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:

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:

Gene-edited pig liver transplant

Important progress (still in the experimental stage!) for non-human organ replacement. Briefly, modifying the donor’s DNA makes it more acceptable to humans’ immune systems, so the organ is not rejected and the patient may not need lifelong immunosuppressants:

In the past year, doctors have performed history-making transplants, placing genetically modified pig kidneys and pig hearts into patients. Now, a group of doctors and scientists in China report they have done the same with a pig liver….

“The transplanted pig liver successfully secreted bile and produced liver-derived albumin, and we think that is a great achievement,” said Dr. Lin Wang… “It means the pig liver could survive together with the original liver in a human being—and would give additional support to an injured liver, maybe, in the future.”

Pigs are promising sources of organs, but the human immune system rejects transplanted pig tissue. Scientists have been getting around this by genetically modifying the pigs that provide the organs. The donor liver in this case came from a pig that had received six modifications to certain genes in order to remove major pig proteins that would have led to rejection; the editing technique also added genes that made the liver appear more human to immune cells.

Approx 700 words: https://time.com/7271780/scientists-pig-liver-transplant/.

And good news from Fix the News:

People who are not up-to-date on the progress of renewable energy often say, “But what happens at night? There’s no sun for solar energy!” Batteries, baby, batteries.

Around the world, mega-batteries are unlocking mega-energy. California is ground zero. Since 2020, the state has tripled grid batteries to 13GW, with 8.6 GW more due by 2027; this spring and summer, batteries supplied over a quarter of evening peaks. Across the United States, 50% more utility scale batteries were added over the last year than the year before despite Trump. Analysts keep forecasting a slowdown; builders keep proving them wrong.

The boom is global: In 2022 there was only a single gigawatt-scale facility (defined as having a capacity of at least 1GWh, able to supply roughly 3 million UK households for an hour) in operation worldwide. Today there are 42 such sites, and five times as many set to come online in the next couple of years. The result? Excess midday solar becomes clean, usable electricity after dark, displacing fossil gas and stabilising grids. FT

Plus an image from my collection:

AI videos getting better

“I don’t believe anything I see online, unless it’s on *Ars Technica*.”

Full eight-second video: Click on the pic or here: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/A_candid_interview_202505261604-1.mp4.

The above video was in fact generated by an AI video program. Can you see anything that clearly shows it to be computer-generated? This article (3,300 words) shows several AI-generated videos that are very good and would need careful examination to find flaws (also several videos that still have serious flaws).

This has serious implications for political or criminal misuse… maybe generate a video “Show current president declaring war on Australia”…

But there’s still good news from Fix the News:

Global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000, marking a major but often overlooked public health success. Narrative violation alert: the drop has been most pronounced in high-income countries, with more gradual progress in others. The trend reflects expanding access to mental health care, public awareness efforts, and means restriction—but further gains will require deeper investment and cultural shifts, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. WHO

COVID versus cancer (in mice)

During the pandemic, some doctors anecdotally began noticing that some people with cancer who got very sick with COVID-19 saw their tumors shrink or grow more slowly…

Typically, monocytes, as part of the immune system, cruise the bloodstream and alert other immune cells to the presence of foreign cells or pathogens; some monocytes can attract cancer-killing immune cells to tumors, but others aren’t as effective in doing so. That’s because in some cases, cancer cells can co-opt monocytes —“like a demon summoning forces” —and form an immune wall protecting the tumor from being discovered and attacked by additional immune defenses.

But during a COVID-19 infection, SARS-CoV-2 attaches itself to these monocytes, and by doing so reverts them back to doing their original job: defending the body against cancer…

By analyzing the receptor on the monocytes that the COVID-19 virus attached to, Bharat found a compound that currently isn’t used to treat any disease but is a close mimic of the COVID-19 virus in the way that it binds to the monocyte to induce the cell’s transformation into a cancer-fighting cell…. In animal tests, the compound—called muramyl dipeptide (MDP)—reduced tumors by 60% to 70% in mice with human cancers including breast, colon, lung, and melanoma.

Full article: https://time.com/7176558/covid-19-virus-cancer-monocytes/ (approx 763 words).

And good news from Fix the News:

The EU is in the midst of finalizing a plan to completely end imports of Russian fossil fuels; the European Commission first pledged to quit Russian fossil fuels in 2022 as a response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The imports won’t completely end until 2027, but in the meantime, Czechia has achieved full independence from Russian oil for the first time in its history; the country now receives no supplies through Russia’s Druzhba pipeline, ending a 60-year dependency. This is significant because Czechia previously received half its oil from Russia and had an EU exemption from the 2022 Russian oil ban.

Dino-killing ourselves

I found this description of how much energy we’re putting into our planet from fossil fuels:

Our addition of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the long lever that can move the world. Between 1970 and 2020, 381±61 zetta joules (10^21 joules) of additional energy was absorbed into the system (i.e. the Earth).

This estimate was prepared using satellite data, which is public source, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/

How much energy is this? It’s roughly 80% of the estimated energy of the Chicxulub impactor. Albeit spread over a significantly longer period of time.

The strongest explosion humanity has ever created is in the order of 10^17 joules, or a hundred quadrillion joules.

We’ve managed to add 1.5 million times that number in this 50 years. We’ve been essentially adding one Tsar Bomba’s worth of energy ((approx 50 megatons)) every fifteen to twenty minutes for the past five decades.

The Chicxulub meteor impact blew away roughly half a continent, and the resulting climate change wiped out all the dinosaurs except for birds. We’re doing the same thing to ourselves, spread out a bit but… that’s a lot of energy to be not thinking about. Yeesh.

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42676838.

And good news from Fix the News:

Major wins for U.S. rape kit reform. In 2016, the Joyful Heart Foundation developed an actionable nationwide campaign to end the backlog of untested rape kits across the United States. As of January 2025, 21 states and Washington D.C. have achieved full rape kit reform, benefitting 163.4 million people. Two recent, big wins occurred in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which both implemented a rape kit tracking system in 2024. End The Backlog

32 of the smartest animals in the world

Well, six of these species are apes / monkeys / humans… but some of the others may not be what you expect. Dolphins, of course, and elephants, octopuses, cats and dogs… but pigeons? Squirrels? Monitor lizards?

In 2020, researchers tested the memories of two species of monitor lizard and found they could learn to solve puzzles and remember the solutions 20 months later.

https://www.livescience.com/animals/32-of-the-smartest-animals-in-the-world. About 5,000 words, easy reading.

Oops! Almost forgot: 86 Stories of Progress from 2024: https://fixthenews.com/86-stories-progress-2024/. Global health, conservation, living standards, energy, human rights, and science and technology. Long but encouraging!

“Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice”

I was just stopped in my (reading) tracks by this headline. And I knew I hadn’t been smoking anything.

Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/09/05/see-through-transparent-mice-food-dye/. If you can’t access that, try https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/scientists-use-food-dye-found-in-doritos-to-make-see-through-mice/.

How does bright yellow food coloring turn tissue transparent? To understand why, it’s essential to consider the reason things look opaque in the first place. The bits of our body — cell membranes, proteins, fluids — all cause light to refract, or bend.

If light bends just once — think of a beam of sunlight hitting a sheet of glass — the image it carries is still mostly clear. But as light refracts over and over, off fluids, proteins and other cellular miscellany, it scatters in lots of directions. All that scattered light, Rowlands said, makes it hard to see through — “like watching TV through a glass of milk.”

…By applying textbook physics principles, the researchers were able to screen for molecules that they predicted would, when absorbed by the body, change how biological tissues refract light. They hit on tartrazine, dissolved in water. But the proof was in the experiment. They soaked a slice of raw chicken in a tartrazine solution and found that the chicken turned clear as they increased the amount of tartrazine. When they rubbed that solution onto the skin of mice, they saw internal organs come into view. The tartrazine reduced the amount of refraction, the light scattered less and the tissue appeared clear.

When the dye was washed off, the tissue returned to normal and the scientists reported “minimal systemic toxicity” in the mice.

Other news sites had less dramatic headlines (eg The Guardian: “Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent”; CNN: “Scientific discovery that turns mouse skin transparent echoes plot of H.G. Wells’ ‘The Invisible Man’”.)

And just two of many good news items from this week’s Fix the News:

Cigarette smoking in the United States is at an 80-year low
When Gallup first asked about cigarette smoking in 1944, 41% of U.S. adults said they smoked. In the most recent Consumption Habits poll, 11% of U.S. adults say they have smoked cigarettes in the past week, matching the historical low of 2022. A major reason for the decline is that cigarette smoking has plunged among young adults, previously the most likely age group to smoke. Gallup

Ozempic and Wegovy’s final frontier could be ageing
When people lose weight, it has a whole lot of further health benefits: lower chances of heart failure, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, amongst others. A new study that tracked more than 17,600 overweight or obese people who took semaglutide for three years has found that they died at a lower rate from all causes. “It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health this way actually slows down the ageing process.” BBC

Alzheimer’s progress

For years, Alzheimer’s conferences were like the obituary pages in the local newspaper: It’s where clinicians and researchers in the field went to find out the names of the latest promising drugs to die. Between 1998 and 2017 alone, 146 clinical trials of new Alzheimer’s drugs failed…

The big potential benefit (of new drugs), say Alzheimer’s experts, lies in using these drugs, or others soon to come, in conjunction with a second recent development in the field: diagnostic blood tests that can identify the presence of Alzheimer’s-associated proteins…. Scientists believe that in a few years clinicians may be able to use them to make quick, early diagnoses cheaply, even before patients show any outward symptoms. That suggests a new strategy against the disease: GPs could screen otherwise healthy people for early-stage Alzheimer’s and treat them with drugs that slow the progress of the disease before major damage has occurred. The hope is that eventually, Alzheimer’s will no longer be a terminal disease but a chronic one that can be managed with drugs and perhaps be staved off indefinitely.

Full article also covers the history of the disease, why it was so hard to develop effective drugs, and how PET scans (to detect amyloid and tau in living people) were a game-changer. And remember, this is just the start — the future will only bring better treatments. 4,400 words: https://www.newsweek.com/2023/10/20/can-we-prevent-alzheimers-scientists-say-new-tests-treatments-game-changer-1832957.html.

Bonus: an item from FutureCrunch:

Ten people died from unprovoked shark attacks globally in 2023, a slight uptick over the five-year average. This makes sharks less dangerous than lawn mowers, ladders, champagne corks, jet skis, and lightning strikes.

Guess which one of those things got an entire article in ABC News?

Science: How to not spill your coffee

Ever wondered why it’s so hard to walk with a cup of coffee without spilling? It just so happens that the human stride has almost exactly the right frequency to drive the natural oscillations of coffee, when the fluid is in a typically sized coffee mug.

New research shows that the properties of mugs, legs and liquid conspire to cause spills, most often at some point between your seventh and tenth step.

Solutions: (1) walk more slowly; (2) watch the cup instead of your feet; (3) accelerate more slowly; and (4) maybe get a differently-shaped cup.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47364282