Day: April 17, 2026

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Scientists are nervous about drug-resistant fungi : NPR

Combatting bacterial and viral infections is getting tougher because of their growing resistance to drugs. Antibiotic drugs can no longer be counted on to conquer nasty bacteria. Antivirals don't always overpower the viruses. This is a huge problem but it is one that widely acknowledged and researched.

There's an additional medical challenge though, that matters a lot. Namely, drug-resistant fungi.

Yep, fungi.

It's a topic that doesn't get discussed much — and that worries Paul Verweij, professor of clinical mycology at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He says there's a "silence surge" in drug-resistant fungi and that it's mostly happening under-the-radar.

Fungicides are used to protect plants against fungal disease. Everything — watermelons, maize, wheat, flowers — use lots of fungicides. If we didn't use the fungicides, you'd probably have a yield loss maybe of 30% or 40%.

The problem is that the fungicides are quite similar to the drugs we give to patients. So the fungus becomes resistant to the fungicide and, at the same time, our medical azoles [a class of antifungal drugs] do not work as well anymore.

Can free buses work in NYC? They were a big hit in Albany nearly 50 years ago. – Gothamist

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Can free buses work in NYC? They were a big hit in Albany nearly 50 years ago. – Gothamist

More than a decade before Mamdani was even born, the streets of Downtown Albany were filled with free buses. They whizzed by the Capitol and other government offices on a regular basis, all thanks to a $326,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how eliminating bus fare affects ridership.

The Freewheeler buses — yes, that’s what they were called — ran during daytime, off-peak hours on routes running through Albany’s central business district from 1978 through 1980. (During peak hours, the regular fare was 40 cents.)

Ridership went through the roof. Three times as many people rode the bus during off-peak hours during the work week when fares were eliminated — a jump from 1,070 daily average riders before the pilot program took effect to 3,040, according to a 1981 federal study. On Saturdays, it was a fivefold increase, from 270 to 1,340.

The study showed the free buses didn’t bring more people to Downtown Albany. Instead, people simply shifted their travel habits.

Workers and residents who had been accustomed to hiking up Downtown Albany’s steep State Street hill hopped on the bus instead. Downtown residents made fewer trips by car, though not by much — about 353 fewer car miles per day, not enough to make a meaningful reduction in emissions, according to the report.