Post a news story, entertain me!

20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion

This doesn't help anybody. Back when I had to frequently explain what a femtosecond was to people, I found that it was much more useful to explain a quadrillion as a million billion. A billion tends to be the highest order of magnitude that regular people can understand. Anything higher than that may as well be infinity. So, by describing something as one million of the largest order of magnitude that they can think of at least gets them to think of it as a quantifiable thing and not just infinity. In my specific case, it was also convenient that most peoples idea of the smallest unit of time is the nanosecond. So, I could just tell them that there was a million femtoseconds in a nanosecond.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

So, 20 million billion.

EO Wilson has written a number of excellent books on ants for regular people as well as scientists, and also a very enjoyable novel called "Anthill".

I am skeptical that people can generally genuinely quantify 1 billion. It is so much larger than people generally think, especially now that billionaires are somewhat common.

NSMike wrote:

I am skeptical that people can generally genuinely quantify 1 billion.

It's easy to quantify, it's just a million times what people can easily quantify, and EVERYONE knows what a million is, right?

Jonman wrote:
NSMike wrote:

I am skeptical that people can generally genuinely quantify 1 billion.

It's easy to quantify, it's just a million times what people can easily quantify, and EVERYONE knows what a million is, right?

The number of people that think a billion is 10x a million beg to differ.

EverythingsTentative wrote:
Jonman wrote:
NSMike wrote:

I am skeptical that people can generally genuinely quantify 1 billion.

It's easy to quantify, it's just a million times what people can easily quantify, and EVERYONE knows what a million is, right?

The number of people that think a billion is 10x a million beg to differ.

Same for them that thinks it's 1000 x a million.

Jonman wrote:
EverythingsTentative wrote:
Jonman wrote:
NSMike wrote:

I am skeptical that people can generally genuinely quantify 1 billion.

It's easy to quantify, it's just a million times what people can easily quantify, and EVERYONE knows what a million is, right?

The number of people that think a billion is 10x a million beg to differ.

Same for them that thinks it's 1000 x a million. :)

It is 1000 x a million, though... kind of.

In the US, a billion has always been 1000 x a million. In the UK, a billion was traditionally a million million. So it depends who you ask, but I think, globally, the 1000x figure is more common these days.

NSMike wrote:

I am skeptical that people can generally genuinely quantify 1 billion. It is so much larger than people generally think, especially now that billionaires are somewhat common.

It's not that they have a natural feel for how big a billion is, it's that they at least still conceive of it as a number and not just infinity. Billion is just the largest order of magnitude that people hear about somewhat regularly. Trillion and quadrillion may as well be a zillion. People just don't hear them enough to think of them as a number.

EverythingsTentative wrote:

The number of people that think a billion is 10x a million beg to differ.

Those people tend not to ask additional questions about your research beyond "So, your a science guy, huh?".

The Tripitaka Koreana

From Dubious Quality

Well, this is really something.

Here's a description:
The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement.

I don't know how I'd never heard of this before.

52 million characters. Two gigabytes of data. 6,568 volumes. Carved into wood blocks. Stacked on top of each other, they'd reach a mile and a half high.

It's the "most comprehensive and oldest version of the Buddhist canon." And it was made in the 13th century.

Everything about this is absolutely stunning, and you can read about it here: Tripitaka Koreana.

Eating Late Increases Hunger, Decreases Calories Burned, and Changes Fat Tissue

Obesity afflicts approximately 42 percent of the U.S. adult population and contributes to the onset of chronic diseases, including diabetes, cancer, and other conditions. While popular healthy diet mantras advise against midnight snacking, few studies have comprehensively investigated the simultaneous effects of late eating on the three main players in body weight regulation and thus obesity risk: regulation of calorie intake, the number of calories you burn, and molecular changes in fat tissue. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, found that when we eat significantly impacts our energy expenditure, appetite, and molecular pathways in adipose tissue. Their results are published in Cell Metabolism.

“We wanted to test the mechanisms that may explain why late eating increases obesity risk,” explained senior author Frank A. J. L. Scheer, PhD, Director of the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Brigham's Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. “Previous research by us and others had shown that late eating is associated with increased obesity risk, increased body fat, and impaired weight loss success. We wanted to understand why.”

“In this study, we asked, ‘Does the time that we eat matter when everything else is kept consistent?’” said first author Nina Vujovic, PhD, a researcher in the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Brigham's Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. “And we found that eating four hours later makes a significant difference for our hunger levels, the way we burn calories after we eat, and the way we store fat.”

Vujovic, Scheer and their team studied 16 patients with a body mass index (BMI) in the overweight or obese range. Each participant completed two laboratory protocols: one with a strictly scheduled early meal schedule, and the other with the exact same meals, each scheduled about four hours later in the day. In the last two to three weeks before starting each of the in-laboratory protocols, participants maintained fixed sleep and wake schedules, and in the final three days before entering the laboratory, they strictly followed identical diets and meal schedules at home. In the lab, participants regularly documented their hunger and appetite, provided frequent small blood samples throughout the day, and had their body temperature and energy expenditure measured. To measure how eating time affected molecular pathways involved in adipogenesis, or how the body stores fat, investigators collected biopsies of adipose tissue from a subset of participants during laboratory testing in both the early and late eating protocols, to enable comparison of gene expression patterns/levels between these two eating conditions.

Results revealed that eating later had profound effects on hunger and appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin, which influence our drive to eat. Specifically, levels of the hormone leptin, which signals satiety, were decreased across the 24 hours in the late eating condition compared to the early eating conditions. When participants ate later, they also burned calories at a slower rate and exhibited adipose tissue gene expression towards increased adipogenesis and decreased lipolysis, which promote fat growth. Notably, these findings convey converging physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying the correlation between late eating and increased obesity risk.

Vujovic explains that these findings are not only consistent with a large body of research suggesting that eating later may increase one’s likelihood of developing obesity, but they shed new light on how this might occur. By using a randomized crossover study, and tightly controlling for behavioral and environmental factors such as physical activity, posture, sleep, and light exposure, investigators were able to detect changes the different control systems involved in energy balance, a marker of how our bodies use the food we consume.

In future studies, Scheer’s team aims to recruit more women to increase the generalizability of their findings to a broader population. While this study cohort included only five female participants, the study was set up to control for menstrual phase, reducing confounding but making recruiting women more difficult. Going forward, Scheer and Vujovic are also interested in better understanding the effects of the relationship between meal time and bedtime on energy balance.

“This study shows the impact of late versus early eating. Here, we isolated these effects by controlling for confounding variables like caloric intake, physical activity, sleep, and light exposure, but in real life, many of these factors may themselves be influenced by meal timing,” said Scheer. “In larger scale studies, where tight control of all these factors is not feasible, we must at least consider how other behavioral and environmental variables alter these biological pathways underlying obesity risk. ”

Disclosures:

During the execution of this project, Scheer received lecture fees from Bayer HealthCare, Sentara HealthCare, Philips, Vanda Pharmaceuticals, and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals; received consulting fees from the University of Alabama at Birmingham; and served on the Board of Directors for the Sleep Research Society. Scheer’s interests were reviewed and managed by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Partners HealthCare in accordance with their conflict of interest policies. None of these are related to the current work. Vujovic has been compensated for consulting services provided to the Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research, also unrelated to the current work.

Funding: This study was funded by R01DK099512, UL1TR001102 and UL1TR002541. F.A.J.L.S. was supported by NIH grants R01DK099512, R01HL118601, R01DK102696, and R01DK105072 and R01HL140574. M.J.P. and M.J.B. were supported by DK020595. M.G. was supported by The Spanish Government of Investigation, Development and Innovation (SAF2017-84135-R) including FEDER co-funding; The Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia through the Seneca Foundation (20795/PI/18), and NIDDK R01DK099512. S.L.C. was supported by the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation. J.Q. was supported by the American Diabetes Association (Award 1-17-PDF-103) and by the NIH (Grant K99HL148500 and R01DK102696).

Paper cited: Vujovic, N et al. “Late isocaloric eating increases hunger, decreases energy expenditure, and modifies metabolic pathways in adults with overweight and obesity” Cell Metabolism DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2022.09.007

What counts as late? I couldn't find it defined in the article.

Yeah is it actually time related or time before bed related? Because I have a 10-11pm snack every night. But I also never go to bed before 1am.

I also couldn't find it explicitly stated anywhere, but it seems to be correlating it with proximity to bedtime, not strictly to the time of day. So assuming I understood it correctly: if you keep everything else equal (meal contents, bedtime, wake time) and vary only meal time, then the person who eats their last meal of the day 4 hours later than another person, will tend to feel more hungry / less satiated on the next day, and will also tend to have worse calorie-burning rates.

These 7 cereals do not qualify as ‘healthy’ according to the FDA’s new criteria

Won't lie, I am a bit surprised by a few of these. In my head I had them pegged as healthy.

Raisin Bran (9g of added sugars)
Honey Nut Cheerios (12g of added sugars)
Corn Flakes (300mg of sodium; 4g of added sugars)
Honey Bunches of Oats, Honey Roasted (8g of added sugars)
Frosted Mini Wheats (12g of added sugars)
Life (8g of added sugars)
Special K (270mg of sodium; 4g of added sugars)
farley3k wrote:

These 7 cereals do not qualify as ‘healthy’ according to the FDA’s new criteria

Won't lie, I am a bit surprised by a few of these. In my head I had them pegged as healthy.

Raisin Bran (9g of added sugars)
Honey Nut Cheerios (12g of added sugars)
Corn Flakes (300mg of sodium; 4g of added sugars)
Honey Bunches of Oats, Honey Roasted (8g of added sugars)
Frosted Mini Wheats (12g of added sugars)
Life (8g of added sugars)
Special K (270mg of sodium; 4g of added sugars)

But Cinnamon Toast Crunch is still healthy, right?

My wife was the one that caught the Honey Nut Cheerios thing a year or two ago when we were finding food for the kids. Have to get just plain Cheerios to avoid crazy sugar

It is a bummer for the cereal Life, but wow, 8g of added sugar is a surprise.
Cereal is off limits for me anyways since all of them are carbs and sugar even without the added sugar.

Gonna go out on a limb here and say basically every boxed cereal is a nutritional disaster.

Even the "good" ones are mostly a big ole bowl of empty carbs. The only saving grace is the milk.

This thread is now sponsored by Magic Spoon.

Jonman wrote:

Gonna go out on a limb here and say basically every boxed cereal is a nutritional disaster.

Even the "good" ones are mostly a big ole bowl of empty carbs. The only saving grace is the milk.

I guess you haven't tried Celery-O's, have you.

It has 8g of added sugar ;P
Cuz I guess that is just standard now

Eh, when I have plain cheerios I probably add way more sugar than that myself.

How much of that is due to people avoiding the intersections with roundabouts?

I suspect they're cheaper than intersections too as you don't need to maintain a traffic light system. Probably more expensive to install, cheaper over the lifetime.

sometimesdee wrote:

How much of that is due to people avoiding the intersections with roundabouts? ;)

My guess is that the safety gains are largely due to the fact that you can't blow through a roundabout at 60 like you can with a red light. That's when the injury/fatalities occur.

Portugal has implemented round-abouts for most of their intersections. It works really well and keeps traffic moving.

Jonman wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

How much of that is due to people avoiding the intersections with roundabouts? ;)

My guess is that the safety gains are largely due to the fact that you can't blow through a roundabout at 60 like you can with a red light. That's when the injury/fatalities occur.

Doesn't stop people from trying.

(To be fair, this is actually a notorious roundabout in Milwaukee. Someone has a camera watching it like the old 11' 8" bridge because things like this happen enough to justify it.)