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New York Times
a day ago
- Health
- New York Times
3 Out of 5 Liver Cancer Cases Are Preventable, Study Finds
Liver cancer kills more than 700,000 people a year. But three in five cases could be prevented, according to a comprehensive analysis published on Monday in the journal Lancet. The research found that prevention could be accomplished by addressing the disease's major causes: hepatitis B, hepatitis C, alcohol-associated liver disease and liver disease linked to metabolic risk factors like obesity. With nearly 900,000 new cases globally each year, liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer and the third leading cause of death from cancer. If cases continue to rise at the current rate, the number of new annual diagnoses will almost double, rising to 1.5 million globally in 2050, the study predicted. The researchers estimated that liver disease from alcohol use and metabolic dysfunction together would account for nearly one-third of new liver cancer cases by then. The findings align with what liver specialists have seen in their clinics for years. 'Liver cancer is common, it causes immense suffering and death, and the saddest part for me as a physician is that most of the cases are preventable,' said Dr. Brian P. Lee, an associate professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study. Improved screening, vaccination and treatment in recent years have helped stem viral hepatitis, especially in the United States. But the threat of liver cancer from heavy alcohol use and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, or MASLD, formerly known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, 'has been underrecognized and underestimated,' said Dr. Ahmed Kaseb, a professor of gastrointestinal medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not associated with the study. A 'Highway' to Liver Cancer A vast majority of liver cancers arise in people with cirrhosis, said Dr. Hashem El-Serag, the chair of the department of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and one of the authors of the new study. Cirrhosis, or advanced and largely irreversible scarring of the liver, damages healthy tissue and prevents the organ from working normally. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Fast Company
21-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Why AI coaching works (and often works better)
What happens when you try to teach a machine how to think like you? That's the question I found myself grappling with when I partnered with a leading learning company to cocreate an AI -powered coaching platform. The idea was inspiring: a tool that would let employees ask questions and get real-time coaching, anytime, anywhere, from a chorus of thought leaders across topics, including myself. My focus? Simplification, innovation, and leading through change. And yet, the most fascinating part wasn't the tech. It was the mirror it held up to human behavior and the potential to unlock better human connection. Coaching democratized Here's an undeniable truth: AI is disrupting the traditional coaching model—and in many cases, for the better. A growing body of research shows that people are more honest with AI coaches. Studies from institutions like MIT, the University of Southern California, and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found that users are more likely to disclose sensitive information to AI avatars than to human counselors. Why? Because there's no judgment or fear of asking a dumb question. AI offers psychological safety, wrapped in code. People act more boldly, less afraid to say what's really on their minds, or what's holding them back. According to a 2025 Korn Ferry research study, 76% of global workers say great development opportunities make them want to stay at a company. And with AI-powered tools, coaching becomes democratized—accessible to more employees, not just the C-suite. But it's not just about access, it's about precision. AI coaching can: • Tailor plans based on role, goals, or even time of day. • Simulate hard conversations with employees or clients. • Offer real-time feedback in meetings or presentations. • Deliver 24/7 guidance on everything from imposter syndrome to difficult feedback. Imagine being able to ask: 'How do I tell my team I disagree with them without killing morale?' Or: 'Give me three ways to simplify my team's strategy presentation for our regional VP.' The AI replies with actionable, contextual advice rooted in the voices of real thought leaders. That's why I said yes to becoming one. The Ethical and Philosophical Questions It Raised The more we built out my coach bot, the more I realized: this isn't just about tech, this is about identity. Building an AI version of yourself reveals more about human behavior than machine learning. It raises questions about how exactly AI can unlock vulnerability, empathy, and ethical nuance in the coaching experience. For instance: if I'm offering guidance as an AI coach, how do I ensure the advice is actually mine, not something the AI made up? How do I preserve the nuance, tone, and ethical compass that defines my human coaching? How do I ensure that answers include not just information but are considerate of human emotions and cultural context? I found myself constantly asking: • Is the model drawing from my most current content? • Does it sound like me? Not just in words, but in tone and intent? • Could the advice ever veer into unethical, biased, or legally gray territory, and how do we ensure that doesn't happen? Hypotheticals Here's why: Imagine this scenario. Someone types in: 'My team is resisting a new innovation initiative. What should I do to push it through?' And the AI responds with: 'Reassign team members who resist. Focus only on fast adopters to accelerate progress.' While this advice may seem efficient on the surface, it lacks strategic nuance and emotional intelligence. Innovation isn't just about speed. It's about bringing people along, addressing resistance with empathy, and fostering long-term cultural change. That kind of answer doesn't reflect how I would guide a leader through transformation. It reflects a cold efficiency bias, one that risks damaging morale, trust, and psychological safety. This is why I need to ensure my AI coach reflects not just what I know, but how I teach, influence, and lead. So, we took proactive steps: feeding it updated materials, refining my tone, testing it with increasingly complex prompts. We checked for hallucinations, those notorious moments when AI confidently delivers misinformation. And we took steps to include empathy and context into every layer. But this went deeper than risk management. It became a philosophical exercise: What does it mean to give people a 'human' experience through a machine? In reality, real coaching is emotional, messy, and revealing. Could we ever replicate that? How to Keep AI Coaching Human The key isn't avoiding AI. It's learning how to humanize it. Here are some prompt examples we suggest to employees using my AI coach: • 'Lisa, what would you say if I feel overwhelmed by my role but don't want to seem weak?' • 'Walk me through a role-play of me firing an underperformer with empathy.' • 'Give me a simulation where I practice pushing back on a senior exec's bad idea—nicely.' • 'Based on your innovation framework, what are 3 experiments I can try this week with my team?' • 'What's one thing I could eliminate from my weekly workflow to simplify things?' Each prompt invites the AI to tap into not just knowledge, but emotional intelligence. Coaching Humans to be More Human I went into this initiative thinking I'd be training a tool. Instead, it trained me on the future of learning, leadership, and the very soul of coaching. AI coaching isn't about algorithms. It's about access, authenticity, and agency. It's about giving people space to grow in private, at their own pace, with perspectives that challenge and change them. And it's only just begun.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
New study makes stunning revelation about unexpected factor causing people to age faster: 'Similar to the effect of smoking and drinking'
If rising global temperatures have you feeling worn down, you aren't alone. A new study published in Science Advances and reported on by NPR found that extreme heat can speed up biological aging in a way that researchers say is "similar to the effect of smoking and drinking." That's the warning from Eunyoung Choi, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California and the lead author of the study. Researchers analyzed blood samples from more than 3,600 U.S. adults over age 56 and compared their genetic markers to past weather data for their home regions. They looked for signs of "epigenetic aging," a process that changes how our genes behave and is linked to an earlier onset of health conditions such as dementia, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. They found that people who lived in areas with prolonged heat — such as Phoenix, where the heat index topped 90 degrees for more than half the year — appeared biologically 14 months older than people living in cooler regions. And that was after considering other factors such as income, education, exercise, and smoking, showing that heat exposure alone has an effect on how fast our bodies age. Scientists have known that heat can negatively affect our health in many ways, from heart issues to increased hospital visits and deaths during heat waves. But in the long term, premature aging also strains families and health systems. "It's just a tremendous strain … that increases your medication budget [and] really can have tremendous impacts," said gerontologist Deborah Carr of Boston University, who was not involved in the study. As global temperatures rise, fueled by our use of dirty energy sources such as oil and gas, extreme heat days are expected to increase across the U.S. by 20 to 30 days annually by the middle of the century. And that's happening at the same time America's population is aging, a concerning overlap since older adults are more vulnerable to heat-related complications. Prolonged exposure to heat makes "you sort of accelerate your way towards an old heart, and an old vulnerable heart," Tom Clanton, a physiologist and heat expert at the University of Florida's College of Health and Human Performance, explained. Researchers say this helps explain the connection between heat and illness. It also points to the need for personalized assessments of heat exposure, especially in homes and communities without reliable cooling. The next step for researchers is to better understand how individual environments — such as overheated homes or neighborhoods with less green space — contribute to heat exposure and health risks. That information could help shape future solutions, from city planning to home cooling upgrades. To protect your household from extreme heat while saving money on electric bills, consider climate-smart upgrades such as installing a heat pump (which also cools your space) or taking steps to weatherize your home. Do you worry about air pollution in and around your home? Yes — always Yes — often Yes — sometimes No — never Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Gizmodo
12-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
Intraterrestrials: The Most Alien Life We've Ever Seen Is Right Beneath Our Feet
While the possibility of life beyond Earth has long captivated the public, there are already tiny organisms on our own planet that are as alien to us as anything we've imagined. These microbes are found in places once thought inhospitable to life, such as inside volcanoes, underneath the Earth's crust in the deep sea, or in the Arctic permafrost. Not only are they surviving in these harsh environments, they're doing so in ways that challenge basic principles of biology scientists thought were firmly established. Karen Lloyd, a microbial biogeochemist at the University of Southern California, has been studying these subsurface organisms for much of her life. In her new book, Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, she takes readers on a guided tour of her own work and that of others, exploring what makes these microbes tick. Gizmodo spoke to Lloyd about the discoveries scientists like her have made to date, the enduring mysteries about these earthly aliens, and why trying to understand them is so important. The following conversation may have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity. Ed Cara, Gizmodo: What led you down this research path in the first place? Karen Lloyd: I was really into chemistry as an undergraduate, and just the sort of mysteriousness of chemistry is honestly where I got my start. But then I was headed to chemistry grad school and it just felt too narrow. I just needed—I knew there was a way to do this science out in nature somewhere. And the way to do that was oceanography because that's a place, not a discipline. I chose oceanography so that I wouldn't have to choose between biology, physics, chemistry, and geology. I have to do them all. Then just by happenstance, there was a lab that was looking at these microbes that were isolated from the deep sea. And I didn't know going into it that there was this world of deep life. Obviously, no one knows it until you're told. But when I found out it was there, I was like, 'Okay, this is a place where I can use all these tools, these basic fundamental tools, to find out new discoveries about biology.' And from there, I was hooked. Gizmodo: What makes these life forms stranger than the life we're used to seeing and studying up top? Lloyd: One of the biggest things that immediately jumps out at you is that these things are on deep branches on the tree of life. So we might think that a slug is on a very different branch of the tree of life from like a kitty cat. But we're talking about the slug and the kitty cat collapsing into the same branch compared to all these new types of microbes. I mean there are things that we never could have guessed—that life was as varied on Earth as we now know that it is. They're just so different evolutionarily from everything that we see with our eyes. Gizmodo: How are they reshaping some of the rules that we thought we had worked out about life? Lloyd: We've always known that there's such a thing as life without oxygen. There are a lot of places that are free of oxygen, like life inside our guts. That's not new. But the idea that you can have an entire ecosystem that never needs oxygen and never needs the influence of plant matter, for instance; that can basically just exist solely on chemical reactions coming from inside the Earth—that's new. That's what we're learning with these guys. Gizmodo: It feels like this field has only barely begun. What are some of the biggest questions left to solve about their biology? Lloyd: The biggest questions left are still very basic fundamental questions. I mean, a lot of what we know is inferred from these highly specialized techniques that we have to use to get at them. You know, it's not real. You can't just walk up to them like you can a tree and be like, 'Okay, that's got roots. I know what it's doing.' So we're still asking questions like, who all is there? And what are they doing? What are they eating? What role do they play on Earth? How do they interact with metals? What role do they play in the development of Earth's evolution over time? Gizmodo: This is your life's work obviously. But what's the latest project or research that you're spearheading right now? Lloyd: Yeah, I just got back from New Zealand. They have an amazing subduction zone. That's where two tectonic plates are overlapping each other. And that process creates volcanoes, but it also creates this sort of like alchemic mixture that enables these subsurface communities to take hold. So we drove all over New Zealand, sampled a lot of land and worked with local folks. It's just really fun to do this work, just on a human level as well. Gizmodo: What would you like our readers to most take away from reading your book? Lloyd: I hope that people feel a sense of hope and possibility. One can imagine that you could get stuck thinking that all science is known or that the questions are small because we've tackled all the big ones. That there's nothing left to explore. We know where all the continents are. We've pretty much got a handle on how many planetary bodies we have in the solar system. But that's just the beginning. There's a whole world underneath our feet, for example. Not that there aren't mysteries in those other places too, but we are just tapping into this stuff. So I hope that people leave with a sense of hope and possibility at all the amazing things we have left to learn about life here. Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth is set to be released on May 13 by Princeton University Press.
