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/.

Could Ozempic also fight addiction?

As semaglutide ((brand names: Wegovy, Ozempic)) has skyrocketed in popularity, patients have been sharing curious effects that go beyond just appetite suppression. They have reported losing interest in a whole range of addictive and compulsive behaviors: drinking, smoking, shopping, biting nails, picking at skin. Not everyone on the drug experiences these positive effects, to be clear, but enough that addiction researchers are paying attention. And the spate of anecdotes might really be onto something. For years now, scientists have been testing whether drugs similar to semaglutide can curb the use of alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opioids in lab animals—to promising results.

Semaglutide and its chemical relatives seem to work, at least in animals, against an unusually broad array of addictive drugs, says Christian Hendershot, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Treatments available today tend to be specific: methadone for opioids, bupropion for smoking. But semaglutide could one day be more widely useful, as this class of drug may alter the brain’s fundamental reward circuitry. The science is still far from settled, though researchers are keen to find out more. At UNC, in fact, Hendershot is now running clinical trials to see whether semaglutide can help people quit drinking alcohol and smoking. This drug that so powerfully suppresses the desire to eat could end up suppressing the desire for a whole lot more.

1,600 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-addictive-behavior-drinking-smoking/674098/. If you can’t get past the paywall, send me a note.

Guy secrets

Fast and funny. I can’t (or won’t) vouch for all twenty of these, but, for example:

7. “We don’t want to tell you certain things are worrying us because we do not want you to worry too. Now there are just two people worrying, whereas before, one was worrying, and the other was happy, which is a reminder to us not to worry so much.”

14. “If it looks like I’m ignoring you, I’m probably just so deep in thought that I forgot I actually exist.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/fabianabuontempo/guy-secrets-girls-dont-know-about

Life extension techniques (in mice)

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a legend in the longevity field who has been steadfastly promoting the idea of life extension since well before it became mainstream. While with SENS Research Foundation, de Grey made significant contributions to geroscience, and at Longevity Summit Dublin last year, he announced the creation of his new brainchild, Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation (LEVF).

(But note that he left his previous position after being accused of sexual harassment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey.)

Note that this strain of mice typically lives 2.5 years, and this project wants to increase it to 3.5… but with interventions starting at 1.5 years. Thus the expected one-more-year of life would become two years.

We want to get mice to live a lot longer than they do now: at least a year longer, starting the treatment or treatments only after middle age. The idea is that this will appeal more directly to people who care, vote, pay taxes, and make donations than if you do early-onset interventions. So, I decided to put numbers on this, to have a milestone that clearly says this is where we want to get to. We believe this will be a sufficiently dramatic result….

There’s a control group that gets nothing, and there’s also a group that gets all four of our interventions, but there are also four groups that get exactly one intervention, so that we have some kind of baseline. And then we have four groups that get three out of the four. This is very important. The purpose of this is to determine whether there are antagonistic interactions between things, which is possible….

Starting late means that the overall experiment will take two years rather than four years. But the other one, which is just as important, is that because we are mostly doing rejuvenation therapies that remove damage rather than just slowing down the creation of new damage, we have a good chance of seeing they’re working from the divergence of survival curves quite quickly, like after only six months.

4,500 words: https://www.lifespan.io/news/aubrey-de-grey-on-levf-and-robust-mouse-rejuvenation/.

Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas: Smooth

I don’t think this will date me, because Smooth is still around. This article covers the idea behind, and the making of, one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. Santana hadn’t scored a hit single in more than 15 years. Part Latin-rock jam, part devotional love song? It almost didn’t happen.

Rob Thomas, who wrote the lyrics, says:

The (original) song was a different song. It was all about some party going on in a room. My wife [Marisol, then his fiancée; the two married in late 1999] went off for the afternoon and I stayed at home. I think the “smooth” part came first. I was thinking more about Carlos. I was thinking, “You’re so smooth,” about Carlos Santana. And then, “You hear my rhythm on your radio.” But then, I also realized somewhere in the middle of it that I had this wealth of information because I had this smokin’ hot Latin girlfriend already. Even though she was from Queens and not Spanish Harlem, everything else was on point, and it ended up being about her.

And:

The challenge was, “How do I create a believable conversation between Carlos and Rob?” Editing was a crucial part of that. Generally, the guitar doesn’t play when Rob sings. And that was really part of the trick of it. There are one or two notes where they land together in harmony, and then they get out of each other’s way. That was designed into the arrangement of everything.

Fights about the rights. Convincing Santana. Fascinating story about how a classic song developed: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/santana-rob-thomas-smooth-oral-history-841189. About 7,200 words.

Ordinary Iranians and the protests

In an authoritarian state such as Iran, protesting against the government can get you arrested, tortured, or even killed. Much of the population is afraid of that, of course. And yet, many have found a role in assisting without exposing themselves too much:

Apart from the two sides, on what everyone knows is a battlefield, a bigger group nonetheless circulates—an almost unending sea of young families, elderly couples and passersby, some just walking up and down the street, some sitting in their cars in the traffic. They are not shouting any slogans, not protesting anything, yet they brave the tear gas, the charges by security forces, the shouts to move along. They act as if it were just another evening and they’re out for a spin on the streets, window shopping, but they’re also giving cover to protesters—to disappear among them, or hop onto cars, or into shops, to escape the frenzied charges of security forces…

Every night at 9:00 the shouts begin. From rooftops, balconies, and windows of dark rooms, women and men, and sometimes even children, huddled into the dark recesses to avoid inquisitive eyes, shout “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom), followed by “Death to the Islamic Republic” and “Poverty, Corruption, High prices, Onwards to the Overthrow.” It started days after Mahsa Amini died in police custody, at age 22, arrested for how she wore her headscarf. Sometimes the chanting goes on for an hour.

About 2,600 words: https://time.com/6275538/iran-protests-eyewitness-report.

Also, this site https://www.understandingwar.org summarizes the Iran situation daily (as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Click on the headline, such as Iran Update, May 2, 2023, to see the full daily report.

Every tech support task you should do for your family

How to save money, prevent hacks and make everything work smoothly.

Like getting your teeth cleaned or emptying the gutters, there are a number of digital maintenance tasks everyone should see to once or twice a year.

  • Update all the software.
  • Make sure contact emails are up-to-date.
  • Turn on two-factor authentication.
  • Set up a password system.
  • See if the storage is full.
  • Set up automatic backups. (In my opinion, this should be the very first priority.)
  • Adjust accessibility features.
  • Scan for any malware or adware.
  • Cancel unwanted subscriptions.
  • Organize cable and streaming services.
  • Check the cable, Internet and phone bill.
  • Add legacy contacts.
  • Lock down all the privacy settings.
  • Set up computers so you can help remotely.
  • Find local tech support.
  • Clear out old unwanted tech.
  • Set up any holiday tech gifts.
  • Review common scams.

Each of these tips has an explanation of why it’s important and how to do it. Yes, it’s a lot of items, but doing as many as you can will help, and you can do (for example) one item a week. 1,600 words: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/20/tech-support-checklist/.

How a shipping error launched the chicken industry

In 2020 alone, people around the world consumed over 70 billion (chickens), up from 8 billion in 1965…

The story begins 100 years ago in 1923, with homemaker and farmer Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware. Steele, like many other rural Americans in her time, kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for eggs and waited to slaughter them for meat once their productivity waned. But one day by accident the local chick hatchery delivered 500 birds, 10 times more than the 50 Steele had ordered

Five hundred hens was a lot — bigger farms at the time had only 300.

The discovery of Vitamin D, which when added to chicken feed helped chickens survive a winter inside a barn, also made a big difference.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/2/10/23589333/cecile-steele-chicken-meat-poultry-eggs-delaware. 2,665 words.