1) Can cancer be treated by bioelectricity?
The human
body—including the brain—runs on electricity - the movements of mostly
positively charged ions of elements like potassium, sodium, and calcium.
Two recent
meta-analyses concluded that amplifying the natural wound current with
electrical stimulation prevented them all from getting worse, and even healed
some of the worst ones completely. Electrical stimulation almost doubles their
healing. Similarly intriguing results have been obtained for non-healing
diabetic wounds—the kind that lead to the amputation of limbs, which usually
leads within a few years to death.
Cancer is beginning
to be viewed increasingly as a failure of communication; a misregulation of the
field of information that orchestrates individual cells’ activities towards
functioning as part of a normal living system. Individual cells “forget” they are
part of a larger whole and treat the rest of the body as an environment whose
resources can be exploited to feed themselves.
In 2013, Levin’s
group showed that they could prevent or reverse some tumors in tadpoles by
using drugs to target their bioelectric signaling. The same drugs could turn
cancer on and off at a distance, by treating the environment, not the cells
themselves.
The broader
implication still is that within the next decade, we could learn enough about
bioelectricity to change how cell networks communicate and make decisions about
how they grow and develop. New computational modeling tools will be a major
factor here.
2) China's food delivery app boom has an odd fallout -
plastic
The astronomical
growth of food delivery apps in China is flooding the country with takeout
containers, utensils and bags. And the country’s patchy recycling system isn’t
keeping up. The vast majority of this plastic ends up discarded, buried or
burned with the rest of the trash.
Scientists estimate
that the online takeout business in China was responsible for 1.6 million tons
of packaging waste in 2017, a ninefold jump from two years before. That
includes 1.2 million tons of plastic containers, 175,000 tons of disposable
chopsticks, 164,000 tons of plastic bags and 44,000 tons of plastic spoons.
More plastic enters
the world’s oceans from China than from any other country. Plastic can take
centuries to break down undersea.
3) Sustainable growth is more important than PE
multiple
The reason that
Wal-Mart produced a fantastic return from 1974 to now is not that it
was cheap relative to its present or near-term future earnings. By the standards of 1974, it was actually a growth
stock–priced at almost twice the market multiple. In the
current market, an equivalent valuation would be something
like 30 or 40 times earnings–for a business with uncomplicated
earnings that had already been in operation in Arkansas for three decades.
It produced a fantastic return because it was a fantastic business, with
miles and miles of growth still in front of it.
4) The way to master more things is to simply focus on
one thing right now
When you begin
practicing a new habit it requires a lot of conscious effort to remember to do
it. After awhile, however, the pattern of behavior becomes easier. Eventually,
your new habit becomes a normal routine and the process is more or less
mindless and automatic.
The counterintuitive
insight from all of this research is that the best way to change your entire
life is by not changing your entire life. Instead, it is best to focus on one
specific habit, work on it until you master it, and make it an automatic part of
your daily life. Then, repeat the process for the next habit.
5) Walk 5000 steps a day, not 10,000 for the health
benefits
There's nothing
magical about the number 10,000.
In fact, the idea of
walking at least 10,000 steps a day for health goes back decades to a marketing
campaign launched in Japan to promote a pedometer. And, in subsequent years, it
was adopted in the U.S. as a goal to promote good health.
In fact, women who
took 4,400 steps per day, on average, were about 40 percent less likely to die
during the follow-up period of about four years compared with women who took
2,700 steps.
The benefits of
walking maxed out at about 7,500 steps. In other words, women who walked more
than 7,500 steps per day saw no additional boost in longevity.
