Stephan: We have become a cesspit of grifting, and corruption. You and I have spent over 100 million dollars to cover the costs of getting Trump to and from his various golf courses. Now we learn that on Pence's utterly useless, indeed embarrassing, trip to Ireland we spent $600,000 just on ground transportation. And that doesn't include the profit to Trump for putting up dozens of people in his hotel over a 100 miles from where Pence's meetings took place. The level of official corruption in America exceeds any other developed nation in the world.
Mike Pence Credit: D. Myles Cullen/White House
Vice President Mike Pence went to Poland to stand in for Donald Trump, who decided to stay behind in the U.S. for a weekend of monitoring Hurricane Dorian from his golf cart. Pence met with Polish President Andrzej Duda on behalf of Trump in an effort to build support for allowing Russia to be re-admitted to the G-7, something all the other members of the G-7 oppose because of Putin’s aggressive actions in the Crimea region of Ukraine, which he annexed for Russia.
Afterward, the Pence family, which included the vice president’s wife-mother, sister, and mother, loaded up for a trip to Ireland, where the Pence family immigrated from several generations ago. Although he was there to meet with Irish leaders and he was technically there on official United States business, Pence and his family opted to stay on the opposite side of the country, to be near the hometown of Pence’s great-great-grandpappy, which also happened to […]
Stephan: For the world, this is good news, for America not so much. The non-U.S. vehicle industry is moving as fast as it can into a non-carbon powered realm. Meanwhile, in the U.S. Ford stock has been downgraded to junk status and the Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep America dependent on carbon, and American workers will live with the implications of this incompetent stupidity.
LONDON — Volkswagen is picking up the pace in its bid to dominate the auto industry’s electric future. The world’s biggest carmaker announced Friday that it had struck a deal with Sweden’s Northvolt to build a giant battery factory in Germany. It also confirmed production dates for two new models key to the group’s success.
The German company said production of lithium-ion batteries would begin in late 2023 or early 2024, a move that will be vital to Volkswagen’s (VLKAF) ability to mount what it calls “the largest electric offensive in the automotive industry worldwide.”
The group plans to launch almost 70 new electric models in the next decade,and hopes to build 22 million electric cars over this period. It is investing more than €30 billion ($33 billion) into electrifying its fleet over the next four years, prompted in part by pressure from regulators and the fallout from its diesel emissions scandal.
Lindsay Brownell, - Wyss Institute - Harvard University
Stephan: Medical studies like this, as with CRISPR research, get almost no national media coverage even though both are part of an important trend holding profound implications for the health and future of humanity.
Living embryoid bodies surround a hollow vascular channel printed using the SWIFT method. Credit: Wyss Institute/ Harvard University
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — 20 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant in the United States, and while more than 30,000 transplants are now performed annually, there are over 113,000 patients currently on organ waitlists. Artificially grown human organs are seen by many as the “holy grail” for resolving this organ shortage, and advances in 3D printing have led to a boom in using that technique to build living tissue constructs in the shape of human organs. However, all 3D-printed human tissues to date lack the cellular density and organ-level functions required for them to be used in organ repair and replacement.
Living embryoid bodies surround a hollow vascular channel printed using the SWIFT method. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University
Now, a new technique called SWIFT (sacrificial writing into functional tissue) created by researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied […]
Stephan: I travel internationally regularly, to present at conferences, and increasingly I am struck by the general obesity of Americans compared with the populations of other nations. Whether it is Japan, China, Sweden or France walking down a street there is a very different experience than walking down the streets of any American city, particularly in the Southeast where obesity seems to be the norm.
This report, based on just published research, discusses this issue from a perspective I have not seen before.
There’s a meme aimed at Millennial catharsis called “Old Economy Steve.” It’s a series of pictures of a late-70s teenager, who presumably is now a middle-aged man, that mocks some of the messages Millennials say they hear from older generations—and shows why they’re deeply janky. Old Economy Steve graduates and gets a job right away. Old Economy Steve “worked his way through college” because tuition was $400. And so forth.
We can now add another one to that list: Old Economy Steve ate at McDonald’s almost every day, and he still somehow had a 32-inch waist.
A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.
The authors examined the dietary data of 36,400 Americans between 1971 and 2008 and the physical activity data of 14,419 people between 1988 and 2006. They grouped the data sets together by the amount of food and activity, age, and BMI.
They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of […]
MARC SIEGEL, MD, Professor of Medicine - NYU - The Hill
Stephan: Whenever you talk to a Republican they tell you what a wonderful president Trump is, how America is prospering, look at the DOW or stock prices, which is all true. Those are all things of great importance to the rich. But what about the 40% of Americans who couldn't write a $400 check in a crisis? Nor do such Trump praisers seem to grasp the implications of trends such as the one described in this report.
Diseases are reemerging in some parts of America, including Los Angeles County, that we haven’t commonly seen since the Middle Ages. (emphasis added) One of those is typhus, a disease carried by fleas that feed on rats, which in turn feed on the garbage and sewage that is prominent in people-packed “typhus zones.” Although typhus can be treated with antibiotics, the challenge is to identify and treat the disease in resistant, hard-to-access populations, such as the homeless or the extremely poor in developing countries.
I also believe that homeless areas are at risk for the reemergence of another deadly ancient disease — leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease. Leprosy involves a mycobacteria (tuberculosis is another mycobacteria) that is very difficult to transmit and very easy to treat with a cocktail of three antibiotics.
Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are more than 200,000 new cases of leprosy reported in the world every year, with two-thirds of them in India, home to one-third of the world’s poor. The poor are disproportionately affected by this disease because close quarters, poor […]
Diseases are reemerging in some parts of America, including Los Angeles County, that we haven’t commonly seen since the Middle Ages. (emphasis added) One of those is typhus, a disease carried by fleas that feed on rats, which in turn feed on the garbage and sewage that is prominent in people-packed “typhus zones.” Although typhus can be treated with antibiotics, the challenge is to identify and treat the disease in resistant, hard-to-access populations, such as the homeless or the extremely poor in developing countries.
