Does this smell like Covid to you?

Here’s something to give you pause: Apparently there are a large number of reviews on the Yankee Candle website complaining that the scented candles don’t have any odor. That got a researcher at Bryn Mawr College to create some charts of Amazon reviews of scented candles. Indeed, the reviews take a noticeable dip in 2020.

Click to see her full charts.

Vaccine updates

Following in the footsteps of Pfizer, Moderna has applied for an emergency use authorization for its Covid-19 vaccine, and says it will have 20 million doses (i.e., enough for 10 million people) ready by the end of 2020.

And by the way, it’s 100% effective.

Unfortunately, Federal officials can’t agree when the vaccine will start rolling out (days? weeks?), nor on who should get it first (seniors? healthcare workers?). “‘It’s going to be messy,’ said a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” President-elect Joe Biden is expected to leave that decision to the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Airlines, for their part, have been running test flights in preparation for distribution to be sure their thermal controls are working.

New pain signal, new pain treatment?

Like moody teens, glial cells in the central nervous system aren’t completely understood, but Japanese researchers say that some of them (astrocytes) clearly have a role in causing pain.

Interestingly, they’re activated by noradrenaline — which could unveil a target for pain treatment. Suppress that noradrenaline signal, suppress the pain. How might you do that? Duloxetine, which may act as a noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor. Nifty.

 

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Laughing isn’t just fun to do, it’s good for you! No, really. Laughing (for real, not the kind you do for Uncle Harry’s penguin jokes) involves a bunch of areas of the brain. And as Bryn Mawr cognitive psychologist Janet Gibson explains:

[L]aughing may help control brain levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, similar to what antidepressants do. By minimizing your brain’s responses to threats, it limits the release of neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol that can wear down your cardiovascular, metabolic and immune systems over time.

On the other hand, she offers this dubious bit of advice: “You can practice laughing even when alone.” Just make sure you really are alone.

All you need is just a little patience (or some serotonin)

Japanese neuroscientists have found two areas of the brain that, when hit with some serotonin, make mice more patient: the orbitofrontal cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex. But each processes the situation differently.

“This confirmed the idea that these two brain areas are calculating the probability of a reward independently from each other, and that these independent calculations are then combined to ultimately determine how long the mice will wait.”

Good news for appendicitis, headache for readers

If you can get past the world’s worst lede* — “Antibiotic treatment was noninferior to appendectomy for appendicitis, according to the results of a pragmatic, nonblinded, noninferiority, randomized trial” — the story is interesting.

Looking at 1,552 people with appendicitis, University of Washington researchers gave half antibiotics, and half had an appendectomy.

225 of the antibiotic recipients needed an appendectomy after all, but the remainder reported outcomes as good as those who had their appendix removed.

“Great,” you think, “Then antibiotics should be the first treatment.” There’s one caveat: “[C]omplications were more common among patients given antibiotics than those who had an appendectomy.”

* Journalist-speak for “the first graf† of a story”
† Journalist-speak for “paragraph”

Flexibility

Next time someone asks you what you’re looking for in a partner, the answer is “flexibility.” It seems (say U. of Rochester researchers) that “those who are psychologically flexible have better romantic and family relationships.”

Well, they did warn us

In July, the administration said it was taking Covid-19 tracking responsibility away from CDC and giving it to HHS’s private contractors. There was an outcry — CDC wasn’t perfect, but the system worked, and it was crazy to switch in the middle of a pandemic.

Now it seems they were right to worry. The new system, HHS Protect, is providing “questionable” data to the people who need it.

A Science examination of HHS Protect and confidential federal documents found the HHS data for three important values in Wisconsin hospitals—beds filled, intensive care unit (ICU) beds filled, and inpatients with COVID-19—often diverge dramatically from those collected by the other federal source, from state-supplied data, and from the apparent reality on the ground.

Mink saga continues

First those shifty Danes decided to slaughter the country’s entire population of caged minks because the animals carried a mutated form of SARS-CoV-2 — one that had already jumped to a dozen humans.

Then the Danish government said no, we actually can’t order farmers to do that.

THEN “Culled mink rise from graves in Denmark after botched mass burial,” presumably to seek vengeance. (Seriously.)

NOW it seems that some of the infected minks have escaped their cages and into the wild where they might spread their mutated virus to other animals.

Stay tuned.