Isegoria

Everyone liked her except the man Napoleon selected to marry her

January 2nd, 2025

At 9 p.m. on Monday, January 4, 1802, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s brother Louis was married to Josephine’s daughter Hortense by the mayor of Paris’ 1st arrondissement:

It was only one of a large number of marriages arranged by Napoleon, whose involvement in the nuptial lives of others was almost uniformly disastrous–certainly so in this case, as very soon Louis, who was in love with someone else at the time, could hardly bear to share a room with Hortense, and vice versa. Napoleon treated Hortense as his own daughter. Everyone liked her except the man Napoleon selected to marry her.

[…]

Reviving the old royal practice by which generals and senior dignitaries had to ask the head of state’s permission to marry, Napoleon attempted to marry his generals into Ancien Régime families. The marriages that Napoleon opposed, such as Lucien’s and Jérôme’s (to his first wife), tended to be happier than the ones that he and Josephine matchmade.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Today the prediction is at 20%

January 1st, 2025

Alex Tabarrok remains stunned at how poorly we are responding to the threat from H5N1:

Our poor response to COVID was regrettable but perhaps understandable given the US hadn’t faced a major pandemic in decades. Having been through COVID, however, you would think that we would be primed. But no. Instead of acting aggressively to stop the spread in cows we took a gamble that avian flu would fizzle out. It didn’t.

[…]

The case fatality rate for cows appears to be low but significant, perhaps 2%. A small number of pigs have also been infected. On the other hand, over 100 million chickens, turkeys and ducks have been killed or culled.

There have now been 66 cases in humans in the US. Moreover, the CDC reports that in at least one case the virus appears to have evolved within its human host to become more infectious. We don’t know that for sure but it’s not good news. Recall that in theory a single mutation will make the virus much more capable of infecting humans.

When I wrote on December 1 that A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History, Manifold Markets was predicting a 9% probability of greater than 1 million US human cases in 2025. Today the prediction is at 20%.

Posted in Policy, Science | 6 Comments »

What really happened in Wuhan

December 31st, 2024

Matt Ridley looks back at what really happened in Wuhan five years ago:

At one minute to midnight, US East Coast time, on the last day of 2019, there was a brief ‘request for information’ on ProMED-mail, an online newsletter that monitors unofficial sources to gather intelligence about new disease outbreaks affecting people and animals. It read, simply: ‘Undiagnosed pneumonia: China (Hubei).’

Dr Marjorie Pollack, the deputy editor of ProMED-mail, had been alerted by a Taiwanese colleague to a message on WeChat, the Chinese social-media site, sent by an ophthalmologist in Wuhan named Dr Li Wenliang: ‘Seven cases of SARS have been diagnosed at the Huanan Fruit and Seafood Market, quarantined in our hospital’s emergency department.’

Li had learned of this from a colleague, Dr Ai Fen, the director of the emergency department of the Wuhan Central Hospital, who had sent samples from her latest pneumonia patient for testing. The results came back on the afternoon of 30 December: ‘SARS coronavirus’, a shocking diagnosis not seen in China for 15 years. Ai circled the word ‘SARS’, photographed it and copied it to a friend at a different hospital.

Dr ‘George’ Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control in Beijing, saw the WeChat message. Just a few weeks before, he had made a rather bold claim: ‘SARS-like viruses can appear at any time. However, I am very confident to say that “SARS-like events” will not occur again, because the infectious-disease surveillance network system of our country is well established, and such events will not happen again.’

So Gao was especially alarmed to hear about an outbreak of a SARS-like virus not through the official surveillance network, but through social media. He raised the alarm with China’s health minister. Liang Wannian, head of the National Health Commission, was despatched to Wuhan on 31 December. Immediately on arrival he took the decision to close down the Huanan Seafood Market, despite the fact that Ai’s latest patient had no connection to the market.

The local officials were already acting fast – but not to stop the disease, only to stop the news of it spreading. Within hours of his WeChat post, at 1.30am on 31 December, Li Wenliang was summoned to an interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait until 4am before being interviewed and forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing ‘untruthful information’. Six weeks later, he would die of Covid.

[…]

Shi Zhengli, head of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was at a conference in Shanghai. On 30 December she was ordered by the head of the WIV to drop whatever she was doing, abandon the conference and catch a train back to the lab to examine samples that had been sent there from the hospital.

I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong’, she later told a journalist. ‘I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.’ She then recalls worrying: ‘Could they [the viruses] have come from our lab?’

Well might she worry. In the preceding 20 years, her lab had been responsible for tracking down the source of the SARS outbreak of 2003. To do this, they had sampled animals and people from all over China, zeroing in on horseshoe bats in southern Yunnan near the border with Laos, from where thousands of bat faeces and blood samples had been sent a thousand miles north to Wuhan. Her lab contained more SARS-like viruses in its freezers than the rest of the world put together: none came from Wuhan itself. These included the closest known relative of what would soon be called SARS-CoV-2. Quite a coincidence.

But it was worse than that. Shi had supervised a team, led by Ben Hu, to do a series of experiments with these bat viruses, swapping their spike genes between strains, infecting human cells with them and infecting mice with human genes. In one experiment, the virus had gained a 10,000-fold increase in infectivity. Some of these experiments had been done at inappropriately low biosafety levels. The risk of a scientist falling ill with a human-trained version of a SARS-like virus was high.

Still more worryingly, the previous year Shi had worked on a plan to insert a feature called a furin cleavage site, known to increase infectivity in human beings but not bats, into a SARS-like virus for the first time. SARS-CoV-2 is still today the only SARS-like virus known with a furin cleavage site.

[…]

The authorities excluded from testing all potential cases that had no connection or proximity to the seafood market. They insisted the virus could only be caught from animals, despite nurses and doctors falling sick. They went ahead with a huge banquet for the Chinese New Year and encouraged people to travel abroad. By mid January at the latest, the virus was already in a dozen countries, every index case tracing back to a traveller from Wuhan.

Posted in Policy, Science | 1 Comment »

If there was a correlation with HR and improved outcomes it would be rational for leaders to invest more

December 31st, 2024

Pamela Dow explains how human resources captured the nation of Great Britain:

Until I started working in the Cabinet Office in 2020 I hadn’t paid much attention to human resources (HR). I had rolled my eyes at more time wasted circumventing another rigid recruitment policy, which, although introduced to make things better, was in fact making them worse. I assumed HR was unavoidable in large organisations, and mostly there to help.

My role was to restore relevance and rigour to civil service training, from entry to leadership. It brought me close to the gatekeepers of employee relations.

[…]

Why were recruitment processes taking so long? To ensure fairness. Who decides what’s fair? The Public Sector Equality Duty, in precedents set by courts and interpreted or pre-empted by employment lawyers and HR advisers.

Why were so many employee grievances settled at such great expense, before and after employment tribunals? Because there were so many transgressions of HR policy, often by the very people who had codified the rules.

Why did every internal meeting start with a lengthy “emotional check-in”? For psychological safety. Where are people learning about that, and similarly subjective concepts? In acquiring vocational credentials from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and other HR representative bodies, and attending their courses. In September, Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes published their “Foundations” essay, which attracted significant attention in the national policy debate. It details how Britain is an outlier, lagging behind comparable G7 nations since the financial crisis, and struggling with growth, productivity, and weak state capacity.

The authors explain why, with clarity and precision: private investment is over-regulated and distorted by complex tax codes; infrastructure projects are stymied by lobbyists and lawyers; and the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act removed the incentive for local councils to permit building infrastructure.

The essay does not mention that Britain is also an international outlier in its dominant and expanding HR sector. We have one of the largest in the world, second only to the Netherlands. HR jobs have been growing steadily in most Western countries but the UK is top of the league* (turn over to see tables evidencing this). The British Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows a steady, 83 per cent increase, from just under 300,000 workers in 2011 to more than 500,000 in 2023. Might this also be an explanation for our national sluggishness?

[…]

Alongside good pay and job security, in many organisations HR allows influence on high-status topics, incommensurate with position: global social justice and identity campaigns.

[…]

In Britain the share of HR directors on boards has increased sharply, from 47 per cent in 2005 to 85 per cent in 2017. More than 70 per cent of FTSE 100 companies have a chief HR or people officer on their executive committee.

The UK legal and policy framework has also been fertile ground for HR growth over the past 20 years. The Equality Act assigns rights that have been interpreted well beyond their intent of fair opportunity, and definitions of “protected characteristics” are increasingly unhelpful. For example, graduates checking “disability” on their application to the Civil Service Fast Stream rose from 11 per cent in 2014 to 23 per cent in 2020. At the time, this allowed candidates to skip an assessment stage, perhaps an incentive to disclose an anxiety disorder. The civil service now is less certain how many people are blind, bipolar, using a wheelchair, or with self-diagnosed ADHD. It’s not a great leap to appreciate both the work this creates for HR, as well as the impact it has on productivity.

If we could track trends towards higher retention, happier workers, fewer grievances, this growth would be welcome. If there was a correlation with HR and improved outcomes it would be rational for leaders to invest more. There is evidence for the opposite. As HR roles have increased so too have the number of tribunals and days lost to work-related illness, while productivity has flatlined. HR expansion is not coinciding with desirable things and appears to be coinciding with undesirable ones.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | 4 Comments »

An Act of Kindness

December 30th, 2024

Saturday Night Live brings us An Act of Kindness:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Taiwan’s presidential office runs first ‘tabletop’ simulation of Chinese military escalation

December 29th, 2024

Taiwan’s presidential office Recently ran a war game, or tabletop simulation, of Chinese military escalation:

Unlike traditional war games by the military, the tabletop exercise was aimed at testing how different government agencies could “ensure the normal functioning of society” in times of crisis, according to Taiwan’s presidential office.

It simulated two scenarios: one where China imposes “high-intensity” grey-zone warfare tactics, and a second where Taiwan is “on the brink of conflict,” the office said. Grey-zone tactics refer to actions that fall just below what might be considered acts of war.

Government agencies were not allowed to prepare notes in advance and had to react immediately to different contingencies, the presidential office said, without elaborating on the exact circumstances featured in the simulation.

While Taiwan’s military regularly holds tabletop war games to test its defense readiness, Thursday’s exercise was the first time that the presidential office has held a simulation that focuses specifically on civil responses to the threat of a Chinese invasion.

[…]

Liu said that while Taiwan’s defense ministry was well positioned to respond to different situations, many government agencies struggled to clarify falsehoods during electricity or internet outages, highlighting the need for Taiwan to have a backup mechanism to ensure the flow of information.

She added that authorities have plans to recruit and train 50,000 volunteers across Taiwan to assist in disaster relief by the end of next year, which will include workers from the public sector.

Posted in Games, Policy, War | 3 Comments »

U.S. higher education is going to muddle through

December 28th, 2024

With apologies to Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowan believes U.S. higher education is going to muddle through:

Adjusting for grants, rather than taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 for this school year. That is a 40% decline from a decade ago…

As might be expected, the trajectory for student debt is down as well. About half of last year’s graduates had no student debt. In 2013, only 40% did. That famous saying from economics — if something cannot go on forever, it will stop — is basically true. Due to changes in the formula, aid for Pell Grants is up, which helps to limit both student debt and the expenses of college.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

The scale was almost comical

December 27th, 2024

Last month, Dwarkesh spent two weeks in China, visiting Beijing, Chengdu, Dujiangyan, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzho:

It’s funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can’t rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can’t be disturbed. There, they’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that no one wants to live in.

My overwhelming first impression was: wow this place is so fucking big. Travel often teaches you things about a country which you honestly should have intuited even without visiting. Obviously, I knew that China is a big country, with over 1.4 billion people. But it was only after I visited that the visceral scale of the biggest cities was impressed upon me.

Even in Dujiangyan, a city of just half a million people (considered a quaint countryside town by Chinese standards), we found a Buddhist temple of staggering proportions. The scale was almost comical — we’d enter what seemed like an impressively large compound, only to discover it was merely the entrance to an even grander structure right behind it. This pattern repeated 5 or 6 times, each subsequent building larger and more ornate than the last, like some kind of inverse nesting doll.

I asked a monk at the temple how they funded this massive site in a city of just half a million people. He told us that it was simply through donations. We probed further about how such an enormous project could have been financed by just ordinary people’s donations. He responded, “We’ve got a lot of supporters, dude”, and changed the topic.

Chongqing is by far the coolest city I’ve ever visited. It’s this insane cyberpunk multi-level metropolis of over 20 million people. I wouldn’t know how to begin describing it, but there’s a bunch of great YouTube videos which will show you what I mean. I got a really nice nice 2-floor hotel room that overlooked two rivers and one of the most insane skylines in the world for 60 bucks – highly recommend visiting Chongqing if you get the chance.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Grok on Isegoria

December 26th, 2024

I recently asked Grok, Twitter/X’s AI, about this blog:

The isegoria.net blog is a broad, eclectic platform that covers a wide range of topics, often focusing on historical, philosophical, political, and cultural themes. Here’s a detailed overview based on available web content:

Content and Themes:

Historical Insights: The blog delves into history, offering reflections on significant events and individuals. For example, it discusses the Napoleonic era, WWII military strategies, and the history of technological developments like the B-29 airplane.

Philosophical and Political Discourse: There’s a strong emphasis on political philosophy, with discussions around concepts like democracy, republicanism, and civic virtues. The blog engages with ideas about freedom of speech, the nature of law, and governance. It also covers controversial or alternative political theories, such as neoreaction.

Media and Journalism: It explores the role of media in society, critiquing modern journalism and discussing the merits of citizen journalism and deliberative democracy.

Cultural Commentary: From analyzing popular culture like “The Lion King” to discussing the implications of modern media consumption and technology, the blog often ties cultural phenomena to broader socio-political commentary.

Science and Technology: There are posts on scientific topics, including space travel, the feasibility of interstellar travel, and critiques of contemporary technology like blockchain and media platforms.

Engagement and Community:

Interactive Discussions: The blog features comments from readers, which often provide additional insights, critiques, or expand on the topics discussed. Contributors like Jim, Phileas Frogg, and Bruce engage in debates, adding layers of discourse.

Personal Milestones: The author(s) occasionally share personal or blog-related milestones, like celebrating 15 years of blogging, which gives a sense of longevity and community around the blog.

Notable Features and Characteristics:

Critical Analysis: There’s a notable tendency to critically analyze popular narratives, especially in political and historical contexts, challenging mainstream views or conventional wisdom.

Diverse Perspectives: The blog does not shy away from controversial or niche topics, often providing a platform for ideas that might be considered outside the mainstream, like discussions on IQ, race, and genetics.

Literary and Cultural References: The posts frequently reference literature, films, and historical anecdotes, enriching the content with cultural depth.

Technical Aspects: The blog is powered by WordPress, with RSS feeds for entries and comments, indicating an active engagement with its readership.

Sources and Citations:

The blog itself does not explicitly cite sources in the traditional academic sense, but the discussions and analyses are often supported by historical facts, personal observations, and sometimes references to other blogs or authors.

Related Web Results: The blog has been mentioned alongside other websites like pdictionary.com or seasonsinthesoil.com, suggesting a similar audience interested in deep, often contrarian, thought on various subjects.

In summary, isegoria.net is a blog that serves as a think tank for those interested in dissecting the intersections of history, politics, culture, and technology, often with a critical eye towards mainstream narratives. Its content is characterized by its depth, the diversity of topics covered, and a community that engages with these ideas in the comments section.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

When tapped, lead crystal makes a ringing sound

December 25th, 2024

When I was a kid, we would get out the fine china and the the lead crystal for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, and both names struck me as odd, because nothing about the nice plates seemed Chinese, and the nice glasses were obviously glass, not lead. Fine porcelain of course did come from China originally, and lead crystal does contain lead, even if that’s obviously a bad idea:

Lead glass, commonly called crystal, is a variety of glass in which lead replaces the calcium content of a typical potash glass. Lead glass contains typically 18–40% (by mass) lead(II) oxide (PbO), while modern lead crystal, historically also known as flint glass due to the original silica source, contains a minimum of 24% PbO. Lead glass is often desirable for a variety of uses due to its clarity. In marketing terms it is often called crystal glass.

The term lead crystal is, technically, not an accurate term to describe lead glass, because glass lacks a crystalline structure and is instead an amorphous solid. The use of the term remains popular for historical and commercial reasons, but is sometimes changed to simply crystal because of lead’s reputation as a toxic substance. It is retained from the Venetian word cristallo to describe the rock crystal (quartz) imitated by Murano glassmakers.

[…]

The addition of lead oxide to glass raises its refractive index and lowers its working temperature and viscosity. The attractive optical properties of lead glass result from the high content of the heavy metal lead. Lead also raises the density of the glass, being over 7 times as dense as calcium.

[…]

The brilliance of lead crystal relies on the high refractive index caused by the lead content. Ordinary glass has a refractive (n) of 1.5, while the addition of lead produces a range up to 1.7[1] or 1.8.[6] This heightened refractive index also correlates with increased dispersion, which measures the degree to which a medium separates light into its component wavelengths, thus producing a spectrum, just as a prism does. Crystal cutting techniques exploit these properties to create a brilliant, sparkling effect as each cut facet in cut glass reflects and transmits light through the object.

[…]

When tapped, lead crystal makes a ringing sound, unlike ordinary glasses. The wine glasses were always valued also for their “ring” made by the clinking glasses. The sound was better when large quantity of the lead oxide was present in the glassmaking material, like in the British and Irish wine glasses of the 17th-19th centuries with their “rich bell-notes of F and G sharp”.

[…]

George Ravenscroft (1618–1681) was the first to produce clear lead crystal glassware on an industrial scale. The son of a merchant with close ties to Venice, Ravenscroft had the cultural and financial resources necessary to revolutionise the glass trade, setting the basis from which England overtook Venice and Bohemia as the centre of the glass industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

[…]

The amount of lead released from lead glass increases with the acidity of the substance being served. Vinegar, for example, has been shown to cause more rapid leaching compared to white wine, as vinegar is more acidic. Citrus juices and other acidic drinks leach lead from crystal as effectively as alcoholic beverages. Daily usage of lead crystalware (without longer-term storage) was found to add up to 14.5 ?g of lead from drinking a 350ml cola beverage.

The amount of lead released into a food or drink increases with the amount of time it stays in the vessel. In a study performed at North Carolina State University, the amount of lead migration was measured for port wine stored in lead crystal decanters. After two days, lead levels were 89 ?g/L (micrograms per liter). After four months, lead levels were between 2,000 and 5,000 ?g/L. White wine doubled its lead content within an hour of storage and tripled it within four hours. Some brandy stored in lead crystal for over five years had lead levels around 20,000 ?g/L.

[…]

It has been proposed that the historic association of gout with the upper classes in Europe and America was, in part, caused by the extensive use of lead crystal decanters to store fortified wines and whisky.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Please enjoy these posts of Christmas Past

December 25th, 2024

Please enjoy these posts of Christmas Past:

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

5.6 trillion metric tons of hydrogen may be buried below Earth’s surface

December 24th, 2024

A recent study led by a petroleum geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that 5.6 trillion metric tons of hydrogen gas could be buried beneath the Earth’s surface in rocks and underground reservoirs:

The study published in Science Advances predicts a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource (103 to 1010 million metric tons (Mt)) with the most probable value of ~5.6 × 10⁶ Mt. Although most of this hydrogen is likely to be impractical to recover, a small fraction or two percent (e.g., 1 × 10⁵ Mt) would supply the projected hydrogen needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions for ~200 years.

This amount of hydrogen contains more energy (~1.4 × 10¹⁶ MJ) than all proven natural gas reserves on Earth (~8.4 × 10¹⁵ MJ).

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

Dostoevsky became a social media sensation?

December 23rd, 2024

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights has been all over BookTok and Bookstagram:

It’s a certain type of book that becomes popular on TikTok, usually. Romance novels do well, as do YA and fantasy, and mostly they’re new or recent releases. So why has a previously little known Russian novella from more than 150 years ago suddenly caught the attention of readers in such a big way?

There’s one prosaic but important reason: it’s just over 80 pages long.

[…]

But the reason this book has resonated with so many new readers this year also has to do with the the story itself. A nameless young man meets a woman called Nastenka by chance one night on the streets of St Petersburg. He is lonely to the point of pain, and she is experiencing her own agony of waiting to hear from her one true love, who has returned from Moscow but has not contacted her as he promised he would. The narrator meets Nastenka on two more nights, and he believes he has fallen deeply in love with her, despite her protestations that he should see her as a friend. When Nastenka starts to think her lover has abandoned her, she and the narrator get carried away imagining the life the two of them might have together instead. The following day, Nastenka’s lover returns, and she abandons the narrator.

It’s a story about someone who feels things very keenly, and lives in his own head. “It begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real,” the narrator laments.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a story about someone who has built an elaborate life of fantasy should become popular on social media, where users intentionally romanticise their lives.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction

December 22nd, 2024

The Guardian is writing about the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration:

Curtis Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics. But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration in particular over potential threats to US democracy.

Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.

Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media, Elon Musk’s promises to pare government spending to the bone, and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvin’s strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.

One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by Michael Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.

[…]

Yarvin is the originator of the neoreactionary or “dark enlightenment” movement, whose early ideas he developed on a blog called Unqualified Reservations in 2007 and 2008 under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He now writes a Substack newsletter under his own name and the far-right imprint Passage Publishing recently published an anthology of his earlier writing.

The Guardian previously reported that Passage Publishing’s founder is Jonathan Keeperman, a former UC Irvine lecturer who had previously operated under the pseudonym “L0m3z”.

For years, Yarvin has consistently held to a number of explicitly anti-democratic beliefs: republican self-government has already ended; real power is exercised oligarchically in a small number of prestigious academic and media institutions he calls the Cathedral; and a sclerotic democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person whose role is that of a monarch or CEO.

He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | 7 Comments »

HPH-15 outperforms metformin by activating AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK)

December 21st, 2024

A research team at Kumamoto University, led by Visiting Associate Professor Hiroshi Tateishi and Professor Eiichi Araki, has identified HPH-15 as a promising alternative to existing diabetes medications like metformin:

The study, published in Diabetologia, a top journal in the field of diabetes, demonstrates that HPH-15 outperforms metformin by activating AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) — a critical protein regulating energy balance — at lower doses. HPH-15 not only improved glucose uptake in liver, muscle, and fat cells but also significantly reduced fat accumulation in high-fat diet (HFD)-induced obese mice. Unlike metformin, HPH-15 exhibited additional antifibrotic properties, potentially addressing liver fibrosis and other complications often seen in diabetes patients.