When Ars tried out Mario Kart World at April's Switch 2 premiere hands-on event, the short demos focused on more-or-less standard races in the game's Grand Prix and Knockout modes. So when Nintendo invited us back for more time previewing the near-final version of the game before the Switch 2's release, we decided to focus most of our time on the game's mysterious (and previously teased) "Free Roam" mode.

We're glad we did, because the mode feels like the hidden gem of Mario Kart World and maybe of the Switch 2 launch as a whole. Combining elements of games like Diddy Kong Racing, Forza Horizon, and even the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, Free Roam provides a unique mixture of racing challenges, exploration, and collectibles that should keep new Switch 2 owners busy for a while.

Switch hunt

Surprisingly, Free Roam mode isn't listed as one of the main options when you launch a new game of Mario Kart World. Instead, a tiny note in the corner of the screen tells you to hit the plus button to get dropped into a completely untimed and free-wheeling version of the vast Mario Kart World map.

The real game takes place in the spaces between those race courses. Credit: Nintendo

Exploring in Free Roam mode provides the best sense of scale for the game's massive, multi-ecosystem island in a way individual races just can't. Sure, other race modes sometimes let you travel between the individual race courses along pre-set paths from one finish line to another starting line. But Free Roam mode lets you fully explore the vast spaces between those paths, encouraging you to go off-roading in the mountains, valleys, rivers, oceans, volcanoes, snowdrifts, and landmarks that dot the countryside.

Your main explicit goal when exploring all this varied expanse is to look for large, blue P-Switches, each of which activates a short, timed challenge mission in the immediate vicinity. In many cases, simply reaching the P-Switch is half the challenge, requiring some inventive wall-riding or item use to get to a particularly out-of-the-way corner of the map.

Any resemblance to the <em>Mad Max</em> film franchise is completely coincidental. Credit: Kyle Orland

The 15 P-Switch missions I was able to uncover during my preview hours with the Free Roam mode showed a fair deal of variety, too. While many missions involved simply collecting a series of nearby blue coins, for instance, no two of those missions played out all that similarly. One might involve dodging rampaging T-rexes chomping at your kart, while others might ask you to grind on the rails of a suspension bridge or hop through the desert sands amid sunken ruins.

Some of the missions I encountered were relaxing sojourns, like one that asked me to "seek peace by climbing the falls" before sending me skimming along the surface of the water alongside gently leaping cheep cheeps. Others were punishing obstacle courses, like one that asked me to race backward through the winding Donkey Kong Spaceport course—except, littered with additional debris and under a strict time limit.

There were missions that felt like a rally racing mini-game, asking me to navigate between timer-extending rings dotting barren desert ruins. There were others that took the form of an "endurance race," where I had to dodge through a crowd of traffic to make it to each checkpoint gate before time ran out. I even stumbled on one mission that felt a bit like a 3D platform game, requiring precision jumps between bouncy clouds to make it to the goal (being able to rewind time after falling off the clouds made me feel like I was in an early 2000s Prince of Persia game).

Not all of the collectibles are especially well-hidden... Credit: Nintendo

Most of these challenges won't be especially taxing for anyone with sufficient racing experience. Even so, the sheer variety of different tasks—and the ways those tasks are presented in different parts of the game's massive map—should keep the P-Switch hunt from feeling dull or rote.

Keeping busy

Nintendo asked us not to reveal the specific number of P-Switches dotting the Mario Kart World map, but suffice it to say they number in the hundreds. And beyond the P-Switches, there are dozens of collectible medallions, out-of-the-way question-mark panels, and giant stacks of coins to find, all of which unlock various new karts and cosmetics. Completionists are going to have their hands full discovering every last tidbit.

Stay on target... Credit: Nintendo

But beyond the more utilitarian, goal-oriented side of Free Roam mode, I was entranced by just how many moments of sheer whimsy there were to discover once the threat of other racers or incoming projectile items was removed from the Mario Kart formula. During my preview time, I got to drive alongside a herd of roaming buffalo while watching a shower of collectible starmen rain down in the distance. I got to grind down a railroad track before climbing to the roof of a speeding train via a ramp on the back of the caboose. I even got to pilot a UFO for a few seconds, in a set piece that seemed to serve no purpose other than putting a massive grin on my face.

There are plenty of smaller-scale grin-inducing moments, too, like bouncing high off a hitchhiking shyguy or seeing a traffic cone sprout legs and walk off (there was a tiny biddybud inside it, don'tcha know). At one point, I drove up to two toads hanging on a bench and just vibed with them as they jumped and cheered my mere presence.

The promise of these kinds of cheerful found moments and bite-sized challenges will likely keep me coming back to Mario Kart World long after I'm tired of the standard racing game it's built on. In the absence of a true 3D Mario game that's ready for the Switch 2 launch, the whimsical exploration on display here will more than suffice.

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Australia: home to koalas, kangaroos, the Great Barrier Reef, the returning boomerang, and — for better or worse — Vegemite. Many things contribute to the world’s perception of Aussie culture, most of which are indeed valid and uniquely Australian. But anyone who thinks that every pub in the Land Down Under is running through kegs of Foster’s every night has probably never been there, or has spent too many nights at their local Outback Steakhouse.

Not only is the brand largely bemoaned by Aussies, it’s apparently also a rarity to find Foster’s in stores and bars throughout its home country. And despite all the “g’days” and other Aussie terms featured in its marketing over the years, the history of the brand proves that Foster’s is about as Australian as apple pie.

Two New Yorkers, an American Engineer, and a German Brewmaster

Don’t get it twisted: Foster’s was founded in Australia, but its story didn’t begin there. American brothers William and Ralph Foster moved from NYC to Melbourne in 1886. While little is known about the Foster brothers — they never held any press conferences and largely stayed out of the public eye — it is known that they arrived in the Land Down Under with a German American brewer who got his credentials in Cologne and an American refrigeration engineer.

According to “The Oxford Companion to Beer,” the most popular beer style in Australia at the time was imported India Pale Ale, but those brews didn’t hold up well in the extreme Aussie heat, and they were typically served warm. This prompted the Australian Brewers’ Journal to predict that lager “supplied in the proper way, in bulk, cold and fully charged with carbonic acid, will be the drink of Australia.”

And that’s exactly what the Foster brothers set out to produce. Although they weren’t the first to brew lager in Australia, they were the first to do it on an industrial scale. After building their brewery, the brothers officially launched Foster’s Lager in November 1888 and delivered it to bars all over Melbourne with a free supply of ice.

Although the beer was initially met with great fanfare, importers began dropping the prices of their beers to compete with Foster’s sales. And it worked. Within a year, the Foster brothers sold the brewery to a group of businessmen for less than it had cost them to build it, and returned home to the Empire State.

To the U.K. and Beyond

Over the following few decades, Foster’s waned in popularity in its home country. By 1907, the brewery had been acquired by the Carlton & United Breweries conglomerate (CUB), and subsequently faced fierce competition within other brands in the CUB portfolio, including Victoria Bitter and Carlton Draught.

With sales slipping in Australia, CUB made the brand-saving move to take Foster’s international. In 1971, it launched in the U.K. before hitting shelves in the U.S. the following year, where the brand introduced the famous “oil can” format. The timing couldn’t have been better. Drinkers were just beginning to develop an affinity for imported beers, and they didn’t mind forking over an extra dollar or two for a foreign lager.

‘Australian for Beer’

Foster’s international success continued to skyrocket, due in large part to a variety of television ads that went all in on the brand’s Australian heritage. Australian actor and star of the “Crocodile Dundee” film series Paul Hogan appeared in a number of snippets, talking up the “amber nectar” with a thick Aussie drawl. The brand also adopted the tagline, “Foster’s: Australian For Beer,” which it used as the framing for a slew of other ads. By the late ‘80s, Foster’s reigned as Australia’s best-selling beer.

But by that time, Foster’s was also cutting ties with its Australian brewing roots. In 1981, the brand signed a deal with British brewer and pub owner Courage, allowing the company to brew the beer under license for the U.K. market. Over the next few decades, similar situations unfolded in other countries around the world. And in 2011, international beverage group SABMiller (now owned by AB-InBev) purchased the Foster’s brand. It hasn’t been brewed in Australia since.

Nowadays, Foster’s production is relatively scattered. In the U.S., it’s brewed in Fort Worth, Texas. In Canada, brewing is handled by Molson Coors. And in Europe, Heineken International owns the brewing rights to Foster’s and exports the beer to a number of countries. The brand’s website now even refers to the beer as “the most refreshing lager in the UK.” So while Foster’s may have been born in the Land Down Under, it certainly wasn’t bred there, and now it’s essentially Miller Light with a questionable Australian accent.

*Image retrieved from Mirko Vitali – stock.adobe.com

The article The Surprisingly Un-Australian History of Foster’s Lager appeared first on VinePair.

Almost 150 years after the fact, future neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard his father talk about the shopkeeper in his hometown of Djúpivogur, Iceland, who was a Black man named Hans Jónatan. Jónatan wasn't born in Iceland, but he settled there, married, became a valued member of the community, and fathered descendants who still lived nearby. Later biographies pieced together the story of Hans Jonathan, who was born into slavery in the Caribbean, was brought to Denmark, walked away from his enslaver and joined the Danish Navy, became a war hero, and then had to fight for his freedom in court more than once. After losing the final court battle in 1802, he simply disappeared. There was also the story of a teenager named Hans Jónatan, who arrived in Djúpivogur on a merchant ship in 1802, and who spoke Danish and played the violin. He was also ready to settle down, and worked at the local general store and trading station, which he later ran.

The story of Hans Jonathan is quite compelling in itself, but there was a new chapter in the 21st century, when Kári Stefánsson, now a neurologist, began a vast DNA study in Iceland to investigate the genetic markers of multiple sclerosis. Since Iceland is quite genetically homogenous, mutations would stand out from the crowd better than with other populations. But the study also yielded intriguing information from Hans Jónatan's 788 verified living descendants. By studying the DNA of these descendants, Stefánsson's team was able to reconstruct large parts of not only Jónatan's genome, but that of his mother as well -two centuries after they lived, with no trace of their own DNA. Read the intriguing story of Hans Jonathan and his legacy in Iceland at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to it in podcast form. -via Strange Company

Enlarge / Starship launched on Saturday with all 33 Raptor engines burning nominally. (credit: SpaceX)

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas—Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue.

Before I had even left the launch viewing area in South Padre Island on Saturday morning headlines started to fill my news feed. The Wall Street Journal led with, “SpaceX second Starship test flight ends in another explosion.” Bloomberg was still more dour, “SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Launch and Failure.” Perhaps, after consultation with their beat reporters, editors subsequently changed these online headlines. And the stories themselves better reflected the reality. Nevertheless, much of the media coverage of the launch delivered a harsh verdict: Another failure for Elon Musk and SpaceX.

I mean, yes. The first stage of the Starship rocket, Super Heavy, did explode. And the upper stage, Starship, had a failure that caused its flight termination system—explosives on board in case a vehicle begins flying off course—to detonate. But that was to be expected on such an experimental, boundary-pushing test flight.

Leading with words like "failure" and "explosion" are kind of like putting the headline “Derek Jeter had a strikeout” on a news story about the 2001 World Series game in which he later hit a walk-off home run. Like, it’s accurate. But it’s a lazy take that completely misses the point.

Rapid rebuild of ground systems

Here’s what SpaceX actually accomplished with its second Starship launch on Saturday morning, from a narrow peninsula of land at the southern extremity of Texas.

The vehicle’s first launch, in April, caused significant damage to the launch mount and surrounding infrastructure. At SpaceX founder Elon Musk's direction, the company had attempted to determine whether it could get away with launching the massive rocket without an advanced sound suppression system to mitigate launch pad damage. Turns out, that's a no. The first Starship launch shredded the launch site by throwing chunks of concrete for miles around.

Musk and SpaceX learned their lesson and completely redesigned and rebuilt the launch pad to incorporate a sophisticated water-based sound suppression system. By August, just four months later, it had not just built the complex system, but tested it. All of these changes resulted in a far more robust launch pad, which survived Saturday's liftoff largely unscathed.

Afterward I spoke with Phillip Rench, an engineer who worked at SpaceX for five years and for a time directed the company's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. He was impressed by the speed of the rebuild and smoothness of the ground-support operations for Saturday's launch.

"The thing I think about, and which probably goes unnoticed by most, is how extremely hot and humid it is in Boca during the late summer and fall," he said. "The team that just rebuilt the orbital launch mount, water deluge, and remaining launch pad just did so in the hottest, most miserable part of the year. I remember having mild heat stress almost every day in August and September while working on the pad. I give kudos to those technicians, welders, and engineers that spent the last seven months out in the field making this happen."

Rapid revamp of the rocket

The SpaceX engineers also rapidly re-engineered the first stage of the Super Heavy booster to address issues with multiple failures of its Raptor rocket engines on the first flight. During Saturday’s launch, all 33 of these Raptor engines burned for their full duration, with nary a failure on the way to space.

Additionally, the company’s engineers gathered data on a brand-new component of the rocket called a "hot staging ring." This interstage sits atop the Super Heavy first stage and below the Starship upper stage. This new piece of hardware was intended to facilitate "hot staging," a difficult maneuver a couple of minutes into the flight at stage separation, in which the Starship upper-stage engines ignite before the Super Heavy first stage has completed its burn. This maneuver was captured with ground-tracking cameras, and it is stunning.

Remember, the first Starship launch was just under seven months ago. And in the time since then, the company—at Musk's direction, in a bid to increase the capability of Starship—implemented this radical engineering change. It is not trivial. Starship is still attached to its booster. The Starship engines, upon igniting, are blasting away at the top of this huge Super Heavy rocket that is still thrusting upward. It's kind of crazy, and it pretty much worked.

Although we don't have the details yet, the Starship upper stage successfully completed hot-staging and pulled away from Super Heavy. If you're not impressed, you should be. This is world-class engineering completed on an insanely compressed time scale.

Some things went wrong, of course

Perhaps most critically for SpaceX, on this flight, the Super Heavy booster appears to have performed a nominal flight. After Starship pulled away, the first stage had done its heavy-lifting job. If this were a normal expendable launch, the rocket would have fallen into the ocean.

But this was not a normal launch, of course. SpaceX intends for Starship to be fully reusable, and that means trying to recover both the booster and the upper stage. According to SpaceX, the Super Heavy rocket initialized its "boostback" burn, which is intended to slow the rocket down. This entails igniting a subset of the rocket’s 33 engines, similar to what happens with the Falcon 9 rocket at the top of the atmosphere. After that point, however, things went sideways. Perhaps the upper portion of the first stage was too damaged by the hot staging, as the ignition of Starship’s engines understandably singed the rocket below. It’s also possible there was an issue with tank pressures inside Super Heavy, as there was not much propellant left, and it's challenging to move the remaining fuel and oxidizer to the engines.

In any case, Super Heavy blew up spectacularly. So was this a failure? Hardly. SpaceX had just launched the largest rocket the world had ever seen, a flying skyscraper largely built with private funding. If it were almost any other rocket in the world, it would have been judged entirely as a success because first stages are disposed of. But because SpaceX took the next step, to experiment with recovery, the loss of the first stage after completing its primary mission was somehow viewed as a failure by some observers. I'm sorry to say it, but that's just dumb.

As for the vehicle’s upper stage, SpaceX reported that Starship not only survived the technically demanding hot-staging maneuver, but ignited all six of its engines and began to power its way to space. Eventually, it reached an altitude of about 150 km above the planet.

However, near the end of its burn, something went wrong. It’s possible that one or more of the Raptor engines failed. Perhaps there was a problem with the shielding around the engines to protect them from heating. In any case, Starship began flying off course, and its flight termination system activated.

Getting any data from Starship on this test flight is a pretty big win for SpaceX, and surviving staging and most of the vehicle’s propulsive burn will set the company’s engineers up well for future success. They will learn so much from this. It would not surprise me if they take enough confidence away from this flight to put Starlink satellites as a payload on Starship's third flight.

But, but, but it’s a failure compared to NASA’s rocket

One year ago NASA flew its Space Launch System rocket for the first time. After a decade of development and tens of billions of dollars, the large rocket had a flawless debut aside from some damage to the launch site. This was a great success, but NASA really had no other choice. It started building pieces of the rocket seven years before launch, and the whole ethos of the space agency is that “failure is not an option.”

SpaceX built the Starship and Super Heavy rocket that launched on Saturday over the span of a couple of months at a price somewhere between one-tenth and one-hundredth the cost of NASA's SLS rocket. Because it can build Starships rapidly and at a low cost, SpaceX has half a dozen more rockets in various stages of work, all awaiting their turn to go to space. Due to this iterative design methodology—flying to identify flaws, and rapidly incorporating those changes into new hardware—SpaceX can afford to fail. That is the whole point. By flying its vehicles, SpaceX can rapidly identify what parts of the rocket need to be changed. The alternative is, quite literally, years and years of analysis and meetings and more analysis. Iterative design is faster and cheaper—if you can afford to fail.

In some respects, on just its second flight, Starship now is as successful as NASA’s SLS rocket. Consider that the Artemis I test flight in November 2022 used a core stage, side-mounted boosters, and an upper stage known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. This core stage performed well, flying a nominal mission as it boosted the Orion spacecraft into orbit.

Although the core stage was new hardware, the upper stage ICPS was a (very, very lightly) modified version of a Delta rocket upper stage that has been flying for a quarter of a century. Put another way, the core stage of the SLS rocket, and the Super Heavy booster have now both completed one successful launch. If SpaceX had stuck an ICPS and the Orion spacecraft hardware on top of Super Heavy, it could have gone to the Moon on Saturday.

This is the power of iterative design—it's faster, cheaper, and typically better than the alternative if you can survive the popular canard of being perceived as a failure.

SpaceX has an incredible amount of work to do

I'm pretty sure that most non-space people do not really understand what Starship aspires to be. And that's OK, because there's really no precedent for this. Yes, NASA went to the Moon with the Apollo program half a century ago, and that was truly awesome. But it did so with funding that approached nearly 5 percent of the US federal budget and a workforce of about 400,000 people. Such resources are completely off the table today.

Moreover, every piece of Apollo hardware that landed astronauts on the Moon was never used again. The components of the big Saturn V rocket fell into the ocean or were jettisoned into deep space. The Apollo spacecraft splashed down into the ocean and ended up in museums.

With Starship, SpaceX is seeking to build a fully reusable launch system that is larger and more powerful than the Apollo rocket. SpaceX seeks to land hundreds of metric tons on the Moon, not 15 tons like Apollo. What SpaceX is trying to do is extremely challenging from a physics and funding standpoint, and the work is only beginning.

Beyond simply getting Starship to space, it must become an orbital vehicle, and both the booster and spacecraft must be made to reliably land. Then SpaceX must learn how to rapidly refurbish the vehicles (which seems possible, given that the company has now landed a remarkable 230 Falcon 9 rockets). The company must also demonstrate and master the challenge of transferring and storing propellant in orbit, so that Starship can be refueled for lunar and Mars missions. Starship must also show that it can light its Raptor engines reliably, on the surface of the Moon in the vacuum of space, far from ground systems on Earth.

But the first step is often the hardest step. And for SpaceX, getting Starship flying to gather that data was the critical step. Now that the company has shown the ability to launch Starship safely from South Texas, the regulatory process should ease up, allowing for a higher flight rate, yielding more data and starting to address all of those challenges cited in the previous paragraph. A high flight rate will solve a lot of ills, and with Saturday's flight SpaceX is on the cusp of doing just that.

Should we cheer for an Elon Musk company, though?

A lot of the media angst this weekend was undoubtedly driven by antipathy for SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The guy's a fraud, right? His companies are a grift, right? I can only really speak to SpaceX, but Musk is definitely not a fraud. He has his flaws, certainly. Some of his politics and public statements are deeply unsettling to many. But the dude founded SpaceX and remains the vital force impelling the company forward. He has dumb ideas. He has brilliant ideas. But mostly, he gets things done.

In the aerospace industry there are basically two types of people: checkers and doers. The checkers sit in meetings, write reports, and perform analysis. They serve an important role to be sure. Spaceflight is complicated and hard and risky, and prudence demands an extra set of eyes on work. But checkers are also the bane of progress.

Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers. That's part of the bureaucratization process, and today it's not a bad place for the agency to be as it manages a slew of traditional and new space contractors. However, it's a terrible place for a space company to be. Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers, even after more than 20 years of existence.

That culture was created by Musk and is maintained by Musk. He is a hard-charging leader who pushes back on bureaucracy. He wants to move fast and break things. And he does break things. Those very public failures and his recent comments and actions have certainly hurt his reputation, and to some extent, that of SpaceX.

But to denigrate the prodigious rocket science on display in Texas this weekend for this reason, alone, is a mistake. The smart take is to look at it as a critical step on the path toward achieving something amazing, with the potential to unlock a future of spaceflight we have only dreamed about heretofore. The smart take is to cheer on the people out there who are actually doing.

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Enlarge (credit: Lew Robertson via Getty Images)

In 1976, beloved chef, cookbook author, and television personality Julia Child returned to WGBH-TV’s studios in Boston for a new cooking show, Julia Child & Company, following her hit series The French Chef. Viewers probably didn’t know that Child’s new and improved kitchen studio, outfitted with gas stoves, was paid for by the American Gas Association.

While this may seem like any corporate sponsorship, we now know it was a part of a calculated campaign by gas industry executives to increase the use of gas stoves across the United States. And stoves weren’t the only objective. The gas industry wanted to grow its residential market, and homes that used gas for cooking were likely also to use it for heat and hot water.

The industry’s efforts went well beyond careful product placement, according to new research from the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center, which analyzes corporate efforts to undermine climate science and slow the ongoing transition away from fossil fuels. As the center’s study and a National Public Radio investigation show, when evidence emerged in the early 1970s about the health effects of indoor nitrogen dioxide exposure from gas stove use, the American Gas Association launched a campaign designed to manufacture doubt about the existing science.

As a researcher who has studied air pollution for many years—including gas stoves’ contribution to indoor air pollution and health effects—I am not naïve about the strategies that some industries use to avoid or delay regulations. But I was surprised to learn that the multipronged strategy related to gas stoves directly mirrored tactics that the tobacco industry used to undermine and distort scientific evidence of health risks associated with smoking starting in the 1950s.

Manufacturing controversy

The gas industry relied on Hill & Knowlton, the same public relations company that masterminded the tobacco industry’s playbook for responding to research linking smoking to lung cancer. Hill & Knowlton’s tactics included sponsoring research that would counter findings about gas stoves published in the scientific literature, emphasizing uncertainty in these findings to construct artificial controversy and engaging in aggressive public relations efforts.

For example, the gas industry obtained and reanalyzed the data from an EPA study on Long Island that showed more respiratory problems in homes with gas stoves. Their reanalysis concluded that there were no significant differences in respiratory outcomes.

The industry also funded its own health studies in the early 1970s, which confirmed large differences in nitrogen dioxide exposures but did not show significant differences in respiratory outcomes. These findings were documented in publications where industry funding was not disclosed. These conclusions were amplified in numerous meetings and conferences and ultimately influenced major governmental reports summarizing the state of the literature.

This campaign was remarkable, since the basics of how gas stoves affected indoor air pollution and respiratory health were straightforward and well-established at the time. Burning fuel, including natural gas, generates nitrogen oxides: The air in Earth’s atmosphere is about 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen, and these gases react at high temperatures.

Nitrogen dioxide is known to adversely affect respiratory health. Inhaling it causes respiratory irritation and can worsen diseases such as asthma. This is a key reason why the US Environmental Protection Agency established an outdoor air quality standard for nitrogen dioxide in 1971.

No such standards exist for indoor air, but as the EPA now acknowledges, nitrogen dioxide exposure indoors is also harmful.

How harmful is indoor exposure?

The key question is whether nitrogen dioxide exposure related to gas stoves is large enough to lead to health concerns. While levels vary across homes, scientific research shows that the simple answer is yes—especially in smaller homes and when ventilation is inadequate.

This has been known for a long time. For example, a 1998 study that I co-authored showed that the presence of gas stoves was the strongest predictor of personal exposure to nitrogen dioxide. And work dating back to the 1970s showed that indoor nitrogen dioxide levels in the presence of gas stoves could be far higher than outdoor levels. Depending on ventilation levels, concentrations could reach levels known to contribute to health risks.

Despite this evidence, the gas industry’s campaign was largely successful. Industry-funded studies successfully muddied the waters, as I have seen over the course of my research career, and stalled further federal investigations or regulations addressing gas stove safety.

This issue took on new life at the end of 2022, when researchers published a new study estimating that 12.7 percent of US cases of childhood asthma—about one case in eight—were attributable to gas stoves. The industry continues to cast doubt on gas stoves’ contribution to health effects and fund pro-gas stove media campaigns.

A concern for climate and health

Residential gas use is also controversial today because it slows the ongoing shift toward renewable energy, at a time when the impacts of climate change are becoming alarmingly clear. Some cities have already moved or are considering steps to ban gas stoves in new construction and shift toward electrifying buildings.

As communities wrestle with these questions, regulators, politicians, and consumers need accurate information about the risks of gas stoves and other products in homes. There is room for vigorous debate that considers a range of evidence, but I believe that everyone has a right to know where that evidence comes from.

The commercial interests of many industries, including alcohol, tobacco, and fossil fuels, aren’t always compatible with the public interest or human health. In my view, exposing the tactics that vested interests use to manipulate the public can make consumers and regulators savvier and help deter other industries from using their playbook.

Jonathan Levy is Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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