News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
All of Us, an ambitious health and genetics study aiming to enroll 1 million volunteers who represent the United States’ diversity, has reached a major milestone: the first release of nearly 100,000 whole genomes. The DNA sequences are tied to anonymized health records from the participants, allowing the study of how gene variants influence health. … Read more
Carlo Rovelli and Matteo Smerlak The world’s military expenditure has nearly doubled since 2000. It now amounts to about $2 trillion per year, more than half of which is from NATO countries. Now, with the war raging in Ukraine, countries are rushing to increase their budgets even more; Germany, for instance, recently announced a roughly … Read more
Green areas give you more than just a place to stretch your legs – they can also affect your chances of suffering a stroke, according to a new study that linked having green spaces close by with a 16 percent reduction in stroke risk. For the purposes of the research, the nearby green spaces … Read more
The rate of gun violence continues to rise across America. There was nearly a 30 percent increase in homicides between 2019 and 2020, making it the largest one-year increase in six decades. The number of gun deaths in 2021 climbed even higher and is approaching the previous peaks in gun death rates in the early … Read more
By Clare Wilson Hello, and welcome to this week’s Health Check, the weekly newsletter that gives you the health and fitness news you can really trust. To receive this free, weekly newsletter in your inbox, sign up here. Last week, one of my stories was on whether vaping is helpful or harmful in reducing smoking rates. … Read more
Why do fitness device makers claim you need to take 10,000 steps every day? Do you also really need to drink eight glasses of water daily? The scientific basis for popular health claims is often thin. A piece in the New York Times, for example, notes that the idea of 10,000 steps was based more … Read more
After Omicron comes pi in the Greek alphabet. And then rho, sigma, tau…. Before SARS-CoV-2 finishes its grand tour through the Greek alphabet, the global public health establishment should do what it should have done long before this coronavirus emerged. It must put in place the basic health systems needed to detect new outbreaks and … Read more
As people in the US prepare to turn their clocks ahead one hour in mid-March, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time to daylight saving time. About a third of Americans say they don’t look forward to these … Read more
A new study adds support to the idea that eating better foods is beneficial even without obtaining weight loss – with the Nordic diet reducing blood sugar and cholesterol even when no weight was lost. “It’s surprising because most people believe that positive effects on blood sugar and cholesterol are solely due to weight loss,” … Read more
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 375, Issue 6585. The reconnaissance trip in western Venezuela was going smoothly—until a gunman took aim at their windshield. It was March 2019, and two infectious disease specialists, Alberto Paniz Mondolfi and Carlos Hernandez, were driving back to their headquarters from villages in Venezuela’s disease-ridden Portuguesa … Read more