Tools of the State
Finally, the perfect —and just in time for V-day! Nope, not much else to say about this one.
UTTARAKHAND FLOODS: A QUICK UPDATE * have been recovered over the weekend—including five from the Tapovan tunnel—taking the death count to 50. Over 150 are still missing. * New satellite images have the presence of a new lake created by the avalanche that triggered the floods. It is 350 metres long and contains 70 crore litres of water. The : It is slowly and naturally draining, and may not be cause for panic. * reminds us that Raini—the village which is ground zero of the current floods—was also the cradle of the ‘chipko’ environmental movement. And they have been determinedly taking on the hydropower projects that threaten their mountain for years. Definitely worth a read. * Meanwhile in Delhi, the government residents of water shortages.The reason: the floods have increased the amount of debris, silt, mud, algae, plant pieces, wood ashes or chemicals in the raw water that supplies the capital. And treatment plants are struggling to keep up. In related enviro news: Rare reveal ‘rivers of gold’ in the Amazon. While beautiful to behold, they show the extent of destructive and illegal gold mining: “The pits—usually hidden from an astronaut’s view by cloud cover or outside the Sun’s glint point—stand out brilliantly in this image due to the reflected sunlight.” () DONALD TRUMP IS ACQUITTED… AGAIN! Republicans unsurprisingly stuck by their ‘inciter in chief’ and helped him get off the hook for a second time around. broke ranks when voting on Trump’s impeachment—which was ten short of the number required to convict him. Two of them have been by the state units of their party. A brief but short lived surprise: of an eff word-laced conversation between the top House Republican and the President in the midst of the siege—which made it very clear that Trump was enjoying every minute of the violence. Nope, it didn’t make a difference. has the key takeaways. calls it an escape, not an exoneration. THE GREAT PANDEMIC: A QUICK UPDATE * In India, only 23,628 healthcare-workers to take the second dose of the vaccine—which is a paltry one in ten of those who received the first jab. * WHO sent a team to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the virus, but it has raised more questions than answers. An Australian member of the team says China turn over anonymised raw patient data—which is “standard practice” for an outbreak investigation. Meanwhile, the US has expressed “deep concerns.” * All the leading vaccines have started testing their drugs on children. Moderna and Pfizer are who are 12-plus. But AstraZeneca is testing the Oxford vaccine on children as . Pfizer says it will wait until it has trial data from the older lot. Either way, don’t expect kid-safe vaccines until late this year, or even 2022. * A shows that the anti-inflammatory arthritis drug called tocilizumab helps reduce deaths, and shorten hospital stays. * Israel is in the enviable position of having more vaccines it can use—but it is refusing to give them to the Palestinians. It is instead keeping of the Moderna vaccine in cold storage. Point to note: The government won’t even vaccinate Palestinians who work in Israel. CLUBHOUSE HAS A PRIVACY ISSUE First, a Stanford group that a Chinese firm hosts and pipes the app's raw audio across the internet. This potentially allows the platform to access both the audio, and connect it to a unique user. Clubhouse has responded by issuing a security update. But as notes in this must-read for CH users, the app has a very hazy privacy policy and very few controls. For example: how it uses not just your contacts, but also of all those people you know. DRONES HEAD FOR MARS When NASA lands its rover dubbed Perseverance on the surface next week, it will be carrying a special something beneath its belly: A drone named Ingenuity that weighs just four pounds. The “helicopter that can fly around” will make its maiden foray in Martian skies in April—marking the flight of “the first powered aircraft outside Earth.” Also, it : In equally exciting news: for Indians, Tesla will set up an electric car manufacturing unit in Karnataka. That’s the latest from the Karnataka government which had previously said the company was setting up an R&D centre. () DISCOVERED: THE WORLD’S OLDEST BREWERY! Archaeologists made this 450 km outside Cairo—at an ancient burial ground. The factory dates back to 3150-2613 BC and consists of eight huge units: > “[E]ach is 20 metres (about 65ft) long and 2.5 metres (about 8ft) wide. Each unit includes about 40 pottery basins in two rows, > which were used to heat a mixture of grains and water to produce beer.” And they look : In related boozy news: Companies are working on ways to age whiskey overnight—to bypass that tedious years-long process. One solution: “using heat and pressure to force alcohol in and out of small pieces of wood that give the spirit its characteristic flavor and color.” () Also making a big change: Coca Cola, which uses around three million metric tons of plastic packaging each year—and much of it isn’t recycled. One of its initiatives to cut back on plastic pollution: a new paper bottle that will roll out for a test run in Europe this summer. > “It’s formed out of a single sheet of paper fiber to help make it strong enough to withstand the pressure of the bottling > process, with the label printed directly on the bottle itself. The first version in the pilot has a thin plastic liner to keep > the paper dry, but eventually, the bottle will use a liner made from a plant-based material; the cap can be made from paper.” has more. Also: it looks like this: A NEURAL CAUSE FOR OVEREATING? A new study has identified the part of the brain that makes us want to overeat—when we are exposed to specific cues or environments. For example: why we opt for meetha even after a big meal: “The study showed that neurons in a specific part of the brain control the link between the cue (seeing the dessert) and the action (ordering the dessert).” With further research, we could figure out how to turn these neurons off. Who this could help: people with conditions like stroke, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high levels of bad cholesterol, and coronary heart disease. () Speaking of weight loss: We carried a story on Friday—titled ‘A breakthrough obesity drug’—that flagged a new weekly injection that reduces appetite—and could be a big breakthrough in weight loss treatments. It evoked the following response from our founding member, Ameya Nagarajan: I was quite shocked by the coverage of the BBC's terrible coverage of the so-called obesity drug you had in today's issue. First, this is not an obesity drug; it's a diabetes drug that's been trialled for obesity. But, more importantly, it's not a breakthrough because that would imply that obesity is an actual disease that people suffer from, when, in fact, the medical classification of obesity is derived from BMI, which has been repeatedly debunked as a useful measure of anything. What's more, a disease implies illness, that affects all humans in largely similar ways and can be treated in largely similar ways across them, neither of which is true for obesity. Viewing obesity as a disease implies that every fat person is ill, despite the fact that many of them are as healthy as their thin counterparts, by any marker you might choose. And that is immensely fatphobic. And finally, for a fat person, like me, it was shocking to see myself called ill. It's like the 80s when homosexuality was called a disease. > Trial data of Semaglutide—delivered as a weekly injection—shows that it is highly effective in suppressing appetite. The 2000 > participants shed an average of 15 kilos during a 15-month period. It is typically used to treat type 2 diabetes, but > researchers upped the dosage of the drug—which fools the body by mimicking a hormone called GLP1 that is released after eating a > filling meal. The BBC also did not address the potential horrific consequences of messing with the body's self regulation system of hormones. For example, one of the classic indicators of being pre-diabetic, is insulin resistance (though it is also a symptom of PCOS). What it means is that your cells have stopped responding to insulin, i.e. they don't believe what their regulators tell them. What could possibly happen when you do this with the hormone that tells your body it is full? Well, for starters, your body learns to believe that it can't trust the regulator to tell it when it's gotten enough nutrition, and will soon enough start ignoring it. > Why this matters: Until now, doctors could only recommend bariatric surgery for people who needed to lose large amounts of > weight. Except... the weight comes right back... as they say right in the beginning of the article. So you would need to be on this drug for life. Except, your body would likely learn to work around it. And... back to square one. And even if your body didn't learn to work around it, how is it reasonable to say people who do not "medically need" to lose weight should be on a drug that gives them the side effects of chemotherapy all their lives? Editor’s note: We carried the item as a breakthrough that helps those who need to lose large amounts of weight for medical reasons. We have since clarified this sentence in the original item: “Why this matters: Until now, doctors could only recommend bariatric surgery for people who need to lose large amounts of weight for medical reasons.”
Full disclosure: ‘’ is not the kind of thing that qualifies as a ‘sanity break’. But we wanted this powerful ad to receive the attention it deserves. Be assured, nothing bad happens in the end. We would not do that to you. (h/t founding member Kruthika Ravi Kumar)
A LIST OF GOOD READS * spent 48 hours on Koo—the atmanirbhar rival to Twitter—and found pretty much what you’d expect: A right-leaning echo chamber. * explores the world of bookstagram—where books are not meant just to be read but admired as objects of art. * Also in : How giant residential schools in the Indian heartland are wiping out Adivasi culture by ‘re-educating’ tribal children. * offers a must-read on the psychological underpinnings of procrastination—and finds that not acting and acting impulsively arise from the exact same cause. * Leander Paes pays heartfelt tribute to his ‘Dronacharya’—his former coach Akhtar Ali in . * And ICYMI: penned a brilliant op-ed calling out the virus of communalism that threatens to infect cricket. * has a fascinating report on America’s top evangelical leader—Chennai-born Ravi Zacharias, who in death has been exposed as a serial sexual predator. * profiles the couple who are fighting for the right to become the first same-sex couple in India to get married. * In a related read: asks why lesbians in recent movies are always shown in a repressed and distant past—their love inevitably doomed? * has a lovely read on the tourist guides in Telangana.
When your vegan friends invite you to dinner… There are ‘trust falls’ and then this… Age is just a number when it’s snowing outside. Belated happy Chinese Lunar New Year!
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