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Supported by Media Soul-Searching From Ad Group That Lauded Cambridge Analytica Photo Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica speaking in 2016 about the presidential election. Mr. Nix has been suspended as chief executive in the wake of revelations that the company improperly acquired data from Facebook users. Credit Bryan Bedder/Getty Images An advertising trade group that gave an award to Cambridge Analytica last year for its “big data” work during the 2016 presidential election is now urging marketers to reconsider the ethics of how consumer information is collected and used.
The trade group, the Advertising Research Foundation, said it was waiting for more information before formally rescinding the award given to Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm that was recently reported to have improperly harvested the data of 50 million Facebook users. The revelations have brought intense criticism of Facebook, which is facing inquiries from lawmakers on both sides of..
A Study on Fats That Doesn’t Fit the Story Line Photo So which kind of fat is actually bad for you? Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times There was a lot of news this week about a study, published in the medical journal BMJ, that looked at how diet affects heart health. The results were unexpected because they challenged the conventional thinking on saturated fats.
And the data were very old, from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This has led many to wonder why they weren’t published previously. It has also added to the growing concern that when it comes to nutrition, personal beliefs often trump science.
Perhaps no subject is more controversial in the nutrition world these days than fats. While in the 1970s and 1980s doctors attacked the total amount of fat in Americans’ diets, that seems to have passed. These days, the fights are over the type of fat that is considered acceptable.
Most of our fat comes from two main sources. The first is saturated fats. Usually solid at room tem..
A New Policy Disagreement Between Clinton and Sanders: Soda Taxes Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have a new issue to disagree about: the wisdom of a soda tax.
A tax on sugary soft drinks, like the one proposed in Philadelphia and endorsed by Mrs. Clinton last week, divides the left. It can be seen as achieving an admirable public health goal of less sugar consumption or as a very regressive tax that falls more on the poor than the rich, since the poor tend to drink more soda.
While not the biggest issue the two candidates have tussled over, it is one that may reverberate across the country in coming years as more cities and states use the tax to raise revenue or improve citizens’ health.
Last week, Mrs. Clinton became the first presidential candidate to explicitly endorse a tax on sugary drinks. At a Philadelphia event Wednesday, she said a proposal there to use a soda tax to fund universal prekindergarten was a good idea.
“It starts early with working with families, working with k..
Supported by Well | Live The Highs and Lows of Testosterone Photo Credit Esther Aarts Getting a high testosterone reading offers bragging rights for some men of a certain age — and may explain in part the lure of testosterone supplements. But once you are within a normal range, does your level of testosterone, the male hormone touted to build energy, libido and confidence, really tell you that much?
Probably not, experts say.
Normal testosterone levels in men range from about 300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter of blood. Going from one number within the normal zone to another one may not pack much of a punch.
“You don’t see the big improvement once men are within the normal range,” said Dr. Shalender Bhasin, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. The largest differences in terms of energy and sex drive are when men go from below-normal to normal levels.
A 2015 study in JAMA found that sex drive improved among men who went from about 230, considere..
Supported by Well | Move Those 2-Minute Walk Breaks? They Add Up Photo Credit iStock Walk for two minutes. Repeat 15 times. Or walk for 10 minutes, thrice. The benefits for longevity appear to be almost exactly the same, according to an inspiring new study of physical activity patterns and life spans.
It finds that exercise does not have to be prolonged in order to be beneficial. It just has to be frequent.
Most of us who are interested in health know that federal exercise guidelines recommend we work out moderately for at least 30 minutes per day at least five times per week in order to reduce our risks of developing many diseases or dying prematurely.
These guidelines also recommend that we accumulate those 30 minutes of daily exercise in bouts lasting for at least 10 minutes at a time.
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Continue reading the main story The guidelines, first published in 2008, were based on the best exercise science available at the time, including several studies indicating that i..
Kim Jong-un’s China Visit Strengthens His Hand in Nuclear Talks Photo In images and in words, President Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, signaled on Wednesday that they had repaired the relationship between their countries. Credit North Korean Central News Agency BEIJING — With a dose of mystery and the flair of a showman, North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, used his debut as an international statesman on Wednesday to present himself as confident, reasonable — and willing to bargain.
Mr. Kim’s surprise two-day visit to Beijing, his first known trip abroad since taking power, was effectively a reminder of how much he has set the agenda in the crisis over his nation’s nuclear arsenal — and of what a strong hand he has going into talks, first with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea next month and later with President Trump.
Mr. Kim has yet to say what concessions he is willing to make, or what he may demand from the United States in return. But he conti..
Insects Flew Before Anything Else Did. So How Did They Get Their Wings? Photo A fossil of a cockroach dating to the Cretaceous period, about 145 to 65 million years ago. Insects took to the skies much earlier, but there is scant fossil evidence from the period showing how they evolved wings. Credit The Lighthouse/Science Source Beetle wings are often hidden. Nestled behind armored shields on the beetle’s back, they unfurl in whirring sheets, whisking their clumsy owners from danger. Beetles don’t have more than two sets of wings — unless they’re in Yoshinori Tomoyasu’s lab.
In research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Tomoyasu and co-author David Linz genetically engineered beetle larvae with wings on their abdomens, part of an ongoing attempt to unpack one of evolution’s greatest mysteries: how insects gained the ability to fly.
Insects took to the empty skies sometime between 300 and 360 million years ago, long before birds, bats or ptero..
Meet TESS, Seeker of Alien Worlds KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The search for cosmic real estate is about to begin anew.
No earlier than 6:32 p.m. on April 16, in NASA’s fractured parlance, a little spacecraft known as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, bristling with cameras and ambition, will ascend on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a blaze of smoke and fire and take up a lengthy residence between the moon and the Earth.
There it will spend the next two years, at least, scanning the sky for alien worlds.
TESS is the latest effort to try to answer questions that have intrigued humans for millenniums and dominated astronomy for the last three decades: Are we alone? Are there other Earths? Evidence of even a single microbe anywhere else in the galaxy would rock science.
Continue reading the main story Photo A plaque with the signatures of people who worked on the TESS project. Also installed on the satellite was a memory chip that included drawings of exoplanets by school..
South Sudan Halts Spread of Crippling Guinea Worms Photo A woman with scars on her leg left by two Guinea worms in Terekeka, South Sudan. Only 30 infestations were recorded worldwide last year, an enormous achievement since 1986, when there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in 21 Asian and African countries. Credit Mariah Quesada/Associated Press South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, appears to have stopped Guinea worm disease within its borders, the country’s health minister announced Wednesday.
“Having known the suffering it inflicted, one is very happy today,” the minister, Dr. Riek Gai Kok, said. “Future generations will just read of Guinea worm in the books as history.”
Dr. Kok made the announcement in Atlanta at the Carter Center, a philanthropy founded by former President Jimmy Carter that leads the effort to eliminate the parasitic worm.
Only 30 worm infestations were detected last year, 15 in Chad and 15 in Ethiopia. When Mr. Carter began the eradication drive in 1986, t..
Finance for controversial and highly polluting tar sands projects more than doubled to $47bn in 2017
Funding from big banks for “extreme” fossil fuels jumped by 11 per cent to $115bn (£81bn) in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, new research shows.
Finance for controversial and highly polluting tar sands projects more than doubled to $47bn in 2017, a report by a group of environmental NGOs found.
Extreme fossil fuels include those that contribute the most to climate change such as Arctic oil drilling, ultra-deepwater oil extraction, liquefied natural gas export, and coal mining and power.
Read more Bank financing of extreme fossil fuel soars, report reveals While several European banks, including ING and BNP Paribas, pledged last year to cut financing for unconventional fossil fuels, North American banks ramped up their funding, particularly in Canada, the research found.
This reversed much of the progress made on reducing investment in the most carbon-intensive foss..
