As Heroin Use by Whites Soars, Parents Urge Gentler Drug War →

The "War on Drugs" was a disaster, a policy failure, as well as a moral failure.

When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.
And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.
“Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered,” said Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the nation’s drug czar. “They know how to call a legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company, they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing the conversation.”

The FDA Just Approved One Cancer-Killing Virus. Expect More →

By the numbers, the newest FDA-approved treatment for skin cancer doesn’t seem a real game changer. A $65,000 course of treatment extends melanoma patients’ lives by less than four and a half months, on average—and that result is barely statistically significant.
It’s how the new drug—Imlygic, made by the biotechnology company Amgen—works that has the oncology world so worked up. Imlygic is a virus—alive and infectious, the first to get a stamp of approval in the US for its ability to attack cancer cells. It opens a whole new front in the fight against cancer, which has the sneaky habit of coming back after chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery. “It is a totally new class of weapons that we can now use,” says Antonio Chiocca, a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. And the armory could be bigger, because coming up right behind Imlygic are over a dozen clinical trials for more anti-cancer viruses.
The idea of deploying viruses against cancer actually stretches back decades. The theory makes sense: When normal cells turn cancerous, replicating out of control, their virus-fighting machinery shuts down...

Nothing to See Here →

A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far.
And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?
What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.

Judge rules Kentucky man had the right to shoot down his neighbor’s drone →

A Kentucky man who shot down a drone flying near his property has been cleared of all charges by a local judge. William Merideth was originally cited for criminal mischief and wanton endangerment after shooting the drone out of the air in July this year, but Judge Rebecca Ward ruled that he was right to do so after reviewing testimony from neighbors that the aircraft was flying near Merideth's house.
"I think it's credible testimony that his drone was hovering [...] for two or three times over these people's property, that it was an invasion of their privacy and that they had the right to shoot this drone," Ward told the court according to a report from Sky News. "I'm going to dismiss his charge."

Meat, Cancer, Fear and Carcinogenic Headlines →

The bottom line? There are plenty of reasons to reduce consumption of processed and red meats — salt, fat, cruelty to livestock, methane, deforestation, water waste… A slight increase in cancer risk may be one of them, as well.
But much of the caricatured quick coverage, with help from the World Health Organization, buried any sense of nuance.
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Yesterday, Yong (appropriately) sharply criticized the cancer registry for failing to note this vital point: “These classifications are based on strength of evidence not degree of risk.”

Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill →

The kind of thing I loved thinking about, reading Asimov's robot series. The kind of thing that's moving from science fiction literature into the real world:

When it comes to automotive technology, self-driving cars are all the rage. Standard features on many ordinary cars include intelligent cruise control, parallel parking programs, and even automatic overtaking—features that allow you to sit back, albeit a little uneasily, and let a computer do the driving.
So it’ll come as no surprise that many car manufacturers are beginning to think about cars that take the driving out of your hands altogether (see “Drivers Push Tesla’s Autopilot Beyond Its Abilities”). These cars will be safer, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient than their manual counterparts. And yet they can never be perfectly safe.
And that raises some difficult issues. How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random? (See also “How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions.”)
The answers to these ethical questions are important because they could have a big impact on the way self-driving cars are accepted in society. Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?
So can science help? Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Jean-Francois Bonnefon at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and a couple of pals. These guys say that even though there is no right or wrong answer to these questions, public opinion will play a strong role in how, or even whether, self-driving cars become widely accepted.

Greenland Is Melting Away →

But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.
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For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.
Scientists know that the melting of Greenland is accelerating. As the temperature rises, large lakes form on the surface of the ice, which in turn create a network of rivers.
“The rivers melt down faster than the surrounding ice, like a knife through butter,” Dr. Smith said.

Powerful admiral punishes suspected whistleblowers, still gets promotion →

Critics say the previously undisclosed investigations into one of the Navy’s top SEALs underscore the weakness of the military’s whistleblower-protection law and how rarely violators are punished.
Under the law, commanders or senior civilian officials are prohibited from taking punitive action against anyone who has reported wrongdoing in the armed forces to the inspector general or members of Congress.
In comparison with other federal employees, whistleblowers working in the military or national security agencies must meet a higher burden of proof to win their cases. The odds are stacked against those who seek redress.
Of the 1,196 whistleblower ­cases closed by the Defense Department during the 12 months ending March 31, only 3 percent were upheld by investigators, records show.
“There’s no teeth,” said Mandy Smithberger, a military reform analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan Washington advocacy group. She called the military’s whistleblower law “a trap, because people think they have protection, but they don’t. It’s sad.”