Paywalled, but I’m gonna go with fossil fuel trap. We need to be completely off fossil fuels by about 2050. Any new major natural gas infrastructure being built now is expected to last longer than 2050. Even new residential gas furnaces are probably expected to last around 20 years or so.
It’s hard, but there are more adults in the U.S. alive today who have successfully quit smoking than currently smoke.
Check out SmokeFree.gov for free science-based resources!
We do trials to determine if a new treatment is safe and effective. Let’s say you got a “miracle drug” that cures whatever disease you’re studying, but it is too toxic and kills patients over time. That drug may get hyped up in early development as a miracle cure, but you need to compare it to something else to be sure the toxicity seen is not driven by something unrelated. This is why it’s not ethical to run late stage trials without a standard of care or placebo control arm, because in this case the standard of care would be the better treatment option.
This concept is called equipoise, as in the two treatments are equally poised to provide benefit to patients at the beginning of the trial. Otherwise if you had enough data to know for certain your new therapy is better, then the trial is unnecessary and it should just be a regular medicine/submitted to a health authority for approval instead of wasting >$100 million dollars on another trial.
If you know your investigational therapy is better than a placebo or standard of care, then why do the trial? Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s good
Check out Naturepedic mattresses. 100% natural materials except the steel springs. They have a modular design that you can open up occasionally to flip the springs or topper if you like. You can also replace the individual components as desired, not that we’ve needed to. Very comfortable too, although during the trial period we ended up switching out the foam topper for one that was less firm than we liked on the show floor (they allow this for free within a certain time frame after buying).
Drosophila geneticists come up with the craziest gene names… My all time WTF is Suppressor of Mothers Against Decapentaplegic (SMAD).