Keith Berman, who claimed he wasn’t taking compensation in his role as CEO, actually splashed out a bunch of company money on himself. Also, he claimed that he could test for covid in 15 seconds. Also also, my guy used a “fake persona to repeat false and misleading statements to investors on internet message boards.”
[www.justice.gov]
The US government is once again offering a round of four at-home covid tests you can get for free. You can place an order directly from the USPS website, which will start shipping the week of November 27th.
Americans have a worse opinion of science now than they did before the covid-19 pandemic. It doesn’t come as a surprise after all the disinformation that’s been swirling around since then. Now we can see how much trust in science has eroded in the latest survey by the Pew Research Center. The number of participants who say science “has had a mostly positive impact on society” fell from 73 percent in 2019 to 57 percent today.
Bloomberg has a sprawling piece chronicling the history of Apple’s efforts to expand into health care. One revelation is this:
“The work was nearly complete when Project Fennel was canceled, in part because the Apple Watch is a driver of iPhone sales. ‘If you gave up the watch to Android, you would dilute the value of the watch to the iPhone,’ said someone with knowledge of the decision.”
The DOJ was granted (PDF) a stay of an injunction barring DHS, CISA, FBI, and other federal officials from contact with social media platforms about content moderation. The judge who wrote the injunction this summer claimed their requests about posts containing covid misinformation amounted to a violation of the First Amendment.
An appeals court limited the terms of the ban last month but paused the process to see if the Supreme Court would weigh in. Now it will hear the DOJ’s appeal, over dissent from three justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch).
The mobile app isn’t for everyone, but for one insomniac, Pikachu and Snorlax made a big difference.
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says it “won’t happen” in 2024 and “possibly” won’t arrive in 2025, either. That’s not a huge surprise — my colleague Victoria Song wrote a piece in March about the challenges facing noninvasive blood glucose monitoring, so it’s not surprising that the technology might be very far away even for Apple.
Kuo also says that we might not see an Apple Watch with a Micro LED screen until 2025 or 2026.
When I contacted a telehealth provider for Ozempic, I got exactly what I asked for.
The government just extended the shelf life of some at-home tests in addition to announcing it’ll offer them for free again earlier this week. That means you might be able to use the tests you ordered last year, even if the kit “expired” in the past month. Just look up your kit in this table and click on the “extended expiration date” link to find out how much longer it’ll last.
[U.S. Food and Drug Administration]
The Withings Body Scan Connected Health Station is an extra as hell scale. It’s got a handle for 6-lead EKGs and can purportedly take segmented body fat scans. As in, differentiate how much fat you carry in your arms versus legs, etc. Withings also claims the scale’s EDA sensors can measure your foot sweat to gauge your nerve health. Wild.
In any case, Withings first announced this baby nearly two years ago at CES 2022 — and this is a good example of how long FDA clearance can take as this $399.95 scale will be available at the end of September 2023.
Consumers, states, and the FTC are taking marketing claims from wellness companies more seriously — and, increasingly, there are legal consequences.
The lawsuits come as online promoters move from endorsing other companies’ products to creating and pushing their own. Meanwhile regulators are looking more closely at influencer marketing, which is expected to exceed $21 billion this year, according to an industry report.
“We were never meant to see our faces this much,” argues a Dazed essay. The increase in video conferencing may also mean an increase in body dysmorphic disorder, one survey of more than 7,000 people suggests. (The survey also found an increased use of fillers in people aged 18 to 24.) Personally, I find it helpful to turn off self-view in video calls and insist on phone calls as often as possible.
You won’t have to listen for long to hear who it is.
Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul comes out on October 11th.
Have you ever wondered why celebrities’ teeth all look the same? It’s veneers, and this Cronenberg-esque piece highlights the problems with treating the body as a platform — and the TikTok account of a dentist devoted to calling veneers out.
[Washington Post]
After the FDA approved Pfizer and Moderna’s newly formulated covid vaccines on Monday, the CDC signed off on both shots today, stating “vaccination remains the best protection against COVID-19-related hospitalization and death.” The new vaccines will become available later this week,
A peer-reviewed survey study published earlier this month in PLOS One found that, for healthcare workers, nose-picking increases covid infection risk, and the risk increases with frequency (go nose mining more, and infection is more likely) (via This Week in Virology).
Nail-biting and other factors didn’t seem to affect risk. But we should note that only 219 people responded to the survey. Researchers also acknowledged that recall bias and “potential shifting of (nose picking) behavior” could influence the results. There was another caveat:
We did not ask whether HCW [healthcare workers] committed to nose picking and nail biting when on the work floor, or the specifics of inter variability between nose pickers, e.g. the depth of penetration and eating of boogers.
The VC firm tried to sell stakes in 258 companies in June, The Information reports, citing anonymous sources. Those stakes were worth $312 million in total, and it’s not clear if they sold. Patreon was among the companies whose stakes were up for grabs, but about 40 percent of the firms were biotech or health.
There are plenty of pollution blind spots that ground monitors miss. So NASA launched a powerful new instrument in April to track air pollution from space. The new tool, called TEMPO, monitors three smog-forming pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and ground-level ozone. NASA released the first data maps from TEMPO today. They show pollution building up over major cities in North America, including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC.
TikTok’s dissociative identity disorder community thinks doctors don’t know what’s going on. Some doctors feel the same about them.
