Lead From Gasoline Blunted the IQ of About Half the U.S. Population, Study Says (nbcnews.com) 243
Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shared this article from NBC News:
Exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the population of the United States, a new study estimates. The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on people born before 1996 — the year the U.S. banned gas containing lead.
Overall, the researchers from Florida State University and Duke University found, childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million points, or 2.6 points per person on average. Certain cohorts were more affected than others. For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption was skyrocketing, the IQ loss was estimated to be up to 6 points and for some, more than 7 points. Exposure to it came primarily from inhaling auto exhaust.
"Lead is a neurotoxin, and no amount of it is safe.
Overall, the researchers from Florida State University and Duke University found, childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million points, or 2.6 points per person on average. Certain cohorts were more affected than others. For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption was skyrocketing, the IQ loss was estimated to be up to 6 points and for some, more than 7 points. Exposure to it came primarily from inhaling auto exhaust.
"Lead is a neurotoxin, and no amount of it is safe.
And the other half? (Score:2)
They were already stupid or what's the message here?
How the hell would lead in the air only affect half the population?
Re: And the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
The lead wasnâ(TM)t evenly distributed, it was proportional to the amount of auto exhaust being emitted nearby.
Those who didnâ(TM)t live near lots of traffic were exposed to less lead than those who did.
Re: And the other half? (Score:5, Funny)
Well that explains city people.
Re: And the other half? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well that explains city people.
Same thing wth asthma [nih.gov]. We've know for a long time people who live in cities have higher health incidents than others despite not being as obese. Which shouldn't be a surprise. People living in cities through centuries have had worse health issues than people living outside the city.
And yet, there are those who keep saying we need to cram everyone into cities so cars aren't needed as much. A better solution would be to reduce the population so people could spread out more and not be like rats in cages. More space between people, more open space in general, will lead to better health conditions.
Re: And the other half? (Score:5, Interesting)
As with all pollution, if the car pollution is the problem the solution is to tax the pollution and let individuals and markets adapt. Right now we do the opposite by heavily subsidizing car transport and the results are not surprising... people respond to the subsidy and even become dependent on them.
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Or, instead of cramming people into cities, when you spread them out you create zones. Each zone has its own stores to support the area. Everything is close enough that an electric car could be used or, if one prefers, bike to the place. Or even walk if your home is close enough. Sort of a return to malls but spread out.
And I don't mean those tiny communities developers are doing. I mean people have a quarter acre of land for their house. Large enough to spread people and have some privacy, but not so la
Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
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You need infrastructure to live and individuals don't create infrastructure. Despite libertarian fantasy, you need "big government" to plan roads, water, sewer, electric grids, etc. If you build a light rail line in a metro area, communities will agglomerate around the stops. The high level of foot traffic will attract businesses and developers will build housing. If you build a 6 lane highway I to your city center, you will create induced demand and suburbs will grow.
People aren't just free to live how the
Re: And the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spreading out creates all kinds of pollution causing inefficiencies. Just to go over a small handful of the limitations spreading out means you need more roads, more power infrastructure, more sewage infrastructure, more mass transit for less people and you cant walk anywhere so you have to drive because most things are farther away. More of all these things means more energy expended on them which right now means more pollution from the energy created to power the electric cars, more mining for more road building materials and larger numbers of metal pipes made for a larger sewer network. All of these things also mean more money spent and money is its own limitation.
So in summary, spreading out is not very efficient as it means you need more of most of the things modern living relies on and thus is not very green.
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Hmm, but cramming people together means you need high-rise buildings which use ludicrous amounts of concrete which needs ludicrous amounts of energy and heavy trucks to move it which destroy the roads which then need repairing etc.
Plus the housing is cramped and impossible to extend, so you need to move house when circumstances change, you need to pump water miles to flush the toilet because you can't catch rainwater and so on.
Re: And the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are you getting this idea from? EVs use regenerative breaking. Basically the motor spins backwards when you let off the pedal, converting the kinetic energy into electrical energy. There's no friction applied, so there's no particles from break pads. Yes, they have regular breaks as a backup, but they're rarely used. Because of the weight, EVs also don't peel out either when they're taking off. They do emit more particles from the tires, but that's not necessarily because of the weight, it's more because of the fact that the electric motor provides instant torque, which creates friction, but with the right tires it's no more than any other high performance car.
There are basically a few ways this can be solved, namely by reducing the acceleration, or possibly by designing new tires along with rethinking the way roads are paved, or all of the above
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The further you spread people out, the more you need cars. It's a straightforward scaling problem and easily verifiable empirically.
As with all pollution, if the car pollution is the problem the solution is to tax the pollution and let individuals and markets adapt. Right now we do the opposite by heavily subsidizing car transport and the results are not surprising... people respond to the subsidy and even become dependent on them.
In 10 years I wouldn't be shocked if more than half of cars on the roads were EVs, in 20 years there might be hardly any ICEs on the road (at a certain point the ICE infrastructure collapses and just finding a gas station becomes very inconvenient and expensive).
Which actually changes the policy decisions a bit. If your city doesn't have a big industrial base it might be all EVs and heat pumps in 20 years and the air quality could be surprisingly good.
Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
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I don't mean to claim there aren't a bunch of non-exhaust environmental impacts from ICEs that EVs don't fix, just that the exhaust still sucks [howstuffworks.com]. I've gone running on a winter day with a bit of a temperature inversion near a major roadway and the air stinks.
I suspect the sweet spot for city size is probably about 100-500k, denser than that and downtown density starts getting a bit rough, smaller than that and you don't get the diversity needed to support a vibrant economic and cultural scene.
Re: And the other half? (Score:3)
20 years ago we were supposed to be all ipv6 in 20 years.
Re: And the other half? (Score:3)
Taxing poison doesn't make it safer.
$15 packs of cigarettes still cause cancer.
If you want to stop a behavior, pass laws to stop the behavior - but own up to the fact that you are trying to control what people do.
Re: And the other half? (Score:3)
That basically goes back full circle to motorcars, because that ended with the proliferation of cars (and government policies that encou
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Well that explains city people.
Same thing wth asthma [nih.gov]. We've know for a long time people who live in cities have higher health incidents than others despite not being as obese. Which shouldn't be a surprise. People living in cities through centuries have had worse health issues than people living outside the city.
And yet, there are those who keep saying we need to cram everyone into cities so cars aren't needed as much. A better solution would be to reduce the population so people could spread out more and not be like rats in cages. More space between people, more open space in general, will lead to better health conditions.
In 2015 there was a huge leak in a Natural Gas storage facility in LA, so the surrounding schools installed air filters and their test scores shot up [vox.com].
Re: And the other half? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reduce the population and spread them out? That is the stupidest thing I ever heard. What are people going to do with their extra space? Grow food so they don't need to waste time and energy bringing it from the shops? Put up windmills so they are less dependent on the grid? And just how do you expect to price young people out of the housing market if there is less competition for the shoddily-built apartments thrown together by rapacious developers? Crazy talk!
Re: And the other half? (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, there are those who keep saying we need to cram everyone into cities so cars aren't needed as much. A better solution would be to reduce the population so people could spread out more and not be like rats in cages. More space between people, more open space in general, will lead to better health conditions.
That is hilariously backwards. Spreading people out is what causes car dependence and car dependence is what causes the air pollution problems leading to poor health outcomes. Cramming people into cities is the *solution* not the problem. Mind you it's not the only solution. We could eliminate this absurd practice of insisting people need to travel from their houses into one small couple of square miles all to sit at a desk and do stuff they could literally do anywhere else. That way they could be spread out *and* not generating hazardous pollution.
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Your comment is not only false, it also ignored the reality of the type of work being discussed and the nuances of the point being made.
Firstly the word "minority" is doing heavy lifting there. Minority is a useful definition to describe 49.9% of the population as well. The fact that anything is a minority does not make it insignificant. We can see this in countries which have adopted stringent flexible working, you only need to get 20-30% of the people to not travel to make a HUGE cut in air pollution beca
Re: And the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure why some here want to "score political points" off of this topic. Wanting to prevent the poisoning of Americans isn't a partisan thing, or at least it should not be.
Because racism, that's why (Score:3, Insightful)
So like just about everything bad in America this disproportionately targeted minority communities, who ironically tended to subsidize those white suburban communities because the extremely low population density of the suburbs meant that there wasn't enough of a tax base to pay for the services they wanted and needed.
Re: Because racism, that's why (Score:2)
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As in, "we the nice lilly white owners of the banks are going to makeabsolutely certain that there's no home loan available to any blacks who want to move to this nice white suburb, on any terms, period."
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Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
Yes, it explains why liberals tend to promote a clean environment and use of EVs/Hybrids - IQ protection. They saw what was happening to their conservative neighbors and don't want any part of that dumbing down, lead poisoning stuff.
Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
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Actually, liberal people don't live close to highways or arterial roads. So no, it doesn't explain liberalism.
The cities are full of liberals and traffic
Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
We also keep all the sex and drugs there too.
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I am curious about what they used as a proxy for auto exhaust exposure.
The proxy is gasoline consumption.
I'm sure that leaded gasoline was very harmful, but the methodology in this study seems questionable. The oddly specific numbers appear to be pulled out of the air. I'm surprised this passed peer review.
Re: And the other half? (Score:5, Informative)
I am curious about what they used as a proxy for auto exhaust exposure.
The proxy is gasoline consumption.
I'm sure that leaded gasoline was very harmful, but the methodology in this study seems questionable. The oddly specific numbers appear to be pulled out of the air. I'm surprised this passed peer review.
That's pretty flawed unless it was leaded gas consumption. I'm surprised it took that long for the government to actually ban it.
The catalytic converter mandate in 1975 made leaded gasoline useless for cars built after that year, and realistically, any car made after 1972 or so could take unleaded gas without difficulty, so by the mid-1980s, the number of cars on the road that still needed leaded gas was approximately zero except for a few collectible cars that people drove once a year.
Thus, gas stations stopped selling it. There might have been one gas station in an area that still sold it for collectible car enthusiasts up until the early 1990s, but most people knew how to add no-knock additives if needed, and just ran unleaded in those, too.
So if they're still seeing a detectable difference past 1985, I'd be shocked.
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The reason effects continued is because engines running on TEL laced gasoline emitted it in the form of lead oxide nanoparticles. Huffing it from car exhaust was the worst, but it didn't disappear if not inhaled. The existence of widespread lead contamination was revealed when scientists examining pre- and post-atomic testing lead isotopes, all the way back in the late 40s, discovered
Re: And the other half? (Score:4, Informative)
From the date of the effective ban in 1975 it took upwards of 15-20 years before measured blood lead levels dropped back to the point of "generally no clinically detectable/meaningful harm" as environmental weathering slowly washed it away.
That seems unlikely. If you look at blood levels plotted against leaded gasoline consumption [pnas.org], blood levels lag behind consumption by only about two years, and the relationship is mostly linear.
Or at least it was linear until about 1990, followed by a long tail. What makes that curious is that most people live in cities, where you'd expect the highest contamination to be, but the long tail didn't start until about the 70% mark, which, if you assume that there's a lot of lingering contamination from gasoline, is not really what you'd expect with ~82% of people living in the most contaminated areas and everyone consuming the same sorts of foods grown in contaminated soil.
And I can't think of any plausible reason why poor people would be dramatically more exposed to latent lead contamination from cars than wealthy people, yet that's what the blood levels show.
I think it is far more likely that a big chunk of child exposure comes from lead-based paint, which was banned in 1978, and that the long tail that began in the late 1980s was mostly caused by the remaining effects of lead-based paint. Poorer people are, of course, more likely to live in older houses that have lead-based paint, more likely to have pipes soldered with lead-based solder, and probably have other risks of lead exposure that have nothing to do with cars. So IMO, paint explains the long tail better than lingering contamination from leaded gasoline, IMO.
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It is largely offset by the Flynn effect - IQ scores have substantially increased from 1932 through the 20th century, with differences ranging from three to five IQ points per decade.
So a loss of 2 points over 50 years compared to the massive increase over that same period. Especially since the study basically eliminated everyone born after the 90s, their inherent increased IQ due to better access to nutrition, medicine, education etc. is not taken into account. (Most) people's IQ naturally decays over time
Re: And the other half? (Score:2)
I feel like there is wisdom in your post. But more in the theme of a Gallant and Goofus strip.
And yet .... (Score:2, Insightful)
... silicofluoric acid leaches lead from pipes and drags it across calcium ion transports and the BBB but they continue to pump it into otherwise safe water supplies despite Medicaid studies from the 90's showing a 10-point IQ hit in the poorest communities.
It's /almost/ as if a dumb, passive populace is the real goal.
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It's /almost/ as if a dumb, passive populace is the real goal.
Television and TikTok do that well enough. There's no point in turning your Gammas into Deltas or Epsilons when it makes them largely unable to meaningfully contribute to society.
It's more likely that it's just a matter of money and not wanting to replace the existing infrastructure that was put in place long before anyone thought it might be a problem down the road as opposed to any intentional malicious act by those supposedly in power. No need to be conspiratorial.
Re:And yet .... (Score:4, Informative)
Gen Z has the least amount of lead poisoning. The older you are, the worse your exposure probably was.
Actually no (Score:2)
Next up, microplastics (Score:2)
I recently read where the majority of the microplastics that we're finding every, including inside our tissues, in placentas, and such is coming from. Tires. Perhaps the car really is killing us, and the US is more in love with cars than almost anywhere. I wonder what these stats are like in Germany, possibly the only place more car-happy than the US?
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I recently read where the majority of the microplastics that we're finding every, including inside our tissues, in placentas, and such is coming from. Tires.
You read wrong. The majority of microsplastics come from synthetic materials [horiba.com] such as polysester clothes [statista.com]. Tires are second.
Perhaps the car really is killing us,
Perhaps clothes really are killing us.
Re: Next up, microplastics (Score:2)
Be specific: Clothes made from synthetic fibre.
Wool, cotton, silk, hemp and the plethora of other natural fibres are and always were just fine.
Except straw. Fuck that stuff.
Re: Next up, microplastics (Score:2)
The only suitable material from which to produce clothing is hemp.
- Spicoli
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What's wrong with straw? It does have a weird smell after being in the sun for a while.
Re:Next up, microplastics (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true, but close.
First, to be technical about it... tires don't produce microplastics, because they're not made of plastic. They break down into rubber-based micropolymers. Does your body care about the difference? In terms of environmental impact, it seems everyone lumps them together as 'microplastics' anyway but it remains a difference I think is worth mentioning.
Tires are the second largest primary source of microplastics. The first is wastewater from washing synthetic textiles.
The bulk of microplastics arrive via secondary sources - something around two-thirds - and they come from exactly where everyone thinks they do, discarded plastic items breaking down over time.
https://www.nokiantyres.com/co... [nokiantyres.com]
One of the best "The Cosmos" episodes (Score:5, Informative)
This Cosmos episode [youtube.com] was an expose on the history of leaded gasoline. It was great in so many ways - educating about the early history of leaded gasoline and its dangers, corporate corruption and their complete disregard to everyone's health when profits are on the line ("greed is good"), scientific corruption (paid for liars to confuse the public),
Re:One of the best "The Cosmos" episodes (Score:4, Interesting)
Except it took 3 decades to get it banned once it was found to be everywhere, consumed the entire life of the scientist who wasn't even involved in studying gasoline or related products. All Clair Patterson wanted to do was date the Earth - using radioactive decay that turned Uranium into Lead.
But his readings were skewed because he kept finding way more lead than should be possible, which he eventually traced to the immense amount of lead in the environment caused by TEL. The environmental levels were much higher than anyone ever believed, and he campaigned to get the lead out of gasoline which he discovered was the primary pollutant of environmental lead by studying antarctic ice core samples.
It took 30 years of campaigning for this - he wanted to do his research in the 60s, the US finally banned leaded gasoline in the mid 90s. (And Japan, while being the first country, banned it barely a decade before). The lobbying was that strong to keep TEL in gasoline.
In the end, he managed to calculate the age of the earth - and to this day CalTech maintains an ultra-clean room where everything has been scrubbed clean to remove all the lead from it.
So while government might make health policy, industry lobbies government to make sure it doesn't harm profits. I mean, the fossil fuel industry still lobbies against policies regarding climate change. Because keeping it legal means profits for them.
TEL was kept legal purely by lobbyists trying to keep from needing to change.
Even industry wants to change now - aviation is the last user of leaded fuel - 100LL being the standard for avgas (100 octane low-lead). And that's an improvement since the performance engines were using 140 leaded (140 octane leaded). "Low lead" just means it had half the amount of lead in it, and engines ran fine on 100LL.
But industry is trying to move to unleaded - unfortunately the octane booster in use today - ethanol - does not work in aircraft engines (it destroys the rubber seals used) making it hard. But the move away from TEL is important because it's hard to get TEL, and only one refinery in the US makes basically the entire global demand for avgas. So the TEL comes from the UK, is shipped to the refinery in the US, they run for ONE day to make all the avgas the world needs for one day. Then the refinery shuts down for a week so all the lead is removed from the equipment. Naturally, this means the cost of avgas is basically dictated by one company and why it makes European petrol seem cheap.
There's already one candidate unleaded gas, G100UL approved as a replacement for 100LL, but it's still in the lab stages of development and not in the commercial production levels yet making it hard to get beyond a few airports.
Of course, a goal would be to get several flavors of 100UL out there for competition, as well as ensuring they are compatible with each other (i.e., you can mix all the various 100UL formulations without ill effect).
It's not all smooth sailing because the University of North Dakota (UND) recently
Abuse of IQ terminology (Score:4, Insightful)
One of my ocd bug a boos.
IQ was never intended as a general measure of intelligence.
It was specifically designed to provide a simple metric to compare one -young- child's intellectual and educational state vs others on a group scale.
It was absolutely not designed to provide a metric for adults since there's a "divide score by age in months" in the calculation.
Rant over. Thank you.
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Lewis Terman (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]):
Early on, Terman adopted William Stern's suggestion that mental age/chronological age times 100 be made the intelligence quotient or IQ.
Revisions (mostly recently the fifth) of the Stanford-Binet remain in widespread use as a measure of general intelligence for both adults and for children.
Unlike Binet and Simon, whose goal was to identify less able school children in order to aid them with the needed care required, Terman proposed using IQ tests to classify children and put them on the appropriate job-track.
William Stern (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
During Stern's time, many other psychologists were working on ways to qualitatively assess individual differences. Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, for instance, were developing tests to assess the mental age of children in order to identify learning disabilities, but lacked a standardized way to compare these scores across populations of children. Stern suggested a change in the formula for intelligence, which has previously been calculated using the difference between an individual's mental age and chronological age. Instead, Stern proposed dividing an individual's mental age by their chronological age to obtain a single ratio. This formula was later improved by Lewis Terman, who multiplied the intelligence quotient by 100 to obtain a whole number.[6]
It seems that the point of the IQ methodology, added on to preexisting intelligence testing, was intended to come up with a general measure that was comparable across populations. Disagree?
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The original intent, as per your quotes was to measure young children.
No modifications of any sort since then can tweak or change it to create a signal numeric metric that can determine "this person is smarter than that person".
It's a silly concept.
Do you believe that a 110 IQ person is 10% smarter than a 100 IQ person? Smarter in what way? What does it even mean to be smarter or have a higher "intelligence quotient"? Note the use of the word quotient.
Re:Abuse of IQ terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Stanford-Binet" test was originally devised for children, but the revisions upon it--that make it the modern IQ test--coming from Stern and Terman in large part, seem to be statistical modifications to do exactly what you're saying it can't. So, even if (your position) the test is not meaningful, the intent was to make a generally comparable measure of intelligence.
You said "IQ was never intended as a general measure of intelligence." The argument I'm making is that it seems as if that was exactly the intent of creating the IQ test.
In response to your other questions:
Do you believe that a 110 IQ person is 10% smarter than a 100 IQ person?
Unsure, but I would say no in terms of thinking about it as some kind of normalized distribution.
Smarter in what way? What does it even mean to be smarter or have a higher "intelligence quotient"? Note the use of the word quotient.
I'm not sure anyone has ever proposed that IQ is the ONLY measure that matters for ALL aspects of life. But, there's very strong evidence that whatever IQ measures has a statistically significant correlation with a number of life outcomes (job performance, income, health, educational performance, etc.).
I heard a lecture years ago where the speaker talked about IQ in terms of mental plasticity / learning flexibility. The example given was being a cashier at McDonalds. This is actually be a fairly mentally taxing job. You have to be able to listen to customers, understand special orders, know the buttons on the register to press to get the desired order in, accept multiple forms of payment, make change from cash, multitask with getting different orders to different customers, etc. Almost anyone can do this job (though as anyone who has been a fastfood customer can attest, some workers ARE better than others!). What impact does IQ have the ability to perform this job? Not a lot. The impact of IQ is in the ability to learn the computer system, learn how to handle new and unexpected order combos, etc--the learning portions.
My own crank theory is that human intelligence almost all boils down to pattern matching on steroids and that genius is pattern matching on a level that most people can't understand (or, differently, recognizing different kinds of patterns from what most people see).
Re: Abuse of IQ terminology (Score:2)
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If we don't know what IQ is even measuring why are we measuring it and how do we know those numbers are in any way accurate?
There is no way to baseline, compare, confirm or anything else to know that IQ is measuring anything at all.
Again, IQ was intended as a very simply back of the envelope method to determine which kids might be falling behind in school. Nothing more. No number of tweaks can "fix" it dot make it a generally applicable measure of intelligence because it does not measure intelligence of c
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Nonetheless, a person with a 120 IQ is going to be smarter than a person with an 80 IQ, and everybody knows it, and I wonder if this is an exercise in pedantry.
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This was my field of study in college. I don't need to google it.
It has no useful meaning. Being widely used does not magically give it value. Science is not based on common belief or we'd still be afraid of falling off the edge of the earth if we travel too far in a straight line.
So you think it is a measure of learning ability. Will an IQ 110 person learn something new 10% faster than an IQ 100 person?
What exactly does it measure?
Re: Abuse of IQ terminology (Score:2)
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Ok, I'll roll with that. Let's go back to the summary with that in mind.
It says lead gasoline fumes/burnt fuel reduced IQ by as much as 7 point for people born in the 60s/70s.
If 10 points doesn't show significant difference then 7 is even smaller, of course. Should we care about the effects of lead gas on IQ? Is there really a point to the article and research behind it?
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Modern intelligence tests are multi-domain. They're composed of several different tests designed to focus on different areas. It differs a bit, but usually some variation of verbal/language, visual/spatial reasoning, working memory, processing speed, numerical/logical and sometimes general knowledge.
There is a lot of foundational work done on measuring intelligence, and it supports a common factor (the g factor) underlying performance in the different domains.
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Ok, no problem. Just like the SAT is a composite score of English and Math tests (or it was when I was a kid, I believe they change ged it a lot since then so I'm talking the original SAT).
If someone scored a 1200 on their SAT are they better at math or English? They could have a 400 English and 800 math which makes them a barely literate bio-calculator. Or a fantastic poet who can't count their own toes.
Making any test multi domain and then coming up with a single combined score doesn't tell us a whole
Re: Abuse of IQ terminology (Score:2)
If by "never" you mean "not at first", then yes.
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Ok, if you want to get technical, yes, later people -tried- to twist it into a general measure, I'll grant that.
But they failed.
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It's the same thing with BMI, but here we are.
Look, if you give people a simple, 30 second sound-bite approved metric with which to apply sweeping generalizations, they'll use it.
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Fair point. It's still irritating.
Re: Abuse of IQ terminology (Score:2)
Explains (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, maybe. But then I was born in the early 1960's and I despise Donald Trump and the White Christian nationalist MAGA crowd in general. But it does explain why I'm an idiot in so many other areas of life. ;-) But then maybe I wasn't exposed to so much of that leaded gasoline as my parents drove a smaller car that got 16 miles to the gallon instead of a land barge that got 8.
Re: Explains (Score:2)
my parents drove a smaller car that got 16 miles to the gallon instead of a land barge that got 8.
That shouldn't have made a difference to you. For the people stuck behind your parents' 16 mpg hooptie, that's a different matter.
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...For the people stuck behind your parents' 16 mpg hooptie, that's a different matter.
That was me, on my skateboard and bicycle in Los Angeles. I really dislike cars.
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Fox News delivering fear and dopamine 24/7.
This sounds familiar (Score:2)
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
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Well today's post is pretty much a dupe of the one you linked to. The one I posted is a bit older. ;-)
That explains a lot (Score:2)
The US is not being slowly corrupted by tons of religious fanatics. These people are _dumb_.
Not supported by the findings of the Flynn effect (Score:2)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
This is a slashdot that touched on the reversal. I always considered it to be little more than a regression to the mean.
However, and I am in no way calling it causal, I do note that the generations suffering from this regression are the generations born after lead was banned
"No amount safe"? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Lead is a neurotoxin, and no amount of it is safe.
To be pedantic, because /., things aren't "safe" and "unsafe". A more precise statement might be "any measurable exposure to lead leads to detectable neural damage. We extrapolate this is true even for unmeasurably small exposures." Saying "no amount is safe" implies to me the judgement "no exposure is worth risking", which is an overstatement. It's a judgement call whether that effect is worth the benefit of whatever it was you were doing which lead to the exposure.
If I ingest one lead atom over my lifetime, I doubt we can measure any effect. If that happened because, to pick a ridiculous example, I was saving my children from a rabid badger by braining it with a lead pipe, we'd conclude that was totally worth it. Eating a big bowl of paint chips while watching the game, probably not.
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If no amount of it is safe then given it's a naturally occurring chemical element, then we must all be dead.
Actually, since the amount of lead on this planet is increasing as the uranium and thorium decay away, clearly we need to evacuate as quickly as possible.
So the real question is how fast can your body pitch the lead it inevitably ingests back out again. There is the maximum safe dose.
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If no amount of it is safe then given it's a naturally occurring chemical element, then we must all be dead.
By that definition grabbing a red-hot pan is unlikely to be fatal it must therefore be safe, so I guess you can save money on oven mitts!
Actually, since the amount of lead on this planet is increasing as the uranium and thorium decay away, clearly we need to evacuate as quickly as possible.
So the real question is how fast can your body pitch the lead it inevitably ingests back out again. There is the maximum safe dose.
That's not the real question.
The fate of ingested lead is unsurprisingly complicated [cdc.gov], but at the high level a fraction (20-80%) of ingested lead goes into the blood stream, and from there it eventually makes its way into other tissues. For inhaled lead (leaded gas exhaust) the fraction is quite a bit higher since shoving molecules into the blood is basically what lungs do.
Re: (Score:2)
Also correlates with violent crime (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Also correlates with violent crime (Score:3)
True. But there's nothing like a small dose of lead to cure that.
Re: (Score:3)
Some correlations are really persuasive.
There was a worldwide drop in violent crime, consistent across places with different policies, but always 16-20 years after each place phased out leaded gas.
always loved smell of gas (Score:4, Informative)
Is this relevant? (Score:3)
Six IQ points is well under a standard deviation. It's not nearly enough to matter.
Let me guess (Score:2)
I kinda doubt that. (Score:2)
Look at GenZ who were all born after lead was banned and... yeah.
I kinda doubt this study has any validity.
Re: (Score:2)
They were RAISED by slower parents and that is not without significant impact.
So what's the excuse now? (Score:2)
Gen X (Score:3)
is still smarter than everyone else.
It hasn't been totally banned yet. (Score:4, Informative)
Why Some Airplanes Still Use Leaded Fuel [monroeaerospace.com]
Most people don't think (Score:2)
They merely drift with the crowd. The fact that many clergy hold STEM PhDs is seldom recognised by those not seeking engage with facts.
Oh please (Score:3, Interesting)
People far more intelligent than you or I are and always have been religious. CS Lewis' party trick was to invite visitors to his rooms in Oxford to pick one of the books from the shelves and start reading. He would then continue the quotation indefinitely; having read a book twice, he had full recall of its content.
Re: Trump and MAGA voters (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It's why cities in the 20th C. had higher crime rates than the rural countryside. That's something that wasn't true for most of human history and hasn't been true in the 21st C.