How Russia has spent a decade crumbling online freedoms

Litreev has been fighting back for years, creating an app that sends lawyers to defend arrested protesters and joining the "digital resistance" that countered the government's attempt to block encrypted-messenger Telegram.

Litreev's contribution was an app called Red Button. If protesters thought they were at risk of arrest, they could open the app and press the big red button it presented. That would automatically call a lawyer, who also receives the protester's emergency contact details and a GPS signal of their location.

Read story by cnet

The future of weight loss

We have eradicated smallpox, cured many bacterial diseases, and invented a vaccine for Covid-19 within the year. But for a very long time we haven’t had a single good treatment for obesity. Has that now changed?

The next generation of weight loss drugs may also cause effects on body composition that are more sophisticated than a simple loss of weight. Another drug-in-testing with a strange name and interesting mechanism is bimagrumab, developed by Novartis, which inhibits a pathway that naturally constrains muscle growth. The result in a recent clinical trial in people with type 2 diabetes was a loss of one-fifth of their fat mass and a 4% gain in lean mass, which is the opposite of what usually happens to lean mass in weight loss trials. This was coupled with a significant improvement in blood sugar control. The drugs of the future may make us leaner, healthier, and more muscular.

Not only are people who take semaglutide less hungry, they’re less easily seduced by tempting, calorie-rich foods

Read story by Works in Progress

Over half of globe doesn't have social protection

Most of the world's population has no access to protections like health care or income security in case of unemployment, old age, illness or maternity. Despite pandemic spending, matters have only gotten worse.

Report by DW

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