It’s quite hard to actually overload your liver with the artificial sweeteners unless you are drinking literal gallons of zero sugar pop a day or eating nothing besides artificially sweetened foods. The stuff is used in such tiny concentrations that someone would have to deliberately seek out overdosing on this stuff to get the same effects as the experimental animals are getting (because the experimental animals are being fed pure sorbitol in doses that no human could reasonably consume.)

That’s the problem with articles like this is that they don’t emphasize that they are only seeing this in animal models and they don’t disclose just how much of the stuff they had to give to the animal for the negative effects to occur. It’s also a bad study because it doesn’t account for the differences in the physiology and biochemistry between humans and zebrafish, nor does it account for the confounding factors in humans. You know who drinks and eats a lot of artificially sweetened things? People with diabetes and people who are trying to lose weight. These are people that are likely to already have fatty liver disease and the sorbitol didn’t really have much to do with it.

The headline (and the article for that matter) are very sensationalist and I don’t think they’ve presented this in a balanced way. They are discussing how sorbitol behaves in zebrafish with limited data presented on human biochemistry, and they discuss it in a vacuum without quantifying the amount of sorbitol it takes to cause a problem. Yes, any substance in excess can be harmful, but the amount of sorbitol in food compared to the amount of high fructose corn syrup makes it the substantially lesser evil. The artificial sweeteners are vastly more potent than actual sugar, so you don’t need very much of it to get the same amount of sweetness. High fructose corn syrup is used in massive amounts in food and is much worse for you on the scale that either substance would be consumed.

Most of the drug research that actually produces new, useful treatments is done by universities and government research institutions, (or at least it was before the budget cuts). That research produced with state funding is then bought for pennies on the dollar by big pharma who does the last couple steps and reaps all of the financial rewards.

The NIH and CDC would be fully funded in perpetuity (along with many research institutions and universities) if they got paid even a fraction of the profits for their foundational research.

I have the pixel watch 2, and waterproofing is very important to me when it comes to a smartwatch. I work in healthcare and have to wash my hands upwards of 30 times a day. If I had to take off my watch every time or gamble on a rubber flap adequately covering the charging port, it simply would not be worth the hassle.

It’s been around for quite awhile. I use Turo more than I use regular car rental services because you actually get to choose what car you’re getting and the prices are better.

Use Turo. You can rent basic or fun/interesting cars directly from the owners.

There’s several paragraphs about ACL injuries that does discuss the hormonal effect of estrogen. The amount of relaxin produced by the corpus luteum is fairly minimal compared to the amount produced by the placenta though.

I think the pay issue is *another big contributor. Women are more likely to accept lower paying jobs, particularly ones like caring professions or teaching, whereas men have a tendency towards higher paying jobs (in part due to the lack of support for pregnancy, parental leave, and childcare expenses).

*edited for clarity

The problem with that is you are then putting the burden on a member of that hated group to present themselves as a paragon and suffer all the vitriol and abuse that gets hurled at them until the hateful person hopefully snaps out of it.

Having been the sole woman in many male-dominated spaces, I gotta tell ya, it is a special kind of hell to try to be that positive example.

From the commenter above talking about negative experiences with talking to women and female therapists, I think the real solution is that men need to be proactive about supporting each other. Ranting and raving about how women are terrible and don’t know how to help men with an undercurrent of expectations that women (especially a romantic partner) should fix everything is simply not a tenable mindset.

As a woman who works in the medical field, I am keenly aware of my limitations when it comes to helping men with mental health issues. I think the real, effective solution is for men to start opening up to each other and supporting each other the way that women tend to do among themselves. I don’t mean this as “oh, men are terrible and they need to fuck off somewhere else with their problems”, I mean it as a sincere belief that the best people to help a man through emotional or psychological problems are probably other men given the shared socialization and perspective.

I don’t think the open internet is a great place to open up about your mental health either. Trusted family, friends, and medical/mental health professionals are the best resources. Entrusting something as precious as your mental health to AI or the internet is a profoundly bad idea.

*Raise taxes on poor people. The billionaires can easily just fly to Europe for a shopping spree attached to their regular weekend jaunt and bring everything home in their luggage (if they cared about the prices of anything to begin with, that is).

Did anyone else see this headline and immediately jump to Ghost in the Shell?

For Youtubers, I wish H. Bomberguy would post more often because I’ve seen him cited as some people’s animus for de-radicalization. Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube was another good “male role model” prior to her transition and a lot of viewers commented about how she gave them a better model of masculinity to emulate (particularly ironic as she turned out to be trans). I think FD Signifier is a good example for young black men in particular, and Devin of Legal Eagle is a fine example of a successful professional for those that are more business-minded.

That’s what I’ve been seeing. I don’t use Netflix anyways and I mostly just have a VPN for when I’m on a university or hospital campus and I’d like to keep my internet usage private. (Or when sailing the high seas for books.)

Yeah, my 2 year plan is up in June. I haven’t decided what I’m switching to. I’ve heard good things about Mullvad’s privacy policies and politics, but I’ve also seen reviews that a bunch of sites and services have them blocked.

I’m open to suggestions at this point.

Back on Windows 95 through XP, each individual window was a process that could be killed in Task Manager, and popups opened in a new window.