Getting Better Stories of Mental Health

Beware Of Fake Pop-Up COVID Sites

In recent months, mobile COVID-19 testing tents and vans have sprouted on urban sidewalks and street curbs as demand has skyrocketed in response to the rapid spread of the omicron variant. Some of the sites run by private companies offer legitimate, timely and reliable results, but others are more like weeds. High demand and scarce supply opened the door to bad actors, and officials in some states are having a hard time keeping up their oversight amid the proliferation. And they are sounding the alarm that by visiting the pop-up industry’s sometimes makeshift tents, desperate patients could be putting their health, wallets and personal data at risk.

“These conditions change so rapidly,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who leads the COVID-19 Testing Toolkit, which provides guidance to employers and others. “It’s not a surprise that these conditions were totally ripe for consumers to be gouged and to get fraudulent tests.” Consumers seeking testing — either a rapid antigen test that provides results in under an hour or a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test that generally takes longer but is more accurate — may think all testing sites are created equal, but they’re not. Unfortunately, telling the good from the bad is not always easy.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

 

Understanding The Cannabis-Body Connection With Exercise

As a person gets ready for a long run, there are a few things they need: keys, cellphone, earbuds. But what about a weed gummy? It may not fit the stereotype of the stoner locked on the couch eating chips. But as cannabis is legalized in an increasing number of states, anecdotal evidence points to a growing community of people mixing cannabis with exercise. In fact, a 2019 study from the University of Colorado Boulder found 80% of users in states where marijuana is legal use it as part of their workout routine.

Prior research suggests there’s a good reason for this, especially for endurance athletes: the notorious feeling of “runner’s high,” which has been described as euphoria and tied to pain relief, appears to be connected to the body’s endocannabinoid system.

Despite its different legal status in various states, marijuana is still classified federally as a Schedule I drug, putting it in the same category as heroin and meth. That affects the research able to be done with cannabis.

Guest host Miles O’Brien talks to two people involved in the first human study of how cannabis and exercise interact: Laurel Gibson, PhD candidate in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, and ultramarathoner and study participant Heather Mashhoodi, also based in Boulder.

 

Are Electric Planes Finally Ready For Takeoff?

You’ve probably had the experience of your flight landing, and as you wait your turn to deplane, seeing the ground crew running up to refuel the plane from a tanker of jet fuel. But could that tanker one day be replaced by a charging station, at least for some types of flights?

Electric aircraft offer the potential of cleaner flight, with fewer emissions, as well as a quieter ride. Last week, Rolls Royce announced that a flight last November by their experimental electric propellor-driven aircraft “Spirit of Innovation” had officially beaten the world zero-emission speed record at 345 miles per hour. And on a more practical level, the company Eviation is set to test its nine-passenger electric commuter plane, named Alice, in the weeks ahead.

Omer Bar-Yohay, the CEO of Eviation, and Mark Moore, the CEO of electric plane start-up Whisper Aero, join guest host Miles O’Brien to talk about electric aviation technology—and what it might take to bring battery-powered planes to an airport near you.

 

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