The five richest families in the United Kingdom own more wealth than the bottom 13 million people. The extreme inequality these numbers illustrate will likely be a motivating factor for UK voters in the imminent general election. These voters have a clear choice: accept the years of austerity that have deepened UK inequality or set …
People with optimistic outlooks tend to live longer than their more negative peers, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine have found. The study drew on data from two long-running studies of Americans aged over 60: one of 1,500 male war veterans, and one of 70,000 female nurses. At the start of both, the participants …
Rights campaigners in Britain have described as “utterly chilling” a secret database compiled by counter-terrorism police containing personal information about thousands of people referred to the government’s controversial anti-radicalisation Prevent programme. The Prevent Case Management (PCM) database is accessible to all police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the Home Office is …
People add their genetic data to genealogy DNA databanks in the hope of tracing long-lost relatives, biological parents and so on. They don’t expect their genomes to be accessed by the police. Yet officials in the US have used “investigative genetic genealogy” in more than 100 cases. One genetic testing company, Family Tree DNA, has …
For most medical issues random control trials, involving sometimes thousands of people, are usual. But most research on food is only observational, using unreliable food diaries and then tracking the health of participants. About a million nutrition research papers have been published, but a fraction of these are good quality, randomized studies. Most are very …
