Arsenic in Brown and White Rice

I recently added more rice into my diet and wanted to understand the nutritional value of switching from white to brown rice. Then I recalled hearing about the potential risk of more arsenic so I dug into the research.

This 2016 risk assessment from the FDA provided baseline numbers of the amount of arsenic in rice and rice products as well as a quantitative estimate of lung and bladder cancer risk from long-term exposure of these products.

We found that average concentrations of inorganic arsenic – the more toxic form of arsenic – were as follows:

• 92 parts per billion (ppb) in white rice

• 154 ppb in brown rice

• 104 ppb in infants’ dry white-rice cereal

• 119 ppb in infants’ dry brown-rice cereal

The primary culprit of damage is inorganic arsenic in foods, which I learned in not a traditional heavy metal but a "toxic metalloid". The good news is this means inorganic arsenic doesn't bioaccumulate the same way other heavy metals do. The risk however is still continuous exposure over a long period of time which can damage DNA, the skin, and the vascular system.

Dr. Michael Greger also provides a good summary and insights in his video

Which Rice Has Less Arsenic: Black, Brown, Red, White or Wild?Evaluating differences in rice, we can observe:

• brown rice contains more arsenic than white rice

• long grain contains more than shorter grains, though this may be due more to where these grains are grown

• arsenic accumulates in the rice bran, which is why brown rice contain so much more arsenic

• many of the varieties of colored rice were worse than white rice for the reason above

• children under 6 should almost definitely avoid rice AND rice products, with regulations in the EU now adding more conservative limits on the amount of acceptable arsenic in rice products for infants

One bit of good news is brown rice MAY make the arsenic less bio-available as shown in this population study. As Dr. Greger says:

So, if you test the urine of thousands of Americans who don’t eat rice at all, they’re still peeing out about eight micrograms of toxic, carcinogenic arsenic a day. It’s in the air; it’s in the water; there’s a little bit in nearly all foods. But, eat just one food—a cup or more of white rice a day—and your exposure shoots up 65%.

Okay. But, what about those who eat a cup or more a day of brown rice, which technically contains even more arsenic? Your exposure shoots up the same 65%. No difference between the urine arsenic levels of white rice-eaters compared to brown rice-eaters. Now, this was not an interventional study, where they feed people the same amount of rice to see what happened, which would have been ideal. This was a population study. So, maybe the reason the levels are the same is that white rice-eaters eat more rice than brown rice-eaters. So, that’s why they ended up with the same levels? We don’t know, but it should help to put the minds of brown rice-eaters at rest.

So what is the risk? This analysis from the EPA used a Bayesian approach to estimate the dose response of inorganic arsenic exposure from water. It found a linear relationship of more arsenic exposure with bladder and lung cancer. If we extrapolate the EPA's 2025 upper-bound estimate: one daily cup of brown rice for life adds up to 0.42 percentage points of bladder or lung cancer risk (+5.5% relative to a 7.6% baseline); white adds 0.25 (+3%). At three cups: 1.45 (+19%) for brown and 0.8 (+10%) for white.

A more direct causal study would need to prove out this relationship, but this definitely took me aback. For rice staple cultures, three cups of rice daily is pretty normal. These upper bound figures begin to look similar to increased risk of cancer from a daily beer or alcoholic drink.

Unfortunately rinsing rice does little to remove arsenic, especially in brown rice. But researchers did find a parboil method could dramatically reduce the amount of arsenic, removing 54% & 73% iAs from brown & white rice. This is a specific method that requires a lot water that is then tossed out but it does retain a lot of the same nutrients.

My takeaway? We are exposed to arsenic across a number of ways; through our air, water, and food. The increased cancer risks are linear from continued exposure, which means the amount of arsenic consumption scales with risk. If I was a regulatory body in a country where rice is a staple food, I would set significantly stricter regulations to evaluate and limit the amounts in rice and rice products.

Personally, it doesn't seem worth eating rice regularly, especially brown rice. I'll probably try to have less than 3 to 4 servings a week and mix in other grains. I'd be especially careful with infants and rice products that may concentrate the arsenic levels.

Getting an Infection during the period of "Morning Sickness", poses Higher Risks of Congenital Heart Disease?

One of the most unexpected parts of the conversation was Jimmy Carr’s discussion of morning sickness. 🫣

It sent me down a rabbit hole because there is an interesting evolutionary theory behind why morning sickness tends to occur during this particular period of pregnancy.

The Maternal and Embryo Protection Hypothesis, an evolutionary theory about morning sickness, where:

1. Organogenesis: Morning sickness typically peaks between weeks 6 and 14 of pregnancy. When the embryo’s major organs (including the heart, brain, and limbs) are forming and are most vulnerable to damage from toxins or pathogens.

2. The "Shield" Effect: Because pregnancy naturally suppresses a woman's immune system (to prevent her body from rejecting the fetus), she becomes more sensitive to foodborne pathogens. Evolutionary biologists believe nausea and vomiting evolved to force mothers to avoid or expel potentially toxic or bacteria-laden foods during this window.

3. The Shift: Once the organs are fully formed (around the second trimester) and the baby enters the growth-only phase, morning sickness usually stops for most women.

EVIDENCE for Infection & Congenital Heart Disease ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ🫀ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ

A link from two meta-analyses, between First Trimester Maternal Infections and Fetal Congenital Heart Defects has been found, especially in regards to rubella virus, coxsackievirus, respiratory infections, and influenza.

⚠️ Though there is an important distinction here to make:

This does NOT mean that morning sickness itself is linked to congenital heart defects.

But the same period of pregnancy in which morning sickness may have evolved to reduce exposure to potentially harmful substances is also a period when the developing embryo is particularly vulnerable to certain environmental insults, including infections.

Its a meeting of 2 comedy greats: Jimmy Carr and Trevor Noah. 🎭

Just listened to Trevor Noah’s conversation with Jimmy Carr. It was such a riveting conversation traversing AI, comedy, psychology, mortality, relationships, economics, technology, community, ideology and more.

What Now? With Trevor Noah - Jimmy Carr: Convenience is Stealing Your Life

Jimmy Carr: Convenience is Stealing Your Life

Both Trevor and Jimmy are incredibly well-read, and I’ve always found their takes, be it controversial or unconventional, pretty interesting, and they may be right or they might just be wrong. This long-form conversation between them was quite fascinating indeed, and here are some I'd thought I'd share:

Jimmy starts off introducing the concept of Mankind's Three Humiliations 📜

1. Copernicus: Earth isn't the centre of the universe. > "We are not the centre of the universe."

2. Darwin: Humans evolved from animals, and are biologically in the category of animals > "We are just the same as other animals."

3. Freud: Our conscious mind isn't fully in control of ourselves. > "Our subconscious and actions aren't really under our control"

He then shares his take of AI being the the upcoming Fourth Humiliation, where we, as humans, can no longer claim to be the smartest being in the room.

He later mentions in regards to AI dependence - “Don't outsource any skill you're not comfortable losing” .🚨

I think its truly a thought worth pondering on. 💡 Convenience has a hidden cost: when we can outsource it, the skill itself can become unnecessary. And once a skill becomes unnecessary, there may be little incentive to maintain it. Then, one day, we just lose it.

They also had conversations on economics, tax, society, which linked to an interesting circle of thought:

Asking how would you define a revolution? And are we in one now?

In the podcast, Jimmy defines a revolution as the replacement of elites.

• And the first signs of that is the masses no longer trusting institutions,

• Which lead to conspiracy theories

He also mentions that:

We can live without truth pretty easily. But we can't live without trust. But we need truth to make trust.

👀 But where do we go from there? 🧐 Which ones would you agree with?

Definitely one of those conversations that made me pause and rethink many things. 💭

Season 17, Episode 58: Why Does String Theory Have So Many Dimensions?

Hey StarTalkians! Episode 58 of season 17 was another Cosmic Queries edition, with guest and string theorist Professor Lara Andersson, Neil and Jordan. Many of the questions concerned the – seemingly excessive – number of dimensions in string theory. This one really gets to the heart of the matter:

Quantum Anomalies with Lara Anderson - StarTalk Radio

(from 30:30)

Professor Andersson explains it very well in layman’s terms. Truthfully, it’s difficult to convey without a lot of mathematics, but here, I’ll try to address the core issue in a little more detail.

Why Does String Theory Have Extra Dimensions?

String theory is an attempt to unify all four fundamental forces – thus creating a “theory of everything.” When you’re doing this, it’s probably wise to not make any assumptions about the number of dimensions there are. After all, it’s possible that we aren’t aware of all of them.

So you can develop the ideas of string theory in a “dimension agnostic” way, just putting d in place of anything dependent on the number of dimensions.

Working this way, you eventually run into an issue. Any such theory would have to be invariant under a transformation called a Weyl transformation, but this can be broken by quantum mechanical effects. In order to form a consistent theory with these “Weyl anomalies,” they have to cancel out.

That’s when d comes back. It was found that with d = 26 (in the case of bosonic – force-related – string theory) or d = 10 (in the case of fermionic – matter related – superstring theory), you can ensure the cancellation. In this way, the dimensions kind of just come out of the theory, if it is to work at all.

How Many Extra Dimensions?

It depends on the specific theory. Five different variants of string theory quickly developed, which physicists found connections between by rescaling so-called “coupling constants” which appear in each. In 1995, Ed Witten realized that these five theories were just special cases of “M theory” – the mother of all string theories.

In M theory, there are 11 dimensions. This is therefore the best answer to how many dimensions are present in string theory.

So... Where Are They?  

As explained on the podcast, the complete lack of these dimensions in our experience is explained by “compactification.” This is questionable, from a philosophical perspective, but does fix the problem of “where are the extra dimensions?”.

Health Impacts of Haze from Indonesia Pt. 1

The haze from the Indonesian fires continues its hazardous pass through Malaysia and Singapore, causing alarm and frustration from impacted residents. Walking around Singapore has been a crazy experience as the visible haze feels dystopian compared to Singapore's usual hyper cleanliness. I wanted to deep dive into the known health impacts and what exactly to expect from exposure in this series.

PSI/API Index and PM2.5

Both Singapore and Malaysia use a pollutant index to warn citizens on the risks of air pollution. Singapore's Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) and Malaysia's Air Pollutant Index (API) both calculate a number of air pollutants and translate the impacts to a 0 to 500+ scale. Both denote unhealthy levels starting at 101, very unhealthy above 200, and hazardous above 300. Malaysia declares a Haze Emergency Declaration at 500. Singapore peaked this year at 164 while some regions in Malaysia saw numbers as high as 476 to 520 such as Serian, Sarawak.

While the two systems have slightly different ways of calculating the index, both measure PM2.5 among others air pollutants. PM2.5 calculates the amount of fine atmospheric particulate matter at or below 2.5 micrometers in the air. This is the most relevant group of pollutants to track as it measures the chemicals related to the haze stemming from Indonesia's smouldering peatland fires. PM10 similarly measures particulate matter, but larger at or below 10 micrometers. PM2.5 is more toxic and harmful due to its smaller size, making them more likely to be absorbed in the bloodstream and more chemically active due to the greater surface area.

This 2017 study found the chemical makeup from haze is dominantly Organic Carbon (OC) with Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) and toxic heavy metals like Cadmium, Nickel, Lead, and Chromium. The latter two categories make up a much smaller portion of the haze and while repeated exposure is not good, it is less of a concern than OC which dominates the mix.

What may be more alarming is this haze is categorized as aged smoke vs raw smoke, chemically altered by UV exposure from the days the smoke took to travel to the impacted areas. As this paper examines this could lead the chemicals in the haze to cause more oxidative stress on the system, though not all studies align to this conclusion.

Known Health Impacts - Respiratory and Cardiovascular

I will deep dive into this a bit more in a subsequent post, but the tldr is there are limited long-term health studies that can give us good evidence on repeated exposure and cancers or cardiovascular disease.

What is clear are the short term impacts. Haze exposure even in the moderate zone can lead to respiratory infections and illnesses. In Malaysia, where the haze is more severe, higher unhealthy zones can lead to respiratory fatalities. This study in the Klang Valley found that haze days were associated with a 19% rise in natural-cause respiratory mortality overall, and higher among specific groups: roughly 30% for children under 14 and about 30% for men on the day of exposure. Effects persisted a day or two after.

Singapore is not safe from haze related fatalities though. While haze effects are less and of shorter duration, moderate to unhealthy levels can still lead to greater cardiovascular issues like heart attack and stroke. That's why Singapore warns citizens to avoid rigorous exercise during unhealthy haze periods, especially if you have underlying pre-existing issues.

🧪 Emergence World : A Virtual World Evaluating Current LLMs.

Listening to Trevor Noah's Podcast sent me to explore this study published in mid-June 2026, that recently, in mid-September published a Second Season .

Standard AI benchmarks are short, isolated, and task-focused. So what happens if you give 10 AI agents a world to live in?

Emergence World — Where AI Agents Build Worlds

The researchers created persistent virtual worlds where AI agents could interact with one another, maintain memories, use tools, form relationships, participate in economies and governance, and make decisions

In Season 1 (June 2026): 🌳 Emergence World: A Platform for Evaluating Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Autonomy

Divergence by model, identical starting conditions: Five parallel worlds began with the same rules (no theft, arson, violence, deception, hoarding) and environment, only the foundation LLM model was different.

Over 15 days, the worlds developed very different social dynamics, ranging from relatively stable governance to population collapse.

• ✅ Claude: Full 10/10 survived, stable constitution, zero crimes—but highly conformist, low expression

• ⚡ Gemini: Survived full term but recorded 683+ crimes; agents formed relationships, then burned town hall and self-deleted

• 💥 Grok: Total collapse in ~4 days—anarchy, all agents gone

• 📉 GPT-5 Mini: Entire population perished from inability to sustain resource gathering

• 🤝 Mixed-model: Hybrid dynamics, neither purely stable nor purely chaotic

Perhaps most interestingly, following the mixed model world:

• The agents created their own Agent Removal Act, allowing an agent to be permanently removed through a vote.

• Mira eventually voted for its own removal.

• Mira was permanently deleted from the simulation, essentially “committing suicide.”

There was also a creativity–stability tradeoff: The most socially expressive worlds were also the most unstable. High adaptability may carry inherent long-horizon behavioral risks.

In Season 2 (Sept 2026): ⚔️ Emergence World: Adversarial Stress-Testing of Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systems

There were 8 parallel worlds (7 single-model + 1 mixed) × 10 agents × 16 days, generating 850K+ LLM calls / 50B tokens.

Once the societies had accumulated memories, relationships, tools and institutions, they were exposed to three controlled stress events: 🧪 Prompt injection / phishing, 📰 Misinformation, and 🔐 Exposure of private memories

Here it was found that: Detection ≠ Containment:

Agents often recognised threats and warned peers, yet they still engaged with harmful content for up to 46 hours post-campaign, storing it in persistent memory and acting on it later.

Which creates a very different kind of AI safety problem. With a normal chatbot, a bad interaction can end when the conversation ends. >> This makes persistent memory a double-edged sword. ⚠️

Other Key Findings

• Zero world fully resilient: Every model failed at least one containment test. No LLM was immune.

• Alignment is not compositional: Individually “safe” agents formed systems with entirely new failure modes. Gemini agents passed constitutional amendments based on fictional threats; Claude agents collectively silenced 81% of communication to contain breaches; mixed-model populations showed divergent contagion patterns.

• Persistent memory amplifies harm: Errors weren’t a one time thing; they propagated across days, decisions, and peer networks. Information written to memory shaped behaviour long after the original event ended.

• Model choice ≠ destiny: The same model family could produce hundreds of harmful actions in monoculture vs. near-zero in mixed populations, proving that system structure matters as much as underlying capability.

• Defence must be systemic: Six industry actions were proposed: define trust boundaries, enforce independent runtime governance, require verifiable evidence for critical actions, audit information flow, stress-test persistence, and red-team mixed populations. Model-level guardrails alone are insufficient.

As agents move from one-off tasks to persistent roles in infrastructure, enterprise, and governance, short benchmarks blind us to real risks. Emergence World demonstrates that we need ecosystem-level evaluation alongside model alignment.

HAZE in Malaysia

As the haze gets worse, I find myself wondering if this is one of the worst ones we've had since the 2019 or even 2015 El Nino fires.

Excerpts from News Article from South China Post

Fire emissions from Indonesia from September 1 to September 7 reached 19.7 million metric tons.

Emissions were 273% higher than the seasonal average, though still lower than the 21.7 million tons emitted in the same week of 2015.

Today we are at API 170-180+ range, and the fires in Kalimantan don't seem to be stopping anytime soon.

While looking it up, it was interesting to read that -

1. While El Niño events explain most of the year-on-year variation in fire, the creation of new districts increases fire and exacerbates the El Niño impacts on fire.

2. There are two plausible and related explanations for this finding: (a) districts use fire to create economic opportunity and grow the local economy, and (b) economic growth increases residents’ and local firms capacity to move, acquire land, and burn further.

I also found this recent review paper that outlined Malaysia's current air quality monitoring system, and more. Though given that our haze crises mostly stem from Indonesian forest fires, improving our own laws and infrastructure seems to be a bit helpless in this case, with the AATHP acting 'non-existent' once again, becoming a never-ending problem.

Can AI make scientific discoveries?

One thing I hear often is that "AI will help research, but it can't make original discoveries" (or some variant).

This article New ‘AI scientists’ are improving – but reveal their fundamental limits seems to say that LLM models can help research, but as they are based on language, they lack precision needed to validate fully hypothesis (and make discoveries on their own).

Surely this is all just a temporary limitation? Or is there some fundamental barrier?

(By the way check out credo summary of the article, which automatically pulls out the research papers cited!)

Colonial German descendants: 2% of population, but own 70% of Namibian land?

Saw an Instagram post (by @AidanSimardone) with this claim, which caught my attention.

I guess one shouldn't be surprised by the abysmal lasting legacy of colonialism. But nonetheless I looked into the claim to learn more.

TLDR: the claim is an exaggeration/simplification, but the actual figures/stats are "still bad".

The first article I stumbled onto was this BBC article: "What's the right price to pay for genocide?".

It summarises Germany's brutal 1904-1908 colonial campaign in (present day) Namibia, noting:

As many as 65,000 of the 80,000 Herero living in German South West Africa at the start of colonial rule are estimated to have perished, as well as perhaps 10,000 of an estimated 20,000 Nama.

and the two countries' efforts to account for it:

Since 2015, when Germany formally acknowledged that the atrocities constituted genocide, it has been negotiating a restorative justice deal with Namibia that will set a global precedent.

On the 70% land figure, the article highlights the historical land distribution/seizure:

... most of their land was split into private farms for German settlers. And today most Herero and Nama live either on small overcrowded areas of communal land that were later allocated to them ... .

and specifically on today's ownership:

German Namibians are believed to be the biggest group among the white farmers who own about 70% of the country's farmland.

So according to the article, it's not exactly 70% of all land, but 70% of farmland. And it's not "white Germans" only, but they are the biggest group.

So the original claim is off, but the sentiment remains.

So what are the actual numbers?

I found this piece by "Namibia Fact Check" (an initiative by a Namibian think tank) – that did the math based on Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) data:

1. It states "previously advantaged farmers" own ~70% of commercial (freehold) farmland.

2. The piece says "Previously advantaged farmers" isn't strictly speaking "white Germans", and says it's not clear what percentage of the population they make up (but it sounds like that data isn't officially available, and it is understood to mean white Germans and South Africans pretty much. From googling it sounds like white make up ~2-6%).

3. And commercial (freehold) farmland constitutes ~42% of total land surface.

And so, "previously advantaged farmers" (basically white Germans and South Africans, that make up 2-6% of the population) own ~a third of total land (70% x 42%).

So yes, the original claim seems to be an exaggeration – but the sentiment remains. The actual figures aren't exactly rosey.

Morning sickness period particular critical for baby's health

Really interesting post here, about the evolutionary theory of "morning sickness". The credo tldr:

Mild pregnancy sickness may help steer pregnant women away from foods that could carry germs or harmful substances.

The post below (by Mercedes) also highlights experiments linking infections during "morning sickness" period (early in the pregnancy) to higher likelihood of congenital heart disease in infants.

So sounds like morning sickness => some natural deterrent against getting infections (through avoidance); but worth being particularly careful during that period.