Amid the news this week from Apple, there was a significant change in their Airpods.
“Apple engineers turning AirPods into hearing aids is wonderful, but it’s not a uniquely difficult endeavor. In fact, what’s happening here is that a set of elected leaders opened up a market closed off by a cartel that had secured a comfortable position, shielded by the Food and Drug Administration. And engineers, many of whom care deeply about hearing, acted in this new legal space to create tools to help people live better lives.”
A low-cost hearing aid is fantastic. How did it come about? From Big, How Joe Biden Engineered Apple's New AirPods
One of the points at which the "West now meets the East" is this.
“How is this crucial brain-body connection orchestrated? The answer involves the very unusual vagus nerve. The longest nerve in the body, it wends its way from the brain throughout the head and trunk, issuing commands to our organs and receiving sensations from them. Much of the bewildering range of functions it regulates, such as mood, learning, sexual arousal and fear, are automatic and operate without conscious control. These complex responses engage a constellation of cerebral circuits that link brain and body. The vagus nerve is, in one way of thinking, the conduit of the mind. …
Nerves are typically named for the specific functions they perform. …The best that early anatomists could do with this nerve, however, was to call it the “vagus,” from the Latin for “wandering.””
From Quanta, How Our Longest Nerve Orchestrates the Mind-Body Connection
We all know that CO2 is one of the greenhouse gases, but what allows it to trap heat rather than let it pass along into space?
“In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere—the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ central conclusion: that every time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubles, Earth’s temperature will rise between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius.
Still, the physical reason why CO2 behaves this way has remained a mystery, until recently.”
From Quanta by way of Wired, The Quantum Mechanics of the Greenhouse Effect
And now for a bit of contrarian thought about Blue Zones
“If you want humans to live much longer lives, please stop looking at purely correlational social science work that says—for example—people who get married live longer lives and thus marriage causally extends lifespans. To really extend lives, you have to get causal, and you will have to fund real, basic, nose to the grindstone scientific work that produces actionable advice, or you’ll end up distracted by nonsense long enough to die.
One major distraction for life extension advocates is geographical peculiarity. That is, regions of the globe that supposedly contain lots and lots of extremely old people, making those regions worthy of study to figure out precisely what allows them to harbor so many of the world’s longest-lived individuals. The most notably peculiar geographical regions are known as blue zones.”
Say it’s not true – are the blue zones just a bit of lousy record-keeping? From Cremieux Recueil, The Blue Zone Distraction
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
