This is from my Podcast, Let’s Get Mental. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Podbean.

In the 1987 Mel Brooks masterpiece Spaceballs, planet Spaceball has totally wrecked its environment, turning a once-green planet into a solid steel sphere with no atmosphere. Clean air is sold in cans of Perri-Air, a wonderfully Brooks-esque spoof of the famous French sparkling water brand. To replenish the planet’s air supply, President Skroob (played by Mel Brooks) orders the military to kidnap Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) of the pristine planet Druidia and hold her hostage in exchange for the planet’s air. Spaceballs military leader Dark Helmet (played by Rick Moranis) is in charge of the mission, but is eventually thwarted by the rogue space pilot Lone Starr (played by the amazing Bill Pullman).

The History of Clean Air Regulations

I won’t give too much away, but there’s also a giant vacuum cleaner wielded by the robotic Mega Maid, and a whole lot of poking fun at the Star Wars franchise.

Spaceballs is riot of a comedy, but it’s also a not-at-all veiled metaphor for atmospheric pollution. Remember, it was made in 1987, right around the time the world was coming to grips with a giant hole in the ozone layer. And while that hole didn’t let our atmosphere leak out into space, it certainly gave Brooks the basis for the Spaceballs story.

And air pollution was a huge deal in Los Angeles, and Hollywood. Many of us never got to experience it, but the air quality in LA in the ’40s ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was deadly. Smog hung in the air like a thick fog and many residents actually said that it hurt to breathe. It sounds like present-day China, which has famously terrible air quality. In fact, the air in parts of China is so bad that some crafty entrepreneurs are actually selling cans of fresh air, just like Spaceballs.

I’m not making it up. Canadian company Vitality Air is selling cans of compressed air from across Canada for about 28 bucks a pop. Each can contains eight liters of air from Canadian natural wonderlands like Banff national park and Lake Louise. Now, that’s absurd enough, but they also sell a diamond-encrusted bottle signed by (rapper?) 2Chainz for $18k. The company actually started as a joke with a single eBay listing of some fresh air sealed in a Ziploc. The bag sold, and then another, and before they knew it the company founders were making good money selling fresh air in cans to China.

And another company called Aethaer in the United Kingdom is selling jars of air from the English countryside for $130 a pop. They also sell posh particulate filter masks with neat designs on them. They also make a very useful app to help people track air quality around the globe. Aethaer was founded to raise awareness of poor air quality around the world.

We’d probably be buying canned air here in the US if we hadn’t dealt with our own smog.

In the early ’50s scientists figured out that the Los Angeles smog was came from car exhaust. Before that, it wasn’t obvious. Sure, anyone who’s been around a classic car knows that exhaust stinks, but it’s transparent. Smog, on the other hand, is brownish. It wasn’t clear (pun intended) that the two were related. Caltech biochemist Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit discovered that smog forms when airborne hydrocarbons from gasoline and nitrogen oxide (NOx) react with sunlight.

In Los Angeles, there were (and still are) millions of cars, and the air tends to stagnate in the warm, sun-drenched valleys. All of this made the air in LA the worst in the nation.

After the discovery, Haagen-Smit spent the next decade or so trying to convince politicians, the auto industry, and the public that cars cause smog. It wasn’t easy. The auto and oil industries pushed back immediately, and even sent a researcher from the nearby oil-industry-funded Stanford Research Institute to discredit his findings. The Stanford scientist failed, and Haagen-Smit was vindicated.

Still, the oil and automobile industries were in denial, claiming that smog was only a quirk of LA’s unique geography. They were reluctant to spend money researching how to make cleaner engines, or to spend money adding extra equipment to cars. In short, they didn’t want anything to cut into their precious profits — Southern California’s health be damned.

But LA residents weren’t having any of it. As the evidence mounted, and more people became aware of and convinced by Haagen-Smit’s research, they began to pressure politicians to make laws to improve air quality. I mean, things were bad. The air was unbreathable more than 200 days of the year. Parents were keeping their kids out of school, athletic events were frequently canceled, and emergency rooms overflowed with people having respiratory problems. Haagen-Smit and his colleagues also put on several big stunts for the media to make their point. The head of the LA Air Quality board volunteered to sit in a plexiglass chamber filled with ozone and smog to prove its danger. He got bronchitis.

Around the same time, Rachel Carson released her book Silent Spring, which launched the environmental movement.

Finally, politicians began to notice and take action. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963. Two years later it called for national emissions standards for cars. In 1966 California established the first tailpipe emissions standards in the nation. The California Clean Air Resources Board, or CARB, was founded in 1967. Still, automakers resisted until 1969, when the Justice Department sued them for conspiring to delay anti-smog devices.

By 1970 the air in LA was improving, but it was still pretty nasty. But the regulations had pushed the oil industry and auto manufacturers to invest in clean gasoline tech. Oil refineries had to be overhauled to make cleaner-burning fuel, and engines had to change to burn that fuel more efficiently. Catalytic converters, along with new gas formulations, really improved emissions from gasoline cars by the early ’80s and the air in LA finally began to clear up. And, of course, air quality across the country improved greatly with the introduction of emissions controls and smog devices on cars.

To be fair, the oil and auto industries really did clean up their acts. The technological transformation was nothing short of miraculous. The gasoline cars of today are many times more powerful, efficient, and cleaner than the cars of the ’50s. But both industries probably wouldn’t have done anything if it weren’t for Haagen-Smit’s whistle blowing and clear air regulations.

And the air has continued to improve. A recent study published in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Journal states that air quality regulations have saved tens of thousands of lives in the US since the 1990s. They say that deaths related to particulate matter dropped more than 50 percent across the country between 1990 and 2010, saving 40,000 lives in 2010 alone.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina, the EPA, and the Department of Energy. They created a computer model to simulate particulate matter and ozone concentrations in the US over the last 21 years. Then they layered mortality rates for people older than 25 who died from diseases that likely result from this pollution. They also accounted for the relative risk people face from those diseases.

There’s a great write-up on the Gizmodo Earther site about the study by reporter Yessenia Funes. It’s so good, in fact, that the last two sentences of that last paragraph were ripped straight from the article. I tried to rework them, but I couldn’t make them any clearer. That’s exceedingly rare when it comes to online reporting. It’s well written, folks. Very well written. Go check it out, I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Which, finally, brings us to the latest and greatest emissions scandal: Dieselgate. I felt it was necessary to talk about how and why we got clean air regulations in the first place before we started talking about VW’s recent debacle. It’s easy to forget how bad the air was right here in the United States before we forced industry to clean up its act. And remembering it will help you understand why dieselgate was such a big deal.

In the next episode I’ll talk about what VW did that almost bankrupt the company, how they did it, and why. Then I’ll go into the science of NOX — nitrous oxide — the thing that makes diesel dirty.

Until then, breathe easy. And thank those brave scientists like Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit for standing up to industry and demanding regulations that helped clean up our air.

There’s a whole lot more to learn about air quality regulations and the history of the environmental movement. I’ve put a ton of links in the show notes. I encourage you to explore them.

And that’s it. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Google Play, or Podbean. If you like it, give it a rating and review. It really helps spread the word. I’d love to eventually do this kind of podcasting and reporting for a living, and the only way that’ll happen is with your support.

Sources:

https://www.kcet.org/history-society/how-los-angeles-began-to-put-its-smoggy-days-behind

https://earther.gizmodo.com/environmental-regulation-has-helped-cut-deaths-from-air-1829875441

https://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hcc/2007/09/After-Burner/1509192.html

https://www.marketplace.org/2014/07/14/sustainability/we-used-be-china/la-smog-battle-against-air-pollution

https://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/spaceballs-becomes-reality-canadian-company-is-selling-bottled-air-to-the-chinese-1642442/

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/15/canadians-are-selling-cans-of-fresh-air-to-china.html

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170515-the-entrepreneurs-making-money-out-of-thin-air

https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/world/fresh-air-britain-china-bottles/index.html

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/about/history

This summer a lot of science news bubbled up out of the quantum foam, but the one thing that really caught my attention was booze. And not Oregon’s world-famous craft beers. A study landed that allegedly found that any amount of alcohol — any — is bad for you.

Now, this news hit hard for a few reasons. First, it contradicts a long list of studies that correlated booze with good health, and second… really?! Is there nothing left in this world to enjoy? Thanks, science. Thanks a lot.

Pretty much everybody was blowing a gasket over this one, and the journalist in me immediately thought it was just a scientist’s ploy to gain notoriety — and secure funding. And considering that scientists are people too, it’s quite possible.

But then I took the time to examine the study, published in the Scientific Journal The Lancet, which let’s be honest is a creepy name, and… wow.

Researchers reviewed data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study of 2016. There were 694 data sources, along with 592 other studies on the risk of alcohol use. Altogether, the data measured health effects of alcohol use in 195 countries from 1990 to 2016.

It’s a lot of data, and a ton of work by hundreds of people. The list of collaborators for this study takes up more screen real estate than the collected works of Shakespeare. It was a massive effort by countless researchers, and so it probably shouldn’t be taken lightly. So what, exactly, did they find?

They found that alcohol is a leading risk factor for disease burden worldwide. It accounts for almost 10 percent of global deaths of people between the ages of 15 to 49 — about 2.8 million people a year. And in general they found that the more people drink, the worse their health is. More cancer, heart disease, kidney and liver problems, pretty much everything. No amount of alcohol, they found, is safe.

In their words:

“Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none. This level is in conflict with most health guidelines, which espouse health benefits associated with consuming up to two drinks per day. Alcohol use contributes to health loss from many causes and exacts its toll across the lifespan, particularly among men. Policies that focus on reducing population-level consumption will be most effective in reducing the health loss from alcohol use.”

The results seem pretty clear, but there could be other factors affecting health in drinkers. Poverty, for instance, has been consistently shown to adversely affect health. So has depression. Of course, all of these are intimately connected — When you’re struggling financially, you get stressed and depressed, and you drink. Probably too much.

But what about all those studies that said moderate drinkers have a lower risk of heart disease? A team of researchers working with the National Institutes of Health did a meta study of those studies last year. They found a pretty consistent, but minor correlation between moderate drinking and decreased rates of heart disease. But they found more. Again, in their words:

“Moderate drinkers tend to be younger, leaner, more physical active, of higher socioeconomic status, and more likely to be married compared with people who abstain or drink rarely. All of these factors have been shown to influence one’s risk of coronary heart disease.”

So there may be correlation, but not causation. People who drink moderately tend to be in overall better health than those who abstain. And you can’t attribute their health to how much wine they drink.

I also searched for someone who could refute or criticise the Global Burden of Diseases study, but I was only able to find articles in publications with ties to the alcohol industry. Like the Lorax said, “Business is business, and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.”

Interestingly, the whole study was sponsored by the Gates Foundation, which was founded by Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett. Buffett famously abstains from alcohol and claims to never have had a sip in his life. It’s not clear whether Bill and Melinda enjoy a glass of wine now and again, but Bill has been known to drink water distilled from human waste. He was demonstrating a really cool machine called the Omniprocessor that can turn poop into energy and clean drinking water. The machine was funded by the Gates Foundation and actually shows a lot of promise in being able to clean up human waste in places without water treatment facilities.

But I digress. The evidence is mounting that alcohol, in general, is pretty bad for you. Now, I’m definitely no teetotaler, and I can’t tell you how to pilot your meat vehicle, but I can tell you what booze does to your body. Or my body. Or any body, really.

Much of this comes from an excellent article on the venerable HowStuffWorks.com titled, How Alcohol Works. Some also comes from the now famous Lifehacker article by Kevin Purdy titled “What Alcohol Actually Does to Your Brain and Body.” I’ll link to both in the show notes.

First, let’s start with alcohol itself. When we’re talking booze, we’re talking ethyl alcohol or ethanol. There are other types of alcohol, but you definitely shouldn’t drink them because you’ll die. Methanol, or wood alcohol, is used to make formaldehyde and as a fuel additive. Isobutyl alcohol is used to strip paint and to make plastic.

The ethanol in booze, beer, and wine is a fairly simple compound of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Back in high school chemistry you could write it as: C2H5OH. It’s volatile and highly flammable and was even used as rocket fuel in the early days. In stronger concentrations it can be used as a solvent for paints and inks.

The stuff we drink, however, is typically suspended in water. Beer contains around 3 to 9 percent alcohol, wine between 10 and 16 percent, and liquor 40 percent and more.

So what happens when you drink?

Most of the sauce is absorbed in your stomach and the rest gets sucked up by your small intestine. Then it dissolves into your bloodstream and gets the party started. It can immediately irritate the linings of the stomach and intestine. It also increases blood flow to those areas, and boosts stomach acid secretion. Blood flows to the skin, causing flushing, sweating, and that nice warm glow we’re all familiar with. It also reduces blood flow to muscles, which can lead to muscle aches later on. Overall blood pressure drops.

But the real fun happens in your brain box. Alcohol essentially gums up the works. Brain cells communicate using electrical and chemical signals. Alcohol blocks some chemical signals and enhances others.

It increases the release of dopamine, which is usually called the pleasure molecule in popular culture. But dopamine does a ton of things in the nervous system and in the body. In the brain, it’s involved in movement, pleasure, attention, mood, and motivation. In the rest of the body, dopamine is involved in nausea, kidney function, and even heart function.

When we’re talking alcohol and drugs, dopamine is really about pleasure and anticipating reward. If you’re a regular drinker, just thinking about mixing a mid-day martini can cause a spike in dopamine. When you take that first sip, you get even more dopamine. This is why alcohol is so addictive.

Beyond the initial rush of pleasure, alcohol enhances the effects of another neurotransmitter called GABA. GABA is an inhibitor — it makes things sluggish. Alcohol also weakens the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamine, slowing things down even more. It depresses inhibitory centers, making you more talkative, self-confident, and less inhibited. It slows down information processing from the senses, making it more difficult to see, hear, feel, and taste. And, as we all know, it inhibits thought processes, leading to poor judgement.

Hold my beer.

Booze also acts on the limbic system, which has a lot to do with emotion and memory. Again, it weakens the normal checks we have on our emotions. This leads to, as the How Stuff Works article points out, “exaggerated states of emotion.” It can also make it difficult to form and retain memories.

The more you drink, the more alcohol affects your brain. Those affects begin in the higher order parts of the brain — thinking and emotion. Then, after Jaeger shot number three or so, they start to affect the cerebellum, which has a lot to do with movement. That leads to the teetering, stumbling, and flailing about of, well, our ‘20s.

Booze also makes us hornier. It depresses the nerve centers in the hypothalamus that control sexual arousal and performance. But the more you drink, the more sexual performance declines — for men, especially. Our favorite How Stuff Works article quotes a few lines from Shakespeare’s MacBeth, and what kind of podcaster would I be if I didn’t perform a dramatic reading:

Macduff: What three things does drink especially promote?

Porter: Marry sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance…

Part of this has to do with how alcohol affects hormones. Studies have shown that even a single drink can lower levels of testosterone in men. And low levels of testosterone have been associated with an array of medical problems, including osteoporosis, decreased muscle and prostate function, anemia, altered immune function, and, of course, a decrease in sperm count.

The porter from MacBeth also points out something we haven’t covered: Pee. Alcohol makes you pee, a lot. And that’s not just because you’re drinking water. Alcohol is a diuretic, which means it makes your kidneys kick into high gear. It inhibits the secretion of the hormone vasopressin, which tells the kidneys to reabsorb water. The end result is a lot of pee, and dehydration, which is a key component of a wicked hangover.

The breakdown of alcohol is also thought to contribute to wicked hangovers. Alcohol is broken down in the liver to form acetaldehyde, which is further broken down into acetic acid, the main part of vinegar. Which is why you can feel pretty pickled after a night of heavy drinking.

Alcohol also really messes up your sleep. Just one drink can disrupt sleep cycles, slashing the amount of REM (or dream) sleep you get. REM sleep helps metal recovery and rejuvenation, and could play a central role in depression. Remember GABA and glutamine? Those two neurotransmitters that get thrown out of whack when you drink? When the alcohol wears off, they return to normal levels, causing wakefulness. Researchers call it the rebound effect, and it happens a few hours after you go to sleep. This, along with the urge to pee, means you’ll probably be up all night. And because your sleep cycle has been disrupted, it’ll be more difficult to get back to sleep. This is the final and probably biggest cause of hangover symptoms.

The way alcohol affects sleep could be the biggest reason it’s so bad for you. Research has shown that lack of sleep is terrible. Poor sleep causes increased rates of cancer and heart disease, premature aging, muscle loss, increased inflammation, you name it. The effects of a bad night’s sleep are truly disastrous, and worth an entire podcast series.

For a good summary of sleep and how it influences health, check out the excellent book Why We Sleep by neuroscientist Matthew Walker. Walker does a great job of breaking down the mechanisms of sleep and explains decades’ worth of sleep studies and what they mean for your health.

So. This is all what happens when you have a single cocktail at happy hour after work. But what about if you keep up the habit?

Simply put, it’s really bad.

Long-term alcohol abuse absolutely wrecks your body and mind. The more you drink, and the more often you drink, the more your body tries to adapt. Your liver kicks into high gear, producing more of the chemicals used to break alcohol down. All that extra work burns up liver tissues. Cells die prematurely, and liver tissue begins to harden, leading to cirrhosis of the liver.

Your brain amps up the amount of glutamine and tanks the amount of GABA to compensate for all the booze. The result is increased anxiety and agitation when you’re not drinking. The same thing happens in nerve cells throughout your body — they increase activity to compensate for being drunk. Without booze, heavy drinkers can experience uncontrollable tremors and shakes.

A few drinks now and then won’t kill brain cells, but long-term alcohol abuse can. Remember how booze kicks your kidneys into high gear, producing more urine and dehydration? Over time, that process can flush a lot of vitamin B out of your system. Vitamin B is crucial to brain health and without it you can develop Wernicke–Korsakoff Syndrome, which is essentially brain damage. It causes confusion, memory loss, and a reduction of overall brain mass.

That same leaching process can also lead to iron deficiencies and anemia.

Long-term alcohol abuse can also lead to hypertension and heart disease. When you drink, blood pressure drops. Your heart then pumps harder to compensate. Over time it’ll just keep pumping harder, leading to overall increased blood pressure.

Finally, alcohol abuse drastically reduces testosterone levels in men.

And this is all just the health effects of alcohol. The social harm alcohol does is almost immeasurable. It wrecks families, ruins careers, incites violence, causes crime, and kills. The Center For Disease Control estimates that approximately 88,000 people die from alcohol-related causes every year in the US. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.3 million people die from alcohol-related causes every year worldwide. There are many more sobering statistics on the National Institutes of Health website, but you get the picture.

Considering all this, it’s extremely difficult to take any studies showing alcohol is good for you seriously. Weighing the evidence, and alcohol’s documented effects on the human body, there’s really only one conclusion: Alcohol is bad for you.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t drink.

Renowned statistics professor Sir David John Spiegelhalter stated it well in an interview with the BBC: “There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention,” he said.

Living is risky. It’s up to you to decide how much risk you want to take, and whether the joy of drinking alcohol is worth the consequences. Booze has inspired great works of art, eased troubled souls, and strengthened relationships since the dawn of humanity. It’s powerful stuff, and it has a price. I’m willing to pay it, but I’m definitely going to cut back after this podcast. Especially considering that I want to remain physically fit as long as possible. Looks like I’ll be limiting my consumption to special occasions. Probably.

Here are some interesting statistics about alcohol consumption from the Global Burden of Diseases study:

Denmark has the highest percentage of drinkers. 97 percent of men and 95 percent of women in the country drink. Norway, Argentina, Germany, Poland, and France aren’t far behind with prevalence in the 93 to 94 percent range.

Pakistan has the lowest prevalence for males at nine tenths of a percent. Bangladesh is the lowest for females at three tenths of a percent.

Romanian men drink an average of 8.2 drinks per day. Portuguese men 7.3. Ukrainian women, 4.2 drinks a day. Women in the UK drink an average of 3 a day. Spanish men have 5.8. Swiss women, 2.8. And remember, these are just averages, which means some people drink far, far more every day. I’m hungover just thinking about it.

That’s it, thank you for listening. This was a big one, and I encourage you to do your own digging. I’ve linked to my sources in the show notes. There are a lot, so be prepared to do a great deal of reading. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you liked this podcast, subscribe on Apple, Google Play or Podbean. There’s more to come.

If you’re looking for a delightful compendium of craft cocktails, check out the book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails by historian Ted Haigh. You can learn how to make everything from the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100. It’s a hoot.

If you’re in the pacific northwest, grab some Portland Syrups Rose City Tonic and some Freeland Spirits Gin. No they’re not sponsors, but they are my go-tos for G&T.

You can learn more about alcohol at any dive bar (if you’re over 21, of course). And you can learn more about me at dustindriver.com.

If you have some good science-y podcast ideas, let me know. Shoot me an email dustin@dustindriver.com

Stay mental.

Sources:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext
https://science.howstuffworks.com/alcohol.htm
https://lifehacker.com/5684996/what-alcohol-actually-does-to-your-brain-and-body
https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh25-4/255-261.htm
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics
https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa63/aa63.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4065474/
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/what_is_dopamine_love_lust_sex_addiction_gambling_motivation_reward.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/07/18/alcohol-related-liver-deaths-have-increased-sharply/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.23550826155d
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321731.php

That’s right, it’s the Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge and we need your submissions. We’re collecting awesome browser extensions from the developer community until April 15, 2018. Our panel of judges will award prizes to the top extensions in three categories: Games & Entertainment, Dynamic Themes, and Tab Manager/Organizer. Winners will be awarded an Apple iPad Pro 10.5” Wifi 256GB and be featured on addons.mozilla.org. Runners up in each category will receive a $250 USD Amazon gift card. Winners will be announced on May 8, 2018 with the release of Firefox 60.

But what makes a great extension? What are we looking for? Here are some great guidelines for building an awesome extension, along with some examples of successful extensions.

Make It Dynamic

Firefox 57 added dynamic themes. What does that mean? They’re just like standard themes that change the look and feel of Firefox, but they can change over time. Create new themes for day, night time, and private browsing.

Quantum Lights is an example of a dynamic theme in action.

Mozilla developer advocate Potch created a wonderful video explaining how dynamic themes work in Firefox:

Make It Fun

Browsing the web is fun, but it can be downright hilarious with an awesome extension. Firefox extensions support JavaScript, which means you can create and integrate full-featured games into the browser. Tab Invaders is a fun example. The remake of the arcade classic Space Invaders lets users blast open tabs into oblivion. It’s a cathartic way to clear your browsing history and start anew.

But you don’t have to build a full-fledged game to have fun. Tabby Cat adds an interactive cartoon cat to every new tab. The cats nap, meow, and even let you pet them. Oh, and the cats can wear hats.

Get creative. Your extension doesn’t have to be strictly business.

Make It Functional

A fantastic extension helps users do everyday tasks faster and more easily. RememBear, from the makers of TunnelBear, remembers usernames and passwords (securely) and can generate new strong passwords. Tree Style Tab lets users order tabs in a collapsible tree structure instead of the traditional tab structure. The Grammarly extension integrates the entire Grammarly suite of writing and editing tools in any browser window. Excellent extensions deliver functionality. Think about ways to make browsing the web faster, easier, and more secure when you’re building your extension.

Make It Firefox

The Firefox UI is built on the Photon Design System. A good extension will fit seamlessly into the UI design language and seem to be a native part of the browser. Guidelines for typography, color, layout, and iconography are available to help you integrate your extension with the Firefox browser. Try to keep edgy or unique design elements apart from the main Firefox UI elements and stick to the Photon system when possible.

Make It Clear

When you upload an extension to addons.mozilla.org (the Firefox add-ons site), pay close attention to its listing information. A clear, easy-to-read description and well-designed screenshots are key. The Notebook Web Clipper extension is a good example of an easy-to-read page with detailed descriptions and clear screenshots. Users know exactly what the extension does and how to use it. It should be easy for users to get started with your extension.

Make It Fresh

Firefox 60, now available in Firefox Beta, includes a host of brand-new APIs that let you do even more with your extensions. We’ve cracked open a cask of theme properties that let you control more parts of the Firefox browser than ever before, including tab color, toolbar icon color, frame color, and button colors.

The tabs API now supports a tabs.captureTab method that can be passed a tabId to capture the visible area of the specified tab. There are also new or improved APIs for proxies, network extensions, keyboard shortcuts, and messages.

For a full breakdown of all the new improvements to extension APIs in Firefox 60, check out Firefox engineer Mike Conca’s excellent post on the Mozilla Add-ons Blog.

Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Barbra Streisand cloned her favorite dog and things didn’t turn out as expected. Why? And How? And, most importantly, Whuuuuuuuut?

First, Streisand revealed in a recent interview with Variety Magazine that she had her recently deceased dog Samantha cloned — twice. Well, she had two clones made. According to the world-renown singer, the dogs have different personalities than Samantha and aren’t exactly identical to her, either.

What’s going on here? Is this real? Are we living in some bizarre future filled with cloned and designer pets? If you have Streisand cash, yes. For about $100k, companies like Sooam Biotech in South Korea and ViaGen in Texas will clone your pet. Or, if you have an advanced genetic and medical laboratory in your garage, you can do it yourself.

First, collect a tissue sample from your donor dog. Epithelial cells from inside the dog’s cheek may work, or from its stomach lining. Then find a surrogate dog to carry the clone puppies. Take a few egg cells from the surrogate dog, remove the cell nuclei, and replace them with nuclei from the original dog. With any luck, the egg cells will start to divide and you can implant them into the surrogate dog. It’s a lot like in vitro fertilization, but you’re using cells from the dog you want to clone.

No, you can’t really clone a dog in your garage. And if you could, I’m sure the health department would have something to say about it. But that’s how the process works, basically, and after that you get clone puppies.

Those puppies aren’t exactly like the donor dog, though. They may have the same genes, but they won’t look or act the same. Streisand found out with her two clone dogs, who have different personalities than the original. Why? Environmental factors play a big role in determining personality. Where the dog is raised, what it eats growing up, and who it interacts with all can change its personality. And environment can also change how certain genes are expressed. Everything from eye color to coat markings could differ from the original.

Clone dogs do appear to be healthy, however. The first one was decanted Korea in 2005 and lived a normal, healthy life. Other clone dogs also appear to be relatively healthy.

But the question remains, why would you want to clone your dog if it won’t have the same personality or even look the same? I mean, this calls into question the entire concept of cloning your family pet to begin with. But who am I to judge?

It’s more interesting that the dogs are different. Scientists know that there’s a strong genetic component to personality and intelligence, but they can’t say for certain what role environment plays. These dog clones show that nurture can have a big effect on nature, which is pretty cool. It’s also an illustration of how quickly life can adapt to changing environments. Finally, it shows that even though clones and twins are remarkably similar, they’re definitely not the same.

If you want to learn more about cloning dogs, take a look at the show notes — I stuck some great links in there. If you want to waste a few hours listening to random dog sounds, head over to freesound.org — the site has a wonderful and seemingly endless collection of pet noises that are free to download and use in your own projects.

Lastly, don’t clone your dog in your garage. Seriously, leave it to the professionals. Or, better yet, adopt from your local shelter.

Stay mental.

A Firefox DevTools retrospective.

Note: The following is a reprint from the Mozilla Hacks Blog. Check it out for fantastic web development tips, tricks, news, and more!

2017 was a big year for Firefox DevTools. We updated and refined the UI, refactored three of the panels, squashed countless bugs, and shipped several new features. This work not only provides a faster and better DevTools experience, but lays the groundwork for some exciting new features and improvements for 2018 and beyond. We’re always striving to make tools and features that help developers build websites using the latest technologies and standards, including JavaScript frameworks and, of course, CSS Grid.

To better understand where we’re headed with Firefox Devtools, let’s take a quick look back.

2016

In 2016, the DevTools team kicked off an ambitious initiative to completely transition DevTools away from XUL and Firefox-specific APIs to modern web technologies. One of the first projects to emerge was debugger.html.

Debugger.html is not just an iteration of the old Firefox Debugger. The team threw everything out, created an empty repo, and set out to build a debugger from scratch that utilized reusable React components and a Redux store model.

The benefits of this modern architecture become obvious right away. Everything was more predictable, understandable, and testable. This approach also allows debugger.html to target more than just Firefox. It can target other platforms such as Chrome and Node.

We also shipped a new Responsive Design Mode in 2016 that was built using only modern web technologies.

2017

Last year, we continued to build on the work that was started in 2016 by building, and rebuilding parts of Firefox DevTools (and adding new features along the way). As a result, our developer tools are faster and more reliable. We also launched Firefox Quantum, which focused on browser speed, and performance.

Debugger

The debugger.html work that started in 2016 shipped to all channels with Firefox 56. We also added several new features and improvements, including better search tools, collapsed framework call-stacks, async stepping, and more.

Console

Just as with debugger.html, we shipped a brand-new Firefox console with Firefox Quantum. It has a new UI, and has been completely rewritten using React and Redux. This new console includes several new improvements such as the ability to collapse log groups, and the ability to inspect objects in context.

Network Monitor

We also shipped a new network monitor to all channels in Firefox 57. This new Network Monitor has a new UI, and is (you guessed it) built with modern web technologies such as React and Redux. It also has a more powerful filter UI, new Netmonitor columns, and more.

CSS Grid Layout Panel

Firefox 57 shipped with a new CSS Grid Layout Panel. CSS Grid is revolutionizing web design, and we wanted to equip designers and developers with powerful tools for building and inspecting CSS Grid layouts. You can read all about the panel features here; highlights include an overlay to visualize the grid, an interactive grid outline, displaying grid area names, and more.

Photon UI

We also did a complete visual refresh of the DevTools themes to coincide with the launch of Firefox Quantum and the new Photon UI. This refresh brings a design that is clean, slick, and easy to read.

2018 and Beyond

All of this work has set up an exciting future for Firefox DevTools. By utilizing modern web technologies, we can create, test, and deploy new features at a faster pace than when we were relying on XUL and Firefox-specific APIs.

So what’s next? Without giving too much away, here are just some of the areas we are focusing on:

Better Tools for Layouts and Design

This is 2018 and static designs made in a drawing program are being surpassed by more modern tools! Designing in the browser gives us the freedom to experiment, innovate, and build faster. Speaking with hundreds of developers over the past year, we’ve learned that there is a huge desire to bring better design tools to the browser.

We’ve been thrilled by overwhelmingly positive feedback around the CSS Grid Layout Panel and we’ve heard your requests for more tools that help design, build, and inspect layouts.

We are making a Firefox Inspector tool to make it easier to write Flexbox code. What do you want it to do the most? What’s the hardest part for you when struggling with Flexbox?
 — @jensimmons, 14 Nov 2017

I’m so pleased about this reaction to the Firefox Grid Inspector. That was the plan. We’ve just gotten started. More super-useful layout tools are coming in 2018.
 — @jensimmons, 24 Nov 2017

Better Tools for Frameworks

2017 was a banner year for JavaScript frameworks such as React and Vue. There are also older favorites such as Angular and Ember that continue to grow and improve. These frameworks are changing the way we build for the web, and we have ideas for how Firefox DevTools can better equip developers who work with frameworks.

An Even Better UI

The work on the Firefox DevTools UI will never be finished. We believe there is always room for improvement. We’ll continue to work with the Firefox Developer community to test and ship improvements.

New DevTools poll: Which of these three toolbar layouts do you prefer for the Network panel?
 — @violasong

More Projects on GitHub

We tried something new when we started building debugger.html. We decided to build the project in GitHub. Not only did we find a number of new contributors, but we received a lot of positive feedback about how easy it was to locate, manage, and work with the code. We will be looking for more opportunities to bring our projects to GitHub this year, so stay tuned.

Get Involved

Have an idea? Found a bug? Have a (gasp) complaint? We will be listening very closely to devtools users as we move into 2018 and we want to hear from you. Here are some of the ways you can join our community and get involved:

Join us on Slack

You can join our devtools.html Slack community. We also hang out on the #devtools channel on irc.mozilla.org

Follow us on Twitter

We have an official account that you can follow, but you can also follow various team members who will occasionally share ideas and ask for feedback. Follow @FirefoxDevTools here.

Contribute

If you want to get your hand dirty, you can become a contributor:

List of open bugs
GitHub

Download Firefox Developer Edition

Firefox Developer Edition is built specifically for developers. It provides early access to all of the great new features we have planned for 2018.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far. Your tweets, bug reports, feedback, criticisms, and suggestions matter and mean the world to us. We hope you’ll join us in 2018 as we continue our work to build amazing tools for developers.

Forging Better Tools for the Web was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In science fiction they call it gray goo — nanobots that replicate without limits until eventually everything on the planet is a featureless gray goo. It’s the first thing that came to mind when I read a recent article in the New York Times about a new species of crayfish that clones itself and is taking over Europe. The species emerged just 25 years ago as a mutation. Normally, animals have two chromosomes, one from each parent. This female crayfish ended up with three, meaning that she could produce her own fertilized eggs without mating. And every egg is a perfect clone of the original crayfish. Oh, and crayfish lay hundreds of eggs at a time. More from the German Cancer Research Institute.

Naked mole rats may be the true underlords of this planet, shriveled immortals lurking beneath our feet, sewing discontent throughout society until humanity is on the verge of collapse. Explains the current state of the world quite well, I’d say. But unfortunately we can’t pin humanity’s failings on the machinations of mole rats. We may, however, learn how to extend our misery indefinitely by studying their apparent agelessness. Based on the article published in eLife Sciences.

Listen on Soundcloud:

Detroit’s hottest dubstep DJs Spectre and Meltdown live at the Music Institute Thursday, January 4th 2018. Get your tickets today at ticketmeister.org.

Spectre and Meltdown are actually two serious security vulnerabilities discovered in nearly every computer processor made since 1995. So what does it mean? Is this the end of computing? Should we throw our computers on the campfire and live among mother nature? I wanted to find out, so I talked to security expert Wu-chang Feng at Portland State University. The verdict? You might just want to break out the abacus, because we’re all in big trouble.

Spectre takes advantage of something called speculative execution. Processors make educated guesses about what’s going to happen next, then run through those steps to save time. It makes modern processors much faster, but it turns out that malicious code can sneak in during this speculation and reveal whatever’s floating around in memory — usernames and passwords, for instance. Meltdown breaks the barrier between applications and system memory, again letting malware take a peek at system memory.

The vulnerabilities were found by university researchers and the security team Google Project Zero. As far as anyone knows, no hackers have taken advantage of either vulnerability, but Microsoft, Apple, and Linux distributors have released patches for meltdown and are working on ways to counteract Spectre.

For more information on Spectre and Meltdown, I recommend meltdownattack.com by Graz University of Technology in Austria. The site has a breakdown of both vulnerabilities for laypersons and technical documents for computer scientists.

I’m launching a new podcast about Science and Technology called Let’s Get Mental. In this, the very first podcast, I chat with Amy Koski at the Oregon Health and Science University about CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing.

You can subscribe on iTunes and Google Play. It’s also available on SoundCloud.

Amy Koski is the lab manager at the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at OHSU. The lab made headlines in August 2017 when they successfully repaired heart disease genes in human embryonic cells using CRISPR/Cas9.

So what is CRISPR/Cas9? CRISPR is an acronym that stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Basically they’re short repeated bits of DNA in a sequence. They were first discovered in the early ’80s by scientists studying Archaea, single-celled organisms that have been around for at least 2.7 billion years. Archaea are super simple organisms and they don’t have immune systems like we do.

Instead, they take DNA snapshots of the viruses that infect them — kind of like those “do not sell to this person” Polaroids posted in convenience stores. If a virus tries to stroll in, Archaea can identify and attack right away. Those snapshots are CRISPRs.

To take the snapshots, Archaea use an enzyme called Cas9 to precisely slices the viral DNA. Researchers saw this and realized right away that Cas9 could be used to target and remove specific genes in a DNA sequence. Since then, they’ve figured out how to use it to do just that, and how to make replacements for the genes they cut out.

At OHSU, they figured out how to target a gene that causes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is a serious heart disease that afflicts people in early middle age. Because it doesn’t strike until later in life, many patients don’t know they carry the gene until they’ve already passed it onto the next generation. So the mutation persists in the population. The lab estimates that about 8 percent of the population in India carries the gene, which is huge.

The lab, led by Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, used Cas9 to snip the gene out of a developing embryo, then the cells in the embryo repaired themselves using a healthy copy of the gene from the second parent.

You’ll hear us talking about embryos, but we’re really talking about eight cells in total, which is VERY early on in development, like, minutes after fertilization. Then that’s it, the experiment is over.

After we stopped recording, we chatted a bit about PGD — preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which is essentially screening embryos for genetic disorders before IVF implantation. The question was: why not just screen embryos instead of trying to fix them? The goal, said Koski, is to eliminate the gene from the population altogether so nobody has to worry about it in the future. You’re preventing untold amounts of suffering, and also expense, by removing the mutated gene from the family line.

Of course, Koski and Mitalipov aren’t proposing that this sort of gene editing should be mandatory, far from it, they want to give couples the option to do this kind of genetic repair if they want.

And as we said during the interview, there are more than 10,000 identified single-gene genetic disorders, including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, Fragile X Syndrome, muscular dystrophy, and Huntington’s disease. So the team at OHSU has their work cut out for them.

Subscribe and stay tuned for more!

2017 was a stellar year for Mozilla. We launched the fastest Firefox ever, rebuilt DevTools, saw support for WebAssembly ship in all four major browsers, and launched open-source virtual reality and speech recognition platforms. Our developer relations team also attended more than 60 roadshow events around the world and saw the MDN Web Docs site nearly double its readership.

It’s a tough act to follow, but we hope to continue the pace in 2018. We have a ton of great open-source tech on the horizon, all of which we’ll cover here and over at the Mozilla Hacks blog. Thanks for sticking with us, and for reading our various publications across the web. We couldn’t have accomplished any of it without the support of the worldwide developer community. If you want to get involved in 2018, visit our community site to get started.

Firefox Quantum

Firefox ran on the same engine for more than a decade, and at the beginning of 2017, it showed. The browser needed a boost, and Mozilla engineers gave it one. Working with the Servo project, they rewrote the browser’s engine using new core technologies. The first being Rust, an all-new programming language written to take advantage of the latest multi-core processors. Then there’s Servo, the parallel engine built on Rust. And Stylo (Quantum CSS) to again take advantage of multi-core processors. Put it all together and you get a browser that’s light years ahead of the previous version and can outperform other browsers in certain tasks. It took years, multiple teams of engineers, and more than four million lines of new code.

For an in-depth look at how it all works, take a look at Mozilla engineer Lin Clark’s comprehensive post at Mozilla Hacks.

WebAssembly

Running big, complex apps on the web has always been a developer’s dream. Imagine editing photos, playing in 3D worlds, or editing video right in a browser without any plugins. Unfortunately, the web really wasn’t set up to do any of that. It’s based on simple layout and style languages (HTML/CSS) and JavaScript, which is fantastic, but not optimized like native languages (C++, etc.) During the turn of the century, however, Mozilla engineers thought it could be done. Engineer Alon Zakai wrote an app to translate C++ code into JavaScript and chief researcher and engineer Luke Wagner worked with his team to optimize the results. In the process they created WebAssembly, a new language that’s capable of running big programs like games in browsers nearly as fast as they run natively. By the end of 2017, all the major browsers shipped support for WebAssembly, making the web a speedier and more robust place for everyone.

Wagner wrote an in-depth history of WebAssembly for IEEE Spectrum magazine. In it, he tells the tale of using WebAssembly to run game engines Unity and Unreal in Firefox.

A-Frame and WebVR

Virtual reality on the web has been the future for about 25 years now, but those dreams didn’t become reality until 2017. This year, VR standards and frameworks took a big step forward, making it easier than ever to create VR experiences and share them on a variety of devices, from headsets to smartphones and browsers. Mozilla helped promote two major virtual reality web platforms: A-Frame and WebVR. Now major browsers support the standards, which means developers are free to create immersive experiences that run on almost any computer or device. And, because they’re based on standards, they’re easy to use. In fact, a member of our team created a virtual reality experience in less than a day and wrote about it here.

With the introduction of Firefox Quantum, virtual reality on the web is, well, a reality. Mozilla engineer Salva wrote a wonderful piece for Mozilla Hacks explaining how it all works.

Project Common Voice

Siri, Cortana, Echo, Google Home — virtual assistants are the future. But the voice recognition data they’re built on is mostly proprietary. That’s why Mozilla launched its open speech initiative in 2017, to try to level the playing field. Common Voice is an open-source voice recognition project for everyone. Here’s how it works: Contributors read phrases aloud to the Common Voice website to help the AI learn how to understand spoken language. They can also validate Common Voice transcriptions to ensure the AI is on the right path. All the data is free and available for researchers building voice apps.

Right now the site is in English, but other languages are forthcoming. Mozilla head researcher Sean White wrote a brilliant piece about Common Voice for the main Mozilla blog here. Head over to the Common Voice site to contribute your own voice.

Firefox DevTools

The Firefox DevTools team was also busy in 2017. They rewrote much of the underlying code for DevTools, and created all-new tools for CSS Grid and JavaScript debugging. They’re open source and built on web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so developers can contribute, remix, and rebuild the DevTools at will. Debugger.html is currently live on Github and ready for contributions and forks. All our DevTools panels were also completely redesigned to be easier to use, and to look better. They adopted our new streamlined Photon UI that totally transformed the look and feel of FireFox.

We also launched the Mozilla DevTools Playground, an in-depth how-to site for learning CSS Grid and JavaScript debugging. Go check it out, it’s free and open to everyone. Also take a look at Mozilla developer advocate Jen Simmons’ incredible CSS Grid lab to learn more about the layout system.

Developer Roadshows

Mozilla developers toured the world in 2017 to help promote open standards and new technologies, including WebVR, A-Frame, and WebAssembly. They visited more than 60 developer roadshow events worldwide.

Mozilla Developer Network

In 2017, more than 8,000 developers contributed to 80,000 pages of content on the Mozilla Developer Network. Mozilla also teamed with Microsoft, Google, and other industry leaders to greatly expand the scope of MDN web docs. It’s a huge collaboration and one that we all hope will make the web a better place for developers and consumers alike.

So what’s next for Mozilla? We’re going to keep making Firefox faster and more powerful, which means fine-tuning WebAssembly and other core technologies. We hope to help WebVR and A-Frame become standards for rich content on the web. We will continue to champion open-source voice and machine learning projects. In short, we’ll keep working to ensure the web remains open and accessible for everyone.

Mozilla Made the Web Better for Developers in 2017 was originally published in Mozilla Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.