“The worst kept secret in Hollywood!” shout the headlines. This particular badly-kept secret involves a pricey new weight-loss drug called Semaglutide. If you take the glossy celebrity magazines at face value, fans of these $1,200-a-month injections include Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk. But in mid-February, the weight-loss treatment moved beyond the A-list when UK high-street chemists announced they would be selling Semaglutide injections from spring 2023. At the time of writing, the UK price had not been disclosed. So what is Semaglutide? Is it safe? And could it be a game-changer for tackling the broader public health crisis of obesity? What is Semaglutide? Semaglutide is manufactured by the Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, and sold under the names Ozempic and Wegovy. Ozempic, in particular, made international headlines last year after going viral on TikTok, with the #MyOzempicJourney trend showcasing scarcely believable body transformations. Wegovy is the one going on ...
The Industrial Revolution was largely powered by coal . Wood and charcoal were used as fuel, and to smelt iron. But even before then, in the 16th Century, wood was already becoming scarce in Britain when the population was still under 10 million. Trees are slow to replace and take up a lot of land area. Wood also has only half the energy density of coal, so you need to burn more of it. Political power probably would have shifted towards Russia, Canada and South America with their huge areas of forested land. Without coal and oil, early chemists would have faced the much more challenging proposition of synthesising long-chain hydrocarbons from ethanol or vegetable oil. Plastics and synthetic rubber would not be developed until much later and would probably have been too expensive to use for toys and disposable packaging. Worse, natural gas is an essential ingredient for the production of ammonia fertilisers . Without them, the world would need four times as much agricultural land to...
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