It wasn’t too long ago that the emergence of the little-understood Zika virus in South and Central America led the US to recommend pregnant women avoid traveling to areas where it was spreading (a warning that remains in place). But it’s actually a familiar mosquito-borne disease that’s now prompting a much wider advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: yellow fever. Continue reading Traveling to Brazil? Get Vaccinated ASAP, Says CDC
Daily Archives: March 24, 2018
Facebook gave researcher anonymized data on 57 billion friendships
The Guardian reports today that Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan’s relationship with Facebook wasn’t limited to his now infamous “thisisyourdigitallife” app. He had actually also received an additional sizable chunk of data from Facebook that he used for a research paper published in 2015. This dataset, however, differs quite a bit from that collected through Kogan’s personality app. While large in volume, this other set was anonymized and aggregated with no personally identifiable information included. As the 2015 research paper states, the data included “every friendship made on Facebook in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level,” which summed up to over 57 billion friendships.
Continue reading Facebook gave researcher anonymized data on 57 billion friendships
Your Low-Calorie Sweetener Could Be Making You Fat
With nearly 40 percent of the world’s population now classified as obese, and increasing evidence pointing to sugar as the culprit, people are turning to foods that contain low-calorie sweeteners to give them the sweet taste they enjoy, without the risk of gaining weight. However, new research from George Washington University in the U.S. suggests that artificial sweeteners may actually increase a person’s risk of becoming obese. Continue reading Your Low-Calorie Sweetener Could Be Making You Fat
The Fat Cat Collective 