Month: December 2021

Enlarge (credit: Florin Petrescu | Getty Images)

You’ve probably heard it before: drinking coffee is good for your health. Studies have shown that drinking a moderate amount of coffee is associated with many health benefits, including a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But while these associations have been demonstrated many times, they don’t actually prove that coffee reduces disease risk. In fact, proving that coffee is good for your health is complicated.

While it’s suggested that consuming three to five cups of coffee a day will provide optimal health benefits, it’s not quite that straightforward. Coffee is chemically complex, containing many components that can affect your health in different ways.

While caffeine is the most well-known compound in coffee, there is more to coffee than caffeine. Here are a few of the other compounds found in coffee that might affect your health.

Enlarge / The Falcon Heavy rocket is the most recent heavy-lift booster to debut, and that was more than three years ago. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica)

A little more than three years ago, Ars published an article assessing the potential for four large rockets to make their debut in 2020. Spoiler alert: none of them made it. None even made it in 2021. So will next year finally be the year for some of them?

Probably. Maybe. We sure hope so.

At the time of the older article’s publication, July 2018, four heavy-lift rockets still had scheduled launch dates for 2020—the European Space Agency’s Ariane 6, NASA’s Space Launch System, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. The article estimated the actual launch dates, predicting that Europe’s Ariane 6 would be the only rocket to make a launch attempt in 2020. All four of the predicted launch dates proved overly optimistic, alas.

Enlarge (credit: Peter Dazeley / Getty Images)

Smoking can really clog up the lungs, even for people who’ve never been near a cigarette. Turns out that smoking habits from the early 1900s are still inflicting damage—not on tobacco users or their families, but on people with cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a hereditary condition that makes afflicted people’s mucus thick and sticky. Their lungs become breeding grounds for bacteria that healthy people’s immune systems easily defeat. People with CF often take antibiotics to prevent lung infections, but antibiotics don’t kill everything. A bacterium called Mycobacterium abscessus (M. abscessus) is resistant to many common drugs, and it has become a plague in the CF community over the last couple of decades.

A few years ago, scientists began investigating how the plague originated. By analyzing M. abscessus genomes collected from people around the world, the researchers traced the bacterium’s spread over the last century. They found that decades before the 1950s—before medical advances let people with CF survive past infancy—M. abscessus was already spreading around the globe, and an old public health enemy was to blame. Smokers’ lungs created a reservoir where the pathogen could live and reproduce, a reservoir that quickly spilled over when people with cystic fibrosis began living into adulthood.

Enlarge / A call for radical empathy: In her 2021 book, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, Maia Szalavitz argues for adopting the controversial practice of harm reduction when treating addiction. (credit: iStock / Getty Image)

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: why we should replace the punitive approach of the “war on drugs” with a radical new paradigm for treating addiction.

In 1986, Maia Szalavitz was a heroin addict in New York City, weighing a scant 80 pounds and shooting up as often as 40 times a day. She had just discovered the heady mixture of cocaine and heroin known as speedballs, and had no intention of quitting, even though HIV was spreading rapidly through the community thanks to the practice of sharing dirty needles. But a chance encounter in an East Village apartment likely saved her life.

A woman visiting from California taught Szalavitz how to protect herself by running bleach through a shared syringe at least twice, then rinsing twice with water, as well as washing the injection point. It was Szalavitz’s first encounter with so-called “harm reduction,” an approach to treating addiction that emphasizes ways to minimize the risks and negative consequences associated with substance abuse—not just the risk of addiction and disease, but also social stigma, poverty, and imprisonment. Needle-exchange programs, for instance, supply free clean syringes to addicts, thereby reducing the spread of HIV.