Case Report: Took 500mg of Potassium and all my melancholy instantly transmuted into rage. What’s the limit on how much of this shit you can take???

Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record – You may have seen the videos where a chimp does amazingly well on a number task, suggesting that chimps have better working memory than humans. But this is probably not true. The chimp in the video does so well because he has had a huge amount of practice. When you give humans a similar amount of practice, they do about as well. A reminder to in general trust primatology findings less than you might otherwise.

Chimps can learn karate, though.

In one study of lithium in urine samples, urine lithium was positively associated with TSH, and high levels of TSH can be a sign of thyroid dysfunction. The authors conclude, “Exposure to lithium via drinking water and other environmental sources may affect thyroid function, consistent with known side effects of medical treatment with lithium.” Jandrade0112 on twitter says, 

to my eyeballing this looks like thyroid inhibiting effects don’t really kick in until urinary excretion > 5 mg/L, which is roughly 5 mg daily lithium intake

r/Biohackers claims about baking soda

He secretly changed this freeway sign, helped millions of drivers. Top YouTube comment: 

In 2001, a friend and I had gotten so tired of a massive pot hole in Seattle that we went and got some vests and bags of asphalt and fixed it ourselves. We didn’t live near it, but hung out down there almost daily and hated driving over it. People in the neighborhood asked if we were from the city, and we said no. People clapped, and one brought us iced tea. A city bus came by as we were finishing and was so happy he drove over it, backed up, and drove over it several times to pack it in. I drove by it earlier today for work, and our patch still holds.

Ellen Airhart ran fireproof envelopes through a charcoal grill to test how well they protect paper. Verdict: they don’t work at all. Not a single one, even though they were tested at only about 400 °F,  less than a quarter of the minimum temperature the envelopes were certified for.

How giant ‘water batteries’ could make green power reliable

China rocked by cooking oil contamination scandal (h/t RedTailTabby on twitter)

The Chinese government says it will investigate allegations that fuel tankers have been used to transport cooking oil after carrying toxic chemicals without being cleaned properly between loads. … Transporting cooking oil in contaminated fuel trucks was said to have been so widespread it was considered an “open secret” in the industry, according to one driver quoted by the newspaper.

Kamala Holding Vinyls

Disappearing polymorph 

The original medication was manufactured in the form of semisolid gel capsules, based on the only known crystal form of the drug (“Form I”). In 1998, however, a second crystal form (“Form Il”) was unexpectedly discovered. It had significantly lower solubility and was not medically effective. 

Form Il was of sufficiently lower energy that it became impossible to produce Form I in any laboratory where Form Il was introduced, even indirectly. Scientists who had been exposed to Form Il in the past seemingly contaminated entire manufacturing plants by their presence, probably because they carried over microscopic seed crystals of the new polymorph.

KineStop is an app that draws an artificial horizon on your phone or tablet to keep you from getting motion sick while reading in the car. Zed (@zmkzmkz) on twitter says, “it looks silly but trust me it’s magic”

Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine

I burn 4,600kcal/day being sedentary – ExFatLoss finds weird results using doubly-labeled water. Definitely keep this one in mind when you see other claims based on methods using doubly-labeled water (e.g. this one that has been going around recently).

Doubly-labeled water is allegedly the Gold Standard ™ test for energy expenditure. It’s what Herman Pontzer and John Speakman have built careers on. It’s apparently so precise it’s used to calibrate all the other tests, basically gospel. So what gives?

Real Chaos, Today!

The first, obvious issue [with RCTs] is that external validity is weak: there’s no real way to verify whether a study generalizes besides its application. This comes from a series of issues, primarily that transporting the results is mostly done based on “faith”. Also, the internal validity of the study is usually in question too: basically, the results for the population are too heterogenous to be both precise (i.e. capturing properly the value of the effect) without being unbiased (affected by “noise”, so to say). And even when the average effect of a treatment is correctly identified, it is never guaranteed that the average effect is the most relevant statistic.