An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Vegetarians have a 14% lower chance of developing cancer than carnivores, according to a large study that links meat-eating to a heightened risk of the disease. A team of researchers from Oxford University analyzed data on more than 470,000 Britons and found that pescatarians had a 10% reduced risk. Compared with people who eat meat regularly -- defined as more than five times a week -- those who consumed small amounts had a 2% lower risk of developing cancer, the study found. "In this large British cohort, being a low meat-eater, fish-eater or vegetarian was associated with a lower risk of all cancer sites when compared to regular meat-eaters," the analysis found.

However, the authors, led by Cody Watling from Oxford's population health cancer epidemiology unit, made clear that their findings did not conclusively prove regular meat-eating increased the risk of cancer. Smoking and body fat could also help explain the differences found, they said. Their study of participants in the UK Biobank study also found that:

- Low meat-eaters -- who consume meat five or fewer times a week -- had a 9% lower risk of developing bowel cancer than regular meat-eaters.
- Vegetarian women were 18% less likely than those who ate meat regularly to develop postmenopausal breast cancer, though that may be due to their lower body mass index.
- Vegetarian men have a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer while among male pescatarians it is 20% lower. The researchers published their findings in the journal BMC Medicine.

"Scientists have made the first steps to develop an atlas of world cancer, hoping it will bring us closer to a cure," reports the Telegraph.

"A map showing stark differences in the incidence of 10 types of cancer between Spain and Portugal has sparked a race to pinpoint causes and risk factors people should avoid." It shows huge differences for people living only a short distance apart, sometimes across the border between Spain and Portugal, and others occurring within the same country. Scientists say it will take years to solve the puzzle completely but are confident that the map provides the pieces. There are easier questions and more complex riddles. But it all points to environmental factors — as opposed to genetics — playing a major role in causing cancers.

The lung cancer map tells a clear story of far higher levels of smoking tobacco in Spain than in Portugal, with the latter country showing a consistent hue of dark blue for a lower risk of mortality, while Spain has large areas lit up in red, at least on the map representing men. Twenty per cent of Spanish adults are daily smokers, compared with just over 11 per cent in Portugal. But the data from cancer of the larynx, also linked to smoking, tells a vastly different story, with a high mortality risk for men shown straddling the border in southern Portugal and south western Spain, as well as patches in the north of both countries. "The lung cancer and smoking connection is very clear, so why in other cancers that have a strong link with tobacco are we seeing such surprising differences?" asks Pablo Fernández-Navarro, the lead co-ordinator of the atlas from the Spanish side.

"This is what is so fantastic. If whole countries had uniform levels of mortality, the maps would be in plain colours. Given that it is not the case, now we have to investigate and explain these differences, eliminating one factor after another," Fernández-Navarro told The Telegraph.

In the case of larynx cancer, the Spanish epidemiologist says the map confirms that smoking is by no means the only risk factor, and that other elements must also be at work, from alcohol intake to levels of pollutants such as asbestos or petrochemicals in the environment.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the link.

A YouTuber who goes by the name of Buildzoid on the Actually Hardcore Overlocking channel has figured out that a backward capacitor on the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard is causing it to melt down, according to a report by Tom's Hardware. From a report: Asus has since acknowledged the issue in a post on its site and plans on issuing replacements to customers with affected motherboards. Problems with the Z690 Hero motherboard started turning up on the Asus support forum, as well as on Reddit, and the issues experienced by users are pretty much identical. As noted by Tom's Hardware, users reported that their motherboards started smoking in the same spot: the two MOSFETs (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) next to the DIMM slots and the Q-code reader. In a video on his channel, Buildzoid diagnoses the issue using only the pictures posted to support forums and on Reddit, attributing the Z690 Hero's failure to the backward capacitor installed next to the MOSFETs, not the MOSFETs themselves. Buildzoid looks closely at the images of the motherboard, pointing out that the text on the capacitor is actually upside down, a potential sign that it's installed incorrectly. As Tom's Hardware mentions, a reversed capacitor results in reversed polarity, causing the MOSFETs to malfunction and burn up.

Supply is low, demand is high -- but that alone cannot explain the weird indignity of renting a vehicle. From a report: The present situation is "the most challenging in the history of car rental," says Chris Brown, the digital editor of the industry trade publication Auto Rental News. "Last year ... it was a disaster." Nobody could have planned for such a catastrophic revenue loss, he told me, and while the airline industry received a government bailout, the rental-car industry did not. "Hertz had 3,000 cars burned to the ground because someone lit a match, and they just burned in a field," he added. (Something like this did happen in Florida, though only around 1,000 of the 4,500 cars destroyed in the fire belonged to Hertz, and investigators blamed the episode on a hot exhaust pipe and dry grass.) Given the context, some negative customer experiences were to be expected, Brown argued. "But I think it's really impressive how car-rental [companies have] been able to pull themselves out of this very difficult time managing as well as they are."

Well, I'm not trying to be unfair to any companies, but many car-rental businesses did receive funds from the Paycheck Protection Program. And many of their negative customer experiences have nothing to do with a car shortage or a pandemic. Why is that car-rental employee typing for so long? We'll never know. Why are the printers so old and loud and broken? Who could say! Will you ever get a straight answer as to how much insurance to buy, or whether to prepay for gas, or why it's forbidden for you to drive this rental car out of the state of Florida? What does the pandemic have to do with Avis allegedly repossessing a rental car from someone's driveway in the middle of the night in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then allegedly claiming to know absolutely nothing about it, in one of the oddest stories I have ever read? And what does the pandemic have to do with the stream of complaints about rental-car companies on the Better Business Bureau website, a surprising number of which come from people who insist that they do not smoke yet they have been charged as much as $450 for allegedly smoking in a car?

I reached out with questions of this kind to the three largest rental-car companies, which control the large majority of the rental-car business in the United States. Enterprise Holdings did not respond. Avis Budget declined to comment about either the state of the industry or the alleged incident in Teaneck. A Hertz spokesperson said, in part, "Hertz is working closely with our automotive partners to add new vehicles to our fleet as quickly as possible amid the microchip shortage that continues to impact the car rental industry. We're also purchasing low-mileage, pre-owned vehicles, and moving vehicles to the areas with highest demand." The financial structure of these companies is as inscrutable as a contract printed on a dot-matrix printer and signed in a dim underground parking garage. Some of them have gone bankrupt; at least one has done so multiple times. Take Hertz for instance: Private-equity firms acquired the company from Ford in 2005, then made a profit of $1 billion with an IPO while the company itself remained deeply in debt. The company is also on its sixth CEO since 2014 and has been deemed a "Frankenstein of financial engineering" by Axios. Most of the cars that Hertz rents out are owned by "special-purpose" subsidiaries of Hertz, from which Hertz then leases them. When Hertz was sliding into bankruptcy in spring 2020, it was because the company had missed lease payments -- to put it crudely -- to itself. I can barely understand this, yet I will walk into a rental-car office and suffer for it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by climate reporter Brian Kahn: In a major announcement at United Nations climate talks on Thursday, 20 countries said they would stop funding fossil fuel development abroad and instead plow money into clean energy. The group of countries includes finance heavy-hitters like the U.S., UK, and Canada as well as smaller players like Mali and Costa Rica. An analysis by Oil Change International indicates that the 20 countries plus four other investment institutions who signed on could shift $15 billion annually from funding fossil fuels to clean energy projects. "The signatories of today's statement are doing what's most logical in a climate emergency: stop adding fuel to the fire and shift dirty finance to climate action," Laurie van der Burg, the global public finance campaigns co-manager at Oil Change International, said in an emailed statement.

[T]he agreement doesn't pull funding from projects already in the pipeline (climate joke, please laugh). Between 2018 and 2020, Oil Change International also found, the G20 kicked an estimated $188 billion to fossil fuel projects in other countries. That's a lot of very recent extraction happening. The lack of financing abroad also doesn't mean a lack of financing at home. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are major oil and gas producers. Without a plan to wind down production at home, the pledge to end financing for fossil fuels abroad is a bit like promising you won't lend your neighbor money for cigarettes while you keep smoking a pack a day.

Some of the biggest smokers -- errr, fossil fuel funders -- on the block also didn't sign on. Those include Japan, Korea, and China, which are the biggest fossil fuel backers in the G20, according to Oil Change International. Together, they account for more than $29 billion in annual fossil fuel development abroad. That's a major lifeline for fossil fuel developers. We also still need more details on the pledge to end funding, including how exactly the 20 countries and banks define fossil fuel funding. Lastly, the world's private banks and investment firms also need to sign on.

The U.S. government's investigation into Havana Syndrome "is turning up new evidence that the symptoms are the result of directed-energy attacks," reports Politico, citing five U.S. lawmakers and officials who've been briefed on the matter: Behind closed doors, lawmakers are also growing increasingly confident that Russia or another hostile foreign government is behind the suspected attacks, based on regular briefings from administration officials — although there is still no smoking gun linking the incidents to Moscow....

The phenomenon is getting more high-level attention as government officials have continued to report incidents in countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and South America throughout the year. Most prominently, Vice President Kamala Harris' August trip from Singapore to Vietnam was delayed more than three hours when multiple U.S. personnel reported symptoms consistent with Havana Syndrome in Hanoi...

A Biden administration official emphasized that the investigation is ongoing and has not yet reached specific conclusions... While CIA Director William Burns and lawmakers briefed on the matter have publicly referred to the incidents as attacks, some officials remain skeptical of the prevailing theory, and some prominent neurologists have described that explanation as implausible. But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who are receiving weekly updates from the intelligence community on the status of the investigation, said the latest information they've received has disproved the skeptics — and in public statements, those lawmakers are increasingly referring to the incidents as directed-energy attacks.
Politico quotes one Republican Senator as saying "There have been new additional attacks, which is very disturbing. It's being taken very seriously now due to the director of the CIA ... [who] has put very highly qualified people on it..."

The Senator also dismissed the theory that the illness was merely psychosomatic. "I don't know how you could argue that when brain imaging is showing a traumatic brain injury, somehow this is psychosomatic."

"If you're wandering around Singapore anytime soon, take some time to wave hi to your friendly neighborhood snitch bot," writes Gizmodo: Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) will be deploying two robots named "Xavier" that the agency says use cameras with a 360-degree field of vision and analytics software to detect "undesirable social behaviors" in real time.

First reported by Business Insider, the robots are designed to detect activities such as public smoking, violation of pandemic restrictions (i.e., groups of more than five people), and illegally selling goods on the street. Other behaviors the agency said the robots can snitch on include the use of motorized vehicles or motorcycles on pedestrian walkways and "improperly parked bicycles." The Xavier robots roll around on a "patrol route pre-configured in advance by public officers," though they can deviate as necessary to avoid slamming into pedestrians or other obstacles. The plan is for the two robots to relay reports of such activity to a central police hub as well as confront violators directly with warning messages, with the first three weeks of deployment starting on Sept. 5 in Toa Payoh Central.
The three weeks are a "trial period," reports ZDNet. But they also note that the program includes "an interactive dashboard where public officers can receive real-time information from and be able to monitor and control multiple robots simultaneously."

One official said in a public statement that "The deployment of ground robots will help to augment our surveillance and enforcement resources."

ZDNet offers some context: Seeing robots being used in Singapore is not uncommon. Last year, Singapore deployed Boston Dynamics' four-legged droids, dubbed Spot, to its parks, garden, and nature reserves to remind people about social distancing. A fleet of Lightstrike robots was then rolled out at one of Singapore's general hospitals in a bid to thoroughly disinfect hospital rooms of pathogens. More recently in May, the Singapore government launched a one-year trial of using autonomous robots to facilitate on-demand food and grocery deliveries.

Lenovo will ring in the arrival of Windows 11 with a pair of premium AMD Ryzen-based laptops. PCWorld reports: The IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon will feature a carbon lid and aluminum body to go with its drop-dead gorgeous 14-inch OLED screen. Besides the infinite contrast an OLED provides, Lenovo will use a fast 90Hz, 2880x1800 panel with an aspect ratio of 16:10 on the Slim 7 Carbon. That's just over 5 megapixels with a density of 243 pixels-per-inch. This is one smoking screen. But this beauty goes deeper than the skin. Inside the Slim 7 Carbon, you'll find an 8-core Ryzen 7 5800U with an optional Nvidia GeForce MX450 GPU. Lenovo will offer up to 16GB of power efficient LPDDR4X RAM and up to a 1TB PCIe SSD.
[...]
If a 14-inch screen laptop with a GeForce MX450 isn't enough for you, Lenovo also unveiled a new IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro. It's aimed at someone who needs a little more oomph. The laptop also features a 16:10 aspect ratio screen, which we consider superior to 16:9 aspect ratio laptops for getting work done. The IPS panel shines at a very bright 500 nits, and it's rated for 100 percent of the sRGB spectrum with an option for a 120Hz refresh rate version. Inside the laptop you'll find an 8-core Ryzen 7 5800H, up to 16GB of DDR4, a 1TB PCIe SSD, and up to a GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop graphics chip. Compared to the Slim 7 Carbon, you should expect the CPU to run faster thanks to the additional thermal headroom of the H-class Ryzen chip. The GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, meanwhile, is based on Nvidia's newest "Ampere" GPU cores instead of the older "Turing" GPU the GeForce MX450 uses in the Slim 7 Carbon. That upgrade translates to far better gaming performance, hardware ray tracing support, and the inclusion of Nvidia hardware encoding and decoding, which can help you use Adobe Premiere on the road.

Passengers escaped an Alaska Airlines jet via emergency slides on Monday night after a malfunctioning smartphone filled the cabin with smoke. The Register reports: The pilot ordered the evacuation of flight 751 from New Orleans to Seattle after someone's cellphone started to spit out sparks and smoke just after landing. As the aircraft was still waiting on the tarmac at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for a gate, the slides were deployed and all 129 passengers and six crew made it out. The errant mobile was also stuffed in a bag to curb its compact conflagration. Two people, we're told, were taken to hospital.

"The crew acted swiftly using fire extinguishers and a battery containment bag to stop the phone from smoking," a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines told The Register. "Crew members deployed the evacuation slides due to hazy conditions inside the cabin. Two guests were treated at a local area hospital." Airport officials, meanwhile, said "only minor scrapes and bruises were reported." It's unknown which device malfunctioned on this flight, but it makes us think back to the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco of 2016 that prompted Samsung to formally recall the smartphone after nearly 100 reports of them catching fire and spewing noxious black smoke. The Note 7 was also banned from aircraft in the United States under an emergency order.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Stat News: Death rates are declining for more than half of the most common forms of cancer in the U.S., according to a sweeping annual analysis released Thursday. The new report -- released by the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other collaborators -- found that between 2014 and 2018, death rates dropped for 11 out of 19 of the most common cancers among men and 14 of the 20 most prevalent cancers among women.

Accelerating declines in lung cancer deaths may account for much of the overall progress seen in recent years, the authors of the report said. Over the past two decades, the death rate for lung cancer has declined even faster than the rate at which patients are diagnosed with the disease. And while part of the early success in preventing lung cancer can be attributed to the massive drop in smoking rates, the authors note the most recent downward trends seem to correspond with the approval of new treatments for non-small cell lung cancer that improved the likelihood of survival. Death rates from melanoma also saw an accelerated decline in the past decade, despite a growing number of diagnoses. Like in lung cancer, authors point to the introduction of novel treatments around the same time as the turnaround on the death rate. New targeted and immune checkpoint inhibitors were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011, one year before major declines in death rates were seen in women and two years before they were seen in men.

While the report showed improved survival rates for many patients over recent years, others, such as prostate, colorectal, or female breast cancers, have seen progress stalled or stopped. Breast cancer continues to be one of the three deadliest cancers for women of all races, and the most frequently fatal cancer for Hispanic women. While the rates of death from breast cancer are declining, the pace of the decline has slowed over the past two decades, according to the report. And across the board, racial health disparities persist. Black women and white women are diagnosed with breast cancer at similar rates, but the mortality rate for Black women is 40% higher. Overall, cancer is more common among white individuals than Black individuals, but Black people die from cancer at higher rates. [The report] emphasized the importance of preventive measures for certain cancers, noting that while cancers related to smoking have continued to decrease, those related to excess body weight have increased. Early and consistent access to screenings has also been critical, as demonstrated by the apparent effect of adapted screening guidelines for colorectal cancer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: From espresso to instant, coffee is part of the daily routine for millions. Now research suggests the brew could be linked to a lower chance of developing or dying from chronic liver disease. Chronic liver disease is a major health problem around the world. According to the British Liver Trust, liver disease is the third leading cause of premature death in the UK, with deaths having risen 400% since 1970. Writing in the journal BMC Public Health, Roderick and colleagues report how they analyzed data from 494,585 participants in the UK Biobank -- a project designed to help unpick the genetic and environmental factors associated with particular conditions. All participants were aged 40 to 69 when they signed up to the project, with 384,818 saying they were coffee drinkers at the outset compared with 109,767 who did not consume the beverage.

The team looked at the liver health of the participants over a median period of almost 11 years, finding 3,600 cases of chronic liver disease, with 301 deaths, and 1,839 cases of simple fatty liver disease. The analysis revealed that after taking into account factors such as body mass index, alcohol consumption, and smoking status, those who drank any amount of coffee, and of any sort, had a 20% lower risk of developing chronic liver disease or fatty liver disease (taken together) than those who did not consume the brew. The coffee drinkers also had a 49% lower risk of dying from chronic liver disease. The team said the magnitude of the effect increased with the amount of coffee consumed, up to about three to four cups a day, "beyond which further increases in consumption provided no additional benefit." A reduction in risk was also found when instant, decaffeinated and ground coffee were considered separately -- although the latter linked to the largest effect.

Online electronics retailer Newegg said it is now accepting dogecoin as a method of payment. From a report: Customers will be able to complete transactions using the dogecoin held in their BitPay wallet, according to an announcement Tuesday. Newegg first began accepting payments in bitcoin in July 2014. The company is now among the first retailers to accept dogecoin as payment. Further reading: Dogecoin Rips in Meme-Fueled Frenzy on Pot-Smoking Holiday.

April 20th or 4/20 is the unofficial marijuana holiday where thousands of cannabis smokers celebrate the smoking of marijuana with marijuana. But this year, it could also be the day the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin shatters new record highs. According to Fortune, "advocates are hoping to see Dogecoin hit $1 on April 20 -- one week after it was valued at just 9 cents. From the report: Dogecoin has already hit some financial landmarks that didn't seem possible at the start of the year. Its market value has topped $50 billion, making it bigger than Ford or Marriott. And if it comes close to hitting its target Tuesday, it could outpace some blue-chip companies. For once (for now), Elon Musk has nothing to do with the furor surrounding Dogecoin. This time, the credit goes, in part, to... Slim Jim. Really.

The packaged meat product latched on to Dogecoin-mania on its Twitter account last Wednesday (saying "RT to send Doge to the moon!!" -- the rallying cry among the r/WallStreetBets crowd for GameStop stock). The cry worked. Doge fans -- and even other brands -- jumped on the bandwagon quickly.

The New York Times reports: A large analysis looked at hundreds of factors that may influence the risk of heart failure and found one dietary factor in particular that was associated with a lower risk: drinking coffee...

The analysis included extensive, decades-long data from three large health studies with 21,361 participants, and used a method called machine learning that uses computers to find meaningful patterns in large amounts of data. "Usually, researchers pick things they suspect would be risk factors for heart failure — smoking, for example — and then look at smokers versus nonsmokers," said the senior author, Dr. David P. Kao, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado. "But machine learning identifies variables that are predictive of either increased or decreased risk, but that you haven't necessarily thought of."

Using this technique, Dr. Kao and his colleagues found 204 variables that are associated with the risk for heart failure. Then they looked at the 41 strongest factors, which included, among others, smoking, marital status, B.M.I., cholesterol, blood pressure and the consumption of various foods. The analysis is in Circulation: Heart Failure. In all three studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk for heart failure.

Drinking a cup a day or less had no effect, but two cups a day conferred a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups or more reduced risk by 29 percent...

Should you start drinking coffee or increase the amount you already drink to reduce your risk for heart failure? "We don't know enough from the results of this study to recommend this," said Dr. Kao, adding that additional research would be needed.

Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7 million deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found. From a report: Countries with the most prodigious consumption of fossil fuels to power factories, homes and vehicles are suffering the highest death tolls, with the study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution, along with nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China. Death rates in South America and Africa were significantly lower. The enormous death toll is higher than previous estimates and surprised even the study's researchers. "We were initially very hesitant when we obtained the results because they are astounding, but we are discovering more and more about the impact of this pollution," said Eloise Marais, a geographer at University College London and a study co-author. "It's pervasive. The more we look for impacts, the more we find." The 8.7 million deaths in 2018 represent a "key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease," states the study, which is the result of collaboration between scientists at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London. The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: YouTube says it has found a "smoking gun" to prove that a class-action lawsuit filed by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Pirate Monitor Ltd was filed in bad faith. According to the Google-owned platform, the same IP address used to upload 'pirate' movies to the platform also sent DMCA notices targeting the same batch of content.

In a motion to dismiss filed in November, Pirate Monitor said YouTube had provided no "hard evidence" to back up these damaging claims, demanding that the court disregard the allegations and reject calls for the right to an injunction to prevent Pirate Monitor from submitting wrongful DMCA notices in the future. YouTube now provides a taster of some of the supporting evidence it has on file. "Pirate Monitor devised an elaborate scheme to prove itself sufficiently trustworthy to use YouTube's advanced copyright management tools," YouTube begins. "Through agents using pseudonyms to hide their identities, Pirate Monitor uploaded some two thousand videos to YouTube, each time representing that the content did not infringe anyone's copyright. Shortly thereafter, Pirate Monitor invoked the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that YouTube remove the same videos its agents had just uploaded."

In all, YouTube processed nearly 2,000 DMCA notices it received by Pirate Monitor in the fall of 2019. All of the targeted videos had a uniform length, around 30 seconds each, generated from "obscure Hungarian movies". They had been uploaded in bulk from users with IP addresses allocated to Pakistan. [...] While the nature of the uploads is indeed suspicious, YouTube says that it also found what it describes as a "smoking gun", i.e evidence that the uploads and DMCA notices were being sent by the same entity. "After considerable digging, YouTube found a smoking gun. In November 2019, amidst a raft of takedown notices from Pirate Monitor, one of the 'RansomNova' users that had been uploading clips via IP addresses in Pakistan logged into their YouTube account from a computer connected to the Internet via an IP address in Hungary," YouTube explains. The opposition to Pirate Monitor's motion to dismiss can be found here.

A new article summarizes research from the University of Oxford and NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Nearly one in five people who have had Covid-19 are diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder such as anxiety, depression or insomnia within three months of testing positive for the virus," Natalie Grover writes.

Although "people with a pre-existing mental health diagnosis" are 65% more likely to get COVID, so it may be that this is partly explained by doctors diagnosing illness that would otherwise be missed, the article suggests that the rate is double the rate for influenza and unexpectedly high so other explanations are needed.
From the article: Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, said more research was needed to establish whether a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder could be directly linked to getting coronavirus. General factors that influence physical health were not captured in the records analysed, such as socio-economic background, smoking, or use of drugs. There was also potential that the general stressful environment of the pandemic is playing a role, he noted. Research suggests that people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to suffer mental ill-health. Poverty also increases exposure to coronavirus, owing to factors like crowded housing and unsafe working conditions.

"Equally, it's not at all implausible that Covid-19 might have some direct effect on your brain and your mental health. But I think that, again, remains to be positively demonstrated," said Mr. Harrison...

The calculations were made on the basis of roughly 70 million US health records, including more than 62,000 cases of Covid-19 that did not require a hospital stay or an emergency department visit.

Scientists are tracking small differences in DNA to explain why the disease has different effects. An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian: Key developments include research which indicates that interferon -- a molecular messenger that stimulates immune defenses against invading viruses -- may play a vital role in defending the body. Scientists have found that rare mutations in some people may leave them unable to make adequate supplies of the interferon they need to trigger effective immune responses to Covid. Trials using interferon as Covid treatments are now under way at several centers. Research is also focusing on a gene known as TYK2. Some variants of this gene are involved in triggering some auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and also seems to be involved in causing severe Covid. A drug developed to treat RA, baricitinib, has a genetic common denominator with Covid and this has led to it being used in clinical trails against the virus. Last month the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced that early results showed the drug helped Covid patients recover.

Other research -- pioneered by Kenneth Baillie, of Edinburgh University, and outlined in a recent issue of Science -- has uncovered several other genes that appear to be important. These include OAS genes that are triggered by interferon and which code for proteins that are involved in breaking down viral RNA, from which the Covid-19 virus is made. Baillie's research has yet to be peer reviewed and he has counseled caution in interpreting this work. Nevertheless, he told Science that he hoped his results would speed the development of treatments "because the epidemic is progressing at such an alarming rate, even a few months of time saved will save lots of lives".

In addition, other researchers point out that there are other ways of using genetics to combat Covid. Dr Dipender Gill of Imperial College London has, with colleagues, used genetic data to predict how different interventions could affect disease reactions. To do that, Gill -- working with a team of British, Norwegian and American scientists -- analyzed data from thousands of patients, using genetic variants that increase individuals' risk of acquiring these conditions. They were then able to carry out studies that would show if action taken to modify these traits would reduce susceptibility to severe Covid-19. The team made two key discoveries. "We found there is a causal link between obesity and the risk of having a severe Covid-19 [reaction]. We also found the same effect for smoking. This indicates that losing weight and giving up smoking will have a direct impact in improving your chances of surviving Covid-19. That is the power of genetic studies like these."

America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed. From a report: This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today -- drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America -- are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity's willingness to take action. "I've been labeled an alarmist," said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. "And I think it's a lot harder for people to say that I'm being alarmist now." Last month, before the skies over San Francisco turned a surreal orange, Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever measured on the planet. Dozens of people have perished from the heat in Phoenix, which in July suffered its hottest month on record, only to surpass that milestone in August.

Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign. The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle? The Times spoke with two dozen climate experts, including scientists, economists, sociologists and policymakers, and their answers were by turns alarming, cynical and hopeful. "It's as if we've been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades" and the world is now feeling the effects, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. But, she said, "we're not dead yet." Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn't seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there's no going back. The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

BBC News reports: In 1991, the trade body that represents electrical companies in the U.S., the Edison Electric Institute, created a campaign called the Information Council for the Environment which aimed to "Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)". Some details of the campaign were leaked to the New York Times. "They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking the data to say, 'Well if the world is warming up, why is Kentucky getting colder?' They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt," argued Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and co-author of Merchants of Doubt. But back in the 1990 there were many campaigns like this...

Most of the organisations opposing or denying climate change science were right-wing think tanks, who tended to be passionately anti-regulation. These groups made convenient allies for the oil industry, as they would argue against action on climate change on ideological grounds. Jerry Taylor spent 23 years with the Cato Institute — one of those right wing think tanks — latterly as vice president. Before he left in 2014, he would regularly appear on TV and radio, insisting that the science of climate change was uncertain and there was no need to act.

Now, he realises his arguments were based on a misinterpretation of the science, and he regrets the impact he's had on the debate.
Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes discovered leading climate-change skeptics had also been prominent skeptics on the dangers of cigarette smoking. "That was a Eureka moment," Oreskes tells BBC News. "We realised this was not a scientific debate." Decades before the energy industry tried to undermine the case for climate change, tobacco companies had used the same techniques to challenge the emerging links between smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s... As a later document by tobacco company Brown and Williamson summarised the approach: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public." Naomi Oreskes says this understanding of the power of doubt is vital. "They realise they can't win this battle by making a false claim that sooner or later would be exposed. But if they can create doubt, that would be sufficient — because if people are confused about the issue, there's a good chance they'll just keep smoking...."

Academics like David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt, fear the use of uncertainty in the past to confuse the public and undermine science has contributed to a dangerous erosion of trust in facts and experts across the globe today, far beyond climate science or the dangers of tobacco. He cites public attitudes to modern issues like the safety of 5G, vaccinations — and coronavirus.

"By cynically manipulating and distorting scientific evidence, the manufacturers of doubt have seeded in much of the public a cynicism about science, making it far more difficult to convince people that science provides useful — in some cases, vitally important — information.

"There is no question that this distrust of science and scientists is making it more difficult to stem the coronavirus pandemic."