The benefits of quitting smoking..

Women who give up smoking by the age of 30 will almost completely evade the risks of dying young from tobacco-related diseases, according to a study of more than a million women in the UK. The results, published in the Lancet, showed lifelong smokers died a decade earlier than those who never started. Those who stopped by 40 died a year younger and those who stopped by 30 lost, on average, a month of life. Health experts said this was not a licence for the young to smoke. The study followed the first generation of women to start smoking during the 1950s and 60s. As women started smoking on a large scale much later than men, the impact of a lifetime of cigarettes has only just been analysed for women. "What we've shown is that if women smoke like men, they die like men," said lead researcher Prof Sir Richard Peto, from Oxford University. He told the BBC: "More than half of women who smoke and keep on smoking will get killed by tobacco. "Stopping works, amazingly well actually. Smoking kills, stopping works and the earlier you stop the better." Early death The records from 1.2 million women showed that even those who smoked fewer than 10 cigarettes a day were more likely to die sooner. Sir Richard said that it was exactly the same picture as for men. The British Lung Foundation said the prospects for long-term health were much better if people stopped smoking before they were 30, but cautioned that this was not a licence to smoke "as much as you want in your 20s". Its chief executive, Dr Penny Woods, said: "Stopping smoking can also be difficult to do - an estimated 70% of current smokers say they want to quit, so you shouldn't start and just assume you'll be able to quit smoking whenever you want to. "The best thing for your health is to avoid smoking at all." Prof Robert West, from the health behaviour research unit at University College London, said it was important to remember that smoking had more effects on the body than leading to an early death, such as ageing the skin. "Around your mid-20s your lung function peaks and then declines. For most people that's fine - by the time you're into your 60s and 70s it's still good enough. But if you've smoked, and then stopped there is irreversible damage, which combined with age-related decline can significantly affect their quality of life. "Obviously there is an issue around smoking if they want to get pregnant because it affects fertility and then there are the dangers of smoking during and after pregnancy."

Free resource from 'Science' magazine

As of September 2012, “Science in the Classroom,” a new educational resource from Science, is available in beta form, as part of a new open access website that also contains other recent education content from Science magazine (see http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/education).

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> “Science in the Classroom” will consist of a collection of annotated research papers and accompanying teaching materials designed to help students at the advanced high school, community college, and undergraduate level understand the structure and workings of professional scientific research.  Currently three Science papers have been annotated (topics: ecology, chemistry, developmental biology) and are ready for use in the classroom.

> http://scienceintheclassroom.org/

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> Each annotated Science paper contains a “Learning Lens,” which is used to selectively highlight different parts of the original text of the research article, including a scroll over glossary.  Additionally, an educational scaffold containing an expanded explanation of the figures, often with a close-up of the relevant section of the figure itself, has been built into each research article.  Discussion questions, additional activities, relevant news articles, and access to raw data provided by the authors also accompany each paper.

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Ben Goldacre talking about bad science

Watch this TED talk by Ben Goldacre. He talks quickly but asks some interesting questions about medical trial design, cause Vs. correlation and the scary prospect that your doctors are not getting all the information they need to make an informed decision about whether to prescribe you a drughttp://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html

More contradictory health studies....

Check out this article - vitamins and risk of cancer; how many contradictory pieces of information can you find?http://www.bbc.com/news/health-19977164

Economics and Medicine cross over!!!

For all you biology/economics students, you might find the following article interesting. Who'd have thought these two subjects would have joined forces?http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20004050