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Hope you all had a great week; I can’t believe May is nearly over. No idea where this year is going.
We are closing out the week with some heavy hitters, including the health consequences of wildfire smoke for pregnant mothers, prehistoric microbes, and the plight of girls in rural America.
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Grist
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Zoya Teirstein & Jess Davis
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Smoke penetrated the sterile operating room where doctors performed Anneke French's emergency cesarean during Australia's Black Summer. Canberra's air quality index topped 5,000 that season. French was 35 weeks pregnant when she suffered a placental abruption, a condition usually tied to trauma or smoking, neither of which applied to her. Her daughter Margot was born early and underweight. Margot is the only one of French's three children with asthma. Zoya Teirstein and Jess Davis report that scientists still cannot say how wildfire smoke harms babies in the womb. Australia collected few samples after 2019. The fires will return.
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The New York Times
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Stuart A. Thompson
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Real estate agents told Stuart Thompson he would lose money on the Hudson Valley ranch he bought for $520,000. Instead of hiring one, he handed the entire sale to Google's Gemini chatbot. It wrote his listing, coached his negotiating tactics, and helped him manage nearly 20 weekend showings. Three offers came in above asking. He closed at just over $600,000. Skipping agent commissions and one buyer-side fee netted him roughly $90,000. The bot could not supply human reassurance, Thompson found. Friends and family did that, free of charge.
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The Atlantic
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Monica Potts
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In Clinton, Arkansas, a "wrong" choice at 13 could close a girl's future for good. Monica Potts writes in her 2023 book about her and her best friend Darci's dreams of getting out. Only Potts did. She left for college and built a journalism career. Darci lost her virginity at 14, had a miscarriage senior year, missed too many days to graduate, and later lost custody of her children to drugs and legal trouble. Their friend Vanessa married a 24-year-old preacher's son at 15. Potts traces the divergence to their boy-crazy middle-school years.
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The New Yorker
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Shayla Love
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A scrape from a crab trap nearly killed Vernon Spear, 85, near Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. The wound carried Vibrio vulnificus, a flesh-eating bacterium that surgeons fought only by cutting away his forearm. Warmer water multiplies it, microbiologist Rita Colwell says, pushing infections as far north as Rhode Island. Warming also helps fungi like Candida auris breach the body's thermal defenses, and melting permafrost is reviving microbes dormant for millennia. Spear still doubts global warming, even as he plans to buy gloves before chasing crabs again. The microbes, one scientist says, will be fine.
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