David H. Freedman

The standard tools that flag high-risk imbibing don’t always send the right people for help

From my article in Elemental posted August 8, 2019

There are two fairly reliable ways to discern whether you may have a biological disposition for alcohol trouble, says one psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital who specializes in substance abuse. One is obvious: Look for alcohol trouble in your family history. The other is much less obvious: If you handle your alcohol better than most people around you, you’re at higher risk of a long-term problem….Read more

Many insist that toking on the job improves their performance. Scientists and other experts are lending some surprising support to the claim.

From my article in Elemental posted July 17, 2019

Besides their outsized reputations in the annals of literature, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire, and Honoré de Balzac had something else in common: their interest in weed. They were all members of the Club des Hashischins — the “Hash Club” — formed in the 19th century as a way to provide opportunities for these towering figures and other celebrated creatives to explore the benefits of writing while high.

There’s reason to believe mixing pot and work may not be as problematic as once thought for others, too. Some scientists, physicians, and other experts are going as far as to suggest that for some people, pot can even be a tool for increasing productivity….Read more

Research explains why people have intense urges for specific foods — and reveals ways to train our brains to resist them

From my article in Elemental posted June 5, 2019

Serving as an experimental subject in the lab of Peter Hall means eating chocolate or potato chips — as much or as little of either as you want. And there’s no catch.

Well, maybe just a tiny one. While you’re scarfing down the goodies, you have to wear a device on your head that scrambles some of the signals in your brain with a blast of magnetic energy. It’s all in the service of advancing science. The science of food cravings, that is….Read more

A new theoretical model may help explain the shocking onset of superconductivity in stacked, twisted carbon sheets.

From my May 27, 2019, article in Quanta Magazine

The blockbuster discovery last year of superconductivity in a material called twisted bilayer graphene caught theorists off guard. None of them had even speculated about the sudden loss of all electrical resistance when two sheets of graphene — honeycomb lattices of carbon atoms — were stacked and twisted at a relative angle of 1.1 degrees. But one prominent proposal from Harvard University condensed matter theorists offers a detailed picture of what might be going on….Read more

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria will kill millions in the coming decades. Can we fix the broken economic and research models that could produce new treatments?

From my cover story in the May 31, 2019, Newsweek

In January, Columbia University revealed that four patients at its Irving Medical Center in New York had been sick with an unusual version of E. coli , a common gut bacterium. Although the news largely escaped attention in the media, it ricocheted through the world of infectious disease experts. The Columbia E. coli had a mutation in a gene, MCR-1, that confers a terrifying attribute: imperviousness to colistin, the final-line-of-defense antibiotic for the bug. “We’re looking to the shelf for the next antibiotic, and there’s nothing there,” says Erica Shenoy, associate chief of the infection control unit at Massachusetts General Hospital….Read more

Researchers are trying to untangle the surprisingly complex relationship between pot and appetite

From my article in Elemental on May 13, 2019

Convenience stores in about 2,000 of the United States’ 3,200 or so counties saw a jump in junk food sales between 2006 and 2016. The indulgent counties were all in or close to states that legalized recreational marijuana at some point during that 10-year time period, just before sales surged.

The new data fits well with the experiences of hundreds of millions of people who use cannabis and with what science knows about pot. Or does it? In hundreds of studies of pot and appetite, the results are, well, disjointed. If there is any sort of consensus, it’s that longer-term use of pot is more closely associated with people maintaining what doctors classify as healthier weights than it is with people ending up glued to the couch, overeating….Read more

The U.S. Lags China in the next big technological advance in cellphone networks. But not where it counts.

From my article (part of the cover story) in the May 10, 2019, issue of Newsweek

“The race to 5G is on, and America must win,” said Trump in mid-April.

It’s no secret that he’s focused on China, led by giant telecommunications manufacturer Huawei. But which 5G race can the U.S. hope to win? There are really three: one to provide the equipment on which the new networks are built; one to roll out the services widely; and another to develop the whole package—the software, devices, services and business processes that take advantage of 5G’s blinding speed and near-instant responsiveness. The distinction is critical, because the U.S. has already lost the first race and may lose the second. But the U.S. could still win the third race—and reap the main economic benefits of 5G….Read more