Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 167

The case for nationalizing Elon Musk

(Credit: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

On Tuesday, Elon Musk launched some stuff into space. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket was shot into the Solar System, tailed by a Tesla Roadster blasting David Bowie songs, reportedly the fastest car ever to be released into orbit. Each Falcon launch is only expected to cost around $90 million — a bargain in the world of extraterrestrial exploration.

Scientific American gawked, “Elon Musk Does It Again,” praising the “bold technological innovations and newfound operational efficiencies that allow SpaceX to not only build its rockets for less money, but also reuse them.” That view — shared by several other outlets — fits comfortably with the Tony Stark-like image Musk has crafted for himself over the years: a quirky and slightly off-kilter playboy genius inventor capable of conquering everything from outer space to the climate crisis with the sheer force of his imagination.

One of Musk’s long-term goals is to create a self-sustaining colony on Mars, and make humanity an interplanetary species. He hopes to shoot two very wealthy people around the moon at some point this year. Musk has invested an awful lot of public money into making those dreams a reality. But why should Americans keep footing the bill for projects where only Musk and his wealthy friends can reap the rewards? Enter: the case for nationalizing Elon Musk, and making the U.S. government a major stakeholder in his companies.

The common logic now holds that the private sector — and prodigies like Musk, in particular — are better at coming up with world-changing ideas than the public sector, which is allegedly bloated and allergic to new, outside-the-box thinking. Corporations’ hunt for profits and lack of bureaucratic constraints, it’s said, compel cutting-edge research and development in a way that the government is simply incapable of. With any hope, more of these billionaires’ breakthroughs than not will be in the public interest.

The reality, as economist Mariana Mazzucato argues in her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, is very different. Many of the companies that are today considered to be headed by brilliant savants — people like Steve Jobs and, yes, Elon Musk — owe much of their success to decades of public sector innovation, through repackaging technologies developed over the course of several decades into new products. Take the iPhone, essentially a collection of Defense Department research and National Science Foundation-grant projects packed into one shiny machine.

“The prospect of the State owning a stake in a private corporation may be anathema to many parts of the capitalist world,” Mazzucato writes, “but given that governments are already investing in the private sector, they may as well earn a return on those investments.”

As she notes, Musk’s future-oriented empire — Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX — has benefitted from around $5 billion in local, state and federal government support, not to mention many years of foundational public research into programs like rocket technology. SpaceX itself exists largely for the sake of competing for government contracts, like its $5.5 billion partnership with NASA and the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Department of Energy invested directly in that company, as well as in Tesla’s work on battery technology and solar panels. The latter is perhaps the biggest success story of the Department of Energy stimulus grant that also supported Solyndra, a solar energy company reliably held up by the Right as an example of the government’s failure to make wise investment decisions. “Taxpayers footed the bill for Solyndra’s losses — yet got hardly any of Tesla’s profits,” Mazzucato notes.

As Mazzucato finds, the private sector hasn’t done much to earn its reputation as a risk-taker. Corporations and venture capitalists often adopt conservative thinking and fall into “path dependency,” and are generally reluctant to invest in important early-stage research that won’t necessarily turn a profit in the short-run. This kind of research is inherently risky, and the vast majority of this kind of protean R&D (research and development) fails. For every internet — birthed in the Defense Department — there are a well over a dozen Solyndras, but it’s virtually impossible to have one without the other.

The problem runs deeper still. Whereas in the past public sector research has been able to attract top-tier talent, the myth that the private sector can do what the State can’t has created a negative feedback loop whereby bright young scientists and engineers flock toward a private sector that goes on to further its reputation for being the place where the real innovation is happening.

The alternative Mazzucato suggests is to socialize risk and reward alike, rather than simply allowing companies that enjoy the benefits of public innovation to funnel their profits into things like stock buybacks and tax havens — or, for that matter, flamethrowers. When companies like SpaceX make it big, they’d be obligated to return some portion of their gains to the public infrastructure that helped them succeed, expanding the government’s capacity to facilitate more innovative development.

All this is not to say that there isn’t a critical role to play for people like Jobs and Musk in bringing new technology to the market. In all likelihood, Tesla’s Powerwall and SolarCity panels will play a key role in our transition off of fossil fuels. But lionizing Musk as the sole creator of the Powerwall and this week’s space launch stands to perpetuate a dangerous series of myths about who’s responsible for such cutting-edge development. Through smart supply-and-demand-side policy, states can play a crucial role in shaping and creating markets for the technologies we’ll need to navigate the 21st century. This can happen not just through R&D but also through developments like fuel efficiency standards, which encourage carmakers to prioritize vehicles that run off of renewable energy.

Given the mounting reality of climate change and the necessity to rapidly switch over to a clean energy economy, there’s also a bigger question about how actively the state should be encouraging certain kinds of research and manufacturing. During World War II, the United States essentially had a planned economy: By 1945, around a quarter of manufacturing in the country was under state control. The reason for that was simple — the U.S. government saw an existential threat, and directed some of its biggest corporations to pitch in to stop it or else risk getting taken over by the state.

There’s some Cold War nostalgia to hoisting shiny objects into orbit — a telegenic show of America’s technological supremacy. But it may not be much solace to coastal residents forced to flee in the coming decades, whose homes are rendered unlivable by a mixture of extreme weather and crumbling, antiquated infrastructure. And if you’ve watched any number of big-budget sci-fi productions over the last several years, it’s not hard to imagine Musk’s Martian colony spinning off into some Elysium-style eco-apartheid, where the rich — for the right price — can escape to new worlds while the rest of us make do on a planet of dystopian slums, swamps and deserts.

Today, the risk posed by climate change is greater still than that posed by fascism on the eve of World War II, threatening to bring about a planet that’s uninhabitable for humans, and plenty hostile to them in the meantime. In such a context, do we need to launch cars into space? Maybe not. If the public sector is going to continue footing the bill for Elon Musk’s fantasies, though, he should at least have to give back some credit, and a cut of the profits.

Go figure: Why Olympic ice skaters don’t fall flat on their faces

(Credit: AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File)

Watching a fellow human jump into the air, spin three times and land on a thin piece of steel — all the while balancing on slippery ice — is an awe-inspiring experience.

Figure skaters execute their routines so elegantly, they make it look easy — an illusion that quickly dissolves with our own trepid first step in an ice rink. Clinging to the side walls for dear life, feet stinging from the awkward display of ice walking, first-time ice skaters can barely skate in a straight line, let alone balance on one foot. Although it may seem Olympic figure skaters have befriended the ice gods and coaxed the laws of physics to work in their favor, what they have really done is rewire their brains to suppress their reflexes.

If one tilts one’s head backward far enough, the body’s reflexes will kick in. Neurons that are responsible for firing when the brain senses the body is off-balance will set off a cascade of signals from the inner ear to the brain stem, then to the spinal cord and finally to the muscles that tell the body to lurch forward for the save. In sports like figure skating, the body is frequently in such unlikely positions. So how do skaters convince their brains that it’s totally okay the body is halfway to a face-plant?

According to researchers, practice can lead to new maps of neurons in the cerebellum, an area in the back of the brain. So when the skater moves into a position anticipated by the cerebellum, it fires neurons to cancel out reflex signals that would interfere with the desired movement. If someone is slipping on ice and someone else is deliberately jumping, “they might be moving through the world in exactly the same way,” says Kathleen Cullen, a neuroscientist at John Hopkins University who in 2015 showed this brain mechanism in an experiment with monkeys. In one case, you want your reflexes to work; in the other, you don’t. The brain learns to quell reflexes when there’s a match between what it expects and what actually happens, she says.

Skaters are also masters at avoiding dizziness. Here again, their brains have learned to subdue a reflex — this time in the eyes. As we move about the world, our eyes automatically move to compensate for slight head movements so we can stare at the same point in space. Normally, if we spin around in an office chair and suddenly stop, we feel like we’re still moving. That’s because fluid in the inner ear responsible for detecting movement continues to whirl around due to inertia, making your brain think it’s still in motion. Because your eyes continue moving to correct your view, you feel dizzy. According to Cullen, what a skater’s brain learns to do — through a similar mechanism in the cerebellum — is to ignore the false sense of motion at the end of a spin and greatly reduce that eye reflex.

Training the brain takes time, and that’s why “it’s only practice that makes perfect,” says Rui Costa, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute who also studies the neuroscience of movement. When you look at how seamless most of these routines are, he says, “I mean, it’s just amazing.” For proof that the brain is continuously working and calibrating itself to help the body adapt to new motions and environments, just step out of the rink after some time skating. The ground will feel weird, as if your brain expects it to be made of ice.

What happens when a driver kills someone while on their phones?

(Credit: Rouzes via iStock)

The victims include a Bible college student in Iowa who was bicycling home from work, a 13-year-old Michigan boy riding in his older sister’s car and a Minnesota school bus driver picking up the morning newspaper in front of his home.

All were killed in recent years by distracted drivers who had been texting or looking at their GPS. Yet none of the drivers responsible for those deaths spent more than a few days behind bars.

Although there are no national statistics on the results of prosecutions brought against distracted drivers who kill or severely injure someone, light punishment appears to be the norm. An informal review by FairWarning of prosecutions of distracted drivers — cases gleaned from news reports over the last five years that involved more than 100 deaths overall — found that few were sentenced to serve for more than a month or two, or given fines of more than $1,000.

To combat distracted driving deaths, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last May published a 24-page guide outlining the best methods to win convictions. It was prepared by a team of eight prosecutors, police officers and traffic safety specialists from across the nation.

“Sending or reading a text message can take the driver’s eyes off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds,” the publication said. “At 55 miles per hour …. the vehicle will travel the length of a football field without any visual guidance.”

Safety advocates and researchers say tougher penalties alone aren’t likely to get drivers to put down their phones. But as with drunk driving a generation ago, they say, stiffer penalties could reduce the reckless behavior, if the tougher punishment is combined with education programs, peer pressure and technology that can disable motorists’ wireless devices while they are driving.

For example, Christopher Kutz, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor, thinks that ”very well-publicized homicide prosecutions” could have a strong deterrent effect. Yet he also believes that technology to prevent drivers from using their smartphones or other devices is essential. “There’s a particular problem with distracted driving — the design of the device is to encourage distraction,” he said. “They’re built with addiction as a feature, not a bug.”

“Part of the challenge,” said Jay Winsten, associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, “is that there is no stigma connected or associated with a distracted driving offense. There’s no shame.”

He added: “I’m at a reception or cocktail party and someone asks, what are you working on and I say distracted driving and they’re more likely than not to say, ‘Yeah, I’m probably one of the worst offenders.’”

Public attitudes tended to be similarly blasé toward drunk driving until the 1980s. “People would joke about how drunk they were when driving,” Winsten recalled. But then the newly formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving stepped in and drew widespread attention to the deadly problem. By swaying public opinion, MADD helped win tougher legal sanctions, higher drinking ages in some states and highlighted such alternatives as designated drivers.

Nearly one-third of drivers between the ages of 18 and 64 read or send text or email messages while at the wheel, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Distracted driving causes almost 3,500 deaths and 400,000 injuries a year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says. In 2015, the agency estimated that nearly 500 deaths involved the use of cellphones, but experts consider that figure very low since the federal database relies on often incomplete information in police reports. Along with using wireless devices, other distractions — such as eating while driving — also figure in some of these crashes.

“This is so prevalent and so very dangerous,” said Amy J. Freedheim, a prosecutor in Seattle for King County, Wash., who co-authored the NHTSA prosecution guide. “We’ve got to address it — we can’t afford not to.”

“All it takes is just a moment of drift and you’ve altered your life and you’ve ended somebody else’s life.”

Jay Winsten, associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, said part of the challenge in dealing with distracted driving is that “there’s no shame” associated with the offense.

The NHTSA guide encourages police to consider using specialized evidence bags for cellphones to preserve their data and reduce the chance that the information would be lost due to outside interference or static electricity.

It also advises police to demand electronic records from wireless providers, who typically won’t release them without a subpoena, and get statements from witnesses and the suspect driver. “The early interview may reduce the opportunity to fabricate or conspire with others,” the manual noted.

Yet no matter how thorough the criminal investigation, experts say that distracted driving is a far tougher nut to crack than drunk driving — and not just because it is more difficult to prove a motorist was texting at the moment of a crash than to demonstrate, with the black-and-white results of a field sobriety test and breathalyzer or blood test, that a driver was intoxicated. Only in the rare case of an eyewitness report or admission by a motorist will police know that a cellphone was involved.

For one thing, more people use wireless devices day-in and day-out, often minute-by-minute. Tweeting, texting and posting are hard habits to break — even for someone in the driver seat.

Winning tougher sanctions also requires some legislators, litigators, judges and juries to ignore their own behavior. As Harvard’s Winsten put it: “There but for the grace of God go I – am I really prepared to send someone to jail?”

Freedheim conceded that tough sanctions will remain difficult to win unless public perception changes.

Most people “are getting the message that texting and driving is injurious,” she said. “But everybody thinks they are the safe person.”

In a particularly horrific case, manslaughter and other charges are pending against Jack Dillon Young, 21. Police say he was texting and on prescription drugs last March 29 when he drove his pickup truck across the center line of a rural road in South Texas and smashed into a church bus, killing 13 people. He has pleaded not guilty.

Most prosecutions that lead to prison sentences, the FairWarning review showed, involved at least one additional illegal act. Those included drinking, drug-taking or the use of a hand-held phone while driving a commercial truck, a practice outlawed by federal transportation authorities.

Perhaps the stiffest sentence in recent years was meted out to Frank Rychtik. The Wisconsin dump truck driver pleaded no contest to killing Minnesota motorist Jason Songer, 29, and seriously injuring two others in 2014. He is serving 16 years in prison.

Rychtik had been drinking the previous evening and his blood alcohol level remained above .04 when he slammed into several vehicles that had come to a halt ahead of him on Interstate 90 near La Crosse, Wis. At the time, he acknowledged, he was looking down at a Facebook post and failed to notice the stoppage.

“Life can change in that second it takes you to look at your phone,” he reflected in a prison interview with Fox 9 News in Minneapolis early last year.

“I just wish I could go back and re-wake up that morning and not get into that truck,” he said. “That text message, that Facebook post, all of that can wait.”

In New Jersey in 2013, a high school sports star, Sam Oltmans, received a five-year prison sentence in connection with a crash that killed a 61-year-old political activist named Lauren O’Neil.

 Authorities said Sam Oltmans, who was 17 at the time of the crash, was at a party before driving off. They said Oltmans later crossed a double yellow line and struck O’Neil’s vehicle head-on while he was talking on his cellphone and sending text messages.

In sentencing the teen, according to local news reports, Superior Court Judge Robert Reed called the case a tragedy and indicated that he hoped the tough sentence would serve as a warning to others.

“For God’s sake, stop it, lest you stand where Sam Oltmans stands today,” the judge said in remarks directed toward young people.

Today, Oltmans is out of prison and is attending Rutgers University, where he plays on the lacrosse team. He also speaks to school groups about drinking, texting and driving.

“My message to you: Be responsible,” he was quoted as telling students at Quinnipiac College. “Don’t make the same mistakes that I did. They’ll stay with you for the rest of your life.”

A case more typical of those reviewed by FairWarning is the one against Drew Fleming of Hudson, Wis. Authorities said Fleming was texting while driving through an eastern Minnesota highway intersection in February 2016 when he lost control of his Saab, careened off an embankment and slammed into Megan Goeltz’s Ford Fusion. Goeltz, who was 22, pregnant and the mother of a toddler, was killed.

But Fleming, then 20, was charged with a misdemeanor reckless driving charge. Still awaiting trial, he faces a maximum sentence of a year in jail.

Forty-three states and Washington, D.C., have text messaging bans for all drivers, and 15 states and the District of Columbia bar all handheld use of phones. But, by and large, the penalties are light.

Amy J. Freedheim, a prosecutor in Seattle for King County, Wash., in front of photos of victims in vehicular homicide cases that she has prosecuted. Freedheim said distracted driving “is so prevalent and so very dangerous” and must be addressed.

In Minnesota, for example, drivers caught texting face a $50 fine and $225 for subsequent offenses. When deaths or seriously injuries occur, a distracted driver faces at most a gross misdemeanor reckless driving charge unless engaged in an additional offense such as drunk driving.

That outrages the victim’s father, Tom Goeltz, who has worked for three decades as a safety consultant in Minneapolis.

“When they say, ‘Well, he has to be doing something else like speeding, or being drunk or high on illegal drugs,’ I mean those things by themselves they can get a felony charge for,” Goeltz said in an interview. “You can get a felony charge for cutting down a darn tree on public land. We’re not protecting the public.”

In his job with a risk management firm, Goeltz discusses safety with business owners and employees, and he has added the topic of distracted driving to his lectures.

“I work with nuclear power plants and linemen that put up high tension wires with big utilities, and gas line employees,” Goeltz said. “And the first thing I tell them if I’m in a safety meeting is the most hazardous thing you’re going to do today is not at work, it’s driving back and forth to work.”

“Last year, 5,000 people died in construction sites and general industry and plants, but 40,000 died driving on our roads back and forth to work, school or wherever,” he said. “But we focus so much less on it.”

Some analysts say that fostering peer pressure — particularly among young drivers, who are most at peril — is crucial for putting the brakes on distracted driving.

For drivers who “are very hooked” on their smartphones, “there is no punishment stiff enough to change that behavior,” said Ramsay Brown, co-founder and chief operations officer of Dopamine Labs in Venice, Calif., an artificial intelligence software firm. “You need to find some way to make it cool to get angry at your friend when he’s texting and driving. You need to make distracted driving wickedly unsexy.”

97 percent of elderly patients say medical marijuana helps them feel better

(Credit: AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File)

Evidence demonstrating the medicinal value of cannabis among the elderly continues to pour in. The latest scientific study, this one from Israel, reveals that patients over the age of 65 benefit greatly from the herbal treatment.

 According to the research paper published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, “The therapeutic use of cannabis is safe and efficacious in the elderly population.” Even more promising is the report’s conclusion that “cannabis use may decrease the use of other prescription medicines, including opioids.”

The research authors, all from Israel — the nation that leads the world in cannabis research — included renowned scientist Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, considered to be the father of cannabis research.

According to the study:

During the study period, 2736 patients above 65 years of age began cannabis treatment and answered the initial questionnaire. The mean age was 74.5 ± 7.5 years. The most common indications for cannabis treatment were pain (66.6 percent) and cancer (60.8 percent). After six months of treatment, 93.7 percent of the respondents reported improvement in their condition and the reported pain level was reduced from a median of 8 on a scale of 0-10 to a median of 4. Most common adverse events were: dizziness (9.7 percent) and dry mouth (7.1 percent). After six months, 18.1% stopped using opioid analgesics or reduced their dose.

Just to hammer the main point: Nearly every patient (93.7 percent) reported improvement in their condition and reported less pain. There are not too many medications — prescription or over-the-counter — that have this kind of success rate.

According to the research authors, the results suggest that elderly patients, who are commonly taking a handful of medications a day, would be able to cut back by simply incorporating cannabis into their wellness regimen.

Just two weeks ago, the daytime talk show The Doctors examined the skyrocketing use of senior citizens turning to cannabis for medicinal purposes. Producer Leslie Marcus traveled to one of the biggest retirement communities in the nation, where she met a group of seniors who say they are now choosing marijuana instead of prescription meds.

Cannabis appears to be an effective medication for many diseases and ailments that often strike in older age, such as arthritis, muscle pain, sleep disorders, mild depression, Alzheimer’s and a host of others.

If football is so deadly, why did 103 million people watch the Super Bowl?

(Credit: AP/Frank Franklin II)

During the second quarter of Super Bowl LII, the party stopped, if just for a second.

Tom Brady found Patriots wide receiver Brandin Cooks downfield with a 23-yard completion. Cooks spun around then got laid out by the Eagles’ Malcolm Jenkins, who was going full speed, leading with his shoulder.

Right in the middle of football’s biggest game, there it was: another reminder of the NFL’s concussion crisis. NBC commentators Cris Collinsworth and Al Michaels seemed to struggle with the fact that the play was legal.

That’s where we are these days. No one knew quite what to say as Cooks looked like he had been knocked out by an absolutely routine part of the game, which sidelined him for the night.

For all that, I doubt the uncomfortable few minutes while he was treated on the field — viewers had no idea how badly he was hurt — caused more than a few fans to turn away. Based on my experience as a sports editor, my hunch is most of the tens of millions who watched had already come to terms with the game’s violence.

Concussions and football

The problem of head injuries in football has gotten widespread attention over the last decade.

In 2015, for example, Will Smith’s “Concussion” chronicled the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who identified the prevalence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in football players. A Newsweek headline at the time asked: “Can a Will Smith movie change the way America views football?”

The answer then was no, in part because the movie’s box-office performance was meh.

If fans and commentators ask a similar question today — can the concussion problem put football out of business? — the answer would still be no, but a qualified one. The health risks of the game aren’t enough on their own to kill the sport.

Americans still (mostly) love football

There are two reasons why football won’t go out of existence, despite a consistent flow of head injuries.

The first is popularity and the financial strength it yields.

While Super Bowl ratings were down, Philadelphia’s thrilling 41-33 upset of New England still drew 103.4 million American viewers. That makes it the 10th most watched event in television history, behind eight other Super Bowls and the final episode of “M.A.S.H.”

Not only that, the NFL dominates TV ratings all year. Little wonder league revenue has almost doubled this decade, to roughly $14 billion. The NFL is shooting for $25 billion by 2027.

Smoking, drunk driving and … football?

That leads to the second point.

The implication of that Newsweek headline is an argument that goes like this: “If fans only understood the dangers of concussions, they would turn against football, as they did against smoking or drunk driving.”

But the issue is not about awareness. The New York Times reported powerfully on it as early as 2007, and a Frontline documentary in 2013 sparked a national discussion. While there is definite concern, as polling data show, most fans haven’t been ready to pull the plug — at least not for that reason.

It’s the same for players. The Associated Press interviewed 100 a couple of seasons ago and found only 39 were more worried about the long-term effects of concussions than other injuries.

Maybe it’s this simple: We’ve always known football was risky, and now we know more about what that means. But if everyone knows the risks involved, then everyone should be free to do and watch what they like. There are other examples of sports and activities in a similar vein — motor racing, hockey and boxing, to name a few.

Behind the decline

Still, the NFL has undeniably suffered a ratings decline.

There are several reasons for this, from the erosion of cable television, to controversies such as what constitutes a catch, to the National Anthem protests that prompted the president to attack the NFL. I asked a class of 15 students recently if they knew someone who stopped watching because of players taking a knee. Five raised their hands, something confirmed by national surveys.

The bottom line: Head injuries don’t appear to be behind the ratings drop. And it could reverse in an instant, perhaps by a Supreme Court decision legalizing sports betting. That’s all it might take to

boost fan interest and the league’s bottom line — with $25 billion around the corner.

John Affleck, Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society, Pennsylvania State University

Earbuds made my teens tune me out, so I changed how we listen to music

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I’m not quite sure when earbuds took over our kids’ lives, but eventually they did — and I wasn’t happy about it. I also wasn’t surprised when my teens became more plugged in. After all, I remember listening to Michael Jackson, Prince, David Bowie, Hall and Oates, Run-DMC, and tons of ’80s music on my Walkman when I was their age.

Back then, headphones were not that comfortable (nor was the sound coming from them that great), cassette tapes got easily mangled, CDs skipped, batteries died quickly, and albums were pricey. But today’s combination of low-cost streaming services, algorithmically driven playlists, and endless music options make it much easier for kids to escape into their earbuds for hours.

So when my husband and I noticed our teens increasingly tuning us out as they washed dishes, hung out in their rooms, or traveled in the car, we became curious about what they were listening to and how they were interpreting the lyrics they were hearing. We decided to try an experiment: Every time we were driving together, each person would take turns DJing by connecting their device to our dashboard stereo. We would listen together and talk about the artist, the music, the lyrics, and why our kid liked the song. What that meant was not only did our teens select songs, but my husband and I also shared our picks, as well as our thoughts on some of the iffy content in our kids’ music.

Daily car rides were filled with a diverse mix of songs from the likes of Rihanna, Stevie Wonder, The Weeknd, Curtis Mayfield, Drake, Erykah Badu, Steel Pulse, Logic, Nina Simone, Kehlani, and more. My husband and I got a better understanding of our kids’ expanding tastes, as well as a chance to share stories about our own teen years. Believe it or not, some great conversations emerged, and as an added bonus, we came across a handful of artists we agreed on (beyond Michael Jackson).

Now it’s become a family ritual as we drive to dinner, on errands, or on road trips. As soon as we get in the car, everyone scrambles to be the first one to connect to the stereo. And while it isn’t always easy sitting through some of the songs my teens (or even my husband) selects, I’m happy we’ve discovered another way to share media and memories together.

If you’re looking for ways to talk to your kids about their music, here are some conversation starters to get you going:

Talk about creativity. Every generation has a different sensibility about music. I remember my parents raising a skeptical brow at my selections. So discussing music as an art form can be very enlightening. Ask: How does music change through different time periods? What types of things inform an artist’s lyrics? How do different genres help an artist convey his or her ideas? Why did this artist choose certain instrumentation? And, even: Why do you like this song?

Talk about the iffy stuff. If you come across strong language or explicit lyrics, use it as an opportunity to share your values about whether they’re appropriate — either in a song or real life. Ask: Why did the artist use these lyrics? Does explicit language make the song better? Could the song have been as effective without it? Why, or why not?

Talk about marketing in the music industry. Help kids understand that an artist’s performance, persona, and presentation are about selling albums — not necessarily how they conduct themselves in the real world. Ask: What makes music sell? Does popular always means good? And: How does the software created by media and tech companies keep us plugged in?

We just witnessed one of the biggest indictments you’ll ever see of a country’s health care system

(Credit: Getty/Cecilie Arcurs)

Warren Buffett has long decried the ballooning cost of health care as a “hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” eating up the country’s wealth from within. Evidently, Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon all feel the same way, as evidenced by the recent joint announcement by their three companies, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, of their plan to form a new entity that will tackle the high costs associated with U.S. health care. In a tortuously phrased press release, the announcement proclaimed that the new company would be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” but an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on whether the entity would actually be a non-profit.

It seems a pretty squirrely way of admitting that our current system, dominated by for-profit private insurance, does not represent the optimal means of delivering health care. The call to action also implies that the three executives have little faith that the magic of the market on its own will somehow manage to provide insurance so cheap that everyone will be able to afford it whatever their income and medical status. Buffett himself has long been in the skeptics’ camp. As early as 2010, he opined that the current system was “hurting the U.S. economy in relation to other developed nations where costs are lower, even though there are more doctors, nurses and hospital beds per person . . . we have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control. And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else.”

But what is that “something else”? First, if we want a system “free from profit-making incentives,” it makes little sense to construct it around the for-profit private health insurance oligopoly as we have today. That’s long been the flaw behind the current U.S. health care system. Neither Obama’s Affordable Care Act, nor the subsequent GOP efforts to repeal and replace it, have fundamentally uprooted that structure, which largely came about via a historic quirk, rather than a conscious policy decision. Second, it’s unlikely that reform can be achieved by these three companies alone, because as big and powerful as they are (employing more than 1.1 million people), they likely don’t have enough leverage to force health care providers (who have tens of millions of customers) to do things differently.

In reality, if we want to find another way to simplify the complexity of our current system and also have the leverage to force cost reductions, we already have a pretty good model in existence. It’s called Medicare, a government program handling health care for anybody over age 65 (even as the delivery of that care remains largely in private hands). Furthermore, the people who run Medicare, unlike Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, have worked extensively in administering health benefits, and in managing doctors, hospitals or pharmaceutical companies. Medicare has enough customers to act as an effective single-payer. And unlike a private monopoly, Medicare does not tend to use its market power to reduce service, jack up prices, and inflate executive pay.

The mere mention of “single-payer” almost inevitably brings forth a chorus railing against the evils of “socialized medicine,” which is a misnomer, as in reality only our insurance is socialized. Insurance has been socialized for a good reason: we do not want insurers to exclude coverage because of pre-existing conditions, or deny treatment for expensive chronic illness. Hence, each insurer needs a pool of young and healthy people to buy into the system to subsidize the unhealthy. That was the rationale for the mandate under the ACA. Of course, it doesn’t sit well when one is mandated to pay what is functionally a tax to a private health insurer. So the best way to ensure maximum diversification (as well as greater popular legitimacy) is to put the entire nation’s population under one pool, which is what we already do for people over the age of 65 under Medicare.

As well as socializing the risk (and thereby helping to contain health care costs), health economist Robert H. Frank notes that Medicare’s administrative costs are substantially lower than a private health insurer, averaging only about 2 percent of total expenses, which is less than one-sixth the corresponding percentage for many private insurers. Frank explains that this occurs in large part because Medicare does not pre-screen anybody, and because the program:

“spend[s]virtually nothing on competitive advertising, which can account for more than 15 percent of total expenses for private insurers.

“The most important source of cost savings under single-payer is that large government entities are able to negotiate much more favorable terms with service providers. In 2012, for example, the average cost of coronary bypass surgery was more than $73,000 in the United States but less than $23,000 in France.”

France, incidentally, has better health care outcomes than the U.S.

It is worth recalling that Social Security is also a single-payer system, and both SS and Medicare remain two of the nation’s most popular entitlement programs. If you don’t believe that, see how many politicians successfully campaign on a platform of reducing or eliminating either program.

Bezos, Buffett and Dimon’s complaints about the rising costs of U.S. health care point to another issue: Why should the U.S., unique amongst western countries, continue to make health care a marginal cost of doing business in America by largely placing the burdens for health care provision on employers, rather than offering health care as a public good (especially as private employer-based health insurance is largely a product of historical accident rather than conscious policy on the part of either employers or the government)?

That historic quirk is outlined in the The Health Care Mess, a book co-authored by Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein. They describe how the current system arose out of the labor shortages created during World War II, which, in the absence of controls, would have left employers in a position to bid aggressively against one another in order to attract workers. The government introduced controls that prevented a wage spiral but did not include health care benefits, a loophole exploited by employers as a means of competing for workers. And as Paul Krugman and Robin Wells have noted, these medical benefits proved to be an attractive form of compensation for workers to the extent that they protected them from risk; additionally, employers liked the fact that the benefits were not deemed to be part of workers’ taxable income, thereby helping to moderate wage demands. This tax loophole is another factor that has contributed to rising costs.

Rising costs and waste were not a problem in 1960, when health care represented approximately 5 percent of GDP. Today, at 15 percent, it exposes U.S. businesses to substantially higher competitive pressures relative to other nations, which clearly provoked the response of Amazon, Berkshire and JPMorgan Chase.

Given the system’s immense profitability to Big Pharma and the private health insurers, no doubt they will mobilize aggressively against fundamental changes to the current system, whether it comes from the government or the private sector. However, the joint announcement from Bezos, Buffett and Dimon represents the latest acknowledgement that costs are still spiraling out of control and becoming economically unsustainable for American businesses. Even with the implementation of the ACA, U.S. health care provision remains far more expensive (as a percentage of GDP) than that of other developed capitalist countries, with no better outcomes — indeed, countries like Canada, France, Australia, etc., achieve similar outcomes while spending as little as half as much. Other countries use a wide variety of methods of provisioning and paying for health care, ranging from full-on “socialization” with government ownership of the hospitals (the UK), to market-based private ownership of medical practices. Many use a single-payer system (like Canada). Others, such as Australia, or Germany, use private insurers. As economist Randy Wray writes, “What is unique about the United States is that it relies so extensively on private for-profit insurers — in other countries that allow participation by private insurers, these are run more like heavily regulated, not-for-profit charities.”

There is nothing wrong with providing health insurance per se. Indeed, as Krugman and Wells note, the intrinsic costs of providing insurance are relatively low, with one proviso: the entire population be offered insurance in the absence of screening, with the annual premium struck at a level that covers the average person’s health care expenses and the insurance company’s administrative costs. This is effectively what Medicare does. But the rest of our U.S. health care system does not do this, even after the reforms introduced under Obamacare, as Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, professor at CUNY-Hunter College and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, remarked in a radio interview last June:

“[T]he ACA made some modest improvements to the healthcare system, and the Republicans would pull those all back. But the Affordable Care Act was never a very good bill. It left 28 million Americans completely uninsured and tens of millions more with these unaffordable gaps in their coverage, like copayments and deductibles and uncovered services. And that’s why the Affordable Care Act has been vulnerable to these Republican attacks, because people look at their own situation and say, ‘Even under Obamacare, under the Affordable Care Act, healthcare [is] still not affordable to me.’”

Even though Obamacare largely survived last year’s GOP efforts to eliminate it, some of its provisions have still been weakened under the recently passed Trump tax bill because of the repeal of the individual mandate (scheduled to come into effect in 2019). As unpopular as it was, the mandate had a certain logic behind it. It required most Americans (other than those who qualify for a hardship exemption) to carry a minimum level of health coverage, the elimination of which potentially reintroduces the “free rider” problem — the incentive to stay uninsured until or unless you get sick. If the young and healthy stay out, government subsidies must be higher, or premiums rise, or the insurers simply choose not to participate. The only other alternative of the insurance companies is routine denial of coverage for expensive treatments or medicines, or gradually breaching the rules pertaining to excluding people who have pre-existing conditions.

There are already signs of the latter. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reportedthat the Idaho Department of Insurance said that it would allow insurers in the state to begin offering “state-based plans” to consumers:

“These products could leave out some of the benefits mandated by the ACA for individual coverage. Insurers would be able to consider enrollees’ medical history in setting their premiums . . . which isn’t authorized under the ACA. The new state-based plans could also include dollar limits on total benefit payouts, which the ACA banned.”

The ability to “consider enrollees’ medical history in setting their premiums” sounds suspiciously like screening for pre-existing conditions which, the WSJ article notes, is illegal under the ACA. Given Trump’s oft-stated preference for letting Obamacare die, it is not inconceivable that he will tacitly connive with the “death by a thousand cuts” approach of Idaho (the Article II requirement that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” notwithstanding, Trump has displayed little enthusiasm for the niceties of the Constitution since elected).

If our private health insurance model is indeed “a tapeworm” eating at the insides of the U.S. economy, then why not eliminate the parasite as a first step? Randy Wray and I have argued in this space in the past:

“Using insurers to provide funding is a complex, costly and distorting method of financing healthcare. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you have been paying ‘food insurance’ premiums — with some of your purchases excluded from coverage at the whim of the insurer. Is there any plausible reason for putting an insurance agent between you and your grocer? No. Then why should an insurer stand between you and your healthcare provider?”

Health care is not synonymous with health insurance. And health insurance is very different from other forms of insurance. Generally, when one purchases insurance, be it home, fire, earthquake, valuables, etc., it is done with the hope that one never collect the benefits, whether that be because of a car accident, a fire to one’s home, or break-in where something of value is stolen. It’s a bad deal, but it’s supposed to be.

Personal health is different. Women “give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,” poignantly observed Samuel Beckett in “Waiting for Godot.” In other words, we are born, we get sick, and eventually we die. One can mitigate the effect of illness or poor health, but one cannot insure against death. While we do face health care expenses due to unexpected accidents, most of our health care needs are day-to-day routine things inextricably tied up with coping with the limitations of our mortality and genetic imperfections. In contrast to other forms of insurance, we buy health insurance, knowing full well that we’ll have to use it, often to prevent greater calamities later. And what insurers call “pre-existing conditions” is what the rest of us would call “genetic makeup,” a bundle of conditions we were born with, some better than others. Advances in genetic screening can be life-enhancing, but in the hands of a private health insurance company, one can imagine it becoming a recipe for exploitation in the form of variable premiums, depending on how well one scored in the genetic lottery.

Medicare is a program that commands huge political legitimacy and by and large works well. Yes, it is also understandably growing in costs, because its insured pool is restricted to the most elderly and potentially infirm in our society. If the young and healthy were introduced into the program, that would address this problem. Additionally, argues Professor Wray, “there is no possibility of shunting high-cost patients off to some other insurer. And total costs are lower because billing is simplified, administrative costs are reduced, and no profits are required for operating the payments system.” If Messrs. Bezos, Buffett and Dimon are serious in their professed goal putting their “collective resources behind the country’s best talent [that] can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes,” Medicare for All would be a good starting point.

Instead of filling cavities, dentists may soon regenerate teeth

(Credit: Getty Images)

For dentists, a cavity is a conundrum — in order to save the tooth they must further damage it. Currently, the primary way to treat a cavity is to excavate the decay and the surrounding area before filling the resulting crater with a durable surrogate material such as metal, plastic or glass cement.

But what if instead of drilling holes into teeth and patching them up with synthetic fillers, dentists could coax our pearly whites to regrow themselves? Recently, Paul Sharpe, a bioengineer at King’s College London, and his colleagues discovered a new way to do exactly this in mice. Last year they published a study describing their innovative techniques in Scientific Reports. And since then they have made even more progress that edges this experimental procedure closer to human clinical trials. If the treatment eventually becomes part of the dentist’s standard tool kit, scientists say it would easily be one of the field’s most important advances in 50 years.

Our teeth get damaged all the time. Most of the injuries they endure are due to everyday wear and tear as well as the activity of microbes in the mouth. These organisms coat the surface of each tooth and feed on meal remnants. As they break down particles of food, some of these microbes produce and secrete acids as a by-product. And that acidity degrades enamel — the tooth’s hard outer layer.

Like skin, teeth can usually repair minor mishaps themselves. When our teeth remain uncleaned for too long, however, acid can eat through the enamel and begin dissolving underlying layers of dense, bony tissue called dentin. When dentin is seriously injured, stem cells located in the tooth’s soft, innermost layer — the dental pulp — morph into cells called odontoblasts, which secrete new tissue. (Stem cells are capable of becoming virtually any type of cell.) Yet when the injury is too large or deep, that fresh dentin is not sufficient to restore the tooth. The result is often a cavity.

Sharpe suspected he could dramatically boost teeth’s natural healing ability by mobilizing stem cells in the dental pulp. Earlier research had demonstrated the Wnt signaling pathway — a particular cascade of molecules involved in cell-to-cell communication — is essential for tissue repair and stem cell development in many parts of the body such as the skin, intestines and brain. Sharpe wondered: Could this signaling pathway also be important for self-repair processes in teeth? If so, maybe exposing damaged teeth to drugs that stimulate Wnt signaling would similarly encourage the activity of stem cells in the dental pulp — giving teeth the kind of regenerative superpowers usually seen only in plants, salamanders and starfish.

To test this idea, Sharpe and his fellow researchers drilled holes into the molars of mice, mimicking cavities. They then soaked tiny collagen sponges (which are made from the same protein found in dentin) in various drugs known to stimulate Wnt signaling, including tideglusib, a compound that has been investigated in clinical trials for its potential to treat Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders. The scientists then placed these drug-soaked sponges in the drilled mouse molars, sealed them up and left them for four to six weeks. The teeth treated with these drugs produced significantly more dentin than ones untreated or stuffed with an unsoaked sponge or typical dental fillers. In most cases the technique restored the rodents’ pearly whites to their former intact state. “It was essentially a complete repair,” Sharpe says. “You can barely see the joint where the old and new dentin meet. This could eventually be the first routine pharmaceutical treatment in dentistry.”

David Mooney, a professor or bioengineering at Harvard University who has also investigated new ways to heal teeth but was not involved in the study, says he is “very impressed” by these findings. “This is not just scientifically important, but has significant practical advantages,” he says. Adam Celiz, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Imperial College London who was also not involved in the recent research, says this is an important advance in the emerging field of regenerative dentistry. “The materials dentists use could soon be revolutionized,” he says.

Any treatment that recruits the body’s native stem cells or adds new stems cells to the body, however, poses a risk of uncontrolled tissue growth. Experimental and unregulated stem cell therapies have resulted in brain tumors, for example, as well as bones growing in eyelids. But in this case, Sharpe says, the amounts of drug used are so tiny that the risk of unwanted growth is minimal. Celiz agrees the danger is small but he says rigorous testing in lab animals and clinical trials should be done to rule out potential side effects.

Since publishing their initial study Sharpe and his colleagues have tested their regenerative technique on rats. (Because those rodents have larger teeth than mice, a drilled rat molar better approximates human tooth decay.) The treatment worked just as well on the rats as it had on the mice, Sharpe says, but the data has not yet been published. Now Sharpe’s team is investigating a larger group of candidate drugs in order to determine whether another medication works better than those already tested, and to determine the optimal dose. They are also developing an alternative delivery system that is more amenable to modern dental practices: The chosen drug will be dissolved in a gel that is injected into a cavity and bathed with ultraviolet light to solidify it — a quick and easy procedure similar to one dentists already use to seal and repair teeth.

In order to formally introduce this treatment to modern dentistry, however, the researchers will need to perform clinical trials with human patients. Such work is at least several years away, Sharpe says. But some of the drugs he might consider are already approved for other uses in humans, which he hopes could expedite the process for eventual approval. “A lot of dental treatments are still in the dark ages,” Sharpe says. “It’s time to move on.”

Dancing dwarf galaxies deepen dark matter mystery

(Credit: Wikimedia via www.forestwander.com/the-sky)

Many large galaxies — our Milky Way among them — are orbited by a retinue of smaller, fainter companions: dwarf galaxies. Some are probably nearly as old as the universe itself, isolated islands of ancient stars that never managed to glom onto a larger galaxy; others are younger, born from the shredded remains of bigger galaxies that collided and ripped one another apart. Regardless of whether any given dwarf galaxy is a primordial building block or a late-stage leftover from a galactic merger, studying these diminutive objects is arguably one of the best ways to learn about how galaxies and other large cosmic structures emerge, interact and grow. And studying the large-scale structures in turn is one of the best ways we have of understanding the fundamental rules of the universe we live in.

In some respects, watching dwarf galaxies orbiting their larger hosts is rather like watching bees humming around a hive. Dwarfs, like bees, appear aimless in their flights — up and down, left and right, with no obvious rhyme or reason. But both have a hidden order. Bees surf around their hives on wind currents carrying the scents of flowers and pheromones, and the orbits of dwarf galaxies are dictated in part by something even more mysterious: the gravitational pull of dark matter. This theoretical, invisible substance is more felt than seen, for it emits no light; the only way we infer its existence is by how it warps the space around it. Crude maps of its distribution indicate dark matter forms a sort of cosmic web, where galaxies large and small are gravitationally glued to filaments and sheets of dark matter. “We have this web of dark matter that feeds the host galaxy from all angles and directions, and that’s why we find so many different orbits and motions of these dwarf galaxies,” says Oliver Müller, a PhD candidate at the University of Basel.

In a new study published Thursday in Science, Müller and colleagues charted how 16 dwarfs moved around the “beehive” of Centaurus A, a large galaxy upward of 10 million light-years distant from the Milky Way. They found that rather than following random orbits, 14 of the dwarfs of Centaurus A are surprisingly aligned and coplanar, that is, they share the same orbital plane — a bit like bees flying in a well-ordered ring around a hive. The puzzling configuration — which Müller’s simulations suggest only have a 0.5 percent probability of occurring by happenstance — has some scientists questioning just how much they understand the behavior and environment around these satellites. If seen around many other galaxies across the universe, Müller says, such bizarrely coplanar dwarfs could even challenge cosmologists’ “Lambda cold dark matter” (LCDM) conception of the universe — the standard model used to explain how galaxies and galaxy clusters emerge and evolve.

But although the new study emphasizes the rarity of aligned coplanar dwarf galaxies, such configurations have been observed before. In fact, prevailing theories suggest that one out of every 10 dwarf galaxies should possess some kind of alignment; at least that’s what computer simulations suggest.

What is unique about this particular alignment is “this is the first example of this kind of configuration seen outside of our local (galactic) group, so that’s quite interesting,” says Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist at Durham University in England. Coplanar dwarf galaxies have been found for the Milky Way and Andromeda, Frenk notes, but the 14 around Centaurus A are the first observed circling a more distant galaxy.

In their study, Müller and his team argue that if coplanar alignments of dwarf galaxies are widespread, this would pose a worthy challenge to the LCDM model — which predicts a random distribution of dwarfs. Finding many coplanar arrangements would suggest, in short, our already limited understanding of dark matter is even more incomplete than previously appreciated. Frenk, for one, is not entirely convinced, pointing out the LCDM model remains in excellent agreement with the vast majority of decades’ worth of observations. “The standard model works quite well,” Frenk says. “Why would it just stop in an instant? It’s interesting, but not a challenge that threatens the cosmological paradigm at this point.”

Unfortunately, taking a more complete census of dwarf galaxies would take decades. Observing the movements of dwarf galaxies is extremely nuanced, in large part because we can more easily measure the speeds of far-distant objects that move either away from or toward us in the sky, rather than those that move across the celestial sphere. And as their name implies, dwarf galaxies are extremely small and dim, making their discoveries even more of a challenge the farther out one looks from the Milky Way. All these effects act to bias the observational data, muddying the waters so that a clear trend either of coplanarity or of disorder becomes hard to see. The only solution is to find and study dwarf galaxies, near and far, using multiple overlapping and time-consuming methods.

Meanwhile, intriguing observations like these might do more to actually confirm the success of the LCDM model than to replace it. Michael Boylan-Kolchin, an astrophysicist at The University of Texas at Austin and author of an accompanying commentary in Science, says the standard model has overcome similar challenges before. “The LCDM has faced many tests and is still the standard cosmological model; I expect the same will be true in the case of satellite planes,” he says. “However, I also think it is essential to fully investigate all potential inconsistencies. It is the only way we increase our confidence in theories or, in rare cases, find the flaws that demand fundamental revisions.”

As a part of his dissertation work, Müller plans to spend time in the upcoming months using the Dark Energy Camera in Chile to study the Centaurus A system with the hopes of finding more dwarf satellites. Another dozen or so in nonplanar orbits could make the reported trend disappear. For now though, he is excited about this oddity, because it may actually be the norm. “These systems aren’t just an outlier — they look like they’re more common. I think we have to take this very seriously…. I want us to do further studies of this structure. I want to show that this isn’t just a coincidence.”

If you want to explain your science to the public, here’s some advice

FILE - This undated file photo shows legendary physicist Dr. Albert Einstein, author of the theory of Relativity. Einstein was a father who worried his son wasn't taking his geometry studies seriously enough, and that he was indebted to a favorite uncle for giving him a toy steam engine when he was a boy, launching a lifelong interest in science. He also believed the infidelity of a friend's spouse was no big deal. These and other reflections, including personal opinions on God and politics, are contained in 27 letters being offered by a private collector at auction this week. (AP Photo/File) (Credit: AP)

Recently, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, urged scientists to share their problem-solving innovations with the public in more accessible ways, including by using vernacular languages. This kind of openness and accessibility is important and needed. While most scientists publish their work in academic journals, only 10 people, on average, read a given article in its entirety; so clearly, the general public is not being reached that way.

Translating complicated concepts that are jargon-heavy into terms and ideas the public can understand is not always easy. But, increasingly, scientists, university and research institutions, government institutions and others are trying to find ways to do it. Professional societies like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Entomological Society of America offer a wide array of tools and programs like science communication courses and science policy fellowships to help scientists with dissemination. The National Academy of Sciences even recently released a report, “Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda,” to help scientists effectively communicate their research. An example of an international effort is the Imagine Project initiative, through which scientists take their research out of the laboratory and share it with rural and indigenous communities in Africa and Latin America.

These are great initiatives, but many young scientists, including PhD students, post-doctoral scholars and early career scientists, need more guidance in maneuvering the art of effectively disseminating their science to the public. I witnessed this need first-hand when I recently spoke at Emory University about my research on beneficial soil microbes and their use in agriculture; I mentioned how ever since I learning the art of writing opinion pieces through participating in a training offered through the Aspen Institute New Voices fellowship, I had written more than 60 opinion pieces that have reached millions of people. The audience of PhD students and post-doctoral fellows clamored to know how they could similarly write about their research for newspapers and reach the kinds of audiences their journal articles never do. I know they are not alone in that desire.

While there are other ways to disseminate academic research to the public, including writing research and policy briefs, sharing it on university and research institutions websites and blogs, my experience of this has been through op-ed writing. This is my advice to scientists who also want to use op-eds to reach the average person:

The first step is to connect the research you are doing or pursuing to a bigger theme. Is it the environment? Climate change? Public health? As an example, my research on beneficial soil microbes ties into several major themes including climate change, food security and soil health.

Secondly, it is important to find the story and storyline in your research. How do the results of your research creatively link and connect to the global challenges facing humanity? Once you have this lined up, it is time to write the piece.

Op-eds are centered around an argument: essentially you are arguing for or against something. So, you must decide on this before you can write the rest of your piece. The core argument should only be a sentence long and stated in a way that is convincing to your readers. Think as you decide on this: What do you want to share with the world? Is it new? Why is it new? Or what is new about it? How is it different from other arguments about the subject theme that have been shared before?

Next you need to build your evidence to support your argument. Often there are at least three main points of evidence. These pieces of evidence can include statistics and research, quotes from experts in the field, anecdotes and personal stories and news articles. For researchers, this should be easy since your piece will be focused on research findings.

The “to be sure” paragraph is an important part of an opinion piece. In this paragraph, you preempt people who may discount your argument by acknowledging their viewpoint and then by bringing in even more evidence to back up your own argument. This allows you to acknowledge the other side, but still support your own.

An element of an op-ed that differs greatly from academic writing is the news hook. While often this goes in the first paragraph of the piece, it does not always have to be placed there. What a news hook does is tie your argument and research to the current issues of the day to show how it’s timely and why your research matters right now. This also helps when pitching your piece to editors because they need to know what is new and timely about your piece before deciding to accept it. While a news hook could be a news story, it can also include new research and studies, a new piece of legislation, or a holiday or anniversary of an event or law. A recent personal experience can also be used as a news hook.

The final concluding paragraph is where you summarize all the paragraphs with a catchy and thought-provoking sentence. This is also where you can place your call to action. Why did you spend all that time doing your research? What do you want your readers and decision-makers to do?

Most importantly, always remember to keep everything short and to the point because many media outlets have a word limit that ranges from 500 to 900 words. And then your piece is ready to pitch!

When scientists write and share their work with the public in accessible ways, that is when the magic happens and we can build bridges between research and society, engage the general public, and develop a critical dialogue about the solutions science offers.