This article was originally published on KFF Health News.

With little pomp, California launched two apps at the start of the year offering free behavioral health services to youths to help them cope with everything from living with anxiety to body acceptance.

Through their phones, young people and some caregivers can meet BrightLife Kids and Soluna coaches, some who specialize in peer support or substance use disorders, for roughly 30-minute virtual counseling sessions that are best suited to those with more mild needs, typically those without a clinical diagnosis. The apps also feature self-directed activities, such as white noise sessions, guided breathing, and videos of ocean waves to help users relax.

“We believe they’re going to have not just great impact, but wide impact across California, especially in places where maybe it’s not so easy to find an in-person behavioral health visit or the kind of coaching and supports that parents and young people need,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom’s health secretary, Mark Ghaly, during the Jan. 16 announcement.

The apps represent one of the Democratic governor’s major forays into health technology and come with four-year contracts valued at $498 million. California is believed to be the first state to offer a mental health app with free coaching to all young residents, according to the Department of Health Care Services, which operates the program.

However, the rollout has been slow. Only about 15,000 of the state’s 12.6 million children and young adults have signed up for the apps, school counselors say they’ve never heard of them, and one of the companies isn’t making its app available on Android phones until summer.

Advocates for youth question the wisdom of investing taxpayer dollars in two private companies. Social workers are concerned the companies’ coaches won’t properly identify youths who need referrals for clinical care. And the spending is drawing lawmaker scrutiny amid a state deficit pegged at as much as $73 billion.

An app for that

Newsom’s administration says the apps fill a need for young Californians and their families to access professional telehealth for free, in multiple languages, and outside of standard 9-to-5 hours. It’s part of Newsom’s sweeping $4.7 billion master plan for kids’ mental health, which was introduced in 2022 to increase access to mental health and substance use support services. In addition to launching virtual tools such as the teletherapy apps, the initiative is working to expand workforce capacity, especially in underserved areas.

“The reality is that we are rarely 6 feet away from our devices,” said Sohil Sud, director of Newsom’s Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. “The question is how we can leverage technology as a resource for all California youth and families, not in place of, but in addition to, other behavioral health services that are being developed and expanded.”

The virtual platforms come amid rising depression and suicide rates among youth and a shortage of mental health providers. Nearly half of California youths from the ages of 12 to 17 report having recently struggled with mental health issues, with nearly a third experiencing serious psychological distress, according to a 2021 study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. These rates are even higher for multiracial youths and those from low-income families.

But those supporting youth mental health at the local level question whether the apps will move the needle on climbing depression and suicide rates.

“It’s fair to applaud the state of California for aggressively seeking new tools,” said Alex Briscoe of California Children’s Trust, a statewide initiative that, along with more than 100 local partners, works to improve the social and emotional health of children. “We just don’t see it as fundamental. And we don’t believe the youth mental health crisis will be solved by technology projects built by a professional class who don’t share the lived experience of marginalized communities.”

The apps, BrightLife Kids and Soluna, are operated by two companies: Brightline, a 5-year-old venture capital-backed startup; and Kooth, a London-based publicly traded company that has experience in the U.K. and has also signed on some schools in Kentucky and Pennsylvania and a health plan in Illinois. In the first five months of Kooth’s Pennsylvania pilot, 6% of students who had access to the app signed up.

Brightline and Kooth represent a growing number of health tech firms seeking to profit in this space. They beat out dozens of other bidders including international consulting companies and other youth telehealth platforms that had already snapped up contracts in California.

Although the service is intended to be free with no insurance requirement, Brightline’s app, BrightLife Kids, is folded into and only accessible through the company’s main app, which asks for insurance information and directs users to paid licensed counseling options alongside the free coaching. After KFF Health News questioned why the free coaching was advertised below paid options, Brightline reordered the page so that, even if a child has high-acuity needs, free coaching shows up first.

The apps take an expansive view of behavioral health, making the tools available to all California youth under age 26 as well as caregivers of babies, toddlers, and children 12 and under. When KFF Health News asked to speak with an app user, Brightline connected a reporter with a mother whose 3-year-old daughter was learning to sleep on her own.

‘It’s like crickets’

Despite being months into the launch and having millions in marketing funds, the companies don’t have a definitive rollout timeline. Brightline said it hopes to have deployed teams across the state to present the tools in person by midyear. Kooth said developing a strategy to hit every school would be “the main focus for this calendar year.”

“It’s a big state—58 counties,” Bob McCullough of Kooth said. “It’ll take us a while to get to all of them.”

So far BrightLife Kids is available only on Apple phones. Brightline said it’s aiming to launch the Android version over the summer.

“Nobody’s really done anything like this at this magnitude, I think, in the U.S. before,” said Naomi Allen, a co-founder and the CEO of Brightline. “We’re very much in the early innings. We’re already learning a lot.”

The contracts, obtained by KFF Health News through a records request, show the companies operating the two apps could earn as much as $498 million through the contract term, which ends in June 2027, months after Newsom is set to leave office. And the state is spending hundreds of millions more on Newsom’s virtual behavioral health strategy. The state said it aims to make the apps available long-term, depending on usage.

The state said 15,000 people signed up in the first three months. When KFF Health News asked how many of those users actively engaged with the app, it declined to say, noting that data would be released this summer.

KFF Health News reached out to nearly a dozen California mental health professionals and youths. None of them were aware of the apps.

“I’m not hearing anything,” said Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California Association of School Counselors. “It’s like crickets.”

Whitson said she doesn’t think the apps are on “anyone’s” radar in schools, and she doesn’t know of any schools that are actively advertising them. Brightline will be presenting its tool to the counselor association in May, but Whitson said the company didn’t reach out to plan the meeting; she did.

Concern over referrals

Whitson isn’t comfortable promoting the apps just yet. Although both companies said they have a clinical team on staff to assist, Whitson said she’s concerned that the coaches, who aren’t all licensed therapists, won’t have the training to detect when users need more help and refer them to clinical care.

This sentiment was echoed by other school-based social workers, who also noted the apps’ duplicative nature—in some counties, like Los Angeles, youths can access free virtual counseling sessions through Hazel Health, a for-profit company. Nonprofits, too, have entered this space. For example, Teen Line, a peer-to-peer hotline operated by Southern California-based Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, is free nationwide.

While the state is also funneling money to the schools as part of Newsom’s master plan, students and school-based mental health professionals voiced confusion at the large app investment when, in many school districts, few in-person counseling roles exist, and in some cases are dwindling.

Kelly Merchant, a student at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, noted that it can be hard to access in-person therapy at her school. She believes the community college, which has about 15,000 students, has only one full-time counselor and one part-time bilingual counselor. She and several students interviewed by KFF Health News said they appreciated having engaging content on their phone and the ability to speak to a coach, but all said they’d prefer in-person therapy.

“There are a lot of people who are seeking therapy, and people close to me that I know. But their insurances are taking forever, and they’re on the waitlist,” Merchant said. “And, like, you’re seeing all these people struggle.”

Fiscal conservatives question whether the money could be spent more effectively, like to bolster county efforts and existing youth behavioral health programs.

Republican state Sen. Roger Niello, vice chair of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee, noted that California is forecasted to face deficits for the next three years, and taxpayer watchdogs worry the apps might cost even more in the long run.

“What starts as a small financial commitment can become uncontrollable expenses down the road,” said Susan Shelley of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

The post Inside California’s $500 million investment in therapy apps for young people appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest human, ran a 100-meter sprint at a speed of 23.35 miles per hour (37.57 kilometers per hour).

That’s mind-blowingly fast for a human. It’s about the same speed as cruising in a car through your neighborhood or in a school zone. It might not seem that fast when you’re in the car, but for a person? Few runners in the world can even come close.

There are several reasons why some people can run very fast while others tend to run more slowly. Genetics–the traits you inherit from your parents–play a role, but so do your choices and experiences.

As pediatric exercise scientists, we create and evaluate programs that help children be healthy. The exciting news is that while you have no control over your genetics, you can train to improve your speed.

Fast twitch, slow twitch

One major factor that influences your ability to run fast is the structure of your body, including how your muscles work.

The human body has more than 600 muscles that work together, allowing you to move in different directions and at various speeds. These muscles are made up of groups of fibers. There are two main types: fast twitch and slow twitch.

Muscles have different mixes of these fiber types. For example, two muscles make up the calf: One is predominantly fast twitch–that’s the gastrocnemius, used for sprinting and jumping. The other is mostly slow twitch–that’s the soleus, used for walking and jogging.

Fast-twitch muscle fibers are larger and help your body move quickly and generate significant force. Sprinters tend to have an abundance of fast-twitch muscle fibers. However, this muscle fiber type also tires quickly, which limits how long you can run at top speed to relatively short distances.

Slow-twitch muscle fibers are smaller and help you run at slower speeds, but with greater endurance. Long-distance runners and competitive cyclists tend to have a lot of these muscles.

How much you have of each type of muscle fiber–fast twitch and slow twitch–is mostly determined by your genes, so you’ll have to work with what you’re born with when it comes to muscle types. But exercises can help train those muscles.

Your brain plays a big role

Physical ability isn’t just about muscle. Your brain plays an important role, too.

Your skeletal muscles are controlled by your brain–you think about your actions and then execute the movements. For example, you can control how long your stride is, how your arms move, how your feet hit the ground and even the techniques you use to breathe.

You can teach your body to use the best running techniques. That includes proper posture, so your body is standing tall, and an economical stride, so your feet land below you rather than too far out in front, where they can slow you down.

You can also improve your running form by using your whole body, with your arms pumping in opposition to the legs, running on your toes and maximizing the time spent in flight phase with both feet off the ground. Using proper running techniques helps the muscles create more force and work together, which helps you run faster.

The more you practice an activity, the better you will get. As your ability to run fast increases, challenge yourself to run even faster.

How to train to run faster–myth-busting!

You may have heard your friends chatting about ways to boost your speed or searched the internet for tips on getting faster. Time to bust some of those myths.

Myth 1: You have to run as fast as you can to train to be faster. That’s false!

You don’t have to run as fast as you can to get faster, and it actually helps to take short breaks to recover in between activities where you are sprinting.

Myth 2: You need to lift heavy weights to get faster. False!

Functional strength training involves performing exercises that help you get better at specific movements. They involve using either medium weights or just the resistance of your own body weight. Doing planks, lunges, step-ups or jump squats are great examples. These activities focus on the muscles that are instrumental during running.

Myth 3: You need to specialize in running early in life to become a fast runner. False!

Picking one activity to focus on early in life may actually limit your ability to develop into a fast runner. Doing a variety of physical activities can help you develop new skills that improve your running. For example, the movements and endurance used in soccer may translate into the ability to run faster.

Myth 4: Training isn’t fun. False!

Training programs can take many shapes and forms. You can play running games with your friends, work on fast footwork using an agility ladder or create obstacle courses. There’s nothing like a little healthy competition to motivate your training.

What’s important is having fun while training and participating in activities that promote running speed on a regular basis.

So, whether you want to be the next Usain Bolt or you just want to win a race against your friend, remember that with a little bit of genetic luck and hard work, it may just be possible.

The post Why are some people faster than others? appeared first on Popular Science.

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It was nearing the peak of PorcUclimb, right before Downward Dog, when I came up with what I was sure was a career-defining concept: Ware ’N Tear’s Salve for Wounded Pride. Here I was fat biking along the groomed singletrack of Round Valley on a perfect bluebird day in early March and I was just gassed, totally holding back our small guided group of snow cyclists. Coming off a recent illness, my altitude-ravaged lungs just couldn’t deliver what my legs demanded. 

I quickly turned to my fellow rider, KT CEO Jessica Klodnicki, and asked if R&D could get started on what could be my legacy. The chances are less than zero, I was quickly told, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plentiful new recovery products to discover. After all, that’s why I was in Park City, Utah, just up the road from American Fork and the headquarters of the brand synonymous with kinesiology tape and its growing KT Ice and KT Health portfolio.

Prepare

Maybe you’re an elite athlete. If so, chances are you’ve used KT Tape. Maybe you’ve seen elite athletes. If so, chances are you’ve seen strips of elastic KT Tape crisscrossing an elbow, knee, shoulder, etc. Maybe you’re sitting at a desk reading this in between emails and trips to the coffee station. If so, chances are you’re wondering if KT products can benefit everybody and every body, not just Olympians and other elevated competitors. Before my trip to Utah, I was firmly in that last group. I knew the brand because, with over 80 percent market share in the taping category and a big, bright logo, KT is hard to miss even if you’ve just dabbled in couch-to-5k programs and ended up limping through CVS aisles searching for muscle soreness relief.

Just because I had seen KT Tape, however, didn’t mean I had tried KT Tape. I honestly never even glanced at it because I wasn’t Athletic—emphasis on that capital A. Sure, I stay active, biking and hiking, but I was a little too quick to let muscle soreness convince me to slow down, or maybe grind to a complete stop. I hadn’t really considered the potential benefits of gentle support, modulating pain signals, and promoting blood flow and lymphatic drainage for swelling relief that could come from kinesiology tape. Sure, I knew the R.I.C.E. method of dealing with obvious inflammation—rest, ice, compression, and elevation—but I didn’t think enough about how to lessen the chance of overuse aches or even microtraumas in the first place. I didn’t know as much about how to aid working out as I did how to react when things don’t work out.

So here I was at 7,000 feet elevation—6,700 feet higher than back home on the East Coast, give or take a few—ready to reevaluate my approach to activity. And to test a therapeutic routine, you need to put some muscles to work. That’s why KT brought a small group of journalists to this mountain town known for winter sports—a high desert covered in deep powder thanks to lake effect storms. That’s how I ended up embarrassing myself on a bike. But the shame of crapping out on the cord wasn’t the only thing leaving me feeling tingly.

Perform

Much like my typical delayed onset muscle soreness, KT’s reveals built up gradually. And our first introduction, prior to carving some corners, was to the new KT Health magnesium creams—KT Health Activate, specifically. Magnesium cream isn’t new—just ask anyone with restless leg syndrome. But KT Health Activate has worked with a local Utah partner on a cream that combines magnesium with Arnica—as well as skin-friendly aloe, vitamin-e, shea butter, and jojoba oil—to provide multiple benefits. 

According to Dr. Erin Hassler, a member of the KT Sports Medicine Advisory Board who led our presentations on the physiological impact of the products, magnesium is the counterbalance to calcium in the tug-of-war that is muscle contractions. Whereas calcium activates muscle, magnesium relaxes it. Applying magnesium cream prior to exercise loosens the muscles, reducing stiffness and, hopefully, injuries. Adding in Arnica is an additional prophylactic tactic, creating a warming sensation and promoting opioid receptor activity to make you feel better about your gains and pains. 

And it certainly worked. Still feeling the long flight in my lower back, I applied some KT Health Activate to the base of my spine prior to our ride (10-20 minutes before activity is recommended). Sure, it was a “warm” day in the low- to mid-30s and we were doing high-output activity, but we were barely into the course before I was striping down almost to my Arc’Teryx Rho Merino wool crew neck because I was primed (and more than a little afraid sweat would trickle some of the cream into a precarious crevice). And while my lungs could have used some soothing going up the trail, my lower back felt great as I eventually caught my breath and ripped the descent. 

My upper back, on the other hand, hasn’t felt great since I was first introduced to personal computing in the early ’90s. Luckily, a second product was unveiled once we returned to the hotel: KT Tape Pro Ice. This new addition infuses Menthol into the established KT Tape Pro adhesive, appealing to consumers who use pain relief patches but find that they bunch or peel or just don’t work well on joints, etc. 

As we’ve established, however, I’d never used KT Tape despite the company’s retail dominance since it launched in 2008. So I wasn’t sure how to apply it. Yes, KT has created a mobile app with guided instructions on anchoring and angles for any anatomy. But, since the team was already there, they invited everyone to identify a problem area and someone would address it for us. Citing my laptop hunch, I had strips put on my neck and across my shoulders and, in a relatively short time, started to experience pain relief, or an excellent approximation of it. What Menthol does, among other things, is create the illusion of cooling by activating the thermoreceptor that senses cold. Triggering ole TRPM8, in turn, activates vasoconstriction—like icing without the ice—and decreases pain receptor sensations. All the while the tape helps open up that dermis and move any prior fluid build-up along.

Much like with the KT Health Activate cream, it wasn’t long before I felt the KT Tape Pro Ice in action—a relief response that gradually faded during some hotel room downtime. What was even more surprising, however, was that the tape reactivated later that evening. Dinner took place in a yurt located at the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center in Midway, the “Little Switzerland” of Utah. To access the yurt, however, you had to snowshoe a half-mile. And that exertion reacted with the tape, cooling me down and firing my opioid receptors up. Maybe it was the rich food and robust pairings from Parallel Wines or maybe it was the Menthol and stretchy support, but I slept well that night. 

Recover

I woke up the next morning with very little residual tenderness, which was good because it was time for two more products and one more test. First, there was KT Health Recover magnesium cream, which swaps the Arnica for Menthol, pre-workout application for post-workout (after your shower, or you’ll wash it all away). But it still energizes nerve endings in its own way. Compared to the KT Tape Pro Ice, I felt less immediate stimulation (YMMV, as it comes down to skin type), but there’s just something about the smell of Menthol that I find appealing and appeasing (and that makes me put on some old skool breakbeat hardcore). Plus, the cream can go where KT Tape Pro Ice can’t—i.e., where there is body hair—just don’t combine the two, as the cream will make the tape less adhesive.

The other new introduction in the KT Health line was the new Ice Sleeve. If you’ve ever entertained exercising, even briefly, you’ve surely dedicated some space in your freezer to ice packs. And you’ve surely grabbed one of those stiff packets, wrapped it in a ratty dish rag, and awkwardly balanced it on some sore appendage propped up on a pillow. The KT Health Ice Sleeve aims to mitigate the swelling and cursing that comes from activity and subpar ice therapy.

Wrapped in microfiber, the water-based glycol gel in the infinitely reusable Ice Sleeve remains pliant even when frozen, making it perfect for 360 degrees of cold compression of ankles, knees, and elbows (potentially even thighs if using the XXL size). There’s no condensation, and 20 minutes or so of cold it gives off lines up with the medically recommended application on joints and tendons. Plus it stores neatly in its insulated portable pouch, a lil localized ice bath that doesn’t confine you to the couch.

As for that last test, it was my Real Housewives of Salt Lake City [Season 2, Ep. 14] moment, according to a coworker who watches the show. Sold as a final recovery activity but really its own core-strength challenge to maintain balance, we participated in stand-up paddle board yoga on the Homestead Crater hot spring. Here I was 24 hours later, yet thinking again about breath control and settling into a Downward Dog, my muscles warm as I tackled another activity that became easier over time. I may not have left Utah with a future in designing recovery products for the recreational athlete. Still, I can now see how KT products and I have a future together whether I’m hunched over a computer, handlebars, a yoga mat, etc. 

The post Roll the tape: What KT Tape taught me about muscles, magnesium, and my limitations appeared first on Popular Science.

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Observers have documented multiple animal species using plants for self-medicinal purposes, such as great apes eating plants that treat parasitic infections or rubbing vegetation on sore muscles. But a wild orangutan recently displayed something never observed before—he treated his own open wound by activating a plant’s medical properties using his own spit. As detailed in a study published May 2 in Scientific Reports, evolutionary biologists believe the behavior could point toward a common ancestor shared with humans.

The discovery occurred within a protected Indonesian rainforest at the Suaq Balimbing research site. This region, currently home to roughly 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans, is utilized by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior to monitor the apes’ behavior and wellbeing. During their daily observations, cognitive and evolutionary biologists noticed a sizable injury on the face of one of the local males named Rakus. Such wounds are unsurprising among the primates, since they frequently spar with one another—but then Rakus did something three days later that the team didn’t expect.

After picking leaves off of a native plant known as an Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), well-known for its anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, and antioxidant properties, as well as its use in traditional malaria medicines, Rakus began to chew the plant into a paste. He then rubbed it directly on his facial injury for several minutes before covering it entirely with the mixture. Over the next few days, researchers noted the self-applied natural bandage kept the wound from showing signs of infection or exacerbation. Within five days, the injury scabbed over before healing entirely.

Such striking behavior raises a number of questions, particularly how Rakus first learned to treat his face using the plant. According to study senior author Caroline Schuppli, one possibility is that it simply comes down to “individual innovation.”

“Orangutans at [Suaq] rarely eat the plant,” she said in an announcement. “However, individuals may accidentally touch their wounds while feeding on this plant and thus unintentionally apply the plant’s juice to their wounds. As Fibraurea tinctoria has potent analgesic effects, individuals may feel an immediate pain release, causing them to repeat the behavior several times.”

[Related: Gorillas like to scramble their brains by spinning around really fast.]

If this were the case, it could be that Rakus is one of the few orangutans to have discovered the benefits of Fibraurea tinctoria. At the same time, adult orangutan males never live where they were born—they migrate sizable distances either during or after puberty to establish new homes. So it’s also possible Rakus may have learned this behavior from his relatives, but given observers don’t know where he is originally from, it’s difficult to follow up on that theory just yet.

Still, Schuppli says other “active wound treatment” methods have been noted in other African and Asian great apes, even when they aren’t used to disinfect or help heal an open wound. Knowing that, “it is possible that there exists a common underlying mechanism for the recognition and application of substances with medical or functional properties to wounds and that our last common ancestor already showed similar forms of ointment behavior.”

Given how much humans already have in common with their great ape relatives, it’s easy to see how this could be a likely explanation. But regardless of how Rakus knew how to utilize the medicinal plant, if he ever ends up scrapping with another male orangutan again, he’ll at least know how to fix himself up afterwards.

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The Danish government is sending a message on PFAS, a class of artificial substances known as “forever chemicals,” as they don’t break down easily in nature.

[ Related: 2 ways of knowing if there are PFAS in your drinking water ]

Denmark’s Ministry of the Environment said it plans to ban all clothes, shoes, and waterproofing agents that contain Per and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, citing myriad health risks linked to the oil, water, and stain repellents. Developed in the 1930s, PFAS became widely used in the ‘50s, appearing in everything from cars and carpets to food packaging and beauty products. Studies have linked PFAS to reproductive health problems, child developmental delays, cancers, and high cholesterol, per the EPA.

Denmark intends for its PFAS clothing ban to kick in on July 1, 2026, in order to offer businesses a “transition period,” the environmental regulator said in an April 25 announcement. The ban will encompass both imported and Danish-made clothing, but it won’t affect “professional” or “safety clothing.” Denmark had already banned PFAS in food packaging as of 2020.

“The proposal for a ban will be subject to consultation,” the Ministry said in a statement. “It will be possible for companies to register if there are special challenges that must be taken into account.”

PFAS’ are specifically common in clothing labeled as water- and stain-resistant, such as rain jackets and athletic wear. A 2022 report, from environmental advocacy group Toxic-Free Future, estimated that 72% of products with such labels contain PFAS. The same year, a study by the non-profit American Chemical Society found significant concentrations of the chemicals in childrens’ school uniforms, CBS reported.

Still commonly used globally, the chemicals persist in the environment, accumulating across the food chain. They are found today in fish, cattle, vegetables, and drinking water. 

[ Related: 8 new types of ‘forever chemicals’ found in river linked to US cancer cluster ]

In the US, the agency banned some PFAS from food packaging and introduced new PFAS-related tap water regulations earlier this month. At the time, the EPA said that limiting exposure would “prevent thousands of premature deaths, tens of thousands of serious illnesses, including certain cancers and liver and heart impacts in adults, and immune and developmental impacts to infants and children.” 

The EPA’s website states that “research is still ongoing to determine how different levels of exposure to different PFAS can lead to a variety of health effects.”

Other nations have moved to outlaw the chemicals. New Zealand will ban them from use in cosmetics as of 2026, and five European countries—Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—introduced a proposal last year to eventually restrict the use of PFAS across the European Union.

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The Federal Trade Commission has ordered Razer to issue over $1.1 million in full refunds for its Razer Zephyr facemasks after alleging the PC gaming accessory company falsely billed its futuristic “wearable air purifier” as equivalent to N95-grade respirators. In truth, the FTC says Zephyr’s makers never even submitted their product for testing to either the FDA or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). 

Razer is best known for its sleek, futuristic, luminescent video gaming accessories—but during the height of COVID-19, the company specializing in RGB backlit keyboards and headphones thought it wise to wade into pandemic healthcare. Released in October 2021 following nearly a year of internet hype, the Razer Zephyr looked more like a cyberpunk cosplay accessory than an actual “wearable air purifier.” Still, the transparent, twin-fan mask included three replaceable filters supposedly functioned together as equivalents to existing N95-grade products.

Outlets approached the odd healthcare accessory with a mix of anticipation and skepticism after plans were revealed in January 2021, later considered the pandemic’s deadliest month in the US. In the months leading up to its official launch, Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan repeatedly posted on social media “linking the mask to the rise of the COVID-19 Delta variant, making explicit health claims, positioning the mask as a reusable N95, and claiming that Razer was seeking certification… [but] knew that they had never sought—and were not seeking—such certification,” according to the FTC’s complaint.

[Related: Calling TurboTax ‘free’ is ‘deceptive advertising,’ says FTC.]

To qualify for N95 certification, filters must guard against at least 95-percent of ambient air particles between 0.1 and 0.3 micrometers in size, while also providing higher filtration rates for larger particulates. Although COVID-19 virus cells measure around just 0.1 micrometers or smaller, they are always bonded to larger bodies such as water molecules and other biological material, and thus are effectively blocked by N95-rated masks and filters.

Razer consulted with a Singapore-based quality assurance company during Zephyr’s development, and in emails wrote they intended to market the wearable as “N95 grade.” Subsequent reviews showed Razer’s design only achieved around 83 percent particulate filtration efficiency (PFE) while its fans were off, with just a three percent improvement with the fans enabled. Even then, FTC documents state the Razer Zephyr “frequently tested much lower” and “did not come close to consistently reaching a PFE of 95 percent.” The quality testing company even went so far as to warn against mentioning N95 ratings “as it is not relevant to this product, and the claim will cause confusion.” 

Despite this, Razer moved forward with its marketing and released Razer Zephyr in October 2021, amid spiking global COVID-19 rates due to the Delta variant. Masks and filter packs were made available online through limited drop releases, as well as at three physical locations in Seattle, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. A single mask and three sets of filter replacements retailed for $99.99, while a mask alongside 33 filter sets sold for $149.99. A single, 10-set filter pack cost its wearers $29.99. The company even announced plans for a “Pro” version featuring voice amplification in early January 2022.

Barely a week later, however, Razer began walking back its N95-grade marketing for Zephyr amid mounting scrutiny and criticism. The Pro edition never saw the light of day, and federal regulators eventually opened its official investigation into the situation. In addition to the more than $1.1 million in refunds, Razer must pay a $100,000 civil penalty, and is forbidden from making any future “COVID-related health misrepresentations or unsubstantiated health claims about protective health equipment.” All references to the sleek, shoddy masks now appear scrubbed from Razer’s official website.

“Products like the Zephyr invite a lot of scrutiny. Is this an honest, good-faith attempt to create an upgraded device for people who plan to wear masks in public long-term, or is it a cash grab? Does it work at all?” PopSci wrote in its official review from January 2022. “These are all good, fair questions to ask when a company with no history making medical technology quickly develops and launches an expensive piece of kit.”

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Genetic material from a particularly virulent strain of bird flu virus has been found in 1 in 5 samples of pasteurized milk, according to an April 25 update from the Food and Drug Administration. The tested milk came from a nationally representative sample and the positive results came from milk in areas with herds of dairy cows where Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) or H5N1 infections have been detected. The FDA’s new test results indicate that the virus has spread further among dairy cows than previously indicated.

As of April 25, bird flu had been detected in 33 herds in Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota, Ohio, and Texas. This particular virus strain has caused a devastating outbreak in wild and commercial birds since 2021. It first spread to mammals in 2022 and can occasionally infect humans. Only two human cases of HPAI have been reported in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). 

The FDA used quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) testing to inspect the milk samples. While the findings are concerning, it does not necessarily mean that the milk was contaminated with live virus–which can cause infection. 

[Related: Bird flu detected in dairy cow milk samples.]

“With qPCR tests, the genetic material, not necessarily the whole active or infectious virus, is what is detected,” clinical pathologist Nam Tran said in a statement. “In the case of food, the genetic material, the RNA found in the grocery store milk samples, may not be the infectious H5N1 virus, but fragments from it.” Tram is a professor at the University of California Davis and senior director of clinical pathology at UC Davis Health.

The FDA believes that the commercial milk supply remains safe, since the testing only revealed small genetic traces of bird flu and not live virus that causes infections. The virus itself was first detected in dairy cows in the US in March and the FDA announced on April 23 that it had found viral fragments in commercially sold milk. 

Milk sold in grocery stores is pasteurized. This process kills harmful bacteria and viruses by heating milk to a specific temperature for a set period of time. The viral particles detected by highly sensitive qPCR tests were likely the remnants of viruses that had already been killed during the pasteurization process. 

To determine if any active, infectious virus remains in the milk samples, the FDA is going to perform egg inoculation tests. These rests are often considered the “gold standard” for determining a virus’ viability. In these tests, scientists will inject the virus sample into a raw chicken egg to see if it replicates or not. This test provides the most sensitive results, but it will take longer than other methods.

“Virus isolation propagates viruses, and needs a live virus particle to start with,” UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine professor of clinical diagnostic virology Beate Crossley said in a statement. “A virus isolation positive result of a sample would indicate a live, infectious virus is present in the sample.”

[Related: Seal pup die-off from avian flu in Argentina looks ‘apocalyptic.’]

The World Health Organization has also urged public health officials to prepare for a potential spillover to humans in the future. While cases of humans getting infected and seriously ill from bird flu are rare, the more it spreads among mammals, the easier it will be for the virus to evolve to spread. 

Health officials continue to believe that commercial milk is unlikely to help spread the virus to humans and that pasteurization is the best line of defense. Consuming raw or unpasteurized milk is dangerous, no matter what the internet says. Raw milk has no added nutritional benefits and it can be contaminated with harmful germs. The CDC even considers raw milk one of the riskiest foods a person can consume.

As an evolving situation, the USDA and FDA will continue to share updates. 

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Energizer has designed a new lithium coin battery that releases a blue dye immediately upon interacting with moisture such as saliva. The marker offers parents a visible way to determine if their children accidentally swallowed one of these toxic products.

After two decades of steady integration into everything from key fobs and remote controls to cooking thermometers and smart watches, lithium button batteries are now extremely commonplace household items. Unfortunately, their ubiquity coincides with a major, ongoing spike in the number of children ingesting the small batteries. Over 70,300 emergency doctor visits were reported for children’s battery-related issues between 2010 and 2019. Of those, nearly 85 percent involved button batteries.

Apart from the choking hazard, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission warns a battery’s chemicals can cause severe bodily injury, and even death, within a matter of hours if ingested. Additionally, the electric current generated by saliva’s interactions with a battery can simultaneously burn through body tissue, leading to even more potentially lethal complications. Every year, thousands of emergency hospital visits occur because of ingesting batteries.

[Related: What to expect if your child swallows a button battery.]

To help address the continuing public health concern, Energizer recently partnered with the children’s safety nonprofit Reese’s Purpose to design a safer button battery, as well as even stronger childproof packaging.

Apart from a bitter-tasting, nontoxic coating increasingly found on similar products, the company’s newest coin-shaped batteries are also wrapped in a container that requires scissors to open. But even if a child does get their hands on one, parents and caretakers will almost instantly be able to see if they need to contact emergency medical services.

Described as a “color alert technology,” the battery’s dotted, negative underside releases a nontoxic, food grade blue dye when mixed with moisture, such as spit. According to Energizer’s website, the batteries contain about as much dye as an ounce of a flavored sports drink, and will disappear after a few water rinses or teeth brushing.

Hamsmith started the nonprofit advocacy group in honor of her 18-month-old daughter who died in 2020 after swallowing a remote control’s coin battery.

Regardless of childproofing innovations, however, caretakers should immediately take a child to medical professionals if they suspect battery ingestion. The National Capital Poison Center warns against inducing vomiting and instead suggests having any child over 12 months old to swallow honey. Doing so can coat the ingested battery, and thus help delay some chemical burning of internal tissue while en route to receiving medical attention. That said, children younger than 1-year-old shouldn’t eat honey, so rushing them immediately to the emergency room for an X-ray is the best approach.

In the event of suspected emergencies, parents are encouraged to call the National Battery Ingestion Hotline (800-498-8666) or Poison Control Center (800-222-1222).

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Myopia, or the need for corrected vision to focus or see objects at a distance, has become a lot more common in recent decades. Some even consider myopia, also known as nearsightedness, an epidemic.

Optometry researchers estimate that about half of the global population will need corrective lenses to offset myopia by 2050 if current rates continue–up from 23% in 2000 and less than 10% in some countries.

The associated health care costs are huge. In the United States alone, spending on corrective lenses, eye tests and related expenses may be as high as US$7.2 billion a year.

What explains the rapid growth in myopia?

I’m a vision scientist who has studied visual perception and perceptual defects. To answer that question, first let’s examine what causes myopia–and what reduces it.

How myopia develops

While having two myopic parents does mean you’re more likely to be nearsighted, there’s no single myopia gene. That means the causes of myopia are more behavioral than genetic.

Optometrists have learned a great deal about the progression of myopia by studying visual development in infant chickens. They do so by putting little helmets on baby chickens. Lenses on the face of the helmet cover the chicks’ eyes and are adjusted to affect how much they see.

Just like in humans, if visual input is distorted, a chick’s eyes grow too large, resulting in myopia. And it’s progressive. Blur leads to eye growth, which causes more blur, which makes the eye grow even larger, and so on.

Two recent studies featuring extensive surveys of children and their parents provide strong support for the idea that an important driver of the uptick in myopia is that people are spending more time focusing on objects immediately in front of our eyes, whether a screen, a book or a drawing pad. The more time we spend focusing on something within arm’s length of our faces, dubbed “near work,” the greater the odds of having myopia.

So as much as people might blame new technologies like smartphones and too much “screen time” for hurting our eyes, the truth is even activities as valuable as reading a good book can affect your eyesight.

Outside light keeps myopia at bay

Other research has shown that this unnatural eye growth can be interrupted by sunlight.

A 2022 study, for example, found that myopia rates were more than four times greater for children who didn’t spend much time outdoors–say, once or twice a week–compared with those who were outside daily. At the same time, kids who spent more than three hours a day while not at school reading or looking at a screen close-up were four times more likely to have myopia than those who spent an hour or less doing so.

In another paper, from 2012, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of seven studies that compared duration of time spent outdoors with myopia incidence. They also found that more time spent outdoors was associated with lower myopia incidence and progression. The odds of developing myopia dropped by 2% for each hour spent outside per week.

Other researchers have reported similar effects and argued for much more time outdoors and changes in early-age schooling to reduce myopia prevalence.

What’s driving the epidemic

That still doesn’t explain why it’s on the rise so rapidly.

Globally, a big part of this is due to the rapid development and industrialization of countries in East Asia over the last 50 years. Around that time, young people began spending more time in classrooms reading and focusing on other objects very close to their eyes and less time outdoors.

This is also what researchers observed in the North American Arctic after World War II, when schooling was mandated for Indigenous people. Myopia rates for Inuit went from the single digits before the 1950s to upwards of 70% by the 1970s as all children began attending schools for the first time.

Countries in Western Europe, North America and Australia have shown increased rates of myopia in recent years but nothing approaching what has been observed recently in China, Japan, Singapore and a few other East Asian countries. The two main factors identified as leading to increased myopia are increased reading and other activities that require focusing on an object close to one’s eyes and a reduction in time spent outdoors.

The surge in myopia cases will likely have its worst effects 40 or 50 years from now because it takes time for the young people being diagnosed with nearsightedness now to experience the most severe vision problems.

Treating myopia

Fortunately, just a few minutes a day with glasses or contact lenses that correct for blur stops the progression of myopia, which is why early vision testing and vision correction are important to limit the development of myopia. Eye checks for children are mandatory in some countries, such as the U.K. and now China, as well as most U.S. states.

People with with high myopia, however, have increased risk of blindness and other severe eye problems, such as retinal detachment, in which the retina pulls away from the the back of the eye. The chances of myopia-related macular degeneration increase by 40% for each diopter of myopia. A diopter is a unit of measurement used in eye prescriptions.

But there appear to be two sure-fire ways to offset or delay these effects: Spend less time focusing on objects close to your face, like books and smartphones, and spend more time outside in the bright, natural light. Given the first one is difficult advice to take in our modern age, the next best thing is taking frequent breaks–or perhaps spend more time reading and scrolling outside in the sun.

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The market is absolutely flooded with devices designed to track your health, most of which reside on the wearer’s wrist. Relatively newer to the health-tracking game, though, are smart rings. The Oura Ring was first released in 2015 but didn’t gain widespread recognition and popularity until roughly 2020. Its main function at the time was sleep tracking, but it has since broadened its applications, offering general health and fitness data for those who don’t want a screen on their wrist.  

I was not exactly sold when I first heard of the Oura Ring. I didn’t understand the benefit of a smart ring when you could just wear a watch. When Oura reached out to see if I would be interested in testing one, however, I decided to see what all the hype was about. I’ve been wearing it since the end of August 2023, giving me just over eight months of time living with it. And I have developed a complicated relationship with it. 

SEE IT

Overview

• Though bulky for a ring, the Oura Ring offers a more discreet profile than smartwatches.
• The Oura Ring tracks a range of health metrics, including heart rate, temperature, sleep, and more.
• The durable and waterproof design means it can stand up to the rigors of daily life. 

Pros

• Collects lots of data
• Mostly accurate sleep info
• App is full of helpful insights and tools
• Durable and waterproof
• Features specific to women’s health
• Frequent updates and new features
• May be eligible for FSA/HSA funds

Cons

• Needs to be removed frequently
• Fairly bulky
• Tethered GPS is quite inaccurate
• Requires a monthly subscription to access all features

Verdict: The Oura Ring is a minimalistic health tracker that helps you better understand your sleep and overall health.  

The Oura Ring’s design & build

The Oura ring comes in several different finishes and two different designs. The Heritage, the original Oura Ring, features a rectangular plateaued top. For an additional $50, you can opt for the Horizon version, which offers a typical, fully round ring. All of the rings, regardless of finish, are made with titanium on the outside, which is strong, non-allergenic, and lighter than most other metals. On the inside is a medical-grade, BPA-free molding. I’ve been wearing the Horizon in rose gold, which is manufactured using a vapor deposition (PVD) coating for added durability. 

The ring feels like, well, a ring, albeit quite bulky compared to rings that I wear. It’s 2.55mm thick (the Heritage will be slightly thicker on the top), roughly the thickness of most wedding bands. It’s worth stating that I have tiny hands, so all but the most dainty rings feel bulky on me. The band is 7.9mm wide and, depending on the size, weighs 0.14 to 0.21 ounces. 

There’s a subtle notch on the outside that indicates the orientation of the ring, as the sensors should be on the palm side of your finger. There are also three little bumps on the inside of the ring that sit against the finger, which aren’t noticeable at all during normal wear. 

The Oura ring is waterproof to 330 feet, so you can wear it when you shower, swim, and snorkel. However, Oura says it doesn’t recommend the ring for scuba diving and that it shouldn’t be submerged for more than 12 hours. Even though it’s waterproof, I typically remove the ring if I’m washing lots of dishes or cleaning, mostly because water tends to get trapped under the band. 

The rose gold finish has noticeable scratches and some patina these days, but I haven’t been super precious with it. I take it off when I’m lifting weights, at the beach, or during any other activity that requires using my hands because of the bulkiness, but otherwise live my normal life with it on. Most of the scratches are on the palm side of the ring, which makes sense as that’s the area that makes contact with things nearly constantly throughout the day. The top of the ring still looks rather shiny and smooth despite eight months of wear. 

Sensors 

Naturally, as a smart ring, the Oura Ring is built with a few sensors. The infrared photoplethysmography sensors (PPG) use LED light to measure heart rate and respiration. If you sleep with the ring, don’t be alarmed when you see your finger glowing in the middle of the night. Oura says this sensor samples 250 times per second and is 99.9% reliable compared to a medical-grade electrocardiogram (ECG). It uses the heart rate data also to tell you your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiration. 

There’s also a negative temperature coefficient (NTC) sensor that measures your nighttime temperature. It won’t tell you what your actual temperature is, but will tell you how much your temperature changes overnight. It’s sensitive enough to pick up changes of just 0.1° Celsius. The temperature data is useful if you are sick, but it also helps those with cycles track what phase of their cycle they are in, as there are predictable rises and falls in temperature for each phase. 

Finally, a 3D accelerometer detects your activity during the day. Keep in mind, though, that there is no GPS in the Oura Ring. Instead, the ring relies on tethered GPS, meaning it pulls location data from your phone. Beyond activity, the accelerometer also tracks nighttime restlessness and helps identify your sleep stages. 

Sensor accuracy

My testing process didn’t involve any lab time for testing the sensors, but I was able to compare them to the best fitness watches and heart rate monitors I use. I found the heart rate pretty spot on with what I get from my watches and even higher fidelity chest-based monitors. In fact, on a recent run, both my Oura Ring and Garmin HRM-Fit (chest-based strap) said my average heart rate was 153. 

I wasn’t taking my temperature every day to compare what the Oura Ring was picking up, but I tend to get pretty sick from the COVID-19 vaccine and was wearing the ring when I got my last booster. The ring detected that my temperature was 2.3 degrees higher than normal, and sure enough, I had a fever of 101 degrees Fahrenheit. In terms of accelerometer accuracy, it mostly picks up when I’ve had a restless night, though not perfectly. 

Battery & connectivity

To use any of your data, the ring needs to sync to the phone app using a Bluetooth Low Energy connection. This happens frequently in the background, but you can also open the app and prompt it to sync with the ring. The app is also how you’ll update the firmware and see all your data.

The ring uses an integrated 15mAh (US6) – 22mAh (US13) Lipo battery. In the original Heritage ring, the battery sits in the rectangular top, while the newer Horizon-style ring uses a flexible battery to maintain the fully rounded shape. Oura promises a battery life of seven days, though it does warn that having blood oxygen sensing turned on will deplete the battery faster. I have Blood Oxygen Sensing turned on and typically get about five to six days on a single charge. The app will remind you to charge the ring before bed if the battery gets low, which is helpful. 

Luckily, charging is fairly quick. I noticed the battery was at roughly 15% before popping out for a run, so I tossed it on the charger to see if I could get enough power to track my activity. I was able to get up to 48% battery in 25 minutes of charging, which was plenty for my 30-minute run. If the battery is fully dead, a full charge takes closer to two hours. I tend to put the ring on the proprietary charger when I’m taking a shower or doing any sort of activity that isn’t conducive to wearing the ring to keep it topped off so I can always wear it to bed for sleep tracking. 

The Oura Ring’s features

The Oura ring may look simple, but it offers quite a few features. Between the data it gathers and the app, Oura makes it pretty easy to get a snapshot of your health and wellness.

Sleep tracking

One of the primary features of the Oura Ring is its sleep-tracking abilities. The ring collects heart rate, respiration, heart rate variability, and movement data throughout the night and then provides a score to let you know the quality of your sleep. It can also pick up what time you go to bed and wake up and detect naps. I fell asleep on the couch one night while watching TV, and the app asked if I took a 20-minute nap from 10:20 to 10:40 pm, which was exactly when I was asleep. That nap was then added to my sleep score since it was so close to when I went to bed. 

Beyond tracking, there are some other helpful sleep tools in the Oura app that I’ve enjoyed. My favorites are the Body Clock and chronotype tools. To provide your chronotype (a fancy way of saying if you are a morning or night person), Oura looks at sleep, activity, and body temperature data over a three-month period of consistent use. It then gives you suggestions on when the ideal time to work out or perform certain types of tasks would be based on your chronotype. While this information is more interesting than earth-shattering in terms of how it impacts my life, it could make a difference for some. 

Fitness tracking

Calling the Oura Ring a fitness tracker is generous, but it does have activity-tracking capabilities. It can automatically detect 40 activities, including housework, but I found the automatic detection to be very hit-and-miss. It almost always thinks I was walking as well, even though there are other options.  

Since there are no buttons or interactive controls on the ring itself, you need the app to do any tracking. Once in the app, you tap the plus sign in the bottom right corner and select “Record workout HR.” Then, you can choose between indoor or outdoor cycling, indoor or outdoor running, or walking. The record button starts tracking, and you’ll need to open the app again to end tracking. 

While Oura relies on your phone’s GPS for anything related to distance and mapping, each company handles tethered GPS differently, resulting in various levels of accuracy. Unfortunately, Oura’s tethered GPS is the worst I’ve come across. A 30-minute run with the Oura Ring and my Garmin epix Pro (which has multi-band GPS and is known for accuracy) showed a distance of 0.3 miles for the ring and 2.6 miles for the watch. I know I’m no speed demon, but I definitely did more than 0.3 miles in 32 minutes while running.

Comparing two tethered devices, I wore the Oura ring along with my Garmin Lily 2, which also relies on tethered GPS. Both were on the left hand. Oura had my distance at 0.7, while the Garmin was 1.67. This route is one I do some variation of multiple times a day, and 1.67 is definitely very close to the correct distance. 

Because of the GPS inaccuracy, I would not recommend the Oura for fitness tracking. Distance and pace data influence a handful of fitness and readiness-related tools, so inaccurate data on those items will throw a lot of stuff off. Luckily, you can connect to Strava and import that data so your Oura account can utilize more accurate information for its health and wellness features.  

Women’s health

The women’s health features appeared relatively recently in the Oura’s arsenal. The app offers the ability to track cycles and now offers pregnancy insights as well. For cycle tracking, the Oura app will prompt you to to input if you use hormonal contraceptives or other hormones. If you use hormones of any type, you won’t be able to see your cycle phases. I really wanted to see my phases, so despite having a hormonal IUD, I selected “none” for hormones. 

It’s been very interesting to watch my temperature shift nightly over the course of my cycle. Plus, even with my hormonal birth control, Oura has been pretty spot on at predicting when my period will start and how long it will last. This information is more interesting for me than actionable, but I could see how it would be useful if something odd started happening or I had concerns that I wanted to show my doctor. 

Oura app

The Oura Ring’s sensors collect data, which the app compiles into a more digestible, usable format. The app’s homepage has different sections showing your sleep, activity goal, stress levels, heart rate, and more. You can click into the different sections to see graphs and track trends over time. Alternatively, you can open the Trends portion of the app for a quick glance at sleep, readiness, activity, and stress trends over time. 

On top of all your data, the app provides suggestions for activity levels based on your information. There are guided meditations and breathing exercises, and plenty of tips on improving sleep, time meals, and understanding your data. 

Unfortunately, a subscription is required to access most features and insights in the app. You get one month free, but after that, it is $5.99 a month. Without an Oura membership, you’ll only be able to see Sleep, Readiness, and Activity scores without any in-depth analysis. 

Final thoughts on my Oura Ring experience

As a bit of a data junky, I certainly appreciate the information I get from the Oura Ring. It’s helped me understand my body a bit better, especially from a women’s health and sleep perspective. I also just think it’s fascinating to see trends over time. Plus, Oura makes it easy to export the data should you want to share something with your doctor, which is really nice. 

My main issue is with the experience of actually wearing the ring, which is more so a personal preference. I find myself taking the ring off quite frequently. Water gets trapped underneath when washing my hands, so I at least need to take it off after to dry it. I don’t like to wear it when cooking since ingredients can get under it, and I wash my hands frequently in the process. Though it can be worn in the shower, I don’t enjoy it, so it comes off. The same goes for when I’m applying lotion. It is too bulky to wear while weight lifting or biking, so I remove it for those activities. You get the gist. Then, in all those times of taking the ring off, I am typically not the best about remembering to put it back on. 

Despite my frustrations with constantly needing to remove the ring, I still see its benefits. There’s no denying that the Oura Ring looks nice, blending into the day-to-day more than an aggressive fitness watch. The smaller form factor is also more comfortable to sleep in, especially if you aren’t used to constantly wearing a watch. And sometimes, it’s nice to separate from a screen and smartwatch notifications while still collecting data. Plus, Oura is actively rolling out new features and researching new ways to use the ring, so investment-wise, you’ll continue to get a lot out of it.
Overall, like anything, there are pros and cons. There are enough pros to keep wearing the ring, and I will continue to do so even after writing this review. In my opinion, the benefits outweigh the occasional annoyance of wearing it. So, my complicated relationship with the Oura Ring will continue for the foreseeable future.

The post Oura Ring Gen3 health tracker review: It’s a complicated relationship appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

“We haven’t had a full night’s sleep since our son was born eight years ago,” said Mrs. B, pointing to her son’s dry, red and itchy skin.

Her son has had eczema his entire life. Also known as atopic dermatitis, this chronic skin disease affects about 1 in 5 children in the industrialized world. Some studies have found rates of eczema in developing nations to be over thirtyfold lower compared with industrialized nations.

However, rates of eczema didn’t spike with the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1760. Instead, eczema in countries such as the U.S., Finland and other countries started rapidly rising around 1970.

What caused eczema rates to spike?

I am an allergist and immunologist working with a team of researchers to study trends in U.S. eczema rates. Scientists know that factors such as diets rich in processed foods as well as exposure to specific detergents and chemicals increase the risk of developing eczema. Living near factories, major roadways or wildfires increase the risk of developing eczema. Environmental exposures may also come from inside the house through paint, plastics, cigarette smoke or synthetic fabrics such as spandex, nylon and polyester.

While researchers have paid a lot of attention to genetics, the best predictor of whether a child will develop eczema isn’t in their genes but the environment they lived in for their first few years of life.

There’s something in the air

To figure out what environmental changes may have caused a spike in eczema in the U.S., we began by looking for potential eczema hot spots – places with eczema rates that were much higher than the national average. Then we looked at databases from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to see which chemicals were most common in those areas.

For eczema, along with the allergic diseases that routinely develop with it – peanut allergy and asthma – two chemical classes leaped off the page: diisocyanates and xylene.

Diisocyanates were first manufactured in the U.S. around 1970 for the production of spandex, nonlatex foam, paint and polyurethane. The manufacture of xylene also increased around that time, alongside an increase in the production of polyester and other materials.

The chemically active portion of the diisocyanates and xylene molecules are also found in cigarette smoke and wildfires. After 1975, when all new cars became outfitted with a new technology that converted exhaust gas to less toxic chemicals, isocyanate and xylene both became components of automobile exhaust.

Research has found that exposing mice to isocyanates and xylene can directly cause eczema, itch and inflammation by increasing the activity of receptors involved in itch, pain and temperature sensation. These receptors are also more active in mice placed on unhealthy diets. How directly exposing mice to these toxins compares to the typical levels of exposure in people is still unclear.

How and why might these chemicals be linked to rising rates of eczema?

Skin microbiome and pollution

Every person is coated with millions of microorganisms that live on the skin, collectively referred to as the skin microbiome. While researchers don’t know everything about how friendly bacteria help the skin, we do know that people need these organisms to produce certain types of lipids, or oils, that keep the skin sealed from the environment and stave off infection.

You’ve probably seen moisturizers and other skin products containing ceramides, a group of lipids that play an important role in protecting the skin. The amount of ceramides and related compounds on a child’s skin during their first few weeks of life is a consistent and significant predictor of whether they will go on to develop eczema. The less ceramides they have on their skin, the more likely they’ll develop eczema.

To see which toxins could prevent production of the beneficial lipids that prevent eczema, my team and I used skin bacteria as canaries in the coal mine. In the lab, we exposed bacteria that directly make ceramides (such as Roseomonas mucosa), bacteria that help the body make its own ceramides (such as Staphylococcus epidermidis) and bacteria that make other beneficial lipids (such as Staphylococcus cohnii) to isocyanates and xylene. We made sure to expose the bacteria to levels of these chemicals that are similar to what people might be exposed to in the real world, such as the standard levels released from a factory or the fumes of polyurethane glue from a hardware store.

We found that exposing these bacteria to isocyanates or xylene led them to stop making ceramides and instead make amino acids such as lysine. Lysine helps protect the bacteria from the harms of the toxins but doesn’t provide the health benefits of ceramides.

We then evaluated how bed sheets manufactured using isocyanates or xylene affect the skin’s bacteria. We found that harmful bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus proliferated on nylon, spandex and polyester but could not survive on cotton or bamboo. Bacteria that help keep skin healthy could live on any fabric, but, just as with air pollution, the amount of beneficial lipids they made dropped to less than half the levels made when grown on fabrics like cotton.

Addressing pollution’s effects on skin

What can be done about the connection between pollution and eczema?

Detectors capable of sensing low levels of isocyanate or xylene could help track pollutants and predict eczema flare-ups across a community. Better detectors can also help researchers identify air filtration systems that can scrub these chemicals from the environment. Within the U.S., people can use the EPA Toxics Tracker to look up which pollutants are most common near their home.

In the meantime, improving your microbial balance may require avoiding products that limit the growth of healthy skin bacteria. This may include certain skin care products, detergents and cleansers. Particularly for kids under 4, avoiding cigarette smoke, synthetic fabrics, nonlatex foams, polyurethanes and some paints may be advised.

Replacing bacteria that has been overly exposed to these chemicals may also help. For example, my research has shown that applying Roseomonas mucosa, a ceramide-producing bacterium that lives on healthy skin, can lead to a monthslong reduction in typical eczema symptoms compared with placebo. Researchers are also studying other potential probiotic treatments for eczema.

Evaluating the environmental causes of diseases that have become increasingly common in an increasingly industrialized world can help protect children from chemical triggers of conditions such as eczema. I believe that it may one day allow us to get back to a time when these diseases were uncommon.

Ian Myles is Chief of the Epithelial Therapeutics Unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Ian Myles receives funding from the Department of Intramural Research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is the author of, and receives royalties for, the book GATTACA Has Fallen: How population genetics failed the populace. Although he is the co-discoverer of Roseomonas mucosa RSM2015 for eczema, he has donated the patent to the public and has no current conflict of interest for its sales.

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In just a few short years, psychedelic-assisted therapy involving controlled substances like ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin (the psychoactive compound found in “magic mushrooms”) have evolved from relative obscurity to the far edges of mainstream medical acceptance. Clinical studies have shown that their medical use can have positive effects for patients living with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes, these treatments prove effective where other, more widely-prescribed medications fall short. But new research suggests close bonds with a trained therapist is a key element contributing to effective psychedelic-assisted treatment, specifically psilocybin.

[Related: 4 visionaries on the history and future of psychedelic medicine ]

A surge in interest in therapeutic use of psychedelics has fostered a burgeoning industry of startups specializing in treatments. As of today, according to the psychedelics industry tracker Psilocybin Alpha, more than 50 publicly traded companies currently offer psychedelic therapy (mostly ketamine) and psychedelic retreats. Yet, the exact ways these companies administer psychedelics can vary widely. While some require patients to consume or inject the substance in the presence of a trained clinician, others lean on loose, pandemic-era health regulations to let patients take the medication at home, typically as pills and lozenges. The latter method can carry risks. In some cases, the Federal Drug Administration, which has yet to approve psychedelic drugs for therapy, claims it has received reports of patients experiencing adverse health effects after they’ve taken medically prescribed ketamine at home without a clinician’s supervision. There are currently no legal at-home psilocybin treatments available however individuals in Oregon were able to begin accessing the compound without a prescription last year. 

A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE this week suggests that strong relationships between patients and their therapists could play a crucial role determining whether or not psychedelic-assisted therapy can prove useful as treatments for depression. The study, which analyzed a 2021 clinical study involving 24 patients using psilocybin-assisted therapy to treat severe depression, found that participants with stronger self-reported connections with their therapist were more likely to report a decrease in depression over time.

In other words, the efficacy of psilocybin treatment increases over the long-term when a patient feels more connected to their clinician. The clinician provides hours or preparation and also guides the patient through the experience and dissects it days and weeks later. Findings like these could help influence treatment standards for psychedelic-assisted therapy treatments, especially as the practice gains more widespread clinical acceptance and adoption. 

Patients with stronger connections to their therapists reported better results 

Researchers from Ohio State University examined data from a 2021 clinical trial where 24 adults seeking treatment for severe depression received two doses of psilocybin paired with 11 hours of psychotherapy. Patients completed survey questionnaires where they assessed the strength of the relationship with their therapists, which the researchers refer to as their “therapeutic alliance.” The patients also noted down any mystical or insightful psychological experience they had during the treatment. Researchers say at times these experiences tend to yield positive therapeutic outcomes, particularly in the short and medium term. In this case, these experiences led to positive outcomes around four-weeks after introducing the psilocybin into treatment.

Higher alliance scores, or stronger relationships with therapists, correlated with longer-term psychological insights. One year after the treatments, patients who reported strong connections with their therapist also crucially provided lower self-reported depression scores one year following treatment than those who reported weaker relationships. The research builds off of past studies that show how a strong therapeutic alliance between a therapist and a patient often leads to a more effective outcome following therapy. This new study suggests those same basic findings similarly apply to psychedelic-assisted therapy. 

“This concept is not novel. What is novel is that very few people have explored this concept as part of psychedelic-assisted therapy,” paper senior author and Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education associate professor Alan Davis said in a statement. “This data suggests that psychedelic-assisted therapy relies heavily on the therapeutic alliance, just like any other treatment.”

The findings also reinforce the role a patient’s environment and mindset, known colloquially as “set and setting” can have on influencing positive experiences. In this case, hours of preparatory psychotherapy prior to administering psilocybin, along with “supportive, no direct” therapy during the actual psychedelic experience posed to be significant variables contributing to the drug’s overall effectiveness. Patients who were more comfortable with their clinician may be more receptive to the therapy.

“That’s why I think the relationship has been shown to be impactful in this analysis–because, really, the whole intervention is designed for us to establish the trust and rapport that’s needed for someone to go into an alternative consciousness safely,” Davis added.

The study’s findings come during what could be an inflection point for psychedelic-assisted therapy research and treatment in the US. Despite still being labeled a Schedule 1 drug on the national level, several cities including Denver, Oakland, and Washington have decriminalized psilocybin. On the medical front, the FDA in 2019 approved the use of a nasal spray called Spravato, which uses a derivative of ketamine, for treating depression. Just last year, the FDA released its first-ever draft guidance outlining considerations for researchers looking to conduct clinical trials for psychedelic treatments. An MDMA therapy from the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation could reportedly receive FDA approval by the end of the year. 

Ohio State University College of Medicine resident and paper lead author Adam Levin notes he and his fellow researchers’ findings could highlight the importance of maintaining strong connections between patients and physicians, especially with treatments posed to gain wider adoption in the coming years. Levin, and others critical of attempts to rush out access to psychedelic drugs without proper therapeutic support warn such an approach could lead to unintended consequences and even set back efforts to make psychedelic-assisted therapy more widely available. 

“Our concern is that any effort to minimize therapeutic support could lead to safety concerns or adverse events,” Levin said. “…What we showed in this study is evidence for the importance of the alliance in not just preventing those types of events, but also in optimizing therapeutic outcomes.”

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Subjecting hospital staff and patients to the snake that bit you won’t help your treatment–and it might even obstruct your care, doctors told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) earlier this month.

Australia is home to some of the most venomous snakes on Earth, including the inland taipan and eastern brown snakes, yet reports of fatal snake bites are relatively rare on the continent, with bites documented only a couple times per year. Still, there are around 3,000 reported snake bites per year in Australia and as many as 500 of those cases require antivenom treatment, as noted by Business Insider.

After any snake bite, Australian health officials say victims should immediately seek medical care; but trying to catch, kill, or photograph the snake after a bite “just puts people at risk,” said Dr. Adam Michael, the emergency medicine director at Bundaberg Hospital in the north-eastern state of Queensland. 

“We want people to be able to get seen and assessed quickly and having a live snake in the department slows up that process,” the director told ABC. He spoke to the news outlet after a patient brought in a “not very well secured” eastern brown, which he said had frightened staff and ultimately caused delays.

Hospital staff aren’t trained to identify snakes, said Dr. Geoff Isbister, who leads clinical toxicology research at the University of Newcastle near Sydney. Still, the researcher told ABC that he’d heard of multiple incidents in which victims brought snakes along with them to the hospital after a bite. “If that snake gets out in an emergency department, that becomes a huge disaster,” Dr. Isbister said.

Instead of inspecting the snake itself, medical staff assess if victims need anti-venom “based on clinical signs, blood tests and also the snake venom detection kits that we keep here at the hospital,” Dr. Michael added. 

Neither doctor spoke to the exact number of incidents they’d observed in which a snakebite patient brought their assailant in tow. However, local snake catcher Jonas Murphy told ABC that he’s personally “relocated several snakes brought into the Bundaberg Hospital,” the outlet wrote. Murphy echoed the doctors’ reasoning in a comment to ABC.

“You are risking a follow-up bite and you’re putting everyone around you in danger as well,” the snake catcher explained.

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This article is excerpted from Sabrina Sholts’s book “The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs.“

“VACCINATE! VACCINATE!! VACCINATE!!! THERE’S MONEY IN IT!!! TWENTY THOUSAND VICTIMS!!! will be Vaccinated within the next ten days in this City under the present ALARM!!! That will put $10,000 into the pockets of the Medical Profession.” In case all the exclamation points and capitalized letters didn’t do the trick, Alexander Milton Ross embellished his poster with a large drawing of a police officer restraining a mother while Death vaccinated her child. It was terrifying, no doubt. For extra emphasis, the police officer held a piece of paper that read “Vaccination for the Jenner-ation of Disease,” a reference to the English physician Edward Jenner, who developed and promoted vaccination.

In 1885, Canada had no greater adversary of smallpox vaccination than Ross, an Anglo-Canadian physician and naturalist whose medical training was informed by the sanitary movement of the 19th century. Opposed to the germ theory emerging in Europe (that same year, Louis Pasteur’s rabies vaccine was announced to the world), Ross believed that smallpox was a filth disease and its only antidote was cleanliness. And though it’s true that smallpox could spread through soiled fabrics used by smallpox patients (such as bedding and clothing), its primary route of transmission was virus-laden respiratory droplets. The real danger thus lay in close and prolonged contact with smallpox patients, independent of how clean the setting was.

Vaccination, in Ross’s mind, was poisonous. He wanted everyone to know it too. Besides papering the city of Montreal with antivaccination posters and pamphlets, writing letters to newspapers and professional journals, and founding a magazine called the Anti-Vaccinator, he formed the Canadian Anti-Vaccination League as part of an international antivaccination crusade. “Though Police and the Profession cry Vaccinate! Vaccinate!! Vaccinate!!! and people in thousands follow their blind leaders, — I still say, DON’T,” Ross urged in a circular that he distributed throughout the city.

At the time, Montreal was struggling to fight off the largest epidemic of smallpox that it would ever face. For almost a century, smallpox vaccination had been widely used to prevent the disease, but many of the city’s inhabitants had refused the procedure.

Some of the holdouts were surely persuaded by Ross and his English-only propaganda. But most of the unvaccinated population and therefore the bulk of the cases consisted of French Canadians. To convince them of the evils of vaccination, French Canadian physician Joseph Emery Coderre formed the first Canadian antivaccination society in Montreal and published numerous antivaccination pamphlets in French in the 1870s. His ardent antivaccination views fed the fervor of protesters who attacked the city council in 1875, halting efforts to enact mandatory smallpox vaccination in Montreal and leaving the city vulnerable to devastating disease 10 years later. When compulsory vaccination was attempted again in 1885, the riot was even bigger. Shortly thereafter, Coderre and colleagues created an antivaccination journal, L’Antivaccinateur canadien-français, the Francophone counterpart to Ross’s magazine.

The misinformation promoted by Ross, Coderre, and their contemporaries should be familiar to anyone with a social media account in the 21st century. First off, they downplayed the threat of the epidemic in Montreal. Francophone newspapers wrote little about it, except to dismiss the panic, while Ross stressed in one of his pamphlets, “CAUTION. Do not be alarmed by the smallpox.” Simultaneously, they insisted that vaccination was the true danger. In the Anti-Vaccinator, Ross explained that vaccination didn’t prevent smallpox and actually infected people with the smallpox virus, along with other equally lethal pathogens. Coderre likewise insisted that victims of vaccination were everywhere. His writings included pages of individuals whom he believed were sickened or killed by the vaccine, either from contracting smallpox or some other malady such as gangrene and syphilis.

And then, of course, they spouted conspiracy theories. Provaccination doctors were accused of profiting from the practice, as Ross broadcast in his poster. One French Canadian doctor, in an open letter to Coderre published by the medical journal L’Union Médicale du Canada in 1875, laid out the same charge. He also perceived another conspiracy among English physicians in particular, attributing their advocacy of the smallpox vaccine to nationalistic conflicts of interest given that English physician Jenner was associated with it. Coderre replied in agreement, affirming that English doctors and public vaccinators practiced vaccination par intérêt — purely out of self-interest. These beliefs were consistent with a general distrust of the Anglophone elite, whose vaccines were seen as both poisoning and punishing the French Canadian community, which mostly lived in overcrowded tenements in the poorest quarters of the city.

Their arguments are reminiscent of misinformation during subsequent epidemics and pandemics, all the way up to the present. It’s also noteworthy that while Ross thought sanitation was the answer to smallpox, Francophone newspapers printed recipes for at-home remedies, such as buckwheat root or mixtures of zinc sulfate, digitalis, and sugar. (A cure was never found for smallpox before its eradication, and treatments generally consisted of cleaning the wounds and easing the pain of the ill.) These ideas are akin to the popularization in the United States of non-FDA-approved treatments for COVID-19, such as ivermectin (an antiparasitic agent used to treat patients with certain worm infections and head lice) and hydroxychloroquine (a medication used for malaria and autoimmune conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis), which many people learned about through the internet, social media, and celebrity testimonials. Despite early hopes, neither of them turned out to be effective for preventing or treating COVID-19. But without any specific treatments for COVID-19 until long into the pandemic, it’s not surprising that some patients opted to take risks with these unproven remedies rather than heed public health warnings against them. Some physicians even participated in misinformation about the efficacy of these drugs and continued to prescribe them for COVID-19. And although many studies haven’t observed that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine cause serious adverse effects in COVID-19 patients, they can still be dangerous if the patients forgo evidence-based COVID-19 treatments or vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 as a result of using them, as editors at the Journal of the American Medical Association pointed out last year.

To be fair, smallpox vaccination was far from perfectly safe in the late 19th century. Even Jenner himself couldn’t explain how his vaccine worked, and some methods (such as passing infectious material directly from the arm of a vaccinated person to an unvaccinated one) undoubtedly had the potential to introduce other infections. There were also some cases where children may have died as a result of faulty vaccine preparations. Furthermore, even if the vaccination was successful, it didn’t guarantee complete or lifelong immunity. Antivaccinationists, though, were incorrect about the risks and effects of the vaccine. And their dishonesty, at least in the case of Ross, raised questions about their own motives.

Ross, the bombastic pamphleteer, was apparently a hypocrite at heart. In October 1885, while the smallpox epidemic was still raging in Montreal, he boarded a train to Toronto. As reported afterward by the Gazette, a medical inspector at the Ontario border asked Ross to show proof of recent smallpox vaccination, either in the form of a certificate or scar. It was a standard policy for travelers, but Ross tried his best to get out of it. Then when he couldn’t produce a certificate, he reluctantly took off his coat, rolled off his sleeve, and revealed “three perfect vaccination marks” on his arm. One of them was relatively fresh, and the others were from infancy and childhood, according to Ross. The article about the incident offered little by way of commentary, except to note the long history of doctors who believed in the efficacy of vaccination but opposed the practice since they would lose a source of revenue if smallpox declined. (Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fox News channel was a top broadcaster of vaccine skepticism in the United States, even though nearly all of the corporation’s employees were vaccinated.)

The news about Ross reached the United States, where it was met with outrage among the public health community. One State Board of Health report called him “a monster in human form who desired that a most terrible disease should decimate his patrons, that he might grow fat on their putrid bodies.”

By the end of the smallpox epidemic in Montreal in 1886, more than 3,200 people had died from the disease. The city lost almost 2 percent of its total population in 1885 alone, and more than 3 percent of its French Canadian community. Most of them were children. There were numerous blunders that helped the disease spread, as historian Michael Bliss recounts in his book “Plague: How Smallpox Devastated Montreal,” and the large population of unvaccinated children created by fear and ignorance was a major factor. Every one of the deaths could have been prevented, Bliss emphasizes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the disease ran out of unvaccinated or otherwise vulnerable hosts that the epidemic finally waned.

Misinformation about diseases is a timeless human challenge. Some opinions offered about the antivaccination riot in Montreal, such as in a New York Times editorial in 1875, ring a bell 150 years later. With shock that anyone would harbor such an absurd preconception against vaccination, a triumph of modern medicine, the editorial lamented that “in spite of all our boasted progress, curious revelations of popular ignorance and superstition are constantly showing us how little progress has been made.” But after laying blame on the fortune tellers in large cities, the quacks in medicine that flourished everywhere, and even the scientific research and scholarly writings that went above the heads of the public, there was still optimism: “When knowledge is more evenly distributed, there will be less of this fantastic and ignorant prejudice.”

Evenly distributed knowledge? That sounds a lot like the internet to me.

Sabrina Sholts is the curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where she developed the major exhibit “Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World.” She is the author of “The Human Disease,” from which this article is excerpted.

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On May 23, 1962, 12-year-old little league pitcher Everette “Eddy” Woodrow Knowles III survived a traumatic accident that would change the medical world.

On that sunny spring day in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Eddy was trainhopping—hitching a ride by gripping the side of a moving train car—when his arm was torn from his body right below the shoulder. Eddy couldn’t remember the details of exactly what happened, but a local store clerk named Alice Chmielewski jumped into action, applying pressure to the wound while another bystander phoned emergency services. In just seven minutes, he arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital where the medical team attempted something unprecedented and more than 30,000 years in the making.

In the latest Popular Science video, we tell the incredible story of what happened next and how everything aligned perfectly to make history.

Want more Popular Science videos? Check out “The revolutionary toy technology of ‘Captain Power’ that time forgot” and “The Buried Treasure That Took Us To The Moon.” And don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube.

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This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.

Nutritional science is supposed to chart a course to our healthier selves. But contradictory scientific results and interpretations can muddy the waters—and few nutrients have recently demonstrated that more clearly than vitamin D.

At one point, it seemed that everyone should be taking vitamin D supplements, and that doing so would protect against a whole host of maladies, from bone problems to heart disease and cancer. More recently, new studies appear to have debunked many of those claims.

But a closer look at the research reveals a more nuanced message around vitamin D supplements: They can be key to correcting deficiencies, though people who already have enough—which is most of the American public—are generally unlikely to see benefits from taking large doses. Experts have come to worry about supplement enthusiasts overdosing in the belief that more is better or, at the other extreme, some nutrient-deprived people shunning them altogether.

Ultimately, says Roger Bouillon, an endocrinologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, “it’s like for most things. You need an optimal amount: not too little, not too much.”

Yet working out who needs vitamin D supplements, how much, and what the specific health benefits are, remains tricky, with questions remaining. Here’s some of what we know.

What does vitamin D do, and where does it come from?

The importance of vitamin D came to light at the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, when people in northern climes crowded in dark, polluted cities and spent more time working indoors. The majority of children in cities like Boston developed rickets, wherein bones soften, weaken and often deform.

Scientists eventually discovered that exposure to sunlight would cure and prevent the disease. Later, researchers learned that UV light from the Sun kick-starts a reaction that generates vitamin D. The vitamin gets converted into its active form in the kidneys and then is shuttled to the intestine, where it stimulates cells to move calcium, a key building block of bones, into the bloodstream. “The most important thing vitamin D does is intestinal calcium absorption,” says Sylvia Christakos, a biochemist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

Though the effects are most severe in children, vitamin D deficiencies can also cause a softening of adult bones called osteomalacia, and increase the risk of osteoporosis, where bones become weak, brittle and more prone to fractures. Though experts debate what exactly constitutes a vitamin D deficiency—and know that healthy levels may vary from person to person—everyone agrees that blood levels should not go below 12 nanograms per milliliter to avoid severe deficiency.

Such severe deficiencies—and the bone ailments they cause—are still rampant across the world. Surprisingly, more than 30 percent of people in some sunny Middle Eastern countries are severely deficient, which may be partly attributed to skin-covering traditional clothing. By contrast, in Finland, a sun-deprived country with dark winters, severe deficiencies are relatively rare, thanks to government policies to fortify dairy products with extra vitamin D.

In contrast, around 20 percent of the United Kingdom’s population is severely deficient by some estimates, due to its northern, cloudy weather and a lack of fortified foods. The United States, where many dairy products, and some juices and breakfast cereals, are fortified, falls somewhere in the middle: Around 6 percent of people are severely deficient. “For the most part in the US, we don’t see frank nutrient deficiencies,” says Regan Bailey, a nutrition expert at Texas A&M University who recently coauthored a review on supplement use among the public in the Annual Review of Nutrition. (Some research groups have produced much larger deficiency estimates by using blood level thresholds that many experts say are too high to qualify as nutrient deficiencies.)

Since 2010, the National Academy of Medicine has recommended relatively modest daily doses: 400 international units (IUs) for babies, 600 IUs for everyone up to age 70 and 800 IUs for older people. These doses are designed to achieve levels of 20 nanograms per milliliter—more than enough to avoid severe deficiencies—for otherwise healthy people in the United States.

Most people should be able to get these doses through brief sun exposure, says John Christopher Gallagher, an endocrinologist at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Measuring vitamin D production in the skin is not an exact science, but five to 10 minutes’ daily exposure without sunblock of just the face, neck, hands and arms should do the trick in the sunnier months, even in temperate places like Boston. While it’s entirely possible to get enough vitamin D this way, the official stance of the American Academy of Dermatology is to not get vitamin D from sun exposure.

Fortified dairy products and other foods will also provide enough. Foods that naturally contain vitamin D, such as fatty fish, egg yolks, red meat, liver and irradiated or sun-dried mushrooms, which are especially rich in vitamin D due to their increased exposure to UV light, can also help. “If you’re out and about and you have sun exposure during some months of the year,” Gallagher says, “you probably get plenty of vitamin D.” That’s especially true if you have enough dairy in your diet.

Does anyone need supplements?

Generally, people need supplements only when they’re not likely to get enough from natural or dietary sources, health experts say. Deficiency-prone populations include breastfed infants who don’t get fortified formula, elderly people (whose skin makes vitamin D less efficiently) and pregnant women. People with dark skin tones should also take care to get sufficient vitamin D, because melanin pigmentation in the skin blocks UV light. People in northern latitudes like England “should all take a supplement during the winter,” adds nutritional scientist Susan Lanham-New of the University of Surrey in the UK, although that’s less important in places like the United States that have food fortification.

Experts worry that it’s often the people already getting enough vitamin D through diet and lifestyle who are the most likely to take supplements, Christakos notes. Meanwhile, communities who need vitamin D supplements the most might not realize their need and may have read news reports suggesting that the supplements aren’t necessary.

That’s an especially dangerous message in countries where deficiencies are common—for instance in the UK, where physicians still see children with deficiency-related ailments, says Martin Hewison, a molecular endocrinologist at the University of Birmingham in that country. One of his UK colleagues is struggling to persuade some of her vitamin D-deficient patients to take supplements because they believe it is a waste of time.

For anyone concerned that they’re not getting enough vitamin D, experts say that up to 1,000 IUs a day would more than suffice. If possible, Lanham-New adds, make sure it’s vitamin D3, a version typically extracted from sheep wool that appears to be better at raising vitamin D blood levels than D2, which is often vegan and mushroom-based.

But avoid the high doses—of 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 IUs, or even higher—that can be found in drugstores or online, stresses JoAnn Manson, an endocrinologist and epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Too much vitamin D, even when taken occasionally, can sometimes cause bone health to deteriorate and lead to an overdose of calcium in the blood and urine, resulting in nausea and even kidney failure. There are reports of people in the UK and US ending up in the hospital after taking excessive doses.

Some experts have advised that Black Americans, in particular, take higher doses of supplements—for instance, 2,500 IUs—as they’re especially prone to low levels. But here’s a mystery: Even though 17.5 percent of African Americans have deficient levels of vitamin D, those vitamin-deficient Blacks tend to have better bone health than comparably deficient white Americans, notes biomedical scientist LaVerne Brown of the National Institutes of Health. It’s possible, she says, that African Americans need less vitamin D than other populations, perhaps because they’re better at metabolizing vitamin D to its final active form. If that’s true, then high doses may have a greater risk of causing harm in African Americans.

“We just don’t have the studies that are focusing on these populations in order to come up with definitive answers,” Brown says. In the meantime, an expert panel meeting in 2017 concluded that the current recommended intake should be enough for African Americans, the same as everyone else. “Anything above 800 IU, it’s not clear that there’s a real need for that,” Brown says.

Could higher doses have benefits?

More than two decades ago, scientists began to make observations suggesting that vitamin D at higher doses could have benefits beyond bone health. Dozens of studies described strong correlations between people’s vitamin D levels and a range of diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers. The lower someone’s vitamin D levels were, the likelier they were to have these diseases, while higher levels were associated with being healthier.

Other research showed that many cell types—in the lungs, heart and immune system—have receptors for the vitamin to dock onto, hinting at far-reaching effects across the body. Giving vitamin D to lab mice with conditions mimicking human diseases could often improve their ailments. Vitamin D, it seemed, might help to tackle the major diseases of our time.

From New Zealand to Europe to North America, scientists launched large clinical trials, enrolling thousands of people over multiple years, to test whether vitamin D supplements would decrease their risk of disease. Importantly, the studies focused on members of the general public, who were largely healthy and had adequate levels of vitamin D. These people then received relatively large doses, of 2,000 or 4,000 IUs or even higher. The studies asked whether there were benefits from getting more than the recommended dietary allowance and ending up with blood levels even higher than 20 or 30 nanograms per milliliter, Manson explains.

To the disappointment of many scientists, giving these generous doses to healthy people didn’t change their risk of developing cancer, heart disease or asthma, nor did it significantly prevent the progression to type 2 diabetes. Extra vitamin D beyond the recommended levels didn’t even do anything to improve bone health or reduce the risk of fractures.

There may be a simple biological reason why more vitamin D isn’t necessarily better: The version of vitamin D found in supplements needs to be converted in the liver and kidneys to reach its final, active form—and that process is probably tightly controlled, says Bouillon. “The body regulates that so you have the exact amount, and not more than what you need.”

The takeaway, many experts agree, is that most healthy people aren’t going to benefit from high doses of vitamin D if they already have enough. The tantalizing associations that led researchers to suspect additional powers of vitamin D could have been an illusion: People with illnesses may end up with lower vitamin D levels because of the diseases themselves, or the unhealthy lifestyles that caused them, says Bouillon.

Are larger doses ever helpful?

A few of the recent trials hinted that some groups of people may benefit from higher doses, but these possible benefits need to be confirmed in further studies, says Manson, who ran one of the trials, called VITAL, which studied nearly 26,000 US adults over five years and looked at supplements of 2,000 IUs of vitamin D as well as omega-3 fatty acids. In that study, participants didn’t have a lower risk of developing cancer but they did have a 25 percent lower chance of it metastasizing or becoming fatal. Perhaps, says Manson, vitamin D makes tumors less likely to metastasize and kill. VITAL also reported that high doses of vitamin D made people less likely to develop certain autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and lupus.

Manson notes that these benefits appeared to be most visible among people with a healthy weight, compared to overweight or obese participants. But she cautions that more research is needed to understand these observations and confirm the observed benefits of larger doses.

Physicians in clinical practice, of course, have leeway in prescribing higher doses to certain people as they see fit, such as for osteoporosis patients, or people with conditions that hamper the absorption of vitamin D through the diet, like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

What don’t we know yet?

As they probe potential effects of higher doses in non-deficient people, researchers still don’t know how many roles vitamin D might have. The trouble is that recent trials don’t tell us whether having enough vitamin D is important for maintaining healthy heart function or avoiding cancer, for instance—only that having more than that won’t help in most cases.

To prove that adequate vitamin D has health benefits beyond keeping bones strong, scientists need more research in which some deficient people receive supplements and the rest receive a placebo. But such studies are hard to conduct in places like the US, where severe deficiencies are relatively rare. It’s also not ethically justifiable to seek out people who are deficient and then deprive half of them of much-needed supplements, because of the risk of poor bone health in vitamin D-deficient people.

Some scientists believe that having enough vitamin D could be key to maintaining heart and immune system health and preventing diabetes and cancer—and perhaps even be important for brain function, athletic performance and other claims. The evidence is particularly strong in the immune system, says Hewison, whose research points to key roles of vitamin D in immune cells; and indeed, human trials that by chance included some deficient people show benefits of supplementation in warding off infections.

But there just aren’t enough data yet, Hewison says. “I think this is the issue facing the field as a whole.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 23, 2024, to correct editorial style for identifying racial groups.

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Groceries are expensive right now, which means a bad case of the munchies can really set you back. That’s bad timing for this 4/20 holiday, which typically involves copious snack consumption. Amazon, however, has decided to be a chill bro and put a bunch of bulk snacks on discount. Even if you’re not doing any 4/20 celebrating, you can appreciate saving a couple bucks on a case of Red Bull, a doomsday-worthy cache of Fig Newtons, and enough Goldfish Crackers to satisfy an entire Kindergarten class for an entire day (those little ones really hammer down the Goldfish). These aren’t wimpy deals, either. Most of these prices are the lowest we’ve seen all year.

• OREO Mini Cookies, CHIPS AHOY! Mini Cookies, SOUR PATCH KIDS Candy & Nutter Butter Bites Cookies & Candy Variety Pack, 32 Snack Packs $17 (was $22)
• belVita Breakfast Sandwich Dark Chocolate Creme Breakfast Biscuits, Value Pack, 12 Packs (2 Sandwiches Per Pack) $10 (was $12)
• Red Bull Energy Drink, 16 Fl Oz Cans, 12 Pack $32 (was $38)
• Red Bull Sugar Free, 8.4-Ounce Cans 2 pack of 12 (total count 24) $34 (was $39)
• StarKist Premium White Chicken – 2.6 oz Pouch (Pack of 12) $14 (was $22)
• Newtons Soft & Fruit Chewy Fig Cookies, 48 Snack Packs (2 Cookies Per Pack, 4 Boxes) $20 (was $25)
• Jack Link’s Beef Sticks, Zero Sugar, Original – Protein Snack, Meat Stick with 6g of Protein, Made with 100% Beef, No Added MSG – 0.92 Oz (Pack of 20) $18 (was $23)
• Lindt LINDOR White Chocolate Candy Truffles, Mother’s Day Chocolate, 25.4 oz., 60 Count $16 (was $19)
• Barnum’s Original Animal Crackers, 12 Snack Packs $5 (was $7)
• Barilla Ready Pasta, Rotini, 7 oz. Pouch (pack of 7) $10 (was $14)
• Nabisco Sweet Treats Cookie Variety Pack OREO, OREO Golden & CHIPS AHOY!, 30 Snack Packs (2 Cookies Per Pack) $10 (was $12)
• Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee K-Cups with Probiotic, Organic and Fair Trade Coffee, Organic and Fair Trade with Turkey Tail, Chaga, Prebiotics, CFU shelf-stable, Heat Resistant, 24 Count $25 (was $29)
• Nabisco Team Favorites Variety Pack, OREO Mini, CHIPS AHOY! Mini, Teddy Grahams Honey & Barnum’s Animal Crackers, 30 Snack Packs $10 (was $12)
• Perfect Bar, Dark Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Protein Bar, High Protein, Organic, Gluten Free, Soy Free, Non GMO, No Sugar Alcohols, 2.3 Ounce Bar, 10 Count $19 (was $22)
• Kodiak Cakes Protein Pancake Power Cakes, Flapjack and Waffle Baking Mix, Buttermilk, 20 Oz, (Pack of 6) $26 (was $32)

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Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location—or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location—and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.

“People are never perfect, but they can be as accurate as single-digit degrees off, which is incredibly accurate,” says Nora Newcombe, a cognitive psychologist at Temple University who coauthored a look at how navigational ability develops in the 2022 Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. But others, when asked to indicate the target’s direction, seem to point at random. “They have literally no idea where it is.”

While it’s easy to show that people differ in navigational ability, it has proved much harder for scientists to explain why. There’s new excitement brewing in the navigation research world, though. By leveraging technologies such as virtual reality and GPS tracking, scientists have been able to watch hundreds, sometimes even millions, of people trying to find their way through complex spaces, and to measure how well they do. Though there’s still much to learn, the research suggests that to some extent, navigation skills are shaped by upbringing.

Nurturing navigation skills

The importance of a person’s environment is underscored by a recent look at the role of genetics in navigation. In 2020, Margherita Malanchini, a developmental psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, and her colleagues compared the performance of more than 2,600 identical and nonidentical twins as they navigated through a virtual environment, to test whether navigational ability runs in families. It does, they found—but only modestly. Instead, the biggest contributor to people’s performance was what geneticists call the “nonshared environment”—that is, the unique experiences each person accumulates as their life unfolds. Good navigators, it appears, are mostly made, not born.

A remarkable, large-scale experiment led by Hugo Spiers, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, gave researchers a glimpse at how experience and other cultural factors might influence wayfinding skills. Spiers and his colleagues, in collaboration with the telecom company T-Mobile, developed a game for cellphones and tablets, Sea Hero Quest, in which players navigate by boat through a virtual environment to locate a series of checkpoints. The game app asked participants to provide basic demographic data, and nearly 4 million worldwide did so. (The app is no longer accepting new participants except by invitation of researchers.)

Through the app, the researchers were able to measure wayfinding ability by the total distance each player traveled to reach all the checkpoints. After completing some levels of the game, players also had to shoot a flare back toward their point of origin—a dead-reckoning test analogous to the pointing-to-out-of-sight-locations task. Then Spiers and his colleagues could compare players’ performance to the demographic data.

Several cultural factors were associated with wayfinding skills, they found. People from Nordic countries tended to be slightly better navigators, perhaps because the sport of orienteering, which combines cross-country running and navigation, is popular in those countries. Country folk did better, on average, than people from cities. And among city-dwellers, those from cities with more chaotic street networks such as those in the older parts of European cities did better than those from cities like Chicago, where the streets form a regular grid, perhaps because residents of grid cities don’t need to build such complex mental maps.

Results like these suggest that an individual’s life experience may be one of the biggest determinants of how well they navigate. Indeed, experience may even underlie one of the most consistent findings—and clichés—in navigation: that men tend to perform better than women. Turns out this gender gap is more a question of culture and experience than of innate ability.

Nordic countries, for example, where gender equality is greatest, show almost no gender difference in navigation. In contrast, men far outperform women in places where women face cultural restrictions on exploring their environment on their own, such as Middle Eastern countries.

This cultural aspect, and the importance of experience, are also supported by studies of the Tsimane, a traditional Indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. Anthropologist Helen Elizabeth Davis of Arizona State University and her colleagues put GPS trackers on 305 Tsimane adults to measure their daily movements over a three-day period, and found no difference in the distance moved by men and women. Men and women also were equally adept at pointing to out-of-sight locations, they reported in Topics in Cognitive Science. Even children performed extremely well at this navigation task—a result, Davis thinks, of growing up in a culture that encourages children to range widely and explore the forest.

Most cultures aren’t like the Tsimane, though, and women and girls tend to be more cautious about exploring, for good reasons of personal safety. Not only do they gather less experience at navigating, but nervousness about security or getting lost also has a direct effect on navigation. “Anxiety gets in the way of good navigation, so if you’re worried about your personal safety, you’re a poor navigator,” says Newcombe.

Personality, too, appears to play a role in developing navigational ability. “To get good at navigating, you have to be willing to explore,” says Uttal. “Some people do not enjoy the experience of wandering, and others enjoy it very much.”

Indeed, people who enjoy outdoor activities, such as hiking and biking, tend to have a better sense of direction, notes Mary Hegarty, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. So do people who play a lot of video games, many of which involve exploring virtual spaces.

To Uttal, this accumulating evidence suggests that inclination and early experience nudge some people toward activities that involve navigation, while those who are temperamentally less inclined to explore, who have less opportunity to wander or who have an initial bad experience may be less likely to engage in activities that require exploration. It all snowballs from there, Uttal speculates. “I think a combination of personality and ability pushes you in certain directions. It’s a developmental cascade.”

Mental mappers

That cascade presumably influences acquisition of the specific skills that are hallmarks of good navigators. These include the ability to estimate how far you’ve traveled, to read and remember maps (both printed and mental), to learn routes based on a sequence of landmarks and to understand where points are relative to one another.

Much of the research, though, has focused on two specific subskills: route-following by using landmarks—for example, turn left at the gas station, then go three blocks and turn right just past the red house—and what’s often termed “survey knowledge,” the ability to build and consult a mental map of a place.

Of the two, route following is by far the easier task, and most people do pretty well at it once they’ve taken a route a few times, says Dan Montello, a geographer and psychologist also at UC Santa Barbara. In a classic experiment from almost two decades ago, Montello’s student Toru Ishikawa drove 24 volunteers, once a week for 10 weeks, on two twisting routes in a tony residential area of Santa Barbara that they’d never visited before.

Later, almost every person could accurately state the order of landmarks along each route and roughly estimate the distance travelled between them. But they varied widely in their ability to identify shortcuts between the two routes, point to landmarks not visible from where they stood, or sketch a map of the routes. Those who couldn’t identify shortcuts or find landmarks may suffer from an inability to create accurate mental maps, the researchers think.

Research by Newcombe and her then graduate student Steven Weisberg underscores the importance of such mental maps in navigation. They asked 294 volunteers to use a mouse and computer screen to navigate along two routes through a virtual town. Once the volunteers had learned the routes and the landmarks they contained, the researchers asked them to stand at one landmark and point to others on both routes.

People fell into three classes, the researchers reported in 2018 in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Some people had formed a good mental map: They could point accurately to landmarks on both the same and different routes. Others had good route knowledge but struggled to create an integrated map: They were good at pointing within a route, but poor between routes. A third group was poor at all the pointing tasks.

That ability to build and refer to a mental map—a person’s survey knowledge—goes a long way toward explaining why they’re better navigators, Montello says. “When the only skill you have is the ability to think in terms of routes, you can’t be creative to get around barriers.” Survey knowledge gives the ability to navigate creatively, he says. “That’s a pretty stunning difference.”

Not surprisingly, better navigators may also be better at switching modes and choosing the most appropriate navigational strategy for the situation they find themselves in, says cognitive neuroscientist Weisberg, now at the University of Florida. This could mean using landmarks when they are obvious and mental maps when more sophisticated calculations are needed.

“I’ve moved toward thinking that our better navigators are also using a lot of alternate strategies,” Weisberg says. “And they’re doing so in a much more flexible way that affords different kinds of navigation, so that when they find themselves in a new situation, they’re better able to find their way.”

When Weisberg moves around Gainesville where he lives now, for example, he keeps track of north, because that works well in a city with a regular street grid; when he goes home to the winding streets of Philadelphia, he relies more on other cues to stay oriented.

Researchers do not yet know whether every bad navigator is simply poor at survey knowledge, or whether some of the lost might be failing at other navigational subskills instead, such as remembering landmarks or estimating distance traveled. Either way, what can poor navigators do to improve? That’s still an open question. “We all have our pet theories,” says Elizabeth Chrastil, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, “but they haven’t reached the level of testing yet.”

Pros and cons of GPS

Simply practicing seems like it should work—and, indeed, it does in lab experiments. “We can improve people’s navigational abilities in virtual environments,” says Arne Ekstrom, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Arizona. It takes about two weeks to show fairly dramatic gains—but it’s not yet clear whether people are really becoming better navigators or just getting better at finding their way through the particular virtual environments used in the experiments.

Support for the notion that people might improve with practice also comes from studies of what happens when people stop using their navigation skills. In a 2020 study published in Scientific Reports, for example, neuroscientists Louisa Dahmani and Véronique Bohbot of McGill University in Montreal recruited 50 young adults and questioned them about their lifetime experience of driving with GPS. Then they tested the volunteers in a virtual world that required them to navigate without GPS. The heaviest GPS users did worse, they found.

A follow-up with 13 of the volunteers three years later revealed that those who had used GPS the most during the intervening period experienced greater declines in their ability to navigate without GPS, strongly suggesting that GPS reliance causes diminished skills, rather than poor skills leading to greater GPS use.

Experts also suggest that struggling navigators like Uttal could try paying closer attention to compass directions or prominent landmarks as a way to integrate their movements into a mental map. For Weisberg, the only way he learns spaces in an integrated way is by paying attention to major cardinal directions or prominent landmarks like the ocean. “The more attention I pay, the better I can link things to the map in my head.” He recommends that struggling navigators ask themselves which way is north 10 times a day, referring to a map if necessary. This, he suggests, could help them move beyond mere route knowledge.

There’s another option for those who don’t really care about improving their skills as long as they just don’t get lost, Weisberg notes: Just make sure your GPS is handy.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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As a child, you were probably told not to stare directly at the sun. If you weren’t told or refused to listen, you may have learned the hard way. The human eye is one of the most sensitive structures in the body. Even a few seconds of direct sun exposure can dry out the eyes and temporarily blind you. That said, just because you’re not staring directly doesn’t mean you’re immune to the sun’s UV rays. It is entirely possible to get a sunburn on your eyes. 

You should always take some precautionary measures when venturing outside, especially as we approach summer’s longer days and more intense sunshine. We asked optometrists to break down how to best protect your eyes from the sun.

Why do the eyes sunburn easily?

The sun can damage your eyes in two different ways. The most common is a sunburn to the front part of the eye, also known as photokeratitis. Catherine Heyman, the founding dean at the High Point University School of Optometry in North Carolina, says photokeratitis happens when the sun’s UV rays damage the cornea. This clear, thin layer covers your iris and pupil. Excessive exposure to the sun also temporarily injures the conjunctiva, a mucous membrane that covers the white part of your eye. 

People with photokeratitis usually experience pain that’s akin to the feeling of having sand in your eye. They also frequently report redness, sensitivity to bright light, and blurry vision. Additionally, the eyelids appear swollen. While discomforting, the symptoms are temporary. Heyman says the cornea heals fast, with symptoms resolving in about 24 hours.

Another way the sun can hurt your eyes is when UV rays damage the retina. The retina is the layer of tissue at the back of your eye that catches light throughout the day, which is then converted into electrical signals for your brain to process vision. Jessilin Quint, a member of the American Optometric Association and co-owner of Smart Eye Care in Maine, explains that the UV light from the sun is intense. When it is too concentrated, the UV rays can cause extensive damage to light-sensitive cells housed in the retina. “The UV rays change how those cells behave and when they are not behaving properly, that can permanently cause tissue damage and trigger inflammation.” 

Also known as solar retinopathy, retinal damage occurs when a person stares directly at the sun. Quint explains that damaged light-sensitive cells in the retina tend to be in an area called the macula. The macula handles central vision, allowing people to see clear shapes and colors. A person with retinal damage commonly reports distorted vision or vision loss. 

Depending on how much eye protection a person had on or how long they were sungazing, Quint says there is a small chance for some cells to regenerate, but usually, retinal damage is permanent. This is because the retina does not carry pain receptors. People may not realize they are hurting their eyes at the moment and continue to sungaze for a few seconds to a few minutes. The aftereffects occur hours after the time of injury or after a couple of days.

How to protect the eyes from the sun’s UV rays

Purchase UV-blocking sunglasses

To avoid sunburn, buy a pair of sunglasses that 100 percent block UVA and UVB rays. Both ultraviolet rays are linked to skin burning. Heyman says you’re going to want to have sunglasses on whenever you’re outside in the daytime. Additionally, you’ll want to have your shades on for activities such as surfing, boating, and skiing, as the water and snow reflect the sun’s UV radiation. If you’re going to be in the sun for long periods of time, wraparound sunglasses are another option for protecting the entire face from the sun’s glare. 

Not all sunglasses have the same protection against UV rays. Quint says many over-the-counter sunglasses are not regulated and do a poor job of properly filtering light. These sunglasses enlarge your pupils when it is dark, allowing more light to enter and potentially hurting your retina. “It’s like when you have your eyes dilated at the optometrist,” adds Heyman. “Putting on sunglasses without UV protection is worse than not having any glasses at all.”

While polarized sunglasses do a better job of shielding the eyes from the sun, the best sunglasses are the ones that can completely block out UVA and UVB rays. You can order prescription sunglasses or check for stickers on over-the-counter sunglasses that specifically say they block both UV rays. If you’re unsure or have an old pair at home, you can take them to your local optometrist, who can assess if they cover UV radiation or not.

Stay in the shade

Another precaution to take is staying in the shade as much as possible. The sun’s rays are the strongest between 10 in the morning and four in the afternoon. Even when it’s cloudy outside, Heyman says UV rays can penetrate through and cause a minor sunburn.

Apply sunscreen to the eyelids

If you’re outside in the sun, apply sunscreen to your eyelids. “If you look at the percentages of skin cancer that happen throughout the body, despite the eyelids having such little surface area compared to the skin of the entire body, it has a much higher percentage of skin cancer,” says Quint. While you want to avoid sunscreen in the eye, cover the entire eyelid with sunscreen, including sunscreen in the narrow corners. You’ll want to reapply sunscreen every couple of hours and much more often if you are doing an activity such as swimming.

There are certain things to look for when purchasing sunscreen. First is using a broad-spectrum sunscreen. The sun protection factor (SPF) number on sunscreen only measures how much it protects against UVB rays. A broad-spectrum sunscreen guards you from UVA and UVB rays. The second is to choose a mineral-based sunscreen, rather than a chemical sunscreen. Quint says some ingredients in chemical sunscreens are harmful to the eyes and can trigger ocular inflammation or dry eye. 

Some makeup brands include sunscreen in their products, but Quint says this does not give enough coverage. “Makeup products will say it has an SPF of a certain amount, and while it’s better than having no SPF, it’s not giving the person the full protection that’s needed.” She recommends starting with a broad-spectrum sunscreen at the base, adding SPF-included makeup or moisturizer, and reapplying sunscreen every few hours. 

What to do when you have sunburned eyes

Pain from a minor sunburn to the eyes can be managed with acetaminophen or other over-the-counter pain relievers. You’ll also want to rest your eyes, which can look like being indoors and keeping your eyes closed or staying in a darkened room. Heyman says that over-the-counter, non-preserved artificial tears can help with dryness and irritation. Additionally, adding a cold compress to the eyes can reduce inflammation and help you avoid rubbing the eyes. If you need to go out, you’ll want to wear sunglasses to avoid worsening symptoms. 

If your eye sunburn persists for more than 24 hours, visit your optometrist for medical attention.

The post Are you wearing the right sunglasses? How to prevent eye sunburn. appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Americans seem to have quite a positive view of dietary supplements. According to a 2023 survey, 74% of U.S. adults take vitamins, prebiotics and the like.

The business of supplements is booming, and with all the hype around them, it’s easy to forget what they actually are: substances that can powerfully affect the body and your health, yet aren’t regulated like drugs are. They’re regulated more like food.

Thanks in large part to a 1994 law, the Food and Drug Administration is essentially toothless when it comes to supplements. As the agency acknowledges: “FDA does not have the authority to approve dietary supplements before they are marketed. Companies can sell supplements without going through any sort of approval process, or even having to share safety evidence.”

As a research faculty member in graduate medical education, I’m responsible for teaching resident physicians how to understand and critically engage with health research. I also write about health, wellness and supplements for a broader audience. As a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about supplements.

It’s important to consider why so many people believe supplements can help them lead a healthier life. While there are many reasons, how supplements are marketed is undeniably an important one. In my years following the industry, I’ve found that three mistaken assumptions appear over and over in supplement marketing.

1. The appeal to nature fallacy

The appeal to nature fallacy occurs when you assume that because something is “natural” it must be good. The word natural is used a lot in the marketing of supplements. In the context of health, it often feels right to want natural medicine, remedies, prevention techniques and so forth.

For example, if I say “vitamin C,” what do you immediately think of? Probably oranges or citrus in general and flu prevention. But if I say “the flu shot,” what immediately comes to mind? Probably doctor’s offices, a little bit of pain and pharmaceutical companies. One of these is clinically proven to prevent flu infections and lessen the severity of illness. The other has been marketed as though it does those same things, but there’s no clinical evidence to support this.

The supplement industry is awash with brand names that incorporate the word “nature,” invoking the appeal to nature fallacy. Also, look at websites and advertisements that urge customers to forgo “artificial” products in favor of “pure” and “natural nutrition.” Using the word artificial to describe other products and natural to describe a specific supplement is intended to make you feel like that product will be superior to the competition and that you need it to be healthy.

To be clear, “natural” does not equate to “better,” but that’s what the marketing wants you to think.

2. The belief that more of a good thing is always better

There’s another assumption that piggybacks on the appeal to nature fallacy: If something is natural, it must be good, and more of it must also always be better. If a little vitamin C is good for us, then a lot of it must be great!

The truth is that our bodies tightly regulate levels of the vitamins and minerals we consume. If you don’t have a deficiency, consuming more of a particular vitamin or mineral through a supplement won’t necessarily lead to health benefits. That’s why supplement skeptics sometimes say, “You’re just paying for expensive pee”–since your body will excrete the excess.

For an example of the more-is-better myth, look at basically any vitamin C supplement. The packaging often prominently displays dosages that can reach 750 or 1,000 milligrams. But adults need only about 75 to 120 milligrams of vitamin C per day. Similarly, look at vitamin D supplements that can come in dosages of 5,000 IU, or international units–a fact also often prominently displayed on packaging. But adults should have no more than 4,000 IU daily. Again, it’s easy to exceed what we need.

3. The action bias

Finally, the supplement industry likes to capitalize on the idea that doing something is better than doing nothing. This is the action bias. Taking action makes people feel like they have more control of a situation, which is especially powerful when it comes to health. “Even if I don’t need the extra vitamin C,” they might think, “I’ll take it just to be sure. What’s the harm?”

The examples in the last section show that supplements often contain many times the recommended daily intake of a particular vitamin or mineral. This assumes that taking that much of any of those particular substances is safe.

It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Too much vitamin C can lead to diarrhea, nausea, stomach cramps and more. Too much vitamin D can lead to conditions including nausea, vomiting and kidney stones. Supplements can also interact with prescribed medications. For example, St. John’s wort is famous for interacting with contraceptives, immunosuppressive drugs, statins and chemotherapy by exacerbating or dulling their effects. When it comes to supplements, taking them isn’t necessarily better than not.

Be on the lookout for these marketing messages–they aren’t necessarily correct or good for your health. And talk with your doctor before taking any supplements.

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Best overall		Apple Beats Fit Pro		SEE IT	A snug fit, balanced sound, and seamless iOS connectivity make these easy to add to any workout routine.
Best battery life		Jabra Elite 8 Active		SEE IT	These earbuds are extremely impervious to dust and water and feature an amazing combination of ANC performance and battery life.
Best budget		soundcore by Anker Sport X10		SEE IT	The soundcore by Anker Sport X10 headphones are great for runners on a budget.

Using headphones for working out can transform your frame of reference and put you in the mood to grind like nothing else. Of course, exercise can be strenuous and involve tons of movement, so it’s essential to find a pair that leaves you unencumbered by wires and fit securely enough that they won’t be flung to the ground every time you move your head. In this list, we’ll break down the best headphones for working out and optimizing your circuit(s) with your favorite music and podcasts.

• Best overall: Apple Beats Fit Pro
• Best on-ear: JBL Live 670NC
• Best bone conduction: SHOKZ OpenRun
• Best earbuds for running or cycling: Bose Ultra Open Earbuds
• Best battery life: Jabra Elite 8 Active
• Best budget: soundcore by Anker Sport X10

How we chose the best headphones for working out

The best headphones for working out are wireless, and Bluetooth requires power. And, in all honesty, the best headphones for working out are earphones, which is why they make up the majority of our selections. We picked pairs that offer at least five hours of single-charge battery life, and all of the earbuds include charging cases. Considering the battery life of your audio device is extremely important for keeping the flow going—you wouldn’t want the music to stop mid-workout. All of the selections on our list fit securely around the head or in the ear to ensure that they move very little or not at all during workouts. Everyday headphones made for walking or when you’re stationary aren’t typically designed with extreme movement in mind.

Sound quality was also a big factor in considering headphones for this list, and many of the earbuds we picked either come with a full and balanced sound profile or offer the option to adjust their sound via an app. Staying aware of the activity around you is always important while wearing headphones, especially if you’re on the go. For our list, we picked headphones/earphones that either feature a transparency mode or are completely open-ear.

The best headphones for working out: Reviews & Recommendations

Prepping for a workout is all about getting your mind and body in the right place, and apart from stretching, putting on the right clothes, and making sure you have a favorite water bottle and your fitness tracker, pumping up the jams properly can pump you up for a regular training run. One of our choices is sure to put a spring in your step the next time you go for a jog or lift weights.

Best overall: Apple Beats Fit Pro

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Apple Beats Fit Pro features a snug fit, balanced sound, and seamless iOS connectivity that make them easy to add to any workout routine.

Specs

• Weight: 0.2 ounces/earbud; 2.3 ounces with case
• IP rating: IPX4 (splash-resistant)
• Battery life: 6 hours single-charge; 24 hours with case

Pros

• High-performance active noise canceling in a compact earbud design
• Secure design stays in ear when running or working out
• Compatible with dynamic head tracking on iOS devices
• Includes pocket-sized travel case and three eartip options

Cons

• No wireless charging
• iOS device required for full functionality
• Not protected against water immersion
• No multipoint pairing

We’ve thoroughly reviewed the Apple Beats Fit Pro, and they take the best overall award on this list thanks to their sound quality, workout-friendly design, and fantastic iOS compatibility. They contain the same proprietary H1 chip found in Apple’s AirPods, which enables near-instantaneous pairing and steady, reliable connections to iOS devices along with battery life optimization. Like AirPods, the Beats Fit Pro earbuds are also fully compatible with iOS head-tracking and spatial audio features for simulated surround sound and immersive media listening. Their inclusion of active noise cancellation (ANC) and transparency modes make them equally useful on the road and at the gym. We also love the range of colors these buds come in.

The Beats Fit Pro earbuds are designed to sit securely in your ears using small rubber wings that rest comfortably against your outer ear along with three sets of variously sized ear tips. A quick optional setup step uses the earbuds’ onboard microphones to test your fit for sound leaks. Once your optimal fit is achieved, the Beats Fit Pro can endure almost every exercise imaginable, including rowing, without budging. They’re some of the best running headphones around. The earbuds’ conveniently pocked-sized charging case brings their total battery life to around 24 hours. While it would be nice to see wireless charging in a product with this price tag, we appreciate that the case is chargeable via USB-C rather than Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector.

While the Beats Fit Pro earbuds are unmistakably great for iPhone users, it’s unfortunate that the instant pairing and steady connectivity of the earbuds’ H1 chip aren’t extended to Android users. For their price, it would also be nice to see features like multipoint pairing and more robust weatherproofing rather than the same IPX4 rating found in standard AirPods. Still, if you work out regularly and are an iPhone user, you’d be seriously hard-pressed to find a better in-ear option. If you’re sold on the Beats features but are looking for an option with earhooks, the Powerbeats Pro earbuds are also a solid choice.

Best on-ear: JBL Live 670NC

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The JBL Live 670NC boasts full, energetic sound with up to a 65-hour battery life, making them perfect for spur-of-the-moment workouts.

Specs

• Weight: 9.3 ounces
• IP rating: N/A
• Battery life: Up to 65 hours (50 with ANC)

Pros

• Long-lasting 65-hour battery life
• Quick charge gives 4 hours operation in 5 minutes
• Adaptive noise cancelling
• JBL app offers EQ and other advanced features

Cons

• Variable fit affects noise cancellation performance
• Integrated voice assistant button is easy to press accidentally
• No IP rating

If you prefer the fit and look of over-ear headphones for working out, the JBL Live 670NC’s are worth considering, thanks to their snug fit and battery life. They offer up to 65 hours of operation on a single charge (50 with ANC, but aided by auto play/pause), a full recharge in two hours, and a burst charge for four hours of operation in 5 minutes, so they’re almost always ready to go on a moment’s notice. The 670NC’s also feature noise-canceling and ambient-aware modes fed by four noise-sensing mics, making them equally suitable for use in noisy gyms and on busy streets. We had inconsistent results with their noise-canceling abilities due to the on-ear earcups sealing differently on different peoples’ heads, so if the best noise-canceling is an absolute must in your book, you’ll want to consider noise-canceling over-ears or earbuds instead. But the 670NC is easy to pull off if you need situational awareness (or you can keep them on with Smart Ambient activated).

Thanks to their 40mm drivers and Bluetooth 5.3, the sound of the JBL 670NC is energetic and immersive with a pronounced “Pure Bass” response that makes them great for listening to pop, dance, and other beat-heavy music while working out. The JBL Headphones app offers further sculpting of the 670NC’s’ sound with EQ (including Personi-Fi 2.0 custom sound profile) and ambient-aware level adjustments, as well as access to battery life indicators and more. The headphones also feature their own onboard suite of control buttons. Still, they require a bit of studying to master, and the voice assistant button that covers the entirety of the left earcup is easy to press accidentally.

Lastly, the 670NCs have no official IP rating, and while we didn’t experience any technical issues from getting them a little sweaty, you’ll still want to be mindful of using them in heavy rain or other settings where they might get doused. If you absolutely need to work out with water-resistant over-ear headphones, the Treblab Z2 headphones are a uniquely light, comfy option with IPX4 and a long battery life that makes them great for taking on a run.

Best bone-conduction: SHOKZ OpenRun

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Why it made the cut: The unique design of the SHOKZ OpenRun keeps your ears fully open, so you can stay aware of your surroundings.

Specs

• Weight: 0.92 ounces
• IP rating: IP67 (dustproof, waterproof for 30 minutes)
• Battery life: 8 hours

Pros

• Fully sweatproof and weatherproof for high-impact workouts
• Open-ear bone conduction design for improved situational awareness
• Long battery life with quick charge function

Cons

• Lacks bass response
• Proprietary magnetic charger isn’t interchangeable
• Not silent—others can hear what you’re listening to

The SHOKZ OpenRun is one of the best bone-conduction headphones on the market, boasting a unique open-ear design that allows you to listen to music and podcasts while maintaining full situational awareness. Unlike traditional headphone designs, bone conduction headphones employ a clever hack of human anatomy to transfer sounds directly to the inner ear by gently vibrating your facial bones from the outside in, leaving the entire ear canal unobstructed. The drawbacks to this design include that they provide no passive or active noise cancellation, and the vibrations can be audible to others, so they’re not the best choice for quiet environments or taking public transit. Bone conduction headphones also produce markedly less bass frequencies than traditional designs, making them less ideal for immersive music listening.

On the functionality side of things, the SHOKZ OpenRun packs about eight hours of battery life on a single charge and boasts a substantial IP67 rating, making them completely impervious to dust ingress and fully waterproof for up to 30 minutes. They have a comfy and lightweight headband design with easy-to-use control buttons that makes them particularly suited for running and cycling on roads and trails. While there’s no way to adjust the headband’s fit, the OpenRun does come in two different sizes. Another minor design gripe is that the OpenRun uses a proprietary magnetic charger instead of USB-C, making it more of a hassle to replace if it breaks or goes missing.

Best for running or cycling: Bose Ultra Open Earbuds

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Specs

• Weight: 0.2 ounces/earbud
• IP rating: IPX4
• Battery life: 7.5 hours (4.5 hours with Immersive Audio enabled)

Pros

• Situational awareness of the world around you
• Guaranteed to fit
• Surprisingly good bass

Cons

• Absolutely no isolation or ANC

It may come as a surprise that Bose, so well-known for industry-leading noise cancellation that shuts the world out, is also responsible for earbuds on this list that are purpose-built to do the exact opposite. Its new Ultra Open Earbuds have a unique design; instead of inserting buds into your ear canal, you wrap it cuff-like around the helix (the edge) of your ear, then settle the speaker end into the concha right above the ear canal. This lets the earbud play into your ear while leaving it exposed to outside noise, which is practical when running or biking or when you need to hear an instructor’s directions/motivation. You’ll be able to hear obstacles like cars or other runners/cyclists coming behind you. And, unlike with bone-conduction headphones, there is ample bass response and a convincing Immersive Audio mode, so the sound appears far more outside your head.

Getting the hang of how to properly wear the Ultra Open Earbuds takes a couple of tries. The buds are very flexible as you clip them on. This curled design ensures they can fit behind virtually any sized ear comfortably. There’s no worrying about which eartips will create a proper seal or whether they’ll fall out of your ear, which allows you to grab and go and focus on whatever you’re listening to or doing with your body. Once settled, the control buttons sit atop the body held securely behind the ear, allowing you push patterns to pause/play, skip/repeat a track, answer calls, toggle the Immersion mode, and adjust volume. And the polished exterior doesn’t interfere with the style or fit of your jewelry, glasses, hats, etc. They grip snugly around our ears even during jogs without indicating they’d slip or fall off. That said, it never felt like the earbuds were pinching our ears or irritating them in any other way.

Musically, Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds are a great addition to the company’s lineup. They support Bluetooth 5.3 (including AAC for iPhones) and, surprisingly, delivered a lot of bass, which we didn’t think would be possible from earbuds that created no seal around our ears. Perhaps even more surprisingly, there was very little sound bleed; the directional drivers do an excellent job of beaming sound into the canal so that you could feel comfortable wearing these without worrying about disturbing someone doing their set next to you. But really where they excel is when you’re actively exercising outdoors and want to enjoy that perfect playlist without sacrificing safety.

Best battery life: Jabra Elite 8 Active

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Why it made the cut: The Jabra Elite 8 Active earbuds are highly resistant to dust and water and feature the best combination of ANC performance and battery life we’ve encountered in a pair of workout headphones.

Specs

• Weight: 0.2 ounces/earbud; 1.8 ounces with case
• IP rating: IP68 (dust-tight, waterproof against extended submersion)
• Battery life: 8 hours single-charge w/ ANC; 32 hours with case

Pros

• Very long battery life for frequent use without charging
• Snug and secure fit with three eartip sizes
• Balanced sound profile with customizable EQ via app
• Multipoint pairing
• Military Standard (MIL-STD-810h) durability

Cons

• Case can be tough to open
• Low-frequency noise cancellation could be improved
• Hit-and-miss phone call quality in loud environments

If you often find yourself in situations where you forget to charge your headphones—maybe you’re an endurance athlete, parent, or every overworked person in the modern world—the Jabra Elite 8 Active, much like the Elite 7 before it, is a great-sounding and reliable option to add to your workout routine. The low-profile design of the Elite 8 Active is utilitarian and doesn’t belie the wealth of tech and battery life within the military-grade, liquid silicone rubber-covered shells—available in dark grey, caramel, or navy. Despite weighing only 0.2 ounces per bud, the Elite 8 Active can run up to 8 hours with ANC on (14 hours with ANC off) and up to 32/56 hours when used with their charging case, making them great for infrequent charging and ideal for stowing in a gym bag or glove compartment.

The Elite 8 Active’s Adaptive Hybrid ANC is also very good in the midrange and high-frequency ranges where human conversation and music from speakers live. However, they didn’t beat our top picks when dealing with car engines, rumble from inside an airplane, and other very loud low-frequency information. This can be mitigated somewhat by selecting the best-fitting “EarGels” (aka tips) from the three pairs included with the buds. Still, if you’re using them for a workout or to listen to podcasts while your kid burns through some energy, the ANC might not be your first concern, as you’ll probably want to stay aware of your surroundings and use the earbuds’ HearThrough mode anyway (which benefits from upgrades to its wind noise detection and suppression technology).

Music sounds great on the Elite 8 Active earbuds thanks to their stable Bluetooth 5.3 (SBC, AAC) connection and flat and balanced sound profile, which you can sculpt further using the EQ settings in the Jabra Sound+ app. The app can also toggle Dolby Audio (spatial sound) and offers battery life indicators, pairing options, and firmware updates, among other features. Call quality through the buds is quite good, with six built-in mics sometimes to discern your own voice from ambient chatter when taking public transit or in other loud environments. The sleek charging case is also a great size and shape for keeping in a pocket during your workouts, but if you’ve worked up a sweat, its shape and smooth finish can make it difficult to open. Still, the ShakeGrip coating and drop resistance ensure these earbuds stay secure throughout strenuous exercises and survive in the unlikely event of a slip.

Best budget: soundcore by Anker Sport X10

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Why it made the cut: The Anker Soundcore Sport X10 offers an incredibly secure fit and long battery life for runners on a budget.

Specs

• Weight: 0.2 ounces/earbud; 1.9 ounces with case
• IP rating: IPX7 (waterproof for 30 minutes, not dustproof)
• Battery life: 8 hours single-charge; 32 hours with case

Pros

• Very secure swiveling ear hook design
• Controls customizable via a smartphone app
• Transparency mode enhances situational awareness

Cons

• No multipoint connection
• ANC performance is lacking in loud environments
• Multi-press controls are confusing and uncomfortable

If you’re less concerned about noise cancellation performance, the Anker Soundcore Sport X10s are a great budget option for working out thanks to their secure fit and long battery life. They have a unique swiveling ear hook design that folds into a compact shape for storage in their charging case and unfolds to loop securely around the front of your earlobe, keeping them snug during even the most vigorous exercise routines. The Sport X10s also features a six-microphone array that provides relatively good phone call quality and an effective transparency mode. Still, their ANC performance falls short of quieting most common midrange sounds like speech, engines, and other urban noise.

The Sport X10’s sound profile is a bit muddy and heavy in the low-mids, but this can be adjusted using the EQ settings within the Soundcore app, which includes several presets to choose from. The app also allows you to rebind custom functions to the earbuds’ onboard control buttons, which are clicky and provide some nice feedback but tend to shift the earbud around with minor discomfort. You also don’t get multipoint pairing with the Sport X10, but at their price point, that’s understandable.

What to consider before buying the best headphones for working out

You could take the best headphones to the gym, but you would probably have very sweaty ears and potentially ruin your precious investment. Heck, even some of the best Bluetooth earbuds might not be suited for more than a brisk stroll. So here is what to think about before clicking “add to cart” on the best headphones for working out and going all in on that next set:

Sweat level

Sweating is a normal part of any workout, but if you tend to sweat more than the average person while you exercise, you should consider a pair of headphones with an Ingress Protection rating of at least IPX7. Most of the headphones on our list are designed with that level of waterproofing, including the Jabra Elite 8 Active and SHOKZ OpenRun. If you sweat a lot, you’ll probably also want to steer clear of over-ear designs, which can heat up your ears and exacerbate the problem.

Workout intensity

If you do CrossFit or other forms of intense workouts, choose earbuds that use an ear hook or another type of external fastener to ensure that they don’t go flying. We like the Powerbeats Pro earbuds for heavy exertion, though the soundcore by Anker Sport X10 is an inexpensive alternative.

Charging capacity

If you use your headphones frequently, have limited access to charging capabilities, or just find yourself constantly running devices on low battery, picking a set of headphones with a high battery capacity can increase the likelihood that they’ll be ready come workout time. The 8-hour single charge and 30-hour charging case with the Jabra Elite 8 Active are the best we’ve tested in the battery life department, though our budget pick, the soundcore by Anker Sport X10, also performs well.

Situational awareness

If you spend lots of time exercising near traffic or in busy locations, it’s important to maintain a good level of situational awareness for your own safety. Many headphones include a transparency mode that allows you to hear your surroundings in addition to your music, including the Apple Beats Fit Pro and the Jabra Elite 8 Active. For maximum situational awareness, nothing beats the open-ear design of bone-conduction headphones, and we prefer the SHOKZ OpenRun.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best headphones for working out

• Best overall: Apple Beats Fit Pro
• Best on-ear: JBL Live 670NC
• Best bone conduction: SHOKZ OpenRun
• Best earbuds for running or cycling: Bose Ultra Open Earbuds
• Best battery life: Jabra Elite 8 Active
• Best budget: soundcore by Anker Sport X10

The best headphones for working out will fit securely in your ears or on your head while delivering great sound and a good level of situational awareness. We love the Apple Beats Fit Pro for its overall sound quality and secure fit. If you need the longest and most reliable battery performance, the Jabra Elite 8 Active and JBL 670NC are the best earbuds and over-ears for working out, respectively. And if you want the best situational awareness possible while cycling and running, the SHOKZ OpenRun bone conduction headphones and the surprisingly immersive Bose Ultra Open Earbuds have our vote.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best headphones for working out in 2024, tested and reviewed appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Best overall		Yeti Gallon Jug		SEE IT	Yeti’s stainless steel gallon water jug is rugged and cleverly designed.
Best insulated		Hydro Flask Oasis		SEE IT	Hydro Flask’s 1-gallon Oasis can quench a big thirst after a long day.
Best motivational		Fidus Motivational Water Bottle		SEE IT	The Fidus motivational water bottle has markings to help you hit your hydration goals.

The gallon water bottle is the ultimate hydration vessel. Carrying 128 ounces of liquid, these giant vessels are the perfect companion for balmy beach days, backcountry hikes, and sweaty gym sessions. They’ve also recently grown popular as a way to push yourself to drink more water every day. If your average 40-ounce water bottle just isn’t cutting it, an absolutely immense gallon bottle will ensure you never feel parched again. Chances are, you’ll have plenty left over to share with your friends and family after you absolutely crush those hydration goals. Here are the best gallon water bottles for aspirational drinkers, fitness obsessives, and anyone who wants to catch the big water bottle wave.

• Best overall: Yeti Gallon Jug
• Best insulated: Hydro Flask Oasis
• Best for the gym: Coleman One Gallon Beverage Cooler
• Best motivational: Fidus Motivational Water Bottle
• Best budget: Simple Modern Gallon Water Bottle

How we chose the best gallon water bottles

I consider myself an outdoorsy guy, so I spend a lot of time at the beach, in the mountains, and far away from clean running water. I was particularly excited to look into gallon water bottles since I’ve been thinking about picking one up myself. To make our selections, I performed hands-on testing and did hours of research, surveying critical viewpoints from water-obsessed coworkers alongside user impressions before settling on our picks.

At Popular Science, I cover a little bit of everything. I’ve researched all kinds of products, from the best energy-efficient air conditioners to the best smoke detectors. Before PopSci, I wrote about and reviewed gadgets for over 10 years for sites like iMore, XDA Developers, and CNN Underscored. 

The best gallon water bottles: Reviews & Recommendations

The type of gallon water bottle you buy depends on how you plan to use it. If you want to keep liquids hot or cold, a stainless steel bottle that’s vacuum insulated is your best option. Otherwise, plastic bottles tend to be more affordable and weigh less. Since there aren’t that many trustworthy brands making gallon water bottles, we feel confident that one of these picks is the best option for you.

Best overall: Yeti Rambler Gallon Jug

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Why it made the cut: The Yeti Gallon Jug features tough stainless steel construction and double-wall vacuum insulation to keep drinks icy cold all day long.

Specs

• Material: Stainless steel
• Height: 15 inches
• Weight: 4.5 pounds
• Dishwasher safe: Yes
• BPA Free: Yes

Pros

• Clever magnetic lid to store spout cap
• Double-wall insulation
• Sturdy handle

Cons

• Expensive
• Heavy

The Yeti Gallon Jug will keep your water cold if you’re out in the field and away from refills. It’s made of durable stainless steel and features vacuum insulation so that it will keep liquids hot or cold for several hours. It also keeps your bottle from sweating, so surfaces are safe from condensation.

The Gallon Jug’s lid features a sturdy metal handle with soft grip padding, making it easier to carry on long hauls. The lid also contains a neat magnetic design, so users can store the cap when the spout is open. You can also screw the entire lid off for easy cleaning and refills. It’s a clever design that reinforces Yeti’s attention to the small details.

Like all Yeti’s other stainless steel bottles, the Gallon Jug is BPA-free and dishwasher safe. It weighs 4.5 pounds before putting water in it, or over 12 pounds full. That’s heavy on a hike. Still, it is far and away the nicest water bottle of this size.

Best insulated: Hydro Flask Oasis

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Why it made the cut: The Hydro Flask Oasis is big and heavy, but it’ll keep your liquids cold for up to 24 hours or hot for up to 12 hours.

Specs

• Material: Stainless steel
• Height: 14.8 inches
• Weight: 4.96 pounds
• Dishwasher safe: Yes
• BPA Free: Yes

Pros

• Easy grip base
• Double-wall insulation
• Keeps liquids cold for up to 24 hours

Cons

• Expensive
• Heavy

Like our top pick, the Hydro Flask Oasis is a large, heavy stainless steel bottle with double-wall vacuum insulation that ensures liquids stay cold. Hydro Flask claims water stays chilled in the Oasis for up to 24 hours, making it the perfect companion for the summer months. It’s also rated for hot liquids and keeps coffee, tea, or soup hot for up to 12 hours. It’s an excellent option for skiers who want a piping hot cup of joe after a long day on the slopes.

In addition to its superior insulation, we like the Oasis’ beveled base, which makes it easier to grab and pour. It’s a nice touch that you won’t find elsewhere. On the other hand, the Oasis’ lid doesn’t provide a place to store the spout cap, and the plastic handle isn’t as durable or easy to hold.

Like the Yeti Rambler, the Hydro Flask Oasis weighs nearly 5 pounds and pushes 13 pounds when filled with water. The weight isn’t a significant hurdle if you’re keeping hydrated at home, but the Oasis’ weight could be an issue on a camping trip or climbing up a mountain when every ounce counts.

Best for the gym: Coleman One-Gallon Beverage Cooler

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Why it made the cut: The Coleman One-Gallon Beverage Cooler features a simple flip-top spout, insulation, and a classic design you remember from childhood.

Specs

• Material: Plastic
• Height: 12.8 inches
• Weight: N/A
• Dishwasher safe: No
• BPA Free: Yes

Pros

• Sturdy design
• Insulation
• Flip-top spout

Cons

• Not dishwasher safe

If you played sports as a kid, you may remember the Coleman gallon jug. Your coach may have brought it along to keep your whole team hydrated, but now it’s just for you.

The fact of the matter is that Coleman still makes a great bottle, and it’s specifically the perfect option for the gym. It has a leakproof lid, flip-top spout, and insulation to keep liquids cold. It’s also incredibly durable and features a handle that makes the Coleman Chiller easy to carry. It’s a simple, classic design that will keep you hydrated through every workout step.

Best motivational: Fidus Motivational Water Bottle

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Why it made the cut: For people buying a big water bottle to drink more water, the Fidus Motivational water bottle gives you regular hydration goals.

Specs

• Material: Plastic
• Height: 13.8 inches
• Weight: 0.83 pounds
• Dishwasher safe: Yes
• BPA Free: Yes

Pros

• Paracord handle
• Button cap
• Available in several colors

Cons

• No insulation

Drinking a gallon of water in a single day is hard work. As we mentioned, you don’t actually need to do it to stay healthily hydrated. But if you want to, this water bottle from Fidus is a trendy Tritan plastic water bottle with markers and motivational quotes to keep you on track to hit that daily goal. 

The 1-gallon water bottle from Fidus features eight motivational quotes to keep users focused and energized about hitting their water intake goals. It also features a cap that covers the spout and straw, so it’ll stay shielded from dust and particles throughout the day, and comes with a detachable paracord handle for easier carrying. Who doesn’t like a bit of encouragement?

Best budget: Simple Modern Gallon Water Bottle

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Why it made the cut: The Simple Modern Gallon Water Bottle offers a basic bottle at an affordable price.

Specs

• Material: Plastic
• Height: 13.8 inches
• Weight: 1.15 pounds
• Dishwasher safe: Yes
• BPA Free: Yes

Pros

• Silicone straw
• Button cap

Cons

• No insulation

The Simple Modern 1-gallon bottle is, just like the brand name implies, a simple gallon water bottle. The dishwasher-safe Tritan plastic bottle comes in a variety of colors, including some calming color gradients like the green-to-purple “Tropical Seas,” and warm coral-to-cyan “Havana.” The best part of the Simple Modern bottle is its lid, which features a silicone mouthpiece with a lockable cover to keep it from getting dirty between sips. Press, Flip, Hydrate. Simple!

What to consider when buying the best gallon water bottles

So let’s get one thing out of the way: You don’t actually need to drink 8 cups of water every day. Giant water bottles have recently seen a surge in popularity, as people see them as a means of motivating themselves to drink more water. While you should never deny yourself water if you’re thirsty, it turns out that you don’t need to push yourself to drink that much.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to carry around an absolutely gigantic jug of water. If you frequently go camping or spend long stretches of time away from a clean water source, it pays to bring a lot of water along. 

There aren’t as many manufacturers making gallon water bottles as the standard 32-ounce and 40-ounce options, so there isn’t as much room to get picky about style and design. That said, it still pays to know the essentials of water bottle construction so you can tell the best gallon water bottles from the knockoffs. Once you know where to look—and what to look for—in a gallon water bottle, you’ll find options that offer excellent durability, insulation, and clever designs for comfortable transportation and enhanced hydration.

Material

Most water bottles, no matter the size, are made of durable plastic or stainless steel. You may also find gallon jars made from shatter-resistant glass, but it’s fairly uncommon among bottles made for daily drinking.

Stainless steel water bottles are popular because they’re light but durable. They’re usually made from 18/8 stainless steel, which refers to its elemental composition—18% chromium and 8% nickel. It is considered food safe and is resistant to corrosion and oxidation. Many stainless steel bottles are also vacuum insulated (like the best insulated water bottles) or designed to create a sealed buffer between the liquid in the container and the environment outside the bottle, which reduces conduction and keeps liquids hot or cold for several hours. 

Reusable plastic water bottles offer a great balance of durability and affordability. High-quality plastic bottles are arguably more resistant to superficial wear and tear, though they generally lack stainless steel’s insulation. There is far more variability among the material to make plastic water bottles than there is among stainless steel water bottles. 

When buying plastic, make sure to get a plastic water bottle that’s made from BPA-free Tritan plastic, which is light, ultra-durable, and safe. Some studies suggest that containers made from plastics with bisphenol A, or BPA, can seep into what’s stored in the container and cause adverse health effects, so avoid plastic bottles unless the manufacturer specifies that they use a BPA-free material.

Durability

The gallon water bottle you buy will likely be by your side day and night, so it needs to withstand the pitfalls of everyday use. Stainless steel can get dented and scratched, but it’s pretty resilient over the long run and should last for several years. Stainless steel can also handle sudden temperature changes, making them more versatile than other materials on this list.

Tritan plastic water bottles are generally more scratch-resistant and won’t ding, but are by no means indestructible. Both materials are strong enough to withstand everyday wear and tear, even hiking or running. However, if you’re likely to drop your bottle off a cliff (or off a car’s roof), maybe go with stainless steel.

Weight

Here’s where things get a little tricky. There’s no way around the fact that our stainless steel picks are heavy. When filled up with water, they feel like small kettlebells. We don’t feel like their weight disqualifies them from consideration because, well … a gallon of water is always going to feel heavy. (Remember: A gallon of water weighs approximately 8 pounds.) That said, if you really want to minimize your bottle’s weight, a plastic bottle will generally weigh less than a stainless steel one.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best gallon water bottles

• Best overall: Yeti Gallon Jug
• Best insulated: Hydro Flask Oasis
• Best for the gym: Coleman One Gallon Beverage Cooler
• Best motivational: Fidus Motivational Water Bottle
• Best budget: Simple Modern Gallon Water Bottle

Gallon water bottles are for people who either won’t have access to a water source for a while or need to hit a specific intake goal. Otherwise, their size and weight make them too cumbersome for most people. If you want something easier to manage, you’re better off checking out our picks for the best water bottles. And if you’ve got young ones, there’s our guide to the best kids’ water bottles.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best gallon water bottles in 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Best overall		Sockwell Firm Compression Socks		SEE IT	These all-around winners provide strong compression and reliable support for people who stand all day and look good to boot.
Best ankle-length		Comrad Ankle Compression Socks		SEE IT	These ankle socks provide 15-20 mmHg compression to gently boost circulation and support the foot.
Best budget		ACTINPUT Compression socks for Men & Women		SEE IT	Light compression you can buy in bulk.

Compression socks, also known as compression stockings or support stockings, gently squeeze and apply pressure to the legs to improve circulation while preventing and reducing swelling. These socks are a common part of post-injury or surgery recovery, but they’ve gained popularity among long-distance travelers and athletes for their recovery benefits, too. Whether you’re an athlete, recovering from an injury, or in an occupation that keeps you on your feet all day, pressure socks encourage blood flow and help you stay comfortable. However, compression socks come in different pressures, lengths, and sizes that determine how well they’ll work for your particular issues. We’ve rounded up some of the best compression socks for swelling, athletics, and general use to get your feet back in working order. 

• Best overall: Sockwell Firm Compression Socks
• Best for men: Physix Gear Sport Compression Socks
• Best for women: Hi Clasmix Graduated Medical Socks
• Best for running: 2XU Vector Cushion
• Best design: VIM & VIGR Cotton Graduated Compression Socks
• Best ankle-length: Comrad Ankle Compression Socks
• Best toeless: SB SOX Plantar Fasciitis Socks
• Best budget: ACTINPUT Compression Socks for Men and Women

How we chose the best compression socks

Pressure socks should not cause pain or uncomfortably pinch the skin. A sock that causes numbness, tingling, or discoloration is too tight. To inform our judging and avoid these shortcomings, we conducted user testing with feet of all sizes, conducted extensive research, and reviewed critical reviews.

The best compression socks: Reviews & Recommendations

We picked a range of socks for various needs, from socks that help runners with performance and recovery time to those that alleviate pain from plantar fasciitis, arch and heel pain, and Achilles tendonitis. Any one of these picks should get your blood pumping and your feet jumpin’.

Best overall: Sockwell Firm Compression Socks

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Why they made the cut: Sockwell’s Firm Compression Socks provide plenty of support while you’re on the job and still look stylish. 

Specs

• Materials: Merino wool, rayon, nylon, Spandex
• Compression: 20-30 mmHG
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Designed with graduated compression to reduce swelling
• Comes with arch support and cushioned sole
• Provides moisture-wicking and odor-control

Cons

• Not designed for athletic performance

If you’re looking for a compression sock you can wear all day, Sockwell’s Firm Compression Socks provide plenty of support while not looking like medical socks. Created to improve circulation in the legs of people who sit or stand all day, these socks are designed with graduated compression that minimizes swelling and cuts down on fatigue. They also wick away moisture and provide odor control thanks to the power of merino wool, and come in a range of colors from black to putty.

Best for men: Physix Gear Sport Compression Socks

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Why they made the cut: These compression socks provide moderate pressure and come in a range of fun designs that will look great when working out.

Specs

• Materials: Lycra
• Compression: 20-30 mmHG
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Great for extreme races
• Ankle cuff stays put
• Range of colors and designs

Cons

• Not particularly suited for the cold

The Physix Gear Sport Compression Socks provide 20-30 mmHg of pressure, which is adequate for running and other sports, as well as post-workout recovery. Their graduated pressure provides higher pressure through the feet and ankles and gradually decreases toward the top of the calf. These socks come in three sizes and include “stay put” cuffs to keep the sock in place. They also come in 12 colors.

Best for women: Hi Clasmix Graduated Medical Compression Socks

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Why they made the cut: These socks are designed to promote blood flow, discourage blood clots after surgery, and are also great for people working on their feet all day. 

Specs

• Materials: Nylon, polyester, copper fiber
• Compression: 20-30 mmHG
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Comfortable for all-day wear
• Encourages blood flow and circulation
• Moisture-wicking and breathable fabric that eliminates odor

Cons 

• Striking design may not work with professional outfits

The Hi Clasmix Graduated Medical Socks are the best compression socks for women and fit shoe sizes 6 to 15.5. They feature graduated compression between 20-30 mmHg, enough for daily wear, athletics, or recovery. A copper-infused fabric helps prevent odors and wicks moisture for more comfortable wear.

Best for running: 2XU Vector Cushion

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Why they made the cut: These athletic compression socks are specifically designed to improve runners’ performance with decreased recovery time and streamlined comfort. 

Specs

• Materials: Nylon, Lycra
• Compression: 15-20 mmHG at base of foot (20-30 mmHG at ankle) 
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Support feet and legs
• Cushioning provides plantar fascia and arch support
• Lock-in technology reduces blistering

Cons

• Expensive

Runners, if you’re looking for compression socks to enhance performance without looking stodgy, the 2XU Vector Cushion Socks are a solid option. Designed with graduated compression, these socks for running increase circulation in your feet and legs to get more blood to your muscles. They come with arch and plantar fascia cushioning to absorb shocks and with technology that helps reduce blistering. That said, they’re an expensive pair of socks. 

Best design: VIM & VIGR Cotton Graduated Compression Socks

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Why they made the cut: If boring socks aren’t your jam, the fun patterns and colors of VIM & VIGR’s compression socks will fit right in with the rest of your color rainbow collection.

Specs 

• Materials: Cotton, nylon, spandex
• Compression: 15-20 mmHg 
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Lots of sizes and colors available
• Ideal for all-day wear
• Cotton gives socks breathability

Cons

• Expensive

Socks are one of the ways we can show our personality without dressing too loud. It’s also titillating to have your own little fun secret hidden by the hem of your pants, only shown once you sit down. VIM & VIGR combines the whimsy of fun patterns like foxes, stripes, butterflies, and parasols with the practicality of compression. Its light compression—15-20 mmHg of it, to be exact—is perfect for traveling, exercising, sitting, standing, walking, and more. They’re soft, stretchy, and easy to put on. They’re also, at $38 per pair, expensive for this type of product.

Best ankle-length: Comrad Ankle Compression Socks

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Why they made the cut: These ankle socks are designed with light compression and provide 360 degrees of support that cradle feet and aid recovery.

Specs

• Materials: Nylon, Spandex
• Compression: 15-20 mmHg 
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Designed with targeted compression zones
• Moisture wicking 
• Comfortable

Cons

• Pill in the wash after a few wears

The Comrad ankle compression socks feature light, 15-20 mmHg compression in a side-specific design. Compression provides progressive pressure throughout the foot and ankle. They’re made of a moisture-wicking fabric that improves breathability for more comfortable wear, and feature extra toe and heel padding. That said, they’re not the best for cold weather, so you may also want to check out some heated socks. They feel just like a regular pair of socks, which is a plus for comfort. As you can see in the photo, the sock’s fabric pills after a few washes. It doesn’t affect their effectiveness, however.

Best toeless: SB SOX Plantar Fasciitis Compression Socks

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Why they made the cut: These compression socks are designed to relieve pain and are created specifically for people with foot ailments such as plantar fasciitis, arch and heel pain, and Achilles tendonitis.

Specs 

• Materials: Nylon, Spandex
• Compression: 15-20 mmHg 
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Provides arch support
• Moisture wicking 
• Comfortable

Cons

• Not designed for cold weather

SB SOX Plantar Fasciitis Compression Socks feature compression and ribbing designed to follow the foot arch. The ribbing through the arch mimics the natural movement of the foot’s ligaments to provide better support. A thin heel lets you fit it under your regular socks without changing the fit of your shoes. Moisture-wicking fabric keeps the SB SOX cool even under another pair of socks. They come in four sizes and nine colors.

Best budget: ACTINPUT Compression Socks for Men and Women

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Why they made the cut: If you’re looking for light compression, this eight-pack of socks provides great value for everyday use for people who stand all day.

Specs 

• Materials: Nylon, polyester, elastane
• Compression: 15-20 mmHg 
• Machine washable: Yes

Pros

• Comes in an eight-pack
• Moisture wicking 
• Good value

Cons

• Not designed for foot ailments

The ACTINPUT Socks for Men and Women are made with 15-20 mmHG compression and come in eight-packs. These knee-high compression socks provide uniform pressure from toe to knee in two sizes. You get many options, from a pack of all black to nude, white, gray, and colorful patterned designs.

What to consider when buying the best compression socks

Let’s start with the most basic question—what are compression socks used for? Compression socks apply gentle pressure to the tissues beneath the skin of the legs. That extra pressure prevents fluid leakage and promotes fluid absorption. That generally means less swelling and further swelling prevention. 

Pressure socks support vein and capillary walls, boosting weakening veins and valves. Even if your veins are perfectly healthy, blood can pool in your legs after long periods of sitting or time on your feet. Consequently, people who work while standing, walk all day, and travel for several hours at a time find relief from swelling with the added pressure of compression socks. 

These socks come in different types and designs. For example, gradient or graduated compression socks apply higher pressure toward the toes, feet, and ankles, with less pressure through the calf. Ankle compression socks only apply pressure to the foot and ankle. Toeless designs make it easier to wear with regular socks for greater cushioning and comfort. 

Pressure levels

Compression socks also come in different pressure levels, with socks available to the average consumer having light to medium compression. Pressure is measured in millimeters of Mercury (mmHg). People with certain health issues may require a specific sock pressure level recommended by a doctor, while others can just choose a comfortable level from the following:

• 15-20 mmHg (light compression): Daily wear, general sports, and travel.
• 20-30 mmHg (medium compression): Daily wear (especially for varicose veins and swelling), mild symptoms of discomfort, sports recovery.
• 30-40 mmHg (strong compression): Often recommended for blood clot prevention, medical recovery, or post-surgery.

Alleviating ankle swelling

Pregnancy, poor circulation, temperature fluctuations, and fatigue are only a few of the reasons your feet and ankles may swell. Capillaries, the very small blood vessels, help carry blood to the arteries and veins and back again. Their thin walls are easily damaged, leading to fluid buildup and poor circulation. 

Pressure socks gently squeeze the legs, helping fluids reabsorb and blood flow more easily. These pressure socks also decrease the diameter of veins, increasing the velocity of blood flow and its volume. In short, they keep the blood moving and fluid from pooling. If swelling plagues you during and after a long airplane, car ride, or a long shift on the job, these socks may help. 

Potential improved running performance

Here’s the deal: The jury is still out on the benefits of compression socks for running performance. Some studies have found a correlation between pressure socks and improved running performance and muscle fatigue, while others have found no difference. 

It comes down to what you need and want the compression socks to do. If you have swelling when you run, which is pretty normal, pressure socks can definitely reduce fluid buildup in your feet and legs. That may or may not benefit your running time and recovery. Runners who travel long distances to get to their events, such as marathons or triathlons,  may also reap the benefits of compression socks because they can reduce swelling due to prolonged periods of sitting or standing.

However, a fairly universal finding is that if the wearer believes the socks help, they report less fatigue, better circulation, and quicker recovery. The mental “race” can be just as difficult for runners as the actual race. If the socks work for you and help with recovery, you may want to consider a purchase. 

Style of sock

Something that goes to your knees or beyond is too much sock for the occasion. In other cases, you may only need compression and extra support in the arch, heel, or low ankle. Ankle socks may offer a solution to any of the aforementioned issues. 

These socks sometimes rise above the ankle bone, but many stay below this visible landmark. They have similar pressure levels as taller socks. Some of these designs feature targeted pressure through the arches or heels to relieve plantar fasciitis or support foot injuries. These socks also cover less surface area, making them a cooler option when temperatures rise.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best compression socks

• Best overall: Sockwell Firm Compression Socks
• Best for men: Physix Gear Sport Compression Socks
• Best for women: Hi Clasmix Graduated Medical Socks
• Best for running: 2XU Vector Cushion
• Best design: VIM & VIGR Cotton Graduated Compression Socks
• Best ankle-length: Comrad Ankle Compression Socks
• Best toeless: SB SOX Plantar Fasciitis Socks
• Best budget: ACTINPUT Compression Socks for Men and Women

Keeping your tootsies happy can help you stay on the move when your feet start to get tired. The best compression socks allow your blood to flow and reduce swelling without pinching or cutting off circulation. They also make great gifts. You may need a sock without toes or an ankle compression sock to support your arch. If you have a medical condition that requires a compression sock, talk to your doctor to determine the right pressure and sock style. These socks can express your personality with bright colors and patterns or blend in with your natural skin tone. If you need a pair, there’s a design out there that will work for you.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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Food allergies are a growing health and safety risk, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimating that about 1 in 3 children in the United States are affected. To help combat this, physicians use a technique called oral immunotherapy to try to build a child’s tolerance to some common food allergens. Now, a study published April 8 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology aims to create the first set of international guidelines for clinicians to use to help families and clinicians succeed in this sometimes life saving process. These guidelines are not currently mandatory and aim to help standardize care to improve patient outcomes. 

“These families must provide the therapy every single day. That’s why these guidelines are so important,” Douglas Mack, study co-author and a clinical professor at McMaster University in Canada, said in a statement. “Safety can be optimized to make sure that they understand what they’re taking on, while ensuring that they are aware of the kinds of side-effects that can be dangerous.”

What is oral immunotherapy?

Oral immunotherapy involves giving very small amounts of a food allergen like peanuts, walnuts, milk, or egg to a child with a documented allergy. The amount is then gradually increased in an attempt to build up the body’s tolerance and the process has been used for over a century. In 1908, oral immunotherapy helped desensitize a 13-year-old patient with an egg allergy. In that study, the starting dose was 1/10,000th of an egg every day. After six months, the patient could safely eat eggs. More recent analysis found that it can induce desensitization in most patients who are allergic to peanuts, milk, and egg by 76.9 percent. 

This process is not without risks, as it is administered every day at home to children by their caregivers, which requires caregivers to act like “amateur medical professionals” by observing a child’s reactions and deciding if medical treatment is necessary. These new guidelines are intended to help prepare families and standardize the approach to the process. 

[Related: Babies who grow up around pets may be less likely to develop food allergies.]

“Families need to learn about food allergies, anaphylaxis, immunotherapy, how to safely dose the food, which things to look out for, when to treat, and when to contact the medical team,” Julia Upton, a clinical immunologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, told DW. Upton is not a co-author of the new study. 

What’s in the new guidelines?

A panel of 36 international oral immunotherapy experts worked together to craft a detailed standardized consent form and topics to discuss with families. This includes mentioning that oral immunotherapy is not a cure, that asthma should be controlled before starting the therapy, and stress all caregivers must understand how the process works. This should ensure that all parents and caregivers know the risks and benefits, and alternative treatments if they are unwilling to take on oral immunotherapy. 

“If they decide they want to do it after following these guidelines, they’re prepared for what they’re getting into,” said Mack. “They understand the risks and most importantly, it makes it safer because they can anticipate the challenges. This protocol sets the standard moving forward.”

The guidelines also stresses adequate adult supervision of dosing before treatment begins and that potential risk factors to the patient should be identified before the therapy begins. Some of these risk factors include uncontrolled asthma in the patient and an unwillingness for the caregiver to use epinephrine in case of a reaction. Failure to administer epinephrine in the event of a severe allergic reaction can result in death. 

[Related: A peanut allergy patch is making headway in trials with toddlers.]

The team estimates that as many as one-third of patients were not getting any degree of counseling or preparation before starting the treatment. It took about 30 to 60 minutes for a clinicing to provide adequate counseling about all of the risks and benefits of oral immunotherapy, according to the study. 

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Today, millions of people will have a chance to watch a total solar eclipse. If you’re one of them, be careful: looking directly at a solar eclipse without eye protection can permanently damage your vision.

It doesn’t matter if our rocky satellite is blocking all or some of our nearest star—the sun is still an incredibly bright source of light. Don’t risk your eyesight for a quick glimpse or even a once-in-a-lifetime event. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to protect your eyes while watching an eclipse.

What happens if you look at a solar eclipse

We are able to see thanks to photoreceptors. These cells, also known as rods and cones, are located at the backs of our eyes, and convert the light reflected by the world around us into electrical impulses that our brain interprets as the image we see. But when strong light, like that from the sun, hits our eyes, a series of chemical reactions occur that damage and often destroy these rods and cones. This is known as solar retinopathy, and can make our eyesight blurry. Sometimes, if the damage is too great in one area, you can lose sight completely.

[Related: Every sunset ends with a green flash. Why is it so hard to see?]

On a typical sunny day, you almost never have to worry about solar retinopathy. That’s because our eyes have natural mechanisms that ensure too much light doesn’t get in. When it’s really bright outside, our pupils get super tiny, reducing the amount of sunlight that can hit your photoreceptors. But when you stare directly at the sun, your pupils’ shrinking power isn’t enough to protect your peepers.

This is where your eyes’ second defense mechanism comes into play. When we look at something bright, we tend to blink. This is known as the corneal or blink reflex, and it  prevents us from staring at anything too damagingly bright. 

Just before a solar eclipse has reached its totality, the moon is partially blocking the sun, making it a lot easier for us to look up at the star without blinking. But that doesn’t mean you should—even that tiny sliver of sunlight is too intense for our sensitive photoreceptors.

[Related: Total eclipses aren’t that rare—and you’ve probably missed a bunch of them]

Unfortunately, if you practice unprotected sun-gazing, you probably won’t know the effects of your actions until the next morning, when the damage to your photoreceptors has kicked in.

And while solar retinopathy is extremely rare, it is by no means unheard of. If you search the term in medical journals, you’ll find case reports after almost every popular solar eclipse. Let’s try really hard to do better this time, eyeball-havers.

How to safely watch a solar eclipse

Watching the eclipse with your own two eyes is easy: just wear legitimate eclipse sunglasses. These are crucial, as they will block the sun’s rays enough for you to safely see the eclipse without burning your eyes out.

And if you don’t have eclipse glasses, you can still enjoy the view, albeit not directly. Try whipping up your own eclipse projector or a DIY pinhole camera so you can enjoy the view without having to book an emergency visit to the eye doctor.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2017.

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You can never have too many protein shakes, and right now is a great time to stock up because Amazon has Premier Protein pre-mixed shakes and powders on sale cheaper than I have ever seen them. At $20.99 for 12, you’re paying just under $1.75 per shake. That’s about seven cents more per shake than they cost at Sam’s Club, but Amazon has a ton of different flavors instead of Sam’s basic chocolate and vanilla. Dymatize protein is also on sale if you’re not into the Premier offerings. Whichever you choose, this is a great time to stock up.

Dymatize ISO100 Hydrolyzed Protein Powder, 100% Whey Isolate, Dunkin’ Glazed Donut Flavor $23.42 (was $34)

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If you’re sick of normal flavors, Dymatize teamed up with Dunkin’ Donuts to make some wonderful (and a little wacky) flavors. I like to imagine this is what Ben Affleck used to get buff to play Batman because it integrated his love of Dunkin’ into his fitness routine. This a great, clean protein powder with a unique taste that pleasantly surprised me when I tried it. Yes, it sounds weird, but the macros are solid, with just two grams of carbs to go with 25 grams of protein.

Premier Protein Shake, Chocolate Peanut Butter, 30g Protein $20.99 (was $29)

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You won’t find this flavor at the big box price club stores, but it’s my personal favorite. I bought a couple of cases last time there was a solid sale (more than a year ago, now), and really liked these. Each shake offers 30 grams of protein as well as calcium, vitamin C, vitamin D, and zinc. It’s not quite as clean as the super-designer stuff out there, but the macros are solid, and they taste good, which is important for something you’re going to consume daily.

Premier Protein Powder Plant Protein, Chocolate $16.79 (was $23.99)

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If you don’t mind mixing your own shakes or you want to add protein to recipes (in a Ninja Creami, perhaps), then the powder is the way to go. This plant-based option offers 15 servings for $16.79, so you’re just over a dollar for each scoop. That gets you an assortment of vitamins and 22g protein. Plus, it’s plant-based, which is great if you’re specifically looking for a vegan protein powder or if your stomach struggles with whey-based supplements. It also comes in Vanilla.

More Dymatize Protein deals

• Dymatize ISO100 Hydrolyzed Protein Powder, 100% Whey Isolate Protein Cookies and Cream $66 (was $94)
• Dymatize ISO 100 Whey Protein Powder with 25g of Hydrolyzed 100% Whey Isolate $59 (was $94)
• Dymatize Elite Casein Protein Powder, Slow Absorbing with Muscle Building Amino Acids, 100% Micellar Casein, 25g Protein $48 (was $64)
• Dymatize ISO100 Hydrolyzed Protein Powder, 100% Whey Isolate, 25g of Protein Fruity Pebbles $64 (was $94)
• Dymatize ISO100 Hydrolyzed Protein Powder, 100% Whey Isolate Protein, 25g of Protein $33 (was $75)
• Dymatize ISO100 Hydrolyzed Protein Powder in Dunkin’ Mocha Latte Flavor $16 (was $39)
• Dymatize Vegan Plant Protein, Creamy Chocolate, 25g Protein, 4.8g BCAAs, Complete Amino Acid Profile $11.99 (was $35)
• Dymatize Elite 100% Whey Protein Powder, 25g Protein, 5.5g BCAAs & 2.7g L-Leucine $24 (was $39)
• Dymatize Vegan Plant Protein, Smooth Vanilla, 25g Protein, 4.8g BCAAs, Complete Amino Acid Profile $11.99 (was $23.99)

More Premier Protein deals

• Premier Protein Shake, Chocolate $20.99 (was $29)
• Premier Protein Shake Limited Edition Salted Caramel Popcorn $20.99 (was $29)
• Premier Protein Shake MINIs, Caramel, 22g Protein $18 (was $27)
• Premier Protein Shake, Chocolate Peanut Butter, 30g Protein $20.99 (was $29)
• Premier Protein Shake Cinnamon Roll, 30g Protein, 1g Sugar $20.99 (was $29)
• Premier Protein Shake MINIs, Vanilla, 22g Protein $18 (was $27)
• Premier Protein Liquid Protein Shake Banana Strawberry $20.99 (was $29)
• Premier Protein Shake Limited Edition 30g Pumpkin Spice $20.99 (was $29)
• Premier Protein Shake, Vanilla $20.99 (was $29)
• Premier Protein Liquid Protein Shake, Caramel $20.99 (was $29)

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A team of scientists is attempting to grow a new liver inside of a human using lymph nodes. While this sounds like science fiction, Pittsburgh-based biotech company LyGenesis announced that a volunteer has received an injection of liver cells from a living donor that could turn one of their lymph nodes into a second and functioning liver.

The experimental procedure took place in Houston on March 25. It is part of a Phase 2a clinical trial that will test this treatment in 12 adults who have end-stage liver disease (ESLD). This illness occurs when the liver is damaged beyond repair, primarily due to chronic liver disease or acute liver failure. Over 50,000 Americans die of chronic liver disease every year. 

Patients with ESLD typically require a liver transplant, but roughly 10,000 people are currently on the waiting list in the United States alone. In 2021, a record of 9,234 liver transplants were performed in the US, according to the federal government’s Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. LyGensis hopes that this procedure will create the growth of enough liver tissue that patients won’t need a transplant. 

[Related: Swiss researchers kept a donor liver healthy for a remarkable 68 hours.]

“This therapy will potentially be a remarkable regenerative medicine milestone by helping patients with ESLD grow new functional ectopic livers in their own body,” LyGenesis co-founder and CEO Dr. Michael Hufford said in a statement. “If our study is successful and we obtain FDA approval, our allogeneic cell therapy could enable one donated liver to treat many dozens of ESLD patients, which could help to tilt the current organ supply-demand imbalance in favor of patients.”

The technique has been in the works for over a decade. It takes liver cells–or hepatocytes–from a donated organ and injects them into the lymph nodes that are found all over the body. In the lymph nodes, the liver cells will hopefully divide, grow, and develop blood vessels. It targets a group of lymph nodes in the abdomen that are connected to the liver via a system of veins.

According to MIT Technology Review, LyGenesis has tested their approach in mice and pigs, finding that the cells can flourish and form an additional liver that will take over the function of an animal’s failing organ. Chief scientific officer of LyGenesis and University of Pittsburgh pathologist Dr. Eric Lagasse published a study in 2020 that found the pigs regained their liver function following the injections. They also noted that the more severe the damage to the pig’s original liver, the bigger the second livers grew. The pig’s body may be able to recognize the more healthy tissue and give the new liver more responsibilities. 

In the trial procedure, the doctors threaded a thin flexible tube down the end of the patient’s throat through the digestive tract, according to Wired. They then used an ultrasound to identify one of the target lymph nodes and put 50 million hepatocytes into it.

[Related: Surgeons complete first-ever gene-edited pig kidney transplant.]

“LyGenesis’ cell therapy platform represents a truly remarkable potential commercial opportunity and may be transformative for chronic liver failure patients who do not have access to a donor liver,” LyGenesis investor Justin Briggs from Prime Movers Lab said in a statement. “Their use of an endoscopic ultrasound as a low risk and low cost route of cell therapy administration is another way this pioneering technology could provide patients with access to life-saving therapies and address complex medical challenges by upending transplant medicine.”

The results won’t be available for a few months and the team will be monitoring how many cells are required to grow a liver that is large enough to filter blood and produce bile. If it works, it could mean a major change for the treatment of liver disease, which affects roughly 4.5 million people in the United States. 

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Multiple brain-computer interface (BCI) devices can allow now users to do everything from control computer cursors, to translate neural activity into words, to convert handwriting into text. While one of the latest BCI examples appears to accomplish very similar tasks, it does so without the need for time-consuming, personalized calibration or high-stakes neurosurgery.

As recently detailed in a study published in PNAS Nexus, University of Texas Austin researchers have developed a wearable cap that allows a user to accomplish complex computer tasks through interpreting brain activity into actionable commands. But instead of needing to tailor each device to a specific user’s neural activity, an accompanying machine learning program offers a new, “one-size-fits-all” approach that dramatically reduces training time.

“Training a BCI subject customarily starts with an offline calibration session to collect data to build an individual decoder,” the team explains in their paper’s abstract. “Apart from being time-consuming, this initial decoder might be inefficient as subjects do not receive feedback that helps them to elicit proper [sensorimotor rhythms] during calibration.”

To solve for this, researchers developed a new machine learning program that identifies an individual’s specific needs and adjusts its repetition-based training as needed. Because of this interoperable self-calibration, trainees don’t need the researcher team’s guidance, or complex medical procedures to install an implant.

[Related: Neuralink shows first human patient using brain implant to play online chess.]

“When we think about this in a clinical setting, this technology will make it so we won’t need a specialized team to do this calibration process, which is long and tedious,” Satyam Kumar, a graduate student involved in the project, said in a recent statement. “It will be much faster to move from patient to patient.”

To prepare, all a user needs to do is don one of the extremely red, electrode-dotted devices resembling a swimmer’s cap. From there, the electrodes gather and transit neural activity to the researcher team’s newly created decoding software during training. Thanks to the program’s machine learning capabilities, developers avoided the time-intensive, personalized training usually required for other BCI tech to calibrate for each individual user.  

Over a five-day period, 18 test subjects effectively learned to mentally envision playing both a car racing game and a simpler bar-balancing program using the new training method. The decoder was so effective, in fact, that wearers could train on both the bar and racing games simultaneously, instead of one at a time. At the annual South by Southwest Conference last month, the UT Austin team took things a step further. During a demonstration, volunteers put on the wearable BCI, then learned to control a pair of hand and arm rehabilitation robots within just a few minutes.

So far, the team has only tested their BCI cap on subjects without motor impairments, but they plan to expand their decoder’s abilities to encompass users with disabilities.

“On the one hand, we want to translate the BCI to the clinical realm to help people with disabilities,” said José del R. Millán, study co-author and UT professor of electrical and computer engineering. “On the other, we need to improve our technology to make it easier to use so that the impact for these people with disabilities is stronger.” Millán’s team is also working to incorporate similar BCI technology into a wheelchair.

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After a particularly mild winter in most of the United States, which followed a record warm summer for the planet, seasonal allergy season is kicking into high gear. According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, more than 80 million Americans suffer from sneezing, itchy eyes, runny nose, and other symptoms of seasonal allergies.  

Climate change is making allergy season worse

A 2021 study found that spring allergy season is beginning about 20 days earlier in North America due to human-caused climate change. Pollen concentrations have risen roughly 20 percent across the country since 1990, with the Midwest and Texas seeing the largest increases. A combination of warmer temperatures, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide, and more precipitation can all contribute to plants producing more pollen longer. 

This year, the pollen count started particularly early, according to allergist and director of the Loyola Medicine Allergy Count Dr. Rachna Shah. She typically looks at pollen counts in Chicago in April, but saw that tree pollen was already at a moderate level in the middle of February. 

[Related: Climate change is pumping more pollen into allergy season.]

“This season has been so nuts,” Shah told the Associated Press. “Granted, it was a pretty mild winter, but I didn’t expect it to be so early.” 

Shah also believes that this season will be longer than other years, if the weather remains unseasonably warm. 

What are some triggers for seasonal allergies?

Pollen from growing trees and other plants is one of the most common triggers of seasonal allergies. In the early spring, tree pollen tends to be the biggest allergy trigger, with grass and weed pollen following. 

Ragweed, goldenrod, dust, and mold can also trigger allergies for some. 

Is it a cold or allergies?

Since allergies typically come with sneezing, coughing, itchy eyes, and sore throat, it can be hard to tell them apart from the common cold. According to Dr. Rita Kachru, chief of clinical allergy and immunology at UCLA Health, muscle pain, joint aches, fatigue, and fever is a sure sign that these symptoms are from a cold and not allergies.

Symptoms flaring up around the same time every year and having a family history of seasonal allergies are also helpful in determining what’s causing the symptoms.

How to manage symptoms

According to the Mayo Clinic, one of the first things to do is reduce exposure. This can mean avoiding going outside on windy days when pollen is blowing around, changing clothes and showering after coming inside, and even rinsing out your nasal passages. The best time to go outside is after a good rainfall, when some pollen has been washed away. You can also monitor pollen counts in your area online or during weather forecasts. 

[Related: It’s time you really understood what allergies mean.]

There are also several over-the-counter remedies available in both oral and nasal spray form that can help with symptoms when taken correctly. These include fexofenadine (Allegra), loratadine (Claritin), levocetirizine (Xyzal), and cetirizine (Zyrtec). Some common steroid nasal sprays include budesonide (Benacort), fluticasone (Flonase), triamcinolone (Nasacort) and mometasone (Nasonex).

Medical professionals do caution against using products that have pseudoephedrine, such as Sudafed, for more than a day or two. These medications can increase heart rate and blood pressure. A task force of physicians also issued guidelines in 2020 that did not recommend using Benadryl to treat allergies. The medication can have sedative effects and cause confusion in some patients.

If symptoms are severe and last for several months, it is important to speak with a medical professional and potentially get tested to see exactly what the body is reacting to. There are also long term allergy shots avaialbe that can help with more severe reactions.

The post Spring allergy season is off to an even earlier start this year appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.

The patient’s teeth appeared to be well cared for, but dentist James Mancini did not like the look of his gums. By chance, Mancini knew the man’s physician, so he raised an alert about a potential problem—and a diagnosis soon emerged.

“Actually, Bob had leukemia,” says Mancini, clinical director of the Meadville Dental Center in Pennsylvania. Though he wasn’t tired or having other symptoms, “his mouth was a disaster,” Mancini says. “Once his physician saw that, they were able to get him treated right away.”

Oral health is tightly connected to whole-body health, so Mancini’s hunch is not surprising. What is unusual is that the dentist and doctor communicated.

Historically, dentistry and medicine have operated as parallel fields: Dentists take care of the mouth, physicians the rest of the body. That is starting to change as many initiatives across the United States and other countries work to integrate oral and whole-body care to more effectively tackle diabetes, cardiovascular disease, joint replacements and many other conditions. The exact relationship between health of mouth and teeth and physical ailments elsewhere in the body is not well understood—and in some cases, is contentious—but experts agree there are links that should no longer be overlooked.

In recent years, dental hygienists have started working in medical clinics; physicians and dentists have started a professional association to promote working together; and a new kind of clinic—with dentists and doctors under one roof — is emerging.

“We are at a pivotal point—I call it the convergence era—where dentistry is not going to be separated from overall health for much longer,” says Stephen E. Thorne IV, founder and CEO of Pacific Dental Services, based in Irvine, California. “Dentistry will be brought into the primary care health-care team.”

Sick mouth, sick body

The list of connections between oral health and systemic health—conditions that affect the entire body—is remarkable. For starters, three common dental issues—cavities, tooth loss and periodontal disease—are all associated with heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. “To me, the number one hidden risk factor for the number one killer in our country is oral health,” says Ellie Campbell, a family physician in Cumming, Georgia, and board member of the American Academy for Oral Systemic Health, founded in 2010 to increase awareness of how oral and whole-body health are related.

Periodontal disease, infection and inflammation of the gums and bone that support the teeth, is the main culprit. Nearly half of adults 30 and older have periodontal disease; by age 65, the rate climbs to about 70 percent. In the early stages, called gingivitis, gums are swollen and may bleed. Periodontitis, a more serious condition in which gums can pull away from the teeth, is the sixth most common human disease.

Periodontitis is associated with a slew of systemic ills: heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, diabetes, endocarditis, chronic kidney disease, recurrent pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, gastritis, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer and cognitive impairment.

Bad habits, including tobacco use, alcohol consumption and high-sugar diets, are implicated too. They raise the risk for cavities and most oral diseases, and are also linked to ills such as cancer, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes.

Such connections were apparently lost on officials at the University of Maryland in 1837, when the university rebuffed a proposal from two physicians to teach dentistry to the school’s medical students. At the time, medicine wanted nothing to do with dentistry, which was practiced by unregulated and inadequately trained itinerants, says medical and dental historian Andrew I. Spielman, a dentist and oral surgeon at the New York University College of Dentistry. “There were a lot of charlatans,” he says. “They had a very bad reputation.”

The dismissal prompted the rejected physicians, Horace Hayden and Chapin Harris, to establish the world’s first dental school, the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. Today, dentistry is a highly regulated profession, and the United States has 73 accredited dental schools.

Despite their disparate training, both doctors and dentists are aware that mouth health is important to whole-body health, Campbell says. “Ask a family practice doctor and they will say ‘Oh yeah, if the patient has diabetes, they’re going to have bad teeth and gums, and I can never get their diabetes better until the dentist fixes their gums,’” she says. “And the dentist is going to say, ‘Well, I’ll never get their gums better until the primary care doctor gets their sugar under control.’”

Mancini, the Pennsylvania dentist, says dentists often are asked to examine a patient’s mouth before physicians will proceed with certain treatments. “Physicians know any infection in a patient who’s being treated for cancer could be very much life-threatening,” he says. “The orthopedic guys are now sending all of their patients to the dentist for the same reason.”

Hurdles to holistic care

But working together to improve a patient’s health is not as simple as it might seem. A decade ago, the federal government hired the National Network for Oral Health Access to run a pilot program merging oral and primary health-care centers. The network’s dental consultant, Irene Hilton, a dentist with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said three barriers to integration became clear.

The fragmented way that health care and dental care are paid for is one of them. While more than 90 percent of Americans have health insurance, only 77 percent of US adults ages 19 to 64 have dental coverage, which typically is sold separately from health insurance. The nation’s largest insurer—the federal Medicare program—generally does not cover dental services, and nearly half of Americans 65 and over have no dental coverage.

That causes problems for patients who need, say, a joint replacement that would be covered by insurance but who cannot afford the dental work that is needed in advance. Surgeons won’t replace a knee until patients first get their dental work done, Mancini says, “so we’re kind of the barrier to them improving their life.”

Another barrier is that dentists and physicians are not routinely trained to work with each other, Hilton says.

Dental students study anatomy, physiology and other sciences related to the whole body, then home in on clinical care for mouth and teeth. But many physicians have almost no training in oral health. A 2009 survey found that 10 percent of medical schools that responded offered no oral health curriculum, and 69 percent offered fewer than five hours on the subject.

A third issue is what Hilton calls infrastructure. In most cases, the electronic health records used by physicians are incompatible with those used by dentists, so sharing information electronically is impossible. Likewise, dental offices are typically not embedded in medical clinics, where doctor-dentist referrals might be easier.

If oral and systemic health are to be integrated broadly, “these are the things that have to be overcome or addressed,” Hilton says.

The situation is not much different in other parts of the world. In 2021 the World Health Organization—noting that oral diseases are a global public health problem affecting nearly 3.5 billion people—recommended that dentistry focus more on prevention and be more integrated with primary care services.

Demonstrated links

In the past quarter-century, a great deal of research has demonstrated the links between oral and whole-body health. For example, when researchers followed 15,456 patients from 39 countries with stable coronary heart disease for nearly four years, they found that those who had lost the most teeth had the highest risk of having a stroke, heart attack or cardiovascular death. Similarly, a study that tracked 7,466 US adults ages 44 to 66 for an average of 14.7 years revealed that those who had severe periodontitis had a greater risk of cancer than those with no or mild periodontitis.

In 2015, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine launched an initiative to support integration of the two fields—in education, insurance and professional practice. (The initiative gets funding from dental product brands and health insurance companies, and Thorne, the Pacific Dental Services CEO, serves on its board.) “We’ve published papers identifying links between periodontal disease and diabetes, hypertension, dementia, adverse birth outcomes, low birth-weight babies, preterm birth, spontaneous abortion, kidney disease,” says Jane Barrow, the initiative’s executive director.

But correlation is not the same as cause and effect, and scientists have not nailed down the exact relationship between periodontitis, which affects more than 11 percent of the global population, and various systemic diseases.

Periodontitis is associated with bacteria in the bloodstream and systemic inflammation, which can affect organs such as the liver and bone marrow. That, in turn, can trigger or aggravate other conditions. And the periodontal bacteria—that travel via the bloodstream, inhalation or ingestion—may also cause infections or exacerbate inflammation in other parts of the body.

When the major professional societies for periodontology in the United States and Europe convened a group of global experts in 2012 to review the science, they concluded that it was “biologically plausible” that the inflammation of periodontitis ups the risk of cardiovascular disease and influences type 2 diabetes and other maladies – but “plausible” was as far as they would go.

Seven years later, the European Federation of Periodontology and the World Heart Federation again gathered experts to review new studies on the link between periodontitis and cardiovascular problems. Again, though scientists had made some headway in identifying possible biological mechanisms to explain the link, experts have since concluded that the evidence does not yet prove that periodontitis actually causes strokes, heart attacks or anything else.

Flipping the question on its head, does preventing or treating periodontal disease help to prevent heart problems? Several observational studies, in which researchers observe individuals and measure particular outcomes, but don’t intervene, suggest that oral health care, including toothbrushing and dental cleanings, make a difference. For example, a study that tracked the health habits of 11,869 adults 35 and older in Scotland found that within eight years, those who rarely brushed their teeth had more cardiovascular problems compared with those who brushed twice a day.

That still does not prove that preventing periodontitis will hold heart problems at bay: Some other habit or feature of the toothbrushing group could have been the important factor. The relationship is difficult to tease out, Barrow says, because people who are taking good care of their mouths tend to take good care of themselves in general. “Could you say that people who are taking care of their mouths are in better health overall? You would probably find that to be true,” she says. “Is it because they’re taking care of their mouth? I can’t say that.”

And nobody else should say that either, according to a 2018 editorial in the Journal of the American Dental Association. The coauthors, a group of dental and public health researchers, cautioned against overstating the oral-systemic health connection. “The main reason for maintaining good oral health is because it is important in and of itself,” they wrote.

One of the contributors, Bryan Michalowicz, a dental researcher at HealthPartners Institute in Minnesota, later led a team that reviewed the medical records and insurance claims of 9,503 patients to see if periodontitis treatment improved the health outcomes of those with coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease or type 2 diabetes.

Overall, cardiovascular patients who received dental treatment and follow-up maintenance saw no difference in the rate of heart attacks, strokes, bypass surgeries or angioplasty procedures compared to those who were not treated, the team reported in 2023. Likewise, periodontal treatment did not significantly lower the blood-sugar levels in patients with type 2 diabetes.

Overdue integration

But the data suggesting connections have been enough to spark many grassroots efforts at integration. In addition to the American Academy for Oral Systemic Health, the National Network of Healthcare Hygienists, founded by hygienist Jamie Dooley in 2018, helps prepare hygienists who want to integrate oral health into health-care systems.

And in California, Thorne’s business is trying to make those interactions easy by putting dental and medical services under one roof. In December 2023, Pacific Dental Services opened a clinic, Culver Smiles Dentistry, in a space shared with a medical practice. It’s the first of 25 planned dental-medical practices that will operate through a partnership between MemorialCare, a big Southern California health system, and Pacific Dental.

Health-care leaders, Thorne says, are beginning to realize that they can improve their patients’ health by incorporating dental care into primary care.

It’s sort of crazy, he says, that our mouth and our jaw and our throat have been considered separate from the rest of our body for so long. “It is changing now, and health care is realizing that the mouth is the gateway to so much of our overall health.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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Best overall		SIHOO Ergonomic Office Chair		SEE IT	The SIHOO M18 Classic Office Chair provides adjustable ergonomic features, a simple stylish design and an affordable price.
Best for gamers		Razer Iskur XL Gaming Chair		SEE IT	The Razer Iskur XL features a fully adjustable lumbar curve, 4D armrests, and contoured high-density foam cushions for back support and comfort.
Best budget		Devoko Office Desk Chair		SEE IT	For less than $70, you’ll get a comfortable, basic chair with an ergonomic curved mesh back.

With the shift to remote and hybrid work, getting an office chair that offers back support is more important than ever. Sitting comfortably for hours means you will be more productive during the day, and diminishing back pressure and pain will also help reduce strain on your body over time. So, if you haven’t upgraded yet, it’s time to ditch the dining chair or stool and invest in your home office setup. Technology advancements have made ergonomically correct office chairs easy to find and less expensive. Ergonomically correct chairs follow the natural curve of the spine and offer adjustable settings that properly align your body while working. The best office chairs for back support are designed for dynamic movement, allowing you to move freely while sitting and reducing pressure and pain on your back for more enjoyable workdays.

• Best overall: SIHOO Ergonomic Office Chair
• Best eco-friendly: Steelcase Karman Chair
• Best low-profile: HON Office Chair Ignition 2.0
• Best for gamers: Razer Iskur XL Gaming Chair
• Best with footrest: Hbada E3 Ergonomic Office Chair
• Best budget: Devoko Office Desk Chair

How we chose the best office chairs for back support

As a remote worker who experiences chronic back/neck tension, I can attest firsthand to how crucial it is to create a functional, comfortable work-at-home office. And at the heart of that is a proper office chair. To find the best office chairs for back support recommendations for this article, I initially researched educational and medical sources to understand the best practices for ergonomically correct seating. After understanding the features that make for an ergonomically correct office chair, I compared over 40 chairs from 30 brands before making recommendations. I considered cost, materials, adjustability, ergonomic construction, and customer reviews. 

The best office chairs for back support: Reviews & Recommendations

Customers with neck and shoulder pain may want to consider ergonomic office chairs with adjustable headrests, which are useful for reclined breaks to reduce neck tension. If you aren’t concerned about neck pain but still wish to support your spine properly, you can get a lower-profile ergonomic office chair that minimally supports your shoulder blades and back. Our selections include chairs with and without a headrest and many other desirable features. (Oh, and while you’re at it, consider a chair mat to make wheeling around easier on you and your floor.)

Best overall: SIHOO Ergonomic Office Chair

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Specs

• Weight capacity: 330 pounds
• Height: 42.91 to 51.18 inches
• Seat width: 20.87 inches
• Seat depth: 17.72 inches
• Seat height: 16.93 to 20.87 inches

Pros

• Affordable list price and extra coupon savings promotion on black and orange colorways
• Simple, streamlined modern design would be aesthetically pleasing in your home office
• Available in three colorways: black, gray, and orange
• Adjustable lumbar support, headrest, height, and tilt

Cons

• Manual controls to adjust settings

The SIHOO M18 Classic Office Chair is our choice for best overall office chair for back support because it provides adjustable ergonomic features, a simple stylish design, and an affordable price. The chair price varies depending on your color preference; the least expensive colorway is black, and the most expensive is gray. SIHOO chairs retail between $179 and $269.99, including current promotions. 

You can work dynamically with the chair’s easy-to-use turning, tilting, rolling, and reclining functions. The SIHOO M18 offers many adjustments to suit your body size and preferences. You can adjust the headrest up and down 3.9 inches, lumbar support in two directions, armrests in two directions, seat height, and recline tension. 

The chair is comfortable in warmer environments since it’s upholstered with a polyester mesh material, which promotes airflow (and keeps you cool). The fabric is also durable and resistant to UV rays. You’ll be able to take breaks while working to release back pain; in fact, you can recline up to 126 degrees. Considering the price and features as well as the stylish look, we chose SIHOO M18 as the best overall office chair for back support.

Best eco-friendly: Steelcase Karman Chair

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Specs

• Weight capacity: 350 pounds
• Height: 39.125 to 43.5 inches
• Seat width: 20 inches
• Seat depth: 16.3 inches
• Seat height: 15.875″ to 20.375

Pros

• Made from sustainable materials 
• Sleek design
• Lightweight
• Comfort adjustment dial added

Cons

• Lumbar support is a separate purchase
• Supports less weight capacity than other ergonomic chairs

Steelcase’s Karman Chair is inspired by the weightlessness of the Kármán Line, where the Earth’s atmosphere meets space. The chair is designed with sustainability in mind and is made from 25 percent recycled and 75 percent recyclable material. Steelcase uses a proprietary mesh material in this offering, combining yarn and filaments to create a weave that responds to your body and ensures you’re consistently comfortable. At 29 pounds, this chair is lighter than many options on the market but still features the same weight capacity as many similar chairs. Functionality was not ceded in the name of sleekness of sustainability.

The Karman features a mechanism that automatically senses your weight to provide the right amount of support for your back when you recline. It also boasts a new comfort dial that adjusts the chair’s tension by up to 20 percent, so you can customize it to your preference. You can also customize the chair when placing your order, choosing between height adjustability, 4-way adjustable arms, or an armless model. These options don’t impact how eco-friendly the chair is, but allow you to make choices based on personal preference and comfort. You can also purchase a cushion for additional lumbar support for an extra $57. Design enthusiasts will also appreciate the ability to choose between 13 colorways and several frame finishes.

Best low-profile: HON Office Chair Ignition 2.0

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Specs

• Weight capacity: 300 pounds
• Height: 44.5 inches
• Seat width: 20 inches
• Seat depth: 19 inches
• Seat height: 16.25 to 19.25 inches

Pros

• Dynamic sitting with synchro-tilt mechanism and tension control
• Seat back constructed with breathable stretch mesh
• Adjustable lumbar support, arms, height and tilt

Cons

• Manual controls to adjust settings
• Some customers found the assembly instructions confusing

The HON Ignition 2.0 is our choice for best low-profile office chair or best office chair for back support without a headrest. For a reasonable price, HON delivers an impressive amount of adjustments, which help this chair conform to your specific height and comfort preferences. For example, you can adjust the lumbar support, chair height and armrest height, and width. The chair tilts, and if preferred, the tilt function can be locked into place. The Ignition 2.0 also has a sturdy star base and a 360-degree swivel. The backrest material is a stretchy, breathable mesh, which is both comfortable and cooling. The chair is also highly rated by users, making it a good, sturdy, classic choice for your home office.

Best for gamers: Razer Iskur XL Gaming Chair

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Specs

• Weight capacity: 400 pounds
• Height: 57.1 inches
• Seat width: 22.83 inches
• Seat depth: 19.88 inches
• Seat height: 18.11 to 22.83 inches

Pros

• Great choice for larger and taller users
• Plush high-density foam cushions provide hours of comfort
• 4D armrests allow users to adjust height, angle, and forward or backward preference

Cons

• Heavy at 74 pounds
• Separate soft tread castors should be purchased for use on hard flooring

The Razer Iskur XL chair is our choice for best for gamers because it can be used both as an ergonomically correct office chair and as a PC gaming chair. Ergonomic features include a fully adjustable lumbar curve, 4D armrests, and contoured high-density foam cushions for back support and comfort. The Razer Iskur is available in average and XL sizes, making it a solid choice for larger frames. The chair is constructed with a steel-reinforced frame for durable support. The biggest difference between this chair and other ergonomic office chairs is the extra padding and thicker back cushion. The thicker cushions are designed to support long hours of gaming but could also work for long hours of computer work in the office. This chair is styled to coordinate with the Razer line of gaming computers and equipment, so if you like the gamer tech look, this chair is a good option to consider for both office and gaming.

Looking for something far more affordable? Check out our guide to the best gaming chairs under $100.

Best with footrest: Hbada E3 Ergonomic Office Chair

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Specs

• Weight capacity: 330 pounds
• Height: 45.2 inches
• Seat width: 19.6 inches
• Seat depth: 19.5 inches
• Seat height: 20 inches

Pros

• Ergonomic 3-zone lumbar support
• Breathable mesh fabric supports temperature regulation
• Adjustable headrest, seat depth and back support
• Allows 125-degree tilt with footrest and headrest for reclining

Cons

• Manual controls to adjust settings
• Some customers found the mesh seating too firm with break-in time needed

The Hbada E3 Ergonomic Chair is our choice for best for reclining with footrest because it offers easy adjustability, supportive upright seating, and a comfortable place to place your feet. The Hbada E3 chair is made from a lightweight, breathable, flexible mesh fabric, which isn’t bulky (despite the added headrest and footrest). 

Building in rest is a smart solution for reducing fatigue and back pain from long days of working at the computer. Rather than moving to a different seat, this chair helps productivity by allowing the user to take rest breaks without relocating. Hbada offers two E3 models, Supreme and Upgraded. The Supreme offers 3D armrests that allow users to raise and lower and go forwards, backward, and sideways. The Upgraded armrests can only be adjusted by height. The price difference is $50.

Best budget: Devoko Office Desk Chair

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Specs

• Weight capacity: 280 pounds
• Height: 41.9 inches
• Seat width: 20.5 inches
• Seat depth: 19.25 inches
• Seat height: 16 to 19.8 inches

Pros

• Curved mesh chair back for ergonomic back support
• Flip up arms for easy storage or multi-functional use
• Rocking backrest with five-star mute rolling wheels for easy mobility

Cons

• No adjustability for lumbar support, armrests, or seat depth
• Some customers found the assembly instructions confusing

The Devoko Office Desk Chair is our choice for the best budget back-supporting office chair because, for less than $70, you will get a comfortable, supportive chair. The Devoko chair will allow you to roll, pivot, and lean back. You can’t adjust the settings, but for most average-sized people, this chair will be comfortable for computer work. The design brings an ergonomic back that supports the natural curve of the spine and breathable mesh fabric, which makes the chair comfortable to sit in. When you are looking for a simple, affordable ergonomic desk chair, this is a good budget option. And it’s available in three colors: black, blue, and gray. Looking for additional options? Check out our guide to the best office chairs under $200.

What to consider when choosing the best office chair for back support

With the shift to working at home, investing in products that let you work comfortably is important. Make sure the office chair you select is best for your office setup and is sized to fit your body. You can easily find an ergonomic office chair within your budget. Comfortable options can be found between $100 and $500, while high-end models retail for well over $1,000. Premium models use more expensive materials and construction, making the chair likely to last longer. Before choosing your office chair, consider these key features: 

Lumbar support

Adding lumbar support is one of the most important features of ergonomic office chairs. Ergonomic chairs are designed with a curved seat back to account for the natural curve of the spine. Many chairs offer adjustable lumbar support, which users can shift up or down for comfort, while others offer extra lumbar cushions. If the lumbar support is fixed, be sure the chair is comfortable with your back pressed against it.

Adjustability

The best ergonomic office chairs consider the shape of the spine and the best alignment for the legs, arms, and back. They provide optimal support for long days in the chair but don’t always account for the variance of body height, shape, and weight. Look for models that easily adjust the height, armrests, seat, and lumbar support, which makes them a better fit for that adjustable ergonomic desk when you change its height, etc.

Materials

The best materials will provide both cushion and breathability. High-quality foam seat cushioning will provide hours of comfort. Mesh fabrics are a good choice for comfort as they allow for airflow. Plastics and PVC upholstery, while durable, can make the chair overly warm and uncomfortable in warmer office settings. And low-density foam cushions will not hold up to years of use.

Size

Some ergonomic office chairs provide a high seat back and include a headrest, while others are designed with a lower profile. Make sure your seat is minimally high enough to hit your shoulder blades—this will ensure sufficient support for both the upper and lower back. The seat pan should be at least one inch wider than your hips and thighs. You should have at least a half-inch gap between the front edge of the seat pan and the back of your knees. The best office chairs for back support have a soft contoured seat pan with a waterfall front (one that curves down) to prevent the seat from compressing leg circulation.

Dynamic movement

Even when you’re working at your desk, you’re moving. The best ergonomic office chairs are built with the ability to shift around. Your chair should have at least a five-star base with castors that glide easily, and your chair’s backrest should recline and support your back in different positions. Dynamic sitting is better for the health of the spine. Want to try something completely different? There are always kneeling chairs that relieve pressure and help strengthen your core (which contributes to less back pain, but consult a doctor first if you have concerns).

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best office chairs for back support

• Best overall: SIHOO Ergonomic Office Chair
• Best eco-friendly: Steelcase Karman Chair
• Best low-profile: HON Office Chair Ignition 2.0
• Best for gamers: Razer Iskur XL Gaming Chair
• Best for reclining with footrest: Hbada E3 Ergonomic Office Chair
• Best budget: Devoko Office Desk Chair

If you work from home, chances are you spend at least seven hours per day in your office chair. That amount of sitting can damage your spine. But the best office chairs for back support come with cushioning, adjustable headrests, lumbar support, and other features that can help the workday take less of a toll on your body and look great in your office as well.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best office chairs for back support in 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you want your humanoid robot to realistically simulate facial expressions, it’s all about timing. And for the past five years, engineers at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab have been honing their robot’s reflexes down to the millisecond. Their results, detailed in a new study published in Science Robotics, are now available to see for yourself.

Meet Emo, the robot head capable of anticipating and mirroring human facial expressions, including smiles, within 840 milliseconds. But whether or not you’ll be left smiling at the end of the demonstration video remains to be seen.

AI is getting pretty good at mimicking human conversations—heavy emphasis on “mimicking.” But when it comes to visibly approximating emotions, their physical robots counterparts still have a lot of catching up to do. A machine misjudging when to smile isn’t just awkward–it draws attention to its artificiality. 

Human brains, in comparison, are incredibly adept at interpreting huge amounts of visual cues in real-time, and then responding accordingly with various facial movements. Apart from making it extremely difficult to teach AI-powered robots the nuances of expression, it’s also hard to build a mechanical face capable of realistic muscle movements that don’t veer into the uncanny.

[Related: Please think twice before letting AI scan your penis for STIs.]

Emo’s creators attempt to solve some of these issues, or at the very least, help narrow the gap between human and robot expressivity. To construct their new bot, a team led by AI and robotics expert Hod Lipson first designed a realistic robotic human head that includes 26 separate actuators to enable tiny facial expression features. Each of Emo’s pupils also contained high-resolution cameras to follow the eyes of its human conversation partner—another important, nonverbal visual cue for people. Finally, Lipson’s team layered a silicone “skin” over Emo’s mechanical parts to make it all a little less.. you know, creepy.

From there, researchers built two separate AI models to work in tandem—one to predict human expressions through a target face’s minuscule expressions, and another to quickly issue motor responses for a robot face. Using sample videos of human facial expressions, Emo’s AI then learned emotional intricacies frame-by-frame. Within just a few hours, Emo was capable of observing, interpreting, and responding to the little facial shifts people tend to make as they begin to smile. What’s more, it can now do so within about 840 milliseconds.

“I think predicting human facial expressions accurately is a revolution in [human-robot interactions,” Yuhang Hu, Columbia Engineering PhD student and study lead author, said earlier this week. “Traditionally, robots have not been designed to consider humans’ expressions during interactions. Now, the robot can integrate human facial expressions as feedback.”

Right now, Emo lacks any verbal interpretation skills, so it can only interact by analyzing human facial expressions. Lipson, Hu, and the rest of their collaborators hope to soon combine the physical abilities with a large language model system such as ChatGPT. If they can accomplish this, then Emo will be even closer to natural(ish) human interactions. Of course, there’s a lot more to relatability than smiles, smirks, and grins, which the scientists appear to be focusing on. (“The mimicking of expressions such as pouting or frowning should be approached with caution because these could potentially be misconstrued as mockery or convey unintended sentiments.”) However, at some point, the future robot overlords may need to know what to do with our grimaces and scowls.

The post A robot named ‘Emo’ can out-smile you by 840 milliseconds appeared first on Popular Science.

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Bustling restaurants provide the ultimate real-world hearing challenge. As diners swap stories, their voices compete with the chatter of other tables, the clatter of dishes, and a smattering of background music that creeps into the foreground. It’s the perfect recipe to overwhelm someone with hidden hearing loss—a poorly understood condition that makes communicating in noisy environments a frustrating ordeal.

A new wave of consumer wearable technologies aims to help people with hidden or mild to moderate high-frequency hearing loss who are not good candidates for traditional hearing aids. For example, Sennheiser’s Conversation Clear Plus looks like and can act just like a regular pair of sleek true wireless earbuds that handle calls and stream content, complete with multiple sizes of eartips and ear fin stabilizers as you’d find with any standard consumer electronics. However, this personal sound amplification product also offers speech enhancement, automatic scene detection, and active noise cancellation technology so wearers can fully participate in everyday conversations without missing a beat.

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“There’s a gap we try to fill: reaching people who have an issue but there’s not really a solution for it yet. They may not be ready for hearing aids due to stigma or just not feeling that it’s for them yet,” said Laura Jagoda, a psychologist specializing in speech perception and Conversation Clear Plus product manager.

Unlike traditional hearing loss where sounds become inaudible, hidden hearing loss makes distinguishing speech from background noise difficult. The condition is hard to diagnose, and many people with hidden hearing loss may pass standard hearing tests—myself included, as I’ll soon explain. More often than not, sufferers easily understand conversations in one-on-one or quiet settings, so they ignore common signs of hearing loss like asking people to repeat themselves. 

Traditional, always-on hearing aids amplify, but people with hidden hearing loss need clarity more than capacity, and only at certain times. The Conversation Clear Plus hearables combine technology and techniques from the long histories of Sennheiser’s personal audio products—such as the low-profile IE 900 audiophile in-ear monitors and connectivity-rich MOMENTUM True Wireless 4 earbuds—and parent company Sonova’s hearing aid development. 

Multiple beamforming microphones fill each Conversation Clear Plus earbud, allowing them to focus on what’s in front of the wearer while tuning out environmental noise. Active noise canceling blocks frequencies outside of human speech. Tests at Force Technology’s SenseLab, a third-party laboratory, found that 95 percent of users experience significant speech enhancement in noisy environments. 

“We have decades of hearing aid experience that really gives us an advantage,” notes Jagoda. “We’re not just tuning out all noise blindly—our techniques isolate speech while maintaining ambient awareness.”

I’ve used the Conversation Clear Plus out and about for happy hours and in restaurants and coffee shops, situations where I increasingly found myself asking “What?” more than I’d like. Group conversations seemed to be a thing of the past, presumably thanks to years spent at clubs, concerts, and live sporting events with only a belated adoption of ear protection. I took a hearing test in 2023, fully expecting to be put into hearing aids. Instead, I was told my hearing fell in a normal range and got a few useful tips like trying to pick a table seat that put my back toward the din of a restaurant. It helped, but I still wondered if there was a discreet, over-the-counter solution for someone who needed slightly elevated audibility with a low barrier to entry.

With the earbuds paired to my phone via Bluetooth 4.2, Sennheiser’s simple smartphone app makes it easy to personalize the earbuds to my hearing, whether you use an iOS or Android device. And the system can automatically adjust levels according to the surrounding environment so I’d often put them in as I entered a challenging space. While AirPods have normalized the near-constant presence of earbuds, I felt compelled to point out that I was wearing the Conversation Clear Plus to help with my hearing, not to block out my conversation-mate for more Kylie. Only then did people notice anything was in my ears, proof that nothing about the earbuds screams garish or medical-grade (though I do have long hair). In moderately noisy bars, I successfully participated in small group conversations with just a little adjustment on the simple sliders to let more or less external sound in, plus occasionally toggling the “enhanced clarity” option to switch the mics from omni to directional pickup. 

Let’s talk about the occlusion effect. Popping in hearing aids, ear plugs, or earbuds blocks an ear pathway, which can make the wearer’s voice sound unnaturally hollow. Ultimately, it makes it hard for the wearer to determine the volume of their voice. With other hearing enhancement products, my voice sounded absolutely booming to me but I was often asked to speak up. Apparently, I was basically whispering. Conversation Clear Plus’s use of active noise cancellation mitigates this effect substantially. 

With Sennheiser’s device, I had normal, seamless conversations. And as I left, I simply popped the earbuds back into the charging case in my bag, assuming I didn’t have any podcasts to catch up on (they can last up to nine hours on a full charge—that’s a looooong conversation or playlist—and the case contains two additional charges). And all without using anything that looked like hearing aids. After all, hearing aids are for old people. Or that’s what people think, according to a National Council on Aging (NCOA) study, but signs of hidden hearing loss show up in groups as young as college students. The council found many people overlook or avoid addressing hearing issues for as long as a decade. Symptoms slowly creep into daily life, like turning up the TV or music far louder than other folks and feeling exhausted from concentrating on listening. NCOA found about 37.5 million American adults report perceived hearing issues, but many question whether hearing aids that cost an average of $4,600 are worth it. 

The Conversation Clear Plus—with its $849.95 MSRP—bridges the gap, but there are still hurdles to clear. Part of the problem is a general lack of awareness about hearing loss compared to similar problems like vision impairments. Though they are both physical problems, vision screening and corrective options are more commonly discussed and accepted. 

“You start wearing glasses quite early on, even if your correction is very low, right? It’s even a fashion item,” Jagoda points out. “Your vision can decline. That’s natural; just biology. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s the same for hearing actually. … We’re just not used to paying a lot of attention to that gradual decline and starting to act on it early on.” 

Various stigmas burden hearing loss. Not only can it be dismissed as a problem for the elderly, but others can confuse a sufferer’s physical impairment with a lack of intelligence when they persistently ask others to repeat themselves or miss parts of conversations. Embarrassment and frustration can lead people to retreat from social interactions. Leaving hearing loss untreated can lead to anxiety, depression, social isolation, and dementia, according to the World Health Organization.

“Some people basically give up or just avoid certain situations. This alone can lead to social isolation … depression,” Jagoda explained. “This sounds quite intense, but with an untreated hearing loss, your brain structure and function reorganizes as it reacts through to lacking input.” 

Game-changing solutions like Conversation Clear Plus add a valuable option between hearing aids and leaving hearing loss untreated. They provide people with hidden hearing loss or who need an audible boost with an accessible, affordable, and unassuming means to remain connected to friends and family.

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A website promising its AI service can accurately scan pictures of penises for signs of sexually transmitted infections is earning the ire of healthcare advocates and digital privacy experts, among many other critics. But while the internet (and Jimmy Fallon) have taken the makers of Calmara to task over the past week, it actually took two years to get here.

Where did the AI ‘intimacy bestie’ come from?

Back in 2022, the company HeHealth debuted itself as an online way to “get answers about your penis health in minutes.” To receive this information, the website uses a combination of questionnaires and what the company claims is a “65-96 percent accurate” AI screening tool allegedly trained on proprietary datasets to flag photographic evidence of various STIs, including genital warts, herpes eruptions, and syphilis. “Cancer” is also included in the list of scannable signs. If the results come back “positive”, HeHealth can then refer users to healthcare professionals for actual physical screenings, diagnoses, and treatment options. It’s largely flown under the radar since then, with only around 31,000 people reportedly using its allegedly anonymized, encrypted services over the last two years. And then came Calmara.

With a website overloaded with Gen Z-centric buzzwords, Calmara sells itself as women’s new “intimacy bestie,” offering to scan pictures of their potential sexual partners’ penises for indications of STIs. According to HeHealth CEO’s latest LinkedIn post, HeHealth and Calmara “are totally different products.” However, according to Calmara’s website, HeHealth’s owners are running Calmara, and it utilizes the same AI. Calmara also markets itself as (currently) free and “really in its element when focused on the D.”

In a March 19 reveal announcement, one “anonymous user” claimed Calmara is already “changing the conversation around sexual health.” Calmara certainly sparked a conversation over the last week—just not the one its makers likely intended.

A novelty app 

Both Calmara’s and HeHealth’s fine print concede their STI judgments “should not be used as substitutes for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or management of any disease or condition.” There’s an obvious reason why this is not actually a real medical diagnosis tool, despite its advertising. 

It doesn’t take an AI “so sharp you’d swear it aced its SATs” to remember that the majority of STIs are asymptomatic. In those cases, they definitely wouldn’t be visible in a photograph. What’s more, a preprint, typo-laden paper explaining Calmara’s AI indicates it was trained on an extremely limited image database that included “synthetic” photos of penises, i.e. computer-generated images. Meanwhile, determining its surprisingly accuracy is difficult to do—Calmara’s preprint paper says its AI is around 94.4-percent accurate, while the homepage says 95 percent. Scroll down a little further, and the FAQ section offers 65-to-90 percent reliability. Not a very encouraging approach to helping foster safe sex practices that would, presumably, require mutual, trustworthy statements about sexual health.

“On its face, the service is so misguided that it’s easy to dismiss it as satire,” sex and culture critic Ella Dawson wrote in a viral blog post last week. Calmara’s central conceit—that new intimate partners would be comfortable enough to snap genital photos for an AI service to “scan”—is hard to imagine actually playing out in real life. “… This is not how human beings interact with each other. This is not how to normalize conversations about sexual health. And this is not how to promote safer sex practices.”

No age verification

Given its specific targeting of younger demographics, Dawson told PopSci she believes “it’s easy to see how a minor could find Calmara in a moment of panic and use it to self-diagnose” which would constitute obvious legal issues, as well as ethical ones. For one, explicit images of minors could constitute sexual child abuse material, or CSAM. While Calmara expressly states its program shouldn’t be used by minors, it still lacks even the most basic of age verification protocols at the time of writing.  

“Calmara’s lack of any age verification, or even a checkbox asking users to confirm that they are eighteen years of age or older, is not just lazy, it’s irresponsible,” Dawson concludes.

Dubious privacy practices 

More to the point, simply slapping caveats across your “wellness” websites could amount to the “legal equivalent of magic pixie dust,” according to digital privacy expert Carey Lening’s rundown. While Calmara’s FAQ section is much vaguer on technical details, HeHealth’s FAQ page does state their services are HIPAA compliant because they utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) “to collect, process, maintain, and store” data—which is technically true.

On its page dedicated to HIPAA regulations, AWS makes clear that there is no such thing as “HIPAA certification” for cloud service providers. Instead, AWS “aligns our HIPAA risk management program” to meet requirements “applicable to our operating model.” According to AWS, it utilizes “higher security standards that map to the HIPAA Security Rule” which enables “covered entities and their business associates” subject to HIPAA to use AWS for processing, maintaining, and storing protected health information. Basically, if you consent to use Calmara or HeHealth, you are consenting to AWS handling penis pictures—be them yours, or someone else’s.

[Related: A once-forgotten antibiotic could be a new weapon against drug-resistant infections.]

That said, Lening says Calmara’s makers may have failed to consider newer state laws, such as Washington’s My Health My Data Act, with its “extremely broad and expansive view of consumer health data” set to go into effect in late June. The first of its kind in the US, the My Health My Data Act is designed specifically to protect personal health data that may fall outside HIPAA qualifications. 

“In short, they didn’t do their legal due diligence,” Lening contends.

“What’s frustrating from the perspective of privacy advocates and practitioners is not that they were ‘embracing health innovation‘ and ‘making a difference‘, but rather that they took a characteristic ‘Move Fast, Break Things’ kind of approach to the problem,” she continues. “The simple fact is, the [online] outrage is entirely predictable, because the Calmara folks did not, in my opinion, adequately assess the risk of harm their app can cause.”

Keep Calmara and carry on

When asked about these issues directly, Calmara and HeHealth’s founders appeared nonplussed.

“Most of the criticism is based on wrong information and misinformation,” HeHealth CEO and Calmara co-founder Yudara Kularathne wrote to PopSci last Friday, pointing to an earlier LinkedIn statement about its privacy policies. Kularathne added that “concerns about potential for anonymized data to be re-identified” are being considered.

On Monday, Kularathne published another public LinkedIn post, claiming to be at work addressing, “Health data and Personally Identifiable Information (PHI) related issues,” “CSAM related issues,” “communication related issues,” and “synthetic data related issues.”

“We are addressing most of the concerns raised, and many changes have been implemented immediately,” Kularathne wrote.

When reached for additional details, Calmara CEO Mei-Ling Lu avoided addressing criticisms in email, and instead offered PopSci an audio file from “one of our female users” recounting how the nameless user and her partner employed HeHealth’s (and now Calmara’s) AI to help determine they had herpes.

“[W]hile they were about to start, she realized something ‘not right’ on her partner’s penis, but he said: ‘you know how much I sweat, this is heat bubbles,’” writes Lu. After noticing similar “heat bubbles… a few days later,” Stacy and her partner consulted HeHealth’s AI scanner, which flagged the uploaded photos and directed them to healthcare professionals who confirmed they both had herpes.

To be clear, medical organizations such as the Mayo Clinic freely offer concise, accurate information on herpes symptoms, which can include pain or itching alongside bumps or blisters around the genitals, anus or mouth, painful urination, and discharge from the urethra or vagina. Symptoms generally occur 2-12 days after infection, and although many people infected with the virus display either mild or no symptoms, they can still spread the disease to others. 

Meanwhile, Calmara’s glossy (NSFW) promotional, double entendre-laden video promises that it is “The PERFECT WEBSITE for HOOKING UP,” but no matter how many bananas are depicted, using AI to give penises a once-over doesn’t seem particularly reliable, enjoyable, or even natural.

The post Please think twice before letting AI scan your penis for STIs appeared first on Popular Science.

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As dairy alternatives such as almond, oat, and soy milk continue to grow in popularity, an centuries old question regarding cow’s milk still remains. How does today’s dairy differ from what previous generations consumed? 

Some clues are now emerging in the form of some 117-year-old whole milk powder that was transported on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition in the early 20th Century. A study published in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Dairy Science found that despite advancement in selective cow breeding and changes to farm practices, milk from the present and past have more similarities than differences. 

The Nimrod expedition

The powdered milk in the study was made by New Zealand’s Defiance brand in 1907. On New Year’s Day in 1908, Shackleton and his crew aboard the ship Nimrod set sail on a quest to be the first to set foot on the South Pole. The Nimrod was well stocked with dairy, including 1,000 pounds of dried whole milk powder, 192 pounds of butter, and two cases of cheese. The crew would make it farther south than any known human had been before and made it within 100 nautical miles of the South Pole and left their base camp and its supplies behind. 

About a century later, one remaining container of Defiance whole milk powder was uncovered during a restoration project by the Antarctic Heritage Trust restoration project. The milk powder had been frozen in time and ice at Shackelton’s base camp for 100 years.

“The Shackleton dried milk is possibly the best-preserved sample manufactured during the pioneering years of commercial milk powder production, and its discovery gives us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to understand the similarities and differences between a roller-dried milk powder manufactured over 100 years ago with modern spray-dried counterparts,” Skelte G. Anema, a study co-author and chemist at Fonterra Research and Development Centre in New Zealand, said in a statement. 

[Related: Ancient milk-drinkers were just fine with their lactose intolerance–until famine struck.]

According to Anema, before vacuum-assisted evaporation, milk powders were made by a roller-drying process. Boiling-hot milk was poured between two steam-heated revolving cylinders so that the water evaporated. A thin sheet of dried milk was left behind that was then milled and sieved. While scientists knew that these early milk powders were not as sophisticated as those available today, they were not sure what other differences existed. 

Analyzing milk powders

In the study, the team analyzed a few hundred grams of the 100 plus year-old Defiance milk. They set out to compare it with two modern-day commercial, non-instantized and spray-dried whole milk powder samples. They compared the composition of the milk’s major and trace components, proteins, fatty acids, and phospholipids. They also looked at the microstructural properties, color, and volatile components in the different whole milk powder samples.

“Despite more than a century between the samples, the composition of bulk components and detailed protein, fat, and minor components have not changed drastically in the intervening years,” said Anema.

The fatty acid composition, phospholipid composition, and protein composition of the samples were generally similar. The major mineral components between the samples were also relatively alike, except for higher levels of lead, tin, iron, and other trace minerals found in the Shackleton whole milk powder. These minerals likely came from the tin-plated can the powder was stored in and the equipment and water supply used during that time period. Using stainless steel and better water has eliminated that issue from modern milk powders, according to the team.

Another notable difference in the Shackleton milk samples was the presence of oxidation-related volatile aroma compounds.

[Related: Tending Sir Ernest’s Legacy: An Interview with Alexandra Shackleton.]

“Perhaps from less-than-ideal collection and storage of the raw milk before drying, but it’s much more likely that—even in frozen conditions—being stored in an open tin for a century is going to result in continued oxidation,” said Anema.

Despite the remarkable similarities between the milk samples, the team points out that modern spray-dried whole milk powders are substantially superior in terms of the powder quality. They look better and dissolve in water more easily. 

This unique Antarctic time capsule still provides a glimpse into dairy food production methods of the past and its evolution over time. 

“The Shackleton samples are a testament to the importance of dairy products—which are rich in protein and energy as well as flexible enough to be powdered for easy transport, preparation, and consumption,” said Anema. 

The post Cracking open a 117-year-old Antarctic milk time capsule appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you think you need over-cushioned, over-supportive, and over-engineered footwear for everything from running errands to running trails, think again. Research has shown many healthful and practical advantages to wearing barefoot or minimalist shoes instead, whether you’re walking, running, hiking, or chasing the kids around the backyard.

Minimalist and barefoot shoes can strengthen muscles and bones in the feet and ankles, which can help prevent injury, stabilize the arch, and help prevent some athletic injuries. Intrinsic foot muscle strength is positively correlated to stability and better balance, especially in older individuals. And in athletes, the strength and flexibility in the big toe area that’s encouraged by barefoot shoes can help with push off, power, and agility. 

However, when you contain your feet in a conventional shoe with excessive cushioning and support and a decidedly un-foot-like shape, you lose much of their natural function and strength—not to mention the childlike joy of feeling the earth beneath your feet. And science seems to corroborate the idea that feet are designed perfectly to perform functions like walking and running in minimalist footwear—or in none at all. After all, for most of human history people trod barefoot or in only minimalist footwear.

But if you’re keen to free your feet and give minimalist shoes a try, whether you’re interested in whole body health and wellness, functional movement, reducing chronic pain, or simply returning to a place of childhood delight that comes only from romping around outside sans footwear, it’s going to take time and strategic effort. Here’s how to transition safely and effectively for a lifetime of healthy, functional feet.

What are barefoot shoes?

Before you start shopping for new shoes, it’s important to know what constitutes minimal or barefoot footwear. Main features include a wide toe box, zero-drop footbed (meaning your heel is the same distance from the ground as your forefoot), no arch support, and a flexible sole. All are designed to let your toes spread and your feet get stronger as they move and flex naturally, as if they were barefoot.

And just about everyone can—and maybe should, according to Emily Splichal, podiatrist and founder of the Center for Functional & Regenerative Medicine—make the transition. There are only a few types of feet she says may not benefit from minimalist footwear, including those with overpronation due to ligament laxity (extra loose ligaments) or high-arched, rigid feet. But most others, including those with bunions, hammer toes, or plantar fasciitis can usually benefit. Just transition wisely.

Start Slow

Like strengthening any other part of your body, strengthening the muscles in your feet will take time, so don’t expect to make the switch to barefoot shoes overnight. “You’re theoretically increasing stress and demands to the foot, which means you need to have sufficient strength to address those demands,” explains Splichal. How much time that takes depends on you and your feet, but it could be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

“This kind of transition from overly structured, stiff, and inflexible shoes requires consistency and patience,” adds John Wadley, vice president of product development at barefoot shoe brand Xero Shoes.

After all, you’ve likely been wearing narrow, cushioned shoes for most of your life; your foot and leg muscles aren’t used to all the increased stress, load, and sensation that comes with wearing minimalist footwear. Think of transitioning like getting a cast removed, Wadley suggests: When the cast comes off, your muscles have atrophied a bit and returning your injured appendage to pre-break strength will take time and effort. Conventional footwear is similar to a cast, just less extreme.

So to start, only wear your minimalist shoes at work, to the gym, around the house, or when running errands, but only one day at a time, and maybe just for a few hours. For example, wear them on Monday, switch to your regular footwear for a few days, then don the minimalist shoes again on Thursday. “Introduce your feet to increased demands, but allow sufficient time for recovery and adaptation,” Splichal instructs. “No pain no gain is definitely not something that is involved here.”

Then, as long as your feet and ankles don’t hurt (they’ll likely feel a bit more tired or strained than usual, but that’s normal), slowly increase the number of days per week you wear your shoes while decreasing the number of rest days in between. Listen to your body for cues and don’t push your limits or you may set your journey to foot health back instead of forward.

If you want to start running in barefoot shoes–not just living, hiking, or walking–plan to take even more time to transition. After all, the impact force and demand on your feet is greater when you run, so Wadley, a runner himself, suggests starting with just a mile or two in barefoot shoes. Then slowly increase time and distance on subsequent runs. It’s also important to focus on single leg stability and foot awareness to get better at barefoot running, Splichal says, which involves strengthening your feet via specific exercises.

Strengthen and Recover

Indeed, balancing all the work you put in with recovery and strengthening exercises to increase balance, stability, and foot awareness is just as important as time in your new footwear, Splichal points out.

To aid in your barefoot journey, start with Splichal’s favorite exercise: short foot. To perform the move, stand up straight, lift and spread your toes, and then place them on the floor. Inhale through your nose and, as you exhale, push the tips of your toes into the ground. Press down for the entire exhalation, then relax, inhale, and repeat the cycle five more times. 

Boost single leg stability by standing on one foot while you wash your hands or do dishes, then after time spent in barefoot shoes, use recovery tools like Splichal’s Neuro Ball, a studded sphere with a smaller, harder ball inside, which can be used to massage or release your feet. Place the ball—or a golf ball or lacrosse ball—on the floor and stand up while you roll it around under one foot at a time, using medium pressure, or keep it stationary while you press down on one area of your sole at a time.

Perform calf stretches after activity and wear toe spacers, too, which can both be useful recovery tools that promote flexibility and function, Splichal says.

Give barefoot a chance

Whether you plan to run, walk, or simply wear barefoot shoes for daily life, are looking to increase foot health and function or improve balance, make sure that you listen to your body when transitioning, don’t overdo it, and focus on recovery.

“Give your feet a chance to be healthy and strong,” Wadley encourages. “You won’t regret it.”

The post The benefits of barefoot shoes: A beginner’s guide appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Black licorice may look and taste like an innocent treat, but this candy has a dark side. On Sept. 23, 2020, doctors reported that black licorice was the culprit in the death of a 54-year-old man in Massachusetts. How could this be? Overdosing on licorice sounds more like a twisted tale than a plausible fact.

I am a toxicologist and author of the book “Pleased to Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are.” I have a long-standing interest in how chemicals in food and the environment affect the body and mind.

When something seemingly harmless like licorice is implicated in a death, we are reminded of the famous proclamation by Swiss physician Paracelsus, considered the father of toxicology: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”

Root of the problem

The unfortunate man who succumbed to excessive black licorice consumption is not alone. There is a smattering of similar case reports in medical journals in which patients experienced a sudden severe increase in blood pressure, muscle breakdown or even death.

Adverse reactions are most frequently seen in people over the age of 40 who are eating far more black licorice than the average person. In addition, they are usually consuming the product for prolonged periods of time. In the 2020 case, the Massachusetts man had been eating a bag and a half of black licorice every day for three weeks.

Licorice is a flowering plant native to parts of Europe and Asia. Its scientific name, Glycyrrhiza, is derived from the Greek words “glykos” (sweet) and “rhiza” (root). People have long used the aromatic and sweet extract from its root as an herbal remedy for a wide variety of health maladies, from heartburn and stomach issues to sore throats and cough. However, there is insufficient evidence that licorice is effective in treating any medical condition.

Glycyrrhizin, also called glycyrrhizic acid, is the chemical in black licorice that gives the candy its signature flavor, but it also leads to its toxic effects.

Glycyrrhizin mimics aldosterone, a hormone your adrenal glands make when your body needs to retain sodium and excrete potassium. Sodium and potassium work together as a kind of cellular battery that drives communication between nerves and the contraction of muscles. Too much glycyrrhizin upsets the balance of these electrolytes, which can raise blood pressure and disturb the heart’s rhythm. Other symptoms of excessive licorice intake include swelling, muscle pain, numbness and headache. Examination of the man who died from consuming too much licorice revealed that he had dangerously low levels of potassium, consistent with glycyrrhizin toxicity.

It should be noted that a number of licorice-based foods do not contain real licorice but use a flavoring substitute called anise oil, which does not pose the dangers discussed here. In addition, despite its name, red licorice rarely contains licorice extract. Instead, red licorice is infused with chemicals that impart its cherry or strawberry flavor.

Products that contain real licorice are usually labeled as such and list licorice extract or glycyrrhizic acid among the ingredients. Be advised that some products, such as black jelly beans or Good & Plenty, are mixtures of different candies that contain both anise oil and licorice extract.

Hidden dangers increase risk

Glycyrrhizin has the distinct licorice flavor and is 50 times sweeter than sugar. It has been used in other types of candy, soft drinks, tea, Belgian beers, throat lozenges and tobacco. The prevalence of glycyrrhizin can make it challenging to keep track of how much has been consumed, and a combination of these products could trigger adverse effects.

Some people take dietary or health supplements that already contain licorice, which increases the risk of toxic effects from eating black licorice candy. Certain medications such as hydrochlorothiazide are diuretics that cause increased urination, which can lower potassium levels in the body. Glycyrrhizin also lowers potassium levels, further disrupting the balance of electrolytes, which can produce muscle cramps and irregular heart rhythms.

People with certain preexisting conditions are more susceptible to black licorice overdose. For example, patients who already have low potassium levels, high blood pressure or heart arrhythmia are likely to have greater sensitivity to the effects of excessive licorice. Those with liver or kidney deficiencies will also retain glycyrrhizin in their bloodstream for longer periods, increasing their risk of experiencing adverse effects.

Safely eating black licorice

If you’re a fan of black licorice, there is no need to ban it from your pantry. Eaten in small quantities from time to time, licorice poses no significant threat to otherwise healthy adults and children.

But it is advisable to monitor your intake. A 2024 study conducted in Sweden found that daily ingestion of 100 mg of licorice, which is considered a safe amount, for two weeks was sufficient to raise blood pressure by an average of 3.1 mm Hg. A quarter of the participants also had elevated blood levels of a protein that is made when the heart is working harder.

Be sure to remind your kids that candy is a “sometimes food,” especially black licorice. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had issued warnings about the rare but serious effects of too much black licorice, advising that people avoid eating more than 2 ounces of black licorice a day for two weeks or longer. The agency advises that if you have been eating a lot of black licorice and experience an irregular heart rhythm or muscle weakness, stop eating it immediately and contact your health care provider.

Some scientists have further cautioned against the routine use of licorice in the form of a dietary supplement or tea for its alleged health benefits, including the treatment of cough associated with COVID-19 or other respiratory infections. A review article from 2012 warned that “the daily consumption of licorice is never justified because its benefits are minor compared to the adverse outcomes of chronic consumption.”

This article, originally published Oct. 26, 2020, has been updated to include results from a 2024 study.

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Best smart home treadmill		NordicTrack T Series		SEE IT	The equipment itself is outstanding and the connected program offers a superior experience.
Best smart home bike		Peloton		SEE IT	Quality equipment with great program options, Peloton is the standard-bearer for a reason.
Best for strength training		Tempo Studio		SEE IT	Quality AI-powered personal training with a full free-weight setup.

Increasingly, home gyms ain’t like the setup your grandpa used. Modern equipment isn’t just about assembling an exercise circuit; it’s connected by all kinds of high-performance circuitry. It’s providing you with access to digital tools and training that are capable of refining your workout routine and truly pushing it to the next level. Below you’ll find our picks for the best smart home gyms from various realms—from treadmills to stationary bikes, plus much more. Depending on your fitness goals, any of these will deliver an outstanding experience. Pair two together, however—say by mixing a cardio machine with a weightlifting or full-body workout machine—and you’ll essentially bring home a complete gym that can deliver you everything from remote trainers to detailed metrics. To that end, here’s equipment for the best smart home gyms so that you can get your state-of-the-art sweat on.

• Best treadmill: NordicTrack T Series
• Best stationary bike: Peloton
• Best for strength training: Tempo Studio
• Best connected boxing trainer: FightCamp
• Best connected rower: Hydrow Wave Rowing Machine
• Best fitness watch: Garmin Venu 2 Plus
• Best budget: MAXPRO Fitness Cable Home Gym

How we chose the best smart home gyms

The options for working out at home are better than ever. Whether you prefer sparring, yoga, rowing, HIIT, or putting in miles on the treadmill, the best smart home gyms include equipment designed with virtual trainers and tracking to help you maximize your sweat sessions. For our list, we considered all types of activities and accessories so you can achieve the most interactive experience as you maximize your investment and output.

The best smart home gyms: Reviews & Recommendations

These days home workout equipment is getting smart. Sure, the classic versions of fitness equipment will still get the job done. Still, the best smart home gym equipment provides innovative opportunities to maximize your fitness progress and get more results in minimal time. It’s also really cool. Here are our top picks across multiple categories.

Best treadmill: NordicTrack T Series

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Specs

• Dimensions: ‎78.5 inches L x 35.5 inches W x 59 inches H
• Power: Corded
• Features: Interactive touchscreen, 12% incline

Pros

• Quiet, cushioned, smooth motion for a pleasant, safe experience
• Folds easily to save space
• Immersive touchscreen with a wide range of program options

Cons

• Must purchase a monthly membership for program access

NordicTrack has been the standard-bearer for treadmills for decades, and that’s still the case. The T Series offers pretty much everything you could want from a connected treadmill, and it does so at a surprisingly affordable price. 

Available in a range of specific model packages to suit a variety of accessories needs, the most basic option provides a solid all-around treadmill with a 5-inch screen and a compact 20-inch by 50-inch deck for just shy of $700, while the top-tier includes an immersive 14-inch screen and an expansive 20-inch by 60-inch deck—and there are several other options in between. Whatever package you choose, it boasts automatic incline and speed adjustments to suit your workout program. The deck itself provides a smooth, cushioned running surface, while the motor is quiet and self-cooling. The deck can also fold to save space.

The iFIT program offers a wide range of live streams, on-demand workouts, and studio classes, and it comes with a 30-day free membership. You will have to purchase a membership after that, though the treadmill provides all its basic functions without access to classes and programs. It is recommended that you buy the expert assembly package for a hundred bucks because putting the thing together is no small task.

Best stationary bike: Peloton

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Specs

• Dimensions: 59 inches D x 23 inches W x 53 inches H
• Power: Corded electric
• Features: Touchscreen, camera, stereo speaker system

Pros

• Sturdy, comfortable equipment provides an enjoyable experience 
• Superior program selection for quality workouts 
• Wide, immersive screen makes location courses a pleasure

Cons

• Must purchase a monthly membership for program access

There are a lot of stationary bikes on the market, and there are a few solid smart bike options, but there’s only one Peloton. It’s become so synonymous with stationary bikes that it’s almost become cliche, but the thing is, they’re really, really high quality. 

First of all, the overall craftsmanship is outstanding. There are no worries about rocking back and forth like with many other bikes—Pelotons stand rock solid. Their seats are comfortable enough for long classes, the setup can be easily adjusted to suit your body size, and the pedal action is smooth. It also has a relatively compact footprint, making it a decent option for small spaces. 

The Peloton programs are fantastic. Viewed via an expansive touchscreen, membership provides access to thousands of wide-ranging classes, games, location courses, and more. It even offers fitness and wellness programs beyond cycling, such as yoga, strength training, boxing, and so on. You do need a membership to get the most out of it, however. Without one, the equipment will still function as a basic stationary bike, but the classes vastly boost the experience.

Best for strength training: Tempo Studio

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Specs

• Dimensions: 72 inches H x 26 inches W x 16 inches D
• Power: Corded electric
• Features: AI creates digital personal trainer, range of packages

Pros

• Expansive screen delivers quality programming and real-time form adjustments
• Free weights, unlike most dubious home cable weight setups
• All-in-one setup boasting all the essentials

Cons

• Not for heavy lifters

There’s no shortage of smart weightlifting options on the market, but Tempo Studio stands out because it provides real-time form adjustments. While most connected strength trainers are essentially videos you follow, Tempo boasts an AI-driven element that analyzes your form and provides adjustment recommendations. It’s essentially a digital personal trainer. 

Another difference: While many similar products come with cheap feeling gear, the weights and bars included with Tempo offer gym-level quality. Tempo Studio comes with three packages. Starter is limited to the screen and a pair of dumbbells. Plus, steps up to include a barbell and bench. Pro goes full package, with a folding bench, squat rack, kettlebell setup, and 215 pounds of weights. Most of the gear stores nicely in the screen platform while the benches fold flat, so the whole thing has a small footprint and eats up very little space. 

The really experienced lifters out there might say that that’s not a lot of weight, and they would be somewhat right. That’s way more than the average lifter will ever need, but the top-tier bodybuilders out there will be left wanting. For typical and even somewhat advanced users, however, Tempo offers more than enough.

Best connected boxing trainer: FightCamp

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Specs

• Dimensions: 67 inches H x 24 inches W
• Power: N/A
• Features: Punching bag, punch trackers, range of classes

Pros

• Fun fusion of cardio and strength training
• Classes are comprehensive and well-instructed
• Equipment is of better quality than competitors

Cons

• Heavy hitters might experience some punching bag creep

When it comes to home boxing trainers, nothing beats FightCamp, period. Not only does it offer a fun and effective fusion of cardio and strength training, but the gear looks great in your living space while taking up very little room.

FightCamp uses a set of punch trackers to collect data on your punching performance, which it gathers as you train to different fighting programs designed to teach basics, footwork, punching styles, and even kickboxing. You then use the data to improve speed and beat your own performance—or compete with other users—which delivers surprisingly solid results in terms of performance improvement. 

The equipment—which includes gloves, punch trackers, and a free-standing bag—is of much better quality than other similar products. The classes are well delivered, and the experience is flat-out fun. The really heavy hitters out there might find that the punching bag creeps a bit if the base is filled with water rather than sand, but other than that, there are few faults with the system. It also comes in two fairly affordable package sizes, which makes it a great option if you’re looking for fitness gifts.

Best connected rower: Hydrow Wave Rowing Machine

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Specs

• Dimensions: 80 inches D x 19 inches W x 43 inches H
• Power: Corded electric
• Features: Touchscreen, access to more than 4,000 classes with membership

Pros

• Great full body, low impact cardio, and strength workout
• Sturdy, stable craftsmanship for comfort and durability 
• Enjoyable, effective workout programs
• Easy to assemble and store

Cons

• Expensive
• Subscription required to track basic data

Rowers can provide an outstanding combination of cardio and strength exercise, but models intended for home use are often wobbly and unstable. Not so with the Hydrow Rower, which is as stable and sturdy as they come, delivering a solid combination of cardio and strength training that is low impact on your joints (as we found in our full review). 

The Hydrow Rower offers thousands of workout programs to choose from to suit any fitness goal, all of which are followed via an expansive 16-inch touchscreen. The screen is bright and colorful, making the location programs that allow you to row digitally through water sites around the world visually pop. It’s also easy to assemble and folds for convenient storage. 

Memberships are offered in two package tiers, with the one negative being that you must purchase a membership to track even the most basic of data like distance, calories burned, and so on. But if you’re in it for the classes anyways, this rower is unsurpassed.

Best fitness watch: Garmin Venu 2 Plus

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Specs

• Dimensions: 1.3-inch screen
• Power: Lithium polymer battery (included) 
• Features: ECG, GPS, bright AMOLED display

Pros

• Wide variety of fitness activity tracking options
• Full range of smartwatch functions for managing calls, emails, notifications, etc.
• Extremely long battery life
• Looks great by every metric

Cons

• Wireless charging would be nice

A solid fitness tracker is a great tool for supporting home fitness—or fitness in any context really. And while we’ve got recommendations for the best Fitbits, when it comes to wearing a fitness watch that will truly track any and all activities, the Garmin Venu 2 Plus is as good as they get. 

The Venu 2 Plus tracks almost every fitness activity imaginable, even swimming. And while tracking fitness metrics should sometimes be taken somewhat with a grain of salt—so far, there is no single device that tracks everything with total accuracy—the Garmin has been pretty extensively tested and proven to track with reasonable accuracy factors like calories burned, heart rate, SpO2 (oxygen level), skin temperature, stress, sleep, and more. Its GPS tracking for running and hiking is as accurate as can be. And it responds well as you progress through different stages of an interval training session. 

On top of all that, it delivers a pretty comprehensive range of smartwatch functions, like receiving calls and notifications, listening to and controlling music, accessing your phone’s voice assistant, and a lot more. And it looks great, with a bright face that can be endlessly customized. For these and other reasons, Garmin smartwatches definitely rank highly among our best Apple Watch alternatives.

The bottom line is that few accessories can support your fitness routine in as many ways, big and small.

Best budget: MAXPRO Fitness Cable Home Gym

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Specs

• Weight: Less than 9 pounds 
• Power: Battery-powered
• Features: Digital coaching for weightlifting, sensors track your stats

Pros

• (Relatively) affordable package option
• Full-body workout with minimal equipment
• Extremely space efficient

Cons

• Doesn’t quite compare to a typical gym experience
• Some users report difficulty achieving coordinated movements

There aren’t a lot of affordable smart home gym setups on the market, at least not ones emphasizing strength training. MAXPRO, however, offers a solid full-body workout fused with digital coaching for significantly less than the competition. 

The MAXPRO achieves this via a cable pulley system capable of producing between 5 and 300 pounds of resistance. The basic package comes with a pulley base that can be attached to a bench, door, or other fixed point, and then you use handles and ankle straps to exercise various muscle groups. Sensors monitor your workout, collect data to monitor your progress, and provide coaching suggestions. The whole setup weighs less than nine pounds and takes up almost no room, so it’s easy to store or pack along while traveling. 

Some users report that it does take some getting used to and that it can be difficult to achieve coordinated movements between both sides of your body. But while it’s not a total replacement for a real gym, it does allow you to bring home a solid workout.

What to consider when buying the best smart home gyms

As you’ve probably realized while reading our recommendations, home fitness equipment comes in an extremely wide range of formats, meaning there are many factors to consider when selecting the right one for you. Here are some of the most important things to keep in mind.

Your fitness goals

What are you looking to get out of your fitness routine? Cardio? Strength training? Classes? Or individual workouts? Some mix of them all? You need to choose the equipment or combination of equipment that will best address your individual goals. A treadmill won’t do much for your fitness training, for example, and a strength trainer isn’t likely your best option for cardio.

Living space requirements

A home gym can be demanding in terms of your living space. Some products require more space than others, but you want something that will look good in your home long after you buy it. Choose a piece that will have a reasonable footprint relative to the available room and suit your aesthetic tastes.

Enjoyment

One of the basic tenets of fitness is that if you can’t enjoy an activity, you won’t stick to it. Choose a home gym you’ll have fun using in the long run. Some people love the repetition of lifting weights, while others need the variety and engagement of classes. Consider what’s right for your personality.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best smart home gyms

• Best treadmill: NordicTrack T Series
• Best stationary bike: Peloton
• Best for strength training: Tempo Studio
• Best connected boxing trainer: FightCamp
• Best connected rower: Hydrow Wave Rowing Machine
• Best fitness watch: Garmin Venu 2 Plus
• Best budget: MAXPRO Fitness Cable Home Gym

Whatever your favorite way to work out, smart equipment can enhance the experience. Whether it’s letting you train with rowers from beautiful spots around the world or setting up a sparring session or interactive yoga session, the best smart home gym equipment can help you track your progress, reach your goals, and have fun while you’re doing it.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best smart home gyms for 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Researchers at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have combined brute force with high tech manufacturing to create a new silicon material for hospitals, laboratories and other potentially sensitive environments. And although it might look and feel like a flat, black mirror to humans, the thin layering actually functions as a thorny deathtrap for pathogens.

As recently detailed in the journal ACS Nano, the interdisciplinary team spent over two years developing the novel material, which is smooth to the human touch. At a microscopic level, however, the silicon surface is covered in “nanospikes” so small and sharp that they can impale individual cells. In lab tests, 96-percent of all hPIV-3 virus cells that came into contact with the material’s miniscule needles either tore apart, or came away so badly damaged that they couldn’t replicate and create their usual infections like pneumonia, croup, and bronchitis. With no external assistance, these eradication levels could be accomplished within six hours.

Interestingly, inspiration came not from vampire hunters, but from insects. Prior to designing the spiky silicon, researchers studied the structural composition of cicada and dragonfly wings, which have evolved to feature similarly sharp nanostructures capable of skewering fungal spores and bacterial cells. Viruses are far more microscopic than even bacteria, however, which meant effective spikes needed to be comparably smaller.

[Related: A once-forgotten antibiotic could be a new weapon against drug-resistant infections.]

To make such a virus-slaying surface, its designers subjected a silicon wafer to ionic bombardment using specialized equipment at the Melbourne Center for Nanofabrication. During this process, the team directed the ions to chip away at specific areas of the wafer, thus creating countless, 2-nanometer-thick, 290-nanometer tall spires. For perspective, a single spike is about 30,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Researchers believe their new silicon material could one day be applied atop commonly touched surfaces in often pathogenic-laden settings.

“Implementing this cutting-edge technology in high-risk environments like laboratories or healthcare facilities, where exposure to hazardous biological materials is a concern, could significantly bolster containment measures against infectious diseases,” Samson Mah, study first author and PhD researcher, said on Wednesday. “By doing so, we aim to create safer environments for researchers, healthcare professionals, and patients alike.”

By relying on the material’s simple, mechanical methods to effectively clean spaces (i.e., stabbing virus cells like they’re shish kabobs), the designers believe overall chemical disinfectant usage could also decrease—a major concern as society contends with the continued rise of increasingly resilient “superbugs.”

The post New material neutralizes 96-percent of virus cells using nanospikes appeared first on Popular Science.

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Avian influenza or bird flu has been detected in milk from dairy cows in Kansas and Texas for the first time. Officials from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Texas Animal Health Commission confirmed that the Type A H5N1 strain of bird flu virus was present in some samples of unpasteurized milk. This particular strain is known to cause devastating outbreaks in wild and commercial birds and can occasionally infect people. H5N1 is also affecting older dairy cows in New Mexico and causes decreased lactation and low appetite in the animals.

“At this stage, there is no concern about the safety of the commercial milk supply or that this circumstance poses a risk to consumer health,” the USDA wrote in a statement.

The commercial milk supply is still safe and the risk to people is low, according to the USDA. Dairies must only send the milk from healthy animals into the food chain, with milk from infected or sick animals diverted. The pasteurization process also kills viruses and other bacteria and this process is required for milk that is sold through interstate commerce.

[Related: Seal pup die-off from avian flu in Argentina looks ‘apocalyptic.’]

The tests on the cattle did not find any changes to the virus that indicate it would make it spread more easily to people. Texas dairy farmers first became concerned about three weeks ago when their cattle began falling ill. It is likely related to the current outbreak of a highly pathogenic avian influenza strain called H5N1 that has killed millions of birds and been detected in mammals including elephant seals and a polar bear in Alaska. 

“It’s important for people to know that at this point, there are still a lot of unanswered questions,” influenza pathologist Richard Webby tells PopSci. “It’s still a very unusual and interesting finding. These cows are not hosts we typically associate with avian influenza viruses.” 

Webby is the Deputy Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds and faculty member in the Department of Infectious Diseases at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. According to Webby, the risk to the general population still remains low and studying the cattle is providing scientists with an opportunity to learn more about how the virus spreads, as domestic cows are easy to sample and track in studies.

“In the whole gamut of influenza viruses that make their home in birds, most don’t cause a whole lot of disease,” says Webby. “There are two groups within that (H5N1 and H7N1) that have this ability to make mutations in one of their proteins that makes them much more able to cause a systemic infection.”

These highly pathogenic forms make it easier for the virus to move away from just the lungs and infect other organs and tissues in the body. Webby also points out that as far as viruses go, influenza can be fairly weak, so pasteurization should remain a strong line of defense. Consuming raw or unpasteurized milk is dangerous, no matter what the internet says. Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that raw milk has no added nutritional benefits and it can be contaminated with harmful germs. The CDC even considers raw milk one of the riskiest foods you can consume. 

“It doesn’t survive long under heat. So from that perspective, it’s a good thing that it’s pretty easy to kill flu viruses,” says Webby. 

University of Texas Medical Branch epidemiologist Gregory Gray, told Science that the new detections in cows across multiple states was a “worrisome” development. Gray said it may be a sign that the virus is spreading between cattle instead of from birds alone and has mutated in ways that could make the virus easier to spread among humans. However, the National Veterinary Services Laboratories said that the preliminary studies on the affected cows show no evidence that the virus has changed.  

Bird flu spreads through air droplets and bird feces. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, it is exacerbated by alterations to bird migration schedules due to human-caused climate change and repeated re-circulation in domestic poultry. There have also been outbreaks of the virus at mink farms in France and Spain and the USDA banned poultry imports from France in October 2023. Scientists confirmed that this virus jumped to wild mammals in May 2022.

[Related: Thriving baby California condor is a ray of hope for the unique species.]

According to USDA and Texas officials, the cows likely contracted the virus from infected wild birds. The infected livestock appear to recover on their own within seven to 10 days, which is very different from how this illness affects commercial poultry. Entire bird flocks must be culled to get rid of the virus. About 82 million wild and commercial birds in the United States have been affected since 2022. 

While the risk to humans is still low, the World Health Organization has urged public health officials to prepare for a potential spillover to humans in the future. Scientists initially thought that mammals could only catch the virus through contact with infected birds. While cases of humans getting infected and seriously ill from bird flu are rare, the more it spreads among mammals, the easier it will be for the virus to evolve to spread.

Since this situation is evolving quickly, the USDA and other health agencies will continue to share updates. More information on biosecurity measures can be found here.

UPDATE April 2, 2024 9:57 a.m. EDT

According to Texas health officials, at least one person has been diagnosed with bird flu after interacting with infected cows. The CDC said there are currently no signs that the virus has evolved methods that help it spread more easily among humans, but the situation is continuing to evolve.

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In the game Stardew Valley, you clear fields overgrown with weeds. You smash stones and chop down trees. You till the soil. You plant and water crops. You harvest. You build new additions to the homestead. You care for animals. Day in and day out. Sure, these responsibilities are punctuated with the levity of fishing, town festivals, cave explorations, courtship, marriage, and raising a child, but this never-ending cycle of digital labor is the beating heart of Stardew Valley. While it certainly doesn’t compare to the difficulties of actual farming, the rote gameplay can still be very chore-like. So why do hundreds of thousands of people want to spend their real-world leisure time working?

Psychologist Jamie Madigan, writing for his website The Psychology of Gaming, believes it all comes down to personal choice. Actual work may be stressful, but imaginary work like the kind in Stardew Valley is much more satisfying, Dr. Madigan argues, because it removes “the worst of the uncertainty, helplessness, ambiguity, and consequences for failure that come with those real-world jobs” from the equation.

“Because they specifically can’t offer you a paycheck,” Dr. Madigan posits, “video games have to rely on the kinds of experiences that every employee longs for and every enlightened manager wishes she could provide: engagement and internal motivators. Why does a gamer slay that giant, radioactive scorpion? Why does he keep trying until he can beat his friend’s best time on a race track? Why does she keep mining materials so he can eventually upgrade her spaceship’s hyperdrive? Because he wants to. Because she has chosen to.”

Put simply, video games provide “clear goals, unambiguous feedback, winnable challenges, and predictable rewards.” When was the last time you got that kind of fulfillment from a 9-to-5?

First released in February 2016 by independent developer Eric Barone, this farm life simulator is currently enjoying a renaissance of sorts thanks to the March 20 launch of the long-awaited 1.6 patch–a series. The update includes a massive list of new opportunities ranging from major and game-changing (e.g. new events, mechanics, dialogue, etc.) to minor and silly (e.g. the ability to drink mayonnaise). Since the patch’s arrival last week, the record number of folks playing Stardew Valley on the game streaming platform Steam spiked at over 230,000, further entrenching Stardew Valley as one of the most popular farming games of all time. So what makes it so special?

Stardew Valley opens with you visiting your ailing grandfather as a child. After the old man says his goodbyes, he pulls you aside and hands you a wax-sealed envelope, but asks you not to open it yet.

“There will come a day when you feel crushed by the burden of modern life,” he says, “and your bright spirit will fade before a growing emptiness. When that happens, my dear, you’ll be ready for this gift.”

More than a decade later, your grandfather’s prophecy is fulfilled. You’re sitting in an office building, unhappy and confined to a monitored cubicle, when you finally reach for the mysterious envelope. Inside, you find the deed to your grandfather’s farm and one final message from the family patriarch encouraging you to follow in his footsteps. You immediately quit your job and set off to do just that, trading your life as an unimportant cog in the corporate machine for more peaceful, pastoral pursuits.

The therapeutic benefits of this fantasy bear out in direct feedback from consumers. During a study of Steam reviews published in October 2021, researchers at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada found substantial evidence of players extolling the benefits of Stardew Valley and other games like it with regards to relaxation and the management of mental health issues. Much like the main character moving to the country to escape the stressors of modern life, Stardew Valley reviews paint the picture of a userbase finding a reliable safety valve to blow off steam in its work-like gameplay loops.

“[Stardew Valley] allows the player a relatively large degree of freedom over what they build, or what path they take,” the paper reads, echoing Dr. Madigan’s observations on player choice. “Since there is no fixed solution for creative challenges, players can spend as much or as little time on optimizations as they choose. With the player focused on designing and developing their farm for a large number of in-game hours, players have many opportunities to become emotionally invested in their farm.”

The study further cites a report published in the Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in which several respondents interviewed by researchers from the University of York, UK and the University of Basel, Switzerland specifically named Stardew Valley as helping them cope with “considerable emotional turmoil.” These negative experiences included various mental health issues, family and relationship problems, bereavement, dysphoria, and job loss.

Escapism is a powerful thing. While detaching from the real world isn’t a permanent solution for a stressful situation, it’s clear video games can be a useful tool for those in search of positive feedback they aren’t getting elsewhere, especially if they’re already predisposed to gaming as a pastime. And while the popularity of Stardew Valley, as well as contemporaries Animal Crossing, House Flipper, and Farming Simulator, may appear on the surface like folks trading real chores for digital ones, the difference perhaps lies with the simple fact players are choosing to perform them rather than being forced through necessity. Combined, these two factors create a perfect storm of gratification that gives players both the ability to push the worries of life to the back of their minds for a few hours and feel accomplished for doing so at the same time.

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Best Overall		Eargasm High Fidelity Earplugs		SEE IT	These crowd pleasers provide balanced sound and a secure fit.
Best Aesthetics		Loop Experience Pro		SEE IT	Form meets function in this uber-stylish set.
Best for Musicians		Minuendo		SEE IT	Seamlessly adjust sound attenuation on the fly—no batteries required.

Earplugs for concerts are the MVPs of personal accessories. They’re easy to use, comfortable, and, most importantly, protect your hearing while letting you enjoy shows in full, heart-pounding fidelity. If you spend time at concerts, work or play in noisy settings, or just want to block out the outside world and get a little peace and quiet, hearing protection is essential. When it comes to enjoying music at full volume, we’re biased by what audiologists call the “annoyance factor.” Your favorite song, cranked up in your earbuds, never really feels overly loud, but the pounding jackhammer across the street is unbearably noisy—when often, they’re equally dangerous. People adapt psychologically to loud sounds they like—like music—and assume that if sound doesn’t hurt, it’s not hurting them. But, as anyone who’s woken up after a show with ringing ears knows, nothing could be farther from the truth. Fortunately, there’s a simple, affordable solution with the best earplugs for concerts.

• Best overall: Eargasm High Fidelity Earplugs
• Best aesthetics: Loop Experience Pro
• Best for musicians: Minuendo
• Best invisible: Vibes High-Fidelity Earplugs
• Best swappable filters: Sennheiser SoundProtex Plus Earplugs
• Best electronic: Elgin Rukus
• Best budget: Etymotic ER20XS

Why you should already be wearing earplugs

Real talk: Noise-induced hearing loss is permanent. It sneaks up on you in a slow, painless progression; by the time you recognize that there’s a problem, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. Making bad decisions now can come back to haunt you decades down the line: Just ask Dave Grohl, Jucifer (the underground duo whose battle with hearing loss inspired the film The Sound of Metal), or the countless artists who have gone public about their severe hearing damage caused by spending their whole careers turning things to 11.

Noise-induced hearing damage manifests in all sorts of insidious ways, from muffled highs and frequency dropouts to tinnitus, a continual ringing or buzzing in the ears. But the great news is this kind of hearing loss is almost always preventable. All you need is basic ear protection.

How we chose the best earplugs for concerts

PopSci’s resident audiophiles and musicians are lifelong fans of hearing protection; we compared our own experiences using earplugs over the years, including many of the products here. It’s difficult to measure the actual attenuation level offered by earplugs without specialized equipment, so, for that, we relied on provided specs. But we were able to evaluate fit and comfort across a broad range of ears and in a range of scenarios, and we put features like apps through the paces wherever possible. Because hearing loss is a medical condition, we consulted audiologists who are also musicians to get their advice on navigating the unique hazards of the concert environment.

The best earplugs for concerts: Reviews & Recommendations

At the risk of sounding like your meddling aunt, nobody can protect your hearing but you. However, you can start your journey to safer, more enjoyable live performance experiences now with our guide to the best concert earplugs.

Best overall: Eargasm High Fidelity Earplugs

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: These affordable silicone earplugs feel great in your ears and offer balanced attenuation, for a more natural sound profile usually only available in expensive models.

Specs 

• Attenuation: 21 dB
• Material: Silicone
• Customizable fit: Yes
• Storage case: Waterproof aluminum

Pros

• Balanced sonic attenuation
• Durable build quality
• Two shell options for fine-tuning fit

Cons

• Blue shell visibly protrudes from ear canal

Many earplugs, including standard-issue disposable foam models, do an excellent job attenuating noise but end up blocking a lot more highs than lows, leading to that dull, muffled sound that makes you want to yank them out of your ears. Perennial crowd favorite Eargasm High Fidelity Earplugs incorporate filters that even out attenuation—it’s like turning down the overall volume knob, not just the treble. Eargasm’s three-tiered, flanged, conical design makes it easy to ensure a seal in your ear canal, which is critical for effective protection. And, the package includes two shells, letting you fine-tune the perfect fit. The included waterproof aluminum case attaches to a keyring for portability. Also available in a Smaller Ears model.

For a lower-priced option, consider Mack’s Hear Plugs flanged silicone earplugs, which preserve clear, natural sound across the frequency spectrum, using an open-air membrane filter system.

Best aesthetic: Loop Experience Pro

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Why it made the cut: These wildly popular models offer adjustable attenuation—and are so cool looking that you can talk your teenager into wearing them.

Specs

• Attenuation: 18 or 23 dB
• Material: Silicone and foam
• Customizable fit: Yes
• Storage case: Hard hinged plastic

Pros

• Removable filters increase attenuation level
• Seven tip options for a perfect fit
• Jewelry-inspired style

Cons

• Case doesn’t include a keychain attachment

Not many earplugs double as fashion accessories. Loop Experience Pro breaks the mold, so to speak, providing robust, high-fidelity hearing protection in sleek, jewelry-inspired enclosures that look way more stylish than sticking orange wads of foam in your ears. Obviously, looks have nothing to do with hearing protection, but we’re fans of anything that ups concert earplugs’ cool factor if it inspires you (or your kids) to wear them.  

Loop Experience Pro earplugs attenuate sound somewhat evenly across the frequency spectrum; two swappable Loop Mute silicon filters let you tailor attenuation (-18 dB or -23 dB) to your surroundings and preferences, and resonant acoustic chambers inside their eponymous “loops” help optimize sound quality.

The Loop Experience Pro package includes four silicone ear tips, three foam ear tips, two sets of Loop Mute filters, and a plastic carry case. Models are available in a variety of colors and metallic finishes (such as silver, shown above) and can be washed with soap and water. A Quiet version, without adjustable filters and set at -27 dB (shown in red above), is just $20. Even more recently, Loop released a multi-mode Switch model, which combines Quiet, Experience, and Engage settings into one $65 set of earplugs. If flash isn’t your thing and you just need to shave off a dozen decibels, check out fully transparent Eardial earplugs, which virtually disappear inside your ears.

Best for musicians: Minuendo

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Why it made the cut: Dial in the perfect sound attenuation level—and the perfect fit—with these highly customizable passive earplugs.

Specs

• Attenuation: 7–25 dB
• Material: Silicone
• Customizable fit: Yes
• Storage case: Hard plastic

Pros

• Stepless adjustable sound attenuation
• Flat attenuation for clear, natural sound
• Eleven tip sets cover just about any ear size

Cons

• Stepless level control is easy to set incorrectly

Designed and manufactured in Norway, Minuendo silicone earplugs are touted as the first passive (non-electronic) earplugs that offer “stepless” sound attenuation. (As someone who can’t live without her active adjustable earplugs, the “battery drain” struggle is real.)

Unlike many earplugs in this class that include switches or removable filters that increase or decrease volume attenuation in specific increments, Minuendo earplugs offer seamless, nuanced adjustment that slides the membrane from “open” (-7 dB) to “closed” ( -25 dB) and anywhere in between. This makes them good in multiple scenarios (the reason why they’re our best overall earplugs for work.)

Minuendo’s low-profile black design features an innovative magnetic locking feature that lets you clasp the earplugs logo-to-logo while leashed around your neck so that you can worry less about losing them. Eleven sets of tips—including foam, silicone, and flange designs—fit just about any ear out there. Wipe clean with water or alcohol.

Like the form factor but don’t need the more conversational or quieted ends of the spectrum? Save $50 and pick up the single setting, 17 dB attenuating Minuendo LIVE with its distinctive copper faceplates. Looking for an even more affordable solution? Check out Earos One High Fidelity Acoustic Filters ($40); developed by audiologists and engineers from MIT’s Acoustics Lab, these flat-response earplugs are modeled after the sound curve of your ear to provide optimal sonic clarity and hearing protection.

Best invisible: Vibes High-Fidelity Earplugs

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Why it made the cut: These earplugs are made with a clear tube that makes them nearly invisible, and they filter out up to 22 decibels of sound.

Specs

• Attenuation: 22 dB
• Material: Silicone
• Customizable fit: Yes
• Storage case: Hard plastic

Pros

• Low profile
• Come in three sizes
• Don’t compromise sound quality

Cons

• Some users say they can get stuck in ears
• Noise reduction may compromise audio quality

If you want to protect your hearing but prefer to keep that fact incognito, Vibes High-Fidelity Earplugs are a good choice. Made of silicone, their clear outer sound tubes are discreet. The eartips come in three sizes—small, medium, and large—so you can get the best fit.  

These high-fidelity earbuds filter out up to 22 decibels of sound, but instead of blocking out noise, Vibes’ earplugs use attenuating filters to lower the volume of the surrounding environment as opposed to noise cancellation, so sound quality is preserved, and you can still hear what’s going on around you. These earplugs also come with a hard plastic travel case for protection and are washable.

Best swappable filters: Sennheiser SoundProtex Plus Earplugs

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Why it made the cut: These Sennheiser swappable-filters earplugs use a two-stage system to maintain clarity and fidelity during shows.

Specs

• Attenuation: 10 dB (weak filter), 17 dB (medium), 20 dB (strong)
• Material: Medical-grade TPE
• Customizable fit: Yes
• Storage case: Soft pouch

Pros

• Tab makes them easy to remove
• Comes with four filters with different strengths
• Includes three eartip sizes
• Very comfortable even for long periods

Cons

• Pricey for earplugs
• Anything over the medium filter makes conversations tricky

Most earplugs give you a single level of protection, which may mean that you leave them behind when going to certain shows or events. The Sennheiser SoundProtex Plus earplugs are unique in their versatility. This set comes with four different filters (three acoustic and one full-block) with different decibel reduction ratings, making them suitable for just about any situation. The two-stage filter design reduces both high and low frequencies but maintains clarity so you can still enjoy the music fully (tested and confirmed in the crowd at an Amon Amarth-Ghost concert, shown above).

The weak filter offers 10 dB of attenuation, perfect for intimate performances or noisy public places. Medium is ideal for festivals or general travel. Finally, the strong filter is made for loud concerts or heavy machinery. Or, if you want total quiet, opt for the full-block filter, which even keeps water out during swims. You’ll also get three eartip adapters to get the most comfortable fit.

The SoundProtex Pro earplugs are high-quality and made of medical-grade TPE, an ideal material for sensitive skin. It also makes them infinitely reusable, as you can simply wash them and toss them in the included pouch to keep them clean. The tab at the end makes it easy to remove them, so you don’t have to worry about the triple-flange design—which, admittedly, can feel somewhat invasive the first time you try it—getting stuck in your ears.

Best electronic: Elgin Rukus Discord

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Why it made the cut: These multitasking wonders let you listen to music, take calls, and command your smart assistant—all while protecting your ears.

Specs

• Attenuation: 25 dB
• Material: Industrial-grade polymer
• Customizable fit: Yes
• Storage case: Yes, plus collar clips

Pros

• Multipurpose active earplugs let you listen to music and make calls
• Bluetooth 5.3 functionality

Cons

• Not everyone likes a neckband, or a deep-insertion earbud
• You might be paying for features you don’t need

Elgin Ruckus Discord Bluetooth Earbuds are ideal for anyone looking for sound attenuation in a rigorous environment while also desiring Bluetooth 5.3 functionality. These active earplugs combine Elgin’s rugged design with classic wireless earphone technology for immersive audio with 25 dB reduction in external sound. But that’s just the beginning.

When the music isn’t playing around you, you can pair these earplugs with your phone and listen to your favorite bands privately, just like the best consumer earbuds. A built-in noise-isolating mic lets you make clear, uninterrupted phone calls. Ruckus Discord is compatible with Siri and Google Assistant, allowing you to control playback and volume with your voice. Battery life is impressive, with 14 hours of continuous audio playback on a single charge. Weatherproof enclosures have an IP65 rating, which means they are resistant to sweat, dust, and dirt damage. These earplugs are constructed with industrial-grade, impact-resistant polymer with Kevlar-reinforced cables and come with isolating, medical-grade, triple-flange silicone tips. Once you leave the concert, they’re equally great for a job site, yardwork, or home improvement project. And the neckband form factor means you’re highly unlikely to lose an earplug if/when you need to take one out.

If you’re looking for rugged earplugs that also raise the level of sounds around you during quieter moments (in noisy work environments, or while hunting, for example), Caldwell E-Max Shadows Pro plugs provide even greater noise suppression while amplifying ambient sounds.

Best budget: Etymotic ER20XS

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Why it made the cut: From trusted audiology experts, these simple silicone models offer balanced sound attenuation at an entry-level price.

Specs

• Attenuation: 20 dB
• Material: Silicone
• Customizable fit: No
• Storage case: Plastic

Pros

• Reduce sound evenly across spectrum
• Backed by decades of audiology research
• Low-profile, stemless design

Cons

• No extra eartips

With deep roots in acoustic and hearing aid research and more than 100 patents, Etymotic has been innovating earphones and earplugs for 40 years. I haven’t left the house without the company’s pro electronic earplugs in a decade—but if $300 sounds like a crazy amount of money to spend on hearing protection, Etymotic’s $20 ER20XS High-Fidelity Earplugs might be for you.

These flanged silicone earplugs reduce sound evenly across the hearing spectrum, which makes them great for enjoying concerts in balanced, natural sound. The ER20XS’ low-profile, stemless design fits snugly in the outer ear without protruding, for a discreet look and comfort under headgear. These silicone earplugs are reusable but may lose elasticity with repeated use, so Etymotic recommends replacing the eartips every three to six months. Standard and Large package options include a neck cord and carrying case that easily attaches to a keychain; a Universal Fit version ($25) includes extra foam and silicone tips.

Things to consider before buying the best earplugs for concerts

The best earplugs for concerts allow you to comfortably listen to music without compromising your hearing—or your experience. Then, it’s about matching features to your lifestyle.

What will you be using earplugs for?

There’s a difference between blocking sound you don’t want to hear and attenuating sound you do want to hear. If you’re in a factory or at a gun range and want to block out a continuous industrial din or potentially hazardous sudden noises, simple foam earplugs or earmuff protectors offer the most robust protection. For sleeping, it’s all about extended comfort. Simple, soft foam or silicone earplugs are ideal, and purpose-designed sleep models, like Loop Quiet, are so comfy you might even forget you’re wearing them. But if you want to safely enjoy music without feeling like there’s cement in your ears, your best option is to invest in a pair of high-quality, flat-response earplugs, which lower sound evenly across the frequency spectrum for a natural, high-fidelity sonic signature.

Types of earplugs

Earplugs run the gamut from cheap, no-frills off-the-shelf earbuds to balanced-response earplugs to electronic systems with adjustable attenuation to professional custom-fit models, which require a visit to an audiologist. Here, we’re focusing on universal, off-the-shelf models.

Expandable foam earplugs are made of pliant material designed to conform to the shape of the ear canal. They’re inserted by first rolling them into compressed cylinders, then placing in the ear canal, where they expand to form a seal. Foam earplugs are the cheapest option and, because they cannot be washed, are considered disposable.

Pre-molded earplugs, constructed from silicone, rubber, or plastic, retain their size and shape when inserted into the ear canal. Because they don’t expand, they’re available in various sizes and often include a range of custom tips to ensure a perfect fit. Pre-molded earplugs can be cleaned and reused.

Earmuffs completely cover the outer ear and are often available with electronic components that suppress sudden noises or let users communicate. If you hate sticking things inside your ear canal and you don’t mind a somewhat bulky profile, earmuff protection might be for you.

Earplug tech innovations

When it comes to off-the-shelf, universal earplugs, technology advancements lean toward expanded feature sets, including noise cancellation, Bluetooth functionality, and companion apps. Some earplugs, such as Loop Experience Pro, feature acoustic innovations, such as resonant chambers, that promise to improve sound quality. Earmuff manufacturers are developing high-tech materials that reduce weight and bulk yet still effectively block noise. These improvements add up to improved sound and a better experience, which is great incentive to wear your earplugs more. And, aesthetic improvements (see: Loop Experience Pro’s jewelry-inspired look) mean your kids might wear them longer, too.

Just like cameras, the best earplugs are the ones you actually have on you when you need them. So, no matter which models you prefer, it can’t hurt to pick up a huge vat of inexpensive, disposables such as Mack’s Ultra Soft Foam Earplugs, which are effective and ridiculously cheap at $8.99 for a tub of 50. (Left yours at home? Some cities, such as San Francisco and Minneapolis, require large venues to make free earplugs available to concertgoers.)

Protecting your ears is all about exposure

Sound-induced hearing damage happens as a result of sudden acoustic trauma (like an explosion) or through chronic exposure to high sound levels. The general rule is the louder the sounds and the longer the length of exposure, the greater the risk of hearing loss. For example, eight hours of exposure to sound levels of 85 decibels (equivalent to heavy street noise) is considered safe according to decibel exposure time guidelines, but at 100 dB—the level of a typical rock concert—safe exposure is limited to 15 minutes. (Free sound-metering apps such as Decibel X can measure surrounding noise and help keep your exposure in check.)

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best earplugs for concerts

• Best overall: Eargasm High Fidelity Earplugs
• Best aesthetics: Loop Experience Pro
• Best for musicians: Minuendo
• Best invisible: Vibes High-Fidelity Earplugs
• Best swappable filters: Sennheiser SoundProtex Plus Earplugs
• Best electronic: Elgin Rukus
• Best budget: Etymotic ER20XS

As musicians and music lovers, we know there’s nothing better than being front and center at your favorite concert, getting lost in the song, feeling every note in your bones. Ultimately, though, loud is loud, and every time you expose your ears to high volume levels, you’re putting your hearing at risk. Luckily, today’s high-fidelity earplugs for concerts let you experience the full spectrum of sound while protecting your hearing: Highs are clear, lows are full, and the overall presentation is rich and detailed, just like without earplugs. All while preserving your precious hearing. Save your ears now; your future self will thank you.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best earplugs for concerts in 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Keeping our teeth clean has been a pain for thousands of years, with some particularly painful methods historically used to take care of our chompers. Two 4,000-year-old human teeth unearthed in a limestone cave in Ireland were recently found to contain an “unprecedented quantity” of the bacteria that cause tooth decay and gum disease. The genetic analysis of these well-preserved microbiomes reveal how changes in diet shaped our oral health from the Bronze Age to today. The findings are described in a study published March 27 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Fossilized dental plaques have been one of the best studied parts of the ancient human body. However, very few full genomes from oral bacteria in teeth prior to the medieval era have been uncovered. This means that scientists have limited data on how the human mouth’s microbiome was affected by changes in diet and from events like the spread of farming about 10,000 years ago.

Sugar-munching, acid producing bacteria

Both of the teeth belonged to the same male individual who lived in present day Ireland during the Bronze Age. The teeth contained the bacteria that cause gum diseases and the first 

high quality ancient genome from Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans). This oral bacterium is one of the major causes of tooth decay.

S. mutans is very common in modern human mouths, but is very rare in the ancient genomic record. One potential reason why it’s so sparse may be how the bacterium produces acid. The acid decays the tooth, but also destroys DNA and stops the dental plaque from fossilizing and hardening over time. Most ancient oral microbiomes are found inside these fossilized plaques, but this new study looked directly at the tooth. 

[Related: Vikings filed their teeth to cope with pain.]

Another reason why S. mutans may not have been present in ancient mouths may be due to a lack of sugary mouths for it to thrive in. S. mutans loves sugar and an increase of dental cavities can be seen in the archaeological record after humans began to grow and farm grains. However, the more dramatic increase occurred over the past few centuries when sugary foods became significantly more prevalent.  

The disappearing microbiota hypothesis

The sampled teeth were part of a larger skeleton found in Killuragh Cave, County Limerick, by the late Peter Woodman of University College Cork. Other teeth in the cave show advanced dental decay, but there wasn’t any evidence of any caries–or early cavities. A single tooth turned out to have a ton of mutans sequences. 

“We were very surprised to see such a large abundance of S. mutans in this 4,000 year old tooth,” study co-author and Trinity College Dublin geneticist Lara Cassidy said in a statement. “It is a remarkably rare find and suggests this man was at high risk of developing cavities right before his death.”

The cool, dry, and alkaline conditions of the cave may have contributed to the preservation of S. mutans DNA. While the S. mutans DNA was plentiful, other streptococcal species were mostly absent from the tooth sample. This indicates that the natural balance or the oral biofilm had been altered–mutans outcompeted the other bacteria species.

According to the team, the study adds more support behind the disappearing microbiota hypothesis. This idea proposes that our ancestors’ microbiomes were actually more diverse than our own today. More evidence that supports this hypothesis came from the two genomes for Tannerella forsythia (T. forsythia) that the team built from the tooth. T. forsythia still exists and causes gum disease. 

“The two sampled teeth contained quite divergent strains of T. forsythia,” study co-author and Trinity College Dublin PhD candidate Iseult Jackson said in a statement. “These strains from a single ancient mouth were more genetically different from one another than any pair of modern strains in our dataset, despite these modern samples deriving from Europe, Japan, and the USA. This is interesting because a loss of biodiversity can have negative impacts on the oral environment and human health.”

Shifting genes and mouths

Both reconstructed genomes revealed  dramatic changes in the oral microenvironment over the last 750 years. One lineage of T. forsythia has become dominant in global populations in recent years, which is a sign of an event geneticists call a selective episode. This is when one bacteria strain quickly rises in frequency due to a particular genetic advantage. The T. forsythia genomes that arose particularly after the Industrial Revolution acquired genes that helped it colonize the mouth and cause disease.

[Related: Bronze Age cauldrons show we’ve always loved meat, dairy, and fancy cookware.]

S. mutans also had evidence of recent lineage expansions and changes in gene content that both coincide with the popularization of sugar. However, modern S. mutans populations have remained even more diverse than T. forsythia, including some deep splits in the S. mutans evolutionary tree that pre-date the genomes uncovered in Ireland. The team believes that this is driven by differences in the evolutionary behind genome diversity in these bacteria species.

“S. mutans is very adept at swapping genetic material across strains,” said Cassidy “This allows an advantageous innovation to be spread across S. mutans lineages, rather than one lineage becoming dominant and replacing all others.”

Both of these disease-causing bacteria have essentially changed dramatically from the Bronze Age to today. However, it’s the very recent cultural transitions like more sugar consumption that appear to have had an outsized impact.

The post Rare traces of tooth decay and gum disease found in Bronze Age teeth appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best for large rooms		Mila Smart Air Purifier		SEE IT	This all-purpose smart air purifier adapts to room size and comes with a carbon monoxide detector and sleep and white noise modes.
Best for smoke		Alen BreatheSmart 75i		SEE IT	This model detects smoke particles and kicks into automatic overdrive to mitigate it.
Best for allergies		InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier		SEE IT	Certified to keep you safe from pollen and not contribute to dangerous levels of ozone gas.

Air purifiers suck in pollen, dust, smoke, other allergens, and even viruses—pummeling them and then circulating clean, filtered air. It sounds simple enough, but not all purifiers are created equal, and there isn’t one that’s right for every person. Your particular environment and the size of your home are huge factors in choosing the best option for you. Is allergy season wreaking havoc on your sinuses? Do you live in a smoggy city? Has wildfire smoke been wafting through, blanketing everything in an unnatural haze? In short, even the finest filters aren’t guaranteed to fix all that ails you and your home. But if you’re wondering whether air purifiers are really worth it … we think so. They can help distribute cleaner air, and that’s always a good thing, considering the link between air quality and health. So, read on as we clear the air on what we think are the best air purifiers.

• Best overall: Dyson PH04 Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde
• Best for large rooms: Mila Smart Air Purifier
• Best for small rooms: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home Bedroom
• Best for quiet: Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max
• Best HEPA: Coway Tower True HEPA Air Purifier
• Best with UV light: Germ Guardian True HEPA Filter Air Purifier
• Best for allergies: InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier
• Best for smoke: Alen BreathSmart 75i Purifier  
• Best for mold: PuroAir 400 HEPA 14 Air Purifier
• Best for pets: LEVOIT Core P350 Air Air Purifier
• Best budget: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home, Core 300

How we chose the best air purifiers

As pet owners and parents, we’ve experienced our fair share of smells and toxins—and that’s just from inside the house. And whether allergy or wildfire season is upon us, there’s always something environmental to consider. With all this in mind, we compiled peer recommendations, critical reviews, online research, user impressions, and plentiful personal testing to create this list of the best air purifiers. We also examined what each air purifier claims to eliminate from the air, its HEPA square footage, and the filters’ MERV (minimum efficiency reporting values) rating ratings.

The best air purifiers: Reviews & Recommendations

Pollen, pet dander, smells, smoke, germs, and other airborne goblins are no match for the best air purifiers. This list includes quiet air purifiers, ones that double as humidifiers, and even ones that claim they can help with a majority of airborne pathogens.

Best overall: Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde

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Why it made the cut: This three-in-one smart device automatically adapts to changes in air quality and humidity.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 400 square feet
• Dimensions: 36.66 x 11.02 x 12.23 inches
• App connectivity: Yes
• Max decibels (dB): 59.8 dB

Pros

• Connectivity with Siri and Alexa
• Three products in one
• Air quality reporting

Cons

• Expensive

Between its TikTok- and Insta-famous Airwrap multistyler to its line of powerful vacuums, Dyson has made a name for itself in sucking—which we don’t mean negatively. The Dyson PH04 Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde proves yet again that Sir James Dyson really knows what he’s doing when it comes to pushing air out and in. This air purifier uses an intelligent sensing system and Air Multiplier technology to purify, humidify, and cool the air. You don’t even need to touch the stylish, distinctive unit—it automatically senses and reacts to changes in air quality and humidity (we’ve watched one enthusiastically spring to life time and time again after a particularly aggressive sauté session in the kitchen). It even features a solid-state sensor to detect and destroy formaldehyde emitted by household items—a boon if you’re in a newly renovated/refurbished space, as fresh carpet and new mattresses are emitting odd things.

You don’t have to worry about airborne baddies getting re-released into the air since the entire purifier-humidifier is fully sealed to the HEPA H13 standard. If you love numbers, neat tech, and data, this machine will tickle your brain when it reports your air quality in real-time on the LCD screen and DysonLink app (which you can use to tweak/schedule usage). The filters are low-maintenance and easy to replace, and the machine features a deep-clean cycle to get rid of mineral build-up and bacteria that may be lurking in the water system. Although it’s almost $1,000, you’re getting three devices for the cost of one. Talk about smart.

Best for large rooms: Mila Smart Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: This mold- and carbon monoxide-detecting air purifier comes in different filter configurations for custom air purification.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 1,000 square feet 
• Dimensions: 12 x 12 x 15 inches
• App connectivity: Yes
• Max decibels (dB): 62 dB but lowers to 24 dB while in room

Pros

• Stylist
• Small
• Carbon monoxide, mold detection, and white noise machine built-in

Cons

• Reviews note excessive air quality notifications

This classy, app-controllable large room air purifier adapts to the size of whatever room it’s placed in. It also looks great in any room it’s placed in. The filter has 45 square feet of HEPA, and with 447 CADR, it’s effective in rooms up to 1,000 square feet. Additional features include a sleep mode and white noise so that it won’t interfere with your sleeping habits. The device also features a carbon monoxide detector. It will monitor your room’s humidity and let you know if it detects any mold. If you’re not a fan of notifications, disable them if you go with the Mila—reviewers note that the Mila app sends lots of alerts.

Best for small rooms: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home Bedroom

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Why it made the cut: Take this lightweight, compact air purifier from room to room to experience dual-filter, three-stage filtration in your entire home.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 161 square feet
• Dimensions: 6.69 x 6.69 x 10.43 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 52 dB

Pros

• Aromatherapy
• Dual-filter, three-stage filtration
• Specifically targets hay fever

Cons

• Not for large homes

The Levoit promises to help relieve allergies, congestion, and sneezing and is our pick for the best small air purifier. Although we can’t vouch for the unit’s specific efficacy against rhinitis, we can vouch for the fact that it has three filters (one more than most other units): HEPA for dust, pollen, and dander; carbon for odors; and polyester for lint and hair. One fun additional feature is that this one has an aromatherapy option if you’d like a little lavender to help lull you to sleep at night.

Best for quiet: Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max

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Why it made the cut: Particles down to .1 microns are no match for this quiet-but-powerful air purifier.

Specs

• Recommended room size: Up to 929 square feet
• Dimensions: 19 x 12.5 x 12.5 inches
• App connectivity: Yes
• Max decibels (dB): 50 dB

Pros

• Removes particles down to .1 micron
• Stylish
• App connectivity

Cons

• Reviews note occasional problems with auto-sensing

Blueair makes svelte cylinders with Scandinavian style packed with highly effective electrostatic and mechanical filtration. The Blue Pure 311i Max is HEPASilent but deadly … against microbes in the air. This stylish, small air purifier features five fan speeds and a one-touch auto mode with a fine particles (PM 2.5) sensor to monitor concentration and adjust speed according. This air purifier can clean a 387-square-foot room in 12.5 minutes and a 929-square-foot space in 30 minutes (there are both larger and smaller models, so something for every home). And, it snags all those particles (99.97% of them down to 0.1 micron) all nearly undetected, clocking in at 23 dB on low/night mode—louder than a quiet natural area with no wind but softer than a whisper. And it never runs above 50dB, which makes it QuietMark certified and perfect for a bedroom, TV room, any room … plus it’s only 8 pounds, so it’s easy to move around while you decide between your study and your yoga studio (or realize it’s easiest to buy two).

Is it working? We barely hear it. But we also don’t hear ourselves sneezing and wheezing and complaining about our watery eyes, so we’re going with yes. If we need more confirmation, we can look at a five-color LED that changes according to Air Quality Index (AQI), or we can reference an app that gives insight into indoor vs. outdoor pollution and lets you control mode, tweak LED Brightness, set a schedule, and more (assuming the 311i Max and your phone are connected to WiFi). And if we don’t want it to be working, Google Assistant and Alexa compatibility let us turn it off with voice commands if our phone isn’t convenient (hooray smart-home devices). While some reviews note that the auto-sensing feature is not as accurate as they hoped, we’ve observed the Blue Pure 311i Max react firsthand thanks to a low smoke-point cooking oil incident or two. It was lively even from across a loft apartment—and helped with the post-coming odors. And the washable pre-filter fabric cover (shown above in “Stockholm Fog” color, quietly complementing some audio-video gear) meshed effortlessly with the decor to boot.

Best HEPA: Coway Tower True HEPA Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: Stylish-meets-powerful with this True HEPA air purifier that features four levels of filtration.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 330 square feet
• Dimensions: 10.5 × 32.7 × 10.7 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 52 dB

Pros

• Real-time air sensing
• Washable pre-filter
• Air quality indicator

Cons

• Noisier compared to other air purifiers

Multiple fan speeds, a timer, an air-quality assessor, and a filter-replacement indicator light make this the best HEPA air purifier—not just quiet and effective, but user-friendly. At just under $200, it’s neither cheap nor exorbitant for an air purifier, and it’s also aesthetically pleasing. Reviewers note that this air purifier is noisier than most.

Best with UV light: Germ Guardian True HEPA Filter Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: This quiet air purifier uses CARB-compliant UVC light and titanium dioxide to reduce airborne bacteria, viruses, and mold spores.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 153 square feet
• Dimensions: 10.25 x 6.75 x 21.5 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 61.2 dB

Pros

• Quiet
• Reduces odors
• Pre-filter traps allergens

Cons

• UV light can be bad for the environment

UVC light (the most destructive of all the UVs) in an air purifier works as a UVGI—ultraviolet germicidal irradiation—disinfection method by attacking the DNA of cells floating through the air, like mold spores, viruses, and bacteria. (This means, like all other filters, it cannot do anything for particles that have settled into fabric). An activated charcoal filter reduces odors. The 22-inch purifier filters air four times per hour at maximum speed in rooms up to 153 square feet. The four fan speeds, whisper-quiet operation, and CARB compliance make this air purifier an especially good pick for allergy sufferers. California Air Resources Board (CARB) compliance means you can rest easy about its environmental footprint.

Best for allergies: InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: CARB compliance plus four levels of air purification equals an exorcism for your sneezes.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 319 square feet
• Dimensions: 12.34 x 6.25 x 17.75 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 55 dB

Pros

• Four fan speeds
• Quiet
• CARB compliant

Cons

• No auto-sensing

The four fan speeds, whisper-quiet operation, and CARB compliance make this air purifier an especially good pick for allergy sufferers. The California Air Resources Board requires purifiers to produce .050 parts per million of ozone or less, so any device with this certification won’t contribute to unsafe gas levels.

Best for smoke: Alen BreatheSmart 75i

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Why it made the cut: Detailed air quality indicators, a B7-Pure filter, and a CADR of 347 mean that this air purifier will stop smoke in its tracks.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 1300 square feet
• Dimensions: 12 x 19 x 27 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 51 dB

Pros

• 8 colorways
• Quickly cleans large rooms
• Auto-adjusts based on air quality
• Relatively quiet at high speeds
• Can swap out panel colors to match decor

Cons

• Expensive
• Little warranty
• Heavy

This is an easy pick for the best air purifier for smoke, thanks to its CADR of 347 (out of 450). Thanks to automatic air-quality detection, the unit will kick up to turbo when any type of smoke is present. When no irritants are present, the device goes into energy-saving mode. Five air quality colors give you a more detailed visual indicator of air quality—other air purifiers only include three color indicators. It’s also the “best design” pick in our best air purifiers for smoke buying guide, which you should check out if you want to smash smog and fog (and nicotine-addicted neighbors) specifically.

Best for mold: PuroAir 400 HEPA 14 Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: Put your mold worries to be with this hospital-grade air purifier.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 2145 square feet
• Dimensions: 17.5 x 10.6 x 12.5
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): Not listed

Pros

• HEPA 14 filter
• Easy-to-read air quality monitor
• Lots of trustworthy certifications

Cons

• No app connectivity
• A little noisy compared to other air purifiers

If you’re looking to exterminate mold spores that can make you cough, the PuroAir 400 Air Purifier can do just that, thanks to its HEPA 14 air purifier, which is practically hospital-grade. It’s CARB-compliant, and has ETL, ISO, UL, and Energy Star certifications. This all just means it’s safe to use and energy-efficient. A smart sensor works for you, adjusting power when polluted air is detected.

Our only complaint? It’s a little loud on the lowest setting. I personally moved mine to the kitchen since its gentle whoosh was too distracting in my home office. If you’re looking for something quieter, consider our best overall air purifier for mold, the PuroAir 240 HEPA 14 Air Purifier. It has the same HEPA 14 filter found in the 400 but is whisper-quiet.

Best for pets: LEVOIT Core P350 Air Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: Eliminate “dog smell” from your space without sacrificing features, design, quality, and price.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 218 square feet
• Dimensions: 8.7 x 8.7 x 14.2 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 24 dB

Pros

• Quiet and compact
• Pet Lock prevents pet and child interference
• Lots of settings and controls

Cons

• No app connectivity

Our pets are often considered family. And just like regular children, four-legged kin can stinky, get hair everywhere, and mess with electronics. Thankfully, the Core P350 is an air purifier made with pet ownership in mind. has a three-in-one filtration system and Pet-Lock to stop hands/paws from meddling with the settings. It’s powerful enough to purify a 219-square-foot room in 12 minutes, but only produces 24 decibels of noise. Three fan settings let you choose filtering speeds, and its night mode is so quiet you don’t even recognize that it’s still on. It doesn’t include app connectivity or air quality sensor, but you can’t beat its price and effectiveness.

Best budget: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home, Core 300

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Why it made the cut: This compact air purifier tackles smoke, dust, pollen, bacteria, and viruses without hurting your wallet.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 219 square feet
• Dimensions: 8.7 x 8.7 x 16.25 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 50 dB

Pros

• Filter life indicator
• Timer
• Quiet

Cons

• Louder than other air purifiers

This cheap air purifier targets smoke, dust, and pollen, along with some bacteria and viruses. Four specialty replacement filters include a pet-allergy option and a toxin absorber for particularly smoky or smoggy areas. Like higher-end air purifiers that are more expensive, this Levoit air purifier features timer settings and a sleep mode. And the display lights can be turned off to ensure a pitch-black room when sleeping. Although the air purifier is louder than some competitors, it resembles a whooshing fan at its highest setting—if you can deal with that, this air purifier is for you.

What to consider when buying the best air purifiers

The best air purifier for you might not be the one your best friend or neighbor loves. You want a HEPA filter with a high MERV rating that’s designed to cover the amount of space you have in your particular room or dwelling. Beyond that, consider whether you want other features like pathogen-killing UV light, smart controls, and/or odor elimination. Do you need the best air purifier for pets or perhaps something portable? Air purifiers for mold or models to get rid of smoke? Air filters work only on airborne particles. To get at anything that’s settled into upholstery or rugs, you’ll need a handy vacuum, a helpful robot, or something else that offers deep-clean suction.

Size of space

There’s an alphabet soup to make sense of when choosing the best air purifier for your home. ACH (air changes per hour) correlates to the airflow of your device. It’s calculated based on the volume of your space, ceiling height, and how many cubic feet per minute the device can cover. It’s independent of other factors, e.g., the filter’s efficacy—to calculate that you need the CADR (clean air delivery rate) rating; because a HEPA filter is more efficient, its CADR rating may be lower, which is deceptive.

The most important thing to note is that an air purifier’s efficacy cannot be calculated based on square footage alone. You can find handy calculators online to determine the proper purifier for your needs, but here’s what to consider with any device: Will it successfully rid your home of odors with carbon or other comparable filters? Is it a good choice for pet owners? Does it feature UV light? Read the fine print.

HEPA

You’ve likely heard of high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters. They are a type of pleated air filter that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “can theoretically remove at least 99.97% of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria, and any airborne particles with a size of .3 microns.” The smaller the particle, the more penetrating and nefarious it can be. So when you’re shopping for air purifiers, check out their filters’ MERV rating—the higher the MERV rating, the better it is at trapping the tiniest particles.

Suppose it’s the coronavirus that has you shopping for purifiers. In that case, it should be said that though a HEPA filter should be able to catch a virus of that size, there’s no conclusive proof that an air purifier can kill airborne COVID-19-carrying air droplets. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that any room housing a coronavirus patient “should be exhausted directly to the outside, or be filtered through a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter directly before recirculation.”

If your main concern about your indoor air quality is lingering food or cigarette smoke odors, make sure the model you’re considering specifically targets fumes and other volatile organic compounds. HEPA filters aren’t good at eliminating odors on their own.

The HEPA filter was initially designed to capture radioactive particles when the atomic bomb was being developed because it can capture 99.97 percent of particles as small as .3 microns, which can evade other types of filters. (This is sometimes referred to as “true HEPA,” as European HEPA standards are required to trap only 85 percent of particles.) It works by ensnaring, sieving, and rerouting irritating particles.

A HEPA air purifier is considered the gold standard, but it does have limitations. Any particle smaller than .3 microns—for example, some viruses and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) like aerosols, ammonia, and other toxins—will slip right through. Changing your filter often enough is key. A HEPA filter does a great job of capturing mold. If you don’t change the filter, the purifier can redistribute that mold back into the air.

Allergies

The best air purifiers for allergies depend on your particular triggers because different filters work on different-sized particles. Pet hair and pollen are large particles, dust is medium-sized, and smoke is small. A combination HEPA-carbon filter is your best bet for filtering the maximum number of irritants to help reduce your allergies.

The addition of an ionizer and UV light, if you’re comfortable with it, adds a belt to your proverbial suspenders. Because UV light does create ozone particles, we recommend choosing an air purifier with UV light that’s approved for sale in California.

Smoke

Pollutants—like smoke and soot—can aggravate asthma, irritate your eyes, and stress your lungs and heart. An intuitive HEPA purifier with multiple fan speeds, maximum air circulation, and zero ozone output is the best one for allergy sufferers and people who are sensitive to smoke. The best air purifiers for smoke have a higher CADR rating. This means your device will be better at eliminating smoke and its odor, whether you’re talking about cigarettes, cannabis, or wildfires.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best air purifiers

• Best overall: Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde
• Best for large rooms: Mila Smart Air Purifier
• Best for small rooms: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home Bedroom
• Best for quiet: Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max
• Best HEPA: Coway Tower True HEPA Air Purifier
• Best with UV light: Germ Guardian True HEPA Filter Air Purifier
• Best for allergies: InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier
• Best for smoke: Alen BreathSmart 75i Purifier  
• Best for mold: PuroAir 400 HEPA 14 Air Purifier
• Best for pets: LEVOIT Core P350 Air Air Purifier
• Best budget: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home, Core 300

In almost every category, the best air purifiers have true HEPA and carbon filters. Together, they get you the most coverage regarding the breadth of pollutants the purifier will attack. Beyond that, the most important qualities are energy efficiency and picking the right model for the size of your room. Everything else—design, whether the device is app-enabled, UV lighting—is just gravy.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best air purifiers for 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Best overall		LARQ PureVis Bottle		SEE IT	A UV-C light zaps away bio-contaminants that could leave you feeling queasy.
Best for hydration		HidrateSpark PRO Smart Water Bottle		SEE IT	Bluetooth automatically updates how much water you’ve sipped.
Best budget		HidrateSpark TAP Smart Water Bottle Chug Lid		SEE IT	An option that’s only $20 packed with top-shelf features.

Among the plethora of “smart” things in this world—televisions, phones, speakers, and even entire homes—water bottles don’t come to top of mind. However, we think that can change, thanks to water bottles now having more capabilities other than “simple receptacle of many liquids.” Now, you can count how many ounces you’re chugging, get reminded to take a sip, and even get your filtered water to a new level of clean. The best smart water bottles make staying hydrated easy as they’re refilled and you’re fulfilled. 

• Best overall: LARQ PureVis Bottle
• Best for hydration: HidrateSpark PRO Smart Water Bottle
• Best budget: HidrateSpark TAP Smart Water Bottle Chug Lid

The best smart water bottles: Reviews & Recommendations

Best overall: LARQ PureVis Bottle

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This high-tech water bottle comes with a self-cleaning cap that uses the power of UV light to give your filtered water a purer taste and keep the bottle clean. 

Specs

• Cap options: PureVis self-cleaning cap, filter cap with flip top (doesn’t self-clean)
• Bottle sizes: 17 oz.; 25 oz.
• Self-cleaning?: Yes
• Water tracking: No

Pros

• Clean that you can taste
• Sleek look
• Lightweight

Cons

• No water tracking
• Largest size is still relatively small
• MicroUSB vs. USB-C

Although water covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, only 3 percent is drinkable fresh water. Even deeper than that, only .5 percent of that drinkable fresh water is available, meaning it’s not locked in a glacier or the atmosphere. And water from public water systems isn’t guaranteed to be clean (hello, boil water advisories). Enter the LARQ PureVis bottle, which uses UV-C light to eliminate up to 99% of bio-contaminants (including E.Coli). And it self-cleans every two hours, meaning you don’t even need to think about having a musty water bottle. Double-vacuum insulation keeps things cool, even when you’re getting stress-sweats thinking about how only 3 percent of the world’s water is drinkable fresh water. 

The LARQ makes for a great travel water bottle as well, especially if you really want to make sure the bottled water you’re drinking is A-OK. Just make sure you fill it up after you pass through TSA security—you don’t want to get this fancy, pricey water bottle confiscated by a very strict agent before a flight. If you’re more active, consider the Movement PureVis bottle, which is uninsulated and lighter but has the same PureVis tech as the insulated version. 

At $99-$118, this water bottle is expensive, meaning it’s heartbreaking for you and your wallet if you misplace it, especially since you can’t use Bluetooth to track its location. And its capacity tops out at 25 ounces—practically a sip for those who drink water like a fish. There’s no hydration tracking, meaning it’s up to you to remember how much water you’ve imbibed. A pitcher version lets you get squeaky clean water you can put into your favorite gallon water bottles (or even the other smart water bottles on this list that focus on water intake tracking). Still, if you’re looking for UV cleaning and water tracking … sadly, this ain’t it!

The water problem, considering how things are going with the climate and public infrastructure, isn’t going away anytime soon. The LARQ PureVis bottle gives you more peace of mind and lets you not sip on nasties. It’s not the only self-cleaning water bottle on our list, but it’s definitely the best. Read more of our thoughts on the LARQ.

Best for hydration: HidrateSpark PRO Smart Water Bottle

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Why it made the cut: This light-up water bottle uses the power of Bluetooth to keep track of how much water you’ve consumed. It even tells you how much water you should drink based on your height and weight. 

Specs

• Cap options: Chug or straw lid
• Bottle sizes: 17 oz.; 21 oz.; 32 oz.
• Self-cleaning?: No
• Water tracking: Yes

Pros

• Lots of size options
• Seamless water tracking
• Friendly UX with bottle and app

Cons

• Straw cap hard to sip out of
• Heavy
• Not self-cleaning

If you need the gently pulsing alarm clock version of a water bottle (aka, those bottles with the lines and cute phrases don’t cut it for you—someone with a mushy brain and short attention span caused by social media scrolling), consider the HidrateSpark PRO just that. It works with Bluetooth and a coordinating app to measure your water intake. All you need to do is set the bottle down, and the app automatically updates how close you are to your water goal. You can set that number yourself or allow the bottle to figure that out for you by entering your weight, height, elevation, and other metrics. Setup is super easy and takes less than five minutes, less than the time it takes to wash the bottle when you first get it in. The settings are also super robust: you can set when the bottle glows—every time you take a sip, when you meet your goal, both, or even … not at all! It’s similarly priced to other non-smart water bottles on the market, meaning you’re wallet won’t hurt as much compared to other options on this list. 

Best budget: HidrateSpark TAP Smart Water Bottle Chug Lid

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Practically all the same capabilities of the HidrateSPARK Pro bottle minus the price tag—and some of the cheapest smart water bottles you can buy. 

Specs

• Cap options: Chug or straw cap
• Bottle sizes: 20 oz.; 24 oz.; 32 oz.
• Self-cleaning?: No
• Water tracking: Yes

Pros

• Lightweight
• Easy setup

Cons

• Not insulated
• Water intake only updated with phone tap

Sure, it’s not as packed with features as its PRO sibling, but the HidrateSpark TAP is an excellent option for someone who doesn’t want to spend too much money on a smart water bottle. It doesn’t update as often as the PRO because it lacks Bluetooth tech—it uses near-field communication (NFC) instead of Bluetooth, with a simple phone tap allowing you to update the app with how much you’ve sipped. It comes in a sip-top option and lights up to remind you to drink (although you can’t customize that option; it’s preset at once an hour for 12 hours as soon as you turn the timer on). Look no further if you’re looking for a basic, budget-friendly smart water bottle. 

Here are other options we think are a cool drink of water:

• Best for travel: Thermos 24 Ounce Hydration Bottle with Connected Smart Lid
• Best rechargeable: PHILIPS Water GoZero UV Self-Cleaning Smart Water
• Best durable: Hydromate Smart Water Bottle
• Best self-cleaning: CrazyCap Self-Cleaning Insulated Bottle
• Best lightweight: Monos Kiyo UVC Water Bottle

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best smart water bottles

• Best overall: LARQ PureVis Bottle
• Best for hydration: HidrateSpark PRO Smart Water Bottle
• Best budget: HidrateSpark TAP Smart Water Bottle Chug Lid

Smart water bottles are a great way to easily track how much water you drink daily, ensure your water has no rogue bacteria, and self-clean for mustiness-free sipping. Our favorite smart water bottle is the LARQ PureVis Bottle, which kills potential bacteria in water for results you can taste. If you’re looking for an option to track hydration, we recommend the Hidrate SparkPRO Smart Water Bottle, which syncs seamlessly with incredibly customizable settings to boot. If the cheapest option is your goal, look no further than the HidrateSpark TAP Smart Water Bottle Chug Lid—the HidrateSpark’s formidable and budget-friendly sibling. 

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best smart water bottles in 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

For people dealing with spina bifida, paralysis, and various bladder diseases, determining when to take a bathroom break can be an issue. To help ease the frequent stress, researchers at Northwestern University have designed a sensor array that attaches to the bladder’s exterior wall, enabling it to detect its fullness in real time. Using embedded Bluetooth technology, the device then transmits its data to a smartphone app, allowing users to monitor their bodily functions without far less discomfort and guesswork.

The new tool, detailed in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), isn’t only meant to prevent incontinence issues. Lacking an ability to feel bladder fullness extends far beyond the obvious inconveniences—for millions of Americans dealing with bladder dysfunctions, not knowing when to go to the bathroom can cause additional organ damage such as regular infections and kidney damage. To combat these issues, the new medical device mirrors the bladder’s own elasticity. 

[Related: This drug-delivery soft robot may help solve medical implants’ scar tissue problem.]

“The key advance here is in the development of super soft, ultrathin, stretchable strain gauges that can gently wrap the outside surface of the bladder, without imposing any mechanical constraints on the natural filling and voiding behaviors,” John Rogers, study co-lead and professor of material sciences and biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, said in a statement.

As a bladder fills with urine, its expansion stretches out the sensor material, which in turn wirelessly sends data to a patient’s smartphone app. This also works as the organ contracts after urination, providing users with the real-time data throughout the day’s ebbs and flows. In small animal lab tests, the battery-free device could accurately monitor a bladder for 30 days, while the implant lasted in non-human primates as long as 8 weeks.

“Depending on the use case, we can design the technology to reside permanently inside the body or to harmlessly dissolve after the patient has made a full recovery,” regenerative engineer and study co-lead Guillermo Ameer said on Monday. 

Researchers believe their device could reduce the need for uncomfortable, infection-prone catheters, as well as limiting the use of more invasive, in-patient bladder monitoring procedures. But why stop there?

The team is also testing a separate, biodegradable “patch” using a patient’s own stem cells. Called a pro-regenerative scaffold (PRS), the new material also expands and contracts alongside the bladder’s movements while encouraging the growth of new organ cells. New tissue remains in place as the patch dissolves, allowing for faster, more effective healing possibilities. Researchers hope to one day combine their PRS work alongside their wireless monitoring sensors.

“This work brings us closer to the reality of smart regenerative systems, which are implantable pro-regenerative devices capable of probing their microenvironment, wirelessly reporting those findings outside the body… and enabling on-demand or programmed responses to change course and improve device performance or safety,” said Ameer.

For even more restored functionality, the team believes their sensors could eventually incorporate additional technology to stimulate urination on demand using the smartphone app. Taken as a whole, the trio of medical advances could one day offer a far less invasive, comfortable, and effective therapy for patients dealing with bladder issues. 

The post This implant will tell a smartphone app when you need to pee appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Sleep is one of the most essential activities for human health, but it’s also one of the most neglected. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 14.5 percent of adults occasionally have trouble falling asleep. Whether because of work or mindlessly scrolling on your phone, staying up late can throw off your circadian rhythm—the internal clock that tells your body when it’s time to sleep and stay awake. 

So how do you get your sleep cycle back on track? Some online communities have suggested pulling an all-nighter as a quick sleep hack for “resetting” your circadian rhythm. The idea is that forcing yourself awake increases sleep pressure—the urge to sleep more that increases the longer a person is awake—allowing you to knock out at your preferred time. While this may have worked for a person or two, it’s not a recommended practice.

Pulling an all-nighter will actually make sleep problems worse, says Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist known as “The Sleep Doctor.” If your sleep schedule is already off, depriving the body of even more sleep can worsen a person’s cognitive function—stunting their problem-solving, memory, and creative thinking skills. A person’s reaction time also drops dramatically, which can increase the risk of drowsy driving accidents.

[Related: How to wake up]

Thomas Kilkenny, the director of the Institute Sleep Medicine at Northwell Health in New York City, points out that sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture banned in the Geneva Conventions—treaties that list protocols for humanitarian treatment during war. “To voluntarily do this is not a good idea and we should try to do whatever we can to avoid that.”

There’s no way to shift the timing of your circadian rhythm in one night. It actually takes roughly 28 days for your circadian rhythm to reset fully, says Breus. The good news is that while it might take some time, there are other effective methods for getting your sleep schedule back on track. Sleep doctors told Popular Science several strategies to get back into your normal sleep schedule. 

How to fix your sleep schedule

Wake up at the same time every day

If you normally wake up around 8 AM, but last night you didn’t get to bed until 3 AM, Kilkenny recommends still getting up at your usual wake-up hours. You may have to deal with a day of grogginess, but the trade-off is being more likely to maintain your normal sleep schedule. “If you’ve had a bad night, you’ll just have to pretend that one night never happened and get right back into that routine,” Kilkenny says.

You may feel tempted to sleep a few extra hours or sleep in on the weekends. Still, Breus says staying consistent with your normal sleep schedule stabilizes the circadian rhythm and establishes a pattern for sleep and wakefulness. This also means not napping after a poor night of sleep. Kilkenny says a nap will throw off your sleep cycle and make it harder for your body to feel tired at night naturally. 

Set aside time for purposeful worrying

Insomnia is often a result of high stress levels. The body can’t shut down for the night when your brain is actively racing with thoughts of a potential threat, whether that’s a lion prowling your campsite or the stress of paying for rent next month.

Kilkenny advises practicing a technique called purposeful worrying. Like its name, purposeful worrying involves setting aside five to 15 minutes everyday to think and feel anxious about anything troubling you. Giving yourself a time limit to worry about your problems will help manage stress without draining too much of your energy. It also provides an opportunity to really think and plan out solutions to overcome these fears.

When you have a realistic plan for overcoming the problem, the initial concern is not so scary anymore. “The brain has a tendency not to revisit something it’s already figured out,” adds Kilkenny. “You’re much less likely to get into bed and bring up the worry again.”

Exercise in the morning or afternoon

Going to bed physically tired helps increase sleep quality. Ideally aim to exercise every day, even if it is a 20-minute walk in the park. If you do exercise, Breus advises not to exercise four hours before bedtime. 

Body temperature normally increases during the day and slowly drops during the night. When you exercise too close to bedtime, your core body temperature increases, which can give a wrong signal to the circadian rhythm that you need to be awake. Breus explains that giving time to let your body temperature cool down makes you more sleepy.

Prep the body for sleep

You want to make sure your body is set up for rest. Kilkenny recommends avoiding bright lights as they can disrupt your circadian rhythm and lower melatonin levels. This includes turning off all electronics an hour or two before bed and having the bedroom lights dimly lit or off completely. Try to use the time to meditate or read to put yourself in a relaxed state. 

Breus also says not to drink coffee past 2 PM. Caffeine has a mean half-life of five hours, meaning that by 7 PM, about half will be out of your system. Another beverage to limit is alcohol, as it is associated with poor quality sleep and frequent wakings throughout the night. If you decide to drink, Breus advises only consuming two drinks and having them three hours before bed.

It may take a while for your sleep schedule to adjust after a couple of bad nights, but it is possible. Although there are some cases where health problems may cause chronic insomnia. If you continue to have trouble sleeping or your insomnia gets worse, consider speaking with a therapist, sleep specialist, or your doctor to get to the root of the problem.

The post How to fix your sleep schedule without pulling an all-nighter appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In a world first, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a person with chronic kidney disease. The historic procedure builds off of decades of research into gene editing of animal organs and could mark an inflection point in efforts to cut down on sometimes fatally lengthy transplant wait times. Recent advances in gene editing technology means procedures like these could become more common. 

The patient, a 62-year-old man from Massachusetts named Richard Slayman, has severe diabetes and hypertension and has been on dialysis for seven years. He eventually received a new kidney from a human donor but it began showing signs of failure after five years. Slayman was on a waiting list for another kidney when his doctors suggested the possibility of receiving an experimental kidney from a gene-edited pig.

“I saw [the transplant] not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” Slayman said in a statement. 

The modified pig was engineered by Massachusetts-based biotech firm eGenesis. Scientists used CRISPR gene editing technology to produce a pig with 69 gene modifications. Several of these modifications were meant to remove harmful pig genes that could provoke an immune response from the patent. Human genes were also added to the pig to improve the kidney’s compatibility and lessen the likelihood of the human body rejecting it. 

After around four hours of tense operating, surgeons in the room reportedly said they saw the transplanted kidney producing urine, a key sign the procedure was a success. The room filled with applause and cheers. 

“This represents a new frontier in medicine and demonstrates the potential of genome engineering to change the lives of millions of patients globally suffering from kidney failure,” eGenesis CEO Mike Curtis said in a statement. 

Why are scientists interested in gene-editing animal organs?

Scientists are hopeful that transplanting animal organs into humans, a practice called “xenotransplantation,” could one day supplement human organ transplants and cut down on lengthy transplant wait times. An estimated 36 million people in the US are affected by chronic kidney disease, 800,000 of which have end stage kidney disease or kidney failure according to the Centers for Disease Control. Once at that stage, patients are often forced to choose between going on a dialysis machine that filters their blood or applying for an organ transplant. Over 103,000 people in the US are currently on organ transplant wait list according to the Health Resource and Services Administration (HRSA). 

But lengthy wait times and a limited supply of able organ donors means many of those patients never end up receiving a transplant. The HRSA estimates 17 people die everyday while waiting for a new organ. Those lengthy wait times and lack of donors has also helped fuel an organ black market. 

Potential animal organ transplants aren’t just limited to kidneys. Surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, successfully implanted a gene-modified pig liver into a brain-stem dead person in 2022. Not long after that surgeons from the University of Maryland Medical Center implanted pig hearts into two fatally-ill patients. Though those two surgeries were successful, their end effect was limited. Both patients reportedly died less than two months after the procedures. Human immune systems react violently to organs from other species and try to reject them, an obstacle which makes these procedures particularly challenging.  

“If it were easy, we’d be doing it by now, but it’s not,” MGH Transplant Center Director Joren Madsen said in a statement. “The barrier to pig xenotransplantation is formidable.” 

Still, researchers are hopeful advancements in gene editing could lead to longer lasting benefits. Surgeons have previously transplanted genetically modified kidneys and livers to baboons. In one case, eGenesis claims a monkey implanted with a gene-edited pig kidney lived for two years following the surgery. Surgeons involved with Slayman’s procedure are similarly hoping his new kidneys could help him live for two more years. The FDA fast tracked approval for his particulate procedure as part of its “compassionate use” program intended for patients nearing the ends of their lives. Wider use of this procedure would require full FDA testing and approval. 

And while the historic procedure is both a feat of scientific and medical prowess, surgeons involved say the real credit belongs to the patient for marching into an unknown territory.

“The real hero today is the patient, Mr. Slayman, as the success of this pioneering surgery, once deemed unimaginable, would not have been possible without his courage and willingness to embark on a journey into uncharted medical territory,” MGH Transplant Center Director Joren C. Madsen said in a statement.

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Online stores sprang up during the covid-19 pandemic’s telehealth boom touting testosterone as a cure-all for men’s age-related illnesses—despite FDA rules issued years ago restricting such “low testosterone” advertising.

In ads on Google, Facebook, and elsewhere, testosterone telemedicine websites may promise a quick fix for sluggishness and low libido in men. But evidence for that is lacking, physicians said, and the midlife malaise for which testosterone is being touted as a solution is more likely caused by chronic medical conditions, poor diet, or a sedentary lifestyle. In fact, doctors urge caution—and the FDA recommends that all testosterone supplements carry a warning that they may increase the risk of heart attack and stroke.

Valid medical reasons do exist for treating some men with testosterone. The hormone as a medication has existed for decades, and today’s patients include men with hypogonadism, some transgender men who use it to help transition physically, and, sometimes, women dealing with menopausal symptoms. It has also been used for decades by bodybuilders and athletes to enhance strength.

However, online dispensaries can overplay the idea of what is sometimes called “male menopause,” or even “manopause,” to drive sales of highly profitable testosterone-boosting injectables, often ignoring safety guidelines that should prevent healthy men from using the hormone. Some of the websites target military veterans.

“I have seen ads online that do cross the line,” said Steven Nissen, a physician and the chief academic officer for the Heart, Vascular, and Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. “For mood and low energy, prescribing testosterone provides little to no benefit. They are promoting testosterone for indications that are not on the label.”

Testosterone telehealth websites almost all cite one study published in 2002 by New England Research Institutes scientists who found testosterone levels drop 1% a year in men over 40. Stefan Schlatt, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Andrology at the University of Muenster in Germany, said the data behind the statistic included older men in deteriorating health whose levels declined because of illnesses.

“Healthy men do not show a drop,” he said.

That 2002 study led to a flood of “low-T” ads on U.S. television—ads that were later banned by the FDA in a 2015 ruling that accused the pharmaceutical industry of exaggerating the low-T phenomenon to scare men into buying drugs. According to another study, the market for testosterone supplements stood at $1.85 billion in 2023.

The deluge of ads “has fueled demand for a largely uninsured product, allowing for high markups,” said Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “The primary driver is manufactured demand.”

Barbara Mintzes, a professor of evidence-based pharmaceutical policy at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre in Australia, said low testosterone should really be seen as a sign of a condition that needs to be treated. She said diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, exposure to toxic chemicals like PFAS, and stress can all reduce testosterone levels.

Several websites reviewed by KFF Health News brand themselves as news and fitness magazines, with advertisements embedded in articles steering readers toward order forms for testosterone replacement therapy, shorthanded as TRT. The sites’ prices for TRT range from $120 to $135 a month, not including initial mail-back blood tests for around $60. Some sites promise increased libido and reduced stomach fat.

Male Excel’s ads on Google, for example, say TRT “improves mood” and “restores vitality.” And its site says testosterone treatment will provide “muscular definition,” “weight loss,” “explosive drive,” “deeper sleep,” and “restored energy” above a link to a free assessment on its online telehealth platform. Craig Larsen, the company’s CEO, did not reply to several attempts to contact him by phone and email.

Both Male Excel and Hone Health are among the sites that pitch to military veterans. Hone Health included a video of a veteran who said he was refused testosterone treatment by a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.

Saad Alam, CEO and co-founder of Hone, said that his company is what he called a “conservative” player in the market. He said that Hone prescribes only to men who are hypogonadal and tests men every 90 days, unlike other companies that operate telehealth websites as what he called a “cash grab.”

“I agree that patients should be treated by their doctors. But the U.S. medical system isn’t at a point where it can service men who have this problem, and some endocrinologists would rather treat patients who are higher-profit,” Hone said. “That’s why people are coming to us.”

One popular form of TRT is injectable testosterone cypionate. According to the Medicare average sales price database, it costs $0.027 per milligram. Online purveyors who sell the drug directly to consumers in 200 mg/mL vials for an average price of $129 per month are charging the equivalent of $1.55 per mg—a markup of more than 50 times the average Medicare price.

According to a 2022 study, the TRT telehealth websites create a way to circumvent doctors who refuse to prescribe the hormone. In that study, Justin Dubin, a urologist at the Memorial Healthcare System in Florida, posed as an online mystery shopper. He reported an above-normal testosterone level, and stated his desire to start a family, even though such therapy can curb sperm production. But six of the seven unnamed online TRT clinics prescribed him testosterone via a medical professional.

“And that’s concerning,” Dubin said. “Telemedicine helps men with hypogonadism who might be too embarrassed to discuss erectile dysfunction. But we need to do a better job of understanding the appropriateness of care.”

Still, while the FDA doesn’t allow off-label marketing, it does allow such off-label prescriptions.

Off-label use of testosterone replacement has become especially commonplace among veterans. And among male service members who received TRT in 2017, fewer than half met the clinical practice guidelines, according to a report by the U.S. military.

Phil Palmer, a 41-year-old Marine Corps veteran who lives outside Charleston, South Carolina, said he pays out-of-pocket for bloodwork and prescriptions for a pellet skin-implant form of testosterone and for clomiphene, a drug that can help counter the male infertility that is a side effect of testosterone treatment. He said the treatment appeals to him and other veterans dealing with the aftermath of military service.

“The environment we served in and stress levels have a lot to do with it,” Palmer said. “We were exposed to burn pits. The military doesn’t teach you to eat well—we ate a lot of processed food.”

In medical settings, TRT can speed recovery of soldiers who have bone density issues or spinal cord injuries, said Mark Peterson, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Michigan Medical School. But, he said, “for men in the normal-T range, using an online prescription to buy testosterone to reduce stomach fat can be counterproductive.”

Those who use it also risk having to take testosterone medication indefinitely, because TRT can cause the body to cease its own production of the hormone.

Palmer, who founded a nonprofit that helps veterans heal through exercise, nutrition, and mentorship, said the medication has been helpful for him but urges fellow veterans to seek care from their doctors rather than what he called “bro science” websites touting testosterone.

“It’s not a magic pill,” he said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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The first human patient to reportedly receive Neuralink’s wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) implant appeared to demonstrate the device’s early capabilities during a company livestream to X on Wednesday night. In late January, Elon Musk publicly stated that the experimental medical procedure was completed, but neither he nor his controversial medical startup had offered evidence of the results until yesterday evening’s 9-minute video.

Neuralink’s first volunteer is 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh from Texas, who dislocated his C4 and C5 vertebrae during a diving accident in 2016, permanently paralyzing him below the shoulders. During the livestream, Arbaugh appears to be playing online chess as a Neuralink BCI implant translates his brain activity into actionable computer inputs.

https://t.co/OMIeGGjYtG

— Neuralink (@neuralink) March 20, 2024

“If y’all can see the cursor moving around the screen, that’s all me,” he says at one point while highlighting a chess piece. “It’s pretty cool, huh?” According to Arbaugh, the key to successfully employing his new implant involved learning how to mentally differentiate between intentional and attempted movement—i.e, brain activity expressing the desire to move as opposed to activity which literally controls motor functions. “From there, I think it just became intuitive to me to start imagining the cursor moving,” Arbaugh continued, likening the feeling to “using the Force” from Star Wars.

Neuralink’s BCI is implanted using a robotic surgeon that subcutaneously connects the device’s microscopic wiring to a patient’s brain. Once installed, the hardware supposedly cannot be seen externally, and recharges wireless from “outside via a compact, inductive charger,” according to Neuralink’s website. Musk has repeatedly stated his hopes Neuralink will ultimately allow users to connect to the internet, smartphones, and computers through a line of upgradable, reversible BCI implants—and that he intends to one day receive the procedure himself.

“Long-term, it is possible to shunt the signals from the brain motor cortex past the damaged part of the spine to enable people to walk again and use their arms normally,” Musk claimed in a reply to Neuralink’s Wednesday evening post.

During the livestream hosted by Neuralink engineer Bliss Chapman, Arbaugh also described independently playing video games like the turn-based strategy game Civilization 6, which often entails more complex user inputs. Before the implant, Arbaugh says he frequently required assistance from his parents or a friend to play such games. Now, however, he says he has been able to do so for as long as eight hours and that the biggest impediment is simply waiting for the Neuralink’s battery to recharge.

[Related: Elon Musk alleges Neuralink completed its first human trial implant.]

“It’s not perfect. We have run into some issues,” Arbaugh concedes at one point, although he does not elaborate on the hurdles. “I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey. There’s still a lot of work to be done.”

“We have more work to do. We have a lot to learn about the brain here,” agreed Chapman.

Neuralink is far from the first company to develop and install BCI implants, with the first successful commercial procedure dating back to 2010. Similar devices have since converted imagined handwriting into text, as well as thoughts into words. One competitor’s implant has also enabled users to browse the web as well as conduct online shopping and banking since 2019.

But it’s unclear if the reveal of Neuralink’s first human participant will assuage critics’ concerns regarding the company’s research record. Less than a day after Neuralink announced it would begin screening human volunteers for its multiyear ​​Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) Study last September, Wired released a damning exposé detailing graphic accounts of lab animal abuse during research. At the time, Wired’s coverage was one in a string of similar investigations into Musk’s company, including internal complaints of “hack job” surgical procedures resulting in over 1,500 animal deaths since 2018. The reports have since prompted multiple federal regulatory reviews and human trial delays.

As Wired also noted this week, Neuralink has not registered its PRIME Study on ClinicalTrials.gov, the federal documentation site for human medical studies, so information like how many human subjects Neuralink is seeking, where its procedures are taking place, or how its results will be assessed are not publicly available.

Still, Arbaugh encouraged people to consider applying to Neuralink’s ongoing PRIME Study, saying “there’s nothing to be afraid of” about the “super easy” procedure which he says has resulted in no cognitive impairments for him. Chapman, meanwhile, stated last night that additional updates on both Neuralink’s and Arbaugh’s progress will be released in the coming days.

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Cataract surgery is one of the most popular and commonly performed procedures in the world. The vast majority of patients have excellent outcomes with few complications.

Here are the numbers:

• By age 80, over half of all Americans have cataracts.
• Close to 4 million cataract surgeries are performed in the U.S. every year.
• Over 90% of patients have 20/20 vision with glasses after surgery, although those with other eye conditions may not do as well, including those with glaucoma, a progressive disease typically associated with elevated pressure within the eye; diabetic retinopathy, which ultimately can cause leakage in the retinal tissues; and macular degeneration, a disease that is typically related to age.
• The rate of post-surgery infection from endophthalmitis is less than 0.1%.

As ophthalmologists who have performed thousands of these procedures, we know that many patients have misconceptions about both cataracts and the surgery. For example, some think a cataract is a growth on the eye’s surface.

We like to compare a cataract with the frosted glass of a bathroom window, where light can be transmitted but details cannot. Or when turbulence from a storm causes normally clear water in the ocean to become murky. In much the same way, the eye’s once transparent lens becomes cloudy.

About the surgery

Cataract surgery removes the clouded lens of the eye and replaces it with a new, clear lens to restore your vision. Most patients report the procedure is painless.

It’s typically an elective surgery that is performed on an outpatient basis. The patient is often awake, under local anesthesia, with sedation similar to that used for dental procedures. We like to say patients receive the equivalent of three margaritas in their IV.

Numbing drops are then applied to the eye’s surface, along with an anesthetic inside the eye. Patients with claustrophobia, or movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, may not be suitable candidates for awake surgeries and require general anesthesia.

Before surgery, patients receive dilating drops to make the pupil as large as possible. The surgeon makes a tiny incision, usually with a small pointed scalpel, between the clear and white part of the eye to gain access to the lens capsule, a thin membrane similar in thickness to a plastic produce bag at the grocery store.

This capsule is suspended by small fibers called zonules, which are arranged like the springs that suspend a trampoline from a frame. The surgeon then creates a small opening in the capsule, called a capsulotomy, to gain access to the cataract. The cataract is then broken into smaller parts so they are removable through the small incision.

This is similar to a tiny jackhammer, breaking the large lens into smaller pieces for removal. That sounds scary, but it’s painless. Ultrasound emulsifies the lens and vacuum power then aspirates it from the eye.

Laser-assisted cataract surgery has been found to have similar outcomes to traditional cataract surgery.

Complications are rare

Serious complications, such as postoperative infection, bleeding in the eye or a postoperative retinal detachment are rare; they occur in approximately 1 in 1,000 cases. But even in many of these situations, appropriate management can salvage useful vision.

Capsular complications deserve additional discussion. According to some studies, they occur in up to 2% of cases. If a hole or tear of the posterior capsule is encountered during cataract surgery, the clear gel in the vitreous – the back chamber of the eye – may be displaced into the front chamber of the eye.

If that happens, the gel must be removed at the time of the cataract surgery. This will reduce the likelihood of additional postoperative complications, but those who have the procedure, known as a vitrectomy, have an increased risk for additional complications, including postoperative infections and postoperative swelling.

After the surgery

Patients usually go home right after the procedure. Most surgery centers require that the patient have someone drive them home, more for the anesthesia rather than the surgery. Patients begin applying postoperative drops that same day and must wear an eye shield at bedtime for a few weeks after surgery.

Patients should keep the eye clean and avoid exposure to dust, debris and water. They should try not to bend over and should avoid heavy lifting or straining in the first week or so after surgery. Lifting or straining can cause a surge of blood pressure to the face and eye. Known as a choroidal hemorrhage, it can lead to bleeding into the wall of the eye and be devastating to vision.

Things that cause only moderate increases in heart rate such as walking are OK. Routine postoperative examinations are usually completed the day after surgery, about a week after surgery and about a month after surgery.

A choice of lens

The plastic lens used to replace the cataract, or intraocular lens, requires careful sizing for optimal results and a nuanced discussion between patient and surgeon.

Early intraocular lens technologies were monofocal, and most patients with these lenses chose distance correction and used reading glasses for near tasks. This is still the preferred approach for approximately 90% of patients having cataract surgery today.

Recent advances have led to intraocular lenses that offer multifocality – the opportunity to have near as well as distance vision, without glasses. Some multifocal lenses are even in the trifocal category, which includes distance, near, and intermediate vision, the latter of which in recent years has become very important for computer and phone use.

Most patients with these advanced technology multifocal lenses are happy with them. However, a small percentage of patients with multifocal lenses can be so bothered by visual disturbances – notably night glare and halos around light sources in the dark – that they request removal of the multifocal lens to exchange it for a standard intraocular lens. These exchanges are a reasonable option for such situations and offer relief for most affected patients.

Determining who’s an ideal candidate for a multifocal intraocular lens is an area of active research. Most clinicians would recommend against such a lens for a patient with a detail-oriented personality. Such patients tend to fixate on the shortcomings of these lenses despite their potential advantages.

As with many technologies, current generation advanced technology intraocular lenses are much better than their predecessors. Future offerings are likely to offer improved vision and fewer side effects than those available today.

But these newer lenses are often not reimbursed by insurance companies and often entail substantial out-of-pocket costs for patients.

Deciding on what type of lens is best for you can be complicated. Fortunately, except in unusual circumstances, such as when a cataract develops after trauma to the eye, there is seldom a hurry for adult cataract surgery.

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The Biden administration has announced some of the biggest pollution regulations in US history. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency revealeded the finalization of new, enforceable standards meant to ensure electric and hybrid vehicles make up at least 56 percent of all passenger car and light truck sales by 2032.

To meet this goal, automotive manufacturers will face increasing tailpipe pollution limits over the next few years. This gradual shift essentially means over half of all car companies’ sales will need to be zero-emission models to meet the new federal benchmarks.

According to the EPA, this unprecedented industry transition could cut an estimated 7 billion tons of emissions over the next three decades. Regulators believe this will also offer a nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits for the nation, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits from improved air quality alongside $62 billion in reduced annual fuel, maintenance, and repair costs for everyday drivers.

[Related: EPA rule finally bans the most common form of asbestos.]

Transportation annually generates 29 percent of all US carbon emissions, making it the country’s largest single climate change contributor. Aggressively pursuing a nationwide shift towards EV adoption was a cornerstone of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign platform. While in office, Donald Trump rolled back the Obama administration’s previous automotive pollution standards applicable to vehicles manufactured through 2025. He has promised to enact similar orders if re-elected during this year’s presidential election.

The EPA’s new standards is actually a slightly relaxed version of a previous proposal put forth last year. To address concerns of both manufacturers and the industry’s largest union, United Auto Workers, the Biden administration agreed to slow the rise of tailpipe standards over the next few years. By 2030, however, limits will increase substantially to make up for the lost time. The EPA claims today’s finalized policy will still reduce emissions by the same amount over the next three decades.

The new rules are by no means an “EPA car ban” on gas-powered vehicles, as lobbyists with the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers continue to falsely claim. The guidelines go into effect in 2027, and only pertain to new cars and light trucks over the coming years. The stipulations also cover companies’ entire product lines, so it’s up to manufacturers to determine how their fleets as a whole meet the EPA benchmarks.

Still, fossil fuel companies and Republican authorities are extremely likely to file legal challenges over today’s announcement—challenges that could easily arrive in front of the Supreme Court in the coming years. Earlier today, the vice president of federal policy for the League of Conservation Voters said during a press call that they already discussed such possibilities with the Biden administration, and “they are crystal clear about the importance of getting rules out to make sure that they withstand both legal challenges from the fossil fuel industry and any congressional attacks should Republicans take over the Senate and the White House.”

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Following a pivotal year in the movement to discard the term “excited delirium,” momentum is building in several states to ban the discredited medical diagnosis from death certificates, law enforcement training, police incident reports, and civil court testimony.

In January, California became the first state to prohibit the medical term from many official proceedings. Now, lawmakers in Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, and New York are considering bills that also would rein in how the excited delirium concept is used.

The new spate of state proposals, driven by families who lost relatives after encounters with law enforcement, marks an important step in doing away with a concept that critics say spurs police to overuse lethal force.

“It’s the law following the science, which is what we want to see,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, an attorney who worked on an influential Physicians for Human Rights review of how the term excited delirium evolved into a concept whose legitimacy is largely rejected by the medical community.

But initial momentum in statehouses is being met with fresh resistance from law enforcement agencies and other defenders, including some who agree that excited delirium is a sham diagnosis.

The bills “clearly run afoul of the First Amendment” and violate free speech, said Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations. He also argued that law enforcement officers do encounter symptoms and behaviors associated with excited delirium.

Excited delirium is a four-decade-old diagnostic theory that has been used to explain how a person experiencing severe agitation can suddenly die while being restrained. Last year, the American College of Emergency Physicians withdrew a 2009 report that had been the last remaining official medical pillar of support for the theory used increasingly over the prior 15 years to explain away police culpability for many in-custody deaths.

Excited delirium was cited as a legal defense in the 2020 deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis; Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York; and Angelo Quinto in Antioch, California, among others. The theory proposed that individuals in a mental health crisis, often under the influence of drugs or alcohol, can exhibit superhuman strength as police try to control them, then die suddenly from the condition, not the police response.

The New York City Police Department issued training materials in 2021 and 2022 that tell officers to restrain and stun people they encounter who exhibit signs of excited delirium, such as “elevated body temperatures, increased physical strength and lack of physical fatigue,” according to New York Focus, a nonprofit newsroom. The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment on its training or the new state bill.

“They still have this on the books,” said Democratic New York state Assembly member Jessica González-Rojas, who introduced the bill that calls for banning the term from death certificates, autopsies, law enforcement training, incident reports, and court proceedings. “And it’s pretty concerning the types of restraints they are recommending, given lack of evidence that this is an actual medical syndrome.”

The Minneapolis Police Department, which according to the Star Tribune used the term in trainings, declined to comment on its training materials and the pending state legislation. That bill would prohibit excited delirium and similar terms from being cited as a cause of death, used as a medical diagnosis, or included in law enforcement training.

But the theory’s presence in training materials may also be starting to change. In Colorado — where the term was used, in part, to justify the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain in Aurora — a state board eliminated the term from law enforcement training starting this January. Law enforcement officers restrained the 23-year-old, and paramedics injected him with a lethal dose of ketamine.

This year, Colorado lawmakers are debating a measure that largely mirrors California’s bill but allows the term to remain in civil court proceedings.

At the bill’s hearing before the Colorado House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 6, Rebecca De Luna described her family’s anguish over the 2017 death of her daughter’s father, Alejandro Gutierrez, in Thornton police custody. She said excited delirium was classified as the cause of his death.

“His face was bruised with an imprint of a shoe. His appearance was unrecognizable,” De Luna testified. “The term has been used far too long as an excuse for law enforcement to protect themselves when someone dies in their custody, quite frankly, as a result of excessive force and what I consider police brutality resulting in death.”

Several medical service providers and educators testified in opposition. John Seward, the University of Denver’s emergency medical services program manager, told the committee that he did not object to banning “excited delirium” in death certificates and police training, as police are not health professionals. But banning the term’s use from medical personnel training would amount to legislating medicine and impeding academic freedom, he said.

“If we cannot study and learn from the past, even when that past is hurtful, we are now condemning ourselves to repeat it,” Seward told lawmakers.

Julia Sherwin, a California civil rights attorney who testified in support of the Colorado bill, was surprised by opponents’ arguments that such bills could limit free speech and discussion about the history of the idea.

“That to me felt a little ridiculous,” said Sherwin, who co-authored the Physicians for Human Rights report. Such bills keep a discredited theory from being falsely used to respond to a crisis and keep “junk science” out of official records, she said.

The Colorado bill passed the state’s House in a 42-19 vote in mid-February and is now before the state Senate. It was amended to clarify that “excited delirium” may be used when teaching about the history of the term and that EMS courses are allowed on “safe and effective medical interaction with individuals exhibiting an altered mental state” who have symptoms that include agitation, aggression, or violence.

Some of the push for such legislation comes from families whose loved ones’ deaths were blamed on excited delirium, rather than on use of force during a police encounter. The Hawaii bill was introduced after William and Verdell Haleck learned about California’s effort and began contacting lawmakers in Hawaii. Their son Sheldon died there in 2015 after he was pepper-sprayed, shocked, and restrained by Honolulu police. In a civil trial that the Halecks lost, officers blamed his death on excited delirium.

The Hawaii bill would ban excited delirium from being used in death certificates, police incident reports, and civil cases. It had not been scheduled for a legislative committee hearing as of mid-March, but the Halecks are hopeful it will eventually pass.

“It would give us some sort of closure and justice,” said William Haleck.

The Honolulu Police Department is monitoring the bill and hasn’t taken a position on it, said Michelle Yu, a spokesperson for the department. And the bill would have little impact on Honolulu’s Department of the Medical Examiner, said its director, Masahiko Kobayashi, because doctors there don’t use excited delirium as a cause of death.

One reason such bills are still important is because they prevent policies from fluctuating with each new leadership change, said David Siffert, legal director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, which helped draft model legislation banning excited delirium and is pushing for the New York bill.

“Even if you are doing everything right, you don’t know if your successor will be,” Siffert said. “Historically we have seen those ups and downs in our agencies.”

Supporters of such state legislation say that banning the term excited delirium is just a first step toward reducing deaths in police custody.

“The underlying context doesn’t change with legislation alone,” Naples-Mitchell said. “It is going to take a very long time to address the root causes.”

Mountain States editor Matt Volz contributed to this article.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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The medical startup Hippocratic AI and Nvidia have announced plans to deploy voice-based “AI healthcare agents.” In demonstration videos provided Monday, at-home patients are depicted conversing with animated human avatar chatbots on tablet and smartphone screens. Examples include a post-op appendectomy screening, as well as a chatbot instructing someone on how to inject penicillin. Hippocratic’s web page suggests providers could soon simply purchase its nursebots for less than $9/hour to handle such tasks, instead of paying an actual registered nurse $90/hour, Hippocratic claims. (The average pay for a registered nurse in the US is $38.74/hour, according to a 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ occupational employment statistics survey.)

A patient’s trust in AI apparently is all about a program’s “seamless, personalized, and conversational” tone, said Munjal Shah, Hippocratic AI co-founder and CEO, in the company’s March 18 statement. Based on their internal research, people’s ability to “emotionally connect” with an AI healthcare agent reportedly increases “by 5-10% or more” for every half-second of conversational speed improvement, dubbed Hippocratic’s “empathy inference” engine. But quickly simulating all that worthwhile humanity requires a lot of computing power—hence Hippocratic’s investment in countless Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” said Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s VP of Healthcare, said on Monday. 

[Related: Will we ever be able to trust health advice from an AI?]

But an H100 GPU-fueled nurse-droid’s capacity to spew medical advice nearly as fast as an overworked healthcare worker is only as good as its accuracy and bedside manner. Hippocratic says it’s also got that covered, of course, and cites internal surveys and beta testing of over 5,500 nurses and doctors voicing overwhelming satisfaction with the AI as proof. When it comes to its ability to avoid AI’s (well documented) racial, gendered, and age-based biases, however, testing is apparently still underway. And in terms of where Hippocratic’s LLM derived its diagnostic and conversational information—well, that’s even vaguer than their mostly anonymous polled humans.

In the company’s white paper detailing Polaris, its “Safety-focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcare,” Hippocratic AI researchers say their model is trained “on a massive collection of proprietary data including clinical care plans, healthcare regulatory documents, medical manuals, drug databases, and other high-quality medical reasoning documents.” And that’s about it for any info on that front. PopSci has reached out to Hippocratic for more specifics, as well as whether or not patient medical info will be used in future training.

In the meantime, it’s currently unclear when healthcare companies (or, say, Amazon, for that matter) can “augment their human staff” with “empathy inference” AI nurses, as Hippocratic advertises. The company did note it’s already working with over 40 “beta partners” to test AI healthcare agents on a wide gamut of responsibilities, including chronic care management, wellness coaching, health risk assessments, pre-op outreach, and post-discharge follow-ups.

It’s hard to envision a majority of people ever preferring to talk with uncanny chat avatars instead of trained, emotionally invested, properly compensated healthcare workers. But that’s not necessarily the point here. The global nursing shortage remains dire, with recent estimates pointing to a shortage of 15 million health workers by 2030. Instead of addressing the working conditions and wage concerns that led unions representing roughly 32,000 nurses to strike in 2023, Hippocratic claims its supposed cost-effective AI solution is the “only scalable way” to close the shortfall gap—a scalability reliant on Nvidia’s H100 GPU.

The H100 is what helped make Nvidia one of the world’s most lucrative, multi trillion-dollar companies, and the chips still support many large language model (LLM) AI supercomputer systems. That said, it’s now technically Nvidia’s third most-powerful offering, following last year’s GH200 Grass Hopper Super Chip, as well as yesterday’s simultaneous reveal of a forthcoming Blackwell B200 GPU. Still, at roughly $30,000-to-$40,000 per chip, the H100’s price tag is reserved for the sorts of projects valued at half-a-billion dollars–projects like Hippocratic AI.

But before jumping at the potential savings that an AI labor workaround could provide the healthcare industry, it’s worth considering these bots’ energy costs. For reference, a single H100 GPU requires as much power per day as the average American household.

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On March 18, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a ban on the last form of ban on asbestos used in the United States. This carcinogen kills upwards of 40,000 Americans annually, has been phased out in many products, but is still used in some capacities in the US. Inhaling the tiny fibrous strands that make up asbestos can lead to numerous illnesses including mesothelioma, asbestosis, and lung and ovarian cancer. 

While not a complete ban, under this new guidance, the EPA would prohibit the import of any items that contain the only asbestos used in the US called chrysotile asbestos, or “white asbestos.” Most consumer products including building materials and household appliances are no longer made with asbestos. However, some products including sheet gaskets, brake blocks, and other vehicle friction products, still have chrysotile asbestos. The ban on asbestos used in these products will take effect in six months.

Chrysotile asbestos is also used to make chlorine bleach and sodium hydroxide that can be used for water purification. Chlorine is a commonly used disinfectant in water treatment and eight chlor-alkali plants in the US still use asbestos diaphragms to make chlorine and sodium hydroxide. These plants are primarily in Louisiana and Texas and this new requirement requires them to be phased out. The EPA notes that asbestos is not needed to produce chlorine and roughly two-thirds of the chlorine made domestically is done so without using asbestos. The rule will be phased in over five or more years to provide “a reasonable transition period.’’ 

[Related: The EPA is trying to ban asbestos—again ]

“The science is clear–asbestos is a known carcinogen that has severe impacts on public health,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement.

According to the EPA, it advances one of the goals of the Biden Administration’s Cancer Moonshot, to harness the power of the federal government to end cancer. This new rule also marks a major expansion of EPA regulation under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which made it difficult for the government to ban chemicals. This law remained unchanged until several amendments in 2016 overhauled the regulations of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals found in items found in everything from furniture to clothing and household cleaners. 

The EPA tried to ban asbestos outright during the late 1980s. Manufacturing companies fought back and the EPA’s initial 1989 prohibition of the use of asbestos contained a carve-out for the chlorine industry. 

By 1991, a panel of federal judges stuck down the ban and weakened the EPA’s ability to address human health risks from asbestos or other existing chemicals. This decision went on to hamper additional federal attempts to ban asbestos. More than 50 countries have already outlawed chrysotile asbestos.

[Related: Lung cancer in naval personnel linked to asbestos exposure.]

This rule could be rolled back by future presidential administrations and some legislators are calling on Congress to step in. 

“An immediate ban on the import of chrysotile asbestos for the chlor-alkali industry is a long overdue step forward for public health,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) said in a statement. However, it cannot be the end of the road when it comes to phasing out other dangerous asbestos fibers, and Congress has a role to play here when it comes to providing stronger protections for our health.”

Drexel University professor of environmental and occupational health Arthur Frank told NPR that asbestos still hides in many existing buildings and products across the US, so continues to pose risks to human health.

“This is not a total ban by any means,” Frank said. “It is a modest step that reduces future exposures.”

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Life in the Stone Age was pretty tough for our ancestors. There were animals to fend off and track for food, new tools to make, and massive swings in climate to adapt to. Stone Age humans also faced off against potentially lethal microbes floating around just like we do today. Some dangerous microorganisms spread through kissing and eating contaminated food were found in remains of Stone Age individuals uncovered in present day Scandinavia. They offer some new clues into a major lifestyle transition in human history. The findings described in a study published March 7 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

There are six major types of microbes–bacteria, archaea, fungi (yeasts and molds), algae, protozoa, and viruses. Some microbes like probiotics help keep human bodies healthy, while others can make us sick. Bacteria and viruses are the most common microbes and their genetic material is organized in DNA. This is why microbial DNA can be found in the remains of infected humans and helps scientists detect evidence of illnesses caused by bacteria and viruses.

In the study, an international team of researchers examined the different types of microbial DNA present inside the teeth of 38 individual human remains uncovered at several Neolithic settlements in Norway and Sweden. The material collected from Hummerviksholmen in southern Norway is estimated to be about 9,500 years old. The specimens from Bergsgraven in Linköping, Sweden are about 4,500 years old. 

[Related: The deadliest viruses in human history, from COVID to smallpox.]

They identified 660 microbial species from these remains. Yersinia enterocolitica and Salmonella enterica were two of the most prolific bacteria found. They are both commonly associated with contracting food poisoning from undercooked meat or eating food contaminated with human feces. Even with modern medical care and food safety standards, food poisoning is still responsible for about 48 million illnesses and 3,000 deaths per year in the United States. Living during a time before life saving treatments may have made an already unpleasant human experience more deadly. 

“Especially the case of Salmonella enterica shows us how difficult it [food poisoning] could be. In a Battle Axe culture burial, Bergsgraven in Linköping, we find two infected individuals, and it is actually possible that we are witnessing their cause of death,” study co-author and Stockholm University PhD student Nora Bergfeldt said in a statement. “This, and other bacterial diseases we have found among the individuals, are easily treated with antibiotics today, but back then they could be lethal.”

They also uncovered Neisseria meningitidis, which is related to meningococcal disease. It spreads through close contact between infected individuals. It is spread through the droplets of saliva release through sneezing, coughing, and kissing. Evidence of Neisseria gonorrhoeae–the bacteria that causes the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea–was also found in the microbial DNA uncovered. These communal diseases found in microbial DNA date back to a long transition from a hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyle and settling down to a farming life. It’s believed that this transition began as early as 12,000 years ago. 

“We know when people turned to farming in Scandinavia, but we still do not know how this change in lifestyle affected the general health,” Helena Malmström, a study co-author and biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a statement. 

[Related: Plague DNA was just found in 4,000-year-old teeth.]

This transition is possibly reflected in the presence of bacterial diseases, as they saw more infections from contaminated food and water and interactions with livestock and one another. Today, illnesses like norovirus and meningitis can quickly spread in schools, dormitories, and nursing homes, and other places where large groups of people are in smaller spaces. The study also found evidence of Yersinia pestis—the bacteria that causes the plague. 

“The more people interacted, [the] more possibilities to infect one another occurred,” study co-author and Stockholm University geneticist Anders Götherström, said in a statement. “But even if we do encounter bacteria with potential to impact societies such as Yersinia pestis, it is the infections that spread through food that is most prominent across the lifestyles in this study.”

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During the lockdowns of the early pandemic, the canals of Venice went from a mucky green to translucent cerulean; motorboat traffic along the waterways had stopped and sediment settled out of the water. Global carbon emissions dropped a record amount, albeit only briefly. People reported animals re-claiming territory from humans in much-memed (and often fake) posts. Nature was–supposedly–healing. 

Except that it wasn’t, really. The effects of Covid-19 restrictions on peoples’ activity and wildlife were nuanced and varied, according to a study published March 18 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The “nature is healing” narrative was far too simplistic to capture the full breadth of what really unfolded between humans and animals in the pandemic’s early stage, says Cole Burton, co-lead study author and a conservation biologist at the University of British Columbia. “I can understand why we wanted to believe that,” he adds, “but there was no one-size-fits all response with animals.” 

[Related: Bronze Age village was ‘pretty cozy’—until Britain’s Pompeii]

Instead, Burton and his many collaborators uncovered finer-scale surprises and counterintuitive trends. The scientists took advantage of the rare, experimental opportunity offered by the pandemic and analyzed mammal activity data from 5,400 camera trap locations in 21 countries collected before and during lockdowns. Unexpected patterns emerged. 

Lockdowns didn’t mean less human activity or more animal sightings

They found, among other things, that lockdowns did not reduce human presence everywhere–especially not in the parks and other greenspaces documented by the camera traps. “We saw a lot of variation in what people were doing. In some areas, people were using them a lot more,” explains Burton. In Vancouver, where he lives, he notes that regional parks were open and many people found themselves with more free time and an eagerness for safer outdoor socialization. People were “trying to find solace in these parks,” he says–activity on trails went up. 

Previous research into pandemic impacts on wildlife has used broadscale measures of human activity, like regional lockdown protocols, to infer how peoples’ behavior changed–but the new research highlights the importance of concrete and specific monitoring data. 

Yet even in locations where human activity did decline, mammal activity did not uniformly increase. “What animals were doing in response to people was super variable, that surprised us a bit,” Burton says. Amid the variation, the researchers found trends. Larger carnivores were more sensitive to human presence, so where human activity was higher, the cameras captured fewer big meat-eating animals like wolves and wolverines. In more urbanized areas or places heavily frequented by people, some of these larger carnivores disappeared entirely. But conversely, large herbivores boosted their activity alongside humans. The former effect could potentially be causing the latter, says Burton: It’s possible that humans offer herbivores a protective shield from their predators, scaring off the carnivores that the prey animals would otherwise have to avoid. 

Another finding was that animals’ responses to changes in human activity were location- and time-specific. In wilder places, animals appeared warier of people and were more likely to retreat when human activity ticked up. In more developed landscapes, animals seemed more habituated to people, and often either didn’t shift their activity level with humans or became more active alongside people. Though the scientists can’t say for sure why this was the case, Burton says one potential hypothesis is that, in more developed areas, wildlife may be taking advantage of human resources by, say, scouring trash cans for food. But he also highlights a possible competing theory: Maybe, where humans and development are more prevalent, other species have to work harder to access resources, traveling farther and appearing more active on camera. The new research, he notes, highlights that far more work is needed to uncover the why behind their observations. “There’s probably lots of different underlying stories about each different area and species.” Until further analysis is done, those stories will remain obscured. 

 Covid’s lessons for conservation

Already the study is offering hints. In some instances, the camera trap data showed that higher human activity led animals to become more nocturnal, increasing their nighttime activity–bolstering previous research findings that co-existing among people shifts many mammals’ schedules. “We think this is an adaptation that allows animals to share spaces with humans, while minimizing negative encounters,” Burton says. 

In a way, it’s evidence of how animals and humans can, theoretically, achieve harmony. Other species are “working hard to coexist with us, in ways that aren’t always obvious,” he explains. Perhaps, if humans take that into account, and begin meeting other mammals in the middle, nature could truly begin healing. 

Burton hopes the global, yet specific findings will help inform and improve conservation efforts. “We might need to think about different types of management in different contexts,” he notes. Perhaps in more remote settings, park managers could use the new study to support permitting, strategic closures, or other efforts that minimize peoples’ presence. In more urban areas, conservation efforts could focus more on reducing nighttime light and noise pollution, to offer wildlife some nightly refuge. “There’s a lot of nuance,” Burton says. “We have to be humble about that as we’re trying to manage our own impact.”

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Any good dentist would tell you that oral health starts with brushing teeth. It’s a habit ingrained in us since early childhood, and as adults, the routine hasn’t changed much. Add a pea-sized amount of toothpaste and gently brush in soft circles for at least two minutes. It’s the two minutes after brushing that’s stirring up discussion on TikTok. 

Many people rinse their mouths after brushing their teeth, but some TikTokers argue it’s healthier to only spit out the excess toothpaste. By not rinsing, they claim, you would allow the toothpaste’s ingredients to exert their effects for longer. 

Though TikTok hasn’t always been the most reliable source for dental news—remember when people were giving DIY advice on how to file down teeth—this information is an exception, and something the dentists PopSci spoke to support.

First, let’s consider why we brush our teeth. Dr. Kacie Woodis, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry, says that when we eat, so do the approximately 1,000 species of bacteria living in our mouths. These microbes have a strange way of thanking us for the meal. Some bacteria in the back of the tongue, for example, interact with amino acids from the food, producing sulfur-producing compounds that cause bad breath. Other bacterial species produce an acid that can break down minerals and dissolve a tooth’s surface, starting cavity formation. 

[Related: The best cheap electric toothbrushes]

Fluoride, a mineral found in most toothpastes, builds resistance against acid attacks. It does so by aiding in a repair process called remineralization. 

“Fluoride counteracts the demineralization process by partnering with calcium and phosphate to form fluorapatite,” explains Dr. Fatima Khan, a dentist and cofounder of Riven Oral Care in Texas. “Fluorapatite is a crystalline lattice that covers the enamel to remineralize it and restore its integrity.” The longer fluoride sits on your teeth, the more effective it is at creating stronger teeth (so long as you’re only using the recommended pea-size amount of toothpaste to brush). 

The American Dental Association recommends brushing for a full two minutes. However, most people brush for less than the recommended time, for about 45 to 70 seconds a day. Brushing less than two minutes means people are not getting the benefits of fluoride toothpaste, says Khan. 

Spitting instead of rinsing toothpaste gives fluoride more time to assist with the remineralization process—especially since tooth enamel cannot grow back once it is completely destroyed. Woodis recommends everyone spit instead of rinse, especially among people at high risk for cavities. “We’ll prescribe an extra-strength fluoride toothpaste, and we often recommend that people spit and not rinse that prescription toothpaste.”

If you’re a mouth rinser, spitting may not sound the most hygienic. You might imagine loose bacteria and food still trapped in your mouth. If that’s the case, Khan says to floss first and then rinse your mouth with water. This would flush out any residual food and plaque buildup prior to brushing your teeth. 

Another concern is residual charcoal on teeth if using charcoal toothpaste. Both Woodis and Khan warn against using charcoal-based toothpaste in the first place. The material is too abrasive and can strip away tooth enamel, eventually turning teeth yellow.

Some people rinse their mouths for medical reasons. People sensitive to sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), another common ingredient in toothpaste, can produce canker sores and skin peeling inside the mouth when exposed to it for a prolonged time. Additionally, some people may develop a rash around their mouth called perioral dermatitis from fluoride, SLS, and cinnamon flavorings in toothpaste. Khan says these folks should switch to a natural toothpaste containing hydroxyapatite and wash their face after brushing to wipe off any excess paste.

If you still want to rinse your mouth, Woodis advises delaying it for 20 to 30 minutes to maximize fluoride’s effects. Even if you wanted to rinse with a fluoride-based mouthwash, she says it would be better to wait instead of immediately rinsing since it has a lower fluoride concentration. She says most over-the-counter toothpaste has a fluoride content of around 1000 to 1500 parts per million, whereas most fluoride mouthrinses are usually 100 to 200 parts per million.

The bottom line is the choice is up to you whether you want to spit or rinse after brushing. Your dentist will probably not hold it against you at your next appointment. Although they might raise an eyebrow if you tell them you’re getting dental information from social media. 

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Space travel is certainly not for the faint of heart, for many reasons including its effects on physical health. It can potentially disturb human immune systems and increase red blood cell death. Astronauts can even suffer from bone loss during missions. It could also increase headaches. Astronauts with no prior history of headaches may experience migraine and tension-type headaches during long-haul space flights–over 10 days in space. The findings are detailed in a study published March 13 in the journal Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

“Changes in gravity caused by space flight affect the function of many parts of the body, including the brain,” W. P. J. van Oosterhout, study co-author and a neurologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, said in a statement. “The vestibular system, which affects balance and posture, has to adapt to the conflict between the signals it is expecting to receive and the actual signals it receives in the absence of normal gravity.”

[Related: 5 space robots that could heal human bodies—or even grow new ones.]

The study looked at 24 astronauts from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). All of the astronauts were assigned to International Space Station expeditions for up to 26 weeks from November 2011 to June 2018. Combined, the astronauts studied spent a total of 3,596 days in space. 

The astronauts all completed health screenings and a questionnaire about individual headache history before their space flight flight. Nine of them reported never having any headaches prior to the study, with three reporting a headache that interfered with their daily activities within the last year. None of the astronauts had a history of recurrent headaches or had a migraine diagnosis. 

During space flight, they filled out a daily questionnaire for the first seven days and a weekly questionnaire each following week throughout their stay in the International Space Station. The astronauts reported 378 headaches during their combined days in space. 

The study found that 92 percent of the astronauts surveyed experienced headaches during space flight, compared to just 38 percent who reported experiencing headaches in the two to six months before going into space. Twenty-two of the 24 astronauts studied also experienced one or more headache episodes during their first week in space. About 89 percent of these headaches were tension headaches and 10 percent were likely a migraine. Headaches were also of a higher intensity and more likely to be like a migraine during the first week of space flight. 

According to van Oosterhout, the changes to the brain’s balance and posture system, combined with adjusting to zero gravity during the first week of space flight, “can lead to space motion sickness in the first week, of which headache is the most frequently reported symptom. Our study shows that headaches also occur later in space flight and could be related to an increase in pressure within the skull.” 

[Related: Why space lettuce could be the pharmacy astronauts need.]

The astronauts were monitored after returning back to Earth and none of them reported any headaches in the three months after returning home. 

One of the study’s limitations is that it relied on self-reporting of symptoms, so the memory recall may not have been fully accurate. It also didn’t say that going into space causes headaches, only shows an association. 

“Further research is needed to unravel the underlying causes of space headache and explore how such discoveries may provide insights into headaches occurring on Earth,” said van Oosterhout. “Also, more effective therapies need to be developed to combat space headaches as for many astronauts this [is] a major problem during space flights.”

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