Good news! delivered to your inbox

The website https://futurecrunch.com collects good news about the world and will send you a weekly email for free. Here are some bits from this week’s email:

Schoolkids in eight US states—Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Vermont, Michigan, Massachusetts, California and Maine—now receive free school meals, regardless of family income. Several other states are considering similar programs, and congressional supporters are working on legislation to extend universal free meals to every state.

The US FDA has approved the first vaccine for RSV for use during late pregnancy, giving the country a powerful new tool to protect young children. RSV is the country’s leading cause of infant hospitalisation, resulting in half a million emergency room visits and 300 deaths in young children every year.

In Pichincha, Ecuador, 120,722 hectares have recently been protected, safeguarding 13 different ecosystems, 67 endemic bird species, and water sources for local communities. The network links to a further 74,281 hectares of parks in Mejía, creating protected migration corridors for pumas, Andean bears and imperiled species like the Andean condor and the capuchin monkey.

A family-run environmental organisation in Indonesia called Sungai Watch has successfully removed 1.2 million kilograms of plastic from polluted rivers and mangroves; and out to sea, nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup has collected over 11,000 kilograms of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the most rubbish cleared from a single extraction.

The usual news outlets don’t cover these (or do so only occasionally… since a lot of this is little-by-little progress every day). Good news on the environment, health care, poverty, violence, pollution, politics, women’s rights.

Egypt used to have the highest rate of hepatitis C in the world. In 2018, the government decided to implement a massive and unprecedented campaign to screen and treat every citizen, crystallising into something called the 100 Million Healthy Lives Campaign. Today, both the World Bank and the WHO say Egypt has eliminated hepatitis C from its entire population. Forbes (from a previous newsletter).

Here’s a link to this week’s entire email. Consider signing up for the free weekly newsletter or even subscribing to the premium version for a mere $80/year.

Yes, we know democracy is in mortal peril in the United States–except for the fact that US states have enacted more than twice as many laws expanding voting rights as restricting them in the past year. So yes, 16 states have made it harder to vote, but 26 have made it easier, including both blue and red states. Fivethirtyeight

Some schizophrenia may actually be lupus

A woman had been diagnosed with schizophrenia for twenty years. Bloodwork found elevated antibody levels, antibodies that were attacking her own body:

The first conclusive evidence was in her bloodwork: It showed that her immune system was producing copious amounts and types of antibodies that were attacking her body. Brain scans showed evidence that these antibodies were damaging her brain’s temporal lobes, areas that are implicated in schizophrenia and psychosis. (…)

Even though April had all the clinical signs of schizophrenia, the team believed that the underlying cause was lupus, a complex autoimmune disorder in which the immune system turns on its own body, producing many antibodies that attack the skin, joints, kidneys or other organs. But April’s symptoms weren’t typical, and there were no obvious external signs of the disease; the lupus appeared to be affecting only her brain. (…)

Every month for six months, April would receive short, but powerful “pulses” of intravenous steroids for five days, plus a single dose of cyclophosphamide…. She was also treated with rituximab, a drug initially developed for lymphoma.

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately.

It’s possible that many psychiatric patients actually have other — curable — medical issues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/01/schizophrenia-autoimmune-lupus-psychiatry/. About 4,400 words. If you don’t have a subscription (and you should), this link also works.

Printing replacement organs

In the United States, there are 106,800 men, women and children on the national organ transplant waiting list as of March 8, 2023, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. However, living donors provide only around 6,000 organs per year on average, and there are about 8,000 deceased donors annually who each provide 3.5 organs on average.

Currently, if one of your important organs stops working or is too damaged, your choices suck: get a transplant, or die. And transplantation means someone has to give up an organ, or has to be dead (and yet still have the needed organ and that in good shape, and a reasonable match for blood type, antibodies, and HLA). 3D printing has spread into the area of printing biological materials. If we can print replacement organs, the donor and donor-match problems go away:

What if doctors could just print a kidney, using cells from the patient, instead of having to find a donor match and hope the patient’s body doesn’t reject the transplanted kidney?

The soonest that could happen is in a decade, thanks to 3D organ bioprinting, said Jennifer Lewis, a professor at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Organ bioprinting is the use of 3D-printing technologies to assemble multiple cell types, growth factors and biomaterials in a layer-by-layer fashion to produce bioartificial organs that ideally imitate their natural counterparts

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/health/3d-printed-organs-bioprinting-life-itself-wellness-scn/index.html. About 1,500 words.



Missed movie jokes

Time for something a little lighter. Here’s 22 people admitting that they missed a joke in a movie and only figured it out years later. For example:

When describing Austin Power’s ‘Mojo,’ Dr. Evil has a line like, ‘What the French call a certain… I don’t know what.’ I always thought the joke was that Dr. Evil was just being stupid. I didn’t learn until much later in life that this is the literal definition of ‘Je ne sais quoi.’ Upon a recent rewatch, that was probably my favorite joke in the entire franchise.

See them at https://www.buzzfeed.com/alliehayes/movies-jokes-people-missed-reddit.

The United States in a new kind of collective order

Why have the number and severity of wars dropped noticeably in the past century? In the past, one state could gain power until it was a risk to all the states near it, so all the states near it ganged up to keep it under control, repeat ad infinitum. But not for the past several decades:

This post will focus on what I do think is the US position in the international order, although the focus here is going to be somewhat less on the United States’ role within what I am going to call the ‘status quo coalition’ than it is on the coalition itself. Because the existence and breadth of this coalition is really unusual and thus remarkable; indeed it may be indicative of broader shifts in how interstate relationships work in an industrial/post-industrial world where institutions and cultural attitudes are beginning, slowly, to catch up to the new realities our technology has created.

(…)

Globally we can see the failure of balancing. Despite the fact that the first real challenger to the US-led world order since 1989 has emerged in the form of the People’s Republic of China, the PRC has the same meager list of allies in 2023 that it had in 1953: North Korea. Russia likewise has a single European client state (Belarus); Russian friendship with Hungary has merely bought neutrality, not aid.

(…)

Meanwhile, the United States’ list of allies is preposterous. Of the top 10 countries by nominal GDP – a decent enough measure of potential military capabilities – one is the United States and six more (3. Japan, 4. Germany, 6. UK, 7. France, 8. Italy and 9. Canada) are close allies of the United States. Of the next ten, five more (South Korea, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, and Turkey) are formal US treaty allies, one is pointedly neutral (Switzerland) and three more (Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia) have either extensive economic ties with the United States, significant military ties with the United States or both.

Why have things changed so drastically? https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/. 8,000 words and worth it; Steven Pinker wrote an entire book about how we got to where we are (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature.)

Medical mystery

Seated next to a radiologist, Thomas P. Trezona scoured the images of his CT scan, dreading the thing he was sure he would find: evidence of pancreatic cancer, the same disease that had killed his mother. Given his age, sex and family history, that was the most likely explanation for the violent abdominal pain, nausea and rapid weight loss that in July 2021 hijacked the life of the retired surgical oncologist.

To Trezona’s enormous relief the scan showed no sign of cancer. His internist suspected he was reacting to grain in his diet, while blood tests performed after the scan suggested a rare, chronic gastrointestinal disorder.

The cause of Trezona’s debilitating symptoms, confirmed nearly two months later following surgery, turned out to be none of those things…

It took a doctor with many medical friends two months to find out what the problem was: an ingested wire from a metal barbecue-grill brush. An estimated 1,700 people suffered the same problem from 2002 through 2014.

https://wapo.st/43kc3fn (2,000 words; should be free to all). More medical mystery stories at wapo.st/medicalmysteries.

AIDS in Africa

Amazing progress: more than 25 million lives have been saved.

Twenty years ago, HIV/AIDS was a death sentence in this region (sub-Saharan Africa). The cemeteries were full every weekend – adults cut down in their prime; children dying without access to treatment. The virus permeated every aspect of life.

Today, the HIV epidemic has faded from the headlines. It is considered by many to be a manageable condition like diabetes, thanks in no small part to an extraordinarily successful US public health initiative, that few in America may have heard of.

President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2003 was dominated by Iraq, a significant moment in the lead-up to the US’s catastrophic invasion of the country.

But few could have predicted the impact of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

…

Despite being one of the world’s poorest countries, Lesotho is a success story.

In 2005, according to UNAIDS data, nearly 20,000 people in the tiny country died of HIV. That number has been reduced four-fold.

The country has reached a key milestone set out by UNAIDS: 90% of people living with HIV know their status; 90% with confirmed HIV are on treatment and 90% of those on treatment are virally suppressed.

About 2,000 words: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/11/africa/aids-epidemic-crossroads-africa-intl-cmd/index.html

Inside the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer

From 2021, so the chip shortage may be over by now, but this is still fascinating:

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips—otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips—that power our phones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators and more. Its clients include Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia… The $550 billion firm today controls more than half the global market for made-to-order chips and has an even tighter stranglehold on the most advanced processors, with more than 90% of market share by some estimates.

TSMC’s success in cornering this vital market has become a geostrategic migraine. The Pentagon is pressing the Biden Administration to invest more in advanced chipmaking, so its missiles and fighter jets are not dependent on a self-ruling island that China’s strongman President Xi Jinping believes is a breakaway province and has repeatedly threatened to invade. More immediately, a global chip shortage has impacted a staggering 169 industries, according to Goldman Sachs analysis, from steel and ready-mix concrete to air-conditioning units and breweries. Most drastically, automakers across America, Japan and Europe were forced to slow and even halt production, meaning 3.9 million fewer cars will roll into world showrooms this year than last.

TSMC’s dominance is such that its chief rivals are not companies but governments.

How did TMSC get there? How does the Chinese government’s feelings about Taiwan affect them (and therefore the rest of the world)? How is the United States dealing with a crucial technology monopoly that it does not own?

Making chips is so unbelievably complex and specialized that diversifying the location of fabs will make it more difficult to maintain quality. The transistor in a 3-nm node is just 1/20,000th the width of a human hair. Were you to enlarge a foot-long wafer of semiconductor to the size of the continental U.S., the required patterning for these chips would still be only the width of a thumbnail.

Full article (about 3,400 words): https://time.com/6102879/semiconductor-chip-shortage-tsmc/. Also see Making chips: 20,000,000,000,000 parts: https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/2021/12/17/making-chips-20000000000000-parts/.