Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Don't assume this kid is going to become more violent because of the games he plays, the APA warns. (credit: Flickr/ Luderbrus)

In a statement this week, the American Psychological Association clarified that, despite popular and political suggestions to the contrary, "there is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior."

The APA's new resolution on this matter is an update to a 2015 APA resolution, which the group said at the time "confirms [the] link between playing violent video games and aggression." But that increase in generalized aggression cannot and should not be extended to link violent games to violent behavior, despite "many occasions in which members of the media or policymakers have cited that resolution as evidence that violent video games are the cause of violent behavior, including mass shootings," the APA said this week.

The updated resolution makes this important distinction plain right from the start:

Enlarge / Harmful compounds linger on surfaces long after cigarettes have been stubbed out. (credit: flickr user: .jocelyn.)

As we all know, smokers continue to smell of smoke long after they've finished their last cigarette. But it's not just a smell; this “third-hand smoke” has many of the harmful substances in cigarette smoke, and it lingers on clothes, bodies, and surfaces. Now we've confirmed that smokers can bring third-hand smoke into smoke-free environments with them.

A paper in Science Advances this week reports finding third-hand smoke in a cinema that has been smoke-free for 15 years. Every time a new audience filed into the cinema, chemist Roger Sheu and his colleagues detected a sharp spike in tobacco-related pollutants. They estimate that the audiences were exposed to the equivalent of between one and 10 cigarettes’ worth of second-hand smoke.

Lingering contaminants

Regulations preventing indoor smoking have done a great job of limiting exposure to cigarette smoke, write Sheu and his colleagues, but third-hand smoke is a “major exposure pathway” to the hazardous substances found in tobacco. With worldwide smoking rates still above 20 percent and public health expert agreement that there is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke, this represents a “major risk for nonsmokers,” they say.