11 December 2024

Good coffee can add 2 years of life, and help you age more gracefully. Good news for the Ronin.  Already started drinking coffee again, and this will encourage me to continue.

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Moderate physical activity can make up for poor-sleep induced memory problem in the elderly. Makes sense, as exercise stimulates release of BDNF. There's already a lot of studies associating physical activity (exercise) with better cognition in the elderly.

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Scientists are fleeing Argentina because they can't get grants anymore. This is a problem with a lot of science. So much is supported by government grants. And there is so much junk science. But even good science needs support. We really need someone to figure out which science really deserves funding, but so much is political. Especially climate science, which is really more like a religion now. I kinda agree with Millei, having read some of the studies on climate change, which seem poorly done. For a country like Argentina, perhaps scientists should leave climate studies to other countries which can afford to spend money on such research that really goes nowhere (Sorry, Nature).

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Five medical breakthroughs in 2024. Actually, osimertinib has been around for a few years, and the discovery was not new to 2024. But the others were nice.

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Tokyo governor announces 4-day work week, to help with the dwindling fertility rate. I dunno, how do you make Japanese men desire Japanese women  How do you make Japanese women want to be mothers instead of "empowered" office workers?

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The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to the researchers.
The universe is weirder than we realized.

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Apple's Siri is now blended with ChatGPT.  So now Siri can help with homework?  And boy, Tim Cook sure loves his emojis.  That's a feature with just about every Apple update release.

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This is what happens when you don't pay down your loan. Average student loan debt increased in first half of 2024 in Oregon. How does that happen? People stopped paying during COVID-19 and just figured it would suddenly go away by itself. Well, it hasn't. What are the rest of us supposed to do about it?

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