Aspartame is a very common "sugar replacement", found in "diet" soft drinks, lower-sugar yogurts and other things where sweetness is desired but sugar is not -- never mind as a sugar substitute in coffee.  These substitutions have been widely promoted for insulin-compromised individuals, particularly those who are overweight or Type II diabetic.

Saccharin was among the first of these, but many people eschewed it after it was linked to the possibility of causing cancer.  The science on that is less-than-conclusive, but needless to say it scared a lot of people off.  The doses used in those studies were insanely high (and in rats) and in 2000 it was concluded it didn't apply in reasonable and consumable doses in humans.  Well, if you believe the studies anyway.

Now we have a study out of Sweden that throws a great deal of shade in aspartame, which is the most-common non-sugar sweetener used in various foods and beverages -- by far.

For the new study, mice were fed food containing 0.15% aspartame every day for 12 weeks — that’s the equivalent of humans drinking about three daily cans of diet soda.

Aspartame-fed mice developed larger and more fatty plaques in their arteries and experienced higher levels of inflammation, a major contributor to heart disease.

The obvious caution is that this was in mice, not humans, but note that this looks a lot like coronary artery disease and it may be related to insulin signaling because the immune signal involved and identified in the study is sensitive to that signal.

The dysregulation of this particular signaling pathway is not well-understood at all -- that is, we know what happens in this regard but not why it happens.

This however begs the question: How is it that this problem in a substance that is this widespread in use, artificially made and when caused by exposure is in a reasonable amount that human would be expected to consume, was not identified before it was approved fifty years ago?

The FDA says:

The FDA first approved aspartame as a sweetener in 1974 and scientific evidence has continued to support the agency’s conclusion that aspartame is safe for the general population when made under good manufacturing practices and used under the approved conditions of use. The FDA-established acceptable daily intake (ADI), or the amount of aspartame that is considered safe to consume each day over the course of a person’s lifetime, continues to be protective of public health.

Three sodas a day is certainly within the realm of expected and reasonable amount of use.

So why is this study a new discovery?

You'd think that's not possible, considering that the changes found against controls were quite dramatic, they occurred at very reasonable levels of consumption and took just about three months to show up in the mice -- and not an extended period of time.

But the record says its not only possible, that's what happened.

Which means nobody looked, because if they looked they would have found it.

Why and how did that happen, and what else has been similarly not looked at?

I get it: It looks like a free lunch.

And for some people perhaps it is.  If your job is just a job, and you're not really after climbing the ladder in the corporate world then it would appear to have little downside.

But it does have downside.

Sure, an employer can (and the smart ones do) measure "metrics" for people working remotely.  Completion time, cases closed, customer satisfaction ratings, listening in on calls and so on.  There are myriad ways to measure performance of a remote employee within their role and most of them work to at least some degree some of the time.

The problem is that you will never, as an employee, "jump the line" in promotions when working remotely.

That's not because there's something unfair at play; it is simply because when you're working remotely you cannot observe other roles in the firm since you're not where they take place and you thus can't demonstrate through initiative and skill that you're not only capable of them -- you are likely to excel if given one.

That is always how you jump the line more than one level in the corporate world within a given company -- you observe, you take the initiative in some form or fashion and you show those more than one level above your current role that you should be given that higher-level job.

To do that you have to be there because its not possible to observe what you can't see simply because you're not there.

At MCSNet the majority of people who wound up with management roles came from straight line-level positions in exactly this fashion.  They observed, they came to a couple-level up person (usually me directly) and through their actions and communicated observations demonstrated they could do that job well above their current level of responsibility.

This is how you go from a line-level hourly worker job to a management role with a salary and, sometimes, an actual office.

It matters not how smart and capable you are if nobody a couple of levels above you can see it.

When you sit at home behind a blinking terminal nobody can see it and much worse you can't see what is going on in the rest of the firm and potentially identify an opportunity to demonstrate superior capability.

That which you cannot observe you cannot act on.

Yes, I get it.  I had plenty of people who worked for me that saw it as "just a job."  Many look at work as, well, work.  Do a job, get a paycheck, that's it.  That's fine, and being in-office is even worse if you're the type to gossip or undermine others because if that describes your behavior to any degree you're far better off where nobody can see that.  That sort of crap is a good way to get passed over.

In short remote work is fine if its just a job -- and you're happy with that.  But if you want remote work and see it as a means to earn a paycheck do realize that while you might get tapped for the next level up in the org chart the odds are ridiculously against you for a two-level or wildly out-of-scope promotion simply because you cannot observe what is going on around you and thus you can't take the initiative and show management two or more levels above you that you ought to be given that superior position because you're not there.

It is precisely that quality -- observation and then initiative which will further the business -- that employers who have some intelligence in their executive suite look for.  It is also how you take your wage and add 50% or even double it in one step instead of another fifty cents or buck an hour a year.

If you demand to work remote you're telling management you're not interested in that.

Choose wisely.

The UK has apparently ordered Apple to provide it a means of access to all cloud data they have -- including that of users outside the UK, such as in the United States.

Citing anonymous sources, the Post reported that the British government’s undisclosed order was issued last month. It reportedly requires Apple to give officials blanket capability to view fully encrypted material.

The error here is the claim that it is "fully encrypted" material.

As I have repeatedly noted over the years any encryption system in which other than you has the keying is not secure.  You are delegating that security to the other party (and they to you if it matters) each and every time you do that.

When you turn on a Google phone, for example, it does ask for a password.  But it boots without it, so the operating system itself will run without that and in addition forced updates can be taken.  Does this means the alleged "encryption" really is encryption with only you having the keying?

Not if it can be remotely unlocked, obviously; the keying is where the system can get to it.  Thus the "encryption" is in fact about as secure as a TSA-approved lock on a suitcase!

Now take something like Geli on a FreeBSD system.  If you attempt to boot such a machine you get a password prompt -- and there might be a second component required too (e.g. on a USB stick or "smart card.")  Without all the components there is no way to derive the key and that's that.

Now you can still presumably compromise the loader (e.g. when it asks for the password) since that has to load unencrypted, which is why systems implement various "secure boot" paradigms -- which attempt to detect tampering with the bootloader.  Those are not foolproof as if someone "with access" to sign a replacement bootloader does so you still get compromised -- when you key the password it can, of course, be stored.

Apple and Google have opted not to offer the choice to users of fully encrypted environments.  That is, the phone (or computer) won't boot without the password and there's no way to remotely -- or locally, via USB or otherwise, do anything about that because the entire storage other than, perhaps a signed loader, is encrypted.  That's still able to be compromised but its harder since now you have to get someone to run software that can grab and keep the keying information.

Modern encryption is very, very hard to actually break -- hard enough that for all intents and purposes the way you break it is by compromising the keying so you know what the key is.

Apple could have implemented their software in such a way that nobody other than you has the keying.  Of course if you lose the keying in that circumstance you're boned -- there's nothing you can do and all the data is irretrievably gone.  That's the price of such a decision of course, but its one users should have the capacity to make.

Had Apple done that then they could tell the UK "what you are ordering us to do is factually impossible as we don't have any of the keying nor can we acquire it -- this is intentional and we're not going to change said design."

That would leave the UK with only one option in that they could attempt to ban Apple from selling goods and services inside the UK but they cannot, as a nation, reach outside their territory with such an act since their sovereignty ends at their border.

This was the right choice originally before they got backed into a corner.

Well, maybe.

For decades, fusion researchers struggled with neutron isotropy, a key indicator of scalable plasma stability. Zap Energy’s latest results show its FuZE device avoids the pitfalls of past Z pinch failures, generating isotropic neutrons that confirm thermal fusion is occurring.

This is indeed a significant step forward.  This is sort of like the situation with fission in that there are two sorts of fission -- thermal and fast.  "Fast" reactors have no moderator and use the neutrons that are ejected by a fission event directly to cause the next fission.  "Thermal" reactors rely on a moderator; that thing (usually water or, in some designs graphite) slows down the neutrons into what is known as the "thermal" range.

The latter is much more effective at causing another fission than "fast" neutrons, thus you can make the core larger -- thus the usable size of the reactor goes up which is a good thing if you want to make lots of power or, in the alternative, you can make the entire thing smaller and more-stable if you don't need a really big one, but the minimum size goes up too (since you need the space for the moderator.)

Likewise with fusion; you want "thermal" fusion in that the neutrons emitted are coherent because that tells you the fusion that is occurring is due to the heat and pressure in the plasma rather than an isolated event from acceleration of the hydrogen (caused by, for example, striking it with a laser or injecting it via an accelerator.)

The problem is that they still generated the fusion using beam injection, so no, this isn't "imminent wildly-above unity" energy output.  That remains to be demonstrated; essentially to do so you have to show that what you're injecting is basically "make-up" for what is fusing rather than being the cause of the fusion.

Thus this is a step forward, but until you see demonstration of the latter imminent way-beyond-unity energy output (that is, much more than what you put in to cause the fusion) isn't on the immediate horizon.  Don't kid yourself on how far you have to go for that either; being "a bit" over unity is nowhere near useful fusion for (as an example) generating electricity -- you need to get wildly beyond the input power required for that to become practical.