The proportion of smokers who think vapes are more harmful than cigarettes is “worse than ever,” academics in the UK have said.
Researchers said that misconceptions about the harms of vapes compared to cigarettes could put smokers off quit attempts. It comes as the latest results from a major new poll of smokers in England were published.
Some 28,393 adult smokers in England were asked about their perceptions about e-cigarettes between November 2014 and June 2023, with 1,700 people interviewed each month.
A ship powered by renewable energy, including hydrogen produced onboard, is docked in the southeastern US state of Florida this week as it prepares to finish the last leg of a voyage around the world.
The 100-foot catamaran, dubbed the Energy Observer, has logged 63,040 nautical miles without using fossil fuels since it first started sailing in 2017. This particular trip around the world started in 2020.
The mission has tested renewable energy -- including by using solar panels and advanced sails called "oceanwings" -- as a power source in multiple climates off the coasts of Africa, Asia and Antarctica.
The automated 12-meter wings boost the ship's speed and reduce energy consumption.
"We learned a lot along this journey," captain Marin Jarry told AFP in Fort Lauderdale, just north of Miami.
Jarry said he wants to share what he has learned through seminars, articles and videos.
The project hopes to influence the shipping and maritime sectors, especially as its "oceanwings" have already been used in commercial shipping.
They were used on a freighter called the Canopee, which was designed to transport parts of the Ariane 6 rocket from Europe to a launch center in French Guiana on the northeast tip of South America.
In the course of the Energy Observer's current voyage, 40 percent of the vessel's energy has come from wind, 40 percent from solar and 20 percent from hydrogen.
The ship is set to make stops in Washington, New York and Boston before heading back to France.
An Energy Observer 2 is already in the works: a cargo ship measuring nearly 400 feet (120 meters) long, with a capacity to carry 5,000 metric tons. It is set to run on liquid hydrogen.
Maritime transport generates around 3 percent of worldwide greenhouse gasses.
Witnesses pushed back on Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) on Wednesday after he suggested women were receiving abortions "up to the moment of birth."
At a Senate Budget Committee hearing about reproductive health, Middlebury College Prof. Caitlin Myers disagreed after Kennedy called a fetus a "baby."
"There is no economic justice for the baby, because the baby's dead, right?" Kennedy asked.
"I don't really know how to answer your question," Myers said. "I would refer to it as a fetus."
"If the mother is healthy, and the baby is healthy, do you support abortion up to the moment of birth?" Kennedy wondered.
"I think that's a really hard question to answer, because that just doesn't happen," Myers explained. "You're asking me about something that simply doesn't happen."
The senator posed similar questions to Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung.
"If the mother is healthy and the baby is healthy, do you support abortion up to the moment of birth?" he said.
"So Senator, you're using really inflammatory language to talk about a medical procedure, and it's not a simple yes or no," Zahedi-Spung noted. "Not to mention, when you make statements like that, you're erasing the grief and the trauma that my patients are going through."
"You're not going to answer my question either, are you?" Kennedy complained.
"It's not a question that can be answered in an appropriate way, Senator," the doctor remarked.
In the discussion of human development, important distinctions are made between the terms "fetus" and "baby," reflecting not only biological differences but also the stages of development.
A fetus refers to an unborn offspring, from the end of the embryonic stage at about the 8th week after fertilization until birth. This period is characterized by significant growth and development, where all major organs start to form and function, yet the fetus is not fully developed to survive outside the womb without medical assistance before a certain period of gestation.
Southern Vietnam, including business hub Ho Chi Minh City and its "rice bowl" Mekong Delta region, suffered an unusually long heatwave in February, weather officials said Wednesday.
Several areas of the delta are also suffering drought and farmers are struggling to transport their crops due to low water levels in the region's canals.
The intense period of heat began on February 9, meteorologists told AFP, with temperatures reaching up to 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) -- an "abnormal" high for February in southern Vietnam, which usually sees hot weather peak at around 39C (102F) in April or May.
In Ca Mau province, at the tip of the Mekong Delta, farmer Hong Chi Hieu told AFP that "severe drought" had made the earth "very, very dry" and caused problems using the waterways.
"Most of us grow rice here. We have quite a bumper crop this year but the dry canals are badly impacting the transportation of our harvest," he said.
Le Dinh Quyet, chief forecaster at the Southern Meteorological and Hydrological Administration, said the El Nino weather phenomenon and the general impact of global climate change were contributing to the unusually long dry spell, which is still going on.
Globally, 2023 was the warmest year on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
It warned last month that this year could be even hotter because the naturally occurring El Nino climate pattern, which emerged in mid-2023, usually increases global temperatures for one year afterwards.
Scientists have warned extreme weather is also being intensified by global warming.
More than 80 canals have dried up in the Tran Van Thoi district of Ca Mau province, state-controlled news site VNExpress reported.
According to local authorities, agricultural production is entirely reliant on rainwater and, given its scarcity this year, farmers were forced to pump water from waterways into their fields.
That caused a large height difference between the riverside road surface and the water level below, leading to subsidence and landslides, local authorities said, according to VNExpress.
Tran Van Thoi has recorded around 340 cases of subsidence and landslides from the beginning of the year, resulting in more than 13 billion VND ($500,000) of damage.
An American lunar lander that tipped over during its historic touchdown last week likely only has hours left until its battery runs out, the private company operating it said Tuesday.
The uncrewed Odysseus, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, made the first return by a US craft to the Moon in five decades -- and the first such successful mission by the private sector.
But one of the lander's legs caught on the surface as it came down near the Moon's south pole, making it pitch over and come to rest on its side.
The mission, partially financed by NASA, was originally projected to last around seven days.
"Flight Controllers continue to communicate with Odysseus. This morning, Odysseus efficiently sent payload science data and imagery in furtherance of the Company's mission objectives," Intuitive Machines said Tuesday in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
"Flight controllers are working on final determination of battery life on the lander, which may continue up to an additional 10-20 hours," the update said.
Intuitive Machines on Monday said it intended to "collect data" from Odysseus "until the lander's solar panels are no longer exposed to light."
NASA is planning to return astronauts to the Moon later this decade, and paid Intuitive Machines around $120 million for the mission, as part of a new initiative to delegate cargo missions to the private sector and stimulate a "lunar economy."
Odysseus carries a suite of NASA instruments designed to improve scientific understanding of the lunar south pole, where the space agency plans to send astronauts under its Artemis program later this decade.
Unlike during the US space agency's Apollo missions, the plan is to build long-term habitats, harvesting polar ice for drinking water and for rocket fuel for onward missions to Mars.
The company also published a new photo taken by the probe during its descent, some 30 meters (100 feet) above the Moon's surface.
"The images included here are the closest observations of any spaceflight mission to the south pole region of the Moon," the company said.
Intuitive Machines joined an exclusive club of five countries that have achieved soft lunar landings: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and Japan. Three prior private attempts failed, including by another American company, Astrobotic, last month.
The Japanese space agency landed a craft on the Moon last month, but it also came down on its side.
However, JAXA on Monday announced it was able to wake up the SLIM lander following the lunar night, which lasts around two Earth weeks.
While global policymakers continue to drag their feet on phasing out planet-heating fossil fuels, scientists around the world "are freaking out" about high ocean temperatures, as they toldThe New York Times in reporting published Tuesday.
A "super El Niño" has expectedly heated up the Pacific, but Times reporter David Gelles spoke with ocean experts from Miami to Cambridge to Sydney about record heat in the North Atlantic as well as conditions around the poles.
"The sea ice around the Antarctic is just not growing," said Matthew England, a University of New South Wales professor who studies ocean currents. "The temperature's just going off the charts. It's like an omen of the future."
Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey who watches polar ice levels, told the paper that "we're used to having a fairly good handle on things. But the impression at the moment is that things have gone further and faster than we expected. That's an uncomfortable place as a scientist to be."
Last week, Jeff Berardelli, WFLA's chief meteorologist and climate specialist, also highlighted the warm North Atlantic and that "all signs are pointing to a busy hurricane season" later this year.
Noting that in the middle of this month, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic were around 2°F higher than the 1990-2020 normal and nearly 3°F above the 1980s, Berardelli explained:
That may not sound like a lot, but consider this is averaged over the majority of the basin shown in the red outline in the image above. A deviation like that is unheard of... until now.
To put it into more relatable terms, considering what's been normal for the most recent 30 years, the statistical chance that any February day would be as warm as it is right now is 1-in-280,000. That's not a typo. This is according to University of Miami researcher Brian McNoldy...
And that 1-in-280,000 is compared against a recent climate, which had already been warmed substantially by climate change. If you tried to compare it against a climate considered normal around the year 1900, the math would become nonsensical. Meaning an occurrence like this simply would not be possible.
McNoldy also stressed the shocking nature of current conditions to the Times, telling Gelles that "the North Atlantic has been record-breakingly warm for almost a year now... It's just astonishing. Like, it doesn't seem real."
The new comments from McNoldy and other scientists come on the heels of various institutions and experts worldwide recently confirming that 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Research also showed that it was the warmest year on record for the oceans, which capture about 91% of excess heat from greenhouse gases.
As Common Dreamsreported last month, Adam Scaife, a principal fellow at the United Kingdom's Met Office, said that "it is striking that the temperature record for 2023 has broken the previous record set in 2016 by so much because the main effect of the current El Niño will come in 2024."
That's the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a climate phenomenon that also has a cool phase called La Niña expected later this year. Still, Scaife warned that "the Met Office's 2024 temperature forecast shows this year has strong potential to be another record-breaking year."
Throughout the record-shattering 2023, experts also expressed alarm. After an April study showed that the ocean is heating up faster than previously thought, the BBCrevealed that some scientists declined to speak about it on the record, reporting that "one spoke of being 'extremely worried and completely stressed.'"
In July, when a buoy roughly 40 miles south of Miami recorded a sea surface temperature of 101.1°F just after a "100% coral mortality" event at a restoration site, Florida State University associate professor Mariana Fuentes toldNPR that "if you have several species that are being impacted at the same time by an increase in temperature, there's going to be a general collapse of the whole ecosystem."
The following month, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that the average daily global ocean surface temperature hit 69.7°F, and deputy director Samantha Burgess said, "The fact that we've seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean may get between now and next March."
"The more we burn fossil fuels, the more excess heat will be taken out by the oceans, which means the longer it will take to stabilize them and get them back to where they were," Burgess emphasized at the time.
Last year ended with a United Nations climate summit that scientists called "a tragedy for the planet," because the final deal out of the conference—led by an Emirati oil CEO—did not demand a global phaseout of fossil fuels.
Azerbaijan, which is set to host this year's U.N. conference in November, has similarly selected a former fossil fuel executive to lead the event. The country also plans to increase its gas production by a third during the next decade.
Can the multi-billion-dollar denim industry keep producing blue jeans in every shape, size and silhouette, while shrinking oversized levels of hazardous pollution? Research published Tuesday suggests a new dye could be a step in the right direction.
Scientists have been searching for ways to make a more sustainable form of indigo, used for centuries to colour textiles, but which in its modern synthetic form needs toxic chemicals, large quantities of water and is linked to substantial carbon dioxide emissions.
But a study published in the journal Nature Communications suggests ditching the classic dye altogether.
Using Indican -- a colorless compound also derived from indigo-producing plants -- could reduce the environmental and societal impacts associated with dying jeans by around 90 percent because it does not need toxic chemicals, researchers said.
"It's been known for some years that indigo could be replaced by this other chemical called indican, because you can use it without any strong chemicals," study author Ditte Hededam Welner, a researcher at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability Enzyme Engineering and Structural Biology, told AFP.
The researchers engineered a variant of an enzyme found in the indigo-producing plant that could produce indican on an industrial scale.
While they said production of indican would still require polluting petrochemicals, so would not be significantly better than producing synthetic indigo, the benefits come when the dye is put to use.
Indican in powdered form can be dissolved in water then used on fabric and activated with either an enzyme or exposure to light.
The study found light-driven dyeing could cut the environmental damage of traditional indigo dyeing by 73 percent, while using the enzyme could slash the impacts by up to 92 percent.
In both cases, the classic blue jean color turns up the same as when conventional indigo is used.
Researchers suggest that, if indican were to replace indigo to dye the nearly four billion jeans traded annually, there would be a significant reduction in production of toxic waste and global CO2 emissions.
The authors, who have a published patent for their study, acknowledged limitations to their work, including a lack of facilities to simulate indican production at scale.
Indican could also be slightly more expensive than traditional dye, they said.
But the study said growing consumer demand for sustainable clothing could still make indican "a commercially viable route".
Just over five years ago, on 22 February 2019, an unmanned space probe was placed in orbit around the Moon. Named Beresheet and built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, it was intended to be the first private spacecraft to perform a soft landing. Among the probe’s payload were tardigrades, renowned for their ability to survive in even the harshest climates.
The mission ran into trouble from the start, with the failure of “star tracker” cameras intended to determine the spacecraft’s orientation and thus properly control its motors. Budgetary limitations had imposed a pared-down design, and while the command center was able to work around some problems, things got even trickier on 11 April, the day of the landing.
On the way to the Moon the spacecraft had been traveling at high speed, and it needed to be slowed way down to make a soft landing. Unfortunately during the braking maneuver a gyroscope failed, blocking the primary engine. At an altitude of 150 m, Beresheet was still moving at 500 km/h, far too fast to be stopped in time. The impact was violent – the probe shattered and its remains were scattered over a distance of around a hundred metres. We know this because the site was photographed by NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) satellite on 22 April.
Animals that can withstand (almost) anything
So what happened to the tardigrades that were traveling on the probe? Given their remarkable abilities to survive situations that would kill pretty much any other animal, could they have contaminated the Moon? Worse, might they be able to reproduce and colonize it?
Tardigrades are microscopic animals that measure less than a millimeter in length. All have neurons, a mouth opening at the end of a retractable proboscis, an intestine containing a microbiota and four pairs of non-articulated legs ending in claws, and most have two eyes. As small as they are, they share a common ancestor with arthropods such as insects and arachnids.
Most tardigrades live in aquatic environments, but they can be found in any environment, even urban ones. Emmanuelle Delagoutte, a researcher at the CNRS, collects them in the mosses and lichens of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. To be active, feed on microalgae such as chlorella, and move, grow and reproduce, tardigrades need to be surrounded by a film of water. They reproduce sexually or asexually via parthenogenesis (from an unfertilized egg) or even hermaphroditism, when an individual (which possesses both male and female gametes) self-fertilizes. Once the egg has hatched, the active life of a tardigrade lasts from 3 to 30 months. A total of 1,265 species have been described, including two fossils.
Tardigrades are famous for their resistance to conditions that exist neither on Earth nor on the Moon. They can shut down their metabolism by losing up to 95% of their body water. Some species synthesize a sugar, trehalose, that acts as an antifreeze, while others synthesize proteins that are thought to incorporate cellular constituents into an amorphous “glassy” network that offers resistance and protection to each cell.
During dehydration, the tardigrade’s body can shrink to half its normal size. The legs disappear, with only the claws still visible. This state, known as cryptobiosis, persists until conditions for active life become favorable again.
Depending on the species of tardigrade, individuals need more or less time to dehydrate and not all specimens of the same species manage to return to active life. Dehydrated adults survive for a few minutes at temperatures as low as -272°C or as high as 150°C, and over the long term at high doses of gamma rays of 1,000 or 4,400 Gray (Gy). By way of comparison, a dose of 10 Gy is fatal for humans, and 40-50,000 Gy sterilizes all types of material. However, whatever the dose, radiation kills tardigrade eggs. What’s more, the protection afforded by cryptobiosis is not always clear-cut, as in the case of Milnesium tardigradum, where radiation affects both active and dehydrated animals in the same way.
So what happened to the tardigrades after they crashed on the Moon? Are any of them still viable, buried under the moon’s regolith, the dust that varies in depth from a few meters to several dozen meters?
First of all, they have to have survived the impact. Laboratory tests have shown that frozen specimens of the Hypsibius dujardini species travelling at 3,000 km/h in a vacuum were fatally damaged when they smashed into sand. However, they survived impacts of 2,600 km/h or less – and their “hard landing” on the Moon, though unwanted, was far slower.
The Moon’s surface is not protected from solar particles and cosmic rays, particularly gamma rays, but here too, the tardigrades would be able to resist. In fact, Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, professor at the University of Kiel in Germany, and his team have shown that the doses of gamma rays hitting the lunar surface were permanent but low compared with the doses mentioned above – 10 years’ exposure to gamma rays would correspond to a total dose of around 1 Gy.
Finally, the tardigrades would have to withstand a lack of water as well as temperatures ranging from -170 to -190°C during the lunar night and 100 to 120°C during the day. A lunar day or night lasts a long time, just under 15 Earth days. The probe itself wasn’t designed to withstand such extremes and even if it hadn’t crashed, it would have ceased all activity after just a few Earth days.
Unfortunately for the tardigrades, they can’t overcome the lack of liquid water, oxygen and microalgae – they would never be able to reactivate, much less reproduce. Their colonising the Moon is thus impossible. Still, inactive specimens are on lunar soil and their presence raises ethical questions, as Matthew Silk, an ecologist at the University of Edinburgh, points out. Moreover, at a time when space exploration is taking off in all directions, contaminating other planets could mean that we would lose the opportunity to detect extraterrestrial life.
The author thanks Emmanuelle Delagoutte and Cédric Hubas of the Muséum de Paris, and Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber of the University of Kiel, for their critical reading of the text and their advice.
Omega-3 fatty acids have garnered significant interest among patients and clinicians for their potential protective health effects, including lung health. In our recently published research, my colleagues and I found that higher dietary intake of omega-3 fatty acids is linked to better lung function and longer survival in patients with pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic respiratory disease.
Found in foods such as fish and nuts and in some supplements, omega-3 fatty acids are polyunsaturated fats that are essential nutrients for people. They serve several important functions in the body, such as providing structure to cells and regulating inflammation.
I am a pulmonologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and my research team and I are working to identify risk factors that may contribute to the development of pulmonary fibrosis. In this disease, scarred lung tissue can lead to respiratory failure and death.
We examined whether higher levels of DHA and EPA in the blood of patients with pulmonary fibrosis in different groups of research participants in the U.S. were linked to disease progression. We found that patients with higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had a slower decline in lung function and longer survival. Notably, these findings persisted even after we accounted for other factors such as age and co-occurring diseases.
Why it matters
Currently, there are very few treatments available for pulmonary fibrosis. Those that do exist have significant side effects. Our findings suggest that increasing omega-3 fatty acids in a patient’s diet may slow the progression of this devastating disease.
Researchers have investigated the role of nutrition in many other diseases, but it remains understudied in chronic lung diseases, including pulmonary fibrosis. Our study, along with other published research, suggests dietary modifications may influence the trajectory of this disease and improve a patient’s ability to tolerate treatment.
Scarring in lung tissue makes it more difficult to breathe.
Furthermore, other studies using mice have shed light on how omega-3 fatty acids may protect against pulmonary fibrosis by regulating the activity of inflammatory cells and slowing buildup of scar tissue in the lungs.
What still isn’t known
Since we were able to measure omega-3 fatty acid levels in the blood at only one point in time, we could not determine whether changing levels over time correlates with changes in pulmonary fibrosis.
Crucially, it remains unknown whether increasing omega-3 fatty acid levels in the blood will have a meaningful effect on the lives of patients with pulmonary fibrosis. Omega-3 fatty acids in the blood might not directly affect pulmonary fibrosis and may simply reflect healthier lifestyles and diets.
Clinical trials are necessary to actually determine whether omega-3 fatty acids are beneficial for patients with respiratory diseases.
What’s next
We plan to continue researching whether omega-3 fatty acids have a protective effect against pulmonary fibrosis.
Specifically, we hope to determine the mechanism by which omega-3-enriched interventions affect the lungs of patients with pulmonary fibrosis.
These will be important steps to identify patients who may be particularly responsive to omega-3 therapies and move these treatments toward clinical testing.
Earlier this month, a Hong Kong company lost HK$200 million (A$40 million) in a deepfake scam. An employee transferred funds following a video conference call with scammers who looked and sounded like senior company officials.
Generative AI tools can create image, video and voice replicas of real people saying and doing things they never would have done. And these tools are becoming increasingly easy to access and use.
But if you’ve been a victim of a deepfake scam, can you obtain compensation or redress for your losses? The legislation hasn’t caught up yet.
Who is responsible?
In most cases of deepfake fraud, scammers will avoid trying to fool banks and security systems, instead opting for so-called “push payment” frauds where victims are tricked into directing their bank to pay the fraudster.
So, if you’re seeking a remedy, there are at least four possible targets:
the fraudster (who will often have disappeared)
the social media platform that hosted the fake
any bank that paid out the money on the instructions of the victim of the fraud
the provider of the AI tool that created the fake.
The quick answer is that once the fraudster vanishes, it is currently unclear whether you have a right to a remedy from any of these other parties (though that may change in the future).
Let’s see why.
The social media platform
In principle, you could seek damages from a social media platform if it hosted a deepfake used to defraud you. But there are hurdles to overcome.
Platforms typically frame themselves as mere conduits of content – which means they are not legally responsible for the content. In the United States, platforms are explicitly shielded from this kind of liability. However, no such protection exists in most other common law countries, including Australia.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is taking Meta (Facebook’s parent company) to court. They are testing the possibility of making digital platforms directly liable for deepfake crypto scams if they actively target the ads to possible victims.
The ACCC is also arguing Meta should be liable as an accessory to the scam – for failing to remove the misleading ads promptly once notified of the problem.
At the very least, platforms should be responsible for promptly removing deepfake content used for fraudulent purposes. They may already claim to be doing this, but it might soon become a legal obligation.
The bank
In Australia, the legal obligations of whether a bank has to reimburse you in the case of a deepfake scam aren’t settled.
This was recently considered by the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, in a case likely to be influential in Australia. It suggests banks don’t have a duty to refuse a customer’s payment instructions where the recipient is suspected to be a (deepfake) fraudster, even if they have a general duty to act promptly once the scam is discovered.
That said, the UK is introducing a mandatory scheme that requires banks to reimburse victims of push payment fraud, at least in certain circumstances.
In Australia, the ACCC and others have presented proposals for a similar scheme, though none exists at this stage.
Australian banks are unlikely to be liable for customer losses due to scams, but new schemes could force them to reimburse victims. TK Kurikawa/Shutterstock
The AI tool provider
The providers of generative AI tools are currently not legally obliged to make their tools unusable for fraud or deception. In law, there is no duty of care to the world at large to prevent someone else’s fraud.
However, providers of generative AI do have an opportunity to use technology to reduce the likelihood of deepfakes. Like banks and social media platforms, they may soon be required to do this, at least in some jurisdictions.
The recently proposed EU AI Act obligates the providers of generative AI tools to design these tools in a way that allows the synthetic/fake content to be detected.
Currently, it’s proposed this could work through digital watermarking, although its effectiveness is still being debated. Other measures include prompt limits, digital ID to verify a person’s identity, and further education about the signs of deepfakes.
Can we stop deepfake fraud altogether?
None of these legal or technical guardrails are likely to be entirely effective in stemming the tide of deepfake fraud, scams or deception – especially as generative AI technology keeps advancing.
However, the response doesn’t need to be perfect: slowing down AI generated fakes and frauds can still reduce harm. We also need to pressure platforms, banks and tech providers to stay on top of the risks.
So while you might never be able to completely prevent yourself from being the victim of a deepfake scam, with all these new legal and technical developments, you might soon be able to seek compensation if things go wrong.
With audio, video and image deepfakes only growing more realistic, we need multi-layered strategies of prevention, education and compensation.
There has been a 10 percent rise in workplace injuries in regions of the U.S. where it is legal to smoke a joint, findings that come as countries including Germany and Thailand debate loosening or tightening rules around marijuana use.
"Laws that allow recreational marijuana sales were associated with a 10 percent increase in workplace injuries among individuals ages 20 to 34," the researchers said, in findings published by the American Medical Association (AMA) and based on official workplace injury data.
While anyone who wants to stay fit knows to go easy on the booze and fries, it turns out keeping such temptations at a literal distance is key to a healthy heart.
Living within a 15 minute walk of pubs and fast food outlets is associated with a greater risk of heart failure, going by health data covering half a million people in Britain.
"Compared with those with no exposure to composite ready-to-eat food environments, participants in the highest density score category had a 16 percent higher risk of [heart failure]," the US-based researchers said, after assessing information from the UK Biobank.
An aerial view of the Energy Observer, the first hydrogen-powered, zero-emission vessel to be self-sufficient in energy, while moored at Pier Sixty Six Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on February 27, 2024 © Marco BELLO / AFP
