Travel

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute study revealed that each cell in normal facial skin carries many thousands of mutations, mainly caused by exposure to sunlight. Around 25 per cent of skin cells in samples from people without cancer were found to carry at least one cancer-associated mutation. The mutations observed showed the patterns associated with the most common and treatable form of skin cancer linked to sun exposure, known as cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, rather than melanoma, a rarer and sometimes fatal form of skin cancer. more »

  Takata files defect reports, enters Consent Order; NHTSA to coordinate remedy program US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx today announced that at the Department’s insistence, air bag manufacturer Takata has acknowledged that a defect exis… more »

Nancy Scheper-Hughes gave two presentations at a human-trafficking plenary in Rome and says her primary contributions came in proposals relating to organ trafficking. One would prohibit "the buying, selling, brokering and implanting of organs and tissues from trafficking persons in all countries." Another would ask the world’s religions to encourage voluntary and altruistic organ sharing. "In the end, clothes did not make either the man or the woman. Gender still remained highly marked, and many clerics at Santa Marta [the Pope's residence] were uncomfortable sharing a communal table with a woman, let alone talking to her." more »

Sonja Zalubowski writes: The scenes stirred something in my bones, my blood, my very genes. This sense of witnessing how the world must have been once at the very beginning. The Serengeti is not far from the Olduvai Gorge where Mary Leakey in 1978 discovered the footprints of our earliest known ancestors, the hominids known as Australopithecenes from more than three million years ago. No cattle drivers or farmers here. The animals were doing quite well at maintaining nature's balance all on their own. I felt humbled, reverent and in awe. But, I also recognized how raw and dangerous and right there in front of us all this was. more »