joshuark writes: A Las Vegas surgeon reports tech workers are paying $70,000 to $150,000 to get surgery to increase their height by 3-inches. The doctor is paid to break their legs (both femurs) and then inserts adjustable metal nails that are slowly tweaked over time. "I joke that I could open a tech company," Dr. Kevin Debiparshad told GQ. "I got, like, 20 software engineers doing this procedure right now who are here in Vegas. There was a girl" -- because girls can be tech bros too. -- "yesterday from PayPal. I've got patients from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. I've had multiple patients from Microsoft."

A new twist, borrow $70K to $150K from a loan shark in Las Vegas, and they'll break your legs later... "Since the onset of the pandemic's work-from-home era, the LimbplastX Institute (where Dr. D performs his procedures) has been seeing twice its normal number of patients, and sometimes as many as 50 new people a month," reports GQ. "That claim is backed up by a BBC report suggesting that hundreds of men in the U.S. are now undergoing the procedure every year."

"According to a 2009 study of Australian men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet); and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportunities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases)," adds the report. "The promise of Dr. D's institute is that, for a price, you too can increase your odds of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO. And people are willing to pay..."

Children under 12 may be losing the equivalent of one night's sleep every week due to excessive social media use, a new study suggests. Insider reports: Almost 70% of the 60 children under 12 surveyed by De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, said they used social media for four hours a day or more. Two thirds said they used social media apps in the two hours before going to bed. The study also found that 12.5% of the children surveyed were waking up in the night to check their notifications.

Psychology lecturer John Shaw, who headed up the study, said children were supposed to sleep for between nine to 11 hours a night, per NHS guidelines, but those surveyed reported sleeping an average of 8.7 hours nightly. He said: "The fear of missing out, which is driven by social media, is directly affecting their sleep. They want to know what their friends are doing, and if you're not online when something is happening, it means you're not taking part in it. "And it can be a feedback loop. If you are anxious you are more likely to be on social media, you are more anxious as a result of that. And you're looking at something, that's stimulating and delaying sleep." "TikTok had the most engagement from the children, with 90% of those surveyed saying they used the app," notes Insider. "Snapchat was used by 84%, while just over half those surveyed said they used Instagram."

President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over in the US, even as the number of Americans who have died from Covid continues to rise. From a report: Mr Biden said that while "we still have a problem", the situation is rapidly improving. Statistics show that over 400 Americans on average are dying from the virus each day. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that the end of the pandemic is "in sight". In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, Mr Biden said that the US is still doing "a lot of work" to control the virus. The interview - aired over the weekend - was partly filmed on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show, where the president gestured towards the crowds. "If you notice, no one's wearing masks," he said. "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape...I think it's changing."

In August, US officials extended the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency, which has been in place since January 2020, through 13 October. To date, more than one million Americans have died from the pandemic. Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the seven-day average of deaths currently stands at over 400, with more than 3,000 dead in the last week. In January 2021, by comparison, more than 23,000 people were reported dead from the virus over a single week-long span. About 65% of the total US population is considered fully vaccinated. Some federal vaccine mandates remain in place in the US - including on healthcare workers, military personnel and any non-US citizen entering the country by airplane.

The Mars rover Perseverance was the subject of a new NASA briefing Thursday. CNET describes it as a celebration of this year's discovery of organic matter — in June NASA for the first time measured the total amount of organic carbon in Martian rocks — and a celebration of rock samples. (Specifically, the two samples collected from mudstone rock on Wildcat Ridge in Jezero Crater.) The rover's Sherloc instrument investigated the rock. (Sherloc stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals.) "In its analysis of Wildcat Ridge, the Sherloc instrument registered the most abundant organic detections on the mission to date," NASA said.

Scientists are seeing familiar signs in the analysis of Wildcat Ridge. "In the distant past, the sand, mud and salts that now make up the Wildcat Ridge sample were deposited under conditions where life could potentially have thrived," said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley in a statement. "The fact the organic matter was found in such a sedimentary rock — known for preserving fossils of ancient life here on Earth — is important."

Perseverance isn't equipped to find definitive evidence of ancient microbial life on the red planet. "The reality is the burden of proof for establishing life on another planet is very, very high," said Farley during the press conference. For that, we need to examine Mars rocks up close and in person in Earth labs. Perseverance currently has 12 rock samples on board, including the Wildcat Ridge pieces and samples from another sedimentary delta rock called Skinner Ridge. It also collected igneous rock samples earlier in the mission that point to the impact of long-ago volcanic action in the crater. NASA is so happy with the diversity of samples collected that it's looking into dropping some of the filled tubes off on the surface soon in preparation for the future Mars Sample Return campaign.... The mission is under development. If all goes as planned, those rocks could be here by 2033 .
The hope is that in 2033, Perseverance will meet the lander "and personally deliver the samples," the article quips. But in the meantime, Perseverance "could wander up the crater rim." And there's one more update about the smaller exploration vehicle that Peseverance carried to Mars.

"Its companion Ingenuity helicopter is in good health and expected to take to the air again."

Randall Munroe does more than draw the online comic strip XKCD. He's also published a funny new speculative science book (following up on his previous New York Times best-seller), promising "short answers, new lists of weird and worrying questions, and some of my favorite answers from the What If site."

From his blog: In What If 2, I answer new questions I've receieved in the years since What If? was released. People have asked about touching exotic materials, traveling across space and time, eating things they shouldn't, and smashing large objects into the Earth. There are questions about lasers, explosions, swingsets, candy, and soup. Several planets are destroyed — one of them by the soup.
But besides launching a new book tour, he's also found some particularly geeky ways to promote the new book. On Thursday Munroe went on a language podcast to ask his own oddball questions — like how to spot an artificial language, and what does the word "it" refer to in the sentence "It's 3pm and hot." He's illustrated a a science-y animated video, and released several self-mocking cartoons.

And of course — answered some more strange science questions.

First, a rumor from the blog Phone Arena. "Not to be outdone by Apple and Huawei, Samsung is planning to incorporate satellite connectivity options in its Galaxy phones as well, hints leakster Ricciolo."

But it's not the first rumor we've heard about phone vendors and satellites. "Cringley Predicts Apple is About to Create a Satellite-Based IoT Business ," read the headline in June. Long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely predicted that Apple would first offer some limited satellite-based functionality,

But he'd also called those services "proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. "After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole.... Ubiquity (being able to track anything in near real time anywhere on the planet) signals the maturity of IoT, turning it quickly into a $1 TRILLION business — in this case Apple's $1 TRILLION business." And beyond that, "in the longer run Cupertino plans to dis-intermediate the mobile carriers — becoming themselves a satellite-based global phone and data company [and] they will also compete with satellite Internet providers like Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon's Kuiper."

So how did Cringely react last week when Apple announced "Emergency SOS" messaging for the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus — via communication satellites — when their users are out of range of a cell signals? He began by wondering if Apple was intentionally downplaying the satellite features: They limited their usage case to emergency SOS texts in the USA and Canada, sorta said it would be just for iPhone 14s, and be free for only the first two years. They showed a satellite app and very deliberately tried to make it look difficult to use. They gave no technical details and there was no talk of industry partners.

Yet there were hints of what's to come. We (you and I, based on my previous column) already knew, for example, that ANY iPhone can be made to work with Globalstar. We also knew the deal was with Globalstar, which Apple never mentioned but Globalstar confirmed, more or less, later in the day in an SEC filing. But Apple DID mention Find My and Air Tags, notably saying they'd work through the satellites even without having to first beseech the sky with an app. So the app is less than it seems and Apple's satellite network will quickly find its use for the Internet of Things [Cringely predicts]....

Apple very specifically said nothing about the global reach of Find My and Air Tags. There is no reason why those services can't have immediate global satellite support, given that the notification system is entirely within Apple's ecosystem and is not dependent on 911-type public safety agreements.

Maybe it will take a couple years to cover the world with SOS, but not for Find My, which means not for IoT — a business headed fast toward $1 trillion and will therefore [hypothetically] have a near-immediate impact on Apple's bottom line.
Speculating further, Cringely predicts that Globalstar — which has ended up with vast tracts of licensed spectrum — will eventually be purchased by a larger company. ("If not Apple, maybe Elon Musk.")

And this leads Cringely to yet another prediction. "If Elon can't get Globalstar, he and his partners will push for the regulatory expansion into space of terrestrial 5G licenses, which will probably be successful." This will happen, frankly, whether SpaceX and T-Mobile are successful or not, because AST&Science and its investors AT&T, Verizon and Zodafone need 5G in space, too, to compete with Apple. So there WILL eventually be satellite competition for Apple and I think the International Telecommunication Union will eventually succumb to industry pressure.
And by the end Cringely is also speculating about just how Apple will come up with innovative new satellite designs on a faster schedule...

Nanoracks just made space construction and manufacturing history with the first demonstration of cutting metal in orbit. TechCrunch reports: The experiment was performed back in May by Nanoracks and its parent company Voyager Space, after getting to orbit aboard the SpaceX Transporter 5 launch. The company only recently released additional details on Friday. The goal of Outpost Mars Demo-1 mission was to cut a piece of corrosion-resistant metal, similar to the outer shell of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur and common in space debris, using a technique called friction milling. Welding and metal-cutting is a messy operation on Earth, but all of that dust and debris simply falls to the ground. But "when you're in space, in the vacuum, it doesn't really do that. It doesn't just float away necessarily either," Marshall Smith, Nanoracks' senior VP of space systems, explained to TechCrunch back in May. "What you want to do is to contain this debris, not necessarily because it might be a micrometeorites issue, which it could be as well, but mostly because you want to keep your work environment clean."

The entire demonstration lasted around one minute. The main goal -- to cut a single small sample of the steel -- was successfully completed. Inside the spacecraft were two additional samples to cut as a "reach goal," and Nanoracks is investigating why they weren't cut as well. It was conducted in partnership with Maxar Technologies, who developed the robotic arm that executed the cut. That arm used a commercially available friction milling end-effector, and the entire structure was contained in the Outpost spacecraft to ensure that no debris escaped. Indeed, one of the main goals of the demonstration was to produce no debris -- and it worked. Nanoracks used a type of metal similar to an upper stage of a rocket precisely because the company's long-term goal is to modify used upper stages and convert them into orbital platforms, or what it calls "outposts." According to Smith, this is just the beginning. In the future, Nanoracks will attempt cuts on a larger scale in its quest to eventually conduct larger construction efforts.

Intellia Therapeutics reported encouraging early-stage study results for its Crispr gene-editing treatments, the latest sign that the pathbreaking technology could result in commercially available drugs in the coming years. The Wall Street Journal reports: Intellia said Friday that one of its treatments, code-named NTLA-2002, significantly reduced levels of a protein that causes periodic attacks of swelling in six patients with a rare genetic disease called hereditary angioedema, or HAE. In a separate study building on previously released trial data, Intellia's treatment NTLA-2001 reduced a disease-causing protein by more than 90% in 12 people with transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis cardiomyopathy, or ATTR-CM, a genetic disease that can lead to heart failure.

Despite the positive results, questions remain about whether therapies based on Crispr will work safely and effectively, analysts said. Intellia's latest studies involved a small number of patients, and were disclosed in news releases and haven't been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The NTLA-2002 study results were presented at the Bradykinin Symposium in Berlin, a medical meeting focused on angioedema. The data came from small, so-called Phase 1 studies conducted in New Zealand and the U.K. that didn't include control groups. Results from such early studies can be unreliable predictors of a drug's safety and effectiveness once the compound is tested in larger numbers of patients. The findings, nevertheless, add to preliminary but promising evidence of the potential for drugs based on the gene-editing technology. Last year, Intellia said that NTLA-2001 reduced the disease-causing protein involved in ATTR patients.

Monitoring the last wild Chittenango ovate amber snails, scientists tiptoe through a waterfall spray zone the size of a living room. From a report: The Chittenango Creek, which runs north for about 30 twisting miles in central New York, has few distinguishing markers: The stream is generally only a couple of feet deep, and the towns it passes through are similarly small and overlooked. One exception is found a couple miles from the source of the creek, where the riverbed flattens out and drops 167 feet over a series of limestone cliffs that are segmented into ledges and still smaller rock shelves. The fractal qualities are magnified by the foaming water that tumbles in thin layers down the cliffs. On some mornings, sunlight from the southeast illuminates the mist, and the whole area glows. Around this time on a recent Thursday, a dozen people clustered on one side of the falls, along two ledges that were blanketed in snakeroot, yellow jewelweed, spotted Joe-Pye weed and pale swallowwort. Here, in an area about the size of a living room, is the only known habitat of a small, critically endangered invertebrate with a marbled spiral shell: the Chittenango ovate amber snail.

A thousand species of land snail worldwide are known to be at risk of extinction. Most have very specific needs and a limited geological range, so scientists have been studying their populations to understand how changes in the environment could affect biodiversity more broadly. "Land snails are apt to be the real canaries in the coal mine for these sorts of changes," said Rebecca Rundell, a biologist at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Dr. Rundell is conducting such research on endangered land snails in the Republic of Palau, and similar projects are underway in such far-flung places as Hawaii and Bermuda. But the same issues are at play in her backyard, with the "Chits," which can only flourish in nearly 100 percent humidity and the shade of deciduous forests. "The conservation status of our local snail is emblematic of what is happening to land snails globally," she said. And so Dr. Rundell's team, with volunteers and employees from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, gathered on the side of the waterfall, their feet and knees planted cautiously but firmly on rocks, and sifted gently through the dirt and roots. Their goal: to figure out how many of these snails remain in the wild without crushing any in the process.

Blue light from artificial sources is on the rise, which may have negative consequences for human health and the wider environment, according to a study. From a report: Academics at the University of Exeter have identified a shift in the kind of lighting technologies European countries are using at night to brighten streets and buildings. Using images produced by the International Space Station (ISS), they have found that the orange-coloured emissions from older sodium lights are rapidly being replaced by white-coloured emissions produced by LEDs. While LED lighting is more energy-efficient and costs less to run, the researchers say the increased blue light radiation associated with it is causing "substantial biological impacts" across the continent. The study also claims that previous research into the effects of light pollution have underestimated the impacts of blue light radiation.

Chief among the health consequences of blue light is its ability to suppress the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep patterns in humans and other organisms. Numerous scientific studies have warned that increased exposure to artificial blue light can worsen people's sleeping habits, which in turn can lead to a variety of chronic health conditions over time. The increase in blue light radiation in Europe has also reduced the visibility of stars in the night sky, which the study says "may have impacts on people's sense of nature." Blue light can also alter the behavioural patterns of animals including bats and moths, as it can change their movements towards or away from light sources.

The world has never been in a better position to end the COVID-19 pandemic, the head of the World Health Organization said on Wednesday, his most optimistic outlook yet on the years-long health crisis which has killed over six million people. From a report: "We are not there yet. But the end is in sight," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at a virtual press conference. That was the most upbeat assessment from the UN agency since it declared an international emergency in January 2020 and started describing COVID-19 as a pandemic three months later. The virus, which emerged in China in late 2019, has killed nearly 6.5 million people and infected 606 million, roiling global economies and overwhelming healthcare systems. The rollout of vaccines and therapies have helped to stem deaths and hospitalisations, and the Omicron variant which emerged late last year causes less severe disease. Deaths from COVID-19 last week were the lowest since March 2020, the U.N. agency reported.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Associated Press: A rape victim whose DNA from her sexual assault case was used by San Francisco police to arrest her in an unrelated property crime on Monday filed a lawsuit against the city. During a search of a San Francisco Police Department crime lab database, the woman's DNA was tied to a burglary in late 2021. Her DNA had been collected and stored in the system as part of a 2016 domestic violence and sexual assault case, then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin said in February in a shocking revelation that raised privacy concerns. "This is government overreach of the highest order, using the most unique and personal thing we have -- our genetic code -- without our knowledge to try and connect us to crime," the woman's attorney, Adante Pointer, said in a statement.

The revelation prompted a national outcry from advocates, law enforcement, legal experts and lawmakers. Advocates said the practice could affect victims' willingness to come forward to law enforcement authorities. Federal law already prohibits the inclusion of victims' DNA in the national Combined DNA Index System. There is no corresponding law in California to prohibit local law enforcement databases from retaining victims' profiles and searching them years later for entirely different purposes.

Boudin said the report was found among hundreds of pages of evidence against a woman who had been recently charged with a felony property crime. After learning the source of the DNA evidence, Boudin dropped the felony property crime charges against the woman. The police department's crime lab stopped the practice shortly after receiving a complaint from the district attorney's office and formally changed its operating procedure to prevent the misuse of DNA collected from sexual assault victims, Police Chief Bill Scott said. Scott said at a police commission meeting in March that he had discovered 17 crime victim profiles, 11 of them from rape kits, that were matched as potential suspects using a crime victims database during unrelated investigations. Scott said he believes the only person arrested was the woman who filed the lawsuit Monday.

On Sept. 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will slam headfirst into a small asteroid in the name of planetary defense. "[S]cientists hope that should a dangerous asteroid threaten the planet in the future, a mission like DART could avert the disaster," reports Space.com. From the report: The theory goes that if scientists ever detected an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, an impactor probe could realign the orbit of the space rock, ensuring that it crossed Earth's path when our planet was a safe distance away. But scientists don't want to be working only from theory if the situation arises. That's where DART's dramatic destruction comes into play. The spacecraft will slam into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, which like clockwork orbits a larger near-Earth asteroid called Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. (Neither asteroid poses any threat to Earth, and DART won't change that.) The DART impact should adjust the orbit of Dimorphos, cutting its circuit by perhaps 10 minutes.

Scientists on Earth will be spending weeks after the impact measuring the actual change in the moonlet's orbit to compare with their predictions. The work will refine scientists' understanding of how asteroids respond to impactors and help to tune any future missions to the necessary amount of orbital change. "This isn't just a one-off event," Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, which runs the mission, said during the news conference. "We want to know what happened to Dimorphos, but more important, we want to understand what that means for potentially applying this technique in the future."

While the stakes are low compared to any scenario that would motivate a real asteroid-deflecting mission, the difficulty is the same. "This is incredibly challenging," Evan Smith, the deputy mission system engineer, said during the news conference, noting that the spacecraft will only be able to see Dimorphos itself about an hour and a half before impact. "This is a par-one course, so we're going in for the hit this time." And if something doesn't go according to plan? Mission personnel are pretty confident that, as long as the spacecraft hits its target, there should be something to see. "If DART collides with Dimorphos and then you don't see any orbital period change, this would be exceptionally surprising," Chabot said. "Just the amount of momentum that DART is bringing in on its own from the weight of the spacecraft slamming into Dimorphos is enough to shift its orbit in a measurable way."

The world's chances of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown are diminishing rapidly, as we enter "uncharted territory of destruction" through our failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions and take the actions needed to stave off catastrophe, leading scientists have said. From a report: Despite intensifying warnings in recent years, governments and businesses have not been changing fast enough, according to the United in Science report published on Tuesday. The consequences are already being seen in increasingly extreme weather around the world, and we are in danger of provoking "tipping points" in the climate system that will mean more rapid and in some cases irreversible shifts.

Recent flooding in Pakistan, which the country's climate minister claimed had covered a third of the country in water, is the latest example of extreme weather that is devastating swathes of the globe. The heatwave across Europe including the UK this summer, prolonged drought in China, a megadrought in the US and near-famine conditions in parts of Africa also reflect increasingly prevalent extremes of weather. The secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said: "There is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction. This year's United in Science report shows climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction."

Ben Nowack, a 26-year old inventor and CEO of Tons of Mirrors, is trying to use satellite-mounted reflective surfaces to redirect sunlight to earthbound solar panels at night. In an interview with Motherboard, Nowack explains what inspired this idea and how he can turn his concept into reality. Here's an excerpt from the report: What was the initial idea? I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It's this unstoppable force. Everybody's installing so many solar panels everywhere. It's really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off, it's called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.

Where did the idea come from? I was watching a YouTube video called The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa. It was basically saying that you need three times as many solar panels in Germany as you do in the Sahara Desert and you can't get the power from the Sahara to Germany in an easy way. I thought, what if you could beam the sunlight and then reflect it with mirrors, and put that light into laser beam vacuum tubes that zigzag around the curvature of the Earth. It could be this beam that comes in just like power companies, this tube full of infinite light. That was the initial idea. But the approach was completely economically unworkable. I was like, this is not going to compete with solar in 10 years. I should just completely give up and do something else. Then I was on a run two days later and thought what if I put that thing that turns sunlight into a beam in orbit then you don't have to build a vacuum tube anymore. And it's so much more valuable because you can shine sunlight on solar farms that already exist. Then I developed several more technologies which I know for a fact no one else is working on. That made the model even more economical.

Are these just like regular household mirrors, but fixed to a satellite? If you did that, the light would go to too many places. The sun is a certain size. It's not a point, it has a distance across. The light from one side of the sun would bounce off your mirror, and the light from the other side would also bounces off your mirror. If you used a perfectly flat mirror, every single microscopic piece would have this angle of diverging light coming from it. By the time the reflection hit Earth, you'd get a 3.6 kilometer diameter spot, which is gigantic. There are only 10 solar farms that big. So I did the math, and figured out that if I could hit a 500-meter spot instead of a 3,600-meter spot, then I'd be able to hit 44 times more solar sites per orbit.

A rocket crashed back to Earth shortly after liftoff Monday in the first launch accident for Jeff Bezos' space travel company, but the capsule carrying experiments managed to parachute to safety. From a report: No one was aboard the Blue Origin flight, which used the same kind of rocket as the one that sends paying customers to the edge of space. The rockets are now grounded pending the outcome of an investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The New Shepard rocket was barely a minute into its flight from West Texas when bright yellow flames shot out from around the single engine at the bottom. The capsule's emergency launch abort system immediately kicked in, lifting the craft off the top. Several minutes later, the capsule parachuted onto the remote desert floor. The rocket came crashing down, with no injuries or damage reported, said the FAA, which is in charge of public safety during commercial space launches and landings. Blue Origin's launch commentary went silent when the capsule catapulted off the rocket Monday morning, eventually announcing: "It appears we've experienced an anomaly with today's flight. This wasn't planned."

Doctors have told health services to prepare for a new era of cancer screening after a study found a simple blood test could spot multiple cancer types in patients before they develop clear symptoms. From a report: The Pathfinder study offered the blood test to more than 6,600 adults aged 50 and over, and detected dozens of new cases of disease. Many cancers were at an early stage and nearly three-quarters were forms not routinely screened for. It is the first time results from the Galleri test, which looks for cancer DNA in the blood, have been returned to patients and their doctors, to guide cancer investigations and any necessary treatment.

The Galleri test has been described as a potential "gamechanger" by NHS England, which is due to report results from a major trial involving 165,000 people next year. Doctors hope the test will save lives by detecting cancer early enough for surgery and treatment to be more effective, but the technology is still in development. "I think what's exciting about this new paradigm and concept is that many of these were cancers for which we do not have any standard screening," Dr Deb Schrag, a senior researcher on the study at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Paris on Sunday.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The global obesity epidemic is getting worse, especially among children, with rates of obesity rising over the past decade and shifting to earlier ages. In the US, roughly 40% of today's high school students were overweight by the time they started high school. Globally, the incidence of obesity has tripled since the 1970s, with fully one billion people expected to be obese by 2030. The consequences are grave, as obesity correlates closely with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and other serious health problems. Despite the magnitude of the problem, there is still no consensus on the cause, although scientists do recognize many contributing factors, including genetics, stress, viruses and changes in sleeping habits. Of course, the popularity of heavily processed foods -- high in sugar, salt and fat -- has also played a role, especially in Western nations, where people on average consume more calories per day now than 50 years ago. Even so, recent reviews of the science conclude that much of the huge rise in obesity globally over the past four decades remains unexplained.

An emerging view among scientists is that one major overlooked component in obesity is almost certainly our environment -- in particular, the pervasive presence within it of chemicals which, even at very low doses, act to disturb the normal functioning of human metabolism, upsetting the body's ability to regulate its intake and expenditure of energy. Some of these chemicals, known as "obesogens," directly boost the production of specific cell types and fatty tissues associated with obesity. Unfortunately, these chemicals are used in many of the most basic products of modern life including plastic packaging, clothes and furniture, cosmetics, food additives, herbicides and pesticides. Ten years ago the idea of chemically induced obesity was something of a fringe hypothesis, but not anymore.

"Scientists have uncovered how air pollution causes lung cancer," reports the Guardian, "in groundbreaking research that promises to rewrite our understanding of the disease."

The BBC is calling it "a discovery that completely transforms our understanding of how tumours arise." The team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed that rather than causing damage, air pollution was waking up old damaged cells. One of the world's leading experts, Prof Charles Swanton, said the breakthrough marked a "new era". And it may now be possible to develop drugs that stop cancers forming.

The findings could explain how hundreds of cancer-causing substances act on the body. The classical view of cancer starts with a healthy cell. It acquires more and more mutations in its genetic code, or DNA, until it reaches a tipping point. Then it becomes a cancer and grows uncontrollably.... The researchers have produced evidence of a different idea. The damage is already there in our cell's DNA, picked up as we grow and age, but something needs to pull the trigger that actually makes it cancerous....

Around one in every 600,000 cells in the lungs of a 50-year-old already contains potentially cancerous mutations. These are acquired as we age but appear completely healthy until they are activated by the chemical alarm and become cancerous. Crucially, the researchers were able to stop cancers forming in mice exposed to air pollution by using a drug that blocks the alarm signal.

The results are a double breakthrough, both for understanding the impact of air pollution and the fundamentals of how we get cancer.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A new study on the Impact of Programming on Primary Mathematics Learning (abstract only, full article $24.95 on ScienceDirect) is generating some buzz on Twitter amongst K-12 CS educator types. It concluded that:

1. Programming did not benefit mathematics learning compared to traditional activities
2. There's a negative though small effect of programming on mathematics learning
3. Mindful "high-road transfer" from programming to mathematics is not self-evident
4. Visual programming languages might distract students from mathematics activities

From the Abstract: "The aim of this study is to investigate whether a programming activity might serve as a learning vehicle for mathematics acquisition in grades four and five.... Classes were randomly assigned to the programming (with Scratch) and control conditions. Multilevel analyses indicate negative effects (effect size range 0.16 to 0.21) of the programming condition for the three mathematical notions.

"A potential explanation of these results is the difficulties in the transfer of learning from programming to mathematics."

The findings of the new study come 4+ years after preliminary results were released from the $1.5M 2015-2019 NSF-funded study Time4CS, a "partnership between Broward County Public Schools (FL), researchers at the University of Chicago, and [tech-bankrolled] Code.org," which explored whether learning CS using Code.org's CS Fundamentals curriculum may be linked to improved learning in math at the grade 3-5 level. Time4CS researchers concluded that the "quasi-experimental" study showed that "No significant differences in Florida State Assessment mathematics scores resulted between treatment and comparison groups."