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18 votes
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Danish artist Jens Haaning ordered to return €67,000 to a museum after he supplied it with two blank canvasses for a project he named "Take the Money and Run"
27 votes -
Elan.School has finished
73 votes -
The One Piece adventure will continue
24 votes -
In 1873, greed, speculation and overinvestment in railroads sparked a financial crisis that sank the US into more than five years of misery
9 votes -
Phenylephrine, a common decongestant in medicines is no better than a placebo when taken orally, says a US FDA advisory panel
by Wes Davis A key cold medicine ingredient is basically worthless The FDA’s 16-member advisory panel unanimously voted yesterday that oral phenylephrine, a common active ingredient in cold...
by Wes Davis
A key cold medicine ingredient is basically worthless
The FDA’s 16-member advisory panel unanimously voted yesterday that oral phenylephrine, a common active ingredient in cold medications, is no better than a placebo for treating congestion.
Link to the article
The call by the panel sets up potential FDA action that could force the removal of certain over-the-counter medications containing the ingredient — including certain formulations of Mucinex, Sudafed, Tylenol, and NyQuil — from store shelves.
But FDA may hold off for many months, pending contested findings by drug makers and other considerations.Data
Newer data from studies the panel says are more consistent with modern clinical trial standards showed phenylephrine simply “was not significantly different from placebo” in the recommended dosage, including trials from 2007 that the FDA had reviewed when considering the drug after a citizen petition prompted it to do so.
Bioavailability
The panel cited the drug’s low bioavailability, a term referring to qualities that allow the drug to be absorbed by the human body, as the main reason the drug should be removed from the market.
Jennifer Schwartzott said the drug “should have been removed from the market a long time ago,” while Dr. Stephen Clement said that although the drug itself isn’t dangerous, its usage by patients should be considered unsafe because it potentially delays actual treatment of disease symptoms.
Alternative
The panel cited pseudoephedrine as an effective alternative though while it’s technically available without a prescription, you must talk to a pharmacist to get it because, in large quantities, it can be used to make methamphetamines.
50 votes -
Former US President Donald Trump acknowledges he was told 2020 election lies were false in wide-ranging interview
30 votes -
Rubble and ruin: How houses in Delhi were turned to rubble before the G20
8 votes -
Netflix lands Richard Linklater and Glen Powell’s ‘Hit Man’ for $20 million
5 votes -
The Savannah Bananas show us that sport’s future may not look like sport
14 votes -
Book review: The Educated Mind
17 votes -
How to regulate AI? Bioethicist David Magnus on medicine’s critical moment
4 votes -
Today I learned this weird Windows keyboard shortcut opens LinkedIn
43 votes -
Debut novel by Millie Bobby Brown reignites debate over ghostwritten celebrity books
16 votes -
Martin Scorsese still has stories to tell
8 votes -
Sweden holds grim warning for the $4bn padel craze – conversions to warehouses and budget grocery stores after the sport's pandemic boom turned to bust
7 votes -
Florida surgeon general rejects FDA guidance, urges people under 65 not to get Covid booster
26 votes -
38TB of data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers
14 votes -
Hyprland is a toxic community
34 votes -
Mental health and sense of belonging
I'm trying to find the root cause of my declining mental health. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe my brain is just physically broken and I have to deal with it. But what I tend to think of recently is...
I'm trying to find the root cause of my declining mental health. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe my brain is just physically broken and I have to deal with it.
But what I tend to think of recently is the concept of belongingness.
I rarely feel I have a sense of belonging anywhere. And my theory is that the constant otherness is what is causing the degradation.So what i want to is, for those who experience frequent depressive cycles -- do you have a sense of belonging? Or do you too feel constantly othered?
(I hope this makes sense haha)
36 votes -
Unity is offering a Runtime Fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay as it tries to “kill AppLovin”
29 votes -
Midweek Movie Free Talk
Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here. Please just try to provide fair warning of...
Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
17 votes -
‘We put in air conditionin’, stayed year-round, and ruined America’
13 votes -
Five oldest descriptions of the Pyramids
5 votes -
Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey Results
19 votes -
The rise of surge pricing: ‘It will eventually be everywhere’
33 votes -
It’s the breakfast of champions no more: Cereal is in long-term decline
47 votes -
Formula 1 Grand Prix of Singapore (Marina Bay) discussion thread
28 votes -
Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of September 11
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate...
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
20 votes -
Prices of goods and what are stores making to misguide consumers
38 votes -
Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (September 2023)
This is a monthly thread for those who need it. Vent, share your experiences, ask for advice, talk about how you are doing. Let's make this a compassionate space for all who may need one.
29 votes -
Recommended tablet apps for Android?
I got a tablet a few years ago, and I've struggled to use it as anything other than a big phone. Sure, it's really nice watching videos on the larger screen, and messaging is nicer too. Do you...
I got a tablet a few years ago, and I've struggled to use it as anything other than a big phone. Sure, it's really nice watching videos on the larger screen, and messaging is nicer too.
Do you guys have any recommendations for apps that are either tablet only, or have a much better experience on a tablet? I have a Galaxy Tab S6 Lite running Android version 13.
On a semi-related note, I am looking for good emulators for android(NES, SNES, Genesis).
10 votes -
Tesla reinvents carmaking with quiet breakthrough
25 votes -
Armand Duplantis breaks pole vault world record at the Wanda Diamond League Final 2023 in Eugene
4 votes -
Letter showing Pope Pius XII had detailed information from German Jesuit about Nazi crimes revealed
33 votes -
Inside the very strange, very expensive race to “de-age”
Whizy Kim The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your...
Whizy Kim
The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your age
Participants compete not on physical abilities but on how quickly and by how much they can slow their “biological age.”
Competitors do this mostly by adjusting their diets (like which macronutrients and supplements they consume), being physically active, and retesting their “age” regularly. They’re not actually reverting to a more youthful version of themselves — that’s not biologically possible. Rather, these competitors are racing to see who can age the slowest; as the Rejuvenation Olympics website quips, “You win by never crossing the finish line.”
Some participants
Steve Aoki, the DJ and heir to the Benihana restaurant chain, appears toward the bottom of the site’s “absolute” ranking, which reflects the 25 competitors with the lowest rate of aging.
The biohacker Ben Greenfield makes the list, too, as does millionaire and longevity science advocate Peter Diamandis. Most of the top 25 names, however, don’t spark immediate recognition, and some are anonymous.
Right now, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who is 46 years old, is leading. But 46 is just what competitors describe as Johnson’s “chronological age,” which means, simply, the years that have passed since his birth date.
He has claimed that he eats 70 pounds of vegetables per month, most of it pureed. He receives blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a red-light cap that’s supposed to stimulate hair growth. His body fat once fell to a dangerous 3 percent (though it has since bumped up a few percentage points).
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is renowned for his eccentric wellness habits; he eats one meal a day, meditates for at least two hours daily, and has a penchant for ice baths. For a while, Steve Jobs was a “fruitarian” — as in, only ate fruit.
Lifestyles of ultrarich
Such extremes are common among the ultrarich, and particularly the Silicon Valley set, a crowd known for its obsession with making moonshot ideas into reality.
The wealthy indulge in countless health trends of varying dubiousness, whether it’s getting IV drips to reduce hangovers, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, implanting devices in the body to monitor health and live longer, even injecting themselves with young blood (a treatment called parabiosis, which Johnson is receiving). This year alone, Johnson will reportedly spend at least $2 million on reducing his biological age.
Society treats them as idols, geniuses whose savvy has vaulted them into the 0.0001 percent of the wealthiest people on Earth. It’s a small hop from there to believing they’d also be savvier than the rest of us about turning back the clock.
Investing in de-aging
Last year, according to a report from the news and market analysis site Longevity. Technology, more than $5 billion in investments poured into longevity-related companies worldwide, including from some big-name tech founders and investors. Many of these companies are aiming to prolong life by focusing on organ regeneration and gene editing.
The buzzy life extension company Altos Labs, which researches biological reprogramming — a way to reset cells to pliable “pluripotent stem cells” — launched last year with a whopping $3 billion investment, and counts internet billionaire Yuri Milner and, reportedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its patrons. Bezos was also an investor in the anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman, meanwhile, recently invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a company vying to add a decade to the human lifespan.
Some of the most famous names in the death-defying sector are old: Calico Labs, a longevity-research subsidiary of Alphabet, was launched by then-Google CEO Larry Page in 2013.
Tally Health, a new biotech company co-founded by Harvard scientist David Sinclair — who is something of a celebrity in the longevity community — boasts some Hollywood A-list investors: John Legend, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Kutcher, Pedro Pascal, and Zac Efron.
Possibility of de-aging
“It’s not possible to reverse your age,” Stuart Jay Olshansky, an aging expert and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, tells Vox. “There’s validity to some of the work that’s going on in epigenetics that may be telling us something about the rate of aging. It’s not yet telling us about longevity.”
No two people age in the exact same way. Discrete from chronological age, “biological age” is the attempt to capture the often invisible difference through epigenetic gene expression, the state of someone’s organs, their immune system, and more.
A 40-year-old with a history of heavy drinking and smoking, for example, may have a higher biological age than someone who never drinks or smokes. (In 2018, a Dutch man even complained that he ought to be able to change his legal age to match his biological age.)
Johnson again
Johnson, who made his hundreds of millions after selling a payments platform he developed to eBay in 2013, has become renowned not for what he’s invented, sold, or designed, as is the case for many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for the unimaginably strict lifestyle he leads.
According to his website and the many interviews he has given, he exerts constant vigilance over the 78 organs of the human body, consistently tracking everything from BMI to brain white matter. Johnson is often described as the “most measured man in human history.”
The point isn’t merely being healthy. It’s laser-precision optimization of his health.
Johnson, for example, never eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It’s simply not a part of his algorithm. “I was just a slave to myself and my passions and my emotions and my next desire,” he said in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That doesn’t mean he never stumbles, but when he does, he calls it an “infraction,” as though he has committed a minor crime.
Leaderboard
Johnson tops the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard; he created the game along with Oliver Zolman — who leads Johnson’s team of 30-plus doctors and other health experts — and TruDiagnostic, an epigenetics lab based in Kentucky that provides the biological age test kits that participants in the Olympics must submit. The cheaper version costs $229. The more expensive one, at $499, provides more data on your results, including how habits like smoking or drinking alcohol have impacted a person’s aging speed.
Ultramarathon
It’s a contest that participants hope never ends — the most ultra of ultramarathons. The most dedicated members in the longevity community are, in essence, spending their lives obsessing over living. Says Lustgarten: “I plan on doing this for at least the next 70-plus years.”
27 votes -
Menopause as a case in point; funding for research on women’s health is still a fraction of that available for men’s health
20 votes -
Sir Curse - Siren (2023)
6 votes -
Rubaboo - Pemmican stew of Canadian Mounties
9 votes -
This boring gray boat patrolling the US east coast is actually a vigilante
20 votes -
Good manners, obedience and unselfishness: data reveals how UK parenting priorities compare with other nations
16 votes -
The fascinating story behind Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1968 epic War and Peace (2019)
5 votes -
Poland's crusade against abortion investigates miscarriages, tests blood for evidence of abortion pills, created a national pregnancy registry
66 votes -
Ministers set to ban single-use vapes in UK over child addiction fears
30 votes -
Veilid — a peer-to-peer network and application framework by Cult of the Dead Cow
26 votes -
Online payment methods, are there significant upsides or downsides of one vs another?
Specifically this week I have to choose whether to create an account with paypal, cashapp or venmo but I am also interested in a broader discussion including other apps. Any advice or information...
Specifically this week I have to choose whether to create an account with paypal, cashapp or venmo but I am also interested in a broader discussion including other apps. Any advice or information would be welcome.
14 votes -
Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server
24 votes -
Opinion: Why a Navajo leader’s federal conviction gives US prosecutors a road map to take on former president Donald Trump
15 votes -
How “little tech” is driving workplace surveillance—and what can be done to push back
29 votes -
TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here. Please just try to provide fair warning of...
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
8 votes