Estradiol is an estrogen hormone used medically during menopause and after hysterectomies to help reduce symptoms such as hot flashes and to prevent osteoporosis (bone loss) in women, but a new paper says it is linked to cocaine addiction.

Women are more likely than men to develop an addiction, try cocaine at a younger age, use larger amounts of the drug, and suffer from overdose. A psychologist says estradiol may be why.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, government health officials went to Congress to ask for more funding to help with Ebola. Prior to that they asked for more funding to help stop Teen Vaping. Prior to that they asked for more funding to stop the Prediabetes Epidemic.

After the pandemic they created regulations to keep landlords from evicting deadbeat tenants. They created regulations to force COVID-19 vaccines on everyone...except fellow government union employees. 

Republicans joined the anti-vaccine movement in 2021 but you might not know it xisted prior to that. Academics and allied journalists would roll out surveys showing that the anti-vaccine movement was similar on both sides to rationalize the behavior of their tribe - while ignoring actual data.

Data like that that coast of California had more vaccine exemptions for school kids than the rest of the US combined. Some coastal schools had vaccine rates of just 26%. Fortunately, we had physicians like Dr. Richard Pan on our side, willing to defy his political party to save kids. We pressured the Governor to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions and now California is nearly as high as Mississippi and Alabama in vaccine uptake.

Like some soldiers become conscientious objectors if they end up in an actual military situation, or when over 300 armed government union employees suddenly forgot they had guns while kids were being murdered in Uvalde, healthcare workers, 18.8 million strong just in the US, were more likely to exit the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike the first two, healthcare workers were right to be afraid. 

In 1845, two ships under the command Captain John Franklin, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, left England on a voyage to chart the top of North America and a Northwest Passage that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. 

Like the interior of Africa and finding the source of the Nile, Great Britain was using some its imperial wealth to explore the unknown and a veteran skipper like Franklin wanted to be first to make the breakthrough across the north pole.

Their ships were state-of-the-art; interior heating and storage enough preserved food to last the 100-plus men for months at a time plus chicken, pigs, and even for the early parts.

An analysis of 2,261 and 1,940 infants ages 12 and 18 months, respectively, found that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy had no impact on infant neurodevelopment. 

Children who had a successful first 10-14 weeks of kindergarten scored higher than others on tests of academic and social-behavioral skills at the end of the school year, according to a new demography paper. Important parts of the transition – what the scholars called a “big little leap” – included making new friends, learning to work with others and adapting to new academic demands.

In the past two weeks I visited two schools in Veneto to engage students with the topic of Artificial Intelligence, which is something everybody seems to be happy to hear about these days: on the 10th of January I visited a school in Vicenza, and on the 17th a school in Venice. In both cases there were about 50-60 students, but there was a crucial difference: while the school in Venezia (the "Liceo Marco Foscarini", where I have been giving lectures in the past within the project called "Art and Science") was a classical liceum and the high-schoolers who came to listen to my presentation were between 16 and 18 years old, the one in Vicenza was a middle school, and its attending students were between 11 and 13 years old. 

If you have bad breath and it hasn't been an issue your entire life, the most common cause may be that garlic and Limburger cheese sandwich you ate at lunch, but sometimes it's not a lifestyle issue. It could be an oral issue but it could also be a stomach one.