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Health Policy InsightIn a new book, Dr Lucy McBride aims to help us navigate US healthcare – and tread carefully in the wellness industry
Most of us want to be healthy, but it’s easier said than done. In the US, people are caught between a broken medical system and a well-resourced wellness industry. The failings of the former – cost barriers, rushed appointments, impersonal attention – push them towards the snake-oil solutions of the latter.
Over 25 years of practicing medicine, running a primary care practice in Washington DC, Dr Lucy McBride has seen patients struggle to navigate the medical system.
Continue reading...Thermal drone footage shows a Microsoft-backed AI datacenter powering its operations with dozens of unpermitted generators
The largest planned AI datacenter in New Jersey is being accused of violating federal law after a visual investigation found the site running dozens of unpermitted gas-powered generators.
Thermal drone footage captured by the non-profit newsroom Floodlight last week showed the partly completed DataOne facility in Vineland was operating at least 45 of the site’s 62 generators at the time.
Continue reading...People with allergies must be able to travel without fear, and a compassionate society should respect that
What are you most scared of? Perhaps snakes send a chill down your spine. Or heights leave your knees weak. Peanuts may sound like an odd source of phobia, but they have taken on an absurd bogeyman quality for me since my daughter was taken to hospital by ambulance after eating peanut butter when she was six months old. Just the sight of a bowl on a pub bar, or their shells discarded on the pavement, can raise my heart rate – even when I’m not with her.
Nowhere is the sight of peanuts more confronting than at 30,000ft, especially now when millions are jetting back from their holidays. Travelling with a severely allergic child can be a nightmare for all sorts of reasons, but the idea you could be sat next to a passenger consuming the very thing that has hospitalised them is its own kind of hell.
Lucy Pasha-Robinson is a Guardian assistant Opinion editor
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Continue reading...Experts say findings mean breast screenings for cancer could also flag cardiovascular problems in women
Doctors have discovered a way to use routine mammograms that screen for breast cancer to spot heart disease, the world’s leading – and frequently underdiagnosed – cause of death in women.
Researchers analysed the scans using artificial intelligence and were able to successfully identify women with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure or who had suffered a stroke.
Continue reading...The pioneering Japanese artist talked openly about how her mental health and neurodivergence informed her creativity, paving the way for the likes of Turner prize winner Nnena Kalu
Yayoi Kusama – who has died at the age of 97 – was 10 when she first started experiencing vivid hallucinations consisting of visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, of a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots; they would become Kusama’s artistic obsession. She hallucinated flowers, too. “I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe”, she once said, when asked about that recurring motif. “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.”
For Kusama, art making was a means of survival. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live”, she said in a 2012 interview. In so doing, she became one of the most acclaimed and admired contemporary artists, staging happenings and influencing the pop art movement as a pioneering figure in the New York avant garde. Her exhibitions and major retrospectives draw huge crowds. In 2022, due to enormous public demand, Tate Modern in London extended her Infinity Mirror Rooms show for a whole extra year (it ended up running until 2024).
Continue reading...Letters obtained by Guardian and AP contradict testimony that 2019 visit to Samoa had ‘nothing to do with vaccines’
Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.
Continue reading...Findings from research into illnesses associated with bathing in lakes and rivers come amid boom in hobby
Wild swimming has been linked to a higher risk of stomach bugs and skin rashes, according to the largest ever controlled study of illnesses associated with bathing in rivers and lakes.
The research found that swimmers at locations in Hungary were more than twice as likely to develop skin problems, while the risk of contracting a stomach bug rose significantly in water with higher concentrations of E coli and other bacteria linked to faecal pollution.
Continue reading...Revisited: Guardian journalist Michael Safi looks into the world of artificial intelligence, exploring the dangers and promises it holds for society
Today in Focus is on a summer break and will be back with new episodes from 1 September. In the meantime, we are bringing you season one of Black Box, before the launch of season two in early September. This episode was first broadcast on 14 March 2024.
Two stories about the way artificial intelligence could make the world better – and is already doing so. In Montana, when Lee Johnson discovered his wife, Yokie, had cancer, he turned to AI – and was surprised by the answers he got. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Prof Regina Barzilay’s experience with cancer has led her to build an AI system that can detect the disease years before a human can.
Continue reading...Actor says she had the ‘weirdest six months of my life’, after being diagnosed days after her Dawson’s Creek co-star James Van Der Beek died of cancer
Busy Philipps has revealed she had a brain tumour removed, which was diagnosed shortly after her Dawson’s Creek co-star James Van Der Beek died from bowel cancer.
The 47-year-old, born Elizabeth Philipps, starred in the hit US teen drama as Audrey Liddell opposite Van Der Beek, who died in February aged 48 after being diagnosed with bowel cancer.
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