The study tested pool filters from public pools, looking for genetic material. It found that 58% of the filters tested positive for a strain of E. coli that is normally found in human intestines and in feces. The CDC stated that the study indicates people are either pooping in pools or failing to clean themselves well before entering pools.

“Swimming is an excellent way to get the physical activity needed to stay healthy,” said Michele Hlavsa, chief of the Healthy Swimming Program at the CDC. “However, pool users should be aware of how to prevent infections while swimming. Remember, chlorine and other disinfectants don’t kill germs instantly. That’s why it’s important for swimmers to protect themselves by not swallowing the water they swim in and to protect others by keeping feces and germs out of the pool by taking a pre-swim shower and not swimming when ill with diarrhea.”

The CDC recommends several practices to cut down on pool contamination. Some of the obvious ones include people not swimming if they have diarrhea, showering with soap before swimming, and washing hands after using the restroom or after changing diapers. The agency also recommends taking bathroom breaks every hour, and checking children’s diapers every half-hour. More advanced pool users can check chlorine levels and water PH before swimming. Possibly the best advice the CDC gives, though, is that swimmers should not swallow the water they swim in.

“These new studies support previous findings that reducing sodium from very high intake levels to moderate levels improves health,” said Brian Strom, a professor of public health and preventive medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “But they also suggest that lowering sodium intake too much may actually increase a person’s risk of some health problems.”

The studies reiterated that there is evidence that high sodium intake is associated with heart disease risk. However, it also found that studies showing that sodium intake below 2,300 mg per day lowers the risk of heart disease and stroke are too “inconsistent” to recommend extremely lowered sodium intake. Lower sodium intake was, in fact, found to be linked to “adverse health effects” for those with mid- to late-stage heart failure.

Researchers stated that the average U.S. adult consumes 3,400 mg (one and one-half teaspoons) or more of sodium per day. Current recommendations on sodium intake suggest that adults ages 14 to 50 lower their sodium intake to 2,300 mg per day, and that adults over 50 and those with hypertension, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease lower their intake to 1,500 mg per day.

Though the report calls current recommendations into question, it does not recommend an intake range for sodium. It also suggests that sodium could affect heart disease in ways other than blood pressure.

“These studies make clear that looking at sodium’s effects on blood pressure is not enough to determine dietary sodium’s ultimate impact on health,” said Strom. “Changes in diet are more complex than simply changing a single mineral. More research is needed to understand these pathways.”

First, a study just published in the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics concludes that “nearly half of US high school students aged ≥16 years report TWD during the past 30 days, and these students are more likely to engage in additional risky MV behaviors.”

What risky behaviors, you ask? Well, the study, based on data from the CDC, found that these teens who texted while driving were more likely to not wear their seatbelts and were also more likely to drink and drive (or at least ride in the car with someone who has been drinking).

The CDC study asked a sample of around 8.500 high school students whether they had texted while driving in the past month. Just shy of 45% copped to it. Those teens were then found to participate in other high-risk driving activities at a higher rate.

“Multitasking is fine if you’re sitting in your dorm room or at home in your bedroom, but multitasking in the car is a terrible idea,” said CDC director Tom Frieden. “It’s amazing how quickly things can go wrong in the car.”

Here’s another alarming find for you parents out there: according to another study, texting while driving is now killing more teens that drunk driving.

The study comes from the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York. They say that over 3,000 teens now die every year as the result of texting while driving. That number just beats the number killed in drunk driving accidents – 2,700.

Of course, texting is a more common practice than drinking while driving. But still, it’s a shocking figure.

“The reality is kids aren’t drinking seven days per week – they are carrying their phones and texting seven days per week, so you intuitively know this a more common occurrence,” said Dr. Andrew Adesman, Chief of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center.

Although these studies focused on teens, it’s not just the younger crowd who is guilty of texting while driving. A recent AT&T study found that 49% of adults admitted to the practice, compared to just 43% of teens. And it’s not for lack of knowledge. 98% admitted that they knew it was wrong, but did it anyway. 39 states currently ban texting while driving and another 6 ban it for novice drivers.

The map was created by geography students at California’s Humboldt State University, the same group of people who brought us the post-election Twitter racism map back in November. Back then, they looked at racist tweets the focused on President Obama’s reelection and found that Mississippi and Alabama were the two hotbeds for such activity.

“Rather than focusing just on hate directed towards a single individual at a single point in time, we wanted to analyze a broader swath of discriminatory speech in social media, including the usage of racist, homophobic and ableist slurs,” say the researchers.

For instance, here’s the map of generally “homophobic” tweets, which are determined by the use of words like “dyke,” “fag,” “homo,” and “queer.”

And here’s the map of racist tweets – those containing the words “nigger,” “chink,” “wetback,” “gook,” or “spick”:

Of course, analysis like this is never going to be 100% accurate. Keyword analysis has inherent issues. For instance, the word “queer” is not always used in a derogatory, hate-filled manner. People could be tweeting out the word “fag” in another context, such as bemoaning its usage.

On the other hand, it’s hard to justify many used of words like “wetback” on Twitter. Sure, it’s not completely solid analysis, but it’s pretty close. You have to to imagine that the majority of people tweeting about fags, dykes, niggers, and chinks are doing so in a hateful manner.

But to completely cut out this sort of uncertainty, the researchers manually read and coded each tweets to judge the sentiment, “in order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama.” This way, they could know, for sure, whether a tweet that contained the word “queer” was actually posted in a hateful context.

Using DOLLY to search for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, we discovered 41,306 tweets containing the word ‘nigger’, 95,123 referenced ‘homo’, among other terms. In order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama, students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map.

You can check out the full interactive map here, where you can zoom in to see specific concentrations of twitter hate speech.

[Floating Sheep via MIT Technology Review]

The study, published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry found that placental “folds” and trophoblast inclusions – abnormal cell growths – can be used to predict whether babies are at risk for autism.

Researchers looked at 117 placentas from infants who already had risk factors for autism, comparing them to 100 placentas from infants not known to be at risk for autism. The placentas from at-risk infants were found to have as many as 15 trophoblast inclusions. The most any placentas from non-at-risk infants had was two. The Yale researchers stated that placenta with four or more trophoblast inclusions “conservatively” predicts a 96.7% chance of the infant being at risk for autism.

The new findings are important, researchers say, because current diagnoses of autism typically happen at age 3 or older, while effective treatment for autism should start well before the child reaches that age.

“Regrettably couples without known genetic susceptibility must rely on identification of early signs or indicators that may not overtly manifest until the child’s second or third year of life,” said Dr. Harvey Kliman, senior author of the study and a research scientist in the OB/GYN department at Yale.

“I hope that diagnosing the risk of developing autism by examining the placenta at birth will become routine, and that the children who are shown to have increased numbers of trophoblast inclusions will have early interventions and an improved quality of life as a result of this test.”

(Image courtesy Patrick Lynch/Yale University)

Millennials, defined as those aged 18-34, were found to be more willing to allow companies track them or access their personal information compared to those 35 and older. Millennials were also found to be more receptive to the idea of targeted advertising, and were much more active on social media. All of this, though, is predicated on receiving some benefit for the lack of privacy.

“Millennials think differently when it comes to online privacy,” said Elaine Coleman, managing director of media and emerging technologies for Bovitz, the research firm that conducted the survey in conjunction with USC. “It’s not that they don’t care about it – rather they perceive social media as an exchange or an economy of ideas, where sharing involves participating in smart ways.”

Though the social benefit of most social media is clear, even more tangible benefits still don’t seem to entice those over 35 as much as they do Millennials. One question, for example, asked whether a survey respondent would reveal their location to a company in exchange for coupons to nearby businesses. 56% of Millennials would share their location, but only 42% of older respondents said they would.

“Online privacy is dead – Millennials understand that, while older users have not adapted,” said Jeffrey Cole, director of the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. “Millennials recognize that giving up some of their privacy online can provide benefits to them. This demonstrates a major shift in online behavior – there’s no going back.”

(Infographic courtesy the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future)

(via BGR)

According to the NIH the study, called HVTN 505, has been running since 2009. 2,504 volunteers in 19 U.S. cities were chosen to undergo a series of immunizations that researchers hoped would prevent HIV infection and reduce viral loads in those infected (or receive a placebo). The volunteers were all either men who have sex with men or transgender people who have sex with men.

After reviewing data from the study this week, the monitoring board found that study participants who received the vaccine were just as likely to contract HIV as those who had not. In fact, more study participants who received the vaccine became infected with HIV than those who received a placebo, though the difference was not statistically significant. The vaccine also failed to reduce viral load among study participants who contracted HIV.

Due to the findings, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has stopped administering the vaccinations. Researchers will continue to follow current study participants, who will be contacted and informed of whether they received the vaccine or the placebo.

A new study has found that DBS in a specific brain region in mice can activate a dopamine type-2 receptor. The process was shown to reduce both the caloric intake and weight of obese mice. The study has been published in in the Journal of Neuroscience.

“Based on this research, DBS may provide therapeutic relief to binge eating, a behavior commonly seen in obese humans, and frequently unresponsive to other approaches,” said Tracy Bale, a neuroscience professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “These results are our best evidence yet that targeting the nucleus accumbens with DBS may be able to modify specific feeding behaviors linked to body weight changes and obesity.”

According to the study’s authors, almost 50% of obese people binge eat. The researchers define binge eating as “uncontrollably” consuming high-calorie food within a short period of time. The mice that received DBS were shown to eat “significantly ” less high fat food. The long-term effects of DBS on obese mice also showed their glucose sensitivity improved.

DBS is currently used to reduce tremors in Parkinson’s disease patients.

“Once replicated in human clinical trials, DBS could rapidly become a treatment for people with obesity due to the extensive groundwork already established in other disease areas,” said Casey Halpern, lead author of the study and a resident in the Perelman School’s Department of Neurosurgery.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have published their new findings in the latest issue of the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine. Their study looked at “inactive” participants who were 45 or older and had “suboptimal” diets. After being divided and coached in different exercise and diet changes for one year, the group that changed both diet and exercise habits at the same time were most likely to meet the U.S. national guidelines for exercise and nutrition.

“It may be particularly useful to start both at the same time,” said Abby King, lead author of the study and a professor of medicine at Stanford. “If you need to start with one, consider starting with physical activity first.”

The study also showed that those who changed their diets first did not meet exercise goals as easily, while those who began exercising first were more likely to meet their nutritional goals.

“These health behaviors aren’t things that we change over a six-week period and then our job is done,” said King. “They’re things that people grapple with their whole lives, so to develop ‘touches’ of advice and support in a cost-efficient way is becoming more and more important.”

Long story short – they’re quite revealing. The researchers were able to accurately predict subjects’ activities and personality traits based on what they liked on Facebook, even when those likes weren’t specifically about the particular proclivities. For instance, a user didn’t have to like the page “I love being gay” in order for researchers to determine that the user was indeed gay. Around 80% of the time, they could rightly infer it based on other sorts of likes, for instance “Britney Spears” or the show “Desperate Housewives.”

The bottom line is that your likes tell a lot about you, and unless you go to great lengths to make your 100, 200, maybe even thousands of likes non-public, people are going to be able to make judgements about you.

Such the rub when you use a public social network. Deal with it or don’t, it’s up to you.

The Colbert Report looked into the topic of these revealing Facebook likes, and basically came to this conclusion:

“Facebook likes can reveal your personality traits, just as Friendster likes can reveal that you stopped using the internet in 2003.”

No, wait, that’s not a conclusion. That’s just a Friendster jab. Low hanging fruit there, Colbert.

“I don’t need some study to tell me who’s gay and who isn’t. That’s what scarves are for.”