“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. Reclassifying marijuana
At the moment, marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug. These are drugs that the Drug Enforcement Administration describes as having a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. That description seems completely at odds with a substance that is currently available for medical use in 38 states.
Not only is marijuana regularly used to treat everything from chronic pain to eye diseases and depressionbut studies have also found it’s considerably less addictive than most illicit drugs. In fact, pot is less addictive than nicotine or alcohol.
It’s been obvious for a long time that marijuana is incorrectly classified. It should not be in the same category as heroin, mescaline, and meth. But somehow, no one has gotten around to fixing a mistake that was made when a frenzy over the perceived dangers of marijuana resulted in this assignment in the 1970s.
Last Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland submitted a proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget that would move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, putting it in the same class as anabolic steroids, testosterone, and ketamine. Tylenol is also a Schedule III drug.
As NBC News reports, the DEA is expected to approve this change based on a favorable recommendation by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Not only would this allow scientists to—for the first time—conduct research about potential health benefits (or harms) from using marijuana while receiving federal funding, but it would also mean an end to harsh penalties faced by those in the military where the use of pot, even in states where it’s legal, results in thousands of involuntary discharges each year.
While President Joe Biden has twice pardoned former military members who were discharged for marijuana use, even admitting past use can keep someone from serving.
Reclassifying pot as a Schedule III drug won’t automatically solve these issues, and it won’t allow states to begin treating marijuana the way they do beer. But it’s a step in the right direction.
2. How junk science keeps contributing to abortion bans
A group of respected researchers in medical and mental health fields has targeted a quartet of peer-reviewed research papers on abortion, calling them “fatally flawed” and calling for their withdrawal.
The scientific community has contended with unreliable research for decades. Ideally, fatally flawed studies will be detected by peer reviewers and rejected by journal editors, but these processes are subjective, varied, and susceptible to error. … (W)hen authors are unwilling or unable to make sufficient corrections, published papers occasionally have to be retracted to correct the scientific record.
The four papers were authored by anti-abortion researchers, and they all claim to show that abortion leads to lasting mental health issues. As The Guardian notes, just one of the papers “has been cited in at least 24 federal and state court cases and 14 parliamentary hearings in six countries.” However, that paper “could not be replicated because it contained incorrect statements about its methods,” say the researchers seeking its retraction.
As a group, the papers claim that women who receive an abortion are more likely to suffer from depression, generalized anxiety, substance abuse, and mental illness than women who carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. As might be expected, despite the issues with these results, they are still used to support claims that anti-abortion laws are improving women’s health.
As with a study that falsely connected vaccines and autism, such results can be difficult to dislodge from the public consciousness, even if a study is eventually withdrawn.
3. Extremist militia groups openly recruiting on Facebook
It would be nice to think that white supremacist groups and violent militias are restricted to seeking out new members in seedy bars, through whispered exchanges at the local gun range, and on parts of the dark web where they’re pursued by a cyber squad of FBI all-stars. But according to WIREDthey’re not quite that subtle.
Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit “active patriots” and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They’re also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be “prepared” for whatever lies ahead.
Some of these pages have been pulled down on Facebook, but Meta largely seems to be ignoring the groups as they grow, connect, and spread violent rhetoric. That may be because Mark Zuckerberg, like Elon Musk on X, has been ditching content moderators in large numbers.
4. New drugs fight food allergies, including peanut allergies
Almost everyone either has a food allergy, has a kid with a food allergy, or knows someone who can’t even walk the aisles of a grocery store in safety. For reasons not well understood, the number of food-related allergies has increased sharply in the last few decades.
Allergic effects can be particularly powerful, even fatal, when a reaction is triggered by multiple exposures to the same allergen. However, in February, the Food and Drug Administration announced the first drug approved for those accidentally exposed to an allergen. Xolair (omalizumab) is a monoclonal antibody. It doesn’t get rid of a food allergy, and it doesn’t work for everyone. But for some it and other similar drugs on the way could mean liberation from being unable to walk through buildings where allergens are made or stored.
For example, here’s how the drug scored with people known to have severe allergy to peanuts.
Of those who received Xolair, 68% (75 of 110 subjects) were able to eat the single dose of peanut protein without moderate to severe allergic symptoms (e.g., whole body hives, persistent coughing, vomiting), compared to 6% (3 of 55 subjects) who received placebo; these results are statistically significant and clinically meaningful for subjects with food allergy. Of note, however, 17% of subjects receiving Xolair had no significant change in the amount of peanut protein tolerated (could not tolerate 100 mg or more of peanut protein).
With more drugs in this category on the way, even those in the out-of-luck 17%, may find some relief in the next few years.
5. Climate change and the ‘Craters of the Moon’
You wouldn’t expect lunar craters to tell you a lot about climate change, what with the moon lacking an atmosphere. But the craters in this story are quite a bit closer than the big ball in the sky. They’re in Idaho at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.
The 753,000 acre (3,050 square kilometers) park is in Idaho’s wide southern section. It features a volcanic landscape filled with expanses of frozen lava flows, tube caves, and those eponymous craters that are the tops of extinct volcanoes rather than the result of asteroid impact.
Also in the park are animals called OTHERa small, short-eared rabbit relative that likes rocky and mountainous places. They’re herbivores. They have a reputation for surviving in extremely harsh conditions. They are 100% adorable.
They are also refugees from a warming world. As the Idaho Capital Sun reports, these are new residents of the park.
“Craters of the Moon provides a little refuge for them because of the topography, but elsewhere, climate change has actually caused some populations to disappear,” Patrick Gonzalez, a climate change scientist and forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Idaho Capital Sun.
My home in Missouri is surrounded by a group of glades, which are naturally occurring openings in the local forest, a few hundred acres in size, caused by combinations of geology and geography. Within those glades are creatures like bark scorpions, Texas brown tarantulas, and collard lizards—all animals that are usually found many miles to the southwest. They live in the glades as relic populations, leftovers from a time near the end of the last ice age when the area was drier, and these desert creatures were widespread.
As climate change continues, pikas and many other creatures are likely to find their populations fractured and isolated, marooned in islands of compatible conditions in a hotter, hostile world.
6. Last of the stock photographers
Stock photography has been around almost as long as there has been photography. The ability to find a picture of a “young kid playing with a dog” or “man checking his watch in a crowd” has made possible illustrations in uncounted articles and ads. It’s never been the most glamorous area of photography, but for many people, it has been a career.
Now, as the The Wall Street Journal reportsdigital photography, piracy, and generative AI is putting stock photographers on the bleeding edge of change.
“At one point I was getting as much as $2,000 for the use of a photo, and that went down to 2 cents,” (Washington state-based photographer Pete Saloutos) said. He still shoots stock but no longer expects good returns.
So many of his peers bowed out that the industry’s trade association, the Stock Artists Alliance, shut down in 2011. Other photographers turned multiple rooms in their homes into studios and began shooting thousands of photos a day, factory-line style, to maintain the figures on their royalty checks.
Can generative AI draw an image of people losing the only work they’ve known?
7. Video: ‘Fall of Civilizations’
Am I really going to ask you to watch a video with the same runtime as “Gone with the Wind”? Well, I can’t make you do it. But I think once you’ve sampled some of “Fall of Civilizations,” available both as a video and a podcast, you’ll be happy to sink hours into the deliberately paced, intricately detailed stories of civilizations that rose and fell, hundreds or thousands of years ago.
My favorite is “The Sumerians” because it was not only the first, but also the strangest. However, the most recent civilization they’ve covered is one that many people likely think they already know. Until you start listening …
Bonus video: This is the mechanism, detailed down to the individual molecules, that allows bacteria to spin their tiny flagella in a circleand even go into reverse. Don’t worry. This one is less than a minute.
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