“7 stories to know” is a new Monday series showcasing stories that may have been ignored in the crush of news over the past few weeks, and stories that have continued to evolve over the weekend. Expect to read coverage about health, science, and climate that frequently take second chair to what’s happening at the top of the page, plus information from local sources that the national media may have overlooked.
1. Secretary Pete Buttigieg announces big changes to protect airline travelers
The Department of Transportation issued new rules last week that address many of the fees, delays, and indignities that make airline travel so unpleasant.
Passengers should expect cash payments for cancellations, long flight delays, flights diverted to another airport, added connections, being bumped down a service class, luggage that doesn’t show up when it should, services like in-flight WiFi that don’t work, or finding that flights don’t meet standards for accessibility.
If airlines have to hand over cash for these things, maybe they’ll stop doing them as a matter of awful routine.
In addition to making airlines pay for these common mistakes, consumers are also now protected from several junk fees, mostly by forcing airlines to be honest about their pricing, rather than advertising a low ticket price while hiding a list of mandatory fees. The Biden administration expects these new rules to result in consumer savings of $500 million a year.
And maybe they’ll make it less likely that your next flight to Boston ends up being diverted to Newark, or that rolling away from the jetway isn’t followed by six hours of staring through the window at the tarmac.
The new transportation policies fit in with President Joe Biden’s bigger fight against junk fees that plague consumers. Whether its banks imposing unreasonable fees on day-to-day actions, or cable and phone providers tacking on whole lists of fees that were not part of the advertised price, Biden has been on a tear when it comes to saving consumers money and giving them more honest information.
The next time someone calculates inflation, they need to work that in. Because if the real cost of living includes hidden fees, there’s less money left for everything else.
2. Microplastics are everywhere, and we don’t know what they do to our health
It’s hard to go a week without a story about microplastics. These tiny bits of former bags, packages, and a million low-cost goods are in the oceans. They’re in the soil. They’re in the air we breathe and the food we eat. So it should come as no surprise that they’re also in us.
As a study in Nature Medicine makes clear, we don’t know what these plastics are doing to us. But we have good reasons to suspect that they are causing extensive damage.
The biological effects of MNPs have been researched for decades, mainly in studies of laboratory rodents and human cells. In rodent studies, microplastics have been shown to have detrimental effects on a wide variety of organs, including the intestine, lungs and liver, as well as the reproductive and nervous systems. More recently, MNPs have been found in a variety of tissues and organs in humans, including blood, lungs, placenta and breast milk.
Is the glut of microplastic the reason more young people are getting cancer? We don’t know. Is it behind a multi-decade increase in chronic health conditions among children and infants? We don’t know. Studies have linked these plastic bits to an increased chance of heart attack, infertility, and inflammatory bowel disease.
As is becoming increasingly clear, most plastic recycling is little short of a sham. Polls have shown that a large majority of Americans support actions to reduce single-use plastic. It shouldn’t be necessary to wait until we know all the ways plastic is killing us and damaging the planet before we move on this issue.
3. Georgia jumps in to fight unions after major vote in Tennessee
It’s been just over a week since workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted overwhelmingly to unionize. It’s a thrilling and historic result, chipping away at decades spent reducing the power of labor and breaking a metaphorical wall that had existed around southern auto plants.
That display of union power clearly has Republicans and their business daddies worried.
Last week, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law to repress new unions in that state. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the law cuts any company that voluntarily recognizes a union out of participation in many large state contracts.
The new law followed a statement from Kemp, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, and four other southern governors, issued the day before the vote at the Volkswagen factory, warning workers that their jobs were in trouble if they voted for a union.
“The UAW has come in making big promises to our constituents that they can’t deliver on. And we have serious reservations that the UAW leadership can represent our values,” reads the statement.
What those values might be isn’t clear. Apparently, they don’t include the massive pay increases, improved job security, and elimination of a system where younger workers were paid less for doing the same job that were part of the new UAW contract.
If Republican governors think they’re going to threaten workers into silence, they may have to find new things to say. Earlier this month, Mercedes workers at a plant in Alabama also called for a union vote.
4. The hot, dry summer ahead for almost everyone in the United States
For those who live in the southeast corner of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, there’s some cool weather ahead this summer. For the rest of America, it’s just a matter of how much hotter than normal it’s going to be.
Outside that small portion of Alaska, there’s no other area of the U.S. where the forecast calls for cooler-than-normal temperatures over the summer. A tiny slice of the upper Midwest may see temperatures close to normal. Everywhere else, the forecast calls for sweat. That’s especially true for the Mountain West and New England regions, where the likelihood of a long, baking summer is the greatest.
Out in the Pacific, the powerful El Niño event is finally dying away, and it’s expected to be replaced by cooler La Niña currents. However, perverse as it may seem, that’s likely to make things even hotter in much of the U.S.
5. Chronic wasting disease may be connected to fatal CJD in humans
Wild deer in the United States began exhibiting signs of chronic wasting disease in the 1960s. Affected animals are marked out by a loss in weight and by what seems to be a general level of confusion. Affected deer are often found away from their herds, not because they’ve been kicked out, but because they wander away and stop responding to social cues from other deer. These deer can also demonstrate a decreased fear of humans, making them more likely to be harvested by hunters. Without rigorous screening, deer with wasting disease may be more likely than uninfected deer to end up on someone’s plate.
And here’s the really scary part: Chronic wasting disease is a prion disorder. If that doesn’t sound familiar, think kuru. Think Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Think mad cow. All of these are diseases caused by the tiny misfolded proteins known as prions, and all of them have roughly the same symptoms: trembling or jerky motion, blurred vision, confusion, hallucinations, dementia, and death.
Many places have adopted rigorous screening and standards for cleaning equipment between the processing of each deer. But there hasn’t been absolute certainty about just how great the risk may be, especially since prion diseases can take years, or even decades, to develop.
But this report in Neurology Journals certainly doesn’t look encouraging.
In 2022, a 72-year-old man with a history of consuming meat from a CWD-infected deer population presented with rapid-onset confusion and aggression. His friend, who had also eaten venison from the same deer population, recently died of CJD, raising concerns about a potential link between CWD and human prion disease. Despite aggressive symptomatic treatment of seizures and agitation, the patient’s condition deteriorated and he died within a month of initial presentation.
6. Restoring eyesight with a cyberpunk combo of hardware and epigenetics
Retinitis pigmentosa affects millions of people worldwide. It’s a genetic condition that often causes gradual loss of vision, starting with a decrease of peripheral vision, and can sometimes lead to near-total blindness.
Treatment has proven difficult to develop, in part because the disease is really a group of diseases, with more than 100 genes suspected to be involved. The Washington Post reports that some of those most badly affected are now getting relief through some novel therapies including gene therapy. But it’s not just gene therapy, and it’s not just one company.
All are basing their work on a research tool in neuroscience called optogenetics, a form of gene therapy that delivers proteins called opsins via injection into the eye to boost the light sensitivity of cells in the retina, the layer of tissue at the rear of the eyeball. …
The second element is a pair of frameless glasses, similar in size and shape to regular prescription glasses, that contain miniature infrared cameras and inductive power coils.
This is one case where you really need to go look at the article because without the pictures, it’s difficult to understand what they’re doing. And with the pictures, it’s just bonkers.
7. The “HoloTile” may be Disney’s next big thing
If you’ve ever watched any video on tech—from cell phones to electric cars to virtual reality—there’s a good chance you’ve run into YouTuber Marques Brownlee. In fact, Brownlee has become so much the upbeat, engaging face of tech that he sometimes seems to exist only to make everyone else jealous over all the gear he gets to play with.
That’s certainly true this week. Because how are we ever going to have a holodeck without some HoloTiles?
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