for many Southern states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana.

Meaning: These findings suggest that SYG laws were associated with increased homicides each year and that the laws should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths.
Abstract

Importance: Most US states have amended self-defense laws to enhance legal immunities for individuals using deadly force in public. Despite concerns that “stand your ground” (SYG) laws unnecessarily encourage the use of deadly violence, their impact on violent deaths and how this varies across states and demographic groups remains unclear.

ObjectiveL  To evaluate the association of SYG laws with homicide and firearm homicide, nationally and by state, while considering variation by the race, age, and sex of individuals who died by homicide.

Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study used a controlled, multiple-baseline and -location interrupted time series design, using natural variation in the timings and locations of SYG laws to assess associations. Changes in homicide and firearm homicide were modeled using Poisson regression analyses within a generalized additive model framework. Analyses included all US states that enacted SYG laws between 2000 and 2016 and states that did not have SYG laws enacted during the full study period, 1999 to 2017. Data were analyzed from November 2019 to December 2020.

Exposures: SYG self-defense laws enacted by statute between January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2016.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The main outcomes were statewide monthly rates of homicide and firearm-related homicide (per 100 000 persons) from January 1, 1999, to December 31, 2017, grouped by characteristics (ie, race, age, sex) of individuals who died by homicide.

Results: Forty-one states were analyzed, including 23 states that enacted SYG laws during the study period and 18 states that did not have SYG laws, with 248 358 homicides (43.7% individuals aged 20-34 years; 77.9% men and 22.1% women), including 170 659 firearm homicides. SYG laws were associated with a mean national increase of 7.8% in monthly homicide rates (incidence rate ratio [IRR],1.08; 95% CI, 1.04-1.12; P < .001) and 8.0% in monthly firearm homicide rates (IRR, 1.08; 95% CI, 1.03-1.13; P = .002). SYG laws were not associated with changes in the negative controls of suicide (IRR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.98-1.01) or firearm suicide (IRR, 1.00; 95% CI, 0.98-1.02). Increases in violent deaths varied across states, with the largest increases (16.2% to 33.5%) clustering in the South (eg, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana). There were no differential associations of SYG laws by demographic group.

Conclusions and Relevance: These findings suggest that adoption of SYG laws across the US was associated with increases in violent deaths, deaths that could potentially have been avoided.

Dear Ammosexuals,

Fuck you.

Your pal,

Mike

Yikes

WaPo:

The ice shelf was cracking up. Surveys showed warm ocean water eroding its underbelly. Satellite imagery revealed long, parallel fissures in the frozen expanse, like scratches from some clawed monster. One fracture grew so big, so fast, scientists took to calling it “the dagger.”

“It was hugely surprising to see things changing that fast,” said Erin Pettit. The Oregon State University glaciologist had chosen this spot for her Antarctic field research precisely because of its stability. While other parts of the infamous Thwaites Glacier crumbled, this wedge of floating ice acted as a brace, slowing the melt. It was supposed to be boring, durable, safe.

Now climate change has turned the ice shelf into a threat — to Pettit’s field work, and to the world.

Planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels and other human activities has already raised global temperatures more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). But the effects are particularly profound at the poles, where rising temperatures have seriously undermined regions once locked in ice.

In research presented this week at the world’s biggest earth science conference, Pettit showed that the Thwaites ice shelf could collapse within the next three to five years, unleashing a river of ice that could dramatically raise sea levels. Aerial surveys document how warmer conditions have allowed beavers to invade the Arctic tundra, flooding the landscape with their dams. Large commercial ships are increasingly infiltrating formerly frozen areas, disturbing wildlife and generating disastrous amounts of trash. In many Alaska Native communities, climate impacts compounded the hardships of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to food shortages among people who have lived off this land for thousands of years.

“The very character of these places is changing,” said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and co-editor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual assessment of the state of the top of the world. “We are seeing conditions unlike those ever seen before.”

The rapid transformation of the Arctic and Antarctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will shift and ecosystems will be altered. Unless humanity acts swiftly to curb emissions, scientists say, the same forces that have destabilized the poles will wreak havoc on the rest of the globe.

“The Arctic is a way to look into the future,” said Matthew Druckenmiller, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and another co-editor of the Arctic Report Card. “Small changes in temperature can have huge effects in a region that is dominated by ice.”

This year’s edition of the report card, which was presented at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting Tuesday, describes a landscape that is transforming so fast scientists struggle to keep up. The period between October and December 2020 was the warmest on record. This summer saw the second-lowest extent of thick, old sea ice since tracking began in 1985.

Separately, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed a new temperature record for the Arctic: 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk on June 20, 2020.

This year, three historic melting episodes struck Greenland, causing the island’s massive ice sheet to lose about 77 trillion pounds. On Aug. 14, for the first time in recorded history, rain fell at the ice sheet summit.

“I think my jaw would have hit the floor,” Moon said, imagining what she might have felt had she witnessed the unprecedented event. “This fundamentally changes the character of that ice sheet surface.”

Though the Greenland ice sheet is more than a mile thick at its center, rain can darken the surface, causing the ice to absorb more of the sun’s heat, Moon said. It changes the way snow behaves and slicks the top of the ice.

The consequences for people living in the Arctic can be dire. In Greenland and elsewhere, meltwater from shrinking glaciers has deluged rivers and contributed to floods. Retreating ice exposes unstable cliffs that can easily collapse into the ocean, triggering deadly tsunamis. Roads buckle, water systems fail and buildings cave in as the permafrost beneath them thaws.

The global loss of ice contributes to dangerously rising oceans. Greenland boasts enough frozen water to boost sea levels 24 feet (though it would take thousands of years to completely melt).

The disintegration of the Thwaites ice shelf won’t immediately increase sea levels — that ice already floats on top of the water, taking up the same amount of space whether it’s solid or liquid. But without the ice shelf acting asa brace, the land-bound parts of the glacier will start to flow more quickly. Thwaites could become vulnerable to ice cliff collapse, a process in which towering walls of ice that directly overlook the ocean start to crumble.

If the entire Thwaites Glacier failed, it would raise sea levels by several feet. Island nations and coastal communities would be inundated.

“We don’t know exactly if or when ice cliff failure is going to initiate,” said Anna Crawford, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews who works on models of the process. “But we’re certain Antarctica is going to change.”

“There’s ample evidence to support reducing emissions,” she added, “because it’s giving us enough to be worried about already.”

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground

For some in the Arctic, this rapid thaw represents opportunity. Tundra vegetation flourishes in the warmer weather. Beavers have migrated northward, digging their paws into the permafrost.

Satellite images show that the number of beaver ponds in western Alaska — formed when the large rodents build their dams along waterways — has at least doubled since 2000. But it’s not clear how beaver engineering might affect the carbon stored in permafrost or ecosystems downstream.

Warmer conditions have also allowed people to infiltrate new environments, and here the detrimental impacts are plain to see. New shipping routes have been established through areas once blocked by sea ice, disrupting wildlife and polluting the ocean with unnatural noise.

Passing ships also leave behind huge amounts of garbage; in summer 2020, hundreds of items washed ashore in Alaskan communities along the Bering Strait. Residents — most of them Alaska Natives — found clothes, equipment, plastic food packaging and cans of hazardous oils and insecticides in waters where they regularly fish. Labels in English, Russian, Korean and a host of other languages illustrated the international nature of the threat.

For many Arctic residents, climate change is a threat multiplier — worsening the dangers of whatever other crises come their way. Another essay in the Arctic Report Card documents the threats to Alaska Natives’ food security caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Quarantine restrictions prevented people from traveling to their traditional harvesting grounds. Economic upheaval and supply chain issues left many grocery stores with empty shelves.

But the essay, which was co-written by Inupiaq, Hadia, Ahtna and Supiaq researchers, along with experts from other Native communities, also highlights how Indigenous cultural practices helped communities stave off hunger. Existing food sharing networks redoubled their efforts. Harvesting practices were adapted with public health in mind.

Native Americans’ farming practices may help feed a warming world

“That these networks and programs worked well under the additional stress created by covid-19 underscores their significance and the importance of continuing to support them,” the authors wrote.

To Moon, this study in resilience holds lessons for the rest of the world.

“We’ve built a society that has assumed many hard boundaries, whether they be political boundaries, expectations of certain foods to grow in certain place, or that buildings can exist in the same spot for hundreds of years,” she said. “Now global change is challenging that assumption.”

Moon continued: “We should look to these communities that have persisted with success for many millennia … and learn from them how we might better communicate and cooperate to move quickly in a fast-changing environment.”

Today's Amaze-Balls

From the über-nerds at Northwestern University

Now think about where we could be today if we could stop thinking we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on war shit - billions and billions extra now because we're fighting in cyberspace as well as meatspace and spacespace too.

Here's a recent FB question:

If you could eliminate one thing from the planet, what would it be?

I'll go with

CONQUEST

Today's Math Lesson

...and History, and Philosophy too.

There are no lost secrets of the ancients. And there's no universal conspiracy to keep the truth from us.

But there is a thing called Pattern-Seeking that evolution has embedded in our firmware. So, sometimes - usually way more often than we like to admit - we think we've found what we went looking for, when actually, we're fooling ourselves into believing we're not just smash-fitting a conclusion in order to sync up with a romantic hypothesis.

see also:

pareidolia 

the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

Today's GIF

via NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Nature Bats Last

A rising tide lifts all boats.

Rising sea level drowns all coastal areas and low-lying islands.

Hank Green - The SciShow

The bit at the end - even brutally efficient predators like smilodons had enough sense (or maybe heart) to look out for the less fortunate among them.

Today's Tweet

The Vaccine Makers Project

"...does not enter the cell's nucleus or interact with DNA."

I am blown away by this COVID vaccine video, one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time pic.twitter.com/yREIETqtWh

— Sam (@SamIAm2021MD) November 12, 2021