Quick hits (part II)

1) Chait on DeSantis:

While the board handles infrastructure and maintenance, DeSantis boasted that it could use its leverage to force Disney to stop “trying to inject woke ideology” on children.

“When you lose your way, you’ve got to have people that are going to tell you the truth,” DeSantis proclaimed. “So we hope they can get back on. But I think all of these board members very much would like to see the type of entertainment that all families can appreciate.”

It is worth pausing a moment to grasp the full breadth of what is going on here. First, DeSantis established the principle that he can and will use the power of the state to punish private firms that exercise their First Amendment right to criticize his positions. Now he is promising to continue exerting state power to pressure the firm to produce content that comports with his own ideological agenda.

Whether he is successful remains to be seen. But a few things ought to be clear. First, DeSantis’s treatment of Disney is not a one-off but a centerpiece of his legacy in Florida. He has repeatedly invoked the episode in his speeches, and his allies have held it up as evidence of his strength and dominance. The Murdoch media empire, which is functionally an arm of the DeSantis campaign, highlighted the Disney conquest in a New York Post front page and a Fox & Friends segment and DeSantis touted his move in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Second, DeSantis’s authoritarian methods have met with vanishingly little resistance within his party.

2) This is good from Jeremy Faust, “Covid antivirals not shown to decrease household spread. Here’s why they still might work.”

Why I’m still optimistic. Usually, I tend to say things like, “If an industry-funded study fails, it has to be really bad news because these studies are often subtly designed to succeed.” In this case, I think the investigators have a fundamental misunderstanding of coronavirus virology. As a result, the study designs were not adequate to detect what I think may be hidden benefits here (or rather, the detected lower rates of infection are meaningful, even though the statistics say they’re not distinguishable from noise).

In both studies, household contacts (who were confirmed not to have Covid-19 at the time of entry) were randomized to get either the antiviral or placebo after exposure to a person with a newish Covid-19 diagnosis (called the “index patient.”) I italicized newish because the household contacts were eligible for the study if the index patient had had a positive Covid-19 test and at least 1 symptom within 5 days.

The gaping hole is that symptoms generally come a few days after infection and don’t necessarily say anything about contagiousness. We know that Covid-19 patients who are asymptomatic (or pre-symptomatic) can and do have viral loads that are similar to those of symptomatic patients. That means in this study, the horse had left the barn in a great number of cases before the study even began.

A large fraction of coronavirus spread occurs early on (a few days after infection). The fact that these studies found (statistically insignificant) 24-37% reductions in infections despite enrolling household contacts of patients who were already symptomatic (for up to 5 days even) is actually remarkably good, in my view.

The reason these numbers were seen as failures is that the researchers were probably aiming for a 50% reduction (I can’t seem to find information on what researchers call “power calculations,” though I am trying to find out).

Why? Like I said: fundamental misunderstandings of coronavirus virology. If the researchers had realized how much transmission happens in the pre-symptomatic period, they might have aimed for a lower reduction as the bar for success. Also, the researchers looked at the number of participants who were positive by day 14. If a bunch of people in both arms of study were infected within 24-48 hours of the first dose of Paxlovid or Molnupiravir, those cases would tend to dilute the power of the study to detect any meaningful difference. (An analogy comes to mind to explain this statistical situation: imagine timing a stove’s performance boiling water. If the starting temperature is actually lower than you believed, you’d conclude the stove stinks. But in fact, your assumption about the baseline condition fooled you.)

Indeed, it turns out that Covid-19 patients are probably contagious for around 8 days on average (some shorter, some longer). And the peak viral load (which corresponds to peak contagiousness) in symptomatic cases has been found to occur on or around day 3 of symptoms. If household contacts were enrolled that day or the next day, the rate of infection in both arms of the study would be high. This is exactly the kind of thing that could take real 24-37% reductions and render them statistically insignificant, even though there might actually be a protective effect “in real life.” Meanwhile, asymptomatic patients may (may) have shorter windows of contagion, but their peak viral loads (which is likely when most spread occurs) appear similar to symptomatic cases.

All told, these studies show that if you enroll household contacts 1-5 days after exposure to a symptomatic Covid-positive patient, the reduction in infections is not statistically significant. But if the studies had aimed for less lofty goals (or had been designed to detect patients before they became symptomatic), the headlines may have have said that PEP worked! It’s amazing how something as subtle as study design can change the outcomes of a study.

3) You know I can’t resist an NYT article like, “How healthy is your gut microbiome?”

What are some simple things I can do to improve my gut health?

Unsurprisingly, the best way to care for your gut is to feed yourself — and by extension, your gut microbes — well.

Prioritizing foods rich in fiber (such as vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, beans and lentils) is one main way to boost gut health because fiber is an important source of nutrients for those bacteria, said Emily Haller, a registered dietitian nutritionist at Michigan Medicine.

Consuming a variety of plant-based foods can also help to diversify the types of microbes in your gut, which is associated with better health, Ms. Haller said. One study published in 2018, for instance, found that people who ate more than 30 types of plant foods per week had a more diverse gut microbiome than those who ate up to 10 types of plant foods per week.

Adding more fermented foods like yogurt, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut or kimchi to your diet can also be a safe (and tasty) way to boost the diversity of your microbiome and decrease inflammation, Dr. Sonnenburg said. Though more research is needed to confirm those links and to determine how much fermented food you must eat to obtain those benefits.

4) Some hospitals are finally figuring out… let patients sleep.

5) Given all the political controversy, this is a very important feature in the British Medical Journal, “Gender dysphoria in young people is rising—and so is professional disagreement”

 

Same evidence, divergent recommendations

Three organisations have had a major role in shaping the US’s approach to gender dysphoria care: WPATH, the AAP, and the Endocrine Society (see box). On 15 September 2022 WPATH published the eighth edition of its Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, with new chapters on children and adolescents and no minimum age requirements for hormonal and surgical treatments.212 GnRHa treatment, says WPATH, can be initiated to arrest puberty at its earliest stage, known as Tanner stage 2.

The Endocrine Society also supports hormonal and surgical intervention in adolescents who meet criteria in clinical practice guidelines published in 2009 and updated in 2017.14 And the AAP’s 2018 policy statement, Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents, says that “various interventions may be considered to better align” a young person’s “gender expression with their underlying identity.”15 Among the components of “gender affirmation” the AAP names social transition, puberty blockers, sex hormones, and surgeries. Other prominent professional organisations, such as the American Medical Association, have issued policy statements in opposition to legislation that would curtail access to medical treatment for minors.16171819

These documents are often cited to suggest that medical treatment is both uncontroversial and backed by rigorous science. “All of those medical societies find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary,” stated a recent article on transgender healthcare for children published in Scientific American.20 “Transition related healthcare is not controversial in the medical field,” wrote Gillian Branstetter, a frequent spokesperson on transgender issues currently with the American Civil Liberties Union, in a 2019 guide for reporters.21 Two physicians and an attorney from Yale recently opined in the Los Angeles Times that “gender-affirming care is standard medical care, supported by major medical organizations . . . Years of study and scientific scrutiny have established safe, evidence-based guidelines for delivery of lifesaving, gender-affirming care.”22 Rachel Levine, the US assistant secretary for health, told National Public Radio last year regarding such treatment, “There is no argument among medical professionals.”23

Internationally, however, governing bodies have come to different conclusions regarding the safety and efficacy of medically treating gender dysphoria. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, which sets guidelines for care, determined last year that the risks of puberty blockers and treatment with hormones “currently outweigh the possible benefits” for minors.24 Finland’s Council for Choices in Health Care, a monitoring agency for the country’s public health services, issued similar guidelines, calling for psychosocial support as the first line treatment.25 (Both countries restrict surgery to adults.)

Medical societies in France, Australia, and New Zealand have also leant away from early medicalisation.2627 And NHS England, which is in the midst of an independent review of gender identity services, recently said that there was “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision making”28 for minors with gender dysphoria29 and that for most who present before puberty it will be a “transient phase,” requiring clinicians to focus on psychological support and to be “mindful” even of the risks of social transition.30

6) This is fascinating, “France was once Europe’s superpower, thanks above all to its enormous population. Its decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.”

In the eighteenth century, France was the China of Europe. But after a thousand years of dominance based on particularly fertile land, she declined over the next 250 years to be just another European power. Around this time, more than 100 years before the rest of Europe, French women began to have fewer children. In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France?

The demographic transition is usually thought to be driven by economic forces, but – in France at least – culture came first. Using data from online family trees, my work shows how the loosening of traditional religious moral constraints in Ancien Régime France drove the decline in fertility, setting France off on a wholly different course from England, which was about to see a dramatic increase in its population…

Broadly, this narrative is accurate. But for Europe’s first superpower it is out of order. The historical decline in fertility took hold in France first, in the mid-eighteenth century and more than a century earlier than in any other country in the world. At the time, there were 25 million inhabitants in France and 5.5 million in England. Today, there are 68 million inhabitants in France and 56 million in England. Had France’s population increased at the same rate as England’s since 1760, there would be more than 250 million French citizens alive today.

According to Alfred Sauvy, the French demographer who coined the term ‘third world’, in 1962, the decline in fertility is ‘the most important fact of the history of France’. France was eclipsed as Europe’s only real superpower by the relative growth of its rivals, most importantly England and Germany, in the nineteenth century.

France’s emergence as a major global power spanned several centuries, from the foundation and expansion of the Kingdom of the Franks under Clovis and Charlemagne in the fifth and ninth centuries to Napoleon. During the Hundred Years’ War in the fourteenth century, London was by far the most populous city in medieval England, but Rouen, only France’s second city, may have been as large as it.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the long-lived Louis XIV France boasted the continent’s largest population and the world’s second largest colonial empire, after Spain. It was so dominant that it prompted multiple coalitions, or grand alliances, of all the other major European powers together to challenge it. And even then the first Grand Alliance was unable to make significant gains in the Nine Years’ War at the end of the seventeenth century. In the War of the Spanish Succession soon after, the French could field 400,000 troops at times, almost as many as the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, England, and the Netherlands.

The gap in demographic power and military might stood perhaps at its widest during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 1792–1815. The French fought against most of Europe at once and could regularly field over a million soldiers, often outnumbering its opponents, which formed more than six successive coalitions before they could eventually prevail.

Rulers had worried about a projected depopulation of France since the seventeenth century, with the pronatalist Edict on Marriage of 1666, but it was not until much later that these demographic struggles became apparent. The prevailing view is that on 15th June 1815, during the Battle of Waterloo, France lost its position as the preeminent power in Europe. The influence of demographic factors was revealed most dramatically during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France was defeated after a solitary battle against a single opponent. During World War I, the population and military gap had completely closed, if not reversed, and Germany had substantially larger forces than France.

And yet the early decline in fertility in France is not well understood…

It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize. Secularization took hold in regions that were by no means the richest areas at the time. Provence was a rural backwater of the Kingdom of France, speaking a different language and under different fiscal rules, suggesting that neither wealth nor institutions caused the decline in fertility. However, the Counter-Reformation, which was particularly powerful in France, is mentioned by historians on occasion. In fact, regions where Jansenism, a theological doctrine opposed by Jesuits and the Pope as heretical, was strongest in the eighteenth century secularized more. The same seems true for areas where the Catholic League was strongest in 1590, during the French wars of religion. Both facts imply that the French regions where the Counter-Reformation was strongest are those which secularized the most, suggesting that secularization might have been a backlash against religious powers closely connected to absolutism.

The consequences for France are astonishing. French historian Fernand Braudel argued that ‘the entire course of French history since then has been influenced by something that happened in the eighteenth century’, and asks, ‘did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?’

7) J. Miles Coleman, “The Shocking Decline of Senate Ticket-Splitting”

— Senate races are increasingly converging with presidential partisanship, to the point where the huge overperformances that were so common a decade or two ago have become much less common.

— Since 2000, the number of senators who have run more than 10 points ahead of their party’s presidential nominee has decreased sharply.

— This trend helps explain why we currently rate Democratic-held West Virginia as Leans Republican and started off Montana and Ohio as Toss-ups.

8) Great example of the dysfunctions of policy, “The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.: After years of crippling problems and a changing mission, the Navy pushed to retire nine of its newest ships. Then the lobbying started.”

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The 387-foot-long warships tied up at the Jacksonville Navy base were acclaimed as some of the most modern in the United States fleet: nimble, superfast vessels designed to operate in coastal waters and hunt down enemy submarines, destroy anti-ship mines and repel attacks from small boats, like those often operated by Iran.

But the Pentagon last year made a startling announcement: Eight of the 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships now based in Jacksonville and another based in San Diego would be retired, even though they averaged only four years old and had been built to last 25 years.

The decision came after the ships, built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity.

“We refused to put an additional dollar against that system that wouldn’t match the Chinese undersea threat,” Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, told Senate lawmakers.

The Navy estimated that the move would save $4.3 billion over the next five years, money that Admiral Gilday said he would rather spend on missiles and other firepower needed to prepare for potential wars. Having ships capable of fulfilling the military mission, he argued, was much more important than the Navy’s total ship count.

Then the lobbying started.

A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships — led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them — mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene…

The effort targeted members of Congress who represent communities with large Navy stations and have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the same military contractors that help maintain and operate these ships. They included Representative Rob Wittman, Republican of Virginia, who represents the Hampton Roads area, home to the world’s largest naval facility.

Within weeks, lawmakers offered amendments to the 2023 Pentagon spending authorization law that prohibited the Navy from retiring four of the eight ships in Jacksonville and the one in San Diego.

9) What is it about diabetes drugs having so many other benefits? “Could A Common Diabetes Drug Slow Down Aging?”

10) History Boomer is an anonymous center-left tweeter/substacker who I quite enjoy. I agree with pretty much everything in here on police violence and police reform. 

So what to do?

Blaming everything on racism is a very bad idea. It distracts from the real factors that lead to excessive police violence. Does this mean cops are never racist? Of course not. But most police violence isn’t a result of racism. If every cop in America underwent extensive diversity training the police would still be killing too many people.

Some police violence is inevitable. Until we can somehow make America less violent (a worthy goal) we will have higher rates of violent police encounters than other rich countries. Some of these encounters, inevitably, will result in wrongful deaths. This doesn’t mean, however, we can’t manage to have fewer killings by law enforcement.

Reducing the size of our departments is madness. We have too few officers, not too many. Eliminating police to solve America’s violence problem is like reducing the number of doctors in order to reduce medical errors. The defund the police activists focused on having fewer police rather than on making our police better. This was a distracting error in strategy and messaging.

Better and more extensive training seems called for. America compares poorly to its peer countries. There are specific procedures that should be reconsidered (no-knock raids, punitive traffic stops, dangerous physical restraint methods). It should be easier to get rid of bad officers (police unions seem to be a real roadblock here). Police need accountability.

Demilitarizing the police is a priority. We don’t need more SCORPIONS. The police force needs to support the communities it serves, not act as an occupying army. Sometimes force is necessary—American cops can’t go unarmed like British bobbies—but the emphasis should be on de-escalation.

Whatever we do to improve our police forces requires serious thought rather than shallow slogans. A rich country should do better with its police and for its citizens. We have lost too many men like Tyre Nichols.

11) G. Elliott Morris on why you should ignore partisan pollsters.

12) This is disturbing, “Why 23 Dead Whales Have Washed Up on the East Coast Since December”

Scientists believe the mortality rate may be tied to an unlikely confluence of factors.

The population of humpbacks, hunted legally until 1985, has rebounded, thanks in part to decades of efforts to clean the Atlantic Ocean and heavily polluted tributaries like the Hudson River. As the climate changes and oceans warm, whales and a favored prey, menhaden, are migrating and feeding in new locations, often closer to shore.

Online pandemic buying habits are also fueling a record-setting surge in cargo shipments that last year made ports in New York and New Jersey the nation’s busiest. Much of the merchandise is now toted on far bigger ships — some of which have altered their routes to help alleviate the supply-chain chaos that last year left some store shelves bare.

As a result, more whales appear to have found themselves in the direct path of more ships.

“When the whales are in these channels,” said Paul Sieswerda, executive director of Gotham Whale, a New York City-based whale research group, “you have to cross your fingers and hope there are no collisions.”

This winter’s quick succession of stranded whales also coincides with work being done in advance of the installation of roughly a dozen large offshore wind farms from Massachusetts to Virginia. Opponents of offshore wind have said that the sonar used by energy companies to map the ocean floor or the noise from seabed rock sampling might be contributing to the whale deaths, though NOAA and the Marine Mammal Commission say there is no evidence that this is true.

13) If you are going to sell tattoos that are designed to fade in “9 to 15 months” they probably shouldn’t be lasting over two years.

14) I love a good key change in music. Turns out they are disappearing and this essay explores why. 

15) Planet Money is one of my favorite podcasts, but talk about hitting my sweet spot! “Exploring Seinfeld through the lens of economics”

16) Well, this kind of sucks, but, hopefully something will be worked out and we’ll get these, “The FDA has cleared the first home flu and Covid test — but its maker just declared bankruptcy”

17) This is excellent from Freddie DeBoer. You should read all of it, “I Cannot Stress Enough That Grade Point Average is Racially Stratified Too: you want to replace the SAT because it’s racially stratified with a metric that’s… also racially stratified”

Again, I’m repeating myself, but all educational data is racially stratified. The SAT, GPA, the NAEP, the state standardized tests, reams of academic research results, and ancillary data like attendance rates. And that’s a reflection of the fact that we have a racially unequal country. What I find so bizarre about all of this is that liberals who will tell you that we live with extreme racial inequality will then turn around and say that racially unequal SAT results invalidate the test. But the test is just revealing the reality that you describe elsewhere in your politics! If we are a racially unequal country, unequal in as many ways as progressive people describe, then these results are precisely what you’d expect. Quantitative education metrics are an essential part of defining and understanding racial inequality, particularly given that they are metrics related to the success of children. Getting rid of them makes it harder for us to understand the degree and trend in that inequality. Indeed, we know that there are some racial influences on SAT score precisely because the test provides quantitative transparency. Abandoning that advantage is senseless.

Contrast that quantitative transparency with the fact that almost all competitive colleges have proprietary formulas which they use to adjust GPAs before consideration for admission. These adjustments are hugely important for admissions decisions, and yet they represent a black box, as schools usually keep their particular adjustment systems secret. So in GPA we’ve got a racially-stratified metric that gets modified by individual schools with secret formulas that make it impossible to know how that metric is actually used. Seems like a bad idea to make that so important in the admissions process. I’ve been trying to get some education reporter to investigate this dynamic for years, to no avail.

Oh, by the way, the SAT and high school GPA correlate at .785 anyway…

So an increasing focus on GPA won’t dramatically change who gets in anyway. Why then would we want to use the SAT? Because that ~.4 of the variance that’s not explained by GPA in SAT results can represent very different kinds of students. GPA rewards grinders; it rewards grade-grubbers; it rewards teacher’s pets. It’s as much a function of effort as of academic ability. And that’s fine; I would never want to remove GPA from the application process. But there are other kinds of kids, the brilliant but disengaged, the talented but unfocused, the gifted whose difficult lives keep them from doing well in school. Those kids are the ones the SAT rewards. So why not use both? And, for the record, the people who stand to gain the most from getting rid of the SAT are not poor Black kids but affluent white kids whose parents have the sway in the local school district they need to lean on teachers and get the grades they want for their children. People complain that SAT scores can be gamed with expensive tutoring. In fact, SAT tutoring has little effect, but let’s set that aside and point out what should be obvious: rich kids can get expensive tutoring to raise their GPA too! How on earth is tutoring an argument against the SAT but not against GPA, when grades are likely more easily influenced by tutoring?

You guys aren’t creating some level playing field where the rich kids won’t get ahead. Instead, you’ll be disadvantaging the brilliant but poor Black kid from a low-income school who used the SAT as the way to announce themselves. And you’re giving a hand to the idiot sons of privilege whose tony private academies will ensure they get a good GPA but who could never crack the SAT.

18) Meanwhile, people way over-estimate how much difference SAT prep makes.

19) Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea is simply one of the most amazing albums ever (I’m lucky to have seen NMH and Jeff Mangum solo)– and it’s 25 years old.  I enjoyed this appreciation.  And somehow I either forgot or never saw this amazing scene in Parks and Rec. 

20) When he was 28, Jimmy Carter really did directly help prevent a nuclear meltdown in Canada. 

In 1952, Carter was selected to join an elite team to help develop the Navy’s first nuclear submarines. Once he had trained his crew and the submarine was constructed, Carter was to be the commanding officer of the USS Seawolf, according to Carter in his 1976 book “Why Not the Best?: The First 50 Years.”

Then the partial meltdown happened, and Lt. Carter was one of the few people on the planet authorized to go inside a nuclear reactor.

Carter and his two dozen men were sent to Canada to help, along with other Canadian and American service members. Because of the intensity of radiation, a human could spend only 90 seconds in the damaged core, even while wearing protective gear.

First, they constructed an exact duplicate of the reactor nearby. Then they practiced and practiced, dashing into the duplicate “to be sure we had the correct tools and knew exactly how to use them,” Carter wrote.

Each time one of his men managed to unscrew a bolt, the same bolt would be removed from the duplicate, and the next man would prep for the next step.

Eventually, it was Carter’s turn. He was in a team of three.

“Outfitted with white protective clothes, we descended into the reactor and worked frantically for our allotted time,” he wrote.

In one minute and 29 seconds, Carter had absorbed the maximum amount of radiation a human can withstand in a year.

The mission was successful. The damaged core was removed. Within two years, it had been rebuilt and was back up and running.

21) More of this, please, “Plant toxin hailed as ‘new weapon’ in antibiotic war against bacteria”

Scientists have discovered a plant toxin whose unique method of dispatching bacteria could be used to create a powerful new range of antibiotics. The prospect of developing new antibacterial drugs this way has been hailed by doctors, who have been warning for many years that the steady rise of multidrug-resistant pathogens such as E coli now presents a dangerous threat to healthcare across the planet.

The new antibiotic – albicidin – attacks bacteria in a completely different way to existing drugs, a group of British, German and Polish scientists have revealed in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Catalysis. This suggests a new route could be exploited to tackle bacterial disease, they say.

“We could not elicit any resistance towards albicidin in the laboratory,” said Dmitry Ghilarov, whose research group is based at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. “That is why we are really excited – because we think it will be very hard for bacteria to evolve resistance against albicidin-derived antibiotics.”

Albicidin is produced by a bacterial plant pathogen called Xanthomonas albilineans that triggers a devastating disease, known as leaf scald, in sugarcane. The pathogen uses albicidin to attack the plant, but it was also found, several decades ago, that it was highly effective at killing bacteria.

“The problem was that, at the time, we did not know exactly how albicidin attacked bacteria and so we could not use it as the basis of new antibiotics because these might have triggered all sorts of complications in the human body,” said Ghilarov. “We had to determine precisely how it killed bacteria before we could do that – and that is what we have now achieved.”

Working with scientists at the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany and at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, Ghilarov and his team used a series of advanced techniques to reveal how albicidin kills.

 

“Now we have a structural understanding, we can create modifications of albicidin to improve its efficacy and pharmacological properties,” said Ghilarov. “We believe this is one of the most exciting new antibiotic candidates in many years. It has extremely high effectiveness in small concentrations and is highly potent against pathogenic bacteria – even those resistant to the widely used antibiotics such as fluoroquinolones.”

22) It really is ridiculous that we think it just fine for a man to go gray and not a woman.  The reporter profiled here still looks great (and of course, you shouldn’t have to look great to report the news), “After Going Gray, a News Anchor Found Herself the Focus of the Story: Lisa LaFlamme was dismissed after a decades-long TV career, not long after she stopped dyeing her hair, setting off debates across Canada about sexism, ageism and going gray”