Month: January 2016

This is just as awkward as it looks. (credit: Selenia Dimension)

In a bracing op-ed published yesterday in the British Medical Journal, researchers questioned the idea that cancer screening "saves lives" as many PSAs for these services promise. Cancer researcher Vinay Prasad and his colleagues warn that cancer screening has "never been shown" to affect general mortality rates, arguing that patients are being over-screened and often misdiagnosed.

The problem they highlight is a common one in the medical field: statistics on how cancer screening affects mortality rates have been widely misunderstood and misreported. Prasad and his colleagues explain that studies show cancer screening can lower mortality rates for people who already have specific diseases such as lung cancer, but the general mortality rate has remained unchanged since the advent of common tests for breast cancer, colon cancer, neuroblastoma, and prostate cancer. In other words, screening may be slightly improving mortality rates for people who have a disease, but screening is not improving mortality overall. As the researchers put it in their op-ed, people are "simply...trading one type of death for another." More simply: even if you're screened for cancer, your risk of dying every year remains the same.

This wouldn't be cause for concern if it weren't for the fact that cancer screening is expensive for both patients and the healthcare industry. On top of that, screening can itself cause health problems. False positives, which are common, can lead to extreme anxiety, unnecessary treatments, and even death.

(credit: Katherine Martinelli/Flickr)

The federal government’s dietary guidelines, updated every five years, just received its regularly scheduled refresh.

The big takeaways largely stand in the revised version, released jointly Thursday by the Agriculture and Health and Human Services Departments. Generally, people should load their diet with “vegetables, fruits, grains, low-fat and fat-free dairy, lean meats and other protein foods and oils, while limiting saturated fats, trans fats, added sugars and sodium.”

But there are some interesting changes to chew on, too. These include a notable ditching of a specific limit on cholesterol—what some might say is a win for the egg industry (and egg lovers)—plus sterner warnings about added sugar in the diet. For the first time, the guidelines also call out adolescent and adult males for eating too much protein and give a definitive nod of approval to moderate coffee drinking— that is, three-to-five 8-ounce cups a day.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere. (credit: T-Mobile)

T-Mobile USA will soon meet with the Federal Communications Commission about whether its controversial “Binge On” program violates network neutrality rules. But even though T-Mobile is throttling video—and the rules ban throttling—the carrier might be able to convince the FCC that an exception should be made.

The rules—which face a court challenge from a wireless industry trade group that T-Mobile belongs to—say that Internet providers including mobile carriers “shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.”

Binge On throttles content based on its type, forcing a downgrade of all video to lower resolution. That’s a clear violation, right? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that it is, saying that “throttling all traffic based on application type… obviously violates the FCC’s Open Internet Order.”

Google Translate has been making some rather unflattering conversions when going from Ukrainian to Russian. "Russia" became "Mordor," "Russians" became "occupiers," and Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, became "sad little horse."

Mordor is, of course, a fictional land from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.

Screenshots of the bad translations were captured and passed around Russian social media site VKontakte.