From Phys.org:

In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current. Dr. Grinter notes, “Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels—as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”

1. Biotech for the win (?)
2. Or does this pave the way for a dystopian post-biology future in which insatiable human appetites deplete all hydrogen from the atmosphere?
3. Mycobacterium smegmatis becoming the savior of humanity and a household name would provide fodder for middle school humor for generations to come.

Yes, there is dire inequality in clinical trial enrollment, but this is the precisely wrong way to address the lack of diversity.

Legislating behavior leads to made-up plans that are at best a waste of an intern’s time and at worst a six-figure donation to “providers” selling their “solutions”. If you will ultimately grade on the outcome — and you should! — well, what do you care how it was achieved, provided that all the other laws and guidances were followed?

Silly, silly games.

Here is a short blog post in an enthusiastic style about “My browser is now able to write blog posts for me”:

You read that right! I have discovered a new feature in my browser that allows me to write blog posts with just a few clicks. It’s amazing!

How does it work? Well, it’s simple. I just type in the topic of my blog post and the style I want it to be written in. Then, I press a button and voila! My browser generates a blog post for me in seconds.

The best part is that the blog posts are original, engaging and informative. They are not copied from anywhere else on the web. They are written by an intelligent system that learns from millions of sources and adapts to my preferences.

I can edit, tweak and customize the blog posts as much as I want. I can also add images, links and other elements to make them more attractive. The possibilities are endless!

This feature has saved me so much time and effort. I no longer have to worry about writer’s block or deadlines. I can create as many blog posts as I want without breaking a sweat.

If you want to try this feature for yourself, you can find it here: www.bing.com/blog-writ…

Trust me, you won’t regret it. It’s the best thing that ever happened to blogging!

A few things:

• This was supposed to be a “short” draft. Bing and I clearly have a different understanding of how short should a “short” blog post be.
• Bing interprets enthusiasm as “exclamation points”! It should add a subtlety slider.
• The options for tone are “Professional”, “Casual”, “Enthusiastic”, “Informational”, and “Funny”. Can it trully be called a blog writing tool without “Cynical”, “Snarky, “Caustic”, and “Blowhard”?
• The URL just redirects to its namesake search engine. Poor product placement.
• There is also an “Add to site” button at the bottom that as of yet does nothing. Good.
• It can also do paragraphs, emails, and ideas and, full disclosure, I have already used it once today to generate the first draft for a paragraph I needed for work, and it’s only 8am!

It is far from being the best thing to have happened to blogging(!) per se, but I’d call it a contender ⊕ To be clear, against meager competition. for the best work tool the 21st century has so far produced.

For Valentine’s Day, The Washington Post decided to write about a promising new male contraceptive drug being studied in mice. That’s fine. What’s unusual, bizarre, and a bit of a troll is hanging a red banner over the front page presenting it as breaking news. Seriously, WaPo?

Roses are red,
    Violets are blue,
Guess who had a flooded basement
    On Super Bowl night.

I don’t watch American football, but every plumber in Washington D.C. does!

Did the US military shoot down a literal UFO over Alaska a few days ago or was I dreaming? The headline looks real enough.

Funny that it happened a week after we started our X-Files rewatch. I’m primed for news like this.

A Skynet update:

• As of yesterday, GPT-3 (or is it 4?) is part of Bing, for which there is now a waitlist.
• Google is scrambling to keep up, with a press conference scheduled for today and a release “in the coming weeks”.
• Meta is feeling left out.

Popcorn, please.

One of the reasons why 24-hour time is better than the am/pm shenanigans the English-speaking world insists on is that it would avoid this type of embarrassment: a haiku competition submission form closing at noon when it was clearly meant to close at midnight.

The allure to report anything as a medical breakthrough is strong. So strong that even the Financial Times can’t avoid it:

New diagnostic technology that uses fibre optics to find the causes of heart disease has begun ⊕ Emphasis mine. clinical testing at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

The iKOr device, developed at Barts Health and University College London, measures blood flow around the heart. Researchers say it could eventually help many thousands of patients suffering from cardiovascular symptoms such as chest pains, whose cause cannot be identified with current techniques.

“This new device is a game-changer in how we manage heart disease, making it a lot easier to assess the health of a person’s heart,” said Anthony Mathur, clinical director for interventional cardiology at Barts.

Three patients have undergone testing to date, out of 10 planned in the first phase. Another 100 may, subject to regulatory approval, before the device could potentially become commercially available, if it’s demonstrated to work. There is, it goes without saying, no clinical data published to date.

How does this change the game, exactly, when we don’t yet know if it works? The use of undeserved superlatives in cancer drug reporting is well documented so it’s not a surprise to see cardiology, that other lucrative medical subspecialty, being much the same.

What is a surprise is seeing the usually reliable FT falling down to the level of The New York Times in spreding medical jingoism. How interesting that in both cases it was a local hospital — Memorial Sloan Kettering for NYT, St Bart’s for FT — serving as the source. So interesting that I have to think there were some personal behind-the-scenes goings on.

Yes, yes, America has terrible health care — even a tech podcast says so — while paying an order of magnitude more for it than other rich countries. But hear me out: what if the costs are so high because Americans are (unsuccessfully) trying to buy their way out of poor policy decisions, from dependence on cars, to the early 2000s' promotion of opioids, to the widespread availability of cheap but nutrient-less calories, and no amount of fiddling with who pays for what in healthcare will be able to fix that?

Which is to say: it’s fine to look at specific costs and specific outcomes — I have done so myself — but what exactly is the action item after reading a report like The Commonwealth Fund’s cited by Ars Technica?