Jackhammers, blenders and and your favorite rock anthem blasted through earbuds – all those deafening hallmarks of life today are wiping out our hearing, doctors warn.
And even if you don’t care today, you will tomorrow, says David Owen, author of Volume Contol: Hearing In A Deafening World. "It is something that happens to old people,” he says, “but it's something that's caused by things that we do when we're young."
Owen has learned to wear musician’s earplugs to loud concerts and movies – silicone plugs designed to protect without blocking tunes or dialogue.
Federal health investigators announced this week that they think they’ve found a chemical instigator behind at least some of the more than 2,000 vaping-related lung injuries that have swept the U.S. since March.
Vitamin E acetate is the likely culprit, according to Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s an oily additive used to dilute liquid in e-cigarettes or vaping products that contain THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
All 29 samples of lung tissue the CDC tested from 10 states contained vitamin E acetate, Schuchat told reporters, and 23 of them contained THC.
What if the same strong soaps and cleaning solutions many of us use to get rid of nasty bacteria in the bathroom and kitchen also clear a path for the growth of a nasty fungus?
That was the surprising finding of scientists who compared microbial diversity of the germs living in urban homes vs. rural ones in Peru and Brazil. The researchers took a census of microbes – bacteria, parasites and fungi – from places that represent a range of industrialized life, from thatched-roof houses in the rainforest to city apartments.
"We expected that all the microbes would actually become less diverse with urbanization, and that's not at all what we found for the fungi," says Laura-Isobel McCall, a biochemist at the University of Oklahoma.
At least one genus of fungi – Malassezia – that she and her team found to be more plentiful in cities contains strains known to cause hospital infections.
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