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The Real Problem with Fake News

Erik Palmer

For years, as I checked out in the grocery store, I saw Bat Boy on the pages of the Weekly World News. That "news" paper is  I being printed, but weeklyworldnews.com exists. According to an article posted on the site in January 2017, Earth was going to collide with the planet Nibiru on October 17, 2017. So I suppose if we were indeed obliterated, you aren't reading this article.

My point is that fake news is nothing new. Weekly World News started in 1979, the popular news satire organization The Onion was founded in 1988, and many other tabloids and websites had the similar idea of writing silly news stories for our amusement. No one thought this was real stuff. We all knew it was satire or farce. All of us, right? But how about a story claiming that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Is that fake news? Unlike the Bat Boy story, which is obviously (to most) silly, the Clinton story is part of a new generation of fake news with less benign motives than amusement.

It was the 2016 presidential election that brought this less benign type of fake news to everyone's attention. Some made-up stories were getting lots of attention, and some people were worried that the stories were being used to influence voters.

Since then, educators have responded to one of the alarms raised by fake news: the relatively easy problem of how to teach students to find the fakes. We have, however, largely ignored the more important and more difficult problem caused by fake news: how to limit skepticism of the media. For every person fooled by a fake story, there may be many more whose trust in the media in general is diminished. Discounting all news means discounting true news, too. And overwhelmingly, most news is true.

(Adapted from www.ascd.org)

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The secret of why we like to eat chocolate

    Chocolate contains a number of interesting psychoactive chemicals. These include anandamide, whose name comes from the Sanskrit – “ananda”, meaning “joy, bliss, delight”. Anandamides, a neurotransmitter, stimulate the brain in much the same way that cannabis does. It also contains tyramine and phenylethylamine, both of which have similar effects to amphetamines. Finally, if you look hard enough, you will find small traces of theobromine and caffeine, both of which are well-known stimulants.

    For a while, some food scientists got very excited about the discovery but, although chocolate contains these substances, we now know they are only there in trace amounts. Your brain is not going to get much of a chemical rush from eating a few squares. None the less, they may play a small part in seducing our senses. So what else does chocolate have going for it? Well, it also has a creamy viscosity. When you take it out of its wrapper and put a bit in your mouth without biting, you will notice that it rapidly melts on your tongue, leaving a lingering sensation of smoothness. Special touch receptors on our tongues detect this textural change, which then stimulates feelings of pleasure.

    But the thing that really transformed the cocoa from a bitter and watery drink into the snack we adore today was the addition of sugar and fat. The addition of just the right amount of each is crucial to our enjoyment of chocolate. Look at the side of a packet of milk chocolate and you will see that it normally contains around 20-25% fat and 40-50% sugar. In nature such high levels of sugar and fat are rarely found, or at least not together. You can get lots of natural sugars from fruits and roots, and there is plenty of fat to be found in nuts or a tasty chunk of salmon, but one of the few places where you will find both together is in milk.

    Human breast milk is particularly rich in natural sugars, mainly lactose. Roughly 4% of human breast milk is fat, while about 8% is made up of sugars. Formula milk, which is fed to babies, contains a similar ratio of fats to sugars. This ratio, 1 g of fat to 2 g of sugars, is the same ratio of fats to sugars that you find in milk chocolate. And in biscuits, doughnuts, ice cream. In fact this particular ratio is reflected in many of the foods that we find hard to resist. So why do we love chocolate? For a whole host of reasons. But it may also be that we are trying to recapture the taste and sense of closeness we got from the first food we ever sampled: human breast milk.

(Michael Mosley. www.bbc.com, 24.02.2017. Adaptado.)

Pollution and respiratory disease: can diet or supplements help? A review

    The World Health Organisation (WHO) released a report in 2014 indicating that 3.7 million
premature deaths globally were attributable to ambient air pollution. Their data more than
doubled previous estimates and placed air pollution as the world’s largest environmental health
risk factor. The majority of outdoor pollutants come from anthropogenic sources such as vehicle
[5] emissions, fossil fuel combustion, forest fires and industrial processes including factory outputs. The
WHO showed that in urban areas which monitor air pollution levels, greater than 80% of people are
exposed to levels of pollution which exceed WHO limits. Primary pollutants can be divided into two
groups: particulate matter (PM) and gases (CO₂, CO, NO₂, NO, NO_x, SO₂). Secondary pollutants
such as ozone are formed from photochemical reactions between the primary pollutants, heat
[10] and UV radiation. Other environmental air pollutants of major public concern include polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and aryl hydrocarbon receptors (AhR).
    There has been increasing research on the effects of ambient pollution on health. Pollution
causes damage when it is in contact with the airways and skin. For example, some pollutants can
accumulate in the blood and be distributed in digestive organs, purely through inhalation. Pollutants
[15] also act on the exterior of the body and have been linked to the progression of inflammatory skin
diseases. Many studies have demonstrated the effects of exposure to environmental pollutants via
skin, inhalation or ingestion on morbidity and mortality.
    The lungs rely on filtered air through the nose (with cilia and mucus attempting to filter/trap
unwanted particles) or unfiltered air via the mouth. Polluted air contributes to chronic obstructive
[20] pulmonary disease (COPD) prevalence and symptom onset. The idea that air pollution can
cause exacerbations of pre-existing asthma is supported by an evidence base that has been
accumulating for several decades, however it has more recently been suggested that air pollution
might cause new-onset asthma as well.[…]
    In addition to outdoor air pollution, indoor smoke is a serious health risk for some 3 billion people
[25] who cook and heat their homes with biomass fuels and coal. Some 4.3 million premature deaths
were attributable to household air pollution in 2012. Almost all of this burden is in low-middle-income
countries. When indoor and ambient air pollution are combined, WHO estimates that, in 2012,
some 14% of deaths were due to COPD or acute lower respiratory infections, and 14% of deaths
were due to lung cancer.
[30]     There has been recent publicity on the role of diet helping to combat the effects of pollution and
in this review we assess the role for diet in preventing the effects of pollution on asthma and other
respiratory diseases. 

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Are We Being Misled About Precision Medicine?
By Liz Szabo
Sept. 11, 2018

    Facing incurable breast cancer at age 55, MaryAnne DiCanto put her faith in “precision medicine” − in which doctors try to match patients with drugs that target the genetic mutations in their tumors. She underwent repeated biopsies to identify therapies that might help.

    “She believed in it wholeheartedly,” said her husband, Scott Primiano of Amityville, N.Y.

    Around this point in the typical news report, readers would learn how Ms. DiCanto, mother to a blended family of five, took a chance on an experimental drug that no one expected to work.

    She would be the scrappy protagonist who beat the odds − allowing us to celebrate the triumph of modern science and worry a bit less about our own mortality.

    But there’s a problem with talking about precision medicine for cancer this way: It misleads the public.

     Ms. DiCanto’s high hopes, she died last year at age 59. According to her husband, she had benefited from standard cancer treatments, but none of the targeted therapies recommended through genetic testing extended her life.

    Doctors and hospitals love to talk about the patients they’ve saved with precision medicine, and reporters love to write about them. But the people who die still vastly outnumber the rare successes.

    “There are very few instances in which we can look at a genomic test and pick a drug off the shelf and say, ‘That will work,’” said Dr. Nikhil Wagle, a cancer specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston who helped develop precision-medicine tests. “That’s our goal in the long run, but in 2018 we’re not there yet.”

    Mr. Primiano said: “You think it’s going to be more precise, like a laser versus a shotgun. But it’s still a shotgun.”

(Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/opinion/cancer-genetic-testing-precision-medicine.html)

Atenção: Para responder à questão, considere o texto abaixo.

Are We Being Misled About Precision Medicine?
By Liz Szabo
Sept. 11, 2018

    Facing incurable breast cancer at age 55, MaryAnne DiCanto put her faith in “precision medicine” − in which doctors try to match patients with drugs that target the genetic mutations in their tumors. She underwent repeated biopsies to identify therapies that might help.

    “She believed in it wholeheartedly,” said her husband, Scott Primiano of Amityville, N.Y.

    Around this point in the typical news report, readers would learn how Ms. DiCanto, mother to a blended family of five, took a chance on an experimental drug that no one expected to work.

    She would be the scrappy protagonist who beat the odds − allowing us to celebrate the triumph of modern science and worry a bit less about our own mortality.

    But there’s a problem with talking about precision medicine for cancer this way: It misleads the public.

     Ms. DiCanto’s high hopes, she died last year at age 59. According to her husband, she had benefited from standard cancer treatments, but none of the targeted therapies recommended through genetic testing extended her life.

    Doctors and hospitals love to talk about the patients they’ve saved with precision medicine, and reporters love to write about them. But the people who die still vastly outnumber the rare successes.

    “There are very few instances in which we can look at a genomic test and pick a drug off the shelf and say, ‘That will work,’” said Dr. Nikhil Wagle, a cancer specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston who helped develop precision-medicine tests. “That’s our goal in the long run, but in 2018 we’re not there yet.”

    Mr. Primiano said: “You think it’s going to be more precise, like a laser versus a shotgun. But it’s still a shotgun.”

(Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/opinion/cancer-genetic-testing-precision-medicine.html)

She just wants to be beautiful
She goes unnoticed, she knows no limits
She craves attention, she praises an image
She prays to be sculpted by the sculptor
Oh, she don’t see the light that’s shining
Deeper than the eyes can find it
Maybe we have made her blind
So she tries to cover up her pain and cut her woes away
Cause cover girls don’t cry after their face is made

But there’s hope that’s waiting for you in the dark
You should know you’re beautiful just the way you are
And you don’t have to change a thing,
The world could change its heart
No scars to your beautiful,
we’re stars and we’re beautiful

[...]

CARA, Alessia. Scars to your beautiful. Disponível em: https://www.google.com.br/ search?q=Scars+to+your+beautiful+lyrics&rlz. Acesso em: nov. 2018.