HEALTH AND SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS

November 14, 2018 (San Diego's East County) -- Our Health and Science Highlights provide cutting edge news that could impact your health and our future.

HEALTH

• In bipartisan push, Medicare expands to give seniors in-home support  (CSMonitor)
• Online abortion pills come to U.S. (Albuquerque Journal)
• New exercise guidelines: Move more, sit less, start younger (AP)
• Vitamin D and Fish Oil Supplements Mostly Disappoint in Long-Awaited Research Results (NPR)

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

• Your smartphone photos are totally fake — and you love it (Washington Post)
• How Tesla's ‘Bioweapon Defense Mode’ Has Helped in California Wildfire (Inverse)
• Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks (National Geographic)

For excerpts and links to full stories, click “read more” and scroll down.

HEALTH

In bipartisan push, Medicare expands to give seniors in-home support  (CSMonitor)

 By next year, Medicare Advantage will offer additional services to seniors – including help with chores, safety devices, and home-delivered meals – in about 20 states. It's a rare moment of bipartisanship. 

Online abortion pills come to U.S. (Albuquerque Journal)

Voters in Alabama and West Virginia Tuesday approved “trigger” measures that could lead to state abortion bans if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade — a possibility raised by the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the court. Even while Roe’s constitutional right to abortion remains in place, abortion has become so hard to get in many parts of the country that an online service called Aid Access launched in the summer to provide prescription abortion pills by mail to women in the U.S. Founder Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician and activist, has for years run Women on Web, which ships abortion pills to women in countries where abortion is illegal.

New exercise guidelines: Move more, sit less, start younger (AP)

Move more, sit less and get kids active as young as age 3, say new federal guidelines that stress that any amount and any type of exercise helps health. The advice is the first update since the government's physical activity guidelines came out a decade ago. Since then, the list of benefits of exercise has grown, and there's more evidence to back things that were of unknown value before, such as short, high-intense workouts and taking the stairs instead of an elevator.

Vitamin D and Fish Oil Supplements Mostly Disappoint in Long-Awaited Research Results (NPR)

…."Overall, they showed that neither fish oil nor vitamin D actually lowered the incidence of heart disease or cancer," Fine says.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Your smartphone photos are totally fake — and you love it (Washington Post)

Night Sight on Google’s Pixel, which shoots pictures in the dark, shows how phone cameras have become faketastic.

How Tesla's ‘Bioweapon Defense Mode’ Has Helped in California Wildfire (Inverse)

 Tesla's Bioweapon Defense Mode is helping electric car owners in the California wildfires. The air filtering system in the Model S and X have enabled users to breathe cleanly as particles fill the surrounding atmosphere. Tesla owners using the defense mode report good results.

Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks (National Geographic)

 In Mozambique, researchers are racing to understand the genetics of elephants born without tusks—and the consequences of the trait.