your science briefing for 05.01.2025

Plastics are invading plants with every breath, the cannabis-cancer paradox, mixing and matching AI math at MIT, and more...

In today’s edition of “plastics are everywhere, all of the time, and are killing you slowly and mercilessly” is a study from China which analyzed plants from public parks to find that they’re — yes, you guessed it — full of plastics. Turns out that microscopic shards of broken down plastic float on air currents into the plants’ stomata, or tiny pores that allow them to breathe. The worry is that we may be underestimating how much plastic we’re consuming when we eat plants, which makes it even more difficult to figure out how much micro and nanoplastics become a full scale health emergency… (ZME)

Using cannabis creates a paradox when it comes to cancer. On the one hand, it helps patients suffering from aches and pains of their disease, and the harsh side-effects of chemotherapy. They feel more optimistic and consume more calories, which are really critical for survival as every ounce of energy counts here. At the same time, having a history of heavy cannabis use is now being linked with higher mortality when it comes to one of the most common types of cancer we’re seeing diagnosed today. It may be that a wake-and-bake lifestyle taxes the immune system in ways that make cancer a lot more likely to develop given enough time… (UCSD)

According to tech bros, AI is a near magical power to be wielded by an almost priest like caste which appreciates their Machine Spirit. To those of us who actually had to study the fundamentals of artificial intelligence, AI is a set of statistical formulas that have ephemeral lifespans on a bunch of servers in a data center. But these formulas and powerful and use a lot of similar components that can be reduced, combined, or amplified to gain new insights and solve more complicated problems in simpler and more efficient ways. This is why MIT created a periodic table of AI to enable just that by classifying relationships between types of machine learning… (MIT)

Remember when according to Republicans, the demonic forces of Big Government were going to storm your house and rip out your gas stove because they hated you, the American way, baseball, mom, and apple pie, and really wanted to show off that they have the power to do it? Well, in the real world, scientists have been working on figuring out the effects of gas stoves and found that they’re correlated with a higher chance of pediatric cancer in homes with bad ventilation and significant stove use. Which is alarming because most people have poorer ventilation than they probably think, but also makes sense because venting benzene into your house is unlikely to end well just because of what it is at the end of the day… (Yahoo)

One of the critical parts of the lonely young man to far right extremist pipeline are a network of anti-porn, anti-masturbation, and sex-shaming communities on the web ran by theocratic and fascist conspiracy theorists. They exist less to help anyone in need of advice and more to stigmatize and indoctrinate young men who end up far worse off than before. One of the key teachings of these groups is that Jews — yes, it’s always Jews in that universe — are trying to get people addicted to porn. Which really isn’t a thing and never has been, but the concept is so popular, psychologists feel the need to explain that the whole idea was debunked by 2004 and is now well understood to be a proxy for something else… (Psychology Today)