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“I don’t think we should ever shake hands again, to be honest with you. Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, but it probably would also decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country.”Dr. Anthony Fauci, April 2020

“It’s [hand shaking] an outdated custom. Many cultures have learned that you can greet one another without touching each other. … when you shake another person’s hand, you have “no idea” where that hand has been and you are exposing yourself to “elements of danger” like viruses and...

Hardly a day passes without a report of some new, startling application of Artificial Intelligence. Two recent articles in the journal Nature described its application to weather forecasting, which, currently, is difficult and time-consuming because meteorologists individually analyze weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, wind, humidity, and cloudiness. However, new AI applications can significantly speed up the process. 

The first article describes how a new AI model, Pangu-Weather, can predict worldwide weekly weather patterns much more rapidly than traditional forecasting methods but with comparable accuracy. The second demonstrates how a deep-learning algorithm could...

We’ve all had that one doctor we really didn’t like, the one who didn’t listen, was brusque, and gave you what turned out to be bad advice, right? You know, the one whose bedside manner was somewhere between Don Rickles and Bill Maher. Well, there’s a dirty little secret that most doctors hide: They’re people, too. They have that cringe-worthy patient, the sight of whose name on the schedule ruins their day, the one whose presence requires a deep, calming breath before entering the exam room, the one for whom you tell your assistant to get you if you don’t come up for air in 20 minutes, the one who makes the staff cry.

That surprises most people, who may love to complain about their doctors, but never think about whether their doctors complain about them.

Like most...

 

“We don’t love our kids any less here in the State of California than they do in Europe. And we need to take the same steps to protect our kids.”

-  California Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel

Why are These Chemicals Banned in Europe and not the US?

According to the Bill, these five compounds have been linked to cancer, reproductive problems, and developmental and behavioral issues in children. The EU decision is based on their adaptation of the Precautionary...

The first city in the US to routinely disinfect water was Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1908. Water disinfection is a broad term that includes all methods of killing microbes in drinking water. The primary disinfection methods are chlorine, ozone, ultraviolet light, and chloramines.    

Waterborne Diseases Today

Although waterborne diseases have been greatly reduced in the US, they have not been eliminated. Most waterborne diseases today are not from inadequate disinfection at drinking water treatment plants but from microbes that grow and spread in the plumbing inside buildings and in recreational water venues such as swimming pools and hot tubs. These microbes grow in biofilms (bacterial build-up) that attach to the walls inside pipes, pools, and plumbing...

Wild game, like any meat, requires rapid, safe, and sanitary handling postmortem to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria such as Salmonella and Escherichia coli O157:H7. Food safety begins in the field after the deer is “harvested.” Immediately removing the entrails, termed field dressing, helps to cool the carcass allowing air into the body cavity. Here are some helpful tips from the Official Pennsylvania Online Hunter Safety Course:

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“Overeating isn’t fueling obesity, it’s too many carbohydrates in our diet, researchers say,” Fox News reported on June 7. Despite its recent vintage, the story outlined the arguments advanced by Harvard endocrinologist Dr. David Ludwig and several co-authors in a December 2021 opinion piece for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Their thesis is well known by this point, but for anyone who hasn't followed the diet wars, the argument goes like this: people necessarily overeat when they gain weight, but overeating is not the ultimate cause of weight gain. Instead, obesity is primarily a hormonal...

“This Roundup ingredient might cause cancer—but the EPA won’t ban it,” Popular Science told its readers in a terribly misleading January 13 story about the weedkiller glyphosate. After nearly 50 years on the market and thousands of studies investigating its health effects, most experts are convinced that the herbicide poses minimal risk to humans. That should be the end of the discussion, but a handful of ostensibly reputable publications,...

Can we agree that our political views are increasingly polarized? Doesn’t the abandonment of the middle for the “poles” suggest an imbalance? The chart is one, among many, metrics of that divisiveness. (Thank you Vox)

I added the vertical line for 2000 because it was around then that Google appeared, followed by Twitter and Facebook in 2006. The Internet was no longer DIY “bulletin boards” but a growing means of communication. CNN was founded in...

Late on August 29, 1892, the SS Moravia crept into NY Harbor carrying two passengers with cholera, seeding the 1892 American cholera epidemic. Not particularly dramatic in terms of the number of deaths, the epidemic was significant in governmental conflict regarding who makes the epidemic rules – and who suffers from them. Four days later, two more ships docked bearing cholera patients, the SS Normannia and the SS Rugia.

All had departed Hamburg, Germany, where the epidemic began several days earlier. Even then, international transport of disease was a concern, and countries had consul stationed in Hamburg, a leading international port, to prevent ships from sailing in the event of an outbreak. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Germany hid the outbreak until...