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Childhood adversity strongly linked to poor mental health in young adults
Emerging adults with an average age of 19 who experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences had substantially higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, hard drug use, and interpersonal violence than those who reported no childhood adversity.
Adventist Health Bakersfield announces free children’s immunizations in October
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Adventist Health Bakersfield is set to provide free childhood immunization opportunities throughout the month of October. The mobile clinics are free and open to …
Adventist Health Bakersfield announces free children’s immunizations in October
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Adventist Health Bakersfield is set to provide free childhood immunization opportunities throughout the month of October. The mobile clinics are free and open to the publi...
49ers’ Brandin Cooks Makes Heartfelt Admission After Signing
New San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Brandin Cooks has an unusually personal connection to his newest team.Cooks’ Childhood Ties to the 49ersCooks, a Stockton, California native, signed to San Francisco’s practice squad Tuesday. It’s the seventh NFL team of his 12-year career, but easily the closest to home. He fondly recalled attending 49ers training camps […] The post 49ers’ Brandin Cooks Makes Heartfelt Admission After Signing appeared first on HEAVY.
Hands-on science can be cool
After spending many long days conducting experiments to find a new way to combat bacterial infections in crops, Misha Hegde and Mia Soleil Maurer have been rewarded with international recognition and access to top research facilities. But these are not typical scientists. They are 16-year-old German high school students.“Our supervisor told us that in order to start a project, you need to begin with either a question or a problem,” says Misha, adding that she and Mia had read about antibiotic resistance in certain plants being treated for bacterial infections. “We found out that antibiotics overuse is very common in agriculture,” explains Mia. “Our aim was to create an alternative to antibiotics and to try to raise awareness of the problem of overusing antibiotics.”Their subsequent research has focused on harnessing bacteriophages, the natural predators of bacteria, to eliminate pathogens threatening food crops treated with antibiotics. At the Schuldorf Bergstraße Jugend forscht MakerLab in Seeheim-Jugenheim, located in the German state of Hesse, they discovered a novel phage that infects the Rhizobium rhizogenes bacterium, which causes the hairy root disease that can reduce yields of tomatoes, carrots, soya beans and other food staples.The students believe their method could curb antibiotic use, while protecting plants from infections without disturbing the natural soil microbiome. “The application of phages is host-specific, so they would only kill the targeted pathogen or disease-causing bacteria,” explains Mia. It may also offer environmental benefits, since applying antibiotics can contaminate groundwater.Getting to this point has not been easy. The childhood friends admit to feeling frustrated when their trials did not yield the expected results. “We spent six months on our first experiment, just doing the same thing over and over and over again, to the point where we thought, is it even worth it? Why are we doing this?” Misha says. “You just need to be brave enough to take that first step and keep going.”The benefits of inquiry-based learningTheir determination has paid off. In 2025, the pair won first prize in biology at Jugend forscht, Germany’s national competition for young people interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. They were also among the winners of the German Research Foundation Europa-Preis, which is awarded to selected national winners at Jugend forscht, and took third place in the 2025 European Union Contest for Young Scientists.The Jugend forscht Foundation opens doors for young people to connect with scientists as well as industry professionals. Jessica Bönsch, executive director of the Foundation, sees Misha and Mia as prime examples of how young people can develop a deeper understanding of science through their own research projects. “The experience of working on your own research question is very important,” she explains, adding that “inquiry-based learning engages with real-life problems in a way that can be more motivating than traditional classroom teaching.”The Jugend forscht Foundation offers financial support through sponsor pools in Germany’s federal states. Some projects are developed in cooperation with student research centres, university labs or informal collaborative learning areas called makerspaces. Other activities start as hands-on “garage projects” and can grow within the Jugend forscht network and infrastructure.The Jugend forscht Foundation is also a partner of Science Comes to Town, an EU initiative to strengthen public awareness about science and create bridges between researchers and communities. The EU-financed project involves universities, research institutions and other stakeholders in three host cities — Brest (France), Kiel (Germany) and Split (Croatia).“It's so important for people not to live in a bubble, because I think science can be very scary if you misunderstand it,” Mia says of SCTT. The initiative’s aim of raising awareness about science is “absolutely amazing,” Misha adds. “I think it's the best way to kind of make science digestible for the public. In a world where misinformation in science is getting more radical, more dangerous, becoming more of a threat to the trust in scientific infrastructure and foundations, we need such programmes.”Misha and Mia also believe that SCTT can help break down gender stereotypes in science by encouraging young women to study and pursue careers in scientific fields. Both students have benefited from female mentors and encouragement they had when they were much younger. Mia’s love of science began with a class trip to a lab, while Misha — with a smile on her face — says she wanted to study history until “a teacher kind of coerced me into joining a school science club.”Recognition beyond EuropeIn May, Misha and Mia were among the finalists at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair held in Phoenix, Arizona, and involving nearly 1,700 pre-university students from over 60 countries. “It was very crazy because there were so many people and so many teenagers interested in science,” Mia recalls. The event was also challenging. “It was eight hours of continuously presenting your project,” adds Misha.Attending the fair was a chance for the young women to see first-hand the value of international collaboration as well as how research cultures differ. “America is a bit more willing to take risks, and I think that's something we can learn about here in Europe,” Misha explains. However, she continues, “I think Europe has the talent, has the innovation and has the resources” to be competitive.Misha and Mia plan to continue their phage experiments in the new school year, inspired by the project’s hands-on nature and the support they receive from their supervisors. They have also attracted the interest of professional scientists and received invitations to leading research facilities, including the Centre for Synthetic Microbiology, jointly run by the University of Marburg and the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany. “It is so cool that we can do something to try to move the world in our school and at this age,” Mia says.After completing secondary school, Mia plans to study microbiology and pursue a career in medical research, focusing on Ebola and other infectious diseases. “This has been my dream for so long,” she says. Her friend Misha is interested in biological research with a focus on medicine. “I've gotten addicted to the process of going to the lab, planning out experiments, then failing, trying again,” Misha says. “I think there's just so much to be discovered, so much to be done.”The students' names and photos were published with the permission of their parents.Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.
Early childhood BMI trajectories predict later cardiometabolic health risks
Childhood obesity predicts later cardiometabolic disease, but single-time weight measures may miss dynamic growth information.
Mobile children’s museum ‘in the business of restoring childhood,’ one building block at a time
In advance of brick-and-mortar, Heart of Play hosts pop-up exhibits throughout Whatcom County
Jewel Reveals How She Teaches Her Teenage Son About ‘Mental Health Hygiene’
Jewel, 52, knows firsthand what happens when a child’s emotional needs go unmet, and she’s determined to give her own son a different experience. Having lived through a chaotic childhood that included...
Childhood trauma linked to risky health behaviors in late adolescence
Experiencing childhood trauma appears to increase a young person's likelihood of smoking, substance use and developing unhealthy eating habits by contributing to behavioral problems during adolescence, such as impulsivity and poor self-control.
Jewel on Emotional Inheritance, Mental Health, Motherhood, More
Singer-songwriter Jewel sits down with TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones to talk about her nonprofit, Inspiring Children Foundation, and the #NotAloneChallenge. She opens up about growing up in Alaska and overcoming challenges from her childhood. Jewel also talks about motherhood: “I really love being a mom. I wanted to be a mom, and I was in a really privileged position that I could change a lot of my life to make sure my son was the center,” she shares.
Poor sleep health in late pregnancy linked to higher childhood obesity risk
New research has found that mothers with poor sleep quality in late pregnancy had babies with lower weight in the first 6 months of life, but higher weight after age 1-2 years.
Is 50 the new 60?
Subscribe TL;DR: Younger generations are showing signs of worse health compared to earlier-born cohorts at the same age This backward “drift” is showing up both in mortality risk and chronic disease Worsening trends in obesity and diabetes are the most consistent signals Taking the long view, we’ve made astonishing gains in health and life expectancy in the last century. Global average life expectancy has more than doubled from 32 years in 1900 to 73 years in 2024. (But don’t forget, there were still old people when life expectancy was 32). As people lived longer, they also generally lived healthier along the way. It turns out that avoiding things that can kill you early, like malnutrition and lots of childhood infections, also keeps you healthier later in life. In a classic 2004 paper, Finch and Crimmins proposed that cohorts of children who benefited from fewer early life infections had less lifetime exposure to inflammation and cardiovascular disease later in life, accelerating mortality improvements at older ages. Poor nutrition in the womb has also been linked to a higher risk of later chronic disease. The upshot is that improvements in childhood health can pay dividends many decades later. The combination of better living conditions (nutrition, sanitation) and medical advances (antibiotics, vaccines, blood pressure meds, etc) meant that people’s healthy lifespan generally expanded, even as they lived longer. Aging researchers call this best-case scenario “compression of morbidity”—meaning we delay the onset of disease and disability even faster than the years of life we are adding. During my 20+ year research career, we could generally bank on the idea that younger generations would not only live longer but also keep getting healthier along the way. “60 is the new 50” as they say… Enter “Generational Health Drift” Sadly, this expectation of steady progress may be changing. You’ve probably heard that US life expectancy gains have slowed to a crawl in the past couple of decades. Mortality improvements are also slowing (though less dramatically) in many other high-income countries (you can read more about that in a review paper I wrote here). Mortality is a very blunt health measure, but it is often a good barometer for the broader population health trends happening underneath. And we are now seeing that younger generations may be in worse health at similar ages compared to earlier born cohorts. My collaborator Prof. George Ploubidis at University College London coined this worsening health in more recently born cohorts “generational health drift.” “Generational health drift” is bad news on multiple fronts. Most obviously, we don’t want our health progress to go backward. But the timing is also bad, since our populations are aging. In demographic terms, “population aging” means that the proportion of the population at older ages (i.e >65 years) is increasing. Fun demography fact: Current population aging is not due to the recent declines in the birth rates making the news, but declines in fertility decades ago, after the “baby boom.” As baby boomers reach older ages, the smaller cohorts behind them mean the percentage of older adults will increase. For example, the share of the population age 65 and older in the US increased from 12.4% in 2004 to 18.0% in 2024. This story of population aging was written long ago. Many worry that population aging will put pressure on health care and pension systems. But if people reach older ages in better health than in years past, those fiscal pressures would be less dire than projected. Healthy older people can also continue to contribute to society in many valuable ways, including paid work, caregiving, community service….even high political office 🤷. On the flip side, if younger generations reach retirement age in worse health and with more disabling conditions, this could magnify the societal challenge of population aging. Evidence for worsening generational health A recent paper that I LOVED in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dr. Leah Abrams and colleagues examined which birth cohorts (aka generations) were behind worsening US mortality. Behold the Lexis diagram (cue swooning demographers). Calendar time is on the x-axis, age on the y-axis. Birth cohorts can be followed over time as they age on the diagonal lines moving up and to the right. This figure plots the year-on-year % change in all-cause mortality at a given age. Green shading indicates mortality improvements over time, white is stagnation, and gray shading indicates worsening mortality. Following the diagonal line for those born in 1950, you can see a noticeable shift from green to gray that follows this cohort for most of their lives. This gray shading shows generally worsening mortality for the 1950 to 1959 birth cohorts compared to their predecessors across all ages. Concerningly for my GenX and elder millennial peeps, there was also a deterioration in mortality for birth cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s, visible as dark gray areas at ages 30 to 45 during the 2010s. While some of these mortality changes reflect specific shocks such as the opioid epidemic, most deaths still occur from major causes of death such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. For cancer, the gray in the top left corner of the figure below reflects the legacies of smoking for older cohorts, followed by a period of green with improvements in cancer mortality as smoking rates declined. But the white/gray shading in the bottom right corner highlights a stagnation and reversal of the cancer trends, with cohorts born around 1970 to 1985 experiencing worsening cancer mortality. This deterioration was most noticeable for colon cancer mortality, possibly linked to obesity or dietary factors. Not just dying more, but less healthy along the way. A recent paper by Dr. Laura Gimeno of University College London (of which I am a co-author), found evidence that more recently born cohorts in Great Britain have stagnating or worsening health. A stylized picture of what“generational health drift” might look like: The review paper found: Rates of childhood overweight and obesity were highest among Gen Z. Rates of diabetes in the 40s almost doubled from 3.1% among the Baby Boomers to 5.9% in Generation X. Gen Z reported higher rates of poor mental health in adolescence compared to earlier-born groups. These UK results are consistent with studies showing worsening health across generations in the US as well. A 2021 US study found that more recently born cohorts had worse biological markers (like blood pressure and blood sugar) than earlier generations at the same age. A separate 2022 study of Americans aged 50 and over found that more recently born generations had a higher number of chronic diseases, with younger age of disease onset. A 2024 Lancet paper found that in the US, women born in 1945 had 33% obesity prevalence at age 50, rising to 48.2% for women born in 1970 turning 50. So what’s going on, and can we turn it around? We don’t have a definitive answer for what’s causing the deteriorating health of younger cohorts, but circumstantial evidence points to worsening trends in obesity and diabetes in both the US and UK. Remember that cohort trends reflect lagged effects of early environments, and younger generations have faced both earlier onset and more severe obesity across their lifetimes. Despite these very concerning trends, the future is not set in stone. We’ve reversed poor generational health trends before: drops in smoking are a major reason cancer and heart disease deaths fell so dramatically in recent decades. GLP-1 drugs may finally turn the tide against rising rates of obesity and diabetes, though it is still early days. But things could also get worse…for example from a return to higher levels of childhood infectious diseases that can have a lasting impact on health. See for example: [ ](https://jenndowd.substack.com/p/dont-you-forget-about-measles-the) [ Don’t You Forget About Me(asles): The Virus That Erases Immune Memory ](https://jenndowd.substack.com/p/dont-you-forget-about-measles-the) Jenn Dowd, PhD · March 24, 2025 [ Read full story ](https://jenndowd.substack.com/p/dont-you-forget-about-measles-the) Even as an optimist, emerging data on the “generational health drift” has my full attention. For most of my research career, we took it for granted that each generation would be healthier than the last. But if present trends continue, **50 could be the new 60….**and Gen Z celebrities will soon look older than Paul Rudd :). Stay well, Jenn Share the Health! If you found this post useful, please share it with a friend. Share
Big Discoveries Start Small: Enroll for 2027–2028 at Brooklyn Preschool of Science (sponsored) | Brooklyn Bridge Parents - News, Events and Family Services
Little hands. Big questions. A lifelong love of learning. At Brooklyn Preschool of Science, children’s natural curiosity starts an extraordinary early childhood experience. We are welcoming families for the 2027–2028 school year, and we invite you to tour our school and discover a place where your child can feel loved, build confidence, make friends, and find joy
Jarvis Cocker remembers Pulp's first time in new documentary
LONDON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Almost half a century after their birth, Britpop darlings Pulp are stars of a documentary that delves back into the band's roots in the childhood dreams of gangly frontman Jarvis Cocker.
[Caring the Korean Way] Korean parents turn to dream lenses to slow childhood myopia
What does it mean to care -- deeply, instinctively and culturally? In this series, "Caring the Korean Way," we explore the distinct practices, beliefs and values that shape how Koreans care for themselves and each other. From time-honored folk remedies to modern reinterpretations of healing, each st
Science Vs on the 49ers Substation: Anatomy of a Hatchet Job
In August, Pablo Torre Finds Out and Science Vs released an episode about my theory that electromagnetic fields from the electrical substation beside the 49ers facility may be contributing to the team’s run of soft-tissue injuries. As the originator of the theory, I was also a subject of the episode. I sat was interviewed by Wendy Zukerman and Rose Rimler of Sciene Vs. I sent them research, connected them with scientists, and spent hours digging through the City of Santa Clara’s and Silicon Valley Power’s records to help clarify critical details. Both Wendy and Rose came off as affable and professional, showing curiosity during the interviews, with Wendy going out of her way to question the “conspiracy theory” framing itself. Then they titled the episode We Solve the 49ers Viral Conspiracy Theory. I was familiar enough with their catalog that I never expected them to agree with my theory, but I did expect them to give it a fair hearing and to deliver their findings honestly. On both counts they came up short. They were not directly dishonest in anything they said, but rather in what they left out, in how what remained was cut, and in the picture painted by those two things in combination. They asked me to recorded the interview on my phone for better audio quality, and I held on to my copy for reference later. That turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Here is the raw audio of my first interview, unedited*. Only my side was recorded, so their questions aren’t on it, but you can generally infer them from the answers, and every claim I make below about what I said can be checked against my statements in this clip. (Note: Wendy had connection trouble at the beginning of the interview and was cutting in and out, which accounts for the false starts.) 0:00 -1:19:13 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Science Vs is a fun show. It is pitched at roughly a high-school understanding of science, for an audience that is skeptical, Snopes-oriented, and worried about misinformation. Take a claim circulating online, interview a supporter of the claim, interview consensus scientists, and then tell people which side of the line it lands on. I have listened to their episodes on raw milk, seed oils, 5G and other contested issues in the wellness space. I have problems with all of them, but each at least made an honest attempt to represent the actual range of scientific opinion by talking to credentialed scientists with differing perspectives. Dissenting researchers were heard from, answered, and often given a chance to respond. This episode did not do that. This article is not a relitigation of the science. I have written extensively about that already. This post is for the record. It is simply an accounting of what was wrong with their episode. Contents Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? — the clearest single example of getting something objectively wrong For the record — a high-level overview of all of the problems with their investigation Draw your own conclusions — why they had to make this episode at all What they left out about childhood leukemia — the exposure threshold, and playing games with statistics to minimize sick children What they left out about the mechanism — the body of literature they refused to cover, and evidence for the mechanism used against it The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air — four credential scientists who support myhe theory, recorded and cut, or not even called How they misrepresented me and my case — an answer severed from its question, and three telling edits How you would actually study the injuries — it doesn’t actually matter which team is the most injured, overall The theory: magnetic fields, oxidative stress, and collagen Since the episode never states my theory, here it is below. Those who are familiar with my work can skip this section. Electrical equipment produces magnetic fields, and those fields induce faint electrical currents in anything that passes through them, including people. My argument goes further than induced current. Mitochondria — the structures that generate a cell’s energy — run on continuous flows of electrons and protons, and those flows carry faint electromagnetic fields of their own. Maxwell’s principle of superposition shows that when two fields share the same space, they add together. An external field does not need to be strong to alter an internal field, it only needs to be present. The electron transport chain inside the mitochondria leaks a small fraction of its electrons by design, and those become reactive oxygen species — free radicals, which healthy cells use as signals. External magnetic fields cause the rate of leakage to change, increasing free radicals. When free radicals accumulate faster than the cell’s antioxidant systems can clear them, the result is oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a recognized driver of chronic illness, including cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, diabetes and cancer, and it is in every medical school curriculum. One of its ordinary effects in connective tissue is that it switches on matrix metalloproteinases — MMPs, the enzymes that break collagen apart — while suppressing new collagen synthesis. Tendons are made of collagen. An athlete loading his soft tissue heavily six days a week is already creating oxidative stress in the tendons, so the addition of magnetic field exposure compounds the damage and inhibits repair, making him more susceptible to injury when enormous force lands on a tendon in a fraction of a second. That is the theory. We know that EMF causes oxidative stress, and we know that oxidative stress degrades collagen. The only thing missing is a study showing that direct connection. I have never claimed certainty that the substation is contributing to the elevated injury rate. I do believe it is likely, and I believe it warrants caution, and that a revenue machine like a major NFL team can easily afford to remove the exposure out of precaution. Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? Here is the clearest single instance of the problem with this episode. It requires no knowledge of electromagnetic fields at all. This story first came to me through Jon Feliciano, a former 49er, in an interview on Willard & Dibs on 95.7 The Game. Asked about why the 49ers are always injured, he said players used to joke that it was the power plant behind the practice fields. Wendy Zukerman corrects him on air. “It’s important to say that it’s not a power plant near the 49ers site.” Torre then asks her to explain the difference between a substation and a power plant. Her answer: a power plant generates electricity and transmits it to a substation, which converts the voltage into something your house can use and sends it on to your home or your business. There are two problems with that. The first is that there is a power plant on that site. The Gianera Generating Station is a natural-gas-fired peaker plant owned by Silicon Valley Power, and it has been there since 1986. I have published aerial photographs of the location from 1987 in which the gas plant is the only thing standing, before the practice facility was even there. I even mentioned the gas plant in my first interview. (Feliciano has since gone on record about this issue, and it is clear he had the substation in mind rather than the gas plant.) The second is that her definition describes a distribution substation, and the facility beside the 49ers is not that. It is the Northern Receiving Station, which takes in bulk power from outside the city’s grid and delivers it to distribution substations. Silicon Valley Power’s own map distinguishes receiving stations from substations, and Rose Rimler even reads the label out loud in the episode when she walks through that map on air. A few minutes before the map segment, Zukerman tells Torre: “like I said, we fact check everything.” Well, maybe not everything. I made a mistake On the morning of July 6th, at 10:20, I sent Rose and Wendy two studies. During the interview I had been asked which human studies show oxidative stress from electromagnetic fields, and I had not been able to name one on the spot. Rose emailed asking for the studies, I quickly searched for a couple, and I wrote that I thought these were the most relevant from that search. Unfortunately, I was busy and did not read either one closely at first. I picked them because they were topically relevant — one on substation workers, one on power plant workers. Neither were great studies, and their problems go past the ones raised in the episode. That was careless on my part. There is context that did not make the episode, though. Before that email I had been on a Zoom call with Rose talking about EMF and oxidative stress, and I pointed her to Dr. Henry Lai at the University of Washington, who has spent years aggregating the literature on this question. His tallies show that roughly 90% of studies since the late 1990s find oxidative effects from electromagnetic field exposure — hundreds of studies, systematically counted. Rose told me she was already aware of his work. So when she asked for studies, I understood her to have the aggregate view already and that she would report anything within that context. Not reading those two carefully was still a mistake, but the larger mistake was assuming the episode would be based on a thorough review of the actual body of literature, rather than on whatever I happened to send that morning. The second email At 1:49 that same afternoon — three hours and twenty-nine minutes after the first — I sent them a second email that I had been preparing for a while. It was a structured document in six numbered sections, written in response to a request they had made two weeks earlier, laying out my entire argument with citations attached to every link in the chain. The episode aired on August 13th, five weeks later, and not a single item from the second email is in it. Here is how it opens: The full email is included at the bottom of this post in Appendix B. Nearly 1,500 words in total. It contains two named mechanisms with the physics behind them. Occupational studies in humans. The literature on oxidative stress and collagen. A section addressing the strongest counter-evidence against my own theory, which I raised myself. And a closing section stating plainly what the theory cannot yet show. My entire argument, in writing, with detailed citations for every claim, provided to them five weeks before broadcast, and none of it made it into the episode. That is the single largest omission, but it is not an isolated one. The whole episode is riddled with similar problems, and the conclusion they came to is not merely a difference of opinion about the scientific evidence. Through omission and through strategic editing, Science Vs misinformed its audience — about what the evidence shows, about what I argued, and about who they spoke to. That is a notable outcome for a show whose stated purpose is correcting misinformation. For the record I am not going to tell you that Science Vs set out to discredit me, or that they had come to their conclusion before they reported the story, or that they used misleading editing to make me look like a man retreating from his own theory. I cannot know what was in anyone’s head, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, either. What I can tell you is what is on the record. They asked me for evidence and aired the weakest thing I sent. They interviewed three scientists who supported my theory and aired none of them. They discussed childhood leukemia without ever saying the exposure level at which it appears. And they took an answer I gave weeks before Ken Karipidis, the one EMF scientist who was put on air, was interviewed, and placed it directly after his critique, where it comes off as a major concession. A friend of mine who has worked as a journalist for thirty years read that last one and called it sleazy. I agree with her. Those are just the four issues that are impossible to defend as pure editorial decision, but they are not the only issues. The most glaring issues stem from what they left out: The exposure level at which the childhood leukemia association actually appears — three to four milligauss, a number the episode never states despite it being much lower than what I measured. The mechanism itself: The episode gets as far as “oxidative stress could weaken collagen,” which leaves it sounding like speculation, rather than a known pathway. The second email, and all the studies in it. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill, whose work my proposed mechanism rests on, whose contact details I supplied, and who was never called. Dr. Beatrice Golomb at UC San Diego, who runs a research group on oxidative stress and mitochondrial function and has specific expdertice in collagen, interviewed and not aired. Dr. David Carpenter at Albany, the most prominent academic voice on the harm from magnetic field exposure, interviewed and not aired. Dr. Joel Moskowitz at Berkeley, interviewed and not even credited. The specific, testable condition I put in writing that would make me abandon the theory. My own unprompted statement of the theory’s evidentiary gap. My caveats about my own measurements. My ranking of EMF as one factor among several rather than the only one. The new equipment installed at those facilities between 2010 and 2014, and the sharp rise in system load from 2013 onward. But that is not all. What they kept, they selectively edited to serve a narrative that was not served by the raw transcripts of the interviews. A description of thousands of commercial routers in a workplace, reduced to the Wi-Fi in your house. My own acknowledgment, multiple times, that "I'm not a scientist" clipped in an episode that spends considerable energy pointing out that I am not a scientist. And a qualification I volunteered about my own measurements, cut from my answer and delivered later by their EMF expert as a correction. Together their edit produce a portrait of a wellness guy with Wi-Fi phobia and two bad studies, backing away from his theory the moment a “real” scientist looked at it. A practice facility where nothing changed because no new substation was built. Injuries written off as random because the 49ers were not quite the single most injured team in the league over the period in question. That portrait is false even though almost no individual statement made in the episode is. Draw your own conclusions At the top of the episode, Pablo Torre says his show had been flooded with requests to investigate the substation — that it was the thing they were asked to look into over and over again. Neither show went hunting for this story. It arrived from their own audience, in volume, and it could not be waved off. A thread I posted on X reached twenty-two million people. A guy with a gaussmeter and a brand-new Substack obligated a Pultizer prize winning program to spend an hour on a question about player health, that is considered fringe enough that most media operations won’t touch it. Pablo Torre Finds Out could not ignore it. So Science Vs came in and ran a “debunking” operation instead of an investigation. Everything below is what had to be left on the cutting room floor to deliver the “debunking”. They could not ignore it. So they tried debunked it instead. The demand was strong enough to force an episode, and since the episodes release the 49ers have sustained more injuries, including season ending ones, and interest has only grown. Demand from fans and playets is strong enough to force a better investigation from someone else. An omission is not a lie until you find out what was omitted. What follows is the detailed record so you can see the full picture. Draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine. I am going to keep publishing. A note about Pablo Torre Finds Out After the episode aired I posted publicly, calling out Pablo Torre Finds Out for concerns I had about the integrity of their investigation, and about an interview directly with Pablo Torre which had been offered but never happened. I have since spoken with a producer at PTFO. The offer had rested on a misunderstanding about where things stood between us, and it fell away as the Science Vs part of the production widened past the science. He apologized for the miscommunication and I accepted. The producer also confirmed to me that they did essentially hand off the entire investigation to Science Vs for narrative purposes — so Pablo would be genuinely curious or potentially surprised by their findings — while still taking responsibility for what went out under their name. I appreciated the candor and the accountability, and I am comfortable with where we left things. So this post is not about PTFO. My disagreement is with Science Vs. What they left out about childhood leukemia Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They gave no number at all. 1. They built an EMF ruler, then discussed childhood cancer without it. The sequence on air went like this: First I measured almost 9 mG, then I measured up to 50 milligauss. Torre reacts with concern — “that sounds high.” Cut to Karipidis: the public limit is 2,000 milligauss. Torre reacts again — “What happens at 2,000?” Karipidis explains that nothing happens at 2,000, that safety factors are built in. Then: at more than 50,000 milligauss you get flickers of light in the retina, and higher still, nerve stimulation. The listener now has a ruler (their ruler) to measure these numbers with. Fifty is nothing by their ruler. Then the episode turns to childhood leukemia and states, accurately, that there is a real association — but tellingly, they never give the exposure level at which that association appears. Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They conveniently left that out. The pooled analyses that produced the World Health Organization’s carcinogen classification found roughly a doubling of childhood leukemia risk above three to four milligauss. That is the number that belongs in that segment, and it is more than ten times below the reading that had just been dismissed as trivial. I gave them that number myself, on tape, in the interview. Describing my own threshold, I said my comfort level for long-term chronic exposure is three to four milligauss, but preferably one. 2. Six children in thirteen million. The episode reports that these fields might explain one to four percent of childhood leukemias, then reframes it as a German estimate of perhaps six cases among thirteen million children. Torre, to his credit, is uncomfortable. What never gets explained is why that number is small. Almost no children lives above three milligauss in Europe. Fewer than two children in a hundred, in the Italian data. So even if the risk to those children doubles, the number of additional cases across an entire country stays small — not because the hazard is small, but because hardly anyone is exposed to it. Count the whole population and the few who are exposed disappear. And the reason hardly anyone is exposed is that siting rules keep housing away from transmission lines. In Europe, at least. The Dutch government has a standing precautionary policy against building new homes in any zone where the annual average magnetic field exceeds 4 milligauss — the same number the episode never mentioned. Denmark and Norway treat 4 milligauss as the level that triggers a look at mitigation. That is five hundred times below the ICNIRP figure quoted on air. The United States has no federal equivalent. That is evidence of infrastructure siting policy working. It is not evidence that there is no hazard. It is evidence that we already act as though there is one. If you listen to the raw audio you will hear that my proposed solution is EMF exposure is to build better infrastructure. What they left out about the mechanism 3. They accused me of cherry-picking, and then cherry-picked themselves. On air, Zukerman tells Torre that people who worry about electromagnetic fields dismiss the studies showing null results and collect the ones showing harm, and that this is why you have to be careful not to cherry-pick. They had two papers I had rattled off in a hurry, and a second email containing a carefully chosen set. They ran the two weakest, graded them on air, and presented the result as the state of the evidence for not only my theory, but the whole question of oxidative stress from magnetic fields. That is cherry-picking from my emails. The bigger picture is what they did with the literature as a whole. Zukerman acknowledges it exists, dismisses it, and disposes of it in a single stroke. You can go online right now, she tells Torre, and find scores of studies showing these fields increase oxidative stress. The issue, she says, is that they are not studies in people. Many of them are in people. The occupational studies in my second email are in people. That email had been in her inbox for five weeks. She waved off the literature on a factual claim that the documents in her possession contradict. (I have written separately about the evidentiary standard at work here). The effect was that they essentially baited me: ask the subject to supply the evidence, take the weakest thing he sends, and let that stand as a proxy for the whole argument. Wendy has been doing this show for ten years and clearly knows how to extract what she needs for her desired narrative. 4. They presented the collagen-improvement research as a gotcha, but I had already addressed it. The episode treats the existence of studies showing that EMF can improve collagen as a surprise that undercuts me, but I had pre-emptively addressed that five weeks earlier in the email they ignored. Those studies use measured, high-intensity pulsed dosing. The mechanism by which they work is oxidative signalling. The cell reads a controlled rise in reactive oxygen species as a warning, upregulates its antioxidant defenses, mounts a repair response, and the therapy stops before the system is overwhelmed. The key point is that it induces an oxidative response, which means those studies are actually evidence for my proposed mechanism, not against it. A field that produces a therapeutic effect cannot be biologically inert (which is the implication when they say “Nothing happens at 2,000 milligauss). Chronic ambient exposure is the same pathway with no off switch, and it is most consequential during the evening and while sleeping, when the body is in repair mode and the exposure does not stop. Section 5 of my email is titled What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis. I raised the counter-evidence myself, explained why I did not think it refuted the theory, and wrote that I was disappointed the question had not come up in the interview. That is worth holding against the cherry-picking charge in the item above: the studies they presented as inconvenient for me were studies I had gone out of my way to put in front of them. 5. Section 1 of my email stated a critical argument that was never put to the expert directly responsible for it. My email says the exposure limits exist to prevent acute effects and do not address chronic exposure at all, and that my dispute is with the entire framework. Zukerman gestures at this once. After Karipidis gives the 2,000 milligauss figure, she tells Torre that I would object because those levels do not capture “more subtle effects.” That is not my argument, and “subtle” is doing a lot of work here. My argument is that the limits are built to prevent acute effects — nerves firing, muscles twitching, etc — and were not designed to address chronic exposure at all. In fact, ICNIRP’s own documents state as much themselves. Mine is a structural objection to what the standard measures, reduced as a concern about subtlety, it becomes a matter of degree, rather than a categorical difference. They interviewed Ken Karipidis, vice chair of ICNIRP — the body that writes those limits. He was asked what the limit is, but he was never asked how it applies to chronic exposure. The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air 6. They interviewed four officials of the standards body. The episode credits roughly a dozen researchers. Four of them are associated with ICNIRP. Ken Karipidis is the vice chair. Rodney Croft chaired ICNIRP from 2020 to 2024 and led the development of its current guidelines. Dan Baaken is ICNIRP’s scientific secretary. Frank de Vocht sits on the Main Commission. One of them speaks in the episode. Their institution’s position is more than adequately represented — the 2,000 milligauss figure, the safety factors, the assurance that nothing happens below the line. 7. The four who were left out. Dr. Beatrice Golomb is Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego — a physics undergraduate degree, a PhD in biology, an MD. She directs a research group whose stated focus is the relationship between oxidative stress, mitochondrial function and health. That is the mechanism the episode spent its first half dismissing. Her published work includes the fluoroquinolone case series behind the FDA’s black box warning on an antibiotic class that ruptures tendons, where the accepted mechanism is oxidative stress and mitochondrial toxicity — the back half of my chain, already on a drug label. She is in the credits. She is not in the episode. She has told me she finds my theory biologically plausible, and that she has a recording of her interview. Dr. David Carpenter directed the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany for decades and is the most prominent academic voice arguing these fields cause harm. Childhood leukemia is the reason these fields carry a WHO classification at all, and Carpenter is the person you call if you want that case made by someone who has spent a career on it. He is in the credits. He is not in the episode. He has told me that when he was interviewed they could not have been less interested in what he had to say. Dr. Joel Moskowitz directs the Center for Family and Community Health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. He told me directly that they interviewed him and that he thought it went well. He does not appear in the episode, and unlike Golomb and Carpenter, he does not even appear in the credits. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill is the researcher whose work provides the foundation for the oxidative stress mechanism my theory rests on. I gave Rose his email address and phone number. He was never interviewed. They never even called him. 8. “He’s not a scientist.” The episode leans hard on the fact that I am not a credentialed scientist. Zukerman says it. Torre repeats it. “At all.” Having built a segment on that, they then left out the physicist-biologist-physician, the professor of public health, the director of a university environmental health institute, and the McGill researcher whose work the primary mechanism comes from. They spent the episode telling their audience I am not a scientist, and then kept four actual scientists who support the theory off because their argument does not survive otherwise. How they misrepresented me and my case 9. They played my words as a response to an interview I had never heard. Near the end of the hour, Zukerman says she went to me and told me the evidence was lacking. Then she plays me saying I am not wedded to it being an EMF, that I have staked my reputation on it needing more study, and that I am not certain of anything. That segment was placed immediately after Karipidis had finished taking the cherry-picked papers apart. It plays as a man folding under expert scrutiny. Commenters have used it against me since, but it is incorrect. Here is the sequence as it happened. I was interviewed. Karipidis was interviewed weeks later. I was never told what he said, or even who he was. I was never asked to respond to it. I did not know his name until the episode aired. That is not a simple editing decision. That is a quote from one interview, moved to follow a critique from a different interview it was not a response to, so that it would land as a concession. A friend of mine who has spent thirty years as a journalist read that sequence and called it sleazy. She is right. The full passage is reproduced in Appendix A, and it is worth reading. What airs is the preamble. Four paragraphs later I say “to directly answer your question” — and that answer, about what would change my mind if the team relocated, is not in the episode. Neither is the sentence two paragraphs on, where I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. I will say the underlying point again, though, because I meant it and I still do. I am not wedded to my theory that magnetic fields from the substation are contributing to the 49ers injuries. I could be wrong. What I am wedded to is the process of scientific inquiry, and the fact that we should be cautious around these exposures and we need more independently funded studies. 10. Three telling edits. They cut “I’m not a scientist” mid-sentence. What I said: “...and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS...” What aired: “...and that I am not certain of anything. I’m not.” The clip ends on the first two words of the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist, in an episode that spends considerable energy establishing that I am not a scientist. The full sequence is in Appendix A. They cut my own description of my work. Asked what I do, I said I run a wellness business, that I am focused on writing software to help people navigate environmental stressors, that environmental health is my focus, and that I also do independent journalism and research. What aired is the wellness business and the environmental health, with the software and the journalism removed from my own answer. The software engineering does come up later — narrated by them, as a hacker who grew up to write firmware — but my current work, in my own words, arrives as “wellness guy.” Thousands of commercial routers became home Wi-Fi. What I described: working at a wireless networking company surrounded by thousands of Wi-Fi routers, and a stress-induced health collapse afterward that working in that environment contributed to. What aired: Wi-Fi, the kind you have at home — reinforced by a clip of Christian McCaffrey talking about turning his router off at night. Three cuts, and every one of them makes me seem less credible. That is not a coincidence. 11. I gave them my own caveats and the test that would disprove me. In the first email I wrote that a well-designed chronic, ambient-level exposure study in tendon showing no collagen degradation, run over many months, would undercut my confidence in the theory. That is a specific, testable condition, stated in advance and in writing. There was a second interview, weeks later, which was not used in the episode, but in that I asked again for the falsification criterion to be included. What the episode presents instead is a man saying “we need more study,” which reads as a hedge, an open-ended request for the benefit of the doubt. It is the opposite of a hedge. Section 6 of my second email says, unprompted, that as far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human in vivo or in human tendon in a lab. I wrote that because it is true and because it is the first thing anyone should check. Under their standard it becomes the hinge of the entire first half, framed as something they had to surface without my cooperation. I had handed it to them five weeks earlier. And in the interview I said that my 25 to 50 milligauss readings were taken at knee level, and that these fields attenuate quickly, so by the time it reaches your head it is not that high anymore. That did not air either. The qualification arrives later, from Karipidis, as a correction. How you would actually study the injuries 12. They measured the wrong thing. The episode spends its final act on whether the 49ers are the most injured team in the NFL, finds no clean ranking, and lands on “injuries are random”. That is the wrong test. You would define the exposure — measured field levels at the facility — and the outcome narrowly: soft-tissue injuries, not a single MSK injury count that a broken finger and a ruptured Achilles both land in. Then you would compare the 49ers to themselves before and after the exposure changed, and compare that change against every other team over the same window. That controls for league-wide shifts in rules, turf and training load. It is a difference-in-differences design, and it is standard. I sent them that argument on July 28th, in writing, along with the fact that in eleven of the past twelve seasons the 49ers had finished top ten in Adjusted Games Lost. And by the episode’s own reporting, the 49ers are second in games lost to injury over the past decade, with FTN’s Aaron Schatz confirming that once you adjust for starters they come out second worst in the league — after having been one of the healthiest teams for years before that. A finding like that is where an investigation starts, not where it stops. 13. I did a lot of substation research for the episode that was never aired. I had reported that the substation next to the facility was expanded in 2014. That was wrong, and Rose Rimler and I sorted it out together. They gave me credit on air, which I appreciated, but framed it as a concession on my part to something they had found. In fact I had been investigating it myself, was uncertain before they asked, but was waiting for clarification from Silicon Valley Power. The uncertainty centered around a substation named “Esparanca” that was proposed right behind the facilities as part of the stadium construction, but now appears to never have been built. I spent days in Silicon Valley Power’s records, and did eventually reach Silicon Valley Power for confirmation and indentified the mistake myself. I also gave them highly detailed documents on what we do know about those facilities: new equipment installed between 2010 and 2014, and load growth across the system with an inflection around 2013–2014, with the Northern Receiving Station carrying the highest capacity in the system and sitting closest to the data center corridor. None of that is in the episode. I have a separate piece about it coming out soon. *I cut 2 seconds from the raw audio to remove personal information that had no connection to anything in the episode. Appendix A: the passage the clip was taken from This is the sequence from my first interview, in full. The episode uses one fragment of it. It’s tricky because my understanding is that there’s something like a 15-year half-life on collagen remodeling issues. They’re going to get a new crop of players. What I really need, though, is for the injuries to be broken down so we can see the soft tissue injuries. Right now, they’re categorized as MSK injuries, but let’s say we can actually identify them more specifically. Is that right? He was able to do that? Oh, cool. I wasn’t able to find that information. Interesting — I didn’t know that data existed. I tried so hard to get it, and I didn’t know it was available. Maybe you could connect me with that person. That would be amazing. I’m not wedded to it being an EMF, honestly. I’m not. I would say that, to a certain extent, I’ve staked my reputation on the fact that it needs more study. It’s important to look into it, and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a tendon hypermobility issue. This condition is documented to be partially caused by oxidative stress. I’ve worked with them to mitigate their EMF exposure and have seen people improve. I think it’s a bigger story. In a way, the 49ers represent an occupational cluster with specific exposure risks. If someone would conduct a study on this, I believe we could learn a lot. Perhaps we would discover that it’s like, okay, maybe it’s 10% of the problem. I don’t know the exact number, but I think either way, conducting the study would provide valuable insights. To directly answer your question, it’s challenging for me because it’s part of a bigger story. If the 49ers move and stop having injuries, I might conclude that it was related to the substation. However, if they move and still experience injuries, I would want to analyze the nature of those injuries. Are they primarily soft tissue injuries? I don’t think it’s necessarily a case closed, but the story might lose traction at that point regardless. Three things are worth noting. The aired fragment stops immediately before the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist — the cut described in item 10. It also stops four paragraphs before the words “to directly answer your question.” What the episode plays is the throat-clearing. The actual answer, about what would change my mind, never airs. And two paragraphs in, I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. That is the ranking the episode says I never gave. Appendix B: the full email, July 6th, 1:39 PM Hi Rose, You asked me to send you some studies a couple of weeks ago. I apologize for the delay. I have been incredibly busy. I also wanted to give you a chance to dig in yourself, and get your own perspective before I influenced you too much with mine. That said, I do want to make sure that the actual argument is abundantly clear, so here it is! One note before I begin, there are really two separate questions here: Does the substation cause the soft-tissue injuries? That was my specific claim, and what the podcast is about. Is the theory biologically sound? Can 50/60 Hz fields at these levels do anything biological below the safety limits? Question two is why people have been calling me a conspiracy theorist. The regulatory and advisory bodies (ICNIRP, etc) maintain that anything below their exposure limits is biologically inert, and that position is broadly accepted within the mainstream, but the actual science paints a different picture. To defend my theory I’ve had to defend a much larger claim: that the advisory bodies have the biology wrong. I can’t honestly answer question 1 without first addressing that. Here’s is a simplified outline of my theory, with links to studies: 1. Advisory body thresholds for biological effects The ELF magnetic-field limits (ICNIRP’s ~2,000 mG public / 10,000 mG occupational) exist to prevent acute effects from exposure. If a magnetic field is strong enough, it makes nerves fire and muscles contract. Muscles twitch. You can see faint flashes of light in your vision. People can even feel tingling or even a shock. That happens due to Faraday’s law, which states that a time-varying magnetic field induces an electric field inside the body via the creation of Eddy currents.The standards assume that those currents do nothing below the twitch threshold. They do not consider chronic effects at all. My argument is that they are biologically active and do have chronic effects. 2. There are multipe ELF-EMF mechanisms for inducing oxidative stress. This is basic biophysics. Below are the two primary mechanisms. Simplest first. Dr. Paul Héroux of McGill has the most intuitive explanation, which rests on Maxwell’s principle of superposition: because Maxwell’s equations are linear, two sets of electromagnetic waves sharing the same space simply add together. In the interview I pictured a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out clean ripples. Then a boat motors past at distance, sending larger waves, and where they meet the ripples, the two add together and the original pattern gets distorted. In our cells, the mitochondria run on continuous currents of electrons and protons that carry their own faint electromagnetic fields. An external field from a substation, by the principle of superposition, adds to those internal currents and shifts the pattern. The electron transport chain in the mitochondria leaks a fraction of its electrons by design as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which act as signalling molecules in a healthy cell. Distorting that field increases that electron leakage, creating oxidative stress. A tiny electromagnetic interference results in a large downstream effect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844025006474 The more complex pathway is Dimitris Panagopoulos’s Ion Forced-Oscillation / Voltage-Gated Ion Channel (IFO-VGIC) mechanism. Weak, polarized, low-frequency fields force the ions (calcium, potassium, sodium) next to an ion channel’s voltage sensor to oscillate; because that force scales with the inverse cube of the distance involved, fields far below the stimulation threshold can still force the channel open, disrupting the cell’s ion balance and driving ROS overproduction (Nitric oxide and superoxide interact and produce peroxynitrite, a highly unstable cytotoxin that breaks down into free radicals). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366088934 https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/59/5/92 https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/18/10041 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1585441/full https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3772193/ 3. Evidence of oxidative stress, in vivo, in humans from ELF-EMF There are many studies, and the strongest are occupational, which applies to the 49ers situation. 115 power-plant workers vs. 145 office controls. Serum malondialdehyde (MDA, the standard lipid-peroxidation marker), superoxide dismutase, and catalase were all significantly higher in the exposed group, and the markers rose with increasing field exposure. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/WOR-203244 A follow-up where they reversed the oxidative stress in power plant workers. A double-blind randomized controlled trial: 91 power-plant workers given vitamin E, vitamin C, both, or placebo for 90 days. The antioxidant groups showed reduced lipid peroxidation and raised antioxidant capacity versus controls. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32191586/ A spot-welder study: 46 welders occupationally exposed at 50 Hz, showed significantly altered red-blood-cell antioxidant enzyme activity and concluded ELF-MF “might act as an oxidative stressor… even at the recommended levels of exposure.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18504600/ A substation-specific study found oxidative stress and DNA damage https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24460415/ 4. Oxidative stress degrades collagen This half isn’t controversial at all. Oxidative stress activates the matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) that break collagen down and suppresses its synthesis. Here are three example studies: Siwik et al. 2001: Oxidative stress raises MMPs and lowers collagen synthesis in cardiac fibroblasts. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11121376/ Fisher et al. 2009: Collagen fragmentation drives oxidative stress and elevates MMP-1 in aged human skin. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2631323/ Varani et al. 2006: Decreased collagen production in oxidatively aged skin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16723701/ 5. What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis I’m glad you asked this question, and I’m bummed we didn’t get to it in the interview because it is a great question, and very important to understand. Superficially it may appear to be a refutation of my theory, but I would argue that it actually supports the underlying argument. That study used a short, high-intensity pulsed dose: therapeutic-PEMF, the same type of field used clinically to stimulate bone and tissue healing. The reason this works is because it triggers the very same biological pathways that can lead to oxidative stress. The exposure still stimulates ROS production, but done at a controlled dosage, for a limited duration it has a different effect. The cell reads the ROS as a warning signal and it upregulates its antioxidant defenses, and mounts a repair/proliferation response. The therapy is then stopped before the cell gets overwhelmed. That is essentially a hormetic response: a small dose of a stressor producing a beneficial adaptation. Two things follow: At the very least, this means the field is biologically active, which by itself undercuts the regulatory claim that these fields are inert below their thresholds. There is a wealth of literature on PEMF (pulsed EMF) bone regeneration and calcium channel signalling (which is the second mechanims in section one). Here is one. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13856 At best, it leads us straight to my actual concern, which is that under chronic, chaotic and unregulated exposure, the cell’s antioxidant capacity gets overwhelmed, resulting in oxidative stress. There are plentiful examples of things that are beneficial at controlled doses, but harmful at uncontrolled doses. Excecise is one obvious, uncontroversial example. Botox is perhaps a more interesting example. 6. What about a study that shows EMF causing collagen degradation in humans? As far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human, in vivo, or in human tendon in a lab. There are studies involving isolated fibroblasts though, which secrete collagen. The most relevant one showed that human fetal scleral fibroblasts exposed to 50 Hz ELF-EMF showed a significant decrease in collagen synthesis and that MMP-2 expression was upregulated, which is the exact mechanism I described in section 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3626379/ That’s it! Thanks again for the interview. Best, Peter Anthony Cowan Environmental Health · Wellness Tech · Researcher & Journalist Publisher & Editor, Living Energy Bio: petercowan.comSocial: X · Instagram · TikTokApp: sunlightis.lifePhone: [redacted]
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Phillies and Nemours Children’s Health Honor Young Cancer Warriors at Childhood Cancer Awareness Day on Sunday, September 6
The Phillies and Nemours Children’s Health will host their 10th annual Childhood Cancer Awareness Day on Sunday, September 6, at Citizens Bank Park, featuring heartwarming moments and once-in-a-lifetime experiences for children and families affected by cancer before and during the game against the Atlanta Braves. The on-field tribute will begin
Justin Parent on unlocking the science of resilience in kids
Penn GSE associate professor Justin Parent investigates how childhood adversity becomes biologically embedded, with the goal of identifying opportunities to intervene early and help children thrive.
Childhood obesity levels still 'higher than hoped' in Jersey
Public Health Jersey says childhood obesity has "plateaued" but is still too high
Ladera Ranch childhood cancer mystery deepens after 20-year-old handwritten warning emerges
Reclaiming your kid's childhood from their screens starts here
There is a particular kind of silence parents know well: a room full of children, together but apart, each looking down at a screen.
Adventist Health Bakersfield to offer free childhood immunizations in September
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Adventist Health Bakersfield announced opportunities for children to get free immunizations throughout the month of September. The free mobile clinics are availab…
Peter Cullen Was The Voice Of My Childhood
Peter Cullen has passed away, but he will never be forgotten. For millions, he's the voice of our childhoods.
To match Denmark’s public health, we need more than its vaccine model
There are plenty of lessons the U.S. should take from countries such as Denmark, but vaccine policy is not one of them.
I was homeless as a teen. Now I coach Aryna Sabalenka.
Jason Stacy was largely homeless from 12 to 15. Now he coaches Aryna Sabalenka for the US Open and uses lessons from his childhood with elite athletes.
Trump's frustrations drove vaccine order, but MAHA wants more
President Donald Trump's frustration that his administration was not doing enough to address what he considers a likely contributor to autism drove a U.S. executive order this month that cut back the number of childhood vaccinations, administration officials told Reuters.
A childhood shaped by sugar rationing was linked to mental health more than 50 years later
UK Biobank researchers examined whether sugar rationing during pregnancy and the first two years of life was associated with adult sweet-food preferences, sugar intake, brain structure, anxiety, and depression.
The ROI of resilience: The economic case for healing Israel’s traumatized children
There is no greater hidden liability than untreated childhood trauma, and no higher-yield investment than breaking the intergenerational cycle of abuse.
US health department seeks public feedback on vaccine guidelines after Trump order
The U.S. health department said on Friday it was seeking public feedback on federal vaccine recommendations, including how they are categorized and communicated, after President Donald Trump's executive order calling for fewer childhood vaccinations.
US Health Department Seeks Public Feedback on Vaccine Guidelines After Trump Order
Aug 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. health department said on Friday it was seeking public feedback on federal vaccine recommendations, including how they are categorized and communicated, after President Donald Trump's executive order calling for fewer childhood vaccinations. The Department of Health ...
'The Magic Faraway Tree' captures the magic of childhood
“The Magic Faraway Tree” opens in theaters on Aug. 21
'The Magic Faraway Tree' captures the magic of childhood
“The Magic Faraway Tree” opens in theaters on Aug. 21
'The Magic Faraway Tree' captures the magic of childhood
“The Magic Faraway Tree” opens in theaters on Aug. 21
Northeast Public Health Collaborative opposes Trump's vaccine changes
President Trump is getting more pushback on his executive order to overhaul childhood immunizations.Back on August 10, Trump announced an executive order that,
NJ health officials urge parents to ignore Trump order on childhood vaccines
NJ's health commissioner wants residents to ignore President Donald Trump's call for childhood vaccines to be cut from 17 to 11.
House Speaker Mike Johnson stumps for LePage in Maine 2nd CD race
With workers in hard hats behind him, Johnson touted LePage’s difficult childhood of abuse, his post-graduate degree, his business background and his two terms as governor.
Hayden Panettiere reflected on childhood friendship with Michelle Trachtenberg before her own death
In a 2025 interview with EW, Hayden Panettiere detailed a surprising childhood connection to her ‘Ice Princess’ costar Michelle Trachtenberg: ‘I’m very grateful that I have the memories that I have with her.’
A therapy that “rewrites” childhood memories can ease fear of failure
Childhood criticism can leave people carrying a fear of failure long into adulthood, but new research suggests those emotional patterns may be surprisingly flexible. Young adults who revisited painful memories through imagery-based therapy showed lasting reductions in fear, guilt, sadness, and stress.
BUSINESS MONDAY: Spotlight on GourMay Cafe in Pittsfield
A Richmond native returns to her childhood dream, opening an affordably priced cafe that serves neighbors and travelers alike.
Kaia Gerber details childhood exorcism mom Cindy Crawford had performed on her
‘The Shards’ actress Kaia Gerber revealed that her mother, supermodel Cindy Crawford, had an exorcism performed on her when she was a child.
We study autism and vaccines. Trump’s executive order rests on flawed science.
The new childhood vaccine schedule and 6G, in readers' eyes.
With measles cases on the rise, doctors stress childhood vaccination
As nationwide measles cases climb to the highest levels seen in 35 years, Lucas County medical practitioners are raising the importance of vaccinating ...
Mississippi health officer addresses Trump order on childhood vaccines
Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said the order does not change vaccine requirements for children attending school in Mississippi.
The science behind the feeling that childhood summers never end
Curiosity, emotion and paying attention shape our perception of time. This is why time flies as we grow older
Health policy must be driven by data, not political grandstanding
'The administration’s anti-vaccine rhetoric will only sow widespread confusion, ultimately driving up rates of entirely preventable childhood diseases,' writes an L.A. Times reader.
In-Depth: Trump’s vaccine order could split up MMR. Here's the science, history and what that means
President Donald Trump is seeking major changes to the way childhood vaccines are recommended in the United States. His call to separate MMR provides options for parents, but what are the implications? WRAL examines the history, science and global practices of MMR.
As back-to-school season begins, MU Health psychiatrist shares tips on child anxiety
MU Health Care psychiatrist Dr. Laine Young Walker discussed why childhood anxiety exists and how parents can support their kids and look for signs of anxiety.
New Executive Order Undermines Child Health
On August 10, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at making major changes to federal vaccine policy. Among several other actions, this order would make major revisions to the childhood vaccination schedule, direct care providers to administer monovalent vaccines as soon as they are available (starting with splitting up the MMR (measles, mumps, […]
How could Trump's proposed changes to childhood vaccine policies impact public health?
Childhood vaccines fall prey to Trump
The Christian right and Big Business have made science denialism a longstanding American tradition
Trump's vaccine plan would require millions of individual shots last used decades ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Public health experts have been quick to condemn an executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at upending childhood vaccinations in the U.S., but the biggest obstacles may be the unprecedented financial and logistical challenges it would impose on parents, health provide...
Head Start changes could eliminate important child health and safety standards in Ohio, nationally
Child advocates in Ohio and nationally have said proposed changes to the federal early childhood education program Head Start would be “devastating” and eliminate important health and safety standards for children.
Colorado health providers say executive order on childhood vaccines puts youth at risk
In Good Health: Why Measles Numbers Are On The Rise
Nationwide, students, teachers, and parents are gearing up for the school year.And measles is spreading. The U.S. has already logged more cases this year than in all of 2025. It’s the highest count in 35 years. That’s in large part because measles vaccination rates have slipped below 95 percent – the threshold public health experts say is needed to stop community spread. Last week on CNN, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said children should be vaccinated for measles after being pressed on-camera, even as he used the same interview to push a debunked claim about respiratory syncytial virus. And on Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at upending the childhood vaccine schedule, including changes to the measles vaccine and others. But what will actually change at the doctor’s office?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.
Trump’s vaccine order hands some MAHA voters a win. It also gives Democrats an attack line
President Donald Trump’s executive order to change the childhood vaccine schedule could endear him to some “Make America Healthy Again” voters who want more flexibility on immunization
Trump’s vaccine order hands some MAHA voters a win. It also gives Democrats an attack line
President Donald Trump's executive order to change the childhood vaccine schedule could endear him to some “Make America Healthy Again” voters who want more flexibility on immunization.
Childhood screen detects mental health risks
Screening for home and family stresses may help identify children at risk for depression and sleep disorders that traditional adversity screening misses.
Trump Administration Bypasses Science Again, Doubles Down on Restrictions to Childhood Vaccines
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Trump administration today issued a new executive order directing changes to the federal childhood vaccine schedule that, if fully implemented, would reduce access to life-saving vaccines for children, add new barriers to care, and further degrade the scientific process the federal government has relied on for decades to ensure vaccine access […]
Health Brief: Is Minnesota ready for Medicare-for-all?
Plus: Trump’s new effort to upend childhood vaccines
WATCH: Trump signs executive order on childhood vaccine recommendations
The order recommends separating the MMR vaccine into three different shots administered in separate visits, and directs the nation's health department to improve vaccine research, says a White House fact sheet.
http://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/media/press-releases/pallone-trumps-gold-standard-vaccine-executive-order-puts-politics-ahead
Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) released the following statement on President Trump’s executive order establishing so-called "Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations:"
http://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/media/press-releases/pallone-trumps-gold-standard-vaccine-executive-order-puts-politics-ahead
Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) released the following statement on President Trump’s executive order establishing so-called "Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations:"
Trump returns to controversial vaccine policy with order questioning childhood schedule
The Trump administration, which had recently avoided public discussions of vaccine policy because of concern around the political repercussions, is changing course.
Trump to sign executive order calling for spacing out childhood shots
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order calling for spacing out childhood vaccines into separate medical visits and splitting the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three different
Trump set to sign executive order targeting childhood vaccines
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Monday focused on childhood vaccines, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says "I trust the science" on childhood vaccines amid measles outbreak
NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says "I trust the science" on childhood vaccines
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.