As far as anecdotes go, since I moved to London I noticed a sharp decrease in memory performance, heavy hair loss, and a general feeling of unhealthiness, developed a random persistent cough as well. The fact that you can always see a heavy haze even in short tube tunnels tells a lot on the air quality, the last underground cleaning train stopped working in the eighties...very unhealthy place to live/work in my opinion.
I’ve lived in London the past decade and had problems with air pollution (got bronchitis a number of times in the last few years).
Just today my GP suggested getting an inhaler. And I just found out a guy I work with got an inhaler last week.
It’s insane how bad the air pollution is, estimated to cause 40k premature deaths each year.
Meanwhile the government hardly does anything (though see below). People feel it’s their divine right to drive old dirty diesel vehicles and how dare the government impose any restriction on this polluting behaviour.
Luckily London just set up the ULEZ (ultra low emission zone) in a small part of central London, making older dirty cars pay a fee if they enter. But they’re not extending the ULEZ to Greater London for another two and a half years. Or another 100k premature deaths.
And the government does nothing. Except speed bumps, which people complain about, mandatory car maintenance, which people complain about, traffic lights everywhere, which people complain about, speed cameras, which people complain about, regulate emissions, which people complain about.
The UK government permits new cars to be sold with tailpipe emissions which are VASTLY higher than those of comparable vehicles in the USA. The Dieselgate scandal never ended outside USA. It's just business as usual in Europe. The UK government is complicit in knowingly allowing manufacturers to sell extremely polluting diesels. The green initiatives in the UK are hilariously inadequate because so many brand new cars are diesels with extreme emissions levels compared to comparable cars sold in the United States. American market diesels do not pollute anywhere as much as UK market diesels.
> The UK government permits new cars to be sold with tailpipe emissions which are VASTLY higher than those of comparable vehicles in the USA.
What I could find about the latest standards does not seem to support your claim. But maybe I'm looking at wrong numbers or misinterpreting them, so I wouldn't mind looking at your own sources if you have them.
EURO 6d standards for diesel passenger cars [1]:
- CO: 0.5 g/km
- NOx: 0.080 g/km
- PM: 0.0045 g/km
California LEV standards for passenger cars <50K miles/5 years [2]. (Not the same as EPA, but I assume California is more strict):
The people commenting kill themselves. The people driving kill and injure other people.
I don't know how widely reported it was outside the UK, but Prince Philip (Queen Elizabeth's husband) is 97. In January this year, he drove his car into a car with two women and a nine month old child in it. He was OK, the women required hospital treatment (but were not seriously injured).
false dichotomy- there exists a world in which cars are not the normal mode of transportation because everything you could possibly want is within walking distance and intra-city travel is something you do only occasionally.
I couldn't possibly want to leave the city, drive down a logging road, tour around, and enjoy my personal freedom, right? Why would anyone want that, when someone might possibly have a small chance of dying because of it?
it's not just the small chance of dying, though- it's the very real and cumulative effects of driving cars in general. We have laws around being able to pump raw sewage into rivers and lakes as well as laws around leaving depleted uranium anywhere remotely possible of causing harm (and even then it probably still isn't great)
You're welcome to leave the city via some means that doesn't pollute the atmosphere. Walk, bike, etc. It's really whiney of you to feel so incensed that you can't just do whatever TF you want because "mah freedoms" when those activities are contributing to a degradation of the livability of the planet.
Yes, we as a species have reached the point where there are things we _can_ do that we _ought not_ do. Sucks I guess?
If you demand your personal freedom in that way, why do you live in a city at all? You can't park on a street at night and blare loud music, you can't shoot pigeons on the rooftops with a rifle, you can't fly a drone over people or around other's property without permission, and those won't even kill people.
A very small minority of elite cyber criminals, less than .000001% of the population will ever have the privilage to drive a vehicle manually in this future.
The Matrix AI robots do not really need humans to survive. They had a form of fusion. In reality the reason why they created the symbiotic relationship was as a kindness to their human supporters so that the human race would not go extinct.
The truth is that in the original imaginings of the plot to The Matrix, the artificial entities of the machine world had reversed the roles of interaction between humans and computers. It wasn't about energy at all, but about using human brains as a computational resource. They were farming the humans and enslaving them, because the machines occupied the antagonist role in the plot.
They were the villains. It's established in the animatrix set of short films, that the machines did not perceive themselves as villains, and this is a common characteristic that cuts across most tropes of villainy. During a monologue, a villain will often equivocate their motivation with that of the hero. (you and me? we're really the same...)
Focus groups and producers interfered with that aspect of the plot (the grid computer made of people, hence the name: The Matrix), and rewrote the story to depict the machines as using humans as an energy source, a power grid (changing puns and quips using, instead of computational terms, to energy references, such as "coppertop" and the like), which tested as a more accessible concept to the lowest common denominator in the target audience.
If you watch the supplemental material included with the trilogy boxed set, I think it's mentioned in either one of the commentaries or the documentaries and interview segments.
There are 45 μg / gram of salt. That means if you consume the recommended amount (1.5-2.3 grams a day) you're getting 1/10 of the supplement dose indicated above. Even a famously salty big mac would get you 100 μg of iodine.
The environmental externality must be internalized strongly and consistently throughout the "developed" and developing economies [1]. Participation from the two groups is a necessary condition for addressing the air pollution issue.
Meanwhile, the situation in London is similar in South Korea [2]. Most likely, worse: South Korean government is afraid of further regulating the domestic industry, when it should. Over the past decade or so, Chinese government has moved a lot of their factories to the East coast which faces SK in the West. Both SK and Chinese citizens must acknowledge this is a mutually-interested issue and take concrete steps to collaborate while minimizing finger pointing. I am convinced this is a tractable scientific and social/diplomatic problem. One proposal is to set up a joint government-backed venture/think tank that incrementally tackles this issue at a tech/policy level. Such a small step but no where near it...
I think you get used to it after some time, and even get, how should I formulate that, "addicted"?
I live in a heavily polluted city -- a couple of chemical plants, a coal power station, and the central heating system burning a few (dozen) tons of coal every day to combat -40°C winters. A lot of my friends/acquaintances (in fact, most of them) have moved to other cities and many of them report having trouble adjusting to less polluted atmosphere: trouble sleeping (after moving within the same timezone), constant headaches, rashes, the list goes on.
Also, you hear a lot of stories of older people (third world definition of "older", i.e. around 60), never having a single complaint about their health, moving to cleaner cities and dying in a couple of weeks of strokes and cardiac arrest.
It sounds like old wive's tale, but not when you hear it for the twentieth time from the relatives of yet another person affected.
In my experience, pollution has been inversely correlated with outbreak of pollen allergies. However, that could just be caused by polluted environments simply having fewer trees.
Well, if you're exposed to higher concentrations of oxygen, you can have exciting amounts of stress getting used to the lower amounts again after, so the converse effect wouldn't be incredibly surprising.
Have you thought about setting up a cheap 20x20 box fan with a HEPA filter in your home/apartment (California Wildfire Setup), air quality can be worse inside. It may be able to create an environment where you can recover a little everyday.
A 20x20 fan DIY was actually on my todo list. This is the first time I've seen a box with multiple filters on it, however -- all the ones I saw before just taped a single filter to the fan. Are the multiple filters a big practical improvement?
(I used to own an expensive air filter that was top-rated by Consumer Reports at the time, but sold it during a minimalism phase. Now I want to try a filter again, this pollen season, but more frugally.)
I suggest you to move to other city / country as fast as possible. For me the same thing started in my late 20s, and now in my 30s all my life is about finding places where the air pollution is very low, as for my body it became impossible to detoxify even a small amount of air pollution. You're getting a chronic disease, and there's no way back for now.
I experienced patchy hair loss after moving to Los Angeles. This "childhood disease" does not run in my family, and I've never had it before. I'm 38 and moved here two years ago.
I have come to suspect systemic inflation from the rampant pollution in LA caused my new autoimmune disease, or at worst exacerbated a condition I never experienced symptoms of before.
I lived in LA for 20 years (moved about 2 years ago -- hope I didn't sell you my condo!) -- and was right by LAX with a view of departing planes over the ocean, right from my balcony. Never had any health issues, still have all of my hair.
My mother was just diagnosed with dementia, and her mother had it before she died. Despite my "anecdata", I am keeping a close eye on these sort of findings, to see if my brain is going to go the same way. I've certainly had a higher pollution load in my life to date than either of them. :/
Where in LA do you live? LAX spews pollution due east all summer, and south all winter when the winds switch. The valleys get terrible pollution from agriculture as well.
I remember once years ago coming into Heathrow on a flight and when the flight circled over central London there was a distinct brown layer of cloud - it looked disgusting!
A feature of modern cities? As a child I'd very rarely join my father on his commute into Manhattan from southern Brooklyn. When the car topped a ridge about halfway there the island appeared to be perfectly capped by some futuristic but dirty thick brown dome.
> since I moved to London I noticed a sharp decrease in memory performance, heavy hair loss, and a general feeling of unhealthiness, developed a random persistent cough as well.
I developed a persistent cough after moving from Shanghai to Santa Cruz, California, but it would be hard to blame that on air pollution.
And it turns out it was probably infection with Heliobacter Pylori.
I went to an Alzheimer's Conference recently and there was an hour-long talk about air pollution and dementia.
1) The title of this article is bad. In epidemiologic terms, you shouldn't combine the words "seem" and "cause". Seem is about perception, is about possibility, whereas any science writer or epi researcher worth their salt is NOT going to use the term "cause" lightly. There may be an association, a correlation, a linkage even, but cause? No no, dementia is a very broad disease with many potential causes, and likely you will never establish a singular cause for that disease.
2) Regarding the talk I attended itself, there is a wildly broad definition of air pollution out there. Are you talking about ozone, NOx, or particulate matter, and what SIZE of particulate matter? How do you measure lifetime exposure or recent exposure for those moving, and for the dynamic process that is air quality? Then, how do you control for community and cultural based effects of living in certain areas - maybe those with other risk factors are also those forced by poverty/etc. to live in the polluted areas.
Summarily, IMHO, air pollution is a contributing factor to dementia, but alone I doubt it'd be sufficient without age-related degeneration, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, stress, underlying genetics/alleles/mutations, etc. There are probably around 10-20 important factors of which air pollution is one.
As a society, let's ditch ICE vehicles, let's ditch coal and dirty industrial practices, both for our planet and for our own health.
What can you do now? Stop idling your car, use your brakes as little as possible (i.e. drive efficiently, don't speed up just to have to brake soon), don't go out in hot summer weather, support renewable energy, oppose coal/dirty diesel/inefficient fossil fuel use, and generally vote for politicians who agree with the above and don't take dirty fossil money.
I definitely notice myself degrading since becoming homeless last year, and its like everything I'm newly subjected to causes dementia and Alzheimers--brake dust, poor air quality, plaque in gums. I lived outside during the wild fires, and I mostly sleep near intersections. (And the homeless must suck it up and compete in the fair market without complaint!)
I documented myself on a YouTube channel as I could sense homelessness looming, and have been keeping pretty extensive logs so that it won't be assumed that I became homeless due to my degraded state when they find my body (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
I remember how kindly people treated dogs during the wildfires. With all luck, I'll be as intelligent as a dog soon.
Plaque in gums is an extremely serious issue that you need to resolve immediately. You can develop many chronic illnesses and deteriorate rapidly If you do not resolve that. If you can't afford a dentist here get a bus ticket to Yuma and walk across the border.
> Both of these studies estimated that around 6 to 7 percent of all dementia cases in their samples could be attributed to air pollution exposures
Is it just me or does this seem very flimsy? Sounds like this model catches very few cases, and there is no mention in TFA of how many false positives were found. The quasi-causal study sounds a bit better, but judging by how much the article seems to have overplayed the correlational studies, I have a feeling the quasi-causal study isn't that good either
What is going on with all the air pollution articles hitting HN this week? This is the 4th(?) I’ve seen in about 3 days. Any tech topic and I might not think about it, but air purification doesn’t really seem to be the kind of topic I’d expect to see so much here.
I left a bunch of comments in that vein yesterday. The thing is, you can’t answer the question of “how to measure air quality” withiut some sort of product. By contrast, if someone asks “how do I manage my time?” the answer can be free.
So if you use a naive filter you’ll be more suspicious of the one case but not the other. But the baseline probability of product mentions is way higher for domains that require products! You can see from my karma and general comment history though that I didn’t make an account to do this. I’ve had an account 8 years and am interested in air quality, to the puzzlement of my peers.
If there were new accounts repeatedly dropping the same products, that would be suspicious. Did that happen?
I have noticed this phenomena a number of times. My theory is that the first article sparks people digging into the matter and related subjects further. This leads to them posting related articles. A bit of herd like mentality.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I cared about pollution as theory for decades. Even as a child when I had to wait near the idling busses I could sense an innate revulsion at whatever I was inhaling.
Maybe what's happening is that after an unfortunately long delay, society is finally coming around to a long overdue conclusion. Some phenomena seem to flip from "absurd" to "obvious" very quickly (gay-marriage, marijuana) once they get a certain critical mass.
Most of India is suffering under extremely high levels of particulate pollution - I wonder how this is going to start affecting the population there, especially as life expectancy is increasing.
Lead in particular is nasty and still in use for aviation fuel:
>the most commonly used grades of avgas still contain tetraethyllead (TEL), a toxic substance used to prevent engine knocking (detonation), with ongoing experiments aimed at eventually reducing or eliminating the use of TEL in aviation gasoline
Definitely, but it’s worth noting for people who are unfamiliar - avgas isn’t jet fuel - it’s only used in small piston planes, not anything with turbine engines. It’s still a problem because there are plenty of that kind of aircraft, but most commercial aviation isn’t using leaded fuel.
>It’s still a problem because there are plenty of that kind of aircraft,
Yeah. But those aircraft don't tend to inhabit the airspace around cities. Pretty much all small commercial aviation in the lower 48 is going to be running turboprops that use normal jet fuel (basically diesel). A suburban airport that actually has a meaningful GA presence is going to put far more lead into the air.
According to the evolution theory, eventually our DNA will evolve to adapt to its external environment so does this mean given enough daily exposure over many generations, at some time in a distant future our immune system will no longer consider those particles as foreign and thus will not fight to eliminate it? There would be no dementia by then if it was indeed caused by inflammation triggered by the immune system. I know this sounds pretty stupid but human bodies are weird machines still not fully understood by today science. If some people within the same race could be allergic to certain types of food that are completely safe to others without any proper explanations (eggs, peanuts, etc...) then anything is possible. I'm sure there are people out there who live to 90 without getting dementia even in heaviest polluted cities.
Yes and no. Evolution theory would require those who get dementia to go extinct. Usually by the time you develop dementia, you already reproduced, so even if some people become "immune" to pollution, the others won't get removed from the gene pool.
This is an interesting angle. Next generation will pretty much be exposed to pollution by the moment they're born. Technically their kids will inherit a slightly mutated version already even though it might not yet be enough. Does our gene "remember" how much exposure it had accumulated from the previous generation? We often hear from the news how they found some individuals who were immune to certain diseases due to a specific genetic mutation. Your kids don't carry the exact DNA as yours since it's a combination between a father and a mother so it will always be a new mutation.
Does our gene "remember" how much exposure it had accumulated from the previous generation?
Not as DNA. The main thing that controls evolution is failure to reproduce. Life experiences have only a very short term effect on how DNA is packaged.
it will always be a new mutation
A "mutation" is not the same thing as a "permutation". The combination of DNA from two parents is not itself mutation.
Transgenerational inheritance is what this is technically called, and is a contentious topic about whether or not it exists in humans and to what degree. There's been studies from people who's grandparents have gone through famine and those grandchildren tend to be shorter or leaner than those who haven't, but AFAIK these are just associations and nothing causal has been found in humans to suggest what happens to you might affect your grandchildren. That being said, being exposed to pollution is not going to be great for your sperm or eggs.
And I know you are worried about what the next generation breathes, but consider that what you were exposed to was much worse, and what your parents were exposed to was worse still, and if your grandparents lived in cities they experienced awful pollution, second only to perhaps what your great grandparents may have been exposed to during the industrial revolution. Air quality has gotten better than it was in 1980 and much better than 1880, but there is still a long way to go to reset the damage of rampant consumer culture on our environment and health.
Also to your point on how mutation happens: its random and rarely beneficial. If you go out in the sun without sunscreen, that UV light penetrates your skin and encourages your skin cells to produce more melanin, but it could also damage your DNA, break a tumor suppressing gene, and give you skin cancer.
Your bodies DNA replication machinery also has an error rate which can be worked out, and you can extrapolate that to get a rate of mutation. Knowing this rate can give you an estimate of how long ago two species diverged based on the number of different bases when you line up their DNA sequences against eachother, for example.
As far as I understand it, evolution only really happens if the survival of the fittest principle also applies. Modern science does good job keeping people who would otherwise could not survive alive. I think that the answer to get rid of allergies will come from science rather than the natural process. (If ever)
Not just that, evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest, than survival of the fittest. Any health effects that don't manifest until 40 or later aren't likely to have much influence on evolution.
You've got it backwards. DNA doesn't "evolve to addapt". Variations get copied and passed down except for those within individuals that didn't reproduce. Sometimes an entire lineage doesn't reproduce, that's extinction. So, there's no "eventually".
Our bodies may not be "fully" understood. But there's no points for an argument from ignorance.
Still there may be people that live to 90 without getting dementia in heavily polluted cities. However, that's down to natural variation.
That only presupposes that these adaptations are evolutionary beneficial to us - if we live long enough to breed and see our offspring breed, it doesn't actually matter if we develop those adaptations. Selection via ability to breed is how evolution works, and we've largely circumvented that.
It depends how near. I've read that living in the outer parts of the exclusion zone is likely to reduce your lifespan by a week or two. Depending on the city, that actually might be an improvement.
