All New York City Hospitals Now Serve Vegan Food As Default

While meat-based options remain available, the two daily Chef’s Specials are now always plant-based. So far, the program has been hugely successful, with over half of patients opting for the plant-based dishes and 95% saying they were satisfied with their choice.

Initially, the plant-based meals were only offered at lunchtimes, but they have proved so popular that the scheme will be extended to dinner. This is despite the fact that only 1% of patients identify as vegetarian or vegan.

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Plant Based Meat the Best Climate Investment

Guardian: Plant-based meat by far the best climate investment, report finds

The report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that, for each dollar, investment in improving and scaling up the production of meat and dairy alternatives resulted in three times more greenhouse gas reductions compared with investment in green cement technology, seven times more than green buildings and 11 times more than zero-emission cars.

Diet-related Greenhouse Gas Emissions Down

Anthropocene: A 15-year snapshot of US diets reveals a gradual shift away from beef

By using data from a national dietary survey of US adults between 2003 and 2018, and conducting a life cycle analysis on the reported foods, the researchers found that the diet-related greenhouse gas emissions of US citizens almost halved, falling from 4 kilograms of CO2 equivalent to 2.45 kg CO2e over the 15 year study period.

The main reason for this decline emerged clearly in the data: over this same period, daily beef consumption plummeted by an average 40% per person, which accounted for nearly half of the diet-related dip in emissions. But it wasn’t just beef: the data showed a slow shift away from all animal-based foods, including dairy, eggs, chicken, and pork—all of which US citizens gradually consumed less of in 2018 than 2003.

Too Much Focus on Boosters, Says FDA Vaccine Advisor

The question is, what do we want from this vaccine? If what we want from this vaccine is protection against serious illness, the current two-dose vaccine strategy for mRNA vaccines, or the two-dose strategy for the J&J [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine, offers protection against serious illness, right up to the present time for all age groups. So if that's the goal, we've reached it. If, on the other hand, the goal is to try and also protect against mild illness, which will fade over time, then you can argue for giving a booster dose, realizing that the protection against mild illness that you're getting from that booster dose will probably last for about 3 to 4 months.

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I transferred my Markdown Vim Syntax file to PreserVim

I recently got an offer from the PreserVim Github organization to take over maintenance of my Markdown Vim plugin and that is its new home. PreserVim adopts Vim plugins that are going unmaintained and tries to at least protect them from bitrot.

I haven't had time to work on vim-markdown in years, but ever since I posted it on Github in 2009 it has lived a life of its own. Contributors took it from a simple syntax file to a full-blown plugin with some awesome features like the table of contents and header increase and decrease commands. I think mine was the first Markdown syntax file for Vim and for a while it was included in the Debian Vim package. After I let it languish a bit, Tim Pope's excellent plugin became the standard and is included in the official Vim distributions.

Here's hoping vim-markdown does well under PreserVim. Maybe I'll even have time to make a few contributions.