The necklace will rat you out

If — with your phone in your pocket — you don’t think you’ve given up quite enough privacy, Northwestern researchers are here to help.

They’ve devised “a smart neck-worn device resembling a lapis blue pendant that detects a user’s smoking.” It uses sensors to track the wearer’s throat’s heat signatures.

“This goes way beyond how many cigarettes a person smokes per day. We can detect when the cigarette is being lit, when the person holds it to their mouth and takes a puff, how much they inhale, how much time between puffs and how long they have the cigarette in their mouth.”

Don’t worry! Just like Google and Facebook and TikTok, “The necklace, called SmokeMon, completely maintains a smoker’s privacy.”

The end of pharmacy techs?

“Will we start seeing prescription lockers at some CVS pharmacies [in Georgia]?” asks Channel 11 in Atlanta. Will they replace technicians?

No, no they won’t.

CMS testing lower pay for accelerated drugs

Drugmakers sometimes get accelerated approval from the FDA; the idea is that full trial results will come soon. But often the pharma companies conveniently forget to submit those results, or just never bother to.

Now CMS has a big incentive: It’s going to pay less for drugs that get accelerated approval — until they turn in their results and get full approval.

It’s a test at the moment (and there are some questions to be answered). Drugmakers, of course, are already complaining, while state Medicaid agencies have already asked that they not be required to cover accelerated drugs at all, so this might make everyone equally (un)happy.

Kidneys and caffeine: all about one gene

Note: The news story about this plays fast and loose with coffee and caffeine. The story is actually about caffeine.

Is caffeine good or bad for your kidneys? There’s actually conflicting evidence, but now an international research group thinks it knows why.

The bottom line: Half the population has a variant of a particular gene that “can result in coffee [sic] being three times more likely to cause kidney dysfunction” because they metabolize caffeine more slowly. Caffeine does have some toxic properties, and if you don’t get it out of your system quickly enough, it can cause damage.

“It was remarkable to see just how striking the effects of [caffeine] were in the group that had this genetic variant, yet no effect whatsoever in those who did not.”

They do everything else, so why not?

Since the 1860s, the average human body has been dropping — it’s currently about 97.7°F. No one knew what was behind the drop. Now, though, researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School think they know.

It’s gut bacteria. Of course it is.

Looking at hospitalized patients, they found that the composition of a patients gut biome correlated with their fever response — specifically the presences of Lachnospiraceae bacteria.

“While we certainly haven’t proven that changes in the microbiome explain the drop in human body temperature, we think it is a reasonable hypothesis. Human genetics haven’t meaningfully changed in the last 150 years, but changes in diet, hygiene, and antibiotics have had profound effects on our gut bacteria.”

Get up and get moving

If you have fat mice, you want them to exercise. Pro tip: Have them do it in the morning.

Swedish researchers (with some help from those shifty Danes) found…

…that mice that did exercise in an early active phase, which corresponds to morning exercise in humans, increased their metabolism more than mice that did exercise at a time when they usually rest.