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Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories have always been with us. The belief that Republican Vice-President Dan Quayle couldn't spell 'potato' or that Democratic President Barack Obama was not a citizen are common modern ones that still get repeated as facts.

A recent paper did something interesting with data from 100 hypertension trials around the world - it compared blood pressure reductions by the type of healthcare professionals who led the interventions.The results were that pharmacists achieved the greatest improvements, followed by community health workers. The authors believe that, unlike in the government-controlled medical environment, especially if patients are subsidized or free under the Affordable Care Act, doctors and nurses don't spend much time, while pharmacists and community health care workers have calmer, more empathetic demeanors.

A new analysis has found that cirrhosis, a liver disease that occurs when scar tissue prevents the liver from functioning normally, occurs twice as often in trans adults as those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.  

Scientists led by Dr. Pamela Ting have reported the discovery and characterization of the first molecular glue degraders of the WIZ transcription factor for fetal hemoglobin derepression in Sickle Cell Disease, which means a pill-based therapy for humans could begin development.Sickle Cell Disease is a genetic life-threatening condition caused by mutation in β-hemoglobin. Inducing fetal hemoglobin safely has been the goal for years but has remained out-of-reach. The discovery of dWIZ-1 and dWIZ-2 molecular glue degraders of the WIZ transcription factor that induce HbF in erythroblasts is a milestone toward a pill for therapy. The authors say WIZ is a previously unknown repressor of HbF.

There are five professions(1) but lots of occupations and trades lay claim to being the oldest one despite predating the concept by millennia.Farming is around 14,000 years old but a new study reveals one less-considered trade predates it by tens of thousands of years: fashion.Humans wore clothing prior to that, but fashion is a different animal skin. It is clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity. Paleolithic eyed needles are now known to be as old as 40,000 years, and with it came the evolution of dressing. 

Monkeypox (Mpox) is an infection transmitted by skin-to-skin contact and causes fever and painful skin blisters. It is in the Orthopoxvirus genus of viruses, which includes smallpox, so those vaccinated against it have cross-protection, smallpox vaccines also work for monkeypox.

Brown adipose tissue is different from the white fat around human belly and thighs. Brown fat helps to turn calories into heat and it was once thought that only small animals like mice and newborns had brown fat but some adults retain it.If some people have it, perhaps others can activate it also, and a study found a previously unknown built-in mechanism that switches it off shortly after being activated.  Which means it doesn't help against obesity. A group discovered a protein responsible for this switching-off process called AC3-AT. Mice that genetically didn't have AC3-AT were protected from becoming obese, partly because their bodies were simply better at burning off calories and were able to increase their metabolic rates through activating brown fat.

With a porous southern border, street fentanyl continues to enter the United States and be purchased by recreational drug users, all while the U.S. government continues to treat suffering cancer patients like criminals when it comes to legitimate pain medication access. It isn't much better in Canada, according to a new study.

A year ago, corporate media promoted the provocative claim that dinosaurs like Tyrannorsaurus rex had so many neurons they had to be substantially more intelligent than assumed, since these high neuron counts could directly inform on intelligence, metabolism and life history.They even added that T. rex was monkey-like in some of its habits and may even have used cultural transmission of knowledge as tools. Corporate media sells ads so they love such 'scientists are baffled by' narratives and a scenario where dinosaurs could be ruling on other planets. Other scientists were instead baffled that it got by peer-review.

In mice, caloric restriction has been found to increase aging but obviously mice are not little people, and mice are weaned on a starvation diet. That cannot and will never happen in humans. Yet  restricting calories even by 20 percent has been shown to promote longer life in animal models.

When we created the Science 2.0 movement, it quickly caught cultural fire. Blogging became the thing to do, to such an extent that corporate media entered with contracts for scientists while outlets like the BBC began to explore publishing user-generated content.Social media filled the void when the blogging movement faded and while it changed journalism - articles about social media responses became common - it did nothing for knowledge creation and scientific peer review. Instead of blogging being a firewall for the public regarding science content, pay-to-publish journals claiming to be peer-reviewed instead overwhelmed the ability of scientists to look at it all.

Tirzepatide facilitates weight loss in obese people with type 2 diabetes and therefore
improves glucose control
and also results in improved cardiovascular disease outcomes.A recent analysis compared a group of adults with type 1 diabetes who were prescribed tirzepatide (off-label) to a control group of adults with type 1 diabetes who were not using any weight-loss medication. The investigators reported significantly larger declines in body mass index (BMI) and weight in the treated group compared to controls. HbA1c decreased in the treated group as early as three months and was sustained through a one-year follow-up.