Sugoi & Yokunai

When a beam of light passes through a cloud of atoms, photons (particles of light) sometimes appear to spend a negative amount of time there, with light seeming to exit the cloud before it even enters.

"Fasting, when done safely, is an effective weight loss intervention. Popular diets that incorporate fasting, such as intermittent fasting, claim to have health benefits beyond weight loss. Our results provide evidence for the health benefits of fasting beyond weight loss, but these were only visible after three days of total caloric restriction -- later than we previously thought."

According to the DOJ, black and Hispanic applicants admitted to Yale had substantially lower median MCAT scores and GPAs than white and Asian applicants across multiple admissions cycles, with the department concluding that equally qualified black applicants had dramatically higher odds of receiving interview invitations than comparable Asian applicants.

If the goal is a medical profession both excellent and broadly representative, then the solution cannot consist merely of manipulating admissions outcomes. The work must begin where the disparities first emerge—not where they become politically embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Holmes has come up with a brand-new approach to try to erase ‘flashbacks’, the intrusive snapshots of memories that pop into our heads without warning.

“We put people in a brain scanner and what we found is that your brain lights up when you play the computer game Tetris in a similar place as when people have flashbacks,” she says.

She has since developed a surprisingly simple technique to reduce flashbacks by essentially hijacking that visual part of the brain.

After you recall the memory of the flashback, you play Tetris for 20 minutes, but do so by carefully focusing on integrating the different shapes together, rather than simply letting them stack up.

Ugh. This is how misinformation starts. Science Alert (which should have researched this better before publication) has this article titled: A Common Vitamin Has a Complicated Link to Cancer. At first I thought it was going to be about niacin, a vitamin which has some link to carcinogenesis. But no, it's about an old observation regarding vitamin B12 levels. This is an issue that comes up repeatedly, because when someone who has cancer has a vitamin B12 level checked, it can be very high, which has led to suspicion that high vitamin B12 levels cause cancer. The explanation is that vitamin B12 is bound not only by transcobalamin, but also by haptocorrin, and it is the latter that is elevated with cancer and other conditions. When we measure vitamin B12 levels, we are measuring the vitamin bound to holotranscobalamin (which is biologically active) and the vitamin bound to haptocorrin (which is biologically inactive). Elevations of haptocorrin caused by cancer and certain liver diseases makes the vitamin B12 level increase, but that is only an epiphenomenon. There is no available assay for holotranscobalamin in the U.S. – only in the U.K. and it's not approved for use here. That would clear up this whole mess.

Although most of the balloon bombs are thought to have gone down in the Pacific Ocean, a few remain in remote areas of the Pacific Northwest. Two forestry workers discovered one near Lumby, British Columbia, in 2014. A Canadian navy bomb disposal unit arrived and blew it to bits. Use caution when hiking.