Scientists uncover link between car fumes and lung cancer that helps explain why so many non-smokers develop disease
— Read on www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/10/cancer-breakthrough-is-a-wake-up-call-on-danger-of-air-pollution
Tag: politics
Climate Change, Fossil-Fuel Pollution, and Children’s Health | NEJM
Review Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Climate Change, Fossil-Fuel Pollution, and Children’s Health
— Read on www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra2117706
A Look at the Mental Health Provisions in the New Gun Law – Scientific American
Most of the $13 billion appropriated in the new legislation Congress recently passed focuses on mental health programs
— Read on www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-look-at-the-mental-health-provisions-in-the-new-gun-law/
An Anthropologist’s 20-Year Quest To Document Pakistan’s Ancient Rock Art
Having spent over two decades tirelessly researching art and culture in Pakistan, Kalhoro stands as possibly the only Pakistani who has extensively documented ancient rock art in the country.
— Read on www.forbes.com/sites/sonyarehman/2022/04/30/an-anthropologists-20-year-quest-to-document-pakistans-ancient-rock-art/
60. Cassandra Quave Thinks the Way Antibiotics Are Developed Might Kill Us | People I (Mostly) Admire
By mid-century, 10 million people a year are projected to die from untreatable infections. Can Cassandra, an ethnobotanist at Emory University convince Steve that herbs and ancient healing are key to our medical future?
Serendipity and strategy in rapid innovation | Nature Communications
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organizations adapt to environmental change and improve. Yet despite advances in our understanding of evolution, what drives innovation remains elusive. On the one hand, organizations invest heavily in systematic strategies to accelerate innovation. On the other, historical analysis and individual experience suggest that serendipity plays a significant role. To unify these perspectives, we analysed the mathematics of innovation as a search for designs across a universe of component building blocks. We tested our insights using data from language, gastronomy and technology. By measuring the number of makeable designs as we acquire components, we observed that the relative usefulness of different components can cross over time. When these crossovers are unanticipated, they appear to be the result of serendipity. But when we can predict crossovers in advance, they offer opportunities to strategically increase the growth of the product space. Organizations can take different approaches to innovation: they can either follow a strategic process or a serendipitous perspective. Here Fink et al. develop a statistical model to analyse how components combine to obtain a product and thus explain the mechanism behind the two approaches.
— Read on www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02042-w
Alexa McDonough remembered for her dedication to social justice, blazing a trail for women | CBC News
Open access book data sovereignty
This book examines how Indigenous Peoples around the world are demanding greater data sovereignty and challenging the ways in which governments have historically used Indigenous data to develop policies and programs.
In the digital age, governments are increasingly dependent on data and data analytics to inform their policies and decision-making.
However, Indigenous Peoples have often been the unwilling targets of policy interventions and have had little say over the collection, use and application of data about them, their lands and cultures. At the heart of Indigenous Peoples’ demands for change are the enduring aspirations of self-determination over their institutions, resources, knowledge and information systems.
With contributors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, North and South America and Europe, this book offers a rich account of the potential for Indigenous Data Sovereignty to support human flourishing and to protect against the ever-growing threats of data-related risks and harms.
U.S. Health Care Spending Highest Among Developed Countries | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
The United States, on a per capita basis, spends much more on health care than other developed countries; the chief reason is not greater health care utilization, but higher prices, according to a study from a team led by a JHSPH researcher.
— Read on publichealth.jhu.edu/2019/us-health-care-spending-highest-among-developed-countries
Hiltzik: The downside of copyrights – Los Angeles Times
‘Winnie-the-Pooh,’ ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and many other works entered the public domain on Saturday. They show what’s wrong with the system.
— Read on www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-01-03/winnie-the-pooh-public-domain