Nuke the bacteria from inside
(it’s the only way to be sure)

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria apparently has a weakness: heat. Warm the little buggers to about 50°C (about 122 in °Freedom) and (say medical researchers at the University of Hong Kong) they’re susceptible to conventional drugs again.

Rather than send patients to a Finnish sauna, though, they came up with a much slicker idea: They created a “microwave-responsive microsphere encapsulated with conventional antibiotics” — that is, a tiny capsule filled with drugs that pops when microwaved. The microwaves heat the bacteria and release the antibiotics at the same time. Cruel, unusual, and awesome.

Covid vaccines for kids are here

Shots for kids are coming to Georgia, but it’s taking time to get the vaccine distributed.

If you want to get it, your county health department should be your first stop. If you want to see about giving it, you want to go to the DPH and be enrolled as a provider.

Fighting Parkinson’s

Want to help reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s? Fight. Well, box. Researchers at Rush University did a small study and found that…

A three-month community-based boxing program significantly eased both motor and non-motor symptoms in adults with early Parkinson’s disease.

By that they mean it didn’t just help with their motor skills, but also reduced “problems like depression, anxiety, sleep problems, pain, apathy and memory problems.”

A pending nicotine cut

The FDA has begun the process of reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. No specifics yet — it’s going to open public comment next May. This gives everyone plenty of time to wring their hands and explain why this is the best/the worst idea in the history of ideas.

Wearing your health on your sleeve

Covid alerts on your wrist

Existing wrist sensors (like those that monitor fertility) could be tricked out to warn someone that they’ve got Covid even before symptoms appear.

Using a bit of artificial intelligence, an international research team led out of Lichtenstein found they could use skin temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate to identify subtle signs of infection.

Tattoo you

Why whip out the sphygmomanometer over and over to check your blood pressure, when a little patch’ll do ya? They call it a tattoo, but engineers in Texas have created a continuous monitoring wrist patch that measures the body’s electrical resistance, aka bioimpedance. A computer is able to correlate those readings with blood pressure and — presto! — cuff-less blood pressure monitoring.

It plumps when you swallow it!

It looks like a pill, works like a balloon, and costs $100 a month: It’s Plenity, a hot new prescription weight-loss … er, treatment.

Patients (users?) pop six capsules a day, which expand in the stomach — a result that’s “comparable to consuming a big salad before lunch and dinner.”

Problems: It’s not covered by insurance, and results are mixed at best. (A trial found that Plenity users lost on average 6.4% of body weight, compared to 4.4% weight loss for those taking a placebo.) But for people who hate vegetables and have some extra cash, why not?

The Long Read: Fear the Squirrels edition

The Atlantic would like you to know that “Squirrels Could Make Monkeypox a Forever Problem.”

One lasting interspecies hop, akin to the one that SARS-CoV-2 has made into white-tailed deer, and monkeypox will be “with us forever” in the U.S.