The birth control pill was first approved in 1960 in the US and 1961 in Finland, at the beginning of a huge drop in fertility rates for both countries:

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/fertility-rate

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fin/finland/fertility-rate

That drop alone brought the US down to about the current total fertility rate: 1960 (3.65), 1973 (1.88), 2024 (1.79). The drop from 2007 (2.12) until now is pretty minor in comparison. I of course won't say that birth control is the only thing that changed in the '60s: a lot of other factors starting converging then as well.

Overall I think the biggest contributor to the drop has been in unintended pregnancies: rates dropped the furthest in teenagers up to age 24. Most people, rich or poor, when they have a real choice, choose to 1, wait to have kids, 2, have fewer of them.

Your link shows a good correlation in non-OECD countries. Among OECD countries (Finland is one) not so much.

Could people please have third party objective tests run on their ouija boards before launching them as a service?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Criticism

That assumes the amount of revenue generated by the product isn't affected by advertising, but in reality in the US (though the intersection of those two sets seems to keep shrinking every day) drug revenue is strongly tied to advertising. Ads get people to go to the doctor about a condition sooner rather than later, they also get people to refill prescriptions sooner rather than later. And those increases in revenue happen immediately. On the other hand money spent on early stage research today won't even begin to generate revenue during the current CEO's tenure, and so should be avoided if at all possible.

One of the purposes of using mouse models is to study a problem in the simplest and cheapest scenario. Once a proof of principle is established, it makes sense to explore the boundaries of how far that principle can be extended. At any rate, they ran the experiments in C57BL/6J, C57BL/6 and a B6;129 cross. Which mouse lines do you think they should try in the future? Should they run those experiments before they look at mouse models of Alzheimers, FTD, and Parkinsons?

Which experiment lacked a control? https://www.nature.com/article...

This sort of stuff isn't in his crosshairs; it's also catnip for aging billionaires. The real risk will be pressure to approve drugs based on this research that have very little evidence of actually providing a real benefit but do have severe side effects, like the recent crop of Alzheimer's drugs (Aduhelm, leqembi, Kisunla)

The post leads off with:

This (and 2.2 g/kg) are the levels of consumption that people have been recommending which Topol is addressing in the article.

Dripdry's comment:

The post does also mention the recommendation of 0.8 g/kg/day from the National Academy of Medicine, but whatever lets try the math again with 0.6 g/kg:

For someone to be eating 560 grams of protein a day at a rate of 0.6 g/kg, they would have to weigh 933 kg.

TL;DR: There is limited evidence for eating up to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily for increasing muscle mass IF you are younger than middle age and doing a lot of resistance training, but the upper limit of usefulness might actually be lower than 1.6. There is also evidence that eating too much protein increases the risk of atherosclerosis. It's not clear where the threshold for increased risk is; it is probably between 1 and 1.6 g/kg. Meanwhile the protein influencer and supplement industry is pushing levels of 2.2 g/kg.

At 56 g protein per chicken breast, that's 560g. At the discussed level of intake (1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily,) you are talking about someone who weighs 350 kg.

Move fast and break things ... laws ... people

They're only going to accelerate to ~1% of the speed of light (400 year trip!), so they'll "only" need 4.5 million tons of Helium-3 and Deuterium.

What happens when the first generation of kids comes of age, notices they never gave consent to be confined to a ship for their entire lives, and decides to turn around? And about that 40 year trip. Bear in mind this math is for a 2000 kg ship, 1 billionth the size of the proposed one:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html

The one way trip requires 4.5 million tons of He3 and Deuterium, they'd need to either bring more than double that or find it there, and also remanufacture most of the 2.4 billion ton ship to bring it back to spec for the trip back. Actually though, I'm surprised at how llitle fuel they need for the trip.

One of the companies that makes the most by selling HIV treatments (Gilead) made their biggest profits and biggest stock market gains by curing Hepatitis C.

Big pharma companies would love to invent more cures: who wouldn't want to own the entire market for a disease instead of having to compete with other treatments? But cures are typically much more difficult to develop, and in many cases will have to be tailored to individual patients. We're really only beginning to have the level of sophistication necessary to do this.