Sergio Parra

California is developing its own generic drug label. This first measure in the country, according to its promoters, will remove the power of large pharmaceutical companies and will reduce prescription drug costs for Californians statewide.

The new law requires the California Health and Human Services Agency to create partnerships designed to increase competition, lower prices, and reduce shortages of generic prescription drugs.

The price problem

The most populous state in the United States has begun to identify certain medications and develop a plan to promote their manufacture and purchase. The agency will look for drugs that can produce the greatest cost savings.

In Xataka Science

The increasing cost of medicines is not only due to the difficulty in developing them

California will shift all Medi-Cal pharmacy services next year from managed care to direct state payment, which will also increase the state's ability to negotiate better drug prices and take power away from drugmakers. The project of law SB-852 It also opens the door for California to make its own generic drugs in the future.

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which represents brand-name drug makers, has taken a neutral position on the bill: It could take years to bring a new California generic product to market and does not appear to be significant competition, yet.

It is unclear what drugs the state would manufacture or purchase, although it would focus on drugs that could produce the greatest cost savings for the state and consumers. But the bill specifically calls for the production of “at least one form of insulin, provided there is a viable avenue to manufacture a more affordable form of insulin at a price that results in savings.” Three major pharmaceutical companies, Eli Lilly and Co., Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, have long controlled the lucrative insulin market in the United States.

In Xataka Science

Why are some drugs legal and others not?

Regardless of whether these policies are correct or not, the truth is that a paradigm shift is urgently needed to avoid too wide inequalities in terms of health. Because the cost of medications It not only depends on the difficulty in developing them.

For example, as noted Javier Padilla in his book Who are we going to let die?, in Baltimore there is a 20.2-year difference in life expectancy between different neighborhoods; In Glasgow there is a 24-year difference between neighborhoods that are only 12 kilometers apart; In Catalonia the richest live 12 years longer than the poorest:

For decades, the explanation for these inequalities has been articulated around the so-called model of social determinants of health, according to which there are structural determinants, such as the economic system, the labor market or welfare policies, which, conditioned due to the existing power relations in society and the place that each person occupies in different variables (social class, gender, age, ethnic group, geographical location), will impact the intermediate determinants (working conditions, income, housing resources, domestic and care work, residential physical environment) and together with individual factors and the action of the health system to determine the health status of people and communities.

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California is developing its own generic drug label and that is good for the consumer

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There are fewer and fewer violent deaths, fewer accidents, fewer food poisonings, longer life expectancy, greater opportunities to connect with each other, less unattainable technological challenges, more empathy and tolerance, more equal rights, more dynamic and participatory democracy, fewer nauseating odors. , better quality food, healthier air, a sustained increase in IQ in all the countries where the mass media has been installed...

Yes, it is true that there is still a lot to improve. It is also true that the optimistic progression has its ups and downs, and also that the global financial crisis has partially slowed all these advances. But if we look back just half a century, we will see that everything previously listed has gotten better. That is the thesis of Perfect future, of Steve Johnson.

Rational optimism

Perfect future, of Steve Johnson, has come to remind us with data, statistics and a focus on how the Internet is turning individuals into a more intelligent and harmonious network or superorganism that, ultimately, things are getting better, and that the future, although distant If it is perfect, it is at least getting closer, step by step, towards perfection.

Perfect future. About Progress in the Network Age (Noema)

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The arguments used by Johnson are hardly questionable, and are also endorsed by many other experts in areas as dissimilar as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, biotechnology or philosophy. But sometimes he seeks more spectacularity than rigor.. This, consequently, carries burdens, but it also produces positive effects, or at least worthy of admiration: that one can go further than anyone else, and provoke reflections that may illuminate ideas that, otherwise, would have taken decades or centuries to arrive. .

Most of the topics about the apocalypse that is looming over the planet are born, mainly, from fear of change, from the lack of perspective and the lack of readings in anthropology. Johnson also includes the birth of the Internet as the definitive technology, the one that will finally propel humanity beyond its individuality. We'll see if that's the case or not.

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Books that inspire us: 'Future Perfect' by Steven Johnson

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The power of placebo (and its counterpart, the nocebo) is so interesting that it can even affect our blood glucose levels if we are convinced that we are consuming a product with a lot of sugar even though it does not have it.

In it next studyFor example, two groups of people consumed drinks with identical ingredients (15 grams of sugar) but with misleading labels: those of one group indicated 31 g of sugar and those of another 0 g. The group that believed they had consumed more sugar experienced an increase in glucose.

Feeding

Specifically, 30 participants (a small sample size, it should be noted) who had type 2 diabetes consumed drinks that had identical ingredients but that displayed misleading nutrition labels.

In Xataka Science

Nocebo, Baskerville, self-induced death and other ways to die when you touch or don't touch

At least three days before participants arrived at the lab, they received a packet of forms and instructions, including a brief survey about their medical conditions, a daily glucose diary, a glucose fluctuation chart, and fasting instructions. To ensure they were familiar with their own blood glucose fluctuations, participants were asked to record their blood glucose levels before and after each meal and to complete a chart of daily blood glucose changes for three days. before the experiment.

Throughout the study, blood glucose levels measured four times before and after consuming the beverages showed that blood glucose levels increased when participants believed the beverage was high in sugar, as shown on tags.

Furthermore, individual eating behaviors and nutritional satisfaction were related to changes in blood glucose levels.

These findings indicate that psychological processes can influence physiological levels, although the role of cognitive and perceptual processes in metabolism is still underestimated. The findings also suggest that psychological intervention programs may be important for diabetes control, beyond current programs in which type 2 diabetes is managed with diet, exercise and medications alone.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that diabetes rates have almost quadrupled worldwide over the last three decades, making diabetes one of the most important international public health challenges, causing approximately 1.6 million deaths in 2015 and a cost of approximately $825 billion per year worldwide.

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The placebo also influences how you process what you eat: glucose rises if you think you ate more sugar

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You don't have to be Einstein offers precisely what it describes in its title: that it is not an essential requirement to be a physics genius to understand some of the most intricate physical processes that surround us, from the behavior of the infinitely small (the table, the chair, the wall in reality are almost totally empty, that they are solid is just an illusion), to the operation of what is considered the most important and complex civil work in the history of humanity, the Large Hadron Collider, a monster almost thirty kilometers in circumference that precisely serves to find out what the infinitely small is made of.

David Bisbal and other jokes

But You don't have to be Einstein It does not stop at this commendable objective: it also aims to make us laugh while reading about all those things that, in the context of high school or school, were a source of eternal yawning.

And it is that Ben Miller, after graduating in Physics from Cambridge, has carved out a career as a comedian. This is the only way to understand that in a physics book, from the first page, in order to explain the Big Bang, David Bisbal is mentioned. And on page three it appears again.

All of this is punctuated by pop culture and with prose so close that at no time does it give us the impression that the book has been written by a physicist (in the academic sense of the term), but by a very close and boastful colleague who tells us the Big Crunch with the same tone with which he would tell us about his last drunk in a seedy bar.

You don't have to be Einstein (Singular Books (Ls))

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To season this sensation, this edition comes laminated, since the book is accompanied by a foldout with drawings, sentences and diagrams that are inspired by the 50s and 60s, when cheap science fiction or straight B series movies were released, and the term “nuclear” sounded like giant monsters with fly eyes.

Furthermore, Miller does his part to forget about dividing people into “literary” or “science” people, betting on an alphanumerism that only the epistemically hungry cultivate at the expense of academic divisions:

I have always liked literature, as well as science, and it has always seemed strange to me that the two disciplines are separated by a strange kind of educational apartheid. If we had to generalize about the current situation of the matter (otherwise, what on earth is a book like this for?), we would say that literature has something aristocratic, liturgical, monarchical, while on the whole the sciences seem to be more egalitarian, more colloquial and democratic. Suddenly we find ourselves on one of the two sides of that cultural dividing line, and basically we see ourselves characterized either as dandies, fanciful and creative, or as unclean, knowledgeable and nerdy people, difficult to deal with, who do not fit in. the society.

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Books that inspire us: 'You don't have to be Einstein' by Ben Miller

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According to A study led by Washington State University (WSU) scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, recently published in the Astrobiology magazine, at least 24 planets outside our solar system They meet some conditions more suitable for life than the Earth itself.

Some of its stars may be even better than our sun, but all of them are very far away: more than 100 light years away.

Superhabitable planets

'Superhabitable' planets are older, slightly larger, slightly warmer and possibly wetter than Earth. Life could also thrive more easily on planets orbiting more slowly changing stars with longer lifespans than our sun: many stars similar to our sun, called G stars, They could run out of fuel before complex life develops.

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but researchers maintain that the sweet spot for life is a planet that is between 5 billion and 8 billion years old.

Press release of @WSUPullman on our “superhabitable world” paper in @Astrobiology_jn: https://t.co/sVbsPTcVlZ. We identify 24 #exoplanets & candidates that could be more suitable for life than Earth. Free PDF: https://t.co/j0dpUmOlEu@extreme_microbe @MPSGoettingen @uniGoettingen pic.twitter.com/kgggjbYKeb

— René Heller (@DrReneHeller) October 5, 2020

Habitability does not mean that these planets definitely have life, simply the conditions that would be conducive to life.

At least two dozen candidates have been located. All in all, none of them meet all the criteria for superhabitable planets, only one has four of the critical characteristics. In addition, it is far to travel there, but we could improve our technology to study them better, as explained Schulze-Makuch, professor at WSU and the Technical University of Berlin:

With the arrival of the next space telescopes, we will obtain more information, so it is important to select some targets. We need to focus on certain planets that have the most promising conditions for complex life. However, we have to be careful not to get stuck looking for a second Earth because there could be planets that could be more suitable for life than ours.

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There are at least 24 planets more habitable than Earth but they are more than 100 light years away

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A forensic anthropologist investigation team Pier Paolo Petrone, director of the Laboratory of Human Osteobiology and Forensic Anthropology of the Departmental Section of Forensic Medicine of the University of Naples Federico II has made an extraordinary discovery.

Nothing less than vitrified neurons of a victim of Vesuvius in 79 AD that buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and the entire surrounding area in ash.

Consequences of the eruption

Founded in the 7th century BC. C., The city of Pompeii was well known because the patricians had it as a vacation spot. One peaceful afternoon like any other, August 24, 79, a distant thunderclap was heard and the ground shook. Vesuvius was beginning to spit out materials with a temperature of more than a thousand degrees Celsius. It is estimated that the eruption was about five hundred times greater than that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The lava reached the city at a speed of 110 kilometers per hour, with no possibility of escape, and plunged Pompeii into forgotten for centuries. It was a tragedy, but, on the other hand, that process preserved the city like an insect encased in amber.

Therefore, thanks to that eruption, using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and advanced image processing tools, Petrone, together with a team of archaeologists, geologists, biologists, forensics, neurogeneticists and mathematicians, was able for the first time to show the presence of neuronal cells in the vitrified remains of the brain and spinal cord, which discovered during recent investigations at the archaeological site of Herculaneum.

The extraordinary discovery of perfectly preserved neuronal structures was made possible by converting human tissue to glass. The unique vitrification process induced by the eruption froze the cellular structures of this victim's central nervous system, keeping them intact to this day.

The study also analyzed the data of some proteins already identified by the researchers in a work published last January by the New England Journal of Medicine.

That eruption, curiously, has not only preserved neurons, but also swear words: the first of which we have evidence in history, as I explain in the book Mecagüen! Swearing, insults and blasphemies.

Mecagüen! Swearing, insults and blasphemies (Vox – Spanish Language)

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Thanks to the Vesuvius tragedy, thousands of graffiti have been preserved and a significant percentage of them are obscene. In a public latrine,
for example, it reads "Encolpius hic bene cacavit" ('Encolpius shit well here'). At the entrance of a bakery, a relief of a penis was found accompanied by the following message: "Hic habitat congratulations" ('happiness is found here'). comments and recommendations ("Sucesa, the slave, has a good fuck"), leaving aside the rich synonymy to refer to prostitutes, such as meretrix ('whore'), concubine ('woman with whom one shares another bed or cubicle, without being married') or culiola (from the Latin culus, 'ass', to specify that it offered anal intercourse).

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These human neurons found are 2,000 years old and are vitrified because they are from a victim of the Vesuvius eruption

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To begin to prepare the ground for what is coming to us (unstoppable and imminent), that is, to begin to assimilate the social, cultural and technological implications of Data mining (like putting correlation above causation), here comes this book: Big Data, written in four hands by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Professor of Internet Regulation and Management at the Internet Institute of Oxford University) and Kenneth Cukier (data editor of The Economist magazine).

Data, data and data

We are, therefore, faced with a text that, despite being a bit redundant or digressive, In general terms it should be called amazing. After reading it, I'm not exaggerating, I felt a little like Neo in the movie Matrix, observing everything as numbers and symbols instead of atoms. Because Big data invites you not only to record reality in a different way, but also to do so at a higher resolution than that obtained with eyes, telescopes, microscopes and even many scientific experiments.

Knowing so much, however, has its price: not knowing how we know it or how exactly the discovered phenomenon occurs. We simply know it, diluting the causal link in favor of the correlational link. The paradigm of this change is Google Flu Trends, which allows us to know before any other organization where a flu epidemic will occur simply by exploring where flu symptoms are searched through Google. Patterns and correlations over causalities. Scientific trials that pursue causality are expensive and complex, so a great alternative to them could be big data.

Big Data – The Revolution of Massive Data (Noema)

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That is just the tip of the iceberg of all the information that the exploration of massive data will offer us, and also the datafication of reality, that is, the transformation of everyday objects into data that adds to the ocean of massive data that already exists. It houses the Internet as a result of our digital footprints through social networks or smartphones.

For example, incorporating sensors into all the objects we buy to know when they are purchased, how they are moved, when they are consumed, etc. Imagine a car seat equipped this way: Calculating the way you put your butt in the seat to prevent your car from being stolen.

All of this could seem like an Orwellian nightmare in which the great eye will strip us of intimacy. But that is another issue that we will have to manage later.. Furthermore, the true value of big data is not in analyzing a user individually, but rather in exploring a collectivity. Such an abundance of data overshadows the individual. It doesn't matter if you like to consume porn, but rather which neighborhood consumes the most porn and what type.

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Books that inspire us: 'Big data: the massive data revolution', by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

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One of the most evident gender gaps in the educational field is that there are boys and girls who drop out of school at the age of 16, and that there are more girls studying at universities, just as you suggest this analysis carried out in the British educational system. The gap, furthermore, has widened every year for a decade until 2018. And as we already saw, the treatment of girls is more condescending, which contributes to the gap.

As a result, children from disadvantaged backgrounds face even greater challenges, and White children from disadvantaged backgrounds have particularly difficult times.

Special treatment by gender

Studies in the United Kingdom and throughout the Western world have repeatedly shown that the education system harms children. Specifically, teachers they seem to have a bias when it comes to protecting girls from their failures but harming boys because of the same difficulties.

That is to say, in order to combat the educational bias that existed around women, the opposite bias is being fed.

This discrimination is also seen in the same behavior of children, since the studies that have analyzed this particularity suggest that teachers are also judging children's behavior with more severe standards than those of girls.

This other one study, for example, suggests that schools respond more harshly to children's transgressions and that difference also contributed to men not getting as far in their education… Even when girls and boys had the same behavioral problems, girls were more likely to finish high school and college.

In Xataka Science

Women outperform men on math tests (only if the teacher knows he is evaluating a woman)

This another study notes that naughty children were increasingly viewed negatively as rebellious and intrusive and were more easily labeled as the “class clown” by their teachers. The data also revealed that playful children were stigmatized by their teachers, and that this was communicated through verbal and non-verbal reprimands. And that the classmates assimilated this message. In contrast, girls' pranks were not a consideration in teacher or peer grades in any grade, nor did their classroom behaviors show significant variation.

another study suggests that, in all subjects, children are represented in grade distributions below what your test scores would predict.

A OECD report on gender in education, in more than 60 countries, also found that girls receive higher grades compared to boys of the same ability.

Educational gender gap

In 2015, returning to the United Kingdom, only 9% of male students progressed directly from the education system to university, a lower higher education participation rate than any other ethnicity/gender combination, and three times lower than the 28% national average.

The gap widened every year for a decade until 2018, when girls' lead narrowed slightly.

Looking beyond school to higher education, female students now outnumber men. In 2017, UK universities awarded places to 136,000 UK-domiciled female applicants and only 105,000 male applicants.

In Xataka Science

Meteorological sexism: hurricanes named after women kill more because we believe they are less dangerous

In short, talking about sexual brains, and any bias, It actually introduces us into an inextricable jungle, where one sex is biased for some reasons and the other for others.

The same thing happens if we analyze ethnicity, beauty, social class or any other parameter. Because, even if unconsciously, we are all crossed by racist, classist, sexist, tribalist biases... and it is inevitable, to a greater or lesser extent, as you can see in the following video:

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Gender gap: only 9% of white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds reach university in the UK

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In this recent study, women outperform men in reading/writing whether the tests were given blindly or not (i.e., the examiner knew the sex of the examinee or not).

However, in mathematics, men outperformed women when the exams were blind, but women to men when they did not go blindly.

Sexual bias

The study's findings suggest that examiners (secondary school teachers) may be biased in favor of women in their mathematics evaluations.

On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in mathematics are more likely to select a science major in high school. Without teachers' bias in favor of girls, the gender gap when choosing a science career would be 12.5% greater in favor of boys.

Similarly, in 2017, social researchers William von Hippel and David Buss sent a survey by email to a sample of psychologists, asking their beliefs about a variety of evolutionary statements and findings. These psychologists were more likely to endorse a sex difference in favor of women than in favor of men. Specifically, they were more likely to agree that women could have evolved to be more verbally talented than men than that men could have evolved to be more mathematically talented than women.

In Xataka Science

Women prefer protective men even though they suppose there is a certain sexism in it

It is not the only observed example of bias towards the female sex. For example, another newly published study in it British Journal of Psychology directed by Steve Stewart-Williams found that people respond to research on sex differences in ways that favor women.

In the study, participants were asked to read a popular science article that was experimentally manipulated to suggest that men or women have a more desirable quality (for example, men/women are better at drawing or men/women lie less often). Participants evaluated pro-women's research more favorably than pro-men's research. Specifically, participants found pro-women's research to be more important, more plausible, and more well-conducted, and they found pro-men's research to be more offensive, more harmful, more disturbing, and inherently sexist.

In Xataka Science

Sexist jokes and humor: how each sex interprets them

This pro-female bias was observed between male and female participants.

It has also been discovered that people have a greater desire to censor science that disfavors women.

Ironically, these pro-feminine preferences may explain why dominant narratives focus so assiduously on the possibility of anti-female prejudice: Society cares more about the well-being of women than men and is therefore less tolerant of disparities that disadvantage them. A series of studies directed by Katharina Block found that people care more about female underrepresentation in careers than they care about male underrepresentation.

Perhaps this bias has something to do with the fact that men tend to be incarcerated more often than women and also receive higher sentences, or that they are shot by police is also higher, or that they are victims of violent crimes, or that are homeless, or who commit suicide or die at work.

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Women outperform men on math tests (only if the teacher knows he is evaluating a woman)

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Sparkling water was invented by an English clergyman and chemist named Joseph Priestley. For that reason alone, it is worth reading this biography of the 18th century English scientist written by Steve Johnson: The invention of air.

Priestley discovered, among other things, oxygen.

Oxygen

The Priestley biography It is only the excuse to superficially touch on the fact that ideas do not flourish in geniuses, but in ecosystems, because Priestley exemplifies, as well as other scientists who revolutionized his time, that the idea of individual, excluded and special genius is a romantic idea that has little support. in the light of the history of ideas.

The invention of air: A discovery, a genius and his time (Noema)

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Great advances have occurred thanks to epistolary communication, to cafeterias where groups of interdisciplinary intellectuals met, to institutions that forced their members to communicate with each other. And all of this has been multiplied by a million thanks to the best tool for connecting people and ideas: the Internet.

Still, the excuse for Priestley's biography contains enough pages and interesting ideas to be worth reading on its own. The invention of air. How, in addition to this vital journey, We also find an outline of these revolutionary ideas about how cultural paradigm shifts work. (or mental), this work by Steven Johnson, once again, is brilliant no matter where you look at it (and it has several facets to look at, like good diamonds).

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Books that inspire us: 'The Invention of Air' by Steven Johnson

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