All Posts Tagged as 'Science'

Fire Island is under fire for violating social distancing guidelines over the July 4 weekend.

Clips and images of hundreds of maskless, shirtless partygoers packed on beaches and in private homes circulated on social media through influencers like journalist Chris Weidner. The posts sparked backlash and calls for more action from law enforcement.

Bigger is better — to a point.

Covid-19 is increasingly a disease of the young, with the message to stay home for the sake of older loved ones wearing off as the pandemic wears on.

The dropping age of the infected is becoming one of the most pressing problems for local officials, who continued Wednesday to set curfews and close places where the young gather. U.S. health experts say that they are more likely to be active and asymptomatic, providing a vast redoubt for the coronavirus that has killed almost 130,000 Americans.

In Arizona, half of all positive cases are people from the ages of 20 to 44, according to state data. The median age in Florida is 37, down from 65 in March. In Texas’s Hays County, people in their 20s make up 50% of the victims.

Wearing headlamps and muck boots, the band of volunteer conservationists trudges into dark forests in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and surrounding communities, turning over leaves and shining lights on tree trunks. Their quarry is a tiny frog called the coqui. No bigger than a quarter, the coqui makes an ear-splitting call as loud as a lawn mower: Ko-kee! Ko-kee! It takes special know-how and fortitude to home in on a frog in a blackened forest ringing with frog calls. But the coquistodores are efficient cutthroats. When they find a coqui, they catch it, and drench it in citric acid, killing it.

Sexual self-esteem influences almost every sexual decision you make, from who you engage with and when to whether you constrain yourself and how.

However, very little is known about sexual self-esteem and who has more or less of it. This is particularly important because sexual self-esteem and sexual satisfaction are closely related. Several studies suggest that lower sexual self-esteem negatively impacts sexual satisfaction. Another study, by Hale and Strassberg, reported the results of an experiment to test the effects of low sexual self-esteem and showed that male participants’ sexual arousal was significantly and negatively affected by poor sexual self-esteem.

What Is Sexual Self-Esteem?

Sexual self-esteem is feeling capable of being involved in sexual practices with successful procedures and results. Sexual self-esteem tends to differ with age and one’s partner’s sexual skills or interest, and it may vary for men and women and across cultures.

Studies also suggest that sexual self-esteem is negatively affected by a variety of life experiences, including childhood sexual abuse, sexual victimization, physical disabilities, and health issues. Another study found that sexual self-esteem is positively associated with general self-esteem.

The problem is obvious: “gender identity” has no basis in physical reality. It is impossible for a doctor to tell from simply examining a patient what his or her (or hir or zir) “gender identity” is. A person’s “gender identity” is totally subjective and has no connection to one’s physical body.

However, health care is very much connected to the physical body. Whether one is biologically male or female makes a great deal of difference in how one ought to be treated — from finding the right medicine dosages to judging the risks of getting certain diseases. To place “gender identity” above biological sex would be to ask medical professionals to ignore their education and their training and instead operate solely on what a patient believes to be true — a dangerous idea if there ever was one.

Frustrated with your child's picky eating? If you're trying to fix the problem by becoming the food police, you're probably making your child's habit of picky eating worse, according to a new study that followed more than 300 parent-and-child pairs for five years.

The study found no difference among children due to socioeconomic demographics, but did find higher rates of picky eating among children who had problems regulating their emotions. Those children were more prone to exaggerated changes in mood with possible heightened irritability or temper.

One of the best practices for parents dealing with picky eaters is to expose your child to the food multiple times, experts said, and always without stress.

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Aiden James Nevils started getting followed. Nevils, who lives in Pittsburgh, is required by Pennsylvania’s statewide regulations to wear a face covering while entering essential businesses, such as drug stores, pharmacies, and laundromats. But when he goes to the grocery store in his blue-and-white-patterned mask, he has noticed lingering stares from other shoppers or security guards who trail closely behind as he’s picking up food for the week.

As a Black man, Nevils says he is viewed as “inherently dangerous,” a reality that's reinforced by centuries of racial biases that send the message that people of his skin color are “wrong, bad, or a menace to society.” Being a transgender man and having his face partially obscured by a mask only reinforces that stigma, he said. It’s essentially four strikes in a game where Black people barely get one chance to swing and miss.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every facet of American life, but perhaps no community has been affected as profoundly as Black LGBTQ people. People who live at this intersection of identity are not only more likely to face higher levels of scrutiny during a crisis in which racial minorities, especially Asian-Americans, are reporting a dramatic increase in hate crimes. They are vulnerable to the novel coronavirus in every conceivable way: from dramatic job loss to unique risks of infection that have yet to be adequately recognized by governmental authorities.

Not only are planted trees not the carbon sinks you want, but tree planting frequently ends up doing more harm than good.

Humans have long believed that planting trees, any kind of tree, anywhere, is good, something Mother Nature cries out for, something that might even solve our climate crisis. Tree-planting initiatives proliferate: the Bonn Challenge, Trees for the Future, Trees Forever, the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami, Plant a Billion Trees, 8 Billion Trees, the Trillion Tree Campaign, the One Trillion Trees Initiative, to mention just a few.

But such slapdash planting is an American tradition. In 1876, possibly inspired by Arbor Day, a man named Ellwood Cooper sought to improve his 2,000-acre, mostly treeless ranch near Santa Barbara, California, with 50,000 eucalyptus seedlings. They shot up 40 feet in just three years, an unheard-of growth rate for which they became known as “miracle trees.” Eucalyptus trees are not native to California.

Shortly thereafter, the University of California and the state Department of Forestry distributed free eucs for everyone to plant. Prairies, chaparral, and cutover forestland were jammed full of these aliens. One hundred years after the first Arbor Day, 271,800 acres of eucalyptus had been planted in the U.S., 197,700 of them in California.

When I inserted my arm into euc leaf and bark litter in Bolinas, California, I couldn’t touch the bottom. That’s because the microbes and insects that eat it are in Australia, not California. Native plant communities can’t survive in these plantations because eucs kill competition with their own herbicide, creating what botanists call “eucalyptus desolation.” Eucs evolved with fire and prosper from it. Their tops don’t just burn; they explode. Living near them is like living beside a gasoline refinery staffed by chain smokers.

But eucs remain popular in California. They’re still being planted. And agencies seeking to protect the public and recover native ecosystems by razing eucs inevitably face the fury of eucalyptus lovers who have, for example, accused them of being “plant Nazis.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked a cluster of coronavirus cases in rural Arkansas back to a church pastor and his wife, indicating that faith-based organizations and events could be sources of Covid-19 transmission, according to a new study published Tuesday.

“This outbreak highlights the potential for widespread transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, both at group gatherings during church events and within the broader community,” the researchers wrote. “Faith-based organizations that are operating or planning to resume in-person operations, including regular services, funerals, or other events, should be aware of the potential for high rates of transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”

Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing North American sales of its talc-based baby powder, a product that once defined the company’s wholesome image and that it has defended for decades even as it faced thousands of lawsuits filed by patients who say it caused cancer.

The decision to wind down sales of the product is a huge concession for Johnson & Johnson, which has for more than a century promoted the powder as pure and gentle enough for babies.

The company said on Tuesday that it would allow existing bottles to be sold by retailers until they ran out. Baby powder made with cornstarch will remain available, and the company will continue to sell talc-based baby powder in other parts of the world.

Exercise and physical therapy often are recommended to help people who have arthritis. Both can strengthen muscle — a benefit that also can reduce joint pain. But building muscle mass and strength can take many months and be difficult in the face of joint pain from osteoarthritis, particularly for older people who are overweight. A new study in mice at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, however, suggests gene therapy one day may help those patients.

The research shows that gene therapy helped build significant muscle mass quickly and reduced the severity of osteoarthritis in the mice, even though they didn’t exercise more. The therapy also staved off obesity, even when the mice ate an extremely high-fat diet.

In addition to keeping an eye on the tragic, and climbing, numbers of total coronavirus cases and deaths across the U.S., it's important to watch how those trends are playing out over time at the state level.

Why it matters: Rising, or falling, numbers of cases is one of the key metrics for determining where mitigation efforts are working and when the economy can begin to reopen.

The Trump administration's reopening guidelines detail that in order to start lifting restrictions and reopening the economy, a state needs to report 14-day trends of fewer cases or fewer positive tests (though local officials do get some leeway in adjusting the metrics).

Not a lot of states meet that criteria.
Our chart compares each state's seven-day average of new cases from Monday and the seven-day average from a week prior, April 27. Comparing the averages of two dates helps smooth out a lot of the noise in how states sometimes inconsistently conduct and report tests.

Fifteen children, many of whom had the coronavirus, have recently been hospitalized in New York City with a mysterious syndrome that doctors do not yet fully understand but that has also been reported in several European countries, health officials announced on Monday night.

Many of the children, ages 2 to 15, have shown symptoms associated with toxic shock or Kawasaki disease, a rare illness in children that involves inflammation of the blood vessels, including coronary arteries, the city’s health department said.

Unless the American economy somehow gets way more productive. More innovative. Technology optimists hope artificial intelligence is the “next big thing” that will drive the next big productivity boom. Eventually. The history of important “general purpose technologies” — such as the steam engine, electrification, and personal computing — is that it takes a while for them to achieve significant economy-wide impact. (Although that diffusion lag has shortened.) They need supporting investments in physical and human capital to achieve full potential. As economist Erik Brynjolfsson told me recently on my Political Economy podcast, we need more people “who know how to take these new technologies and translate them into new products. The more of those we have, the better because there are intangible capital and business processes that need to be reinvented.”