umberway

>These articles repeating the same hyped up fear

Yes! Antibiotics (as an issue) are now associated with guilt and hubris. I trust CRISPR technologies will yield new weapons to fight infections and other diseases.

My thought is that 'nerds' collaborate better despite poorer than average understanding of fellow humans. It's because their work and its success or failure are more objectively defined which makes organising and delegation of tasks relatively straightforward. So we can have thousands of scientists and engineers building the Large Super Hadron Collider while a Liberal Arts Department may be beset by bickering and feuds.

There may be a lot of antibiotics present in the soil which haven't been exploited yet because it's hard to grow in the lab the organisms which produce them. However techniques are being developed to circumvent this problem and here's an early discovery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin

Hopefully other and fundamentally newer ways to fight infection will be found. In the mean time getting fit and healthy now seems like a slightly wiser choice than it already was.

Isn't the best approach to 'fake physics' simply to publicly criticise the ideas, or, if that's too exhausting, to point to a previous criticism?

These reports have an empiricist slant to them and there's usually no attempt to explain the result. No doubt there's truth to be found here, but note that mere act of sitting cannot be bad for health, otherwise seated meditation would be bad for health too (which it isn't).

I conjecture it is the combination of sitting and hard focus on work or video games which is relevant. The brain withdraws attention from the body (which, being supported, isn't required much beyond breathing and digestion). The result seems to be bad things like inflammation, poor lymph circulation, etc, though I think this isn't understood. I remember it was said that, a few decades back in the UK, bus drivers (seated) had more heart attacks than bus conductors (standing).

I don't wish to imply that getting a job is the only meaningful thing a teen could be doing. However there are plenty of teens who would love to get paid jobs as say, programmers. They are denied because of old laws intended to prevent poor families forcing kids into mines or factories for twelve hours a day. Yet most of what teens are coerced into doing at present is 'make work'. It is this fact which explains the lack of motivation, not idleness or some kind of pathology requiring 'intervention'.

'Idle' adults do the same, and it's worth pointing out that young teenagers aren't permitted to contribute to society in other meaningful ways e.g. by getting a job if they can and prefer to.

I would agree that the medical field is plagued with empiricism which consists of asking a naive question (rather than working from a deeper theory) and then doing a study to 'measure' the thing in question. Third parties then note the correlation and issue 'advice' in the form of suggestive reporting. I would guess this puts the public off science altogether!

Perhaps the best way to look after the body will turn out to be as Aubrey de Grey suggests: regular servicing to repair accumulated damage. But we aren't there yet. Plus we urgently need new antibiotics.

My heart often tells me when something is amiss. For example, if I'm about to buy excessive amounts of junk food and alcohol I sometimes feel a twinge emanating from the chest region. I acknowledge and interpret this as my brain's anticipation of the price that will be paid.

But what if things have gone more badly wrong? If the heart seems to say one thing whilst ideas (the ones I can name) say something else? One way to resolve the conflict is simply to censor the bodily signals. (Fear can do this sort of thing.)

Yet there are physiological consequences, because the brain has two roles: (1) to run the mind, (2) to regulate the body. And withdrawing attention from bodily signals has consequences for health, I guess due to a concomitant weakening of the controlling function.

It's pretty sad that the question "Why are western women, particularly American women, so miserable?" is now a political question. (And therefore resists attempts to discuss it, which I don't recommend btw.)