Study: 100 Nuclear Bombs Is Enough
It was on-again, off-again but President Trump did meet with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un, and they agreed to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. What that means is still unclear, but a new study has some advice for all nuclear nations: limit your arsenal to 100 weapons.

That apparently is the tipping point where the risks of nuclear annihilation outweigh the benefits of nuclear deterrence.

David Denkenberger is an assistant professor at Tennessee State University and director of the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). He co-authored the study and is interested in the long-term future of the world, and preventing what he calls “catastrophic risks.”

“I’ve done work on backup plans for a disaster that blocked the sunlight, like an asteroid impact or volcanic eruption," Denkenberger said. "But what’s most likely is a nuclear exchange: burning of cities, and smoke going up into the atmosphere.”

The best solution is to prevent such a catastrophe, he said, and complete denuclearization is best scenario. But there is the argument of using nukes as a deterrent.

“If my country has nuclear weapons... other countries would be less likely to attack,” he said. “What we’re interested in is when the diminishing returns of that nuclear deterrence hit."

In other words, the point at which you start endangering your country with your own nuclear weapons.

According to Denkenberger, 100 nuclear weapons could kill a significant percentage of people in another country and the fatalities could be as large as those in World War II.

“It’s also similar to mortality to some of big plagues and pandemics in the past," he said. "We feel that’s sufficient deterrence.”

But firing a weapon on another country can impact the country doing the attack. The smoke that goes into the upper atmosphere can stay there for years, even a decade, and would spread globally.

“It would reduce sunlight and temperature, which is not good for plants,” he said. “And it would reduce rain and it could also disrupt the ozone layer and create more ultraviolet radiation.”

Fewer weapons could also create what’s called nuclear autumn rather than nuclear winter.

"If you reduce the number of nuclear weapons being used, the global temperature might fall by two degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.

The study assumes there is no retaliation, but a basic principle behind nuclear deterrence is mutually assured destruction — the idea that the other side would fire back.

"It demonstrates how conservative we’re being," he said. "If the firing of your nuclear weapon results in another country firing back, the damage to your country is going to be much larger. So that could be a reason to have even fewer nuclear weapons."

He added that his study supposes a very optimistic scenario. "And still the result is to have many fewer nukes than U.S. and Russia currently have, which is many thousands of weapons,” he said.

Denkenberger also encouraged governments to take into account these secondary effects, noting that governments have generally focused their planning on the initial blast but not on the nuclear winter that follows.

In the case of a global nuclear catastrophe, there would be a lot of dead plants and trees, which would make conventional farming difficult.

"One option is growing mushrooms on that material," he said. "Another option is turning corn stalks into sugar."

He noted that cows, sheep, goats, and rabbits can eat fiber that people cannot, making those animals a possible source of food after an apocalypse.

Or maybe we should just avoid nuclear war.

"I would agree," Denkenberger said.

What The Death Of Net Neutrality Means For Science
It’s official — the net neutrality rules put into place by the FCC in 2015 went away on April 23 after being repealed by the Trump Administration in December.

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.

Most of the controversy about the decision centered on the impact the changes will have on residential internet customers or small businesses.

But some in the science community have voiced concern that data-intensive research could suffer, and that could have impacts for all of us.

“I spoke with a meteorologist who told me that he relies on the internet for all of his work,” said Ari Daniel, Senior Digital Producer for NOVA. Daniel recently looked into the possible impacts of the net neutrality rule change on science.

“He’s worried that if he doesn’t choose to pay an extra fee…it could impact his ability to get access to weather and climate data sets that are particularly voluminous.”

Others who spoke to Daniel said they feared the government would limit or even block scientific sites that offer politically sensitive information, such as climate change data. Daniel points out that this is hypothetical.

“There’s no evidence that companies would do this kind of thing,” he said.

This means that scientists are just like the rest of us — waiting to see what the death of net neutrality really means.

Lyme Vaccine Gets Closer To Reality
It’s hard to believe, but we actually had a vaccine for Lyme disease in the 1990s.

It was pulled from the market in 2002 after a class action lawsuit alleged that it infected people with Lyme rather than protecting them from it.

The government didn't find any evidence of that, but it’s taken 15 years for a drug developer to get close to getting a new one to market. Now, a French company called Valneva has taken its vaccine through Phase 1 of a three-phase testing regime.

“That’s what keeps me up at night — that we know we can make a vaccine,” expert Stanley Plotkin told Living Lab Radio. "But it doesn't exist."

Plotkin is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Pennsylvania, Adjunct Professor of the Johns Hopkins University and he serves as a consultant to vaccine manufacturers. (He notes that he does not accept consulting fees to avoid any conflict of interest.)

He knows a thing or two about what it takes to make a new vaccine. Plotkin developed the rubella vaccine and is the lead author of Plotkin’s Vaccines — the medical handbook that is now in its seventh edition. In recent years, he’s been a vocal advocate for a vaccine for Lyme disease.

“As far as how optimistic we should be, I would say cautiously optimistic,” Plotkin said when asked about the prospects of a new vaccine.

He added that it could take another three to five years before we see a Lyme vaccine in the pharmacy. With an estimated 300,000 new Lyme cases each year in the United States, Plotkin said he would like it to be sooner.

Your Happy Brain
There’s a lot of advice out there about how to be happy — websites, videos, newsletters — and many pedal a recipe for happiness backed by science.

But neuroscientist Dean Burnett started to notice that a lot of it wasn’t very scientific at all. It bugged him so much that he decided to write a book about it, Happy Brain: Where Happiness Comes From and Why.

Burnett is a lecturer at Cardiff University and author of The Guardian’s Brain Flapping blog, as well as a previous book called Idiot Brain.

“Happiness is really complicated, like anything to do with the brain,” Burnett said. “These quick-fix solutions, these simple ideas that it’s all a matter of doing just two or three things, making this one minor change to your life, that’s very wrong.”

That’s a problem because it gives people false hope. Despite the complications, Burnett said there are things that tend to produce happy feelings. For example, people are often happy when they are home. That has to do with a lack of stress and perceived threats, he said.

“I’ve been here many times. At no point have I died,” he imagined the brain saying. “This place is safe and I can relax now.”

Work can also be a place of happiness if certain conditions are met.

“Autonomy,” Burnett said. “The brain loves a sense of control, so if you’ve got a job that lets you… make your own decisions and effect things around you, that’s often noted as a rewarding job.”

Social media has accelerated an already-existing phenomenon of comparing one’s life to others and coming up short, Burnett said.

“It does give a sense that we should be happy and if we’re not, there must be something wrong,” he said. “Which isn’t the case, really. It’s perfectly normal to not be happy.”