Welcome to this edition of Over a Cup of Coffee!

In this newsletter

• Eco-friendly move backfires

• When misleading headlines are worse than fake news …

• How nightowls are ruining mental health by being n …

Eco-friendly move backfires

In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) passed a regulation mandating a reduction in the sulfur content of shipping fuel from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent.

This regulation was aimed at reducing emissions from shipping, a well-intentioned move considering the warming planet and bore some good results immediately. Sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping activity dropped by a whopping 80 percent.

But the move also had an unintended consequence: substantial oceanic warming.

When sulfur dioxide reacts with water vapor in the atmosphere, it produces sulfate aerosols. These aerosols usually help cool the Earth in two ways.

One, by reflecting sunlight back into space, and two, by impacting cloud cover. When aerosols increase in number, they can interact with larger number of water droplets. This increases the cloud coverage, which also helps reflect sunlight back into space, keeping Earth cooler.

When sulfur dioxide emission dropped by 80 percent, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center wanted to understand how it impacted the cloud formation over North Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the South China Sea, the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Their calculations showed an equivalent 80 percent increase in heat energy retained on Earth during this period, which could potentially affect regional weather patterns.

The research findings were published in Communications Earth and Environment.

When misleading headlines are worse than fake news!

During the COVID pandemic, there was a lot of fake news circulated about vaccines that stopped people from taking them.

When researchers at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania looked into posts that were shared about vaccines on Facebook, it was misleading headlines that affected vaccination rates in the US.

Interestingly, these headlines came from media outlets like the Chicago Tribune and Forbes, not propaganda websites.

The researchers analyzed the impact of Facebook links about vaccines between January and March 2021. Facebook’s fact-checkers were good at identifying fake news and flagging them.

Even though they were viewed 8.7 million times, this was only 0.3 percent of the 2.7 billion total views garnered for vaccine-related posts.

It was headlines like “A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine (Chicago Tribune) and “A surprising number of healthcare workers, including physicians and registered nurses, refuse COVID vaccinations” (Forbes) that actually got hundreds of millions of views, surpassing the reach of fake news.

Researchers suggest that a headline like Chicago Tribune can have devastating effects when shared in an anti-vaccine group.

Instead of competing for clicks, mainstream media must watch what they publish.

The research findings were published in Science.

How nightowls are ruining mental health by being nightowls

We all have nightowls in our circles. These people who can conquer the world at night but simply do not have the same enthusiasm come sun rise.

Nightowls pride themselves is getting things done in the later hours of the day, when the whole world goes to sleep.

But a recent study shows that there is an increased risk of mental, behavioral, neurodevelopmental (MBN) disorders as well as depression and anxiety in these individuals. And it only gets worse by following the nightowl routine.

The study included nearly 74,000 middle and older-age individuals who were probed on their inclination to sleep at a specific time (chronotype) and actual sleep timing (behavior) using questionnaires.

The researchers were keen to know how sticking to their preferences impacted mental health.

The findings showed that nightowls, who naturally prefer to sleep late and stuck to such a behavior demonstrated poorer mental health. Interestingly, night owls who still chose to sleep a bit early, had a decreased risk for depression. MBN disorders and anxiety.

All isn’t great for the morning types though, just because prefer morning routines. Those morning types, who displayed a late behavior had an increased risk for depression and anxiety as well.

The research findings were published in the journal Psychiatry Research.

The takeaway : Researchers recommend even nightowls to go to sleep before 1 AM.

If you know an nightowl, why not share this newsletter with them.

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Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Ameya