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Historically speaking, it's not a bad time to be a teenager's liver. Or the lungs.Regular alcohol, tobacco, and drug use among high school students has seen a long downward trend.In 2023, 46% of older adults said they had had a drink in the year before being surveyed; that's a steep decline from 88% in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national survey of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and tenth graders and for these three age groups regarding cigarette smoking. In 2023, only 15% of older adults reported having smoked a cigarette in their lifetime, compared to a peak of 76% in 1977.Illicit drug use among adolescents has remained low and fairly stable over the past t...

Quando il padre di Diane Scheig, Bill, tornava a casa dal lavoro presso la fabbrica Mallinckrodt di St. Louis, si spogliava nel garage e consegnava i suoi vestiti alla madre di lei perché li lavasse immediatamente, senza osare contaminare la casa con i residui delle sue fatiche. .Il signor Scheig, un metalmeccanico che contribuì a costruire il famoso arco della città, non raccontò mai alla famiglia esattamente cosa stesse facendo nello stabilimento, dove gli scienziati iniziarono per la prima volta a lavorare l'uranio per il Progetto Manhattan nel 1942. Ma all'età di 49 anni, aveva sviluppato cancro ai reni, perse la capacità di camminare e morì.Decenni dopo, la sorella maggiore di Diane, Sheryle, che anni prima aveva dato alla luce un bambino nato con un tumore delle dimensioni di...

OpenAI, Google, and other tech companies train their chatbots with massive amounts of data collected from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories, and other sources on the Internet. But in the future they hope to use something called synthetic data.That's because tech companies may be running out of high-quality text the Internet has to offer for AI development. And companies are facing copyright lawsuits from authors, news organizations and computer programmers for using their works without permission. (In one of these lawsuits, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft.)According to them, synthetic data will help reduce copyright issues and increase the supply of training materials needed for artificial intelligence. Here's what to know about it.What is synthetic data?It i...

In the fall of 2016, the Obama administration signed a major military agreement with Israel that committed the United States to giving the country $38 billion in weapons over 10 years.“Continued delivery of the world's most advanced weapons technology will ensure that Israel has the ability to defend itself against all threats,” President Barack Obama said.The deal was not controversial at the time. It was a period of relative calm for Israel, and few officials in Washington expressed concern about how American weapons might one day be used.Now that military aid package, which guarantees Israel $3.3 billion a year for the purchase of weapons, along with another $500 million a year for missile defense, has become a flashpoint for the Biden administration. A minority of lawmakers in Co...

In 1817 James Parkinson expressed hope about the disease that bears his name. He thought that sooner or later there would be a discovery and “the progress of the disease could be stopped”.Now, nearly 200 years since Parkinson expressed his hope, and after four decades of unsuccessful clinical trials, a group of French researchers reports the first glimmer of success: a modest slowing of the disease in a year-long study.And the drug they used? A so-called GLP-1 receptor agonist, similar to the hugely popular drugs Ozempic, for diabetes, and Wegovy, for obesity.About half a million Americans have been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a degenerative brain disease second only to Alzheimer's in prevalence.Symptoms include tremors, slowness, stiffness and difficulty with balance. T...

Lynne Reid Banks, a versatile British author who began her writing career with the best-selling feminist novel “The L-Shaped Room” but found her greatest success with the popular children's book “The Indian in the Cupboard” , died Thursday in Surrey. , England. She was 94.Her death, in a nursing facility, was caused by cancer, said James Wills, her literary agent.Ms Banks was part of a generation of writers, including Shelagh Delaney and Margaret Drabble, who emerged in post-war Britain and whose books explored the struggles of young women seeking personal and financial independence, in stark contrast to the contemporary literature of "angry young men". movement defined by John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.Over the course of her long career, Ms. Banks's character portrayals have of...

Stripe, a payments start-up, is one of the most successful companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in recent times. Last year it reached a valuation of $65 billion. But in the 15 years since its founding, most people have had no chance to invest in it.It's a problem that has plagued retail investors for years, as startups like Stripe, SpaceX and OpenAI reach huge valuations in the private market. Only so-called high-net-worth accredited investors can invest in private technology startups. When companies go public, ten years or more after their birth, their growth is often slowed and their valuations are high.A new fund, Destiny Tech100, is trying to change that with a new solution. It offers an exchange-traded fund that contains shares of 23 private technology companies including ...

World leaders and aid groups said Friday that Israel must show concrete results after reacting to growing U.S. pressure by announcing it will open more aid routes to the Gaza Strip, where the United Nations has warned that a famine is imminent.At a press conference in Brussels on Friday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken welcomed the new aid routes, calling them “positive developments,” but said the United States was watching to see whether Israel will make it a priority. the alleviation of humanitarian difficulties. crisis in Gaza. One measure of Israel's commitment, he said, will be "the number of trucks that actually arrive on an ongoing basis."“The true test is the results, and that's what we hope to see in the coming days and weeks,” he said, adding, “Really, the proof is...

Outbreaks of avian influenza among dairy cows in several states, and at least one infection among a farm worker in Texas, have raised fears that the virus could be the next infectious threat to people.The influenza virus, called H5N1, is highly pathogenic, meaning it has the ability to cause severe illness and death. But while its spread among cows was unexpected, people can contract the virus only through close contact with infected animals, not each other, federal officials said.“These are actually people who are in environments where they might interact with cattle infected with this virus,” said Dr. Demeter Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for disease control and prevention.“The risk for most others is very low,” he a...

Florentino Pérez had a satisfied smile on his face, and with good reason. He had just seen Spain and Brazil share a thrilling freewheeling draw in the stadium that he himself reconfirmed at great cost. Now, Pérez, the all-powerful president of Real Madrid, has found himself in a whitewashed tunnel, presented—completely randomly, of course—with his favorite kind of photo opportunity.On one side was Vinícius Júnior, Real Madrid's flag bearer and main event, dutifully introducing the man who pays his salary to his Brazilian teammates. A little further in the corridor, he was quick to bow, Rodrygo, another employee of Pérez.But Pérez's attention was on Endrick, the promising 17-year-old who will complete his long-awaited move to the Santiago Bernabéu this summer. To say the two sha...