Month: January 2017

Enlarge / Close up of cancer cells in the cervix, the portion of the uterus that is attached to the top of the vagina. (credit: Getty | American Cancer Society)

Cervical cancer is 77 percent more deadly for black women and 44 percent more deadly for white women than previously thought, researchers report today in the journal Cancer.

But the lethal boosts aren’t from more women actually dying than before—they’re from scientists correcting their own calculation error. In the past, their estimates didn’t account for women who had undergone hysterectomies—which almost always removes the cervix, and with it the risk of getting cervical cancer.

“We don’t include men in our calculation because they are not at risk for cervical cancer and by the same measure, we shouldn’t include women who don’t have a cervix,” Anne F. Rositch, the study's lead author and an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins told The New York Times.

(credit: Ryan McLaughlin)

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology yesterday announced a major crackdown on VPN (virtual private network) services that encrypt Internet traffic and let residents access websites blocked by the country's so-called Great Firewall. The ministry "said that all special cable and VPN services on the mainland needed to obtain prior government approval—a move making most VPN service providers in the country of 730 million Internet users illegal," reported the South China Morning Post, a major newspaper in Hong Kong.

China's announcement said the country's Internet service market "has signs of disordered development that requires urgent regulation and governance" and that the crackdown is needed to “strengthen cyberspace information security management," according to the Post. The government said its crackdown would begin immediately and run until March 31, 2018.

Numerous Internet users in China rely on VPNs to access sites blocked or censored by the government's Great Firewall, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, The Pirate Bay, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many others. Apple recently pulled New York Times apps from its Chinese App Store to comply with Chinese regulations.

Praising Resident Evil 7 isn't as simple as calling it "a return to the series' roots," though that part doesn't hurt. Capcom has added more active, combat-heavy stuff to nearly every Resident Evil game over the past 21 years, and 2012's Resident Evil 6 saw the core fun of the series topple over as a result.

In many ways, we're back to the horror series' original formula: big, old house; various collect-a-thon puzzles that unlock doors; the uneasy feeling that something's about to pop up and get you. But there's more. This game looks and plays differently, and it does this to emphasize something new to the series: an evil that is just as terrifying as it is on your level.

NOAA

In November, the most expensive and advanced weather satellite ever built in the United States launched, and it then spent several weeks reaching a geosynchronous orbit nearly 36,000km from Earth. After some initial diagnostics, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration turned the GOES-16 satellite (GOES stands for "Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite") on and began taking photos of Earth.

On Monday, the agency released the first images taken by GOES-16—and do they ever deliver the goods. "These images come from the most sophisticated technology ever flown in space to predict severe weather on Earth," said Stephen Volz, director of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. "The fantastically rich images provide us with our first glimpse of the impact GOES-16 will have on developing life-saving forecasts.”