Slightly related: I've decided to stop using suncreen altogether for day-to-day sun exposure. My mood and overall sense of happiness increased significantly – in fact, it seemed to have helped more than my antidepressants ever did. (My libido did not increase but my antidepressants are pretty much libido killers.)
There is a whole lot of new conflict world wide out of the isolation and conservation that recent pandemics have caused. It's been a really frustrating missed opportunity by social and dating apps that they don't better help people to navigate social communication, scientifically based health advice, and relationship building/improvement with all the human isolation that is occurring and growing fast.
The term gonads though has always triggered Beavis and Butthead giggles for me ever since high school.
I have been seeing many hints recently that UV might be good for us in moderation but determining how much one is getting is problematic.
Very early in the process one of the scientists, Mac Hadley,[15] who was conducting experiments on himself with the peptide melanotan II, injected himself with twice the dose he intended and experienced an eight-hour erection, along with nausea and vomiting.[13]Curious about this. I understand ethical boards for psychological blind studies and such, but for questionaires?
“UV light is an established carcinogen, yet evidence suggests that UV-seeking behavior has addictive features”
“Opioid blockade also elicits withdrawal signs after chronic UV exposure”
(I'm only half-joking; the countries that are most obsessed with keeping skin white — and so are likely the highest sunscreen users — are also the countries with the lowest birth rates.)
Melanocyte-stimulating hormones have been known to stimulate sexual behavior since forever. Melanocortin receptors directly modulate sexual behavior.
Melanocyte-stimulating hormone production is boosted by from inflammatory effects of UV damage. This has been known forever, too.
That wording supports a notion that the boosting is to encourage the most essential activity of a species—reproduction—in the face of potential harms that may shorten the opportunity for that activity (cancer-induced final exit).
That said, I’m aware of counterarguments to the simplistic takes on “sun bad” messaging and think they have merit. Not trying to open a debate on the latter, just clarifying that I’m not trying to grind an ax with the first paragraph.
Many animals are seasonal. And extra sun exposure might indicate a good time to mate (spring/summer)
I don’t go out if UV is above a 2 anymore.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain the difference between colored people and people of color.
https://www.proflamps.com/datasheets/Philips%20Phototherapy-...
https://getchroma.co/product/chroma-d-light/
I never bothered with a device because we have the actual sun for free, and the potential for misuse is enormous -- it's trivial to accidentally blind yourself.
Then as a follow up have the indoor laborers go outside for 1 hr mid-day or something for 12 weeks and measure the effect.
Testosterone is increased for men living in areas with high UV radiation, but only during summer time.
Proteins upstream of sex hormone production were upregulated after just a single day of 25m of bright midday sun exposure in both men and women.
If those extreme studies were to happen at a non suppressed rate we would be asking for IRBs and talking how science can't regulate itself.
So IRBs might be effective but they suffer from the prevention paradox.
Apparently there was some concern about inducing epileptic seizures. Not that there was any evidence that optical illusions, on their own, separate from the flickering of the computer screen, could cause seizures. But someone had the idea and then it couldn't be un-un-boxed.
The IRB submission process would have been too long to finish the study by the end of the semester (by the time I found out about it). So I just... didn't tell anyone I had already posted the demo online, before I ever even learned that IRB existed, and had a bunch of people on a game development forum on which I was a regular go through the study.
In my case, it was super low stakes. I mean, people into game development are subjecting themselves to the dodgy apps all the time. But when I tell this story today, there are two types of responses: those who have done academic research and laugh at my story, and those who haven't and start crying about "HuMaN eXpErImEnTaTiOn!!!"
I should start putting that on my business card: "formerly engaged in unlicensed human experimentation."
Who am I joking? I don't have business cards anymore. It's going on my Twitter profile.
classic feature creep + bureaucratization (so it's now done by a special class of IRB administrators, not really by peers, etc)
They tracked for 30 years the mortality of all Danes who were at least 50 years old on 1 April 1968 (about 1.4 million people born before April 1918). They also analyzed about Austrians with known birth dates who died between 1988 and 1996 (about 700,000 people born before 1947) and native-born Australians who died between 1993 and 1997 (about 200,000 people born before 1948).
They found in Denmark and Austria that "adults born in autumn (October–December) live longer than those born in spring (April–June). The difference in lifespan between the spring and autumn born is twice as large in Austria (0.6 years) as in Denmark (0.3 years). ... We found the pattern in the Southern Hemisphere to be a mirror image reversal of that in the Northern Hemisphere." British born Australians were statistically closer to the Danes and Austrians.
Their analysis eliminated three hypotheses for these observations: seasonal distribution of deaths, social factors related to seasonal distribution of births, and differential infant survival. Their analysis and other studies of birth weight data led them to conclude that "seasonal differences in nutrition and disease environment early in life [in utero and infancy] could explain the relationship between month of birth and adult lifespan." Over the years, winter and spring nutrition has improved, so "the relationship between month of birth and lifespan seems to be stronger among the older birth cohorts than among the more recently born."
While not globally consistent due to regional weather differences it makes sense for there to be a broad average seasonal benefit.
So this is why I hate winters and don't complain when it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside.
I would wear a jacket or hoodie in the middle of summer because of the office AC.
I need to move to Key West.
Most industrial materials block roughly 100% of UV rays, except viewing windows which allows as much as 1%. Therefore, just staying in any modern building alone cuts down UV exposure by 99% at very least. There is absolutely no way some translucent face painting does that.
The set of countries experiencing birth-rate decline is not 1:1 correlated with the set of countries with high/increasing white-collar employment; but, AFAICT, it is 1:1 correlated with the set of countries that have strong avoidance of tanning / strong interest in skin-whitening.
Wow what a dismissive comment to chemistry and cosmetics.
Just for fun, try take a pic of yourself with a UV camera (or just UV light with some phones), and you'll see it's translucent only to the visible spectrum: https://petapixel.com/2016/05/26/tiny-uv-camera-shows-youve-...
Isn't it rather more about avoiding skin cancer?
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18268914
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005927/chinas-quest-for-fair...
Such standards of beauty are quite old and largely predate Western colonialism. My impression is that they were often linked to caste or class, where higher-class people spent more time indoors while lower-class workers spent more time out in the sun.
This cultural difference is the source of much amusement for the Indian spouse of my European coworker. When they vacation in Europe all the ladies on the beach want to tan, and when they visit India it’s the other way around.
Industrialized societies most work is performed indoors, most people only tan during leisure time. Thus a tan is an indication of having leisure time and is looked upon positively.
Societies that are not industrialized most work is performed outdoors, leisure is generally indoors. Thus the absence of a tan is an indication of wealth and is looked upon positively.
Note that this lags behind reality, many places have industrialized but their perception of tans is still negative. My wife is Chinese and I sometimes joke that she's half-vampire because of how sun-avoidant she is.
“Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.”
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2854760/
Add to this the fact that less than 1% of the estrogen in the water supply is from The Pill.
Obsession with keeping skin white is not something I normally see associated with South Korea, Singapore, or Bosnia and Herzegovina.
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-...
This study is part of an interesting trend I'm seeing of studies finding beneficial health effects to well timed, full spectrum sunlight exposure. The circadian benefits of seeing early morning sun every day (and darkness every evening) are well known. What's more surprising is that even UV exposure is not purely negative, and in the context of sunlight in moderate amounts (not to the point of acute sunburn) may be beneficial for health:
https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/dji019 finds that high intermittent sun exposure actually decreases melanoma lethality. I.e. those who avoid the sun die more from melanoma.
https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12251 found in a study that followed 30k women over 20 years that more sun exposure was associated with reduced all cause mortality. I.e. those who avoid the sun, apply more sunscreen die more in general.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/07/us-su...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/banana-boat-s...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sunscreen-coppertone-benzene-re...
The only sane solution I've seen to that is to make everything go through security review, even if the review is a simple "we don't need to review this." If everyone knows everything needs review, it makes it very hard to forget about it and incentivizes people to involve security folks with their projects ASAP in the hopes of getting review done early on / avoiding being blocked by it.
You'll always need exceptions to the rule, so you can have some sufficiently high up VP or similar sign off on releasing things without review (and with the caveat that it's still going to get reviewed, it just won't block release), but that's a lot easier to manage than dealing with random developers deciding it for themselves.
It also helps a lot to have a culture where developers learn about security too, but just like researchers and ethics, they'll have perverse incentives to downplay/ignore risks so you still need other, differently incentivized people, to enforce "checks and balances."
It sounds like IRBs are not designed to review all or even most (animal?) experiments and I think that's unfortunate. It seems like a win for everyone if we get better ethics coverage.
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/jco.2010.28.15_suppl.15...
It is amazing because I'm really dark and dark skinned, I'm also native of the region (Algeria), and even then, I'll protect myself and stay in the shade because I'll get sunburnt very easily if I don't take precautions. They're fair skinned and they're not as cautious. It's just incredible.
Russians are ethnically much closer to the Poles
This is, after all, what the students are paying in their tuition, which is becoming a major burden on the American middle class.
(Ironically, "tuition" as a word promises that the money is mostly spent on teaching, not on administration and amenities.)
There is a strange reluctance on the American liberal left to criticize greediness in academia or even acknowledge that such thing exists. Politically, I get it, the academia is overwhelmingly liberal-left, so there is an instinct not to alienate it. But there surely must be some upper bound to the growth of tuition costs, after which the burden becomes unbearable.
I think the cognitive dissonance is more that administrative types want to think of their positions as necessary to the proper functioning of things.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen#Sun_protection_facto...
I'm not seeing that. The countries that are most into avoidance of tanning are probably in Southern Asia, or Asia in general. Their birth rates are not that low, with the exception of Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan.
You can see it happening in China right now (which also culturally has a preference for lighter skin), as the last few decades of infrastructure build-up have led to a new generation whose parents are lower-class farmers but who are themselves middle-class white-collar workers. My hypothesis would predict a lower birth-rate among this cohort, while the previous generation's birth rate remains high.
[0] https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1580...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Trend-in-US-T...
The only downside of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide is that they are awful to apply (you need a good technique) and you will probably look awful after application. It may be better to apply less material at a time but more often. Most manufacturers recommend every 80 minutes. I think this is defined by FDA regulation.
Since zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are semiconductors, they can both reflect and absorb UV. I think there is a large gap in understanding by sunscreen manufacturers of how these nanoparticles perform on a quantum level. I hold out hope that some chemist can further engineer these nanoparticles perhaps through an innovative coating to further improve performance and appearance when applied. I think there is still a lot of money being left on the table and these compounds are under appreciated, not understood well, nor developed enough to this day. Fortunately the sunscreens containing them do work today.
By the way no one knows how elements behave on the quantum level we don’t have a quantum computer nearly powerful to simulate anything more than hydrogen
Meanwhile here in northern Europe we get markedly more children during March-April. Which of course could be a sociological thing, or depend on something else, but still.
The idea that we stopped evolving sometime before we spread over the globe is obviously false, with the number of adaptations that are plainly observable on the outside.
The authors are from Israel, so I guess the participants are Israelis too. That's one of the more ethnically diverse places, but only 12% of Israelis are of African origin. Of course not all of Africa is in the tropics, but there are a couple of Asian Israelis who are from the tropics, so let's estimate it at about 12% with mostly tropical ancestors. That might just vanish within the noise of the data unless you specifically look at the correlation to ethnicity.
I'm no expert on the topic, but i heard people refer to this sort of social symbol and discrimination as "colorism".
For anecdote, in France, "sang bleu" (blue blood) used to refer to the nobles and higher classes, as they didn't work the fields, and their thin and pale skin let see through the blue-looking veins. From what i hear, it appears before the revolution this biological distinction was formally racialized: the higher classes with their never-sighted "blue blood" was another "race" as the lower peoples whose spilled blood we could confirm was red.
In many caste-esque societies, having a darker tone is a sign of having to work outside, thus of lower class.
This happens a lot in the Philippines, for example. With a ton of skin lightening products.
Being thin and tan is desirable today when the poor have to toil away in offices and don't have enough free time to go to the gym or take vacations in warm places.
Being pale is still desirable for the middle class themselves, though, as they're trying to avoid being seen as lower class (tradespeople, farmers, etc).
Also, thinness is actually a middle-class obsession, because it's the lower class who "don't have enough free time to go to the gym or take vacations in warm places." The upper class don't care what their bodies look like, as they all know that they and everyone else in the upper class can afford to "throw money at the problem" (plastic surgery et al), and so how healthy you look is no longer a good signal for how healthy you actually are. (Instead, they tend to judge your genetic fitness — when they care about that sort of thing — by the health of your lineage, going back several generations. Which is one reason royals/nobles make a big deal of keeping track of that.)
The term "broad spectrum" is used to denote UVA/UVB protection in the US, and is an FDA-regulated term.
Tl;Dr - you want minimum 5-star 30 SPF for your daily cream.
Many daily moisturisers will have at least SPF15 so it's no hardship since you're already moisturising every day anyway.
It is generally agreed that UV absorption excites an electron from the valence band to the conduction band of the semiconductor. The resulting excited electrons, in the otherwise empty conduction band, and the “positive holes” in the valence band allow charge transfer to the TiO2 surface which facilitates oxidation of surrounding molecules. Sometimes direct charge-transfer causes the oxidation.
https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/19/11/18192/htm
Some questions which stem from this finding include: what is being oxidized on the skin in its immediate vicinity when UV makes contact with the semiconductor sunscreen? What are the implications?
Is there any performance difference between nanoparticle sizes?
-out of pocket maximum expenses are capped per calendar year. Typically, healthcare expenses for births happen in the latter half than former, and so you can potentially save a few thousand dollars, and even up to $17.4k (legal max). Post birth complications are plenty, and pelvic floor physical therapy does wonders. Not worrying about costs for these is a huge benefit.
-new resident doctors start in June, so you have less risk of a brand new doctor in April/May when they would have had 10 months of experience
-kid would be 6 months of age by winter season, so eligible for flu vaccine, and now Covid vaccine too during their first winter
-lots of schools have hard cutoffs at Aug 31 or around there. Birthdays before then, kid is in school, and after that, kid has to wait another year to start school. This could mean 6+ months of fewer daycare expenses, easily worth $10k
'Farmer-class': Well, we have awareness, darkness, and an array of farming tools as weapons, such as Kusari Gama (sickle), nun-chuck (rice thrashers), the modern police baton is a farmers implement...
Also, we know how to fight in close quarters, such as your Rice Palace, and as such we have short, straight, nible blades and Iai KPIs show that our blades are superior in cramp enclosures, as opposed to your blades, which the curve is to assist in the blade length for the cut as you pull, however, in close quarters, your large exaggerated movements are a detriment....
Also, We know that our blade is a tool thus, we will flick dirt at you with it, because you see your sword as an extension of your soul, and will not let it touch earth.
[Dystopian Aside]: I have been saying for a very long time (rightly/wrongly), but always been laughed at; "In the future, the most valuable people will be farmers"
I was laughed at.
However, look where we are headed. Right now, today ; BGates is not only one of the most famous and richest people on the oblate spheroid, he is also the richest "farmer"[0] in the world.
The "farmer" ([0]:pharm-er) who masters lab-grown civilization-supporting-scale sustenance production will be the richest in the galaxy.
Ever try to corner the galactic wheat production in Trade Wars on BBSs in the 1980s? Yeah - we are at stage zero of seeing that in action, and it wont be pretty.
Personally, I'm from the UK and don't worry about skin cancer. If I was in Australia or some climate I'm not adapted for then I'd be concerned.
Yet the impact on quality of life is huge. Using the same US numbers [0], comparing directly-attributable deaths against life years lost (disability-adjusted life years):
- melanoma: 2.2 vs 64.8
- squamous cell carcinoma: 0.8 vs 26.6
- basal cell carcinoma: 0.2 vs 51.2
It's not scientific by nature, it focuses on outdoor activities, which is only a tangent topic, the author has no bio, there is little to no bibliographic references.
It was an observational study of 30k women over two decades, so very good statistical power.
> As compared to the highest sun exposure group, the mortality rate was doubled (2.0, 95% CI 1.6–2.5) amongst avoiders of sun exposure and increased by 40% (1.4, 95% CI 1.1– 1.7) in those with moderate exposure. We found that the assumption of proportional hazards seemed reasonable.
So at least among Swedish middle aged women, you are twice as likely to die if you avoid the sun, vs. if you are exposed more to the sun, controlling for factors like income, education, smoking, BMI, and exercise.
It was not a RCT, but then almost no studies of all cause mortality are.
A smaller case study of 500 melanoma patients (https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/dji019) also found that "sun exposure is associated with increased survival from melanoma."
I think sudden and extreme sun exposure, i.e. "staying in an office all year and then going on the beach for 9h on vacation" definitely requires sunscreen, but consistent and moderate sun exposure at a rate that your body can tan and adjust to is probably a net positive for everything from circadian effects to mood and mortality, even accounting for skin cancer risk.
"In a 2016 study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, Lindqvist’s team put it in perspective: “Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.”"
I mean, just google "Zuckerberg sunscreen".
The basic argument here is that rules are ineffective because bad actors ignore them.
- Before IRBs, unethical experiments were done by professors and grad students with disposal to all of the resources they normally have.
- People don’t always know what the ethical implications of their study is, or how it could negatively impact participants.
- The IRBs are not there to stop research. They are there to help people figure out how to conduct research ethically.
IRBs don't need to be ran by anyone more competent than a 5 year old to catch the cases you're talking about. What they have metastasis to today is just another part of the administrative industrial complex which has strangled academia.
Yes. For example, every time we see someone here talking about A/B testing, they're talking about human experimentation. Do these humans buy more often when shown A or B?
I consider it unethical as they don't even inform test subjects nor do they seek consent. Unfortunately, I seem to be a minority.
I don't think this argument invalidates the concept of review boards though. If anything it supports their expansion into national or international law.
Turns out 5 year olds might catch all the bad experiment but due to lack of understanding in the field they will also reject a lot of valid experiments. Domain experts and people who have thought a lot about ethics might have better false positive and false negative rates.
Regulating constraints which impose a prevention paradox is though and is vulnerable to over bureaucratisation. I am unaware how this is handled but you told me nothing convincing which indicates that there is no back pressure limiting how much bureaucracy can be created by IRB.
Could you give some examples of what cases I’m talking about? I’m just dying to see what kind of straw man argument you’ve been building.