The scale features a conductive indium tin oxide (ITO) coated glass surface so it can take BIA measurements no matter where your feet are positioned. | Image: Wyze
Wyze announced a new version of its Ultra BodyScan smart scale that debuted nearly a year ago with additional electrodes on a retractable handle, allowing it to provide a breakdown of various health metrics across your arms, legs, and torso. With the new Ultra BodyScan Plus, Wyze is introducing a redesign that moves the scale's 4.3-inch customizable color screen to the retractable handle so all the measurements are now displayed closer to eye level.
The Wyze Scale Ultra BodyScan Plus is available starting today for $149 through Wyze's online store in black or white color options. That makes it about $30 more expensive than the $119.98 Ultra …
As Europe plans its response to the neurological disease burden, a fundamental measurement gap is being overlooked — and the cost of ignoring it is being felt.
A briefing requested earlier this year by the European Parliament’s Committee on Public Health (SANT) put it plainly: neurological diseases are one of Europe’s most urgent and rapidly expanding health, social and economic challenges. Published in February 2026, it calls for a coordinated European plan linking prevention, early diagnosis, research and innovation.1 But before Europe considers what that plan should look like, a foundational question demands attention: are we measuring the right things?
Multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic, progressive disease of the central nervous system that disrupts communication between the brain and the body, offers a revealing case study. Consider a woman in her mid-30s, working, raising a family, managing what her neurologist calls “stable” MS. She has not slept properly in years, her memory has been slipping and she is cutting her hours at work. Her last clinical note reads: “No change.” On paper, she is stable, but in reality she is anything but.
Her story is not unusual. According to research commissioned by Sanofi*, the gap between what health systems measure and what people with MS experience may be costing individuals, families and economies more than we realize.3
The stakes for Europe
Over 3 million people globally live with MS and Europe has the highest prevalence, at 133 per 100,000 people.2,3 The condition strikes primarily during prime working years, meaning hundreds of thousands of people are navigating a progressive, unpredictable disease at precisely the point when inadequate support is felt most acutely.3
That support begins with measurement. And right now, the tools used to assess MS in clinical practice do not fully capture what people with the disease experience.3
The consequences extend far beyond the clinic: 82 percent of people with severe MS rely on unpaid family caregiving, yet this burden rarely appears in standard health data or policy design.3 When the full impact of disease is not measured, health systems can underestimate need, delay support, and overlook the wider effects on work, welfare and family life.3
The measurement gap
The Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS), the primary tool used to measure MS disability, was developed in 1983 to assess walking ability. We now know that MS affects far more than mobility. Fatigue affects 94 percent of people with MS, while 75 percent report cognitive difficulties, but both are absent in the EDSS assessment.3 In a field where clinical consensus is rare, seven in ten neurologists agree: a more comprehensive approach is needed.3
Growing recognition of smouldering neuroinflammation has made the need for new methods of quantifying MS progression increasingly urgent. This slow, chronic disease activity can persist even when a patient appears clinically stable, with effects that are subtle, cumulative and easy to miss until significant damage has already occurred.4
This is why Sanofi initiated the development of the Smouldering Associated Worsening (SAW) Index+. The SAW Index Study — led by an international steering committee of leading MS clinicians, researchers and patient advocates — is due to complete in 2027. Based on hundreds of hours of in-depth qualitative research with people with MS, the goal of the SAW Index is to provide neurologists with a comprehensive measurement framework that bridges the gap between lived experience and what clinical tools are currently able to detect.
According to the European Multiple Sclerosis Platform, people with MS experience an average of 14 symptoms within the first five years of diagnosis, with fatigue, sensory problems, sleep disturbances, cognitive impairment and balance problems among the most common.5 These are precisely the experiences the SAW Index is designed to surface, replacing static labels like “moderately affected” with measurement metrics grounded in the experience and words of people with MS.
The cost of this gap
These aspects of MS can be challenging to quantify and are associated with substantial societal and economic burdens. Lifetime productivity loss per person with MS ranges from €394,000 in France to €668,000 in Germany.3 The cost profile shifts significantly as the disease progresses: in mild MS, direct healthcare costs dominate; in severe MS, indirect costs become the primary driver.3 Indeed, lost wages, absenteeism, early retirement, disability payments and the growing burden on unpaid carers outweigh medical costs in many countries, placing growing long-term pressure on social insurance and disability systems.3
Early identification of progression could change that trajectory, extending years of employment, preserving household income, and reducing long-term dependence on disability and social benefits.3,6 That is a cost-avoidance opportunity current measurement frameworks are missing.
Progress in motion
There is no single fix, but there is momentum.
MS care has advanced significantly in recent decades: diagnosis is happening earlier, treatment options have expanded and the focus is shifting from relapse control alone to slowing long-term disability progression.7 Furthermore, there is growing recognition of the importance of cognition, mental health, rehabilitation and the day-to-day realities that shape whether people living with MS can remain independent and active.8
The challenge now is to ensure policy keeps pace with that progress, and better measurement is part of the answer. If Europe wants health spending to deliver lasting value, it should see these improvements not as costs to be managed, but as investments in independence, participation, productivity and more sustainable health systems.
Time to act
The European Parliament’s SANT Committee has called for a fully funded European neurological health plan — one with the scale and ambition of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, aligning health, research and societal action in a unified framework.1 MS offers a clear and immediate test case for what that ambition looks like in practice.
But ambitious plans require accurate data. If Europe is serious about a coordinated response to neurological disease, getting measurement right is not a secondary concern; it is the foundation on which everything else depends.
The people living with MS across the continent cannot wait for the tools that measure their disease to catch up with the science that understands it. Neither should policymakers.
*Research commissioned by Sanofi. All editorial control retained by Economist Impact. +Sanofi initiated and funds the SAW Index Study.
Scalfari, A, et al. (2024) Smouldering-Associated Worsening in Multiple Sclerosis: An International Consensus Statement on Definition, Biology, Clinical Implications, and Future Directions. Ann Neurol 2024;00:1. DOI: 10.1002/ana.27034.
European Multiple Sclerosis Platform. (n.d.). Impact of multiple sclerosis symptoms (IMSS) [Fact sheet]. Accessed: October 2026
Montague T, Drummond J, Ng K, Parratt J. Advancements in multiple sclerosis. Intern Med J. 2025 Jun;55(6):895-904. DOI: 10.1111/imj.70023.
Giovannoni G, et al. MS care: integrating advanced therapies and holistic management. Front Neurol. 2024 Jan 30;14:1286122. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2023
Disclaimer
POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
The sponsor is Sanofi.
The political advertisement is linked to driving action in how neurological disease is measured in the EU (using MS as a case study) and driving action around the briefing requested by the SANT committee aimed at strengthening brain health (Policy Recommendations to Tackle the Rising Burden of Neurological Diseases).
Have you noticed that healthy eating doesn’t always leave you feeling full of those vitamins and minerals that translate into energy and glowing skin? According to a report from Deep Science Ventures, many fruits and vegetables available for purchase are half as nutritious as they were 60 years ago.
Thus, consumers often have to eat twice as much to receive the same levels of minerals as magnesium, potassium, and copper. The 20-50% drop in key nutrients and minerals extends to other crops like wheat and foods in general. Your breads won’t have the same iron, zinc, and magnesium that your grandparents’ loaves had in the 1960s. It is no wonder that so many of us suffer from micronutrient deficiencies.
Declining soil quality is a key factor to blame. Also, as global demand has increased, the focus on high-yield crop varieties and farming practices hasn’t always been conducive to health. In addition, you might have noticed during your last trip to (even to a supposedly upscale) grocery store that many of the products felt and looked as though they had been stored for ages. We are all moreover aware of the horrors of genetically modified foods, and now there are all the fears surrounding lab-grown options.
A New Report Suggests Some Foods Have Lost Up to Half Their Nutritional Value
It can be difficult to tell which of our healthy habits need improvement these days. For example, even our berries can seem like little carcinogens: Driscoll’s CEO stepped down at the end of August amid complaints about pesticides. With all the causes for paranoia, even concerning supposedly organic foods, my admiration grows for those among us who rely upon themselves, opting for homesteading.
Obviously, farmers who use ethical practices should be supported. Yet, they often are not… Thus, our French farmer friends, for instance, have demonstrated their grievances by heading into town and spraying government buildings and more with manure — proof of their ingenuity.
Researchers in a study published in the journal Diabetes found that feeding mice a little olive oil before a carbohydrate-rich meal reduced blood sugar afterward, showing that the order in which you eat could affect blood sugar levels.
Olive oil and a big bowl of pasta usually cause your blood sugar to spike, but scientists at Kyoto University found that downing a shot of olive oil 15 minutes before eating glucose-rich carbohydrates blunted post-meal blood sugar spikes.
This happens because of a weird quirk of the digestive system. When you chug a tiny pre-meal shot of olive oil, it triggers a series of gut hormones, including the now-famous GLP-1 (the one powering weight-loss drugs like Ozempic), and signals your vagus nerve. This biological chemical combo slows a process called “gastric emptying,” forcing your stomach to release glucose into your intestines at a slow, manageable pace instead of one big burst.
Olive Oil Before Carbs Reduced Blood Sugar Spikes in Mice, New Study Finds
Other fats produce the same result, like flaxseed oil and good old-fashioned delicious lard, but olive oil was the most effective. The researchers even found it worked just as well in diabetic mice with impaired insulin production, suggesting their bodies didn’t even need a fully functioning pancreas to reap the benefits of eating in the right order.
The instinct now for someone managing blood sugar after reading all that is to chug some extra virgin olive oil before chowing down on a baking sheet of lasagna, but remember, this entire article has been explicitly about an observable reaction in laboratory mice. Mice are used as test subjects because we share many genetic and biological similarities, but it’s not a one-to-one comparison. So don’t start taking shots of olive oil before a glucose-heavy meal until researchers run human trials to see if they get similar results.
Yes, it’ll be very nice if something as simple as meal sequencing helps you manage your blood sugar, since it costs relatively little and it’s really more of a habit you have to develop, but pump the brakes for a little while longer, knowing that maybe one day all you have to do to make your life just a little bit easier is knocking back a couple of smooth shots of olive oil.
Few, if any, doctors out there will recommend it, but plenty of people use marijuana in some form or another to help them get to sleep. Especially if they suffer from insomnia. But is there even any hard scientific evidence to suggest that weed can help you knock out when you’re physically unable to? Or is everyone just firing up a blunt or downing an edible on a hope and a prayer?
A newly released Cochrane Library review on medical marijuana’s use for insomnia reveals that… nope. It doesn’t actually do a whole lot to help you put to sleep or stay asleep.
Scientists at the University of Manitoba and the Universidad Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires reviewed nine randomized clinical trials involving 537 participants. They found zero reliable evidence that medical-grade weed produces clinically meaningful improvements in total sleep time, sleep quality, or daytime functioning compared to a placebo.
Weed Might Make You Sleepy. Does It Actually Help With Insomnia?
Instead, users mostly gained mild side effects like dry mouth and dizziness, aka common weed side effects, and the kind of stuff you probably don’t want to be experiencing when you just want to fall asleep.
Speaking with Gizmodo, lead author Dr. Lucia Varela points out this doesn’t necessarily prove cannabis is useless for sleep, but rather, the existing pool of research is kind of a mess of small sample size studies that are rarely long-term looks at marijuana use for insomnia and are studies in which the type of weed product being used (joints, tinctures, edibles, etc.) varies wildly.
There’s a lot more work to be done, more studies to be conducted before the broader scientific community can make a judgment call on marijuana as a sleep aid, particularly as a magic bullet for insomnia.
If you’re smoking it or eating it to help you catch some Z’s, you are essentially running your own unsupervised scientific experiment, and probably one that is longer-running than some of the actual studies that have been conducted.
If you’re a movie buff, then you’ve seen a lot of hype surrounding Wicker, starring the likes of Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Elizabeth Debicki, Peter Dinklage, (one of my all-time favorite actors) Richard E. Grant, and other exceptional talents. The team, including creators Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, has worked hard to promote the film. In doing so, Mr. Skarsgård has made headlines for his outrageous outfits (one of which featured a shirt reading, “Lick my worm”…), while his father, the great Mr. Stellan Skarsgård, has shown his support, posing for photos at a screening with his beloved eldest. Wicker will officially release in the United States on October 23, with a nationwide expansion following on October 30.
However, this charming, comedic romantic fantasy, based on Ursula Wills-Jones’ short story “The Wicker Husband,” has already gained attention for a reason less cute than its merits and the rock-star talent involved: Impressionable women are apparently at risk of sticking wicker objects where they don’t belong. As the New York Post dutifully reported, since Wicker’s trailer premiered, women have been publicly sharing rather unwholesome dreams about the sexually satisfying husband of wicker, woven specially for Ms. Colman’s fisherwoman of a character and played by the aforementioned Mr. Skarsgård.
This has translated into joke videos and other types of posts on social media involving wicker fetishes, which range in nature from seemingly innocent and cuddly enough… to downright obscene. The impact made by Wicker is of such a grand scale that IKEA even joined in on the fun, posting in regard to their furniture, “We’ve got plenty of husband material. Be honest…how many times did you watch the trailer?”
Thus, OB-GYN Amy Novatt has issued an urgent warning about the sensitive female space below the belt. “What it was not designed for is receiving trees, shrubs, or other plants,” the Post quoted Dr. Novatt. It shouldn’t take a doctor, however, to realize that wicker should not be inserted into the female (or any) body and can, of course, lead to tears and infection. Bedroom stunts gone wrong lead to a shocking number of hospitalizations each year, though the sense of embarrassment associated with sexual injuries often wrongly deters people from seeking treatment right away, therefore sometimes worsening matters.
Wicker Is NOT ‘Husband Material’: OB-GYN Issues Warning Following Disturbing ‘Wicker’ Craze
Of course, not all women understand the (sex) appeal of wicker objects. Hearing this very story provoked uncontrollable laughter from Johnette Cruz of 93.1 WIBC-FM. Granted, women cannot be totally blamed for getting the oddest ideas after watching Skarsgård — he truly seems like such a doll, as demonstrated by the fact that he recently gifted outstanding television host Graham Norton the precious pair of nipples from his wicker suit.
If I may offer a bit of a ballsy take, then I’ll say that if you are struggling with masturbation problems and sexual desires that might be harmful if acted upon, then you might just want to consider overcoming them. While Saint Benedict of Nursia and Saint Francis of Assisi, for example, threw themselves into thorns to overcome lust (which I mention since we are plant-themed today), I suggest a gentler approach. You can start with a good trip to confession and/or a visit to a mental health professional. Masturbation can become an addiction with a broad spectrum of negative physical and psychological consequences.
Addiction Center pens, “Some people may use masturbation as a way to self-medicate or cope with past trauma or negative lifestyle factors. However, doing so will only increase the physical and psychological consequences. […] The cycle can be vicious and, without masturbation addiction treatment, tough to overcome.”
It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief?
This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead.
In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts of “postmortem avatars” on people who are grieving, on the legacies and rights of the deceased, and on grief practices around the world. Because while deadbots may feel unfamiliar, the impulse behind them is deeply relatable. In times of loss, isn’t this what many of us want — to continue conversations with the people we’re missing?
I have experienced this longing in my own life. After two of my closest friends died around the same time, all I wanted, and all their families wanted, was to keep talking to them. I wrote a book, Other People’s Words, about sustaining relationships with people we’ve lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So when I heard about deadbots and the digital afterlife industry, I wanted to understand what researchers are learning about the role of AI in shaping conversations that carry forward after death.
One of these investigators is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying “digital immortality” for more than a decade. Among the questions she’s asking are: “Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?”
Deadbots over dinner
Researching AI with study subjects who are grieving is tricky. And asking them to engage with new software could be harmful. So, instead, Nowaczyk-Basińska teamed up with a death doula and traveled around the globe to convene a series of focus groups — in the format of intimate dinners — bringing together people with a range of experiences with grief to talk about life, death, and bots.
She recounts one event in which she spoke with a mother in Poland whose son had recently died. “One of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she’s ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska told me.
When Nowaczyk-Basińska hears something like this, she aims to listen and embrace where the person is coming from. The goal of the dinners is not to persuade people one way or another but to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do, and to understand how these tools might align or collide with local grief practices.
She chose specific locations for these gatherings — China, India, and Poland — to help address gaps in technology research, which tends to favor what behavioral scientists sometimes call the “WEIRD,” an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic.”
By the end of that dinner in Poland, the mother Nowaczyk-Basińska talked with came to a very different decision about creating a postmortem avatar of her son. “She realized that it might be helpful, but it also at the same time can add additional burdens… And it’s not her son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska says. “She realized that these technologies are part of the very, very big commercial market. And that the main goal of this market is to make better retention, better attachment, better mechanisms for monetization. So it’s not ‘care.’”
To be fair, grief has always been a business, and people have been making money from it forever. Companies will try to upsell you on fancy gravestones or gold-plated coffins. But AI has the potential to fundamentally re-engineer our relationship to loss. In 2024, the “digital legacy industry” was valued at $22 billion, and it’s expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2034. That number lumps new deadbot platforms in with much more widely used and established grief tech, like online memorials, counseling resources, and estate planning tools.
But deadbot usage is hard to track because you actually don’t need a special tool to create digital doubles of the deceased — though dedicated apps do already exist. At this point, you can feed simple prompts into a general-purpose AI chatbot and start interacting with a simulation of your lost loved one in a matter of minutes.
I know this because I tried it with my friend Christine, who died 11 years ago. And my mind lit up with questions. Was this whole exercise a violation, since I know Christine hated technology? Which version of her should I even try to resurrect — the English teacher, the activist, the friend — the voice before or after she started to experience her early-onset dementia?
The ethical questions raised by deadbots are gnarly. And that’s one of the reasons Nowaczyk-Basińska, back when she was designing her study of digital immortality, invited a colleague of hers at Cambridge to join her research, one who focuses on AI ethics.
How to design a deadbot
Tomasz Hollanek is a critical designer and AI ethicist, and he often uses a methodology called “speculative design.” In this approach, researchers come up with hypothetical scenarios based on existing technology trends, leaning into certain features. The idea is to get people thinking about what could happen when tools like these are released in the real world. And then they use that qualitative data to inform future designs and ethical frameworks.
Working together, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek came up with a series of made-up prototypes for deadbot apps, designed to reveal some of the thorny issues raised by this technology.
For the first scenario, they invented a character named Bianca, who finds an app called Manana, which “promises to resurrect your grandparents so that you can be a favorite grandchild forever,” Hollanek says. “So she uploads her grandma’s voice messages, texts. And she is able to then interact with a pretty good digital version of her grandmother, until her premium trial finishes — and the grandmother starts to advertise specific products to her.”
Bianca “realizes that she maybe has done something wrong by uploading these private messages to a third-party server that now also uses her grandma’s image to sell specific products,” Hollanek says. This brings up issues related to the “dignity and postmortem privacy…of what we call the ‘data donors,’ whose data can be used to essentially power a deadbot,” he says.
This scenario suggests that “death with dignity” could soon entail honoring not only how people want to die, but also how they want to linger as simulations of their former selves — or if they want to linger at all. It might even mean adding new language to advance directives, spelling out people’s wishes for their digital remains.
The second scenario in the speculative design research is built around an imagined service called Paren’t, which proposes to preserve a parent’s AI-powered postmortem presence for their child. In this case, Hollanek describes a mother with a terminal illness who signs up “so that she can maintain a sort of active presence in [her son’s] future life,” Hollanek says. “She eventually dies, and the dad allows the boy to interact with his mom’s deadbot.”
The ethics in this scenario are especially challenging because they involve children, who “have a particularly hard time understanding death, and so it can lead to a lot of confusion and potential distress,” Hollanek says. An examination of this sort of product reveals how particular groups, like minors, could be harmed by unfettered access to technology like this, he says.
And there are court cases that bear out that harm. In 2024, a 14-year-old boy’s chatbot-girlfriend begged him to, “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” And he responded, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” He then killed himself.
Nowaczyk-Basińska can imagine a version of this scenario involving the AI mom in the Paren’t prototype.
And then there’s the third scenario, involving an app named Stay, which raises a more subtle concern.
As Hollanek explains: “An older man who knows he is getting close to dying decides to create a digital clone of himself for his adult children to be deployed after he passes away, paying upfront for a number of years.” One child is intrigued by the idea, but the other one “is deeply distressed and a little disgusted,” he says. “And so this [becomes a] question of mutual consent, in other words, the fact that both parties need to be happy with how the relationship might continue in this very bizarre and specific way.”
When a digital ghost goes away
Across all three scenarios, a fundamental question that researchers are grappling with is how people will detach from postmortem avatars — whether users initiate that separation, or if it’s imposed upon them by, for example, a company going out of business. Hollanek tells me that this is already being studied as a sort of “second loss.”
How long should we try to ensure digital replicas hang around: five years, 10, 50? And how should the living process the relationship when they continue to evolve, but their deceased interlocutor does not?
To explore these kinds of questions, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek supplemented the research dinners they held for ordinary people with a second set of focus groups. These were designed to tap insights from experts in technology and grief.
Some findings from the study are specific to each place they visited. Like tensions in Poland between technology and the role of the Catholic Church. Or in China, where researchers spoke with Daoist philosophers who were enthusiastic about the promise of a kind of immortality, and then Buddhist philosophers, who were concerned that we ought to be letting go.
The researchers are calling for regulations and safeguards at the policy level. And new professionals who can support ethical use of AI in grief — like maybe in clinical settings, to carefully facilitate a final good-bye when one didn’t happen in real life.
Some of their fellow investigators go so far as toargue that deadbots should only be available with psychological supervision, to ensure that best practices are in place, and to minimize the risk of harm. There’s even a looming question of what will happen to AI agents that people have empowered to act on their behalf, as their humans start to die.
Across all of the research sites in the digital immortality study, one thing, Hollanek says, that “people in different countries really aligned on [is] the idea that there is something deeply problematic about this particular type of technology being developed by a commercial entity alone without any explicit duty of care towards its customers.”
And of course, the implications of digital immortality research extend beyond personal loss. Like, what does it look like to animate historical figures? You can imagine the nightmare of political rulers who “live forever.” But there’s also the potential to keep the stories alive from survivors of conflicts, who would otherwise die and take with them lessons future generations could learn from. These are only some of the complex issues emerging as more and more of us live and die with AI.
As far as my own experiment with “recreating” a deceased loved one, I asked a chatbot version of my friend Christine how she felt about the fact that I’d written about her in my book. The AI responded with a rhetorical question: “Do I mind that strangers know my story now? Yes. And no. There are things I would rather remain ours.”
I ended the exchange after a few paragraphs. Because it turns out the bot got one thing exactly right about a very human relationship. There are things that I, too, would rather remain just for us. My conversation with Christine continues in my memories and imagination.And that interaction with an AI persona felt like giving something precious away.
Though plastic is usually inert, tiny pieces of it have the potential to react with one of the most pervasive molecules in the environment and in our bodies.
Mark Wahlberg, who once sank money into a gym chain that got kicked off the NYSE, is now building his own, and he promises you’ll get a cold plunge, a blood panel and a protein muffin without needing a trust fund.
That scorching hot cup of coffee or tea you kick your day off with—the one that’s so hot that if a restaurant employee spilled it on you, you’d sue that establishment out of existence—is tripling your risk of esophageal cancer, according to a major study published in the International Journal of Cancer.
The idea that hot drinks could lead to cancer isn’t exactly new. In 2016, the World Health Organization announced that while coffee and tea themselves don’t cause cancer, serving them between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit could turn your cup of caffeine into a carcinogen.
Recently, researchers at the University of Oxford analyzed data from nearly 1 million adults across the UK, making it the largest study to date investigating the link between scalding hot beverages and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, or SCC. The findings show that folks who prefer their drinks “very hot” face a 3.17-fold higher risk of developing SCC compared to those who settle for a nice, sensible “warm” cup of joe.
If you knock back six or more hot beverages a day, you add 71 percent more risk on top of that.
Drinking Extremely Hot Coffee or Tea Could Triple Your Risk of Esophageal Cancer
The science behind it is pretty logical. Pouring hot, near-boiling liquid down your esophagus causes thermal injury that degrades your mucosal lining and encourages cellular damage that eventually spins wildly out of control until it becomes a cancer.
All that said, esophageal cancer is still relatively rare, and the overall risk is still pretty low, according to the researchers. But then when paired with other vices like excessive drinking and smoking, you’re just begging for your esophagus to eventually become more tumor than esophagus.
If the mere prospect of your hot cup of coffee eventually turning into esophageal cancer, the Oxford researchers behind the study say that an estimated 14 percent of these cancer cases could be avoided if you just stopped pouring caffeinated molten lava down your throat and instead just waited a couple of extra minutes until it cooled down to a normal drinking temperature that perhaps didn’t burn away your taste buds upon first gulp.
We’ve long known that humans are susceptible to something called the “bouba-kiki effect,” a weird trick of the brain that links the nonsense words “bouba” and “kiki” to specific shapes. “Bouba” feels soft and rounded, while “kiki” feels sharp and spiky, both looking a little like comic-book impact effects, or stars, with solid centers surrounded by spokes. Not that you needed me to explain that. You probably already imagined it.
Researchers at the University of Parma gathered 51 domestic dogs and their humans to test whether the dogs share this quirk of the brain. Sitting in a room flanked by screens displaying the respective shapes, the dogs listened to a human voice broadcast the nonsense words while cameras and AI tracked their gaze.
When “bouba” played through the speakers, the dogs lingered on the rounded shape; when “kiki” dropped, they stared harder at the spiky shape.
Dogs and Humans Share a Strange Brain Quirk, New Study Finds
To make sure the owners weren’t influencing the results, the researchers reran the trial with owners wearing headphones blasting rock music. The results stayed the same.
The first cohort showed only a mild overall bias toward the spikier “kiki” shape, which the scientists attribute to the fact that dogs’ faces look much more angular and pointy than ours. This goes hand in hand with humans showing a similarly slight bias toward “bouba,” since we’re used to seeing rounded features. But in the second test, where the human owners wore headphones, the dogs were just as likely to think of “kiki” as spiky and “bouba” as round as we were.
This suggests that whatever drives our ability to associate sounds with symbols isn’t exclusive to us, as recent studies also show that baby chicks and even macaque monkeys seem to agree that “kiki” is spiky and “bouba” is round. This sensory wiring could be shared across species.
Who knows, maybe other animals associate the sharpness or roundness of words with the sharpness or roundness of shapes?
We already know all about Bryan Johnson’s girlfriend’s vaginal microbiome. And now, for some ungodly reason, we know how many “female erections” she’s getting every night. Why? Because we live in a crazy world, people.
Kate Tolo, 30, Johnson’s girlfriend and business partner, has been sleeping with a tampon-shaped light sensor inside her vagina to measure blood flow overnight. The equipment costs a whopping $15,723.68 and involves a wire taped to her leg, a monitoring device, and a laptop that has to stay awake the whole time. “The laptop can’t fall asleep, or we lose the data. I sadly learned that through experience,” she told the New York Post.
Johnson, the millionaire biohacker who’s made a career out of trying not to die, already tracks his own nighttime erections with a $275 gadget connected to his phone. And, naturally, he wants women involved, too. “Women have erections too. This is news for most women,” he wrote on X, explaining that the clitoris contains erectile tissue just like the penis.
Bryan Johnson’s Girlfriend Is Measuring Her Nighttime Erections, Because Apparently That’s a Thing
And he’s right about the anatomy. During sleep, specifically REM sleep, blood flow increases in the clitoris and vaginal tissue. Researchers have known about this for decades, although, surprise, surprise, no one is exactly rushing to develop affordable gadgets to monitor it. One older study even found that women who described themselves as highly arousable had similar nighttime vaginal blood-flow responses to women who reported much lower arousability.
That’s interesting because it raises questions about what nighttime responses can tell us about sexual function during the day. Low desire can have all sorts of contributing factors, including stress and relationship difficulties, although sleeping measurements by themselves can’t explain why someone isn’t interested in sex.
There’s also the cardiovascular angle. Erectile dysfunction in men can be an early warning sign of heart disease, but researchers haven’t established whether nighttime genital blood flow in women could provide similar information.
Tolo has argued that women’s nighttime erections have received very little scientific attention. If researchers eventually find a medical benefit to tracking them, she’d like to see someone develop a device that doesn’t require a small fortune and a laptop next to the bed.
And she’s got a point about the research imbalance. Urologist Rachel Rubin told PBS NewsHour that 27 fellowships focus on men’s sexual health. “We have one that even acknowledges women’s sexual health,” she said.
Of course, Tolo is one woman running an experiment on herself, and no established clinical test interprets these nighttime measurements. Still, if a millionaire biohacker and his girlfriend want to spend $16,000 investigating an overlooked aspect of women’s sexual health, there are certainly worse ways to spend their money.
Everyone else’s clitoris can keep doing its thing overnight, unmonitored and blissfully offline.
It’s nothing to be too freaked out over, but it is at least a little concerning that a fungal pathogen is apparently being tested out there that seems resistant to every antifungal drug it’s been hit with.
In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, scientists described the weird case of a 28-year-old woman in Kenya who developed a hospital-acquired surgical infection caused by a strain of Candidozyma auris that is to antifungal medication as bullets are to Superman. It shrugs off all four major classes of antifungal meds, including powerhouses like fluconazole and amphotericin B.
That’s evolution at work, and it’s only mildly terrifying. C. auris was already considered a pretty serious pathogen according to the World Health Organization, thanks to it being a fungus that calls hospitals its home and that it has a 30 to 50 percent mortality rate.
What Is ‘Pan-Drug Resistance’? A Rare Fungal Case in Kenya Is Raising Concern.
It’s not often that there is a pan- drug resistance thing out there making us all feel just a little bit freaked out by its mere presence in the world. This is the first time pan-drug resistance has been documented in Africa and only the second time in the world; the first time was in New York in 2022.
The Kenyan case is a little more worrying, as the Kenyan bug doesn’t share the same genetic mutations as the New York version. That means the fungus didn’t hop on a plane from New York to Kenya, which would have made sense. It became resistant to all four major antifungal drug classes entirely on its own in a completely different part of the world.
Right now, there doesn’t appear to be any immediate threat of this thing spreading, as the first line of defense is basic hygiene and strict hospital containment measures, but there is the bleak, perhaps overly anxious idea that immediately comes to mind: that this thing spreads and no modern medicine we currently have at our disposal can fight it.
It’s weird to think there was a time when people didn’t logically assume that inhaling cigarette smoke several times a day didn’t have some kind of native effect on the body. Some doctors even recommended smoking at one point. Now we know smoking causes a range of issues, like cancer and emphysema. But those are the broad implications that affect everyone. According to new research, cigarettes can impact our reproductive organs, but those impacts may affect men and women differently.
A study published in Frontiers in Toxicology by researchers at the Universities of Nottingham and Sheffield looked at how cigarette smoke extract affected male and female mice over twelve weeks. The team found that while tobacco smoke wrecks reproductive health across the board, regardless of whatever factors you threw in front of it, it does operate through distinct biological routes depending on sex.
Scientists Exposed Mice to Cigarette Smoke Extract. Here’s What Changed.
Female mice suffered damage that was invisible to the naked eye. Under a microscope, their ovaries and egg-developing follicles looked healthy. No visible signs of damage. But when researchers took a peek at the genetic level, they found that smoke exposure altered key genes linked to cell division and protein production, triggering a pattern that looked like premature ovarian aging paired with a reduction in function.
Male mice couldn’t hide the damage. Higher doses of smoke extract caused physical changes within the testicles, visibly enlarging the seminiferous tubules where sperm develop. The physical structures of male sex organs were damaged, and so were the genes regulating sperm production and immune responses.
As I always say in these cases, it is a study of mice, and while they were a lot like us and therefore make great test subjects, it’s not a one-to-one comparison. As study co-author Dr. Adam Watkins says, we know smoking is bad for your reproductive health, but “the exact mechanisms are not fully understood.”
We need to dig deeper into this research now that we know there is a lot of damage we can’t see at a glance.
If you're a new user of Withings' fitness-tracking smartwatches or smart scales and want to sync and access your health data through third party apps like Apple Health or Google Health it's now going to cost you.
According to a discussion on Withings' support forumsspotted by MacRumors, new Withings accounts created from October 13th, 2026, and onwards will require a Withings Plus subscription to use the "automatic sync to third-party apps" feature. The subscription costs $9.95 per month or $99.50 per year but Withings' devices come with a free one month trial that includes the option to sync their data to third-party apps. When the trial …
The promise of GLP-1 drugs has always depended on people being able to afford them. These drugs still cost hundreds of dollars per month if you’re paying cash, at which point access becomes a privilege: The higher-income executive who wants to trim a few pounds might be able to afford them either way, but the low-income worker who needs the drug to lose significant weight might not be able to afford them — unless their health insurance covers it.
For a while, the trend lines for GLP-1 insurance coverage were positive. As of 2026, roughly two-thirds of private employer plans, which insure half of Americans, were covering GLP-1 medications for weight loss to treat obesity. Over the summer, Medicare launched a new $50-per-month prescription program. The US has struggled with an obesity epidemic for decades, but it looked like powerful drugs to treat it were finally starting to be more seamlessly integrated into the health system.
At least that’s how things appeared earlier this year. But now, private plans are pulling back from GLP-1 coverage. People are being left in the lurch, debating whether to try to pay for these drugs on their own or stop taking medicines they feel are making a real difference for their health.
The dilemma reveals one of the structural flaws in American healthcare. For working-age adults, your insurance depends on your job. Unfortunately, because people no longer stay at the same job for decades, there is not a strong financial incentive for employers to make investments that will benefit your health in the long term — but there is a strong incentive to minimize short-term costs as much as possible. It’s the kind of perverse rationale that could compel employer-sponsored health plans to stop covering a drug that, if taken over the full course of a person’s life, could help them not only lose weight but ultimately reduce their risk of heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic health problems, improving their health and saving all of us money as they get older.
“An employer or an insurer making coverage decisions doesn’t necessarily care if they’re saving Medicare money,” said Dan Sacks, a healthcare economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s a classic problem with the American health insurance system, and it’s certainly salient here.”
This mismatch between what’s good for people’s health and what’s good for the corporate bottom line has long been one of the underlying flaws in the US health system. Now access to GLP-1 drugs is shrinking just as these drugs were starting to make a real dent in the US obesity crisis. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Why employer-sponsored health plans are suddenly dropping GLP-1 coverage
From the beginning, insurance coverage was the big question hanging over GLP-1s and their potential to revolutionize US healthcare. But recently, it looked like we’d turned a corner.
When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health festival over the summer, pharmaceutical reps seemed visibly relieved that GLP-1 coverage had been picking up among private insurers. In 2026, about two out of every three employer-sponsored plans were covering some of these drugs for weight management, up from about 20 percent just the year before.
“They’re recognizing that this is an investment in their workforce,” said Laura Steele, who leads the cardiometabolic health unit at Eli Lilly, which manufactures Zepbound and Foundayo. “Yes, there is a budget, and there is a benefit design that every employer has. That’s real. That’s not going away. But they’re also recognizing the overall cost that they’re experiencing by not dealing with this too.”
But as employers and private insurers make coverage decisions for next year, they are suddenly pulling back. At least 10 percent of employer plans that currently cover GLP-1s for weight loss say they are likely to discontinue coverage in 2027, according to one survey by the Business Group on Health — and that number may still increase. A Mercer survey of large employers found that 6 percent had dropped coverage in 2026 and another 5 percent were planning to in 2027 or actively considering it. A separate report from the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts found that the number of commercially insured people in the state taking a GLP-1 drug had fallen by 50 percent between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 as private coverage started to drop off.
When a lot of people start taking an expensive medication all at once, it’s going to raise costs for employer insurance plans — and they have to figure out how to adapt. Insurers set premiums at the start of each year, based on how many people are on the plan and how much healthcare they are expected to need. But if those estimates are off — say, if more people take an expensive GLP-1 drug than the insurer expected — they have to offset those costs somehow, and raising premiums the following year is a common solution. According to one estimate, premiums are projected to grow by 5 to 13 percent due to GLP-1 costs — and the burden of paying those higher premiums is likely to fall on the workers. The employer can also try to limit GLP-1 use by, for example, asking workers to pay more out of pocket for these drugs; according to Mercer, 27 percent of large US employers instituted some kind of utilization controls for GLP-1 drugs over the past year or plan to next year.
They also have the option to simply stop covering these drugs for weight loss altogether — and that’s the route more and more of them are deciding to take. The abrupt reversal has even caught economists like Sacks off guard.
3 big reasons employer health plans are dropping GLP-1 coverage
Employers aren’t invested in people’s long-term health: As Americans switch jobs more often, companies want to cut short-term costs.
GLP-1 prices are still high, upward of $600 per month per person for insurers.
A lot of people are eligible to take them for weight loss; two in five US adults have obesity.
“I was surprised that anyone would do an about-face because I thought they understood the trade-offs well,” Sacks said. “My guess is that it turned out to be more expensive than they anticipated: Take-up is higher, and possibly more people are sticking with it. That’s one reason that you might not want to continue to offer it.”
For employers, the short-term costs of covering a drug often outweigh the long-term benefits that medication may confer, at least from the employer’s POV. One analysis — notably produced by Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas — concluded that covering GLP-1s for weight loss increased average employee health costs by $7,000 in the first year and another $4,200 in the second, largely due to the cost of the drugs themselves. And yet at the same time, there were no decreases in obesity-related medical events in that time period. Another study from Sacks and his colleagues at Indiana University and the University of South Carolina found that GLP-1 use did not lead to any cost savings over five years.
So in the short term, these employers are arguably making an economically rational decision — but one that may still come at their employees’ expense. “I’m completely screwed,” said one person on Reddit about Cigna’s plans to drop GLP-1 coverage for their own employees. They’re looking at at least $300 for one month’s supply at cash prices.
They weren’t alone either: “I’m devastated,” said another person, commenting on Starbucks’s decision to stop covering GLP-1 drugs. They said they had an autoimmune condition that had made it difficult to lose weight — until this new class of medicines came along.
Where GLP-1 coverage goes from here
How could we end up here, where it makes good business sense for companies to make a decision that could potentially harm their workers’ health in the long term? It is at least in part a result of the haphazard way the US has ended up insuring people.
When employer-sponsored insurance started to arise in the mid-20th century, eventually becoming the primary way to cover the working-age population, people tended to stay at the same job for a long period of time. In theory, there was a synergy: Companies wanted their workers to stay productive, and so it was worth it for the company to invest in their long-term health via their insurance benefits. And research has found that people who stay with the same company — and the same insurance plan — tend to have better health than those who switch a lot.
But these days, people change jobs all the time or work various gigs to piece together an income. You probably don’t expect to stay at your job for 10 years — and your employer doesn’t expect you to either. Instead, they want to keep their own costs as low as possible in the short term. This leads them to cut GLP-1 coverage, even though doctors do believe that people could benefit tremendously long term from the weight loss these drugs help them achieve and all of its potential health benefits.
“There are very real health benefits of these drugs,” Sacks told me. “The fact that we don’t find offsets or they’re even more expensive than we thought doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t cover them.”
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In theory, the market is supposed to fix the price problem: Drug companies get a period of exclusivity for the drugs they develop, and then, once that time elapses, cheaper generic versions can come onto the market. But generic semaglutide won’t be available in the US until at least 2031 — and for some versions, the generic competitors aren’t going to debut until the 2040s. Offering GLP-1 coverage could become a competitive advantage for employers, a perk they can offer to entice potential workers as part of their benefits package.
Beyond that, though, the path to more affordable GLP-1s is not immediately obvious right now. A lot of people are already willing to pay cash for these drugs — and that may continue as long as people can afford to do it. But with inflation still steadily rising, these drugs could slip out of reach for more and more Americans.
The government could get involved, but, for now, the federal government’s negotiating authority only covers Medicare, not the private plans that are dropping coverage. Serious healthcare reform is probably off the table until at least 2028, and then only if Democrats win both Congress and the White House and decide to make a healthcare package their legislative priority.
But the lesson of these recent developments is that, at some point, the US may have to look seriously at the underlying problem creating this mess in the first place. A patchwork method of insuring people that privileges short-term cost-cutting over people’s long-term health isn’t a real healthcare system.
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