On second thought....

By Nick Anderson 

 

Guilty!

 

Buzzed?

Bumblebees Work Better after Caffeine Intake, New Study Shows

By News Staff / Source

Feeding bumblebees caffeine helps them better remember the smell of a specific flower with nectar inside. Image credit: Arnold et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.068.

Caffeine is a widely occurring plant defense chemical that occurs in the nectar of some plants, e.g., coffee and citrus, where it may influence pollinator behavior to enhance pollination. 

New laboratory tests show that buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) locate new food sources emitting a learned floral odor more consistently if they have been fed caffeine.

“When you give bees caffeine, they don’t do anything like fly in loops, but do seem to be more motivated and more efficient,” said Dr. Sarah Arnold, a researcher at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich.

“We wanted to see if providing caffeine would help their brains create a positive association between a certain flower odor and a sugar reward.”

Scientists already know that caffeine plays a role in converting bees into faithful customers of caffeinated flowers.

'Good cholesterol' may protect liver

HDL from the intestine may prevent liver inflammation

Washington University School of Medicine

The body's so-called good cholesterol may be even better than we realize. 

New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that one type of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) has a previously unknown role in protecting the liver from injury. This HDL protects the liver by blocking inflammatory signals produced by common gut bacteria.

The study is published July 23 in the journal Science.

HDL is mostly known for mopping up cholesterol in the body and delivering it to the liver for disposal. But in the new study, the researchers identified a special type of HDL called HDL3 that, when produced by the intestine, blocks gut bacterial signals that cause liver inflammation. If not blocked, these bacterial signals travel from the intestine to the liver, where they activate immune cells that trigger an inflammatory state, which leads to liver damage.

What if there was no internet?

Fight for control threatens to destabilize and fragment the internet

Nick Merrill, University of California, Berkeley

International power plays are a threat to a stable, open internet. erhui1979/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

You try to use your credit card, but it doesn’t work. In fact, no one’s credit card works. You try to go to some news sites to find out why, but you can’t access any of those, either. Neither can anyone else. Panic-buying ensues. People empty ATMs of cash.

This kind of catastrophic pan-internet meltdown is more likely than most people realize.

I direct the Internet Atlas Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Our goal is to shine a light on long-term risks to the internet. We produce indicators of weak points and bottlenecks that threaten the internet’s stability.

For example, where are points of fragility in the global connectivity of cables? Physical cables under the sea deliver 95% of the internet’s voice and data traffic. But some countries, like Tonga, connect to only one other country, making them vulnerable to cable-clipping attacks.

Another example is content delivery networks, which websites use to make their content readily available to large numbers of internet users. An outage at the content delivery network Fastly on June 8, 2021, briefly severed access to the websites of Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Reddit, Spotify, The New York Times and the U.K. government.

Fight the forces of darkness

Covid is Resurging. So is Trumpian Politics.

By Robert Reich

By Scott Stantis, Chicago Tribune

Despair is worse after a brief period of hope. I don’t know about you, but I was elated earlier this spring when it seemed as if Trump and COVID were gone, and Biden seemed surprisingly able to get the nation rapidly back on track.  

Now much is sliding backwards. It’s not Biden’s fault; it’s Trump’s ongoing legacy.

The new Delta strain of the virus requires, according to the CDC, that we go back to wearing masks inside in public places where the virus is surging, even if we’re fully inoculated.

This would be nothing more than a small disappointment and inconvenience were it not for Republicans using it as another opportunity to politicize public health.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded to the new CDC recommendation with the kind of unhinged hyperbole Trumpers have perfected. “The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” he said.

Republican politicizing of public health will get worse if the Delta variant continues to surge. At some point vaccines will have to be mandated because being inoculated is not solely a matter of personal choice. Herd immunity is a common good. If infections mount, that common good can only be achieved if nearly everyone is vaccinated.

But those eager to exploit the virus’s resurgence – the know-nothings, Trump wannabe’s, vilely ambitious political upstarts, Tucker Carlsons and similarly cynical entertainers – are already howling about “personal freedom” threatened by “socialism.”

I'm rooting for Darwin

 

This weekend, starting Friday. Saturday fireworks

 

A new pest is on the way

The invasive spotted lanternfly is spreading across the eastern US – here’s what you need to know about this voracious pest

In seven years, the lanternfly has spread from Berks County, northwest
of Philadelphia, to large areas of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and
 both south and north. Penn State/E. Swackhamer

Frank A. Hale, University of Tennessee

The spotted lanternfly was first detected in Pennsylvania in 2014 and has since spread to 26 counties in that state and at least six other eastern states. It’s moving into southern New England, Ohio and Indiana. 

This approximately 1-inch-long species from Asia has attractive polka-dotted front wings but can infest and kill trees and plants. We recently caught up with Professor Frank Hale, an entomologist who is tracking this species.

The Conversation: How did the spotted lanternfly get to the U.S., and how quickly is it spreading?

Frank Hale: It is native to India, China and Vietnam and probably arrived in a cut stone shipment in 2012. The first sighting was in 2014 in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on a tree of heaven — a common invasive tree brought to North America from China in the late 1700s.

By July 2021 the lanternfly had spread to about half of Pennsylvania, large areas of New Jersey, parts of New York state, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. It also had been found in western Connecticut, eastern Ohio, and now Indiana. To give an idea of how fast these lanternflies spread, they were introduced into South Korea in 2004 and spread throughout that entire country – which is approximately the size of Pennsylvania – in only three years.

In only seven years, the spotted lanternfly has infested large areas of the Middle Atlantic and has begun to push into Connecticut. New York State Integrated Pest Management Program

What is the HIPAA Privacy Rule?

It applies ONLY to health care providers and insurers. It DOES not make it illegal for someone to ask you if you've been vaxxed, Flip

Margaret Riley, University of Virginia

HIPAA allows you to control disclosure of certain types of personal
health information. Heath Korvola/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s Privacy Rule is a federal law prohibiting health care providers, businesses and the people working with them – including administrative staff, laboratories, pharmacies, health insurers and so on – from disclosing your health information without your permission.

When people talk about HIPAA, they typically refer to the Privacy Rule provision established in 2003, which is just one part of a broader law initially passed by Congress in 1996. 

The Privacy Rule came into force after tennis star Arthur Ashe’s HIV status was publicly revealed and country music star Tammy Wynette’s health records were sold to tabloids. People were starting to worry about genetic privacy. And Congress recognized that the internet would make it easier for health care privacy breaches to occur.

Why you can't get stuff: Our supply chain mess

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that global supply chains are a huge house of cards

Glenn McGillivray, Western University

The container ship Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal in Egypt,
viewed from the International Space Station. NASA JSC ISS

COVID-19 has laid bare many uncomfortable truths regarding society’s overall preparedness for low-probability but high-impact events, especially global ones. 

These range from issues pertaining exclusively to pandemic readiness (like our domestic capacity to produce personal protective equipment, ventilators, sanitizer and vaccines) to matters that are considerably less esoteric, like the ability of global supply chains to operate regardless of the various stresses put upon them.

The latter goes far beyond the toilet paper supply issue experienced early in the pandemic. It expands to include a whole range of products like lumber and other building materials, tools, foodstuffs, seeds, furniture, cleaning supplies, aluminum cans, jars, pools and pool equipment, chemicals, bicycles, camping gear, household appliances and replacement parts of all kinds.

In many cases supply chains have been simultaneously squeezed on both ends — supply and demand.

Production and distribution disruptions

While unscheduled closures of manufacturing and distribution facilities, bottlenecks at borders and sick workers have caused choke points in supply lines, people being cooped up in their homes for months on end have driven up demand for a host of products.

There has also been a simultaneous shortage of labour, particularly in the licensed trades.

Throw in other disruptors, like the massive winter storm in Texas in February, the six-day blockage of the Suez Canal due to the grounded ship Ever Given in March and the six-day closure of the Colonial gasoline pipeline in the United States after a cyberattack in early May.

Also include the fact that shipping containers are being lost in record amounts for various reasons, with more than 3,000 going overboard in 2020 and the 2021 number already hitting 1,000 by the end of April.

The pandemic has shown us that global supply chains are a huge house of cards: fragile enough on a good day, but prone to come tumbling down when there’s an unexpected breeze.

This has been particularly apparent with the manufacturing of computer chips.

Over 40,000 Rhode Island families in danger of eviction

McKee administration is sitting on almost $200 million in rent assistance

By Will Collette

RentReliefRI has almost
$200 million available

Over the weekend, the federal moratorium on pandemic-related evictions expired. The moratorium had been imposed early in the COVID outbreak and had been renewed several times by the Centers for Disease Control as a public health measure.

However, the US Supreme Court responded to a lawsuit by Republicans, ruling that the CDC could no longer renew the foreclosure/eviction moratorium without specific Congressional authorization. 

That authorization didn’t happen due to obstruction by Mitch McConnell and his band of Republican Senate nihilists.

As President Joe Biden reminded Americans, this crisis doesn’t have to be as bad as it sounds because there is LOTS of unspent federal rental assistance money sitting in state treasuries that hasn’t been spent.

Rhode Island received $200 million in rental assistance for both tenants and landlords, but has only spent around $8 million. This is not a unique Rhode Island problem, but that doesn’t excuse the lapse in putting this much needed money into play.

As US Rep. David Cicilline explained, “That money is available, both for people that can’t pay their rent and for landlords who are expecting rent and haven’t received it. There really is no reason to evict anyone.”

The money is administered by RentReliefRI. Christine Hunsinger, RentReliefRI’s chief strategy and information officer, told WPRI that people can still apply for help with both rent and utilities dating back to the beginning of the pandemic.

As of Monday, they had received 7,934 applications and had approved 1,342. More than 5,000 are still in the process. There are a variety of excuses for this dismal performance – timing, rules and regulations, staffing, technology, etc. – but frankly, let’s get on with it.

Though RentReliefRI can't seem to get much money out to desperate tenants, they have been able to create a lovely data dashboard, as you can see here:

Note that so far, the program has paid out $7.6 million to landlords and only $186,406 to tenants - that's almost 98% to landlords.

Almost 366,000 Rhode Islanders live in rental units, More than 12% - around 45,000 – are behind on their rent and could face eviction.

That’s the immediate crisis and with almost $200 million sitting and waiting to be used, we have an almost immediate solution – if Dan McKee will kick some ass to make it happen.

Lest we forget, the Rhode Island economy could also greatly benefit from the direct injection of another $200 million in immediate aid.

If you know someone who is having trouble paying for their rent or utilities or a landlord struggling with unpaid rent, have them go to RentReliefRI and fill out an application. 

They can also call the RentRelief Call Center at 1-855-608-8756, Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. They’re open Saturday from 8 AM to 1 PM.

APPLY TODAY

Need application assistance or legal services?

Click here for a listing of partner agencies offering those services.

Then we should focus our attention on the more long term cause of this crisis and that’s the lack of affordable housing. Very few municipalities in Rhode Island have met state mandated goals for having enough affordable housing to meet the needs of the people.

As the map below shows, Charlestown is one of the worst. For a long time and to this very day, Charlestown resists affordable housing as an affront to its “rural character,” an undefined term that when used by the ruling Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party), is just another form of Jim Crow.

Life jackets violate my freedom

 

Fools

 

What is your dog thinking?

Making connections in canine cognition

Brown University

With dogs important contributors in everything from rescue operations to assisting people with disabilities, the rising senior is spending her summer in a Brown laboratory researching the reasoning abilities of man’s best friend.

What is my dog even looking at? Why are they barking? Can they tell when I’m upset? And how does my dog always seem to know when I’m about to go on vacation?

At times to their dismay, most dog owners can only wonder about the answers to these questions. But Sarah Zylberfuden is spending her summer investigating them — and given the importance of dogs in everything from search-and-rescue operations to assisting individuals with disabilities, finding answers could be significant.

As a rising Brown University senior concentrating in cognitive neuroscience and literary arts, Zylberfuden is researching the learning and reasoning abilities of man’s best friend in the laboratory of Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences Daphna Buchsbaum.