What the 18th century can teach the 21st

Although the fact is often forgotten, the American colonists were not the only people who faced a political crisis in the late 18th century. The British people did too. And, ironically, the United States finds itself in a situation today very similar to the one Britain faced back then.

The diagnostic checklist that an attentive observer might have drawn up in Britain in the 1770s seems very familiar. The constitution was out of balance, and the executive—at this time still the King—was accumulating powers and patronage at the expense of Parliament.

…The radicals in Britain pursued two chief goals: reform to the Civil List, and the establishment of universal male suffrage. Both had the purpose of reining in corruption…. Richmond introduced a suffrage bill in 1780. Although it failed, it became the basis for political efforts that built consistently over the next 50 years…. In the end, over the course of nearly a century, there would be four Reform Acts. The last, in 1918, finally delivered universal male suffrage, as well as suffrage for many women. A decade later, the vote was extended to all women.

Of course, this is not exactly the situation we find ourselves in today. But the struggle for government of, by, and for the people was followed for decades, and ultimately was pretty successful. Interesting reading!

2,500 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/18th-century-britain-reform/687221/. If this is paywalled for you, contact me.

Good news from Fix the News (long one, this could have been a post all by itself):

The past year has brought us three Alzheimer’s breakthroughs. For 30 years, Alzheimer’s research has had one song, “Amyloid plaques are bad.” Billions of dollars, two FDA-approved drugs (lecanemab and donanemab), and yet Alzheimer’s patients have only gotten slightly less worse, a little bit slower. But within the last 12 months, three separate teams have said: what if we tried literally anything else.

Indiana University went for an enzyme called IDOL. Everyone assumed it mattered in the brain’s immune cells because that’s where most of it gets made. Wrong floor. Knock out IDOL in neurons and plaques drop, APOE (the gene variant that’s basically a lit fuse for late-onset Alzheimer’s) drops, and the receptors that keep neurons talking to each other go up.

Barcelona, Sichuan and London ignored the neuron, and went for the plumbing instead. The blood-brain barrier has a protein called LRP1 whose job is grabbing amyloid and shoving it into the bloodstream — except in Alzheimer’s, LRP1 jams. They built nanoparticles that act like a reset button. Three injections, and an elderly mouse came out behaviourally indistinguishable from a healthy one.

Bordeaux, Moncton and Inserm went one floor deeper. Forget the neurons, forget the plumbing, look at the power supply. Mitochondria — the engines inside every neuron — start failing before cells die. So the team built an artificial receptor that revs them back up, and memory came back.

Caveat: Mice. It’s always mice. But it looks like the amyloid plaque monopoly might finally be over.

And an image from my collection:

Everyday street safety tips

From Buzzfeed.com, suggestions on staying safe. Some examples:

If you’re ever forced into the trunk of someone’s vehicle, pull out every wire you can find. The driver may be pulled over for a blown taillight or license plate light.
Did you know that your thumb is a powerful thing to use if you’re attacked? You can use it to poke the eyes and throat of your opponent.
‘Head-shirt-shoes.’ I work in large crowds as a security director, and it’s easy to forget what someone looks like because we usually look at faces when something is happening. I tell my team to look for those three things…
When parking in a mall, etc., put a note in your phone with the floor number, floor name, and how many spaces to the door. Then, check your notes before going to the car.

And several more (some of which have multiple tips). Full article: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lizmrichardson/travel-city-safety-tips-street-smarts-may-2026 (1,300 words).

Good news from Fix the News:

AI mapping tools are transforming rainforest investigations. Environmental journalists are using satellite imagery and machine-learning to expose illegal activities across the Amazon. One investigation mapped 3,718 illegal gold-mining sites in Venezuela, including inside protected Indigenous territories. The technology now allows continent-wide monitoring for the Amazon and Congo basins, allowing reporters to track environmental destruction remotely in regions too dangerous or inaccessible for field reporting. Nieman Lab

And an image from my collection:

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: