Coffee, dementia, and reading scientific studies

We see a lot of stories about scientific discoveries and results. In particular, we see a lot of correlation results: A and B seem to work together. But does A cause B, or B cause A, or both are caused by something else? (In particular, this has been a huge problem in Alzheimer’s research for twenty years.) Here’s an example that a neuroscientist, Richard M. Ransohoff, uses to discuss the issue:

Many people like me — scientists and coffee enthusiasts — were intrigued by a long-term study that found that those who drank multiple cups of coffee a day were less likely to develop dementia.

I’m a neuroscientist who drinks a lot of strong coffee, so that got my attention. And I would love for it to be true. But this was a correlational study, meaning it didn’t (and couldn’t) look at whether caffeine intake actually decreases dementia risk. It reinforced for me the importance of reading the actual study, rather than stories about the study, because scientific researchers are usually pretty candid about the limitations of their work.

Summary: Check out the original papers on important scientific results yourself, paying attention to:

Look at when and where the study was published. Check for signs that it appeared in a “predatory” journal, which is a journal that charges academics to publish and fails to provide peer review and other hallmarks of scientific legitimacy. Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to do research on the research.

Take some time to really read. Scientific studies are not things you can skim or scroll through on your phone. In time, you will be able to get the gist of a study by reading the abstract — but not at first.

Introduction. This tells you what knowledge gaps the researchers were trying to fill.

Skip the methods and statistical analyses. These are highly technical and less useful for laypeople.

Go to the discussion section. That’s where the authors will describe what they found and what they think it means.

Read the limitations section. It’s important, because scientists and their academic editors care deeply about their work not being misunderstood or exaggerated.

Many of the comments to the article disagree with skipping the methods and statistical analyses. A mere 830 words: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/28/coffee-dementia-why-research-studies-are-worth-reading-yourself/. The coffee/dementia study is linked to in the article but is paywalled; this link has the full article.

Good news from Fix the News:

We have the first national-level evidence that the malaria vaccines are working. With the exception of COVID-19, malaria vaccines have seen the fastest rollout in history; they are now in routine use across 25 African countries. Anecdotal data has suggested substantial reductions in severe cases and hospital admissions – but now we have the first official figures, from Burkina Faso, one of the world’s ten highest burden countries. Between 2024 and 2025 malaria cases fell by 32% and malaria‑related deaths by 44%. That’s in a single year.

And an image from my collection:

Butts Arrested in Boob Murder Case

There has been a development in a year-old murder case in Potter Township, Pa. The victim: Samuel S. Boob, 29. The alleged getaway driver has been arrested, Kermit Butts, 26.

I first found this on the ThisIsTrue weekly email, and here’s a link to the specific article: https://thisistrue.com/family-feud/. Details about the case were difficult to find in any well-known news site, but maybe try this: https://thecinemaholic.com/samuel-boob-murder-where-are-mirinda-boob-and-ronald-heichel-now/ (730 words).

Good news from Fix the News:

One-shot gene therapy is helping the deaf hear. The OTOF gene makes otoferlin, a protein the inner ear needs to send sound to the brain. Those born without this gene are deaf… but maybe only temporarily. Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute injected ten OTOF-deaf people with a working copy of the otoferlin-making gene, delivered straight into the cochlea via synthetic virus.

The hearing of all ten improved drastically: on average, the quietest sound they could hear dropped from 106 decibels to 52, roughly the difference between a chainsaw and normal conversation. Children responded fastest; one seven-year-old was chatting with her mother four months after therapy. The treatment has shown no adverse side effects, so the Karolinska team is now looking to try the same setup on different deafness genes. ScienceDaily

And an image from my collection:

Donald Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025

From CNN:

Here is our highly subjective list of Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025. We chose some because the president repeated them particularly often, some because they were about notably consequential topics, and some because they were especially egregious in their distance from reality….

Here are the headlines. Each one has a short explanatory paragraph:

Inflation, tariffs and the economy

Lie: Trump secured $17 trillion or $18 trillion in investment in 2025
Lie: ‘Every price is down’
Lie: Trump was reducing prescription drug prices by ‘2,000%, 3,000%’
Lie: Foreign countries pay the US government’s tariffs

Public safety

Lie: Portland was ‘burning down’
Lie: Washington, DC had no murders for six months
((Full explanation:)) The president continued his long-established pattern of choosing dramatic untruths over facts that would have been useful to him if he had just stated them accurately. Instead of correctly noting that crime in Washington, DC, declined after his federal takeover of law enforcement there in August, he falsely claimed three times in a November speech that the capital hadn’t had a single murder “in six months.” Washington actually had more than 50 homicides over the six months prior to the speech, police statistics and Washington Post tracking show.
Lie: ‘I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water’
Lie: The Democratic governor of Maryland called Trump ‘the greatest president of my lifetime’

Foreign affairs

Lie: Ukraine ‘started’ Russia’s war on Ukraine
Lie: Trump was speaking ‘in jest’ when he promised to immediately end the Ukraine war
Lie: The US government had planned to spend $50 million on ‘condoms for Hamas’
Lie: Every drug boat in the Caribbean ‘kills 25,000 Americans’
Lie: Trump ‘didn’t say’ he had no problem releasing full footage of a September boat
strike
Lie: Numerous foreign leaders emptied prisons and mental institutions to send their most undesirable people into the US
Lie: Trump ended seven or eight wars
Lie: ‘The people of Canada like’ the idea of becoming the 51st US state

Justice and elections

Lie: Capitol rioters ‘didn’t assault’
Lie: Critical media coverage of Trump is ‘illegal’
Lie: Trump didn’t pressure the Justice Department to go after his opponents
Lie: Obama, Biden and Comey made up the Epstein files
Lie: The 2020 election was ‘rigged and stolen’
Lie: The US is ‘the only country in the world’ with mail-in voting

Health care, legislation and Democrats

Lie: Babies get 80-plus vaccines at once
Lie: Trump’s big domestic policy bill didn’t change Medicaid
Lie: The domestic policy bill was ‘the single most popular bill ever signed’

2,900 words: https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/27/politics/analysis-donald-trumps-top-25-lies-of-2025

Good news from Fix the News:

Mozambique has wiped its IMF debt to zero. The country cleared its $701 million IMF debt by late March, making Mozambique one of a growing number of African countries with no IMF debt at all (Nigeria and Namibia cleared theirs last year). The move doesn’t end the country’s wider debt problems, but it does remove an important external liability. Business Insider Africa

And an image from my collection:

Superstition

xkcd.com posts a new item three times a week. I always read them. (Remember to hold your mouse over the item for an extra comment.) Some people try to say “Rabbit rabbit” or “Rabbit rabbit day” as the very first thing they say on the first of each month (https://xkcd.com/3191/):

(And the mouseover comment is: “It’s important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That’s what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I’d said rabbit rabbit that year!”)

Good news from Fix the News: Big progress in 25 years!

The UN Special Programme on Human Reproduction’s 2025 annual report reveals women today are 40% less likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth than in 2000. That’s astonishing progress, and there are powerful reasons to believe it will continue: in 2025 the WHO issued new guidance on standardising postpartum haemorrhage treatment, the single leading cause of maternal mortality globally, responsible for around a quarter of all deaths.

☝️ possibly the most beautifully designed UN report you will ever see.

And an image from my collection:

“No Kings 3” signs

On March 28, 2026, over eight million people attended more than 3,300 “No Kings” protests across the country, making it the largest single-day demonstration in US history, according to organizers. Buzzfeed seems to really like these: here are three links to pics of signs:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mychalthompson/no-kings-best-protest-signs-march-2026
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanavalko/best-no-kings-signs-2026
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mychalthompson/no-kings-protest-signs-buzzfeed-community

Good news from Fix the News: Our President has (totally by accident) greatly advanced interest in switching from foreign oil as an energy source to locally-produced green energy:

Iran shock speeds the shift from fossil fuels to electrification. The data is starting to come in: the Iran war is acting as an accelerant for clean energy. As oil and gas volatility pushes up costs, households from Britain to India and Pakistan are turning to EVs, solar, heat pumps and induction stoves as a hedge. These shifts will not stay local: when major economies accelerate the transition, others follow, creating spillover effects that outlast the crisis. Bloomberg / PV Magazine / CleanTechnica

And an image from my collection:

(xkcd.com/3199. The mouse-hover text is “Ugh, I’m never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own business and don’t do anything weird.” –The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects.)

A stranger said six words that saved my husband’s life

My takeaway from this article was the importance of taking charge of your own (or your husband’s) medical treatment.

Joel elected to have a hip replacement. He counted on it to improve his quality of life.

Instead, a nick from the retractor caused a life-threatening bleed that set off a cascade of catastrophes. Within a few hours, he went from a healthy, active, 63-year-old to an unconscious, life-support-dependent ICU patient. Kidney failure followed, plus an obstructed colon and compartment syndrome — all complications of what should have been a routine procedure.

To make matters worse, the doctor who fucked up his hip replacement was in charge of fixing the mistake. Joel instead embarked on a months-long hospitalization with no guaranteed survival….

Just minutes before, a nurse had told me one doctor advocated amputating Joel’s leg; the other disagreed. The argument continued.

Why only two doctors instead of a larger team? I wondered. Why did they not ask my opinion? Who would make the ultimate decision?

That’s when a rabbi came to see me. “You can request a different hospital,” she told me calmly. “You could have your husband transferred.”

Those six words seemed so obvious…

Now, before every doctor appointment, I compose a list of questions, complaints and possible treatments. When a doctor pooh-poohs a test, I challenge their opinion. When a nurse minimizes a symptom, I repeat my concern. When a result goes unnoticed, I call attention to it. And my advocacy goes beyond medicine. When I appeared in court on a probate issue, I wrote a script for my lawyer with points to make to the judge.

1,300 words: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/botched-hip-replacement-doctors-hospital-transfer-patient-advocacy_n_6977b017e4b01cc3c1ad5e0a.

And good news from Fix the News:

Child mortality down 60% in two generations, as low-cost tools save millions. Since 1990, global under-five deaths have fallen from 13 million to 4.9 million a year, one of the largest public health gains in human history. Vaccines, oral rehydration, bed nets and safer births have been at the heart of this, with deaths from diarrhoea down 75% and malaria by 63%. Although progress has slowed in the last decade, the tools to prevent most remaining deaths exist. The gap is now political will rather than innovation. UNICEF

And an image from my collection:

Word Crimes

A song by Weird Al Yankovic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc. 3 minutes 45 seconds; a parody of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. Lyrics and detailed explanation: https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-word-crimes-lyrics.

One thing I ask of you (Okay)
Time to learn your homophones is past due (Woo)
Learn to diagram a sentence, too
Always say “to whom”, don’t ever say “to who” (Woo)
And listen up when I tell you this
I hope you never use quotation marks for emphasis (Woo)

Also see https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/2025/05/15/white-and-nerdy/.

And good news from Fix the News:

Adult smoking in the United States has dropped below 10% for the first time. New analysis of national survey data found that cigarette use fell from 10.8% of adults in 2023 to 9.9% in 2024 (about 25 million people) down from 42% in 1964. The shift has helped drive a long fall in cancer mortality, with the American Cancer Society estimating reduced smoking prevented nearly four million lung cancer deaths between 1970 and 2022. Gizmodo

Plus an image from my collection, in honor of (recently) St. Patrick’s Day:

Big Bang prediction confirmed

Here’s the story of how the Big Bang’s fifth and final great prediction was confirmed.

…As time went forward ((from the instant of the Big Bang)), the Universe would cool, expand, and gravitate all together. First atomic nuclei would form from protons and neutrons, then neutral atoms would form, and then gravitation would lead to stars, galaxies, and the grand structures of the cosmic web. These leftover relics — the light elements formed in the Big Bang, the relic photons from the primordial plasma, and the large-scale structure of the Universe — would, along with the cosmic expansion of the Universe, form the four modern cornerstones of the Big Bang.

But remaining from an even earlier epoch, a fifth cornerstone should exist as well. There would be an early signal left over from when the Universe was just one second old: a bath of neutrinos and antineutrinos. Known as the cosmic neutrino background (CNB), it was theorized generations ago but was dismissed throughout the 20th century as being fundamentally undetectable.

That’s no longer the case.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/big-bangs-final-prediction. 3,600 words, dense but worth it: it’s how all of the Universe started!

And good news from Fix the News:

River otters have staged a remarkable comeback across North America’s Great Lakes after disappearing from many waterways by the 1970s. Reintroductions beginning in the 1980s, combined with wetland restoration and pollution controls under the 1972 US–Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, have allowed breeding populations to recover across Ohio, New York, Ontario and beyond. As apex predators, their return signals cleaner water and healthier ecosystems. Rewilding Magazine

And an image from my collection:

Fifty shirts of “Hey—”

Amusing, weird, clever… and several are NSFW. Here ya go: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikespohr/50-absolutely-hilarious-t-shirts.

One example:

Good news from Fix the News:

Sweden cuts shootings by 63% after policing overhaul. Gun violence in Sweden has dropped sharply since peaking in 2022, with shooting incidents falling to 147 in 2025, down from the 390 recorded three years earlier. Authorities attribute the shift to expanded surveillance powers, tougher sentencing and new police tactics targeting criminal networks, which have also improved asset seizures and disruption of gang operations. Reuters

If it’s possible in Sweden (in just three years), maybe it’s possible here…

And an image from my collection. People’s profile pictures on dating sites often include other people; for privacy, many people will “scratch out” the faces of the others:

Recording ICE safely

Tips on safely using your Constitutional rights to free speech in the face of authoritarian tactics. Summarized:

After Alex Pretti was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, eyewitness cellphone videos became a powerful tool to contradict the Trump administration’s version of what had happened.

The Trump administration called Pretti “an assassin,” but videos show Pretti helping a protester who got pepper sprayed before he is pinned to the ground and shot. The Department of Homeland Security initially alleged in a statement that Pretti approached officers with a handgun, which is not supported by publicly available videos that show him clearly holding a cellphone when officers approached him.

People have the right to record law enforcement in public spaces under the First Amendment, but federal government officials have denounced people who do so. Last year, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that videotaping agents when they are out on operations is “violence.”

“There’s no guaranteed safe way to record ICE right now,” explained David Huerta, senior digital security trainer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “There are ways to at least do so with as many safety measures as one could put in place.”

1. Before Filming, Prepare Yourself And Your Phone.

Burner phone, strong password, updated OS, and “Do this kind of activity with neighbors on your block or in pairs.”

2. While Filming, Narrate What You See For Verification Later.

“Make sure to mention the time, the date and an approximate location…” ((many details under the acronym “SALUTE”))

3. While Filming, Remember You’re There To Document.

Nathan-Pineau said she doesn’t encourage people to follow ICE officers back to their house.

4. While Filming, Ask The Person Being Arrested If They Want To Share Contact Info.

5. Focus Camera On Agents, Not People Being Detained.

If you do capture a person’s face, Nathan-Pineau advises against immediately sharing that video without obscuring the detained person’s face in some way.

6. Preserve Footage If Your Phone Gets Taken.

If you believe your phone is about to be seized by an officer, hit the stop button on the recording and turn the phone completely off. This “is probably the best protection, because then it’s in a fully encrypted state at that point,” Huerta said.

7. After Filming, Don’t Edit Your File.

(…)

After a federal agent fatally shot Renee Good in her car in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz asked residents to “carry your phone with you at all times” and “hit record” when they see ICE agents in neighborhoods.

“Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution,” he said.

1,800 words: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-record-ice-safety-tips_l_69811632e4b0926bfc4844ef. If you do this, read the entire article carefully.

Good news from Fix the News (info on dengue, AKA “breakbone disease” because of the great pain that some victims suffer):

Singapore demonstrates that specially-bred mosquitos can keep dengue suppressed at city-scale. Wolbachia is a bacterium that lives in many insects; when scientists breed male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with it, those males don’t bite, and when they mate with wild females the eggs don’t hatch. In a 24 month trial across 15 residential areas in Singapore, this approach slashed wild female mosquitoes by around three‑quarters and reduced symptomatic dengue risk by roughly 70%. Medical Xpress

And an image from my collection: