Image: Pink Moose

On Monday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said she wasn’t going to worry about ridding Tumblr of porn. “It’s just the nature of user-generated content,” she said.

In other words: Welcome to the Internet, there will be porn.

And Mayer is right. The numbers about just how much of the Internet is dedicated to porn are wildly variable, but they’re there. Some estimates put porn at 30 percent of all Internet traffic. Other places claim the percentage is far higher. Forbes put the question to neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, who studies our consumption of all things wicked, and heard that, in 2010, about 4 percent of websites were dedicated to porn and, between July 2009 to July 2010, about 13 percent of web searches were for some sort of erotica.

Now, some of that comes from the changing demographics of who uses the Internet, says Ogas. When the web was first formed, it was largely populated by dudes. “I think in 1999 that 4 or 5 of the top 10 searches on the Web were for porn,” he told Forbes. But now the uses and users of the Internet have increased dramatically. And while Internet users are still looking for porn, it’s not the only thing or even the most common thing they’re after.

But it is there. It’s there, and it’s easy to find. Which is why parents and lawmakers are still talking about it. In the UK, David Cameron announced that all porn sites would be blocked from public places, striving to create “good, clean WiFi.” Mirror News writes that the Prime Minister “stressed the importance of parents having confidence in public internet systems and that their children ‘are not going to see things they shouldn’t’.” And the UK isn’t the only place to talk about cracking down on porn. In Iceland, they’ve proposed to ban all online pornography—a curious turn for a generally liberal country.

Now, actually carrying these bans out is hard. You can’t just flip a switch and change the content of the Internet. The Economist explains why Iceland’s ban in particular would be hard, but the reasons stand for most porn bans:

Banning online pornography would be tricky. The definition of violent or degrading pornography would have to be clearly enshrined in law. Iceland would then have to police the internet, a difficult thing to do. When Denmark and Australia introduced online blacklists in an effort to block porn sites, some innocuous websites crept on to the lists by mistake.

Basically, actually rooting out which sites are porn and which aren’t isn’t as easy as it might sound. And, ban or no ban, porn will always be on the Internet for those who choose to seek it out.

This is why some places are arguing that rather than ban or regulate or stamp out porn, children and adults should simply be educated on the pros and cons of pornography. In the UK, where they want to ban porn from public wifi, 83 percent of parents felt that students should learn about pornography in sex education classes. In the United States, one class at Pasadena College takes porn head on. The course, Navigating Pornography, has students watch and discuss porn, and tries to debunk the myth that people should learn about sexuality through porn. “Students today live in a porn-saturated culture and very rarely get a chance to learn about it in a safe, non-judgmental, intellectually thoughtful way,” professor Hugo Schwyzer told the Huffington Post.

Buzzfeed visited Schwyzer’s class to see just what a course in porn might be like:

But in many places, where even regular sex education is hard to come by, the chances that students will learn about porn are slim to none. The National Children’s Bureau says that teaching about porn is crucial to giving children a well-rounded education about sex and relationships. Lucy Emmerson, Co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum for the NCB, says that teachers are too scared to mention porn in class.  “Given the ease with which children are able to access explicit sexual content on the Internet,  it is vital that teachers can respond to this reality appropriately,” she says. “Whilst in some cases children find this material by accident, there are instances when they come across pornography whilst looking for answers to sex education questions; it is therefore wholly appropriate that pornography and the issues it reveals are addressed in school SRE.”

Basically, the reality is that ban or not, young people are going to encounter pornography on the Internet. Whether or not they’re ready for it seems to be up to their parents and teachers.

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For patients suffering from C. difficile colitis—a stubbornly persistant severe bowel inflammation that often evades conventional treatment—a stool transplant from a family member, friend or even doctor can often fix the problem. Over the past several years, an increasing number of patients have found relief through fecal transplants, which involves an injection of sterile communities of gut microbes from another person—not actual feces. Patients undergoing such procedures have seen seemingly miraculous results. Some trials show that up to 94 percent of patients’ C. difficile infections clear up following a transplant.

But now, as Scientific American writes, “the sh*t has hit the fan.” The Food and Drug Administration has caught a whiff of the controversial new treatment and has declared fecal transplants as a biologic therapy, meaning any doctor who wants to use it will have to file an investigational new drug application. For patients, this means more paperwork, a longer wait for treatment and a potential application rejection from the FDA.

This isn’t exactly welcome news for doctors, either. Judy Stone, an infectious disease specialist, further delves into the issue in SciAm:

Yes, there are many questions involving FMT that do warrant further study. For example, what is the best diluent for the stool? Saline or water or milk or other? What is the most efficacious route of administration—colonoscopy vs enema vs nasoduodenal tube?

However, she writes, fecal transplants do display better efficacy in patients than many other treatments—some already approved by the FDA, others not—which also tend to cost more and may cause serious side effects.

I think it is reasonable for the FDA to provide guidance and to try to collect data in some standardized format so that we can learn more about best approaches. My understanding is that individual physicians will have to develop and submit their own plan for treatment—which is both burdensome and will not result in any generalizable conclusions. While the FDA says that in emergencies, physicians can seek urgent approval, rather than wait for a 30 day turnaround time on their IND submission, in practical terms, this isn’t going to happen.

On MedPageToday, infectious disease expert William Schaffner at Vanderbilt University, predicted that the new regulation would significantly increase cost to researchers (though he could not put a number on that figure). Michael Edmond, a physician at Virginia Commonwealth University, complains on his blog Controversies in Hospital Infection Prevention:

Over the past several days I have spent a lot of time talking to patients, trying to explain why I’ve had to cancel their upcoming fecal transplant.

So now I must apply for an IND number, which requires that I send the FDA my protocol. On the 30th day after receipt of my documents the FDA will let me know whether I can proceed. When I talked to the FDA officer yesterday she informed me that the FDA is only interested in fecal transplants with regards to safety. They want to ensure that donors are appropriately screened. Thus, I need to send them my protocol for donor testing and then I will get a ruling. I asked the officer what the FDA was looking for and was told that they can’t say but will either approve or not approve my protocol. Now wouldn’t it have made more sense for the FDA to review the literature and consult experts about what optimal testing of donors and safeguards should be for the procedure and simply require practitioners to follow their guideline instead of the guess-what-I’m-thinking-and-wait-30-days game?

Other doctors are put out, but more understanding of the FDA’s decision. MedPageToday writes:  

Herbert DuPont, MD, of the University of Texas Medical Center in Houston, who is gearing up for a major fecal transplantation program there, said he already had his protocol approved by the center’s Institutional Review Board (IRB).

“Am I disappointed? Yes,” DuPont told MedPage Today. “Do I have problems with the outcome? Absolutely not.”

DuPont, who also attended the hearing, said he understood the FDA’s concerns about needing to set standards for safety and efficacy with procedures such as fecal transplant.

Dr. Stone suggests instead that the FDA clinicians to pursue the treatment in certain patients who qualify, and exclude them from the lengthy approval process. Otherwise, just like so-called worm therapy, or deliberate infection with parasitic worms to treat diseases ranging from asthma to Crohn’s disease to multiple sclerosis, patients may try to perform the procedure at home and a blackmarket may even emerge for fecal transplants. So, while law-abiding patients suffer in the hospital from C. difficile infections, others will try to perform their own DIY fecal transplants at home, which will likely cause additional health and safety issues when things in the bathroom go awry.

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As a patient, dealing with the anxiety of waiting to get poked with a needle may be no fun at all. But it’s actually a positive behavior. In trials with mice, stress boosted the immune system, a team of Stanford University researchers found, making it vaccines more effective. Ferris Jabr reports for Scientific American:

Mice that were stressed out prior to their inoculations had an easier time overcoming a subsequent infection than mice that the researchers left in peace before their shots.

Something similar seems to happen to people. In a study of knee surgery patients, for example, Dhabhar and his teammates found that anticipating surgery increases the number of immune cells circulating in the bloodstream in the days preceding the operation.

While stress is generally thought of in terms of its negative effects, researchers are beginning to distinguish between two different types of stress. Chronic stress, suffered over a long period of time, can cause harm, whereas acute stress, like visiting the doctor or racing to meet a deadline, may actually make us stronger and healthier.

From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that short-term stress revs up the immune system makes sense. Consider a gazelle fleeing a lioness. Once the gazelle’s eyes and ears alert its brain to the threat, certain brain regions immediately activate the famous fight-or-flight response, sending electrical signals along the nervous system to the muscles and many other organs, including the endocrine glands—the body’s hormone factories. Levels of cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline and noradrenaline rapidly increase; the heart beats faster; and enzymes race to convert glucose and fatty acids into energy for cells. All these swift biological changes give the gazelle the best chance of escape.

The brain also responds to stress by priming the immune system to prepare for a potential injury. This may explain why people and mice more readily respond to vaccines when they’re stressed out. So cry all you’d like in the waiting room – you may be doing your body a favor in the long run.

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In the animal kingdom, larger males—think chimpanzees, lions, bulls—often try to acquire or defend more resources, like territory, food, and females, than their weaker underlings. Researchers decided to apply the competitive animal model to human political decision making about redistribution of wealth and income to see if there was any correlation.

The Atlantic describes the study:

Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and UC Santa Barbara collected from several hundred men and women in Argentina, the U.S., and Denmark. They categorized the subjects by socioeconomic class, their upper-body strength, or “fighting ability” (as measured by the “circumference of the flexed bicep of the dominant arm”), and their responses to a questionnaire gauging their support for economic redistribution.

They hypothesized that men with more upper body strength would be less open to wealth distribution, following the same tendency of stronger males of many animal species. After all, upper-body strength has counted as a major component of dominance throughout human evolutionary history. When economics, strength and gender were taking into account, that hypothesis turned out to be true. Popular Science reports:

Socioeconomic status also showed a correlation with economic views. As expected, rich men were generally opposed to redistribution, and poor men generally in favor of it. Men with stronger upper bodies tended to have stronger views–rich, strong men were very much opposed to redistribution, while less strong but still rich men were less opposed. On the side of those that support redistribution, the trend was reversed: poorer but strong men were strongly in favor of redistribution, while weaker poor men were not as committed.

Political party had nothing to do with the results, the researchers found, and no correlation turned up between women’s opinion on the subjet and their physical strength and/or wealth.

The authors conclude: “Because personal upper-body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.”

For many men, apparently, animal antics still hold strong.

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“Dying of a broken heart” is more than just a turn of phrase. The despair of losing a loved one—the stress and the anxiety and the pumping adrenaline—can actually kill you. Writing for The Conversation, cardiologist Alexander Lyon tells the tale of the broken-hearted, those whose hearts simply shut down during times of stress.

Known to doctors as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, broken heart syndrome is a special type of heart attack. In a normal heart attack, a blocked artery chokes the flow of blood to the heart, cutting off the supply of oxygen and killing heart tissues. In a Takotsubo heart attack, there is no such blockage. For the broken-hearted, nine out of ten of whom are “middle-aged or elderly women,” says Lyon:

They have chest pains, a shortness of breath and ECG monitors show the same extreme changes which we see with a heart attack.

But when an angiogram is performed, none of their coronary arteries are blocked. Instead, the lower half of their ventricle, the main pumping chamber of their heart, shows a very peculiar and distinctive abnormality – it fails to contract, and appears partially or completely paralysed.

…In the most extreme cases the heart can stop – a cardiac arrest.

We’re still not really sure what causes broken heart syndrome, writes Lyon, but research suggests that adrenaline—the hormone behind the body’s “fight or flight” response—may be to blame.

At low and medium levels adrenaline is a stimulating hormone, triggering the heart to beat harder and faster, which we need during exercise or stress. However at the highest levels it has the opposite effect and can reduce the power the heart has to beat and triggering temporary heart muscle paralysis.

Unlike normal heart attacks, where the tissues are usually damaged for good, people can often walk away from a Takotsubo heart attack unscathed. But though the physical damage may be undone, a broken heart never truly mends.

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Weee, feces! Photo: Jtu

The public pool may as well be renamed the public poo. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that the majority of public swimming holes have feces in them—brought to the pool on people’s unwashed skin or deposited by those who lack self-control. And along with fecal matter come illness-inducing bacteria.

Last year, the CDC tested the water from 161 public pools around Atlanta, where the CDC’s main offices are located. In 95 of them, or 58 percent, they found the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacteria that causes rashes or ear infections. In 59 percent of pools they found E. coli, another sign that feces had been in the water. The CDC puts it delicately:

Fecal material can be introduced when it washes off of swimmers’ bodies or through a formed or diarrheal fecal incident in the water. The risk for pathogen transmission increases if swimmers introduce diarrheal feces.

Though the CDC only tested pools in Atlanta, they’re pretty sure that the results apply to the whole country. As the CDC tells the Associated Press, outbreaks of diarrhea are common across the country. Along with taking a pre-swim shower, the health agency wants to remind you that it’s probably a good idea to not drink the water.

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Math haters: If slight electric shocks to your brain would improve your ability to crunch numbers, would you do it? Alternatively, would you sign your child up to undergo this treatment if it meant better grades in algebra class? If new research published in Current Biology pans out, those of us who are not mathematically gifted may someday face these questions. The Guardian reports:

Psychologists at Oxford University found that students scored higher on mental arithmetic tasks after a five-day course of brain stimulation.

If future studies prove that it works – and is safe – the cheap and non-invasive procedure might be used routinely to boost the cognitive power of those who fall behind in maths, the scientists said. Researchers led by Roi Cohen Kadosh zapped students’ brains with a technique called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) while they performed simple calculations, or tried to remember mathematical facts by rote learning.

Twenty-five students received these “gentle” brain shocks, and 26 served as control students, though they believed they were receiving treatment, the Guardian continues. Those who received the real treatment completed math questions 27 percent faster than those who received the placebo, the researchers reported in their paper.

ScienceNOW points out that, while this may sound extreme, electroshock treatment finds use in a range of medical applications:

The idea of using electrical current to alter brain activity is nothing new—electroshock therapy, which induces seizures for therapeutic effect, is probably the best known and most dramatic example. In recent years, however, a slew of studies has shown that much milder electrical stimulation applied to targeted regions of the brain can dramatically accelerate learning in a wide range of tasks, from marksmanship to speech rehabilitation after stroke.

In this latest study, the researchers additionally claimed that at least six of the students who returned to the lab for further testing still enjoyed the mathematical benefits of their treatment six months after it was administered. Other researchers told the Guardian, however, that six is a very small sample number so should not be counted as definitive evidence, so more thorough follow-ups will be needed to confirm that observation.

Even though the amount of electricity used in this study—1 milliamp, just a fraction of the voltage of an AA battery—is very small, ScienceNOW writes, there could be unintended side effects, so researchers discourage overenthusiastic parents from trying the technique at home.

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This ad for Subway sandwiches reminds you that, unlike their fast food competitors that sell burgers and fries and shakes, Subway is healthy. That seems obvious, since they’re selling sandwiches with lettuce on them while other places sell fattening burgers. But a new study suggests that in fact eating at Subway might be less healthy than eating at McDonald’s.

The study sent a bunch of kids off to the two chains. The researchers tracked what the kids ate and counted the calories. On average, whole meal at McDonald’s added up to 1,038 calories, but Subway wasn’t far behind at 955. And if you take away the extras and sides, Subway starts to lose out. The sandwich the study subjects ordered had 784 calories, while the burger only had 582. And the two meals were similar in other ways too. Here’s the NY Post:

Diners ordered 102g of carbohydrates at Subway compared to 128 at McDonald’s and 36g of sugar to McDonald’s’ 54g.

People ate even more sodium at Subway, with 2,149mg compared to 1,829mg at McDonald’s. Overconsumption of salt is a growing health crisis for Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned, putting children and adults at risk for hypertension, heart disease and obesity. One CDC study found the average kid consumers 3,300mg of salt daily, far more than the recommended 2,300mg.

Now, the sides, extras and drinks do seem to differ between Subway and McDonald’s. At Subway, participants purchased 61 calories worth of sugary drinks, while at McDonald’s they bought 151 calories. Subway usually serves chips as a side, while McDonald’s offers fries. And the teens were asked to buy a “meal,” which usually means more than a sandwich or burger.

Of course, Subway wasn’t totally happy with the study. It responded to the work saying:

“[We] want to clarify a few things. As long time leaders in offering customers healthier options, Subway restaurants has always provided customers nutritional information on all of our menu offerings along with a wide array of great-tasting, low-fat and low-calorie subs and salads.”

And the study authors aren’t really out to get Subway in particular. They want everyone to stop eating at these restaurants in general. Their conclusions state:

We found that, despite being marketed as “healthy,” adolescents purchasing a meal at Subway order just as many calories as at McDonald’s. Although Subway meals had more vegetables, meals from both restaurants are likely to contribute to overeating.

Stay in and make your own sandwich or burger, the authors say, and you’ll be far better off.

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Pregnancy tests did not always come in an easy-to-use, sterile kit that provided almost immediate results. Less than a century ago, women had to rely upon frogs instead. In 1938, Dr. Edward R. Elkan wrote in the British Medical Journal:

The discovery of what is now known as the xenopus pregnancy test is based on experiments conducted by Hogben (1930, 1931), who observed that hypophysectomy produced ovarian retrogression, and the injection of anterior pituitary extracts ovulation, in the female South African clawed toad.

The African clawed frog, as its better known today, was imported around the world for its use in pregnancy tests. Doctors would ship urine samples to frog labs, where technicians would inject female frogs with a bit of the urine into their hind leg. The animals would be placed back into their tanks, and in the morning the technicians would check for tell-tale frog eggs dotting the water. If the female frog had ovulated, that meant the woman who provided the urine was pregnant and the pregnancy hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, had kicked off ovulation in the frog. Researchers referred to this procedure as the Hogben test.

Among the 295 tests which I have done so far and in which 2,112 frogs were used I have not seen one clear positive that did not indicate a pregnancy. There were a few negative results which when repeated after a fortnight became positive, but I do not think that these can be regarded as failures.

Frogs were actually a great improvement on the previous means of testing whether or not a woman was pregnant.   Welcome History describes:

Prior to Xenopus, female mice and rabbits had been used, but these had to be slaughtered, dissected and carefully examined for ovarian changes. Because toads were reusable and could be conveniently kept in aquaria, Xenopus made pregnancy testing practical on a larger scale than before.

Thousands of the frogs were exported across the world from the 1930s to 1950s for use as pregnancy testers.

Immunological test kits finally replaced Xenopus in the 1960s and were rapidly taken up by private companies and feminist organisations offering diagnostic services directly to women. The first over-the-counter home test was sold in pharmacies in the early 1970s, but it resembled a small chemistry set and so was not user-friendly. It was not until 1988 that the first recognisably ‘modern’ one-step-stick hit the shelves.

But the frogs’ legacy lives on. African clawed frogs can be found living around many urban centers today, where they were likely released into the wild after hospitals no longer had use for them. Additionally, the imported frogs are common pets, and no doubt some of those pets wear out their welcome and get chucked into a local stream or pond.

In 2006, researchers realized that the frog may be carriers for the deadly amphibian chytrid fungus, which has caused the extinction and decline of around 200 amphibian species around the world. Now, research published in PLoS One shows for the first time that populations of African clawed frogs living in California carry the fungus. The frogs can carry the disease for long periods without being affected themselves, so researchers suspect that they may be the original vectors that introduced the fungus around the world—a sort of revenge for being used as egg-laying research subjects for all those years.

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Many runners pursue the sport for the reward that comes at the end of a race or long jog: the runner’s high. Researchers suspect that other animals adapted to run, like dogs, may experience this neurobiological response after a round of exercise, too. A group of University of Arizona researchers decided to test this hypothesis, publishing their results in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The researchers decided to test how dogs, humans and ferrets experience the runner’s high, Discovery News writes. While dogs’ long, muscular legs are adapted for running, ferrets’ legs are not. Instead, those small carnivores tend to scamper around in short bursts.

The researchers made their human and animal subjects work out on a treadmill, then gaged the results by measuring levels of endocannabinoids, a type of neurotransmitter involved in a number of physiological processes and associated with sending reward signals to the brain.

Both the humans and the dogs’ levels of endocannabinoids spiked after their workout, but the ferrets lacked any measurable buzz. Though the researchers didn’t include cats in the study, Discovery writes, they suspect that felines, too, would experience a runner’s high.

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Up on the roof of a government research building in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that straddles Montana and North Dakota, Barbara Cade-Menun has a tarp filled with poo. Little brown pucks of cow manure that bake in the sun and freeze in the winter, where temperatures regularly drop below 5 degrees.

Cade-Menun and students are tracking how bacteria such as E. coli survive the harsh prairie winters. “[I]f E. coli can survive here, they’ll survive anywhere,” says the CBC. The research has important implications for people living in or downstream of agricultural regions as E. coli in your water can be a very bad thing.

Thirteen years ago this month tragedy struck a small Ontario, Canada, town when E. coli bacteria got into the water system. In Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 5,000 people, 2,300 fell ill suffering from “bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps and fever.” Seven people died. Over time, the tragedy was traced to manure spread on a nearby farm that had managed to carry the E. coli bacteria through the ground and into the town’s water system. That, alongside regulatory missteps, caused the preventable disaster—the “most serious case of water contamination in Canadian history.”

Though steps have been taken in the region to prevent similar disasters in the future, there is still much that is unknown about how E. coli moves through a watershed. From her rooftop investigation Cade-Menun found that E. coli are sneaky little bacteria.

Cade-Menun and her colleagues found that when the temperature plummets the frozen manure pucks seem to be bacteria-free. But the bacteria aren’t dead, and when the spring warmth returns so too do the bacteria.

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Parasitic hookworms in a person’s intestinal lining. Photo: CDC Public Health Image Library

Of the neglected tropical diseases, parasitic worms, or helminths, are one of the most common maladies. Diseases like this, caused by parasite or bacteria, kill around 534,000 a year, according to the CDC.  These have been largely wiped out in developed countries, but they still persist in the poorest parts of the world. People pick up infections by walking or consuming bits of contaminated soil in areas where sanitation is poor. After a person becomes infected, he perpetuates the infection in others through feces teeming with worm eggs.

Treating the worms is usually straight forward, but doctors must first determine whether or not a person is infected. Microscopes are not always available in poor communities, however, since they are difficult to transport and break easily. To get around this, an international team of doctors have developed an impromptu microscope by sticking a cheap lens onto his iPhone using double-sided tape. The New York Times describes the contraption:

The invention, described recently in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, was tested in Tanzania on 200 stool samples from children who had a mix of hookworms, roundworms and giant roundworms.

A three-millimeter ball lens was taped over the camera lens of an iPhone 4. The zoom was increased to maximum, and slides, with tape atop the samples, were pressed right up to the lens. A pen flashlight shone light through the slide.

The improvised microscope detected giant roundworm eggs 81 percent of the time, roundworm eggs 54 percent of the time and hookworm eggs 14 percent of the time. The latter parasite may evade detection because it produces fewer eggs which also tend to degrade quickly outside of the body, the Times writes.

In order for doctors to determine whether or not to treat a person or village with anti-helminth medication, they need to have a microscope that performs with at least 80 percent accuracy. Unfortunately, the iPhone scope delivered results at just 70 percent accuracy compared to a conventional microscope. But with increasingly high tech smartphone cameras frequently introduced, the Times points out, the iPhone may soon find its place as a diagnostic tool after all.

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Today, Angelina Jolie announced that she has decided to have a preventive double mastectomy, after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene implicated in increasing the risk of breast cancer in women. Her decision is a drastic one, but she’s not the only woman to have both breasts removed before any sign of cancer. While the procedure is still rare, rates of preventive double mastectomies are on the rise. But no one is quite sure what’s driving these increasing rates, and doctors disagree about the benefits of the procedure.

Jolie joins a few celebrities who have had the procedure. Sharon Osbourne had her breasts removed last year. Miss America contestant Allyn Rose said in January that she would have hers removed once the contest was over. In 2006, the then 23-year-old Lindsay Avner became one of the first women to undergo the procedure to avoid breast cancer. A study from last year reported that the rate of these surgeries—which remove breasts before cancer is found—is on the rise. In 2002, 94 women in Pennsylvania had preventative surgery. In 2012 that number was 455. (These number include both women who had two seemingly healthy breasts removed and women who had one healthy breast removed after a diagnosis of cancer in the other.) The Journal of Clinical Oncology found that bilateral mastectomies—in which a woman with cancer in one breast has both removed—increased from 1.8 percent in 1998 to 4.8 percent in 2003.

It’s hard to track these sorts of things, though. There is no good nationwide data on exactly how many are done each year and how that number has changed from year to year. But doctors generally agree that the rate is increasing.

The reasons for that increase are also slippery. Easier and cheaper genetic testing is providing more women with the information that often spurs the procedure. And surgeries to remove the breasts are getting safer and less expensive, as are plastic surgeries to replace tissue or minimize scarring.

The women who opt for the surgery cite a few reasons. The first is the real risk of breast cancer. Angelina Jolie, in her opinion piece for the New York Times, says that “doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer.”

The second is peace of mind. Women living with the gene say they feel as though cancer is looming over them at all times. “There wasn’t a minute where it didn’t cross my mind in some way,” Sara Tenenbein wrote in XO Jane. “BRCA was taking over my entire life.” Tenenbein opted for the preventive double mastectomy. She knows her choice was unusual, but she doesn’t regret it. “I know that I chose something extreme in order to live without fear. I chosejoie de vivre over vanity, and I am proud of it,” she writes.

“A lot of women really feel that it’s liberating,” Jocelyn Dunn, a breast surgeon in Palo Alto, California, told the Daily Beast. “Regrets are rare.” But peace of mind has a dark side, too. The Daily Beast also talked to Stephen Sener,  a doctor and former president of the American Cancer Society. “The main motivation is fear. Some women say, ‘I can’t live with the anxiety of having this happen again’.” The opening of a 2007 story about another woman who chose the surgery reads: “Her latest mammogram was clean. But Deborah Lindner, 33, was tired of constantly looking for the lump.”

But doctors say that there’s also a problem in risk perception. Only 5-10 percent of the women who get breast cancer are positive for the “breast cancer genes.” Women with the genes have a 60 percent chance of getting breast cancer. But having the double mastectomy doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be cancer free, either. One study found that the procedure doesn’t work for all women. The study looked at women who have preventive mastectomies after being diagnosed with cancer in one breast and found that the procedure only seemed to help women under 50 whose cancer was in very early stages. Another study that looked at preventive mastectomies says that, while the procedure does reduce the risk of developing breast cancer, “there is conflicting evidence on whether or not it reduces breast cancer mortality or overall death.”

While the research is still out on how effective it is, women who have the BRCA1 gene or a family history of breast cancer might see people like Jolie and Osbourne as examples. Removing both breasts might seem drastic, but it can feel worth it to those who have watched a loved one die of cancer. But that fear and dread could be pushing women to make decisions that aren’t medically sound. Allyn Rose, the Miss America contestant, says her father suggested the procedure, and when she pushed back he told her that, if she didn’t do it, “you’re going to end up dead like your mom.”

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Having a baby can mean thinking a lot about pee. You pee on a stick to see if you’re ovulating. You pee on a stick to check if you’re pregnant. And soon, you might be able to pee to check your baby’s health. Using urine samples collected from pregnant women, researchers have developed a test that found signs of serious medical issues in the still unborn baby, including Down syndrome, premature birth, brain damage and pre-eclampsia (a disorder that can cause a mother to have seizures).

The new research, conducted by a team of Portuguese researchers lead by Sílvia Diaz, is still in the early stages. But, if the technique bears out it could mean that checking for serious complications will be as easy as peeing in a cup—an alternative to the invasive techniques, like biopsies or umbilical cord blood tests, used today.

The researchers collected urine samples from 300 women who were in the second trimester of their pregnancies. They froze the samples and waited until the baby was born. Then, they combed through the urine with a sensitive analytical technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy looking for chemicals that were related with the conditions of the babies. According to the researchers, they found chemicals that could be related to “central nervous system malformations, trisomy 21, preterm delivery, gestational diabetes, intrauterine growth restriction and preeclampsia.”

According to Chemical and Engineering News, the next step is to do bigger and better tests, looking at more mothers from a larger geographic area.

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Photo: Thomas Marthinsen

Drug addiction is a complicated and messy thing, and fighting a history of heroin use is especially so. In the San Diego Union-Tribune, Bradley Fikes reports on a new tool that may soon be added to the regime of psychological and behavioral counseling and pharmaceutical treatments: a compound he describes as a “heroin vaccine.” So far only tested in rats, the researchers behind the study tell Fikes that the drug is ready for human testing.

Unlike methadone or other synthetic opiates that mimic the behavior of heroin, the new drug actually trains the body to pull heroin from the bloodstream:

Senior study author Kim Janda says the vaccine causes the body to produce antibodies against heroin and its psychoactive products. These antibodies circulate in the bloodstream, and neutralize any of these substances they encounter before they reach the brain.

“It’s like the old ’80s game Pac-Man,” Janda said. “They immediately seek out the target and sequester it.”

People looking to quit heroin use, or those trying to help them, would be able to use the vaccine to nullify the effects of any future heroin use. Substance abuse is way more than just a physical addiction: this vaccine could help protect users whose bodies are off heroin but who decide it’d be a good idea to start using again. Combined with existing treatments to get a person used to a drug-free life, the new pharmaceutical would help make sure the treatment sticks.

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