As the conversation around higher ed has increasingly come to focus on inclusivity and maximizing graduation rates, elite universities have reacted by eliminating their core curricula, dumbing down the requirements that remain, or providing so many degree options that a student of average ability at an average school could be placed in most top liberal arts colleges and still survive (albeit, perhaps, in the lowest quartile of his class). Who would more likely win admission to a top school: the wealthy world-traveler with prestigious extracurriculars (and a parent willing to donate a tidy sum to the university’s endowment), or the scrappy straight-A student who spends his summers working for minimum wage to help cover his tuition? The combined SAT verbal and math result for the lowest-scoring student is often comparable to that of the average score at an elite school.

Emergency room patients increasingly leave California hospitals against medical advice, and experts say crowded ERs are likely to blame. Dr. Veronica Vasquez-Montez, emergency room medical director at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, said she sometimes finds herself having “tough conversations” with sick patients intent on leaving the ER, often citing pressing responsibilities. When a sick patient is about to leave the emergency room, doctors should determine why he or she wants to go, make sure the patient is capable of making a sound decision, involve friends and family, explain the course of treatment and, if nothing works, arrange for speedy follow-up care, said Dr. Jay Brenner, emergency department medical director at Upstate University Hospital-Community Campus in New York and co-author of several studies about patients leaving against medical advice.

But despite petitions from several advocacy groups – some dating back decades – the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still considers these to be Gras or “generally recognized as safe” to eat, though plenty of experts disagree. The Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the FDA to ban potassium bromate two decades ago due to cancer concerns, but the FDA’s response, according to a letter from the agency, was that it couldn’t examine the issue due to “limited availability of resources and other agency priorities.” “In EWG’s view, it is important for companies to start removing chemicals associated with health risks, so that shoppers don’t have to have a chemistry degree in order to decipher food labels,” said Naidenko.

Huawei says it is reviewing its relationship with courier service FedEx after packages intended for addresses in Asia were redirected to the US without explanation. Huawei also alleges that FedEx attempted to redirect two other packages sent from Vietnam to the US. Earlier this month, Last week, the US Commerce Department prohibited American firms from doing business with Huawei, a move which means the company’s handsets will no longer receive updates for the Android operating system from Google or access to its popular applications.

Rumors and reports that WhatsApp would start getting in-app ads have been flying around for some time but now we have explicit confirmation from Facebook that they will be coming to the messaging platform by 2020. Several slides from the event show what appear to be ads within the WhatsApp Stories section (via Matt Navarra / Oliver Ponteville). It still isn’t ideal, but ads within WhatsApp were always likely to come at some point as Facebook has sought to monetize the world’s largest messaging platform for some time.

Since 2015, Google has been funding experiments into the controversial science of cold fusion — the theory that nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, can produce energy in a table-top experiment at room temperature. Google’s project — revealed in a peer-reviewed Nature Perspective1 this week — found no evidence that cold fusion is possible, but made some advances in measurement and materials-science techniques that the researchers say could benefit energy research. The Google team explored three experimental set-ups that have been proposed to generate cold fusion — two involving palladium and hydrogen, and one involving metallic powders and hydrogen.

Despite claims by the World Health Organization (WHO) that eating processed meat causes colon cancer and red meat probably causes cancer, the observational data used to support the claims are weak, confounded by multiple unmeasured factors, and not supported by other types of research needed for such a conclusion. It is likely that the association of red-meat consumption with colon cancer is explained either by an inability of epidemiology to detect such a small risk or by combinations of other factors such as greater overweight, less exercise, lower vegetable or dietary fiber intake, and perhaps other habits that differentiate those who eat the most meat from those who eat the least. In recent decades, many observational studies of people have associated consumption of red or processed meats with a variety of chronic diseases such as multiple types of cancer, various forms of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and total mortality (Boada et al., 2016).

The telecommunications company TalkTalk admitted that its data breach last year resulted in criminals using customer information to commit fraud. All this makes data a toxic asset, and it continues to be toxic as long as it sits in a company’s computers and networks. The Ashley Madison data breach was such a disaster for the company because it saved its customers’ real names and credit card numbers.

The following paragraph from The Farmer’s Dog by John Holmes describes this old type of dog in its homeland:

There are several other types of Collie quite distinct from the Border Collie. The result of such vanity has been genocidal for the Old Scotch Collie; in a few years it has become a rarity. I traced her ancestry back through her mother to a collie bitch, “Charlie-the-Wire’s dog,” and hence to a MacKinnon family at West Lake Ainslie.

Using a standard lab trick such as polymerase chain reaction, you randomly mutate the gene that encodes the protein. You consciously treat proteins and their carrier microbes exactly as people unconsciously treat disease microbes when blasting them willy-nilly with antibiotics: You encourage the microbes to rise to the challenge, adapt, survive. All it took were a few mutational tweaks to a bacterial protein called cytochrome c.

“We showed for the first time that living organisms can use their own machinery to bring carbon and silicon together to form a bond,” said Jennifer Kan, a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Arnold’s lab who performed the experiments.