Catching Up on Some Old Discover Issues

My home office reached critical mass today and I had to winnow the stacks. That means I found some magazines with article I had meant to post about on the blog at some earlier point, so here goes.

March 2019, from an article called The Happiness Dilemma:

• "Happiness is a tool that evolution uses to incentivize us to do what is in our genes' best interest. If we were capable of experiencing lasting happiness, evolution would lose one of its best ways to motivate us."
• "Studies show that older people tend to remember the positive things in life rather than the negative things, while younger people remember the positive and negative equally well."
• "...our immune system evolved to run at peak capacity when we're happy, but to slow down dramatically when we're not. This is why long-term unhappiness can literally kill you through its immune-suppressing effects, and why loneliness in late adulthood is deadlier than smoking."

April 2019, from an article called Raising the Steaks on plant alternatives to meat, particularly the section on duckweed, pinhead-sized plants that taste nutty:

• "Duckweed is one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth. Its biomass can double in size in as little as 16 hours..."
• "The plant is packed with protein. 'We've calculated that you can produced 10 times more protein per hectare per year with duckweed compared to soybean"...
• The researchers prefer to call the plant "water lentils" from the Old Dutch word waterlinsen.

June 2019, a set of infographics summarizing health care prices between 2000 and 2016. The graphics are based on research published in the journal Health Affairs, using data from the OECD comparing U.S. health care spending with that in other high-income countries:






So, to put it simply, we pay more for less health care.