Software Developer, Performer
Mom and Dad, I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but–what about throwing a couple of these in your backyard, and Dad can live on the grounds, closer to his sisters, and also get rental income from property he’s currently staying at?
Love you!
For a small family-run property management business, going the DIY route to manage properties digitally can be a game-changer. Instead of relying on expensive third-party apps or property management services that often eat into profits, building a tailored app lets you retain control, save money, and streamline day-to-day operations. With an app designed specifically for your needs, you can simplify tasks like advertising properties, accepting applications, collecting payments, and managing maintenance requests—all from one place. In the short term, this approach reduces operating costs and improves communication with tenants. In the long term, it lays the groundwork for scaling your business, even allowing you to expand your services to the broader Chaldean landlord community by offering a customizable app in Syriac. This creates an opportunity to grow revenue while strengthening ties within the Chaldean-American hubs of Detroit, Chicago, and San Diego.
By breaking the project into these manageable stages, you can prioritize the most immediate needs while building a system that grows with your business. Ultimately, this not only reduces reliance on third-party services but also creates a sustainable tool that adds value to your business and community.
Here’s how the various entities (tenant, property manager, property, maintenance staff, etc.) interact:
Using this breakdown, we can design the WordPress site to manage these relationships and interactions:
These are placeholder graphics generated (hence the misspelling), with a Chaldrean themes, from ChatGPT:
Here’s a graphic design concept that incorporates traditional Chaldean themes and colors, blending cultural richness with a modern, professional aesthetic suitable for your property management project.
Mom, this video was interesting: apparently your convection oven is basically an air fryer, minus a basket! So, if you use a basket when you cook things, you might get very similar results to as using an air fryer–so maybe try different temperature combos with convection mode!
Love you!
Mom, I’m not recommending you watch the whole video, but he does build a heated-floor doghouse for rough winters, and you could do something like this for an outdoor dog (or two, or three) that permanently stay outside, and have automatic feeders/water, and do not come in, but stay outside to play and guard the house against intruders.
It makes invaders that less likely given additional hurdles/noise to overcome, and multiple animals can watch each others’ backs. It could also be attached (and separated) from a protected chicken coop, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now.
Love you!
Gardening Help Wanted – Perfect for a Motivated Teen
Looking for a reliable, self-motivated teenager who enjoys working independently and takes pride in getting things done. This is an opportunity to earn trust, earn cash, and make a difference by helping me meet my goals efficiently.
What we’re looking for:
What we offer:
While I prefer to meet your parents, this is entirely your discretion. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and have fun while making money, I’d love to hear from you!
Mom and Dad, this is the result of a back-and-forth with ChatGPT, just to give you an idea of what kind of ad you can write to find someone local who can help you. You might even employ a whole squad of people, so having on-boarding and off-boarding materials ready and organized can really streamline things, in my opinion (IMO). Love you!
Simplified Overview: “How to Save Money by Taking Control of Property Management”
Headline for a Broader Audience:
Are you tired of losing money on property management?
Small landlords are going out of business because of rising costs from apps and third-party managers. But here’s how you can lower costs and take back control with your own in-house system.
Overview:
Commercial property management apps charge per unit and siphon data to train their AI models. Third-party managers take a big cut to handle your tenants, leaving you with little control over your data or your costs. With an in-house property management system, you can:
Solution Summary:
We propose developing a simple, in-house system using Kotlin (backend), Vue.js (frontend), and MongoDB or PostgreSQL for database management. The system would allow tenants to pay rent, submit maintenance requests, and communicate directly, while integrating basic AI to automate routine tasks like reminders, maintenance scheduling, and tenant inquiries.
1. Why In-House Property Management Makes Sense
| Option | Cost | Privacy | Customization | AI Utilization |
| AppFolio (or similar) | $1–$3/unit/month + fees | Limited | None | Uses your data for their AI |
| Third-Party Property Managers | 8–12% of rental income | N/A | None | None |
| In-House Custom Solution | Initial development + hosting (~$1,500/year) | Full control | Fully customizable | Private AI model for your use |
2. System Features
3. Cost Breakdown
Initial Development Costs:
| Component | Description | Cost |
| Backend (Kotlin) | Server-side logic for tenant management | $3,000–$5,000 |
| Frontend (Vue.js) | Tenant and landlord user interfaces | $2,000–$4,000 |
| Database (MongoDB) | Tenant records, maintenance logs, etc. | Free–$50/month (hosted) |
| AI Integration | Custom models or open-source tools | $1,500–$3,000 |
Ongoing Costs:
| Expense | Description | Annual Cost |
| Hosting (AWS/Google) | Cloud servers for web app | $200–$1,200 |
| Maintenance | Bug fixes, updates, feature improvements | $1,000–$2,000 |
| Electricity/Hardware | If self-hosted, additional infrastructure costs | ~$500 |
4. Outsourcing Development
To reduce upfront costs and development time, you can hire developers on a per-component basis.
| Component | Who to Hire | Cost Range |
| Backend Development | Freelance Kotlin developers | $25–$50/hour |
| Frontend Development | Vue.js developers | $20–$40/hour |
| AI Integration | Machine learning specialists | $50–$100/hour |
Steps for Outsourcing:
5. Cloud vs. Self-Hosting: Pros and Cons
| Hosting Option | Pros | Cons |
| Cloud (e.g., AWS) | Scalable, no hardware needed | Recurring costs |
| Self-Hosting | Full control, no ongoing fees | Requires setup, maintenance |
Conclusion:
Building your own property management system is a cost-effective and scalable solution for small landlords. Not only does it save money, but it also ensures your data remains private and works for you, not for third-party providers. By integrating AI and custom tools, you can streamline operations while enhancing tenant satisfaction.
If you’d like to explore this further, we can provide a detailed implementation plan or assist in connecting with developers.
This was from a back-and-forth I had with ChatGPT
TV software is getting loaded with ads, changing what it means to own a TV set.
Scharon Harding | Ars Technica | Aug 19, 2024 4:00 AM
Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.
Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.
How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?
Success in the TV industry used to mean selling as many TV sets as possible. But with smart TVs becoming mainstream and hardware margins falling, OEMs have sought new ways to make money. TV OS providers can access a more frequent revenue source at higher margins, which has led to a viewing experience loaded with ads. They can be served from the moment you pick up your remote, which may feature streaming service ads in the form of physical buttons.
Some TV brands already prioritize data collection and the ability to sell ads, and most are trying to boost their appeal to advertisers. Smart TV OSes have become the cash cow of the TV business, with providers generating revenue by licensing the software and through revenue sharing of in-app purchases and subscriptions.
A huge part of TV OS revenue comes from selling ads, including on the OS’s home screen and screensaver and through free, ad-supported streaming television channels. GroupM, the world’s largest media investment company, reported that smart TV ad revenue grew 20 percent from 2023 to 2024 and will grow another 20 percent to reach $46 billion next year. In September 2023, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, reported that “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Automatic content recognition (ACR) tech is at the heart of the smart TV ads business. Most TV brands say users can opt out of ACR, but we’ve already seen Vizio take advantage of the feature without user permission. ACR is also sometimes turned on by default, and the off switch is often buried in a settings menu. Including ACR on a TV at all says a lot about a TV maker’s priorities. Most users have almost nothing to gain from ACR and face privacy concerns by sharing information—sometimes in real time—about what they do with their TVs.
At this point, consumers have come to expect ads and tracking on budget TVs from names like Vizio or Roku. But the biggest companies in TV are working on turning their sets into data-prolific billboards, too.
In recent years, we’ve seen companies like LG and Samsung increase their TVs’ ad capabilities as advertisers become more eager to access tracking data from TVs.
LG, for example, started sharing data gathered from its TVs with Nielsen, giving the data and market measurement firm “the largest ACR data footprint in the industry,” according to an October announcement. The deal gives Nielsen streaming and linear TV data from LG TVs and provides firms buying ads on LG TVs with “‘Always On’ streaming measurement and big data from LG Ad Solutions” via Nielsen’s ONE Ads dashboard.
LG, which recently unveiled a goal of evolving its hardware business into an ad-pushing “media and entertainment platform company,” expects there to be 300 million webOS TVs in homes by 2026. That represents a huge data-collection and recurring-revenue opportunity. In September, LG said it would invest 1 trillion KRW (about $737.7 million) through 2028 into its “webOS business,” or the business behind its smart TV OS. The company said updates will include improving webOS’s UI, AI-based recommendations, and search capabilities.
Similarly, Samsung recently updated its ACR tech to track exposure to ads viewed on its TVs via streaming services instead of just from linear TV. Samsung is also trying to make its ACR data more valuable for ad targeting, including through a deal signed in December with analytics firm Experian.
Representatives for LG and Samsung declined to comment to Ars Technica about how much of their respective company’s business is ad sales. But the deals they’ve made with data-collection firms signal big interest in turning their products into lucrative smart TVs. In this case, “smart” isn’t about Internet connectivity but rather how well the TV understands its viewer.
Budget TVs are the leaders in this trend, often offsetting cheap hardware prices with ads and data collection. Some people seek out the latest display developments, but many consumers merely want the cheapest TV they can buy within a certain size range. Various brands lure budget shoppers with low prices but then force them to pay through heightened ad exposure—either immediately or after a future software update. In recent months, we’ve seen budget brands test users’ limits when it comes to ads, and this is all happening amid a global shift to streaming services that are also increasingly ad-driven.
Roku OS is constantly trying to fit more ads with stronger targeting into its UI, whether that’s on the menu, on screensavers, or delivered via Roku TV channels. Earlier this year, Roku OS introduced home-screen video ads.
Roku has also tested a feature that “would force viewers to sit through effectively a mid-roll ad when clicking from the Roku City screensaver to return to home screen,” Digiday reported in May. Additionally, Roku filed a patent for showing ads over anything you plug into your TV. It’s possible that neither capability will roll out, but interest in these sorts of developments illustrates the value Roku puts in advancing its ad services.
Moving off an Android fork, Amazon reportedly started deploying its own OS to run on its TVs in November. Amazon Fire TV users are subject to full-screen video ads, and OS ownership gives Amazon more control and greater potential for earnings from advertising services. Amazon’s advertising business was thought to be its most profitable in 2020, and Fire OS is becoming a bigger part of that.
With software updates easily forcing new ad capabilities into already-owned TVs, it’s likely that this strategy will intensify in the near term as OS providers try to find more ways to support new types of ads. In the long term, with price often cited as a top factor in TV purchasing decisions, pricier brands may potentially cave and adopt more ad-centric tactics. Such moves could help those brands offer prices that are more competitive with budget options.
Even before smart TVs, watching TV typically meant watching plenty of commercials and product placements. But Internet connectivity, advanced tracking techniques, and interest in TV data collection from megastores are pushing TVs to evolve from digital billboards to digital stores.
People usually only buy a new TV every few years or longer, which has driven OEMs to the ongoing revenue potential tied to data and ads. For users, this means that TV watching could become much more commercialized as the industry seeks new ways to use TVs for ad tracking. The current focus is on developing “shoppable ads,” or ads that let people make purchases while using their TV.
A depiction of a shoppable ad for Walmart on a Roku TV.Roku
Checking out on the Roku TV. Roku
Streaming services like Hulu already show shoppable ads, and TV OS operators are exploring ways to capitalize on the trend. Amazon and Roku TVs, for example, have shoppable ads on screensavers. Other brands, like Samsung, are building out their ability to deliver shoppable ads on TVs. Relevant players are exploring formats like QR codes, games, and ads you can navigate with your remote. And TV brands are increasingly working with big stores like Walgreens and Best Buy to more extensively target advertising.
Omdia’s Horner tells me that shoppable ads are the “next wave of smart TV advertising.” Amazon and Walmart are expected to lead the way as huge retailers that can incorporate the purchase histories they have from their stores with viewer data. According to trade publication Retail TouchPoints, Walgreens Senior Director of Client Success Katie Vogt explained the appeal at a June conference:
The beauty of reaching a specific Walgreens shopper is that [brands can] tie back the measurement and understand whether the shoppable [connected TV] ad actually drove those customers to go into a store or go online to make a purchase.
Walmart’s proposed Vizio acquisition is an obvious example of how eager retailers and advertisers are to access data collected from TVs. Through its Platform+ business unit, Vizio was one of the first OEMs to focus more business on ad sales and tracking than hardware.
Walmart is willing to pay $2.3 billion for Vizio to help reach its dream of being a top-10 advertising business. Soon, using a Vizio TV could mean fueling Walmart’s ability to sell and track ads and make retail sales.
Stakeholders argue that shoppable ads provide a service to viewers, but the obvious winner is advertisers. As Tony Marlow, CMO of LG Ad Solutions, wrote earlier this year, without shoppable TV ads, “marketers have been unable to gain a truly holistic view of the entire purchase journey.”
Going even further, newcomer Displace is offering a peek at an aggressive TV-as-a-store future. The company says its sets, which will ship at the end of the year, will be able to use proprietary gesture tech to tell if someone is raising a hand. The TV will pause the content and use computer vision to look for stuff the viewer can buy. Viewers can place items they want in a shopping cart and pay for them using the TV’s integrated NFC reader.
As a 2-year-old startup offering a niche product, Displace likely won’t have the same impact on the industry as the likes of Amazon or Vizio. But Displace’s TVs are indicative of an industry desperate for new ways to make money and eager to be an integral part of e-commerce.
Another niche upcoming TV set is the Telly. The company’s TVs are free but allow the startup to track their owners, and they have a secondary screen for showing ads, including when the TV is off (the secondary screen can also display information like the weather or sports scores). Telly’s prospective owners must answer a long series of questions, like if they’re registered to vote and who their cell phone provider is, with the data used for ad targeting. Telly has discussed further potential ways to commercialize TV watching, such as letting people earn gift cards by filling out surveys (also to help targeted advertising) on the TV.
Telly takes tracking to a new level, especially since owners can’t opt out—blocking tracking may result in an owner being charged for the TV. The company’s viewing and activity data policy says its TVs can track a myriad of things, including settings, search queries, apps usage, and how many people are within 25 feet of the TV. Telly claims that advertisers won’t see personal information when viewing data accumulated from its TVs.
In theory, Telly could help get a new 55-inch 4K TV in the hands of people who wouldn’t be able to afford one otherwise. But at least in this early stage, the company isn’t primarily benefitting low-income households. According to a May Video Week report, Telly’s first 400,000 users have “higher incomes than the US average,” which seems like a draw for advertisers.
Telly’s business model is an outlier, but its CEO thinks the company is ahead of the curve, and advertisers are jumping aboard. Still, Omdia’s Horner believes Telly’s strategy won’t become mainstream. “Amazon and Walmart are the players to watch for trends in smart TV ads and e-commerce. Niche players giving away free TVs in exchange for extreme data collection will not move the market,” he said.
As the TV industry has grown its ad capabilities over the years, shoppers have nearly lost the option to buy a new TV that doesn’t connect to the Internet. Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described the trend of building surveillance into all new smart TVs as “incredibly invasive and little understood.”
In an email to Ars, he added, “Nobody wants a snooping and snitching television, but lately that’s all you can buy.”
Those who want a TV without an Internet connection have few options. You can try to prevent a smart TV from tracking you, but again, turning off ACR and other tracking techniques can be challenging. Some TVs remove basic features like Internet connectivity if you don’t let them track you.
Companies like Telly open a window for other brands to consider more intrusive tracking and ads. Consider a world in which you have to say a brand name at your TV to skip ads, as demonstrated by a Sony patent:
It’s likely that Sony won’t make anything of this patent, as is typically the case with patents from research and development teams. But here again, we see how common it is for tech brands that sell TVs to experiment with ad formats and delivery.
Some things TVs already track would have sounded extreme before 2011, when ACR started taking off. For example, using ACR, TVs can reveal to OS providers—and therefore advertisers—the shows watched on the set and whether that content was streamed or watched via an antenna or cable. ACR can even identify DVDs watched on a TV. Per Ad Exchanger: “ACR ingests pixels on-screen to assign a value to each frame,” which is like an “unknown fingerprint.” The OS sends these fingerprints “to a database that logs content available on TV to find a known match and identify the content. Once ACR identifies the show, it can tie that viewing data to a specific household, such as a given household watching The Big Bang Theory at 9 pm.” Advertisers can combine this information with other tactics, like advertisement identification, which assigns a unique ID to ads, to further track TV usage.
But there are plenty who don’t know the extent to which their TVs are monitoring them. Complexity in understanding and controlling TV tracking is especially relevant as more sets incorporate microphones and cameras. Terms of service are often complex, wordy agreements buried in elusive TV settings or online, and companies have ways of strong-arming TV owners into accepting such agreements. Further complicating matters, it’s possible for consumers to disable tracking from the TV OS provider, such as Google, but still be tracked by the TV OEM, like TCL.
With TV sales declining and many shoppers prioritizing pricing, smart TV players will continue developing ads that are harder to avoid and better at targeting. Interestingly, Horner told Ars that smart TV advertising revenue exceeding smart TV hardware revenue (as well as ad sale margins surpassing those of hardware) is a US-only trend, albeit one that shows no signs of abating. OLED has become a mainstay in the TV marketplace, and until the next big display technology becomes readily available, OEMs are scrambling to make money in a saturated TV market filled with budget options. Selling ads is an obvious way to bridge the gap between today and The Next Big Thing in TVs.
Indeed, with companies like Samsung and LG making big deals with analytics firms and other brands building their businesses around ads, the industry’s obsession with ads will only intensify. As we’ve seen before with TV commercials, which have gotten more frequent over time, once the ad genie is out of the bottle, it tends to grow, not go back inside.
One side effect we’re already seeing, Horner notes, is “a proliferation of more TV operating systems.” While choice is often a good thing for consumers, it’s important to consider if new options from companies like Amazon, Comcast, and TiVo actually do anything to notably improve the smart TV experience for owners.
And OS operators’ financial success is tied to the number of hours users spend viewing something on the OS. Roku’s senior director of ad innovation, Peter Hamilton, told Digiday in May that his team works closely with Roku’s consumer team, “whose goal is to drive total viewing hours.” Many smart TV OS operators are therefore focused on making it easier for users to navigate content via AI.
Per a blog post from Omdia’s Horner:
With advertising, it’s not just the number of TVs shipped but rather the number of hours of content consumed that determines the winner. In this respect, the TV itself matters as well. Only the set in the main TV viewing room will get enough engagement to justify selling at close-to-manufacturing costs. The smaller sets in bedrooms and the kitchen, for example, will not get enough engagement to be profitable from advertising alone. We expect that in the US, TVs that are 50 inches and above and in the main viewing area of the house will be the primary targets for advertising engagement.
Vendors I spoke with all said that ad interests wouldn’t hinder R&D around more traditional features. Having TVs with desirable features like strong image or sound quality remains relevant for pushing ads. But it’s easy to imagine TV brands growing complacent about improving more traditional TV capabilities, too.
For most people who want fewer ads on their TVs, the only option is to vote with your dollar. There’s also a growing pool of technically savvy folks sharing hacks for disconnecting smart TVs from the web or even DIYing your own smart TV.
People who ask me for recommendations for cheap TVs used to receive lectures about factors like viewing angles and sound quality. Now, I talk about privacy, tracking concerns, and the software behind the hardware.
No matter how you slice it, though, the ad-ificaiton of TVs is here to stay.
Twenty-four brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight
Douglas Main | the Guardian | Wed 21 Aug 2024 09.00 EDT
A growing body of scientific evidence shows that microplastics are accumulating in critical human organs, including the brain, leading researchers to call for more urgent actions to rein in plastic pollution.
Studies have detected tiny shards and specks of plastics in human lungs, placentas, reproductive organs, livers, kidneys, knee and elbow joints, blood vessels and bone marrow.
Given the research findings, “it is now imperative to declare a global emergency” to deal with plastic pollution, said Sedat Gündoğdu, who studies microplastics at Cukurova University in Turkey.
Humans are exposed to microplastics – defined as fragments smaller than 5mm in diameter – and the chemicals used to make plastics from widespread plastic pollution in air, water and even food.
There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with
Matthew Campen, University of New Mexico
The health hazards of microplastics within the human body are not yet well-known. Recent studies are just beginning to suggest they could increase the risk of various conditions such as oxidative stress, which can lead to cell damage and inflammation, as well as cardiovascular disease.
Animal studies have also linked microplastics to fertility issues, various cancers, a disrupted endocrine and immune system, and impaired learning and memory.
There are currently no governmental standards for plastic particles in food or water in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency is working on crafting guidelines for measuring them, and has been giving out grants since 2018 to develop new ways to quickly detect and quantify them.
Finding microplastics in more and more human organs “raises a lot of concerns”, given what we know about health effects in animals, studies of human cells in the lab, and emerging epidemiological studies, said Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “It’s scary, I’d say.”
In one of the latest studies to emerge – a pre-print paper still undergoing peer review that is posted online by the National Institutes of Health – researchers found a particularly concerning accumulation of microplastics in brain samples.
An examination of the livers, kidneys and brains of autopsied bodies found that all contained microplastics, but the 91 brain samples contained on average about 10 to 20 times more than the other organs. The results came as a shock, according to the study’s lead author Matthew Campen, a toxicologist and professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico.
The researchers found that 24 of the brain samples, which were collected in early 2024, measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight.
“It’s pretty alarming,” Campen said. “There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with.”
The study describes the brain as “one of the most plastic-polluted tissues yet sampled”.
The pre-print brain study led by Campen also hinted at a concerning link. In the study, researchers looked at 12 brain samples from people who had died with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. These brains contained up to 10 times more plastic by weight than healthy samples. (The latest version of Campen’s study, which contains these findings, was not yet posted online when this story was published.)
“I don’t know how much more plastic our brain can stuff in without it causing some problems,” Campen said.
The paper also found the quantity of microplastics in brain samples from 2024 was about 50% higher from the total in samples that date to 2016, suggesting the concentration of microplastics found in human brains is rising at a similar rate to that found in the environment. Most of the organs came from the office of the medical investigator in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which investigates untimely or violent deaths.
“You can draw a line – it’s increasing over time. It’s consistent with what you’re seeing in the environment,” Campen said.
Many other papers have found microplastics in the brains of other animal species, so it’s not entirely surprising the same could be true for humans, said Almroth of the University of Gothenburg, who was not involved in the paper.
When it comes to these insidious particles, “the blood-brain barrier is not as protective as we’d like to think”, Almroth said, referring to the series of membranes that keep many chemicals and pathogens from reaching the central nervous system.
Adding to the concerns about accumulation in the human body, the Journal of Hazardous Materials published a study last month that found microplastics in all 16 samples of bone marrow examined, the first paper of its kind. All the samples contained polystyrene, used to make packing for peanuts and electronics, and almost all contained polyethylene, used in clear food wrap, detergent bottles and other common household products.
Another recent paper looking at 45 patients undergoing hip or knee surgery in Beijing, China, found microplastics in the membranous lining of every single hip or knee joint examined.
A study published on 15 May in the journal Toxicological Sciences found microplastics in all 23 human and 47 canine testicles studied, finding that samples from people had a nearly threefold greater concentration than those from dogs. A higher quantity of certain types of plastic particles – including polyethylene, the main component of plastic water bottles – correlated with lower testicular weights in dogs.
Another paper, which appeared on 19 June in the International Journal of Impotence Research, detected plastic particles in the penises of four out of five men getting penile implants to treat erectile dysfunction.
“The potential health effects are concerning, especially considering the unknown long-term consequences of microplastics accumulating in sensitive tissues like the reproductive organs,” said Ranjith Ramasamy, the study’s lead author and a medical researcher and urologist at the University of Miami.
Meanwhile, a Chinese group published a study in May showing small quantities of microplastics in the semen of all 40 participants. An Italian paper from a few months prior reported similar results.
A handful of studies have also now found contamination in human placentas. A study that appeared in the May issue of Toxicological Sciences reported finding micro- and nanoplastics in all 62 placental samples, though the concentration ranged widely.
In Italy, researchers followed 312 patients who had fatty deposits, or plaques, removed from their carotid artery. Almost six in 10 had microplastics, and these people fared worse than those who did not: Over the next 34 months, they were 2.1 times as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke, or die.
The Food and Drug Administration says in a statement on its website that “current scientific evidence does not demonstrate that levels of microplastics or nanoplastics detected in foods pose a risk to human health.”
Still, researchers say that individuals should try to reduce their exposure by avoiding the use of plastic in preparing food, especially when microwaving; drinking tap water instead of bottled water; and trying to prevent the accumulation of dust, which is contaminated with plastics. Some researchers advise eating less meat, especially processed products.
Leonardo Trasande, a medical researcher at New York University, said much remains unknown about the impacts of microplastic accumulation in humans. The negative health impacts of chemicals used in plastics, such as phthalates, are better established, though, he said. A study he co-authored found exposure to phthalates had increased the risk of cardiovascular disease and death in the United States, causing $39bn or more in lost productivity per year.
Microplastic particles can be contaminated with and carry such chemicals into the body. “The micro- and nanoplastics may be effective delivery systems for toxic chemicals,” Trasande said.
The American Chemistry Council, which represents plastic and chemical manufacturers, did not directly respond to questions about the recent studies finding microplastics in human organs. Kimberly Wise White, a vice-president with the group, noted that “the global plastics industry is dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of microplastics”.
The United Nations Environment Assembly agreed two years ago to begin working toward a global treaty to end plastic pollution, a process that is ongoing.
Several news reports in the last week suggest that the Biden administration has signaled that the US delegation involved in the discussions will support measures to reduce global production of plastics, which researchers say is critical to getting a handle on the problem.
“There’s nowhere left untouched from the deep sea to the atmosphere to the human brain,” Almroth said.
This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group
ICS/OTKansas Water Facility Switches to Manual Operations Following Cyberattack
Ransomware possibly involved in a cybersecurity incident at Arkansas City’s water treatment facility.
ByIonut Arghire | Security Week | September 24, 2024
Arkansas City, a small city in Kansas, says its water treatment facility was forced to switch to manual operations while a cybersecurity incident is being resolved.
The incident, described by local media as a cyberattack, was discovered on the morning of September 22 and led to precautionary measures being taken “to ensure plant operations remained secure”, the city announced in an incident notice.
According to city manager Randy Frazer, the water supply has not been affected and the incident has not caused disruption to service.
“Despite the incident, the water supply remains completely safe, and there has been no disruption to service. Out of caution, the water treatment facility has switched to manual operations while the situation is being resolved,” Frazer said.
He also noted that the city has full control of the situation and reassured residents that the drinking water is safe.
Arkansas City says it has notified the relevant authorities of the incident and that they are working with cybersecurity experts to address the issue and return the facility’s operations to normal.
“Enhanced security measures are currently in place to protect the water supply, and no changes to water quality or service are expected for residents,” the city said.
While the city’s notification does not share further details on the incident, it appears that the water treatment plant might have fallen victim to a ransomware attack.
Switching to manual operations suggests that systems were shut down to contain the attack, which is the typical response to incidents involving ransomware.
SecurityWeek has emailed Arkansas City for additional information on the incident and will update this article as soon as a reply arrives.
It’s not uncommon for US water facilities to be targeted by threat actors and the government has been taking steps to increase the water sector’s resilience to cyberattacks.
Because it doesn’t need expensive energy storage for times without sunshine, the technology could provide communities with drinking water at low costs.
Jennifer Chu | MIT News | October 8, 2024
Caption:
Jon Bessette sits atop a trailer housing the electrodialysis desalination system at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility (BGNDRF) in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The system is connected to real groundwater, water tanks, and solar panels.
Credits:
Photo: Shane Pratt
Caption:
(Left to right): Jon Bessette, Shane Pratt, and Muriel McWhinnie (UROP) stand in front of the electrodialysis desalination system during an installation in July.
Credits:
Photo: Shane Pratt
Caption:
In a direct-drive electrodialysis desalination system, using flow-commanded current control, solar panels take in energy from the sun and then optimally allocate energy (shown in yellow) to the pump and electrodialysis stack, without the need for energy storage, such as batteries. Saline feed water flows through the pump into the electrodialysis stack, where it is desalinated and split into a drinking water stream (light blue) and a concentrated brine stream (dark blue).
Credits:
Credit: Jonathan Bessette
MIT engineers have built a new desalination system that runs with the rhythms of the sun.
The solar-powered system removes salt from water at a pace that closely follows changes in solar energy. As sunlight increases through the day, the system ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear.
Because the system can quickly react to subtle changes in sunlight, it maximizes the utility of solar energy, producing large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day. In contrast to other solar-driven desalination designs, the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid.
The engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over six months, working in variable weather conditions and water types. The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system’s solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day despite large swings in weather and available sunlight.
“Conventional desalination technologies require steady power and need battery storage to smooth out a variable power source like solar. By continually varying power consumption in sync with the sun, our technology directly and efficiently uses solar power to make water,” says Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at MIT. “Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge. And we’ve done it.”
The system is geared toward desalinating brackish groundwater — a salty source of water that is found in underground reservoirs and is more prevalent than fresh groundwater resources. The researchers see brackish groundwater as a huge untapped source of potential drinking water, particularly as reserves of fresh water are stressed in parts of the world. They envision that the new renewable, battery-free system could provide much-needed drinking water at low costs, especially for inland communities where access to seawater and grid power are limited.
“The majority of the population actually lives far enough from the coast, that seawater desalination could never reach them. They consequently rely heavily on groundwater, especially in remote, low-income regions. And unfortunately, this groundwater is becoming more and more saline due to climate change,” says Jonathan Bessette, MIT PhD student in mechanical engineering. “This technology could bring sustainable, affordable clean water to underreached places around the world.”
The researchers report details the new system in a paper appearing today in Nature Water. The study’s co-authors are Bessette, Winter, and staff engineer Shane Pratt.
Pump and flow
The new system builds on a previous design, which Winter and his colleagues, including former MIT postdoc Wei He, reported earlier this year. That system aimed to desalinate water through “flexible batch electrodialysis.”
Electrodialysis and reverse osmosis are two of the main methods used to desalinate brackish groundwater. With reverse osmosis, pressure is used to pump salty water through a membrane and filter out salts. Electrodialysis uses an electric field to draw out salt ions as water is pumped through a stack of ion-exchange membranes.
Scientists have looked to power both methods with renewable sources. But this has been especially challenging for reverse osmosis systems, which traditionally run at a steady power level that’s incompatible with naturally variable energy sources such as the sun.
Winter, He, and their colleagues focused on electrodialysis, seeking ways to make a more flexible, “time-variant” system that would be responsive to variations in renewable, solar power.
In their previous design, the team built an electrodialysis system consisting of water pumps, an ion-exchange membrane stack, and a solar panel array. The innovation in this system was a model-based control system that used sensor readings from every part of the system to predict the optimal rate at which to pump water through the stack and the voltage that should be applied to the stack to maximize the amount of salt drawn out of the water.
When the team tested this system in the field, it was able to vary its water production with the sun’s natural variations. On average, the system directly used 77 percent of the available electrical energy produced by the solar panels, which the team estimated was 91 percent more than traditionally designed solar-powered electrodialysis systems.
Still, the researchers felt they could do better.
“We could only calculate every three minutes, and in that time, a cloud could literally come by and block the sun,” Winter says. “The system could be saying, ‘I need to run at this high power.’ But some of that power has suddenly dropped because there’s now less sunlight. So, we had to make up that power with extra batteries.”
Solar commands
In their latest work, the researchers looked to eliminate the need for batteries, by shaving the system’s response time to a fraction of a second. The new system is able to update its desalination rate, three to five times per second. The faster response time enables the system to adjust to changes in sunlight throughout the day, without having to make up any lag in power with additional power supplies.
The key to the nimbler desalting is a simpler control strategy, devised by Bessette and Pratt. The new strategy is one of “flow-commanded current control,” in which the system first senses the amount of solar power that is being produced by the system’s solar panels. If the panels are generating more power than the system is using, the controller automatically “commands” the system to dial up its pumping, pushing more water through the electrodialysis stacks. Simultaneously, the system diverts some of the additional solar power by increasing the electrical current delivered to the stack, to drive more salt out of the faster-flowing water.
“Let’s say the sun is rising every few seconds,” Winter explains. “So, three times a second, we’re looking at the solar panels and saying, ‘Oh, we have more power — let’s bump up our flow rate and current a little bit.’ When we look again and see there’s still more excess power, we’ll up it again. As we do that, we’re able to closely match our consumed power with available solar power really accurately, throughout the day. And the quicker we loop this, the less battery buffering we need.”
The engineers incorporated the new control strategy into a fully automated system that they sized to desalinate brackish groundwater at a daily volume that would be enough to supply a small community of about 3,000 people. They operated the system for six months on several wells at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Throughout the trial, the prototype operated under a wide range of solar conditions, harnessing over 94 percent of the solar panel’s electrical energy, on average, to directly power desalination.
“Compared to how you would traditionally design a solar desal system, we cut our required battery capacity by almost 100 percent,” Winter says.
The engineers plan to further test and scale up the system in hopes of supplying larger communities, and even whole municipalities, with low-cost, fully sun-driven drinking water.
“While this is a major step forward, we’re still working diligently to continue developing lower cost, more sustainable desalination methods,” Bessette says.
“Our focus now is on testing, maximizing reliability, and building out a product line that can provide desalinated water using renewables to multiple markets around the world,” Pratt adds.
The team will be launching a company based on their technology in the coming months.
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Julia Burke Foundation, and the MIT Morningside Academy of Design. This work was additionally supported in-kind by Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions and Xylem Goulds.
The Feather River smart glass door starts at $800 and works with The Home Depot’s Hubspace smart home platform.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy | the Verge | Sep 30, 2024, 9:50 AM PDT
Glass front doors are great for letting light in during the day but not so great when you want privacy at night. The Home Depot has a smart solution for this problem — a glass front door that can switch from clear to opaque on a schedule, with a voice command, or by pressing a button.
The smart glass Feather River door is a prehung fiberglass front door with built-in smart glass. A button on the door lets you change the glass from clear to opaque, and it works with The Home Depot’s Hubspace smart home app to control it from your phone. You can also set the glass on a schedule and have it be clear during the day and opaque at night. The door costs $798 for a quarter lite, $899 for a half lite, and $998 for a full lite or three-quarter lite, which is similar pricing to a non-smart front door.
The smart glass door with the half lite glass. It doesn’t come with a door lock or handle; you need to supply your own.Image: The Home Depot
The door with one-quarter lite window. Image: The Home Depot
Hubspace is The Home Depot’s attempt at demystifying the smart home for its customers. Despite the name, the smart home platform doesn’t require a hub, just the Hubspace app. With it, you can connect and control a wide range of The Home Depot’s store brands, from smart lights and shades to bathroom fans and thermostats.
The smart glass door is the retail giant’s first Hubspace collaboration with a third party. It works with the Hubspace app and can connect to smart home systems like Amazon Alexa or Google Home to use a voice command to make your door clear or opaque.
The smart glass works over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and requires power. The door has a battery built into the frame, which a USB cable can power if you have an outlet nearby. The battery is removable, and the door comes with a second battery and a charger.
The battery only powers the glass and the connectivity. Unlike The Home Depot’s first attempt at selling a smart door — the $4,000 M-PWR smart door from Masonite — the Feather River door doesn’t feature built-in power for a smart doorbell or door lock. It’s a standard door outside of the glass. You can add a battery-powered smart lock, and the door acts as a Bluetooth-to-Wi-Fi bridge for Hubspace-compatible Bluetooth locks.
The door is designed to fit a standard entryway and comes with a frame and weather stripping for easy installation. According to The Home Depot, the glass is exterior security strength, and a hurricane glass option is coming soon.
This smart fridge or freezer can send you alerts if its temperature changes.Image: The Home Depot
Along with the new door, The Home Depot is launching a number of other new connected products that work with its Hubspace app:
Update, September 30th: An earlier version of this story listed three sizes; the glass door comes in four. The correct list and prices are quarter lite for $789, half lite for $899, and $998 for a full lite or three-quarter lite.
(This is the result of my conversation with ChatGPT)
Incorporating a separate utility-focused business into your existing property management company could be a smart move for both financial and operational reasons.
By establishing a business dedicated to services like moving furniture, snow plowing, and off-grid installations, you create an opportunity to streamline operations while improving transparency and financial control.
For example, having a truck owned by this new business allows it to charge your property management company for services like hauling and repairs. This approach not only keeps costs clearly accounted for but also positions the new business to serve external clients, generating additional revenue.
While there are potential drawbacks, like double taxation on intercompany transactions, these can often be offset by tax deductions for business expenses and the operational efficiencies of specialization.
Separating businesses can also enhance professionalism and reduce liability. When each business focuses on a specific area, such as property management or utility services, it becomes easier to ensure compliance with industry standards, secure specialized insurance, and maintain accurate financial records.
Although maintaining multiple businesses involves more paperwork and administrative effort, it minimizes the risk of a single company being overextended or poorly managed.
Think of it as spreading your eggs across different baskets—each basket is tailored for its specific task, reducing overall risk and increasing the potential for growth in each area
By investing in this utility-focused venture, you gain an additional income stream, a strategic advantage, and the flexibility to improve both businesses over time.
Breaking up services into separate businesses or keeping them under one umbrella depends on various factors like the target market, operational scale, liability concerns, and tax implications. Here’s a breakdown of how other businesses commonly structure this and considerations for your case:
| Factor | Separate Businesses | One Business |
|---|---|---|
| Liability | Keeps liabilities contained within each business. | A single lawsuit could impact all operations. |
| Taxes | Double taxation on intercompany billing may apply. | Simplified tax filings, but fewer deductions. |
| Branding | Allows tailored branding for niche services. | Easier to promote one cohesive brand. |
| Operational Focus | Specialists in each area drive efficiency. | Risk of spreading resources too thin. |
| Administration | Requires separate paperwork and accounting. | Reduced admin overhead but more complexity. |
| Scalability | Easier to sell or franchise individual businesses. | Harder to divide operations if selling later. |
Separating businesses where liability or specialization is a concern makes sense, especially if you plan to grow or sell them independently. However, if you’re operating on a smaller scale and want simplicity, combining complementary services into one business can reduce overhead.
Would you like me to help sketch out the financial or legal considerations for any of these structures?
Jackery’s new solar roof is almost indistinguishable from a regular roof. Is it better than solar panels?
Ajay Kumar | CNET | Article updated on January 10, 2025 at 1:22 PM PST
Solar shingles or solar roofs are an attractive option for many homeowners because they allow you to get solar power without the bulky and unsightly solar panels. Other models on the market include the Tesla Solar Roof, which CNET has reviewed, Luma, Timberline and others.
The latest addition to the market comes from Jackery. Unveiled at CES 2025, its new solar roof stands out (or rather, it doesn’t) because it’s almost indistinguishable from a regular roof. With curved roof tile panels that come with a dark obsidian and terra-cotta options (more to follow), the Jackery Solar Roof can be added on top of your existing roof tiles, blending into the rest of your architecture. Each roof tile weighs about 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms).
Jackery says its solar roof has a 25% cell conversion efficiency, putting it on the high end of solar panel efficiency. Lab testing on the Maxeon 7, the best currently on the market, shows 24.9% cell conversion efficiency and real-world efficiency at 24.1%. If the Jackery solar roof can actually hit 25% in real-world usage, that’s an impressive feat, and it would make it one of the most efficient solar cells on the market.
In terms of other specs, the rooftop system can generate 170 watts per square meter, with each tile 38W. The tiles come with a 30-year warranty and they’re designed to handle extreme weather conditions, including hail and high winds, along with temperatures ranging from -40 degrees to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. The Solar Roof is expected to cost $7,000 to $20,000 on average, with installation costs estimated at $5,000 to $7,000 in the US. Jackery hasn’t revealed when exactly the solar roof will be ready for sale yet, but expect it to be released sometime in 2025.
Jackery says the solar roof is compatible with smart energy management systems, Jackery’s own solar generators and battery systems like the Jackery 5000 Plus and the HomePower EnergySystem the company is launching later this year. The HomePower is particularly interesting because it’s a modular energy system that can be scaled up with stacks ranging from 7.7 kilowatt-hours to 15.4kWh. You can get a total system capacity of 123.2kWh per inverter. The setup consists of battery units, a hybrid inverter that can operate on or off-grid and a hub to manage loads.
Also revealed at CES, Jackery has the new Solar Generator 5000 Plus kit and Solar Generator 3000v2. The 5000 Plus is a larger LFP system that can deliver up to 14,400W of power with two units paired with the Jackery Smart Transfer Switch. With all the modular extensions, the full ecosystem can reach 60kWh.
Jackery says the 3000v2 is the smallest and lightest solar generator and power station, with a 3600W output and 0 millisecond UPS switchover functionality. It hooks up to solar panels to keep devices and appliances running during a blackout and it’s resistant to bumpy roads, dust and temperatures as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit. It should be available later this year. It’s expected to cost $2,499.
https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/jackery-new-solar-roof-tile-debuts-at-ces-2025-looks-just-like-a-regular-roof/
Michael Crider , Staff Writer | PCWorld | Nov 12, 2024 8:00 am PST
Tech-savvy thieves are finding new ways to circumvent wireless networked security cameras like Ring and Nest.
A Wi-Fi-connected security camera is an easy and technologically simple way to watch your home and give yourself a little peace of mind… or maybe you just like knowing the moment your Amazon packages arrive. Honestly, it’s mostly the second thing.
But while Wi-Fi security cameras are meant to equip homeowners and apartment dwellers with burglar-deterring measures, thieves are now using tech to even the playing field.
According to a tweet sent out by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire division earlier this year (spotted by Tom’s Hardware), a small band of burglars is using Wi-Fi jamming devices to nullify wireless security cameras before breaking and entering.
The thieves seem to be well above the level of your typical smash-and-grab job. They have lookout teams, they enter through the second story, and they go for small, high-value items like jewelry and designer purses.
Wireless signal jammers are illegal in the United States. Wireless bands are tightly regulated and the FCC doesn’t allow any consumer device to intentionally disrupt radio waves from other devices. Similar laws are in place in most other countries.
But signal jammers are electronically simple and relatively easy to build or buy from less-than-scrupulous sources.
The police are suggesting the usual precautions: don’t tell anyone you’re going on vacation, look out for suspicious vehicles, etc. But they’re also suggesting that homeowners use old-fashioned, wired sets of security cameras that require more elaborate installations and extra hardware.
I think that’s overkill, especially if this group of thieves is specifically targeting people who are away from their homes. The point of the Wi-Fi jammer seems to be knocking out active surveillance, which can alert police within a few seconds of spotting a break-in. And if they’re smart enough to use Wi-Fi jammers, they’re smart enough to use alternate means of avoiding detection—like cutting power to the entire house, thus nullifying the advantages of a wired camera system.
The police also suggest adding a padlock to your electrical circuit box, but that’s not going to stop someone with $30 bolt cutters.
My point being that if someone wants to break into your home while you’re away, there’s not a lot you can do to stop them. But if you want extra peace of mind without the expense of a full wired camera system, get a camera with built-in storage and a battery, like Eufy’s solar-powered SoloCam series. As long as it isn’t within reach and easily accessible, it should provide you with a visual record of any break-in.
Madeleine Cuff | New Scientist | 1 July 2024
US company Source, which makes solar panels that produce drinking water from moisture in the air, plans to launch a canned water brand called Sky Wtr later this year
Canned water distilled from the air will be available to buy in the US later this year, in an effort to promote solar-powered “hydropanels” that provide an off-grid method of producing drinking water.
The panels, created by Arizona-based firm Source, use solar energy to power fans, which draw water vapour from the air. A water-absorbing substance, known as a desiccant, traps the moisture, before solar energy from the panel releases the moisture into a collection area within the panel.
Sandee LaMotte | CNN | Updated 8:38 PM EST, Wed February 28, 2024
Eating ultraprocessed foods raises the risk of developing or dying from dozens of adverse health conditions, according to a new review of 45 meta-analyses on almost 10 million people.
“We found consistent evidence linking higher intakes of ultra-processed foods with over 70% of the 45 different health outcomes we assessed,” said senior author Wolfgang Marx, a senior research fellow at the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, in an email.
A higher intake was considered about one serving or about 10% more ultraprocessed foods per day, said Heinz Freisling, a scientist in the nutrition and metabolism branch of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, in an email.
“This proportion can be regarded as ‘baseline’ and for people consuming more than this baseline, the risk might increase,” said Freisling, who was not involved in the study.
Researchers graded each study as having credible or strong, highly suggestive, suggestive, weak or no evidence. All the studies in the review were published in the past three years, and none was funded by companies involved in the production of ultraprocessed foods, the authors said.
“Strong evidence shows that a higher intake of ultra-processed foods was associated with approximately 50% higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death and common mental disorders,” said lead author Dr. Melissa Lane, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin, in an email. Cardiovascular disease encompasses heart attacks, stroke, clogged arteries and peripheral artery disease.
There was convincing evidence that a high versus low intake of ultraprocessed foods could increase the risk of anxiety by up to 53%, and the risk of an early death from any cause by 20%, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal The BMJ.
“It’s not surprising that there are a lot of studies that point to a positive association between ultraprocessed food consumption and the risk of various disease outcomes,” said cancer epidemiologist Fang Fang Zhang, associate professor and chair of the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at Tufts University in Boston. She was not involved in the new research.
“Ultraprocessed foods are high in calories, added sugar, sodium, and low in fiber,” Zhang said. “All of these have already been known to contribute to cardiometabolic health outcomes, weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes and hypertension.”
However, Zhang questioned the findings on studies of anxiety and depression, which tend to be done only on those who have already been diagnosed with those conditions.
“People who are having depressive symptoms or anxiety may seek out ultraprocessed foods for various reasons such as self-comfort,” she said. “It may not be that eating ultraprocessed food puts you at high risk for depression — we cannot tell.”
Mixed impact on some health conditions
Researchers found highly suggestive evidence that eating more ultraprocessed foods raised the risk of obesity by 55%, sleep disorders by 41%, development of type 2 diabetes by 40% and the risk of depression by 20%.
However, evidence was limited for an association between consuming ultraprocessed food and asthma, gastrointestinal health and cardiometabolic risk factors such as high blood fats and low levels of “good” high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, cholesterol, according to the analysis.
In addition, the study found only suggestive or no evidence for an association between ultraprocessed foods and cancer. That’s surprising, according to Zhang, who has researched the role of ultraprocessed foods and cancer.
“Obesity is a risk factor for 13 types of cancers. Ultraprocessed foods increase weight gain, and obesity increases cancer,” she said. In an August 2022 study she coauthored, Zhang found men who ate the most ultraprocessed foods of any type had a 29% higher risk of developing colorectal cancer.
One reason for the unexpected finding is that research on ultraprocessed foods is still in its infancy, said study coauthor Mathilde Touvier, research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, a public research organization.
“We definitely need more studies to be able to upgrade the weight of evidence for cancer, for instance,” said Touvier, also the principal investigator of the NutriNet-Santé cohort, a long-term study of the relationship between nutrition and health.
“So it’s not because there’s nothing there, it’s just because we need additional research,” she said.
The making of ultraprocessed foods
Ultraprocessed foods are much more than simply “modified” foods, said nutrition researcher Dr. Carlos Monteiro, head of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies in Health and Nutrition at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He was not involved in the new research.
“They are formulations of often chemically manipulated cheap ingredients such as modified starches, sugars, oils, fats, and protein isolates, with little if any whole food added,” said Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health, in an attached editorial.
Monteiro coined the term ultraprocessed food in 2009 when he developed NOVA, a system of classifying foods into four categories. Group one consists of unprocessed or minimally processed foods such as fruits, vegetables, eggs and milk. Group two includes culinary ingredients such as salt, herbs, oils and the like. Group three are processed foods that combine groups one and two — canned goods and frozen vegetables are examples.
Group four are ultraprocessed foods, which Monteiro said are made flavorful and enticing by using combinations of artificial flavors, colors, thickeners and other additives that have been “linked by experimental and epidemiological evidence to imbalances in gut microbiota and systemic inflammation.”
“No reason exists to believe that humans can fully adapt to these products,” Monteiro wrote in the editorial. “The body may react to them as useless or harmful, so its systems may become impaired or damaged, depending on their vulnerability and the amount of ultra-processed food consumed.”
Since Monteiro’s definition of ultraprocessed food appeared, nutritionists, researchers and public health officials have grown concerned about the increasing prevalence of such foods in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and many developing nations.
More than 70% of the US food supply is ultraprocessed foods, according to research.
More than 70% of the US food supply is ultraprocessed foods, according to research. jenifoto/iStockphoto/Getty Images
“Two-thirds of the calories children consume in the US are ultraprocessed, while about 60% of adult diets are ultraprocessed,” Zhang said.
“I think it’s like when we invented cars,” she added. “Yes, they bring us convenience, but if we use a car for everything and we don’t exercise we have problems. We need new strategies to bring down the consumption of ultraprocessed food to a healthier level.”
How to reduce the use of ultraprocessed foods
There’s an easy solution — buy real food and cook it at home. It’s that simple, experts say. But experts also agree that in today’s fast-paced world, giving up the convenience of ready-to-heat and ready-to-eat foods is difficult. In addition, it’s nearly impossible to avoid temptation, as over 70% of the US food supply is made of ultraprocessed food.
Regulation by public health agencies and governments should be considered, Monteiro said, such as front-of-pack warning labels; restriction of advertising, especially to children; and the prohibition of sales of ultraprocessed foods in or near schools and hospitals, all while making minimally processed foods more affordable and accessible.
In the meantime, Marx and Lane offered the following advice:
1) Read and compare product labels and try to choose less processed alternatives. For example, swap flavored yogurt for plain yogurt with added fruit.
2) What you include is just as important as what you exclude. Focus on what you can add to your diet such as fresh, frozen or tinned fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes.
3) Be mindful of beverages. Sugar-sweetened beverages have no nutritional value. Swap them out for water.
4) When eating out, go to local restaurants and cafés instead of fast-food chains. Local eateries are less likely to make ultraprocessed foods.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/health/ultraprocessed-food-health-risks-study-wellness/index.html
Johnny von Einem | University of Adelaide | Oct 12 2023
A new study, jointly conducted by the University of Adelaide and University of Essex, has found that renting, rather than owning, a private-sector home leads to faster biological ageing.
The negative health impacts of renting were shown to be greater than those of experiencing unemployment or being a former smoker.
“Our findings demonstrate that housing circumstances have a significant impact on biological ageing, even more so than other important social determinants, such as unemployment, for example, and therefore health impacts should be an important consideration shaping housing policies,” said lead researcher Dr Amy Clair, from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Housing Research.
Biological ageing refers to cumulative damage to the body’s tissues and cells, irrespective of chronological age.
Some aspects of housing were linked with faster biological ageing regardless of whether a person rents or owns their home, including repeated payment arrears and pollution.
The researchers found it is likely that the insecurity and poor affordability of private rented homes is driving the link between renting and biological ageing.
“We hope to build on this work using data from different countries and exploring whether the association between housing tenure and biological ageing changes over time,” said Dr Clair.
The researchers also found the epigenetic impacts of renting are potentially reversible, making the implementation of health interventions for renters all the more necessary.
“Policies to reduce the stress and uncertainty associated with private renting, such as ending ‘no-grounds’ evictions, limiting rent increases, and improving conditions may go some way to reducing the negative impacts of private renting,” said the University of Adelaide’s Professor of Housing Research, Emma Baker, who also contributed to the study.
This study used data from surveys of 1420 adults in Great Britain and took into account elements of housing such as tenure, meaning whether a person rents or owns their home; building type; government financial support available to renters; the presence of central heating, as a proxy for adequate warmth; and whether the house was in an urban or rural area.
As this was an observational study on an all-white and European population, the researchers acknowledge there are limitations to their findings, but suggest they are likely to be relevant to housing and health elsewhere, particularly to countries with similar housing policies, such as Australia.
“There are many similarities between the housing policy approaches of the UK and Australia – private renters in both countries have very limited security of tenure and face high costs. It is therefore likely that private renters in Australia might also experience accelerated biological ageing,” said Dr Clair.
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2023/10/12/private-renting-is-making-you-age-faster
This YouTube channel has stunning headlines
My opinion: the people are getting sick and tired of being squeezed. War calms people down.
Nina Lakhani in New Orleans | the Guardian | Thu 16 Nov 2023 06.00 EST
After Hurricanes Katrina and Ida, a city initiative is building solar-driven disaster response hubs to increase its resilience
Like many community-based solutions, the community lighthouse network in New Orleans can be traced back to a crisis moment when people realised that something had to change and they – not elected officials – would have to make it happen.
“For [Hurricane] Ida we were ready with showers, mattresses, shelter and food, but once again the electricity was out so we couldn’t serve our community,” said Antoine Barriere, a 61-year-old pastor. “The power was the missing piece.
“We realised that we had to stop waiting for a fix and do it ourselves. We need to get off the grid and be self-sufficient, as with climate change we’re going to get more disasters.”
In late August 2021, several faith leaders were on a Zoom call during yet another citywide blackout which left vulnerable residents struggling to cope with extreme heat and humidity. The power lines had been knocked out by Hurricane Ida, a category 4 Atlantic storm that had made landfall on 29 August, exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina.
Ida left some parts of New Orleans in the dark for 10 days and overwhelmed the city’s emergency response efforts. But a couple of months earlier a new network had been launched called Together New Orleans (TNO), which included churches, mosques, synagogues, unions and environmental nonprofits whose leaders are working across historical racial and religious divides to build collective political power and challenge longstanding anti-sustainable pro-business policies.
The fix, they decided, would be the community lighthouse network, solar-powered disaster response hubs that could transform the city’s approach to resilience for climate and other natural disasters.
On a bright, balmy autumn morning a couple of weeks ago Barriere climbed a long, steep ladder to show me the 460 solar panels that now cover a third or so of his church’s flat roof.
The solar panels were generating more than enough energy to power Household of Faith, a non-denominational megachurch with 4,000 mostly Black parishioners in New Orleans East. Downstairs, a cabinet was stacked with backup batteries that were fully charged in case of a power outage – a frequent occurrence thanks to the low-lying city’s vulnerability to hurricanes, thunderstorms, high winds, extreme heat and flooding.
In a worst-case scenario – no sun, thundery dark skies and power outage – the backup batteries could power essential appliances for a couple of days including the water heater, five commercial fridge freezers storing perishables for the weekly food pantry, and air conditioning for the vast main hall which could be converted into a dormitory-style shelter.
But on this brilliant cloudless morning, most of the solar-generated energy was going into the city’s electric grid. New Orleans’ one-for-one net metering scheme allows the church to offset its excess clean energy against the utility’s dirty energy, and this should become a net zero facility within 12 months.
Household of Faith is among seven, and so far the largest, community lighthouse, but TNO has ambitions to build dozens more and is working with sister networks statewide.
The idea is that each community lighthouse should be an institution locals already know and trust – such as a place of worship, health clinic or community centre – that can be converted into a resilience hub where people can converge during a power outage to get cool, recharge phones, have a meal, connect to a medical device or store medication that requires refrigeration such as insulin.
In addition, community lighthouses will be able to keep the services running that people rely on such as the food pantry and religious sermons, while also adding capacity to the city’s wider emergency-response efforts as a distribution hub, shelter and possibly even house a makeshift clinic.
A couple of weeks before my visit, a run-of-the-mill storm took out some power lines, causing an outage during the church’s weekly bible study class.
“We just kept going, the power just switched to the batteries,” said Barriere. “The grid is going to keep going down while the sun will always come up. And even when it’s cloudy, we’re still generating some – and saving money.”
It was the first time the system was tested for real, outside a disaster simulation exercise, and while it was only a couple of hours, people were relieved to see that it worked.
At bible study that night was the 68-year-old parishioner Linda Thomas, who spends most of her day attached to an oxygen tank due to chronic lung damage caused by an autoimmune disease. She is mobile but frail, while her husband takes intravenous medication for congestive heart failure which must be kept refrigerated. They managed to stay at home after Ida, using a small generator and portable oxygen tanks until the power was restored on their street on the fourth day. But any longer, and they would have had to evacuate.
Thomas said: “Moving in an emergency is very stressful and hard physically, so it’s absolutely great that our church has solar because there is no place like home.”
Economically, it works too. Household of Faith’s electricity bill, after taking into account maintenance and insurance costs and the monthly solar service charge to pay TNO back for the upfront material and installation, is expected to drop by 20-30%, according to Pierre Moses, the project’s technical expert.
The city faces power outages that are not just triggered by storms such as Ida, and it’s much worse for low-income neighbourhoods where local people are mainly Black, Latin and Asian. On top of this, the climate crisis is exacerbating other extreme weather events such as record-breaking heat and humidity.
Residents agree that it is a matter of when the next major hurricane strikes, not if.
“We need to be up and running by the next hurricane season,” said Sonya Norsworthy, the Household of Faith community lighthouse coordinator.
The next step is to recruit and train volunteers and begin mapping the vulnerable residents within a mile-and-a-half radius of the lighthouse. Volunteers will contact them before an incoming storm or tornado, and then again within 24 hours of an outage, as part of the project’s post-disaster response plan.
The end goal is to build a lighthouse within 15 minutes walking distance of all 375,000 city residents – and hundreds more across the state. They are hopeful about the next wave after recently helping the state win a $259m (£208m) federal grant to improve grid resilience.
“After Ida hit, there was an overwhelming frustration and feeling powerless,” said Abel Thompson, a TNO organiser. “That’s when people switched from asking when will they [solve this] to why not us? And we can solve this.”
Lewis Gordon | the Verge | Dec 1, 2023, 8:00 AM PST
With avowed ‘massive gamer’ Mohammed bin Salman at the helm, the kingdom’s insatiable appetite and bottomless riches are already remaking the global video game industry.
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You could call it the summer that Saudi Arabia swallowed sports. On June 6th, news broke that Saudi-backed LIV Golf was merging with the Professional Golfers’ Association, funded to the tune of over a billion dollars by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). In soccer, the world’s most popular and lucrative sport, the kingdom has brought global superstars such as Karim Benzema, Neymar, and Jordan Henderson to the desert to play their trade, laboring not only under the region’s sweltering heat but virulent criticisms of sportswashing. For established institutions, it was a summer of humbling disruption in which they had perhaps quietly sensed, for they would never admit it, the dawning of a new world order.
The spending spree isn’t limited to sports. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has invested in movies, establishing the Red Sea International Film Festival. The country hosts — in what feels like the final boss of late-stage capitalism — pay-per-view WWE events. Then there are video games, a global industry worth $187 billion that the kingdom is intent on muscling its way into, but with perhaps not quite the equivalent, naked levels of aggression that it has shown toward sports.
The minority investments are stacking up now: Nintendo, Take-Two, EA, Activision Blizzard. These are significant pieces of some of the industry’s most profitable pies. Through the PIF-funded Savvy Games Group (which declined to be interviewed for the piece), the kingdom has acquired mobile developer Scopely for $4.9 billion and esports organizations ESL and Faceit for $1.5 billion. A further $13 billion has been earmarked “for the acquisition and development of a leading game publisher” with many more billions reserved for further minority investments. Oil money, then, is coursing through the video game industry almost as quickly as Saudi Arabia can pump it from the ground.
Where is it all leading? According to Savvy CEO Brian Ward, a former executive at EA and Activision, the country aims to become a gaming “powerhouse,” transforming the kingdom into a hub of development and esports and, in the process, perhaps making Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman the most powerful, avowed “gamer” in the entire world. Ward has said this investment is part of the Saudi plan for “economic diversification and social transformation,” a gargantuan effort to maintain the kingdom’s economic relevance in a world rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels while strengthening its political position at home through the oldest play in the book: bread and circuses.
Above all, Mohammed bin Salman seems intent on putting his nation’s bottomless, oil-gained riches to persuasive use — and the plan appears to be working.
In this era of mergers and acquisitions, such gigantic investment is hardly remarkable, but “the appetite with which Savvy and PIF has sucked their teeth into this is unprecedented,” says Joost van Dreunen, a New York University professor who wrote a book about the business of video games. For most of video games’ history, he says, it was ignored by the wider business world — that is, until the digital distribution blew access to games wide open. This has led to the current bizarre moment: a nation state with an appalling human rights record, and which hands out the death sentence to those who tweet critically of it, forcing its way into what continues to be an often nerdish, escapist pursuit. The dissonance is such that van Dreunen says it reminds him of “real estate companies in China that all of a sudden got all these film ambitions.”
The rate of investment might be unprecedented, but the actual plan is not: neither the aim to transform the kingdom into a video game hub nor to acquire a leading publisher. van Dreunen points to the way South Korea invested heavily in internet infrastructure in the late 1990s which, in turn, led to it becoming a new focal point for video games in Asia and the home for many esports stars, “like the Alps for the Tour de France,” he says. China, meanwhile, has emerged as a fulcrum of external development, particularly the production of detailed 3D assets for blockbuster titles like Horizon Zero Dawn. “The ability to plug into the global economy, which required some investment from the government and some momentum from the market, has led to the emergence of these new hubs that didn’t previously exist,” van Dreunen says.
If the acquisition of major soccer clubs by petro-states is any indicator, then Saudi Arabia should have no problem picking up a major publisher. Esports is, if not a more complicated question, then a riskier bet — an industry that Wired recently described as “facing an economic downturn and a dampening of hype,” particularly in the US. Covid-19 shut down live, in-person events, viewing figures are declining, and the lofty expectations set by individuals like Steve Bornstein, former CEO of the NFL Network before he became Blizzard’s esports chair, have not been met. According to Mikhail Klimentov, a Washington Post foreign desk editor (and former editor at the paper’s Launcher gaming vertical) who also runs the esports newsletter ReaderGrev, “the bigger problem is that a lot of esports leagues and teams are not monetizable in a particularly robust way … once you start building a bigger infrastructure, once you start hiring people, you lose money really quickly.”
For this reason — the sense that the esports bubble is bursting — Klimentov describes Saudi Arabia’s move into the arena as one of “impeccable timing.” “I think Saudi Arabia views esports, to a certain extent, as a distressed asset,” he continues. “A lot of these organizations, infrastructure companies, tournament organizers, and publishers are in no position to turn down really big sums of money. If the option is between not existing and taking money from a Saudi-backed company that has a ‘nice, western face’ in terms of Brian Ward, I think they will comfortably take the money and accept that things have changed [in Saudi Arabia]. They’ll accept those assurances.”
Saudi Arabia is indeed changing, but not in a straightforwardly more liberal direction. For every social reform, there is a crackdown on dissent, and some argue social changes are limited to major cities such as the capital Riyadh. The country is in flux, which is why Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at Skema Business School in Paris, argues that investment in video games and other industries is fundamentally a matter of “security.”
According to Chadwick, there are two major aspects to this security. The first is economic: Saudi Arabia is hugely dependent on oil and gas, which he says makes up “40 to 50 percent of Saudi Arabia’s GDP per annum.” As it stands, the kingdom is “incredibly exposed” and so needs to “undertake a period of industrial diversification.” The second element is political. There are worries that the kingdom’s big youth population — 70 percent of Saudis are under 35 — is susceptible to both religious radicalism and political radicalism. “Essentially, Mohammed bin Salman is negotiating a new social contract within Saudi Arabia,” says Chadwick. “That social contract is: ‘We will cater for whatever demands that you have.’”
Video games also present an opportunity to maintain and broker power internationally through what Chadwick calls “network strategy.” In December 2022, China’s President Xi Jinping visited the Persian Gulf, calling in at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia rather than Qatar where the World Cup was currently being played. A few weeks later, the kingdom purchased a $265 million stake in Chinese esports company VSPO, its first foray into the country’s games market and an example, says Chadwick, of “esports as a form of diplomacy.”
What sports (in particular soccer) share with video games, beyond this competitive crossover in the form of esports, are committed, tribal fandoms. In an essay for RealLife, writer and author Vicky Osterweil describes such video game fans as “goon squads” who she says “act as volunteer Pinkertons and scabs.” Something similar could be said of soccer. In the aftermath of Newcastle United’s takeover by Saudi Arabia, fans were seen pictured wearing tea towels on their head, not as a provocation or protest at their club’s new owners but as a sign of affection: they had become torchbearers for the Saudi regime.
Whether targeting industries with highly mobilized, vocal fandoms is an intentional strategy or not, these kinds of zealous actions will likely be music to the ears of the kingdom that wishes to burnish its global reputation. Like the sportswashing that’s occurring through soccer and golf, the same can be said of video games — call it gameswashing.
“It’s never just a pure business investment.”
“Anywhere that Saudi Arabia is spending any amount of money lately, there are always strings attached. It’s never just a pure business investment,” says Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “It’s hard for me to imagine that gaming is any different … At the very least, they’re buying silence.” Freeman points to the non-disparagement clause central to the LIV Golf deal as well as the self-censorship that invariably happens at companies owned by such powers. “If you’re a mid-level manager, or a programmer, you’re probably going to self-censor because you want to avoid an awkward conversation with your boss,” he says.
Regardless of censorship, self or otherwise, the effects of Saudi Arabia’s financial clout, or at least the promise of it, are already being felt, not least by developers formerly employed by the video game conglomerate Embracer. In May, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors announced — in highly stressful fashion — that a gigantic deal with an unnamed partner worth some $2 billion had fallen through. As a result, Embracer implemented a “comprehensive restructuring program” which would include the “closing of studios and termination of projects.” Subsequent reporting carried out by Axios Gaming suggests it was Savvy Gaming Group that pulled out of the deal, despite, according to Wingefors, a “really strong commitment” having been made. Because of this gap in funding — money it appears Embracer had already been spending — hundreds of developers (and counting) lost their jobs, including those at the highly regarded, long-running studio Volition, maker of the Saints Row and Red Faction franchises.
Saudi money, then, is already changing video games just as it is changing global sports and culture. As Klimentov puts it, the “aim is to make themselves inextractable from a lot of industries.” Mohammed bin Salman, famously a fan of the army-building strategy game Age of Empires, is likely more personally invested in this venture than others. But it is borne from the same cold-hearted rationale that saw his kingdom murder Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and cause mass starvation and death in Yemen through its military blockade. It is about power primarily — the preservation of it at home, expansion of it abroad, and the further enrichment of a dynasty whose wealth already knows no bounds.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/1/23948992/saudi-arabia-gaming-investment
I lived right near there for 5+ years
Oliver Milman in New York | the Guardian | Sun 29 Dec 2024 06.00 EST
A car is often essential in the US but while owning a vehicle is better than not for life satisfaction, a study has found, having to drive too much sends happiness plummeting
The United States, with its enormous highways, sprawling suburbs and neglected public transport systems, is one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. But this arrangement of obligatory driving is making many Americans actively unhappy, new research has found.
The car is firmly entrenched as the default, and often only, mode of transport for the vast majority of Americans, with more than nine in 10 households having at least one vehicle and 87% of people using their cars daily. Last year, a record 290m vehicles were operated on US streets and highways.
However, this extreme car dependence is affecting Americans’ quality of life, with a new study finding there is a tipping point at which more driving leads to deeper unhappiness. It found that while having a car is better than not for overall life satisfaction, having to drive for more than 50% of the time for out-of-home activities is linked to a decrease in life satisfaction.
“Car dependency has a threshold effect – using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,” said Rababe Saadaoui, an urban planning expert at Arizona State University and lead author of the study. “Extreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.”
The new research, conducted via a survey of a representative group of people across the US, analyzed people’s responses to questions about driving habits and life satisfaction and sought to find the link between the two via a statistical model that factored in other variables of general contentment, such as income, family situation, race and disability.
The results were “surprising”, Saadaoui said, and could be the result of a number of negative impacts of driving, such as the stress of continually navigating roads and traffic, the loss of physical activity from not walking anywhere, a reduced engagement with other people and the growing financial burden of owning and maintaining a vehicle.
“Some people drive a lot and feel fine with it but others feel a real burden,” she said. “The study doesn’t call for people to completely stop using cars but the solution could be in finding a balance. For many people driving isn’t a choice, so diversifying choices is important.”
Decades of national and state interventions have provided the US with an extensive system of highways, many of which cut deep into the heart of its cities, fracturing communities and bringing congestion and air pollution to nearby residents, particularly those of color.
Planning policies and mandatory car parking construction have encouraged suburban sprawl, strip malls with more space for cars than people and the erosion of shared “third places” where Americans can congregate. As a result, even very short journeys outside the house require a car, with half of all car trips being under three miles.
Most of the decisions driving this are made at a state level, although Joe Biden’s administration vowed to help rebuild public transit networks beleaguered by the Covid pandemic and to tear down certain divisive highways. However, the federal government has continued pouring far more money into building and expanding roads than in any alternatives to driving. Next year, more than $60bn in federal funding is planned for roads and bridges.
A small sliver of the American public actively chooses to live without a car because they are able to live in the few remaining walkable communities in the US, but for most of those without a car it is a forced deprivation due to poverty or disability.
Being without a car can itself be expensive and isolating, according to Anna Zivarts, who was born with a neurological condition that prevents her from driving. Zivarts, based in Seattle, is the author of the book When Driving Is Not an Option and advocates on behalf of those unable to drive.
“Seattle has a solid bus system but everyone who can afford a car has a car. I’m often the only parent going to any sort of event without a car. Everything is built around cars,” she said.
“We are just locked into a system of driving that is meant to be more enjoyable but isn’t. I walk five minutes with my kid to the school bus stop and yet other parents make that journey to the stop by car. Is this really how you want to spend your life?”
A long-term effort is required to make communities more walkable and bolster public transport and biking options, Zivarts said, but an immediate step would be simply to consider the existence of people without cars.
“We need to get the voices of those who can’t drive – disabled people, seniors, immigrants, poor folks – into the room because the people making decisions drive everywhere,” she said. “They don’t know what it’s like to have to spend two hours riding the bus.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/29/extreme-car-dependency-unhappiness-americans