Weekend Reads 3/3/18

What Facebook, Google and Twitter Owe America

Facebook, Google and Twitter were used to spread false, wildly misleading and vicious messages from Russian operatives. And Americans did not know until after the 2016 election that Russians were responsible for these distorting, campaign-related communications. The tech companies are now fully on notice about the essential role their platforms played in the Russian intervention.

The Key to Weight Loss Is Diet Quality, Not Quantity, a New Study Finds

The new study stands apart from many previous weight-loss trials because it did not set extremely restrictive carbohydrate, fat or caloric limits on people and emphasized that they focus on eating whole or “real” foods — as much as they needed to avoid feeling hungry.

Scientists Reverse Alzheimer’s Disease In Mice

The team found that the mice engineered to gradually lose BACE1 saw their amyloid plaque melt away. At the 10-month benchmark, the mice had no residual amyloid plaque left in their brains.

However, the study makes no claim of such success in humans. In fact, scientists have cured Alzheimer’s disease before in mice without replicating the results in patients. Instead, the hope lies in pointing researchers to drugs that could mimic a similar process in humans.

Green Science’s White People Problem

Amid the flood of research abstracts, images, and data, one graphic caught his eye. Colored in blue hues, a map from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention depicted asthma prevalence among Latinos in the United States. A quick glance seemed to tell a simple tale: Latinos in New York, Massachusetts, and other northeastern states experienced asthma at significantly higher rates than Latinos living in other parts of the country.