The Generation Gap infographic by Steve Perry highlights the birth years of different generations. The stats from 2022 led him to develop a few fun facts of the differences between the generations.
Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest generation in the United States, with an estimated population of over 72 million. While Millennials and Gen Z face challenges in building wealth, with factors such as student loan debt and rising home prices, Baby Boomers tend to have the highest wealth accumulation, with only 20% of the population they have 52% of the wealth in the country, benefiting from longer periods of economic growth and home ownership. Older generations have traditionally had higher voter turnout rates compared to younger generations. Millennials and Generation X are becoming increasingly politically engaged. Older generations are also delaying retirement and staying in the workforce longer, leading to a “graying” of the labor force and potential competition for job opportunities with younger generations.
You may have heard that the Mississippi River is mighty, but if you ever doubted it, just take a look at this map. You'll see that an extraordinary number of the United States' rivers and tributaries send water into the Mighty Miss.
There’s a crack in California. It stretches for 800 miles, from the Salton Sea in the south, to Cape Mendocino in the north. It runs through vineyards and subway stations, power lines and water mains. Millions live and work alongside the crack, many passing over it (966 roads cross the line) every day. For most, it warrants hardly a thought. Yet in an instant, that crack, the San Andreas fault, could ruin lives and cripple the national economy.
In one scenario produced by the United States Geological Survey, researchers found that a big quake along the San Andreas could kill 1,800 people, injure 55,000 and wreak $200 million in damage. It could take years, nearly a decade, for California to recover.
On the bright side, during the process of building and maintaining all that infrastructure that crosses the fault, geologists have gotten an up-close and personal look at it over the past several decades, contributing to a growing and extensive body of work. While the future remains uncertain (no one can predict when an earthquake will strike) people living near the fault are better prepared than they have ever been before.
THE TROUBLE WITH FAULTS
All of the land on earth, including the ocean floors, is divided into relatively thin, brittle segments of rock that float on top of a much thicker layer of softer rock called the mantle. The largest of these segments are called tectonic plates, and roughly correspond with the continents and subcontinents of the earth.
The San Andreas fault is a boundary between two of these tectonic plates. In California, along the fault, the two plates--the Pacific plate and the North American plate--are rubbing past each other, like you might slip by someone in a crowded room. The Pacific plate is moving generally northwest, headed towards Alaska and Japan, while the North American plate heads southwest.
In a simplified, ideal world, this movement would happen easily and smoothly. Because it covers such a large area, not all of the fault moves at the same time. In the middle, things are moving rather smoothly, with part of the Pacific plate gliding by the North American plate with relative ease, a segment that scientists say is ‘creeping’.
It’s at the northern and southern extremes where things get tricky. The real problems begin when the plates get stuck, or wedged together.
VISIONS OF A DISASTER
The fear of a huge earthquake from the San Andreas devastating the west coast has been rich fodder for disaster films, including Superman and, more recently, San Andreas. The good news is that the worst-case scenarios in those films are completely impossible. California will not sink into the sea, and even the largest possible earthquake is short of anything that the Rock had to wrestle with.
But disasters have happened.
In 1906, the northern segment of the fault, near the city of San Francisco, ruptured along nearly 300 miles, causing a huge earthquake that led to fires, downed buildings, and thousands of casualties. The death toll was between 700 and 2,800.
Meanwhile, other segments of the fault, like one south of Los Angeles that hasn’t seen a large earthquake since 1690, are considered stalled. Centuries of energy are built up and ready to be released. When? Nobody knows.
Recent analyses suggest that in a worst-case scenario, the San Andreas would beget an earthquake ranking an 8.3 on the Richter scale, a logarithmic scale on which a 6.0 is ten times as powerful as a 5.0, a 7.0 ten times as powerful as a 6.0, and so forth. To put that in context, earthquakes under 2.5 are rarely felt. Earthquakes under 6.0 can cause some damage to buildings, but aren’t major events. Above that level things start to get interesting. The largest recorded quake in the United States was a 9.2 earthquake that hit Alaska in 1964.
“That would require the San Andreas to rupture wall to wall from its southern extremis to up to Cape Mendocino,” says Tom Jordan, the director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at The University of Southern California,. He explains that the creeping segment in the middle acts as a buffer, making the 8.3-magnitude earthquake much less plausible than some other options.
Even if the 8.3 earthquake never materializes, scientists worry that a rupture along the long-inactive southern segment could be devastating, compounded by the large population in the area. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that shook San Francisco was only a 6.9, but it caused billions of dollars in damageinjured over 3,000 people, and killed 63.
“The San Andreas lies close to the coastline where people live,” Jordan says. The valleys along the coast that proved so enticing to the settlers who founded cities like Los Angeles are large areas of sedimentary rock that could be hugely problematic in an earthquake.
“Even though L.A. is 30 miles from the San Andreas, it can still get very strong ground motion,” Jordan says. “The sediments shake like bowls of jelly.”
But even just a medium-bad scenario could be enough to kill hundreds and ruin the economy.
Researchers like Jordan are building up huge, incredibly detailed 3D maps of the geology near the San Andreas fault. These maps can be used to generate detailed assessments for almost any possible earthquake scenario that might happen along the fault.
In 2008, United States Geological Survey scientist Lucy Jones and colleagues published the ShakeOut scenario, a detailed report that looked at what could happen if a large (magnitude 7.8) earthquake occurred along the southern leg of the fault.
Just like the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, people living in the area would be without power and water for interminable lengths of time, and in the immediate aftermath, firefighters would not have access to water to fight the fires that would spring up in the wake of the disaster. And in California’s current drought, the fires after the earthquake could prove more devastating than the shaking itself.
DODGING A BULLET
Scientists may not be able to predict where and when a strike will hit, but the more they understand what could happen, the more they can help plan for any event. Last winter, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a plan called Resilience By Design, that tries to address the huge risk facing the city if there was an earthquake along the San Andreas.
“It is highly unlikely we’ll make a century [without a large earthquake]” said Jones, who also headed up the Resilience by Design group. Reinforcing the city’s lifelines, like roads and utilities, is a huge priority.
Fortunately, California has a precedent to the north.
In 2002, the Denali fault in Alaska slipped and caused an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.9, the largest inland earthquake recorded in the country in 150 years. And running right across that fault was the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, an 800-mile long piece of infrastructure that carries 550,000 barrels of crude across near-pristine tundra every day.
“It was the biggest ecological disaster that never happened.” Jones said.
The pipeline was built to accommodate the movement of the earth, so that even though the earth slid by up to 18 feet in the 2002 earthquake, the pipeline didn’t break, averting a serious oil spill. To avoid rupturing, the engineers designed the above-ground portion of the pipeline in an intentional zig-zag pattern instead of a straight line, giving the pipeline flexibility. The pipeline itself can also slide. Instead of being anchored in the permafrost, part of the pipeline sit on Teflon-coated ‘shoes’ which rest on huge steel beams that sit perpendicular to the pipeline. In the event of shaking, segments of the pipe can slide on the beams like train cars on rails, without breaking.
DENALI PIPELINE
The zig-zag pattern allows it to flex and move without breaking
THE NEXT QUAKE
In California, water pipes and electrical lines could be built or retrofitted with similar flexibility. Researchers are even working on building earthquake-resistant houses that can slide back and forth on instead of crumbling. Unlike traditional homes, which sit on a foundation, these earthquake-resistant homes sit on sliders made out of steel, that, just like the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, can slide over the shaking ground instead of breaking.
The internet of everything has a role to play here too. In the future, networks of devices scattered across the southern California landscape could monitor an earthquake as it starts. This seismic network could send out an alert as the earthquake propagates through the earth, giving utilities precious seconds of warning to shut off valves in pipes along the fault, shut off power to prevent damage, and even send an alert to operating rooms, allowing a surgeon to remove her scalpel from a patient before the shaking even begins.
Scientists already have a seismic network in California, but more seismic sensors and technical development are needed to get the fledgling network to the next level. Unfortunately, those developments require money, and getting enough funding to build the next system has been elusive.
The cost for a truly robust alert system is estimated at $80 million for California alone, and $120 million for the whole West Coast. But funding is sparse. Earlier this year, President Obama pledged $5 million. The first sensors are already being used by San Francisco's mass transit system to slow down trains in the event of an earthquake.
To see what the future of California might look like, one only has to glance west towards Japan, where even their fastest trains come to a halt at the first sign of an earthquake, elevators allow people to disembark, and people get warnings on radio, TV, and cell phones.
Similar techniques could be employed near Los Angeles, Jones says, making the city ready to bounce back from even the worst earthquake that the San Andreas can throw at the city.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “we learn geology the morning after the earthquake.” Fortunately for Los Angeles, plenty of people, from geologists to city and emergency planners, have no intention of waiting that long.
Killer T cells (orange) are recruited to attack malignant cells (mauve) in the viral-based cancer therapy T-VEC. US regulators clear a viral melanoma therapy, paving the way for a promising field with a chequered past.
An engineered herpesvirus that provokes an immune response against cancer has become the first treatment of its kind to be approved for use in the United States, paving the way for a long-awaited class of therapies. On 27 October, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a genetically engineered virus called talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC) to treat advanced melanoma. Four days earlier, advisers to the European Medicines Agency had endorsed the drug.
With dozens of ongoing clinical trials of similar ‘oncolytic’ viruses, researchers hope that the approval will generate the enthusiasm and cash needed to spur further development of the approach. “The era of the oncolytic virus is probably here,” says Stephen Russell, a cancer researcher and haematologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “I expect to see a great deal happening over the next few years.”
Many viruses preferentially infect cancer cells. Malignancy can suppress normal antiviral responses, and sometimes the mutations that drive tumour growth also make cells more susceptible to infection. Viral infection can thus ravage a tumour while leaving abutting healthy cells untouched, says Brad Thompson, president of the pharmaceutical-development firm Oncolytics Biotech in Calgary, Canada.
Early attempts
The strategy builds on a phenomenon that has been appreciated for more than a century. Physicians in the 1800s noted that their cancer patients sometimes unexpectedly went into remission after experiencing a viral infection. These case reports later inspired doctors, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, to raid nature’s viral cupboard. Clinicians injected cancer patients with a menagerie of viruses. Sometimes the therapy destroyed the tumour, and sometimes it killed the person instead.
Unlike the wild viruses used in those mid-twentieth-century experiments, some of today’s anti-cancer viruses are painstakingly engineered. T-VEC, for example, has been altered to drastically reduce its ability to cause herpes. Researchers also inserted a gene encoding a protein that stimulates the immune system, which makes the virus even more potent against cancer (see ‘Going viral against cancer’).
As more researchers entered the field and initiated small clinical tests, they began to produce enticing anecdotes. Russell recalls the case of an individual with myeloma who remained sick after undergoing two stem-cell transplants. A tumour on the left side of her forehead had degraded the bone underneath and was putting pressure on her brain. Yet treatment with an experimental virus sent her into complete remission (S. Russell et al. Mayo Clin. Proc. 89, 926–933; 2014). “She’s a star patient who convinced us that this oncolytic paradigm can really work,” he says.
But statistics — not anecdotes — rule over drug approvals. In 2005, regulators in China approved an oncolytic adenovirus called H101 to treat head-and-neck cancer, after evidence showed that the treatment could shrink tumours. Those trials stopped short of assessing improvements in patient survival — a measure often required for FDA approval. Since then, a medical-tourism industry has built up in China for people who cannot get the therapy in their home countries.
Then, in May this year, a team supported by biotechnology giant Amgen of Thousand Oaks, California, published promising results from a large clinical trial of T-VEC (R. H. Andtbacka et al. J. Clin. Oncol. 33, 2780–2788; 2015). The virus both shrank tumours in people with advanced melanoma and extended patient survival by a median of 4.4 months. Yet statistically, survival benefits fell just a hair’s breadth of significance. “That raised the question, ‘Well, what is statistical significance? Is this an active agent or not?’” Russell says.
He and others note that the therapy — which must be injected directly into tumours — seemed to rein in cancer elsewhere in the body as well. This is a sign that results are real and that the virus sparked an immune response as intended, Thompson says.
Room for improvement
Administering T-VEC in combination with cancer immunotherapy could prove particularly effective, notes Stephen Hodi, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. In June 2014, a small clinical trial by Amgen suggested that this combination may boost effectiveness over that of the immunotherapies alone.
And researchers continue to look for ways to improve T-VEC. In particular, they would like to be able to deliver the therapy systemically, so that the virus could target tumours in organs that are difficult to reach with an injection. This would require a technique to prevent the body from mounting an immune response to the virus prematurely, which would disable it before it could reach and kill tumour cells, says Howard Kaufman, a cancer researcher at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
To that end, those in the field are experimenting with a smorgasbord of viruses — from poxviruses to vesicular stomatitis virus, which does not normally infect humans but causes a blistering disease in cattle. Oncolytics Biotech is studying a virus that hitch-hikes through the body on certain blood cells, camouflaged from the immune system.
If cancer-killing viruses could be delivered to their targets through the bloodstream, rather than via injection directly into the tumour, they could be used to treat a greater range of cancers. Thompson envisions a day when physicians will be able to peruse a menu of oncolytic viruses and select the best fit. “Each virus interacts with the immune system differently,” he says. “They could have a role in pretty much all cancer therapy.”
The Scottish dish was banned because of its key ingredient, sheep's lungs. The FDA doesn't want us eating those. It also contains a sheep's heart and liver, and is cooked in a sheep's stomach, BUT those are all apparently cool for us to eat.
#2 Absinthe
It's been banned in the U.S. forever, but the absinthe that's legal in the U.S. contains a small amount of wormwood. And absinthe without the wormwood isn't really absinthe. . . It doesn't make you hallucinate!
#3 Pig's Blood Cake
What a name, right?! The Taiwanese delicacy is a mix of pig's blood and rice on a stick. The reason behind the ban is the FDA believes pig's blood cake is unsanitary.
#4 Sassafras Oil
It's used to flavor root beer, but was banned because it was found to cause cancer in lab rats, BUT who really thinks of "sassafras" as an oil?
#5 Kinder Eggs
The German candy egg has a milk chocolate shell and a white chocolate layer below. In it's hollow center there's a little toy, which could potentially cause a "choking hazard". Therefore, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says they're not safe for kids.
#6 The Orignal Four Loko
The FDA banned the drink because the mix of alcohol and caffeine is dangerous. BUT how about: Red Bull vodkas, whiskey-Cokes, rum and cokes, Jagerbombs, Irish coffees, SuperDews, 5 Hour Everclear, and ALL the other ways we mix alcohol and caffeine?
#7 Pommac
The champagne-flavored soft drink, made by Dr. Pepper in the '60s, didn't sell well and the company changed it's formula to what we know today as Dr. Pepper soda. Apparently additionally its original chemical sweetener, sodium cyclamate was banned.
#8 Authentic Italian Meats
We can eat salami, prosciutto and head-cheese, BUT it has to be slaughtered and produced in the U.S.A., AND your family in the "old country" can't export any to you.
#9 Horse & Human Meat
A few years ago, it became illegal to slaughter horses for food in the U.S. But did you know, there are actually factories here which slaughter horses for their meat? Since we don't eat it, it's now exported. As for human meat. . . That's a no brainer!
#10 Vegemite
Vegemite contains folate, which is a food additive that the FDA doesn't approve. So there's no official ban, but it's questionable enough that its makers in Australia won't import it to the U.S.
#11 Fugu
Fugu, known as the Japanese puffer fish, is incredibly poisonous if not prepared correctly, therefore the U.S. avoids the selling of the exotic cuisine all together.
