HEALTH AND SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS

May 29, 2019 (San Diego's East County) -- Our Health and Science Highlights provide cutting edge news that could impact your health and our future.

HEALTH

• Cannabis can leave teenagers three years behind their classmates (Daily Mail)
• Aspartame Is Linked To Leukemia And Lymphoma In Landmark Study On Humans (Daily Health Post)
• Do You Really Need 10,000 Steps Per Day? (NPR)
• Free-Range Food Labels: Can My Groceries Really Help The Planet? (NPR)
• Lower-fat diet reduces women’s risk of dying from breast cancer, study says (Washington Post)

 SCIENCE AND TECH

• Experts warn 5G could disrupt weather forecasting (NBC San Diego)
• Farmers are using flowers instead of chemicals to beat back pests (GreenMatters)
• An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth - Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing (ProPublica)
• Hobbling Huawei: How America woke up to the threat from 5G (Reuters)
• Strange waves rippled around Earth. Now we may know why. (National Geographic)
• In Yemen Conflict, Some See A New Age Of Drone Warfare (NPR)

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

HEALTH

Cannabis can leave teenagers three years behind their classmates (Daily Mail)

Regularly smoking cannabis can affect teenagers so severely that they end up three years behind their classmates in terms of brain development, a landmark study has found. 

Aspartame Is Linked To Leukemia And Lymphoma In Landmark Study On Humans (Daily Health Post)

It’s time to play Kick the Can—of soda, that is. In a 22-year landmark study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutritioninvolving over 125,000 people, significant links were found between daily intake of aspartame and the development of leukemia and lymphoma. (1) These findings are consistent with previous studies in animal models:

Do You Really Need 10,000 Steps Per Day? (NPR)

...women who took 4,400 steps per day, on average, were 40 percent less likely to die during the follow-up period of about four years compared to women who took 2,700 steps. The findings were published Wednesday in JAMA Internal Medicine …. The benefits of walking maxed out at about 7,500 steps. In other words, women who walked more than 7,500 steps per day saw no additional boost in longevity. 

Free-Range Food Labels: Can My Groceries Really Help The Planet? (NPR)

 So many food labels proclaim their eco-virtues these days — organic. Pasture-raised. Cage-free. Non-GMO. What do they actually mean? Here are six ways to make sense of it all.  

Lower-fat diet reduces women’s risk of dying from breast cancer, study says (Washington Post)

 Women who followed a lower-fat diet rich in fruits, vegetables and grains had a lower risk of dying of breast cancer than those on a higher-fat diet, according to the results of major study released Wednesday.

SCIENCE AND TECH

Experts warn 5G could disrupt weather forecasting (NBC San Diego)

That means predictions of storms, floods, and hurricanes could be set back by years.

Farmers are using flowers instead of chemicals to beat back pests (GreenMatters)

Fast Company reports that many organic farmers are going back to older practices by cultivating an environment where natural pest predators can live. They're growing flowers amongst their other crops, creating a home for creatures like parasitic wasps, who eat aphids in their larval state. It's been a common practice to grow flowers around the perimeter of farmland acres, because it encourages biodiversity. But agriculturalists are experimenting with strips of flowers within their crops, creating a highway for bugs to travel farther and cover more ground for pest control.

An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth - Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing (ProPublica)

The desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t — and won’t — deliver the climate benefit they promise.

Hobbling Huawei: How America woke up to the threat from 5G (Reuters)

Washington is widely seen as having taken the initiative in the global campaign against Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, a tech juggernaut that in the three decades since its founding has become a pillar of Beijing’s bid to expand its global influence. Yet Reuters interviews with more than two dozen current and former Western officials show it was the Australians who led the way in pressing for action on 5G; that the United States was initially slow to act; and that Britain and other European countries are caught between security concerns and the competitive prices offered by Huawei. 

Strange waves rippled around Earth. Now we may know why. (National Geographic)

An “exceptional phenomenon” near the tiny islands of Mayotte may help explain a low-frequency rumble that swept around the world last year. 

In Yemen Conflict, Some See A New Age Of Drone Warfare (NPR)

Iran has been developing drones for both itself and its proxies. In recent months those drones have been used for targeted assassinations, military strikes and to sow chaos in the region.