Truckers love EVs

While trucks are only 4 percent of the vehicles on the road (in the US), they make up almost a quarter of the country’s transportation emissions. Around 10,000 of those trucks were just put on the road in 2023, up from 2,000 the year before.

Amazon, for example, has ordered and deployed thousands of electric delivery vans made by Rivian; the company says it has electric trucks operating in 1,800 cities in the United States. FedEx has electric trucks rolling through the streets of Los Angeles. The logistics company Schneider has dozens of Class 8 electric semi-trucks delivering loads throughout Southern California.

And the drivers operating them say they love driving electric. Marty Boots, a 66-year-old driver for Schneider in South El Monte, Calif., appreciates the lightness and the smoothness of his Freightliner eCascadia semi-truck. “Diesel was like a college wrestler,” he said. “And the electric is like a ballet dancer.”… Some drivers were hesitant when first trying out the technology. But once they try it, he said, most are sold. “You get back into diesel and it’s like, ‘What’s wrong with this thing?’” he said. “Why is it making so much noise? Why is it so hard to steer?”

Many drivers have reported that the new vehicles are easier on their bodies — thanks to both less rocking off the cab, assisted steering and the quiet motor. “We’re seeing people who would retire driving a diesel truck now working more years with an electric truck.”

Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/01/18/electric-truck-drivers-vehicles/ (1,200 words). Let me know if you can’t access that.

Experts on relationships

All relationships take work to help them function healthily – but what can you do when bonds urgently need repairing? Here’s advice from therapists on how to build better connections with everyone in your life, from your mother to your manager.

Headlines:

Communication is key
Make time to talk
Listen to and acknowledge the other person’s feelings
Be yourself within relationships
Report rather than act out any issues
Embrace arguing (occasionally)
Lower your expectations of others
Hurtful comments can come from a place of love
If you aren’t close to family, don’t force it
Say sorry when necessary
Accept that relationships with children often aren’t what we hoped for
When faced with really challenging behaviour, look back
Reboot yourself before you try to reboot a relationship
Schedule planning meetings
Don’t expect problems to be resolved quickly
Avoid fighting over who is right or wrong
Work out what you can change yourself
Consider whether friendships are worth salvaging
In the workplace, treat others as you wish to be treated

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/sep/26/the-experts-therapists-on-19-ways-to-have-much-happier-healthier-relationships. 2,600 words. One to three paragraphs on each item.

And good news from this week’s Fix the News:

No cervical cancer cases among HPV-vaccinated women in Scotland
A groundbreaking study, the first to track a national group of women over a lengthy period, has found no cases of cervical cancer among women born between 1988 and 1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV at ages 12 and 13. STAT
…
‘Game-changing’ HIV drug to be made affordable in 120 countries
Pharma giant Gilead has signed agreements with six manufacturers to make and sell cheaper versions of its HIV prevention drug lenacapavir in 120 ‘high-incidence, resource-limited’ countries. Lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection, has been shown to offer near-complete protection from HIV in recent trials. Guardian

UK closes last coal power plant

Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, around 1780, and a major reason was that coal was plentiful and accessible. On September 30 2024, its last coal-powered electrical generating plant closed, replaced by natural gas, nuclear, and renewables:

This was a country powered by coal — dug by a million miners, used to make cheap energy, to generate heat, then steam, then electricity. Coal heated the homes, ran the trains and made the steel and cement.

The first coal-fired electric plant in the world was built in England in 1882. The term “smog” was coined here, too.

Now Britain is the first in the global club of wealthy countries to quit coal — relying instead on natural gas, nuclear power and a combination of renewable energy sources.

We’re moving into the future. Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/29/uk-last-coal-power-plant/ (about 1,400 words). Also see https://xkcd.com/2992/ (remember to hover over the pic for an extra joke).

And just one good news item from this week’s Fix the News:

A lead-free future
Lead poisoning kills more people than HIV and malaria combined. Now the first-ever global public-private partnership has committed $150 million to end lead poisoning in children in developing countries once and for all. Over the past few years Bangladesh, Malawi and Madagascar have all achieved outsized impact in fighting lead expose with low-cost and effective approaches.

Font follies

So some fonts get together to chat: Times New Roman, Garamond, Futura, Arial, Courier, Helvetica, Papyrus, Comic Sans.

Times New Roman: “Do I miss being default font? No. Like I told Calibri back in 2007, I’ve done my time.”

Garamond: “Yes, you were made for newspapers darling. You should not be languishing in double-spaced essays written by eighth-graders.”

Futura: “Serifs. I get a headache just looking at them.”

Courier: “Back in my day, we didn’t have none of this variable width hanky-panky, see?”

1 minute 16 seconds: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3QVZHDx8A6/?igsh=MWVvanczdWZua2RmMA%3D%3D. Remember to click the speaker icon at the lower right if you’re not hearing it. Also see https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KnIZFlHI3-I for a Star Trek item, or https://www.youtube.com/@ElleCordova/featured for yet more of Elle’s quick videos!

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

Towards the elimination of a Biblical scourge
A new WHO update on Hansen’s disease—more commonly known as leprosy—shows that from 2014 through 2023 ((just ten years!)), the number of new cases globally decreased by 14.6%, from 214,001 to 182,815. New leprosy cases among children also significantly dropped during this time, from 18,862 cases in 2014 to 10,322 in 2023, representing a decrease of 45.3%. WHO

Domestic violence in America down by two-thirds in 30 years
In September 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act, the country’s first federal law criminalising domestic violence and providing support for community-based efforts against sexual assault. According to the FBI, between 1993 and 2022, domestic violence rates dropped by 67%. President Biden, who authored and championed VAWA as a senator, has announced that future renewals will include over $690 million in grants to support survivors. PBS

“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

Scamming the scammers

Apate’s aim is to defeat global phone scams with conversational AI, taking advantage of systems already in place where telecommunications companies divert calls they can identify as coming from scammers.

Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a “dad’s joke” on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. “The kids had a very good laugh,” he says. “And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don’t talk to others.

“Scamming the scammers, if you like.”

So AI bots are wasting the scammer’s time, and (I like this bit particularly) they are learning what is most effective at doing that. Link (1,100 words): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/07/ai-chatbots-phone-scams.

Scammers are trying to make a “sale.” If you waste their time, they can’t be scamming someone else. My own experience is that a phone scammer usually asks for the expiration date on my credit card early in the conversation, so I just say, “Oh, the card’s in the other room, hold on a second.” Then I put the phone on the desk and go on with other stuff for ten minutes.

Some things to watch for:

Scammers can use a fake Caller ID. The number that is displayed is not trustworthy.
Government agencies don’t contact you via phone. I got a very realistic-sounding scammer pretending to need my Medicare number in order to send me a new card. She even knew the first two and last two letters/numbers… which in fact are the same for everyone, or something. (I told her I’d check with the Social Security website.)
“Windows” doesn’t call you either. It’s a scam.
If you think a caller is a scammer, don’t even pick up. That tells them that at least they found a real person, and you’ll get more calls. (Unless you want to chat and waste their time.) A real person will leave voicemail.
Never use the word “Yes” with a phone scammer. Supposedly this can be recorded as proof that you agreed to sign up for something.
Email: No real site will email you asking you to enter a password. Hover your mouse over the link. That will show you the actual link, which can be entirely different from the displayed link.

And just two of many good news items from Fix the News:

A ‘liberal, democratic, non-discriminatory, non-sectarian Bangladesh’
Following the ‘people’s victory‘ after student protests in July, the country’s new caretaker leader, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, has called for a ‘new Bangladesh‘, promising free, fair, and participatory elections and emphasising the role of citizens in deciding the government’s fate. It’s still early days—but if even half those promises are met, it will be a huge victory for democracy. Time

US cancer death rates have fallen by a third since 1999
A new CDC report has found that cancer death rates dropped from 200.7 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 142 per 100,000 in 2022. This equates to roughly three million additional Americans alive today due to reduced cancer death rates over the past two decades. The decrease is credited to advances in treatment, technological innovations, and lower smoking rates. Baltimore Sun

Polling problems

This does not bode well for pre-election polls…

These are strange times for survey science. Traditional polling, which relies on responses from a randomly selected group that represents the entire population, remains the gold standard for gauging public opinion, said Stanford political scientist Jon Krosnick. But as it’s become harder to reach people on the phone, response rates have plummeted, and those surveys have grown exponentially more expensive to run. Meanwhile, cheaper, less-accurate online polls have proliferated.

“Unfortunately, the world is seeing much more of the nonscientific methods that are put forth as if they’re scientific,” said Krosnick.

…In one test of opt-in polling, 12 percent of US adults younger than 30 claimed that they were licensed to operate a nuclear submarine. The true figure, of course, is approximately 0 percent.

Full article (approx 2,800 words): https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/the-job-of-pollsters-has-become-much-harder-heres-how-theyre-responding/.

And more good news from Fix the News:

Medicare negotiates prescription drug prices in US for first time
The White House has secured new, lower Medicare prices for ten of the most costly drugs, potentially saving billions of dollars a year for taxpayers and beneficiaries. The reductions, which range from 38% for the blood cancer drug Imbruvica to 79% for the diabetes drug Januvia, take effect in 2026. ‘No one should be forced to choose between filling their prescriptions or filling their grocery carts.’ NPR

Kids these days

So I was tired of “Things are so terrible! Kids these days! The world is coming to an end!” when people suffered a stolen bike or a dog owner not cleaning up after their dog. I noticed these markings on my walk, took a couple pics, and tried to be funny on NextDoor:

Comments generally fell into three categories:

(a) They got the humor and added to it: “I see them doing it sometimes. They’re bold. They wear yellow safety vests and act like they’re some kind of construction crew!”

(b) Literal: “It’s construction markings.” Got it in one try.

Here’s the whole thread:

This was long enough. Good News next week.

Breakthroughs giving new hope in treating cancer

At the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference, doctors, scientists and researchers shared new findings on ways to tackle the disease.
The event in Chicago, attended by about 44,000 health professionals, featured more than 200 sessions…

The world’s first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma halves the risk of patients dying or the disease returning, according to trial results doctors described as “extremely impressive”… Patients who received the vaccine after having a stage 3 or 4 melanoma removed had a 49% lower risk of dying or the disease recurring after three years, data presented at the conference showed.

Delegates were briefed about two new tests aimed at providing an early warning sign for two of the world’s most common cancers.

The first, for prostate cancer, involves a DNA sample collected with a simple spit test. Trial results suggest it is more accurate than standard tests. It works by looking for genetic signals in the saliva that are linked to prostate cancer. The second, a blood test, predicts the risk of breast cancer returning three years before tumours show up on scans. The breakthrough could help more women beat the disease permanently.

60% of patients diagnosed with advanced forms of lung cancer who took lorlatinib were still alive five years later with no progression in their disease, data presented at the conference showed. The rate was 8% in patients treated with a standard drug, the trial found.

Doctors hailed the trial results as “off the chart”.

Full article (950 words with lots o links): https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/07/what-are-off-the-charts-breakthroughs-cancer-treatments.

And more good news from Fix the News:

Fewer children are dying from air pollution: The State of Global Air (SoGA) 2024 report has recorded a 53% drop in air pollution deaths between 2000 and 2021 for the world’s population of children under five. Deaths from household air pollution have decreased by 36%… 14.7 million fewer people go hungry in Brazil: A new UN report shows that severe food insecurity has fallen by a colossal 85% in just one year, from 8% in 2022 to 1.2% in 2023… China’s carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2024, the first quarterly fall since COVID-19, and the first ever structural decline due to growth in renewables. Electricity generation from wind and solar grew by 171 TWh in the first half of the year, and the increase in the number of EVs on China’s roads cut demand for transport fuels by approximately 4%.

Flight safety video

The Hobbit was filmed in New Zealand. Air New Zealand takes advantage… (4 min 38 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOw44VFNk8Y. This one is based on the third movie, others include https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlRbrB_Gnc.

And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News):

The proportion of the world’s adults with a net worth of less than $10,000 has plunged from 75% in 2000 to less than 40% in 2023. The percentage of American workers earning under $15 an hour has dropped from 32% to 13% in just two years. The US Internal Revenue Service just collected a record $1 billion in past-due taxes from millionaires. Gavi’s Big Catch-Up begins, allocating 200 million vaccine doses to children missed during COVID-19. Saudi Arabia announces an unprecedented pension reform package, addressing critical issues such as retirement age and maternity leave. Johnson & Johnson agrees not to enforce its patent on critical TB medication in South Africa.