Science 2.0

If a doctor declares that they are going to another country on vacation to provide free medical care, they get a great deal of social currency from that. Ask a San Francisco doctor to travel to rural California to do the same and you'll be dismissed.

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During yesterday's Golden Globes acceptance speech for best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr. ("Oppenheimer") seemed to be referencing stage fright when he said "Yeah, yeah, I took a beta-blocker so this will be a breeze." 

Let's ignore that he is pretending he has stage fright, and certainly that accepting an award would give him high blood pressure or heart palpitations, and discuss what we know it really means; celebrities have jumped on the beta blocker fad for social anxiety or depression. Unlike fentanyl or xanax, no one will judge you if you keel over while on beta blockers. No one is worried your propranolol habit is out of hand.

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Presidents Obama and Bush are good friends now, but they wouldn't be in President Bush held a grudge. While campaigning in 2007 and 2008, Senator Obama laid every cultural crime at the feet of the outgoing Republican. And when the housing crisis hit, and he made the economy worse with a stimulus package for government union employees just as President Biden did in 2021, President Obama blamed Bush - even though Bush warned in 2005 that forcing banks to justify why they turned down a mortgage while insuring bad housing loans, at the demand of Democrats, is what led to the housing bubble.

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Even though author JK Rowling controversially believes that being a woman might be more than a state of mind, people bought "Hogwarts Legacy" in droves last year. It was the top-selling game, beating out new entries in the popular "Call of Duty" and "Diablo" franchises.

That is if current trends from November held up. December can be a real confounder because "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III" came out in November - and quickly rose to the number two spot. It could have beat Harry Potter but we won't know until Activision releases its numbers. Also impressive was "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", because it was only available on one platform, the Nintendo Switch, while Harry Potter was also available on Xbox, Playstation, and PC.

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This is a companion piece to “Enough: Toward A Sustainable Economics” 

https://www.science20.com/fred_phillips/enough_toward_a_sustainable_economics-256755.

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It is commonly said that Neptune is azure blue and Uranus pale cyan green – but a new study shows the two ice giants are actually far closer in color than typically thought. Because Uranus’ appearance and color has changed over the decades in response to the weirdest seasons in the Solar System.

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We're only two weeks into winter and a New York university is already declaring above-average temperatures in 2023 a result of global climate change. 

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If you're holding back on revealing negative secrets about yourself, new survey results in a social psychology journal say you can relax; most people don't care.

When study participants pushed through fear to reveal a secret, those in whom they confided were significantly more charitable than they expected. This was a marketing experiment, not real life, but the authors say recipients appreciated the trust, honesty, and vulnerability needed to reveal secrets.

Here are some findings.

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Bipolar disorder, a mental illness with both manic and depressed moods, is often resulting in earlier death than others, by up to 15 years. In two groups, people with bipolar disorder were four to six times more likely as people without the condition to die prematurely, while people who had ever smoked were about twice as likely to die prematurely than those who had never smoked – whether or not they had bipolar disorder.

When it comes to bipolar disorder, the differences in health and lifestyle change mortality a lot.

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An examination of more than 300 sudden, unexpected deaths in young children, which usually occur during sleep,  commonly known as SIDS in babies or SUDC in toddlers, including extensive medical record analysis and video evidence donated by families to document the inexplicable deaths of seven toddlers between the ages of 1 and 3 finds they were potentially attributable to seizures. 

These seizures lasted less than 60 seconds and occurred within 30 minutes immediately prior to each child’s death, say the study authors.

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