California gives free medical care to a lot of people but that doesn't mean they are getting access. Many doctors won't accept new patients at all due to the increased number of patients, while an alarming number of offices ask what kind of insurance people have before declaring someone can't get an appointment for six months if it's California state insurance.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding basic research on non-genetic drugs that can temporarily enhance the human body’s ability to endure extreme cold exposure.

The human body’s response to cold involves two biological processes known as thermogenesis. Shivering is something everyone has experienced, it raises your body temperature in a direct fashion, with movement. The second uses brown adipose tissue, brown fat, which regulates body temperature by breaking down blood sugar and other fat molecules  The first is physical and the second chemical, but the second happens first. It just doesn't generate as much heat.

It rarely happens to play a regular chess game with no clear mistakes. When the game is a blitz one, though, this is exceedingly rare. A blitz game is one where both players have 5 minutes to make all their moves, and the first who runs out of time automatically loses (provided the opponent realizes it).
Because of the very short time to make decisions, blitz chess games are an adrenaline-producing, intense brain activity. So much so that when people talk to me during a blitz game I simply do not record the words they speak, for the whole duration of the game; after the end, I often find myself reckoning with a buffer of words that by then have no meaning anymore. 

You wouldn't know it from listening to epidemiologists inside EPA or local weather personalities, but American air quality is better than it's been in 150 years. So clean they had to define "clean" down and start touting small micron particulate matter (PM_2.5) one quarter the size of real smog, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, as a concern.

Well, it isn't. No one has ever died from PM_2.5 and asthmatics are at greater risk in the perfume section of Macy's, regardless of hyperbolic air quality maps that routinely show red and orange despite much of the US having the same air quality as untouched sections of Siberia.

Things are getting back to normal because even though activist journalists are now covering a Tripledemic of COVID-19, flu, and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) they have also found time to promote a story that claims a zero-calorie sweetener, asparatame, common in products like Diet Coke, Crystal Light, whatever causes anxiety. 

That's right, media have taken time from writing about something that may be important for the public to write about a paper claiming that aspartame gives mice anxiety.

We must be safe when we're back to covering mouse studies about safe products.

Humans owe it to language for their many accomplishments throughout history. Our ability to communicate thoughts and ideas enabled us to build entire cultures, establish laws, and develop new ways of making life increasingly better. 

Since 1975, stroke mortality plummeted from 88 to 31 per 100,0000 for women and 112 to 39 per 100,0000 for men, but since 2020 it has been creeping back up. 

Strokes haven't seen a huge resurgence yet because Baby Boomers, and soon Generation X, have the biggest risk for it like aging is for most diseases. For example, a 10 percent reduction in the fatality rate for 75-year-olds would more than offset a doubling of the fatality rate among 35-year-olds because strokes are 100 times more common in 75-year-olds. Yet that Millennials are seeing higher numbers than previous generations at their ages is a concern.

Phase 2 data showing a reduction in amyloid-beta plaques in early Alzheimer's patients is good enough for FDA to give it temporary approval under their Accelerated Approval pathway.

The positive results occurred in mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia patients. Lecanemab-irmb is a 100 mg/mL injection for intravenous use, a humanized immunoglobulin gamma 1 (IgG1) monoclonal antibody directed against aggregated soluble (“protofibril”) and insoluble forms of amyloid beta (Aβ) for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The approval is based on Phase 2 data that demonstrated that LEQEMBI reduced the accumulation of Aβ plaque in the brain, a defining feature of Alzheimer's Disease.

Vegetables have had a lot of foodborne outbreak scandals, but two times since the 1980s they have also impacted meat in a big way. 

Mad Cow disease in 1986 and Listeria in 2019 killed people. Mad Cow disease was due to poor quality control and a lack of coherent meat-chain understanding - the annual Burns Supper is coming up but you still can't buy haggis from Scotland - while more recent Listeria was just sloppy controls. Those can happen anywhere in the food chain but there may be ways to reduce the risk without making the perfect the enemy of the good. 

Another year just started, and this is as good a time as any to line up a few wishes. Not a bucket list, nor a "will do" set of destined-to-fail propositions. It is painful to have to reckon with the failure of our strength of will, so I'd say it is better to avoid that. Rather, it is a good exercise to put together a list of things that we would like to happen, and over which we have little or no control: it is much safer as we won't feel guilty if these wishes do not come true.