Consumers, states, and the FTC are taking marketing claims from wellness companies more seriously — and, increasingly, there are legal consequences.
The lawsuits come as online promoters move from endorsing other companies’ products to creating and pushing their own. Meanwhile regulators are looking more closely at influencer marketing, which is expected to exceed $21 billion this year, according to an industry report.
“We were never meant to see our faces this much,” argues a Dazed essay. The increase in video conferencing may also mean an increase in body dysmorphic disorder, one survey of more than 7,000 people suggests. (The survey also found an increased use of fillers in people aged 18 to 24.) Personally, I find it helpful to turn off self-view in video calls and insist on phone calls as often as possible.
You won’t have to listen for long to hear who it is.
Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul comes out on October 11th.
Have you ever wondered why celebrities’ teeth all look the same? It’s veneers, and this Cronenberg-esque piece highlights the problems with treating the body as a platform — and the TikTok account of a dentist devoted to calling veneers out.
[Washington Post]
After the FDA approved Pfizer and Moderna’s newly formulated covid vaccines on Monday, the CDC signed off on both shots today, stating “vaccination remains the best protection against COVID-19-related hospitalization and death.” The new vaccines will become available later this week,
A peer-reviewed survey study published earlier this month in PLOS One found that, for healthcare workers, nose-picking increases covid infection risk, and the risk increases with frequency (go nose mining more, and infection is more likely) (via This Week in Virology).
Nail-biting and other factors didn’t seem to affect risk. But we should note that only 219 people responded to the survey. Researchers also acknowledged that recall bias and “potential shifting of (nose picking) behavior” could influence the results. There was another caveat:
We did not ask whether HCW [healthcare workers] committed to nose picking and nail biting when on the work floor, or the specifics of inter variability between nose pickers, e.g. the depth of penetration and eating of boogers.
The VC firm tried to sell stakes in 258 companies in June, The Information reports, citing anonymous sources. Those stakes were worth $312 million in total, and it’s not clear if they sold. Patreon was among the companies whose stakes were up for grabs, but about 40 percent of the firms were biotech or health.
There are plenty of pollution blind spots that ground monitors miss. So NASA launched a powerful new instrument in April to track air pollution from space. The new tool, called TEMPO, monitors three smog-forming pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and ground-level ozone. NASA released the first data maps from TEMPO today. They show pollution building up over major cities in North America, including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC.
TikTok’s dissociative identity disorder community thinks doctors don’t know what’s going on. Some doctors feel the same about them.
They are made by Novo Nordisk, and its market value “has risen by more than a third so far this year to about $419 billion, bigger than the country’s gross domestic product of about $406 billion,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Because the pharmaceutical industry’s exports have grown so much, it’s creating a big influx of currency into the Danish economy,” Danske Bank director Jens Naervig Pedersen tells WSJ.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Early results are in from attempts to recreate LK-99 and see if it truly is the room-temperature superconductor of people’s dreams.
CMTC cites discouraging results from the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory in India and the International Center for Quantum Materials in China. We’ll hear from more labs soon, but at this point, it’s looking like LK-99 was too good to be true.
The 31-year-old Reed Jobs named the firm Yosemite after the park where his parents got married. His father, Steve Jobs, died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.
Yosemite is a spinoff of the Emerson Collective, the philanthropic organization run by his mother, Laurene Jobs. According to the NYT, the fund already raised $200 million from institutes like MIT, The Rockefeller University, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
[The New York Times]
Lack was a Black cancer patient whose cells were sampled by doctors without her permission. Her cells, called the HeLa line, led to numerous scientific advances, but her family never received compensation. Today is her 103rd birthday.
“There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief,” her grandson said. “It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”
Details of her family’s settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific weren’t disclosed.
Temperatures hit at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix for 31 days in a row. The record-smashing heat has crowded hospitals with patients struck with heat illness or who burned themselves on scorching hot pavement. July is expected to go down as the planet’s hottest month on record, and North America’s heatwaves this month would have been virtually impossible without climate change.
After overcoming one legal challenge, the UK’s Covid inquiry has reportedly hit another roadblock as it attempts to acquire the old WhatsApp messages of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson — a forgotten passcode. The Times of London is reporting that Johnson can’t recall the old phone’s PIN, which he stopped using in May 2021. At least he didn’t drop it into the ocean.
The subscription-based meditation app is bringing some of its relaxing audio tracks to Spotify. While that includes free content from several of its shows, including Calm for Sleep, Calm for Stress & Anxiety, and Calm for Meditation, you’ll still need a Calm subscription to access all the tracks.
Meditation apps like Calm rose in popularity during the covid-19 pandemic, but experienced a sharp dropoff in use last year. Bringing its content to Spotify might help expose the app and its services to a wider userbase as things slow down.
“When the surfer got the board back, there were bite marks on it.” Listen man, generally I feel that wildlife that has lost its fear of humans is a bad deal for everyone. However, in this specific case, I do want to see if the otter can actually hang ten.
Burger King in Thailand has revealed what it considers the “real cheeseburger,” which is just a bun with 20 slices of cheese... and no meat.
The disgraced Theranos founder and CEO has had her prison sentence reduced from 11 years and 3 months to 9 years and 7 months. No reason has been given, but could be on account of behavioral considerations like following orders and completing rehabilitation courses.
Nevertheless, as The Guardian notes:
People convicted of federal offenses must serve 85 percent of their mandated sentence, even if they get time shaved off for good conduct.
