Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

• America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

  New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

  Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.
  ...
  In states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime declined slowly. Where it declined quickly, crime declined quickly.
  ...
  When differences of atmospheric lead density between big and small cities largely went away, so did the difference in murder rates.

• The Correlation Between Arts and Crafts and a Nobel Prize

  The average scientist is not statistically more likely than a member of the general public to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society -- elite societies of scientists, membership in which is based on professional accomplishments and discoveries -- are 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to have an artistic or crafty hobby than the average scientist is. And Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to have an artistic or crafty hobby.

• Getting it Wrong: 'Everyone' Suffers An Incorrect or Late Diagnosis
  
  According to the report:
  1. At least 5 percent of U.S. adults who seek outpatient care each year experience a diagnostic error.
  2. Postmortem exams suggest diagnostic errors contribute to 10 percent of patient deaths.
  3. Medical records suggest diagnostic errors account for 6 to 17 percent of adverse events in hospitals.

• Neural network chess computer abandons brute force for selective, 'human' approach

  A chess computer has taught itself the game and advanced to 'international master'-level in only three days by adopting a more 'human' approach. Mathew Lai, an MsC student at Imperial College London, devised a neural-network-based chess computer dubbed Giraffe -- the first of its kind to abandon the 'brute force' approach to competing with human opponents in favour of a branch-based approach whereby the AI stops to evaluate which of the calculated move branches that it has already made are most likely to lead to victory.
  ...
  The lag between depth-based 'move-crunching' and neural-based branch evaluation has not completely closed, and Giraffe cannot perform yet at either the same level or with the same latency as traditional depth-based chess engines.

• How Biohackers are Fighting a Two-front War on Antibiotic Resistance

  Enter CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. CRISPRs are part of an immune system for bacteria -- a way for populations of bugs to share immunity to bacteria-specific viruses, called phages.
  ...
  CRISPR is a really powerful tool for gene editing, and one that has applications for overcoming antibiotic resistance. In an ironic twist, researchers are packing CRISPR/Cas systems into phages and using them to attack bacteria. The CRISPR system is programmed to search for and destroy the sequences that code for antibiotic resistance, like the beta-lactamase protein that confers penicillin resistance. The bacteria are then vulnerable to antibiotics they had previously been able to stand up to.

• Restoring Henry

  Niall Ferguson, Kissinger's authorized biographer, begins the arduous task of rolling his subject's fallen reputation back up the hill.

  Negative review of authorized biography of Henry Kissinger.

• The Rent Crisis Is About to Get a Lot Worse

  Millions of households could join the ranks of those spending more than half their income on rent, Harvard study warns

• What Is College Worth?

  What's the real value of higher education?

  These types of studies, and there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents and students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their "investment." But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. "The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges," Cappelli writes. "Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs--as much as one in four--is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students."

• Men with unaggressive prostate tumors 'unlikely to develop, die from prostate cancer'

  With careful monitoring by a urologist, a man with relatively unaggressive prostate cancer is unlikely to develop metastatic prostate cancer or die from the disease. This is according to a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

• Surprising benefits of sexually transmitted infections

  Some microbes passed on during sex could actually be good for us, are most of us missing out?

  Microbes that cause sexual diseases need to ensure they can hop from human to human
  ...
  A six-study review found that it (GB virus C) was associated with a 59% reduction in the mortality rate of HIV patients. Scientists think GBV-C does this by reducing HIV's ability to compromise our immune system cells. It may also stimulate other parts of the immune system to actively fight the infection.

• Food Goes 'GMO Free' With Same Ingredients

  As consumer concern grows over genetically modified products, more produce purveyors are paying to use such labels

  While the U.S. government and most major science groups say evidence shows that GMOs are safe, consumer concern has grown so strong that some vendors of products such as blueberries and lettuce are paying for non-GMO labeling even though their products aren't among the small number of crops that are genetically modified in the U.S.

• Ice cream that does not melt 'could soon hit the shelves'

  Scientists have discovered a protein which binds the components of ice cream together and stops it melting so fast.

  The new ingredient should create firmer, longer lasting ice cream that will keep it frozen for much longer in hot weather

• Can't sleep? Try getting less

  By reducing your "sleep window", you're raising the stakes, giving your powers of sleep a real challenge, which brings out the best in them'

  Also see, Sleep Restriction Therapy (SRT).

• How the Big Schlep Is Changing the Way New Yorkers Live

  But as the city transformed into an exceedingly safe and exceedingly expensive place to live over the past two decades, it's not only the crime and the pervasive decay that have fallen away, but the close proximity, creating a social commute that echoes and exacerbates a work commute that, at more than six hours a week, is the longest in the nation
  ...
  Manhattan, once the center of the world, is not even the center of the city anymore. Or, at least, it's not the only center.

• What Jane Jacobs Got Wrong About Cities

  The peerless urban theorist misunderstood the suburbs and failed to see how gentrification would make urban neighborhoods unaffordable to all but the rich.

  "The most successful urban neighborhoods have attracted not the blue-collar families that she celebrated, but the rich and the young. The urban vitality that she espoused--and correctly saw as a barometer of healthy city life--has found new expressions in planned commercial and residential developments whose scale rivals that of the urban renewal of which she was so critical. These developments are the work of real estate entrepreneurs, who were absent from the city described but loom large today, having long ago replaced planners and our chief urban strategists."
  ...
  Cities, as Jacobs hoped, have indeed experienced a renaissance, but not in the form she preferred. To be sure, this revival is a hell of lot better than the urban dystopia that developed in the years after Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities first appeared. But it's time to recognize that we are not seeing a renaissance of the kind of middle-class urbanity that she loved and championed. That city has passed into myth, and, unless society changes in very radical ways, it is never going to come back.

• NYC landlords face new limits buying out tenants

  New York Landlords hoping to pay tenants to move out of the city's 1.3 million rent-regulated apartments will face new limitations on extending offers under measures signed Thursday to rein in a practice that has come under scrutiny in a roaring real-estate market.
  ...
  Under state laws, vacant rent-stabilized apartments often can be renovated, deregulated and re-rented at triple the price or more -- $5,200 a month instead of $1,700 for a Manhattan two-bedroom, for example. Citywide, about 266,000 apartments have been deregulated since 1994.

• Real New Yorkers Can Say Goodbye to All That

  We did leave our hometown because of all these aspirational New Yorkers. But we didn't leave to get away from these people, exactly. We left because those of us who grew up there were less willing to bear any burden, pay any price, to stay. The dreamers simply outbid us for our New York, and in the process, they created a city we no longer loved quite so much. This is apt to make such musings hard reading for us.