Global warming 2023 / 2024

We’re shattering heat records: https://wapo.st/49b3HcF (Washington Post free link, from June 2023, approx 1,100 words):

New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data.

And then, on Monday, came Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years. Tuesday was hotter.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

But it’s not hopeless. EV sales are rising rapidly (almost all new cars in Norway, 25% of all new cars in Europe, from 2% in the US in 2020 to almost 10% in 2023); renewable energy is going up (see chart below); CO2 emissions are actually dropping in the EU and the US: https://wapo.st/3J3jRtX (Washington Post free link), approx 700 words. One chart:

The note in the upper-right corner is amazing: “China increased its renewable energy by almost 400% since 2015.”

Online breast cancer risk calculator

A 5-Minute Quiz Revealed Olivia Munn’s Breast Cancer Risk. You Can Take It Too.

Article is about 1,100 words: https://time.com/6952723/breast-cancer-risk-assessment-tool/.

What is the Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool?
Who should take it?
Where do mammograms fit in?
Future innovations

Released in 1989 by the National Cancer Institute, the online questionnaire takes less than five minutes to complete and pretty accurately predicts a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer…. The questionnaire—also known as the Gail Model after its developer Dr. Mitchell Gail at the National Cancer Institute—is about 98% accurate in predicting risk of breast cancer in most women.

Here’s the calculator: https://bcrisktool.cancer.gov/calculator.html.

And random good news from Future Crunch (now calling its newsletter Fix the News):

Lichtenstein’s parliament just voted 24-1 to legalise same-sex marriage. The African Development Bank says Africa will have 11 of the 20 fastest-growing economies in the world this year. McKenzie Scott has now given away $16.5 billion from the fortune she came into after divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Fewer middle-aged people are dying from cancer in the UK than at any other point in the last 25 years. Gene editing for sickle cell disease is expensive, but it’s going to get a lot more accessible.

The cystic-fibrosis breakthrough that changed everything

Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with CF died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5—an essentially normal life span.

Of course, there are issues:

Side effects: “It can cause cataracts as well as liver injury. More perplexing, Trikafta may affect the brain. For Jenny, starting Trikafta coincided with a wave of intense insomnia, brain fog, and anxiety.”
Trikafta repairs the results of a specific mutation: “For another group of CF patients, Trikafta simply does not work. About 10 percent lack the F508del mutation that the triple combination was specifically designed to fix.”
Since so many people have been more or less cured, support groups for CF patient have been disappearing, even for the 10% who are not helped by Trikafta: “Recently, Make-A-Wish announced that children with CF would no longer automatically be eligible for the program, because “life-changing advances” had radically improved the outlook for them.”
And… CF patients expected to die young. Often they have no savings, no professional skills, no kids, because they did not expect to live long enough to deal with those. But now they will live.

7,700 words but all interesting: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/cystic-fibrosis-trikafta-breakthrough-treatment/677471/. Send me a note if you can’t read it.

From the internet (2018, part 1)

I save interesting sayings that I find on the internet. Here are some from 2016-2018 but which still make me laugh… or learn:

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> Old Chinese proverb: You can’t polish a turd.

Rlippa: But you can sure step in it… over and over and over again.

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” …You Don’t Tug On Superman’s Cape…

You Don’t Spit Into The Wind
You Don’t Pull The Mask Off The Old Lone Ranger
And You Don’t Mess Around With “A Grand Jury Subpoena.”

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Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tells me: “The result will violate a cardinal national security rule: Avoid having more than one nuclear crisis at a time.”

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biffbobfred Ars Scholae Palatinae:

<<…>>

My grandmother was kinda like this. At night she got up and laid on the bathroom floor, probably because the tiles were cool and soothing (no evidence of a fall). My sis found her in the morning. No known cause of death. I can guarantee she was not part of Project Mayhem or whatever. Human bodies are incredibly complex. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t randomly explode. The fact that some people live for 30,000 days or more is still magic to me. Not a miracle but magic.

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I don’t know why men go to bars to meet women.

Go to Target.

The female to male ratio is 10 to 1 & they’re already looking for things they don’t need.

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Remember, folks, you can lead a gift horse to water, but you can’t look him in the mouth. (Or something like that.) Sometimes you just have to bite the hand that you’re dealt.

We could stand here and talk until the cows turn blue. But we have to get all our ducks on the same page, or the fan is gonna hit the roof.

Wake up and smell the music. Don’t count your chickens without breaking a few eggs!

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You never realize how many shortcuts a computer has until a cat sits on the keyboard.

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Libertarians believe consenting adults have the right to do whatever they choose, except band together. — Emo Philips

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/14/raccoons-drunk-crab-apples-cause-false-rabies-scare-west-virginia/:

High animals are more common as more jurisdictions legalize marijuana and people plop the drug into tasty edibles that also appeal to their pets, who can’t read warning labels and don’t typically have the impulse control to stop at one, Brulliard reported.