Month: May 2026

Vision Zero: Protecting pedestrians

Wikipedia:

Vision Zero is a multi-national road traffic safety project that aims to achieve a roadway system with no fatalities or serious injuries involving road traffic. It started in Sweden and was approved by their parliament in October 1997.

Two articles in The Washington Post discuss how this works and why, in the United States, it tends to not work. (Briefly, drivers and businesses oppose anything that makes driving easier and more convenient, politicians cave in, and if mere pedestrians die, tough noogies.)

How it works: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/interactive/2025/pedestrian-deaths-road-safety-solutions (look for the arrow at the right edge of the screen, or use your arrow keys):

  • Lower speed limits
  • Automated speed cameras
  • Medians so pedestrians have a safe place in the middle of a street
  • More crosswalks and on-demand crosswalk stoplights
  • Better lighting
  • Narrower lanes to slow drivers
  • Bus lanes between drivers and sidewalks
  • Speed bumps 15 yards before crosswalks

How it doesn’t work here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2025/pedestrian-deaths-vision-zero-roads (approx 3,200 words). But it does work when governments (and politicians!) commit to it:

Sweden redesigned roads, increased enforcement, put money into expanded public transit networks and required new safety features from car manufacturers. Road deaths were cut by 60 percent, and pedestrian deaths by 65 percent…

Hoboken, New Jersey, focused on removing parking close to crosswalks that made it hard to see people crossing the street. Hoboken has gone eight years without a traffic death.

Good news from Fix the News:

Elephants on farm raids might help us find new medicines. When elephants raid banana and papaya farms, they occasionally skip the fruit and eat only the stems and leaves. Why? Gabonese scientist Steeve Ngama suspected the answer was at least partially pharmaceutical. He and his team collected dung samples from farm-raiding elephants and found that those with parasitic infections were much more likely to eat plant parts with anti-parasitic properties — including banana stems and papaya trees. The implications cut two ways: if elephants are self-medicating, their foraging might help us identify new human treatments, and if stem-raiding elephants can be given medications they might leave fruit farms alone more often. British Ecological Society

And an image from my collection: Introverts!:

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: