The Number of Moles on Your Right Arm Could Be Tied to Your Cancer Risk

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Moles are usually harmless, but they can be used to assess a person’s risk for developing skin cancer. Someone with more than 100 moles across their body, for example, can be at a greater risk for melanoma, according to experts. Now a new study suggests that physicians may not have to look at a patient’s entire body—instead, doctors can focus on the patient’s right arm, where the presence of 11 or more moles could signal a greater risk of melanoma.

The study, published in the British Journal of Dermatology on Monday, looked at 3,594 twins, and then a larger group of men and women, who all had nurses count how many moles they had on 17 different parts of their body. The researchers found that the number of moles on a person’s right arm was most predictive of their total number of moles on their body. Women with over seven moles on their right arm were nine times more likely to have over 50 moles on their whole body. People with over 11 moles on their right arm were more likely to have over 100 moles on their whole body. (Read more from “The Number of Moles on Your Right Arm Could Be Tied to Your Cancer Risk” HERE)

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Captain America Battles Right-Wing Conservatives in New Comic [+video]

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In the latest issue of Marvel’s revamped Captain America, the iconic superhero takes on a group of right-wing conservatives trying to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the border.

In “Captain America: Sam Wilson #1,” the superhero also known as Sam Wilson heads to the border to take on an “evil” militia group known as the Sons of the Serpent, who are patrolling the area between Mexico and Arizona, according to a video summary of the issue created by the MacIver Institute. . .

The villain continues to describe the need for a wall along the U.S. border — another common theme among Republican presidential candidates. (Read more from “Captain America Battles Right-Wing Conservatives in New Comic” HERE)

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Cops Are Asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for Their Customers’ DNA

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When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.

Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient. “Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”

The FBI maintains a national genetic database with samples from convicts and arrestees, but this was the most public example of cops turning to private genetic databases to find a suspect. But it’s not the only time it’s happened, and it means that people who submitted genetic samples for reasons of health, curiosity, or to advance science could now end up in a genetic line-up of criminal suspects. (Read more from “Cops Are Asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for Their Customers’ DNA” HERE)

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How a Woman’s Ebola Relapse Tears up Everything Doctors Thought They Knew

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Since 1976, when the Ebola virus was first identified, doctors racing to remote villages in African forests have thought they had a reasonable idea of what those infected were facing. The disease was grim – a hemorrhagic fever which caused copious bleeding and often death – but some people could and did fully recover. Now that is in question.

When nurse Pauline Cafferkey was admitted back into the infectious diseases unit of the Royal Free hospital in London on 9 October, nine months after recovering from Ebola, and then became critically ill, all the previous assumptions about the long-term effects of this virus had to be torn up.

Doctors and scientists are amazed and appalled. It is horrible for Cafferkey and her family, but the implications of her new illness are much more wide-reaching. The UK has a world-class health service. Cafferkey’s family were angry that the possibility that her symptoms were linked to Ebola was not immediately picked up, but even though she did not have the usual fever and vomiting, within days the virus had been identified once more and she had been flown to specialised care.

But a resurgence of illness that did not look like classic Ebola in survivors in countries with fragile or collapsed health systems, such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea or – for that matter – DRC or Uganda, which have had outbreaks in the past, would not have been recognised. It is entirely possible that people have died from Ebola complications unnoticed, months after their initial recovery, and more could still die.

Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at Nottingham University, is one of those who admits to real surprise. There are a lot of unknowns about Ebola, he said, “but I don’t think anybody would for one minute have expected complications quite as serious as they certainly appear. (Read more from “How a Woman’s Ebola Relapse Tears up Everything Doctors Thought They Knew” HERE)

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McDonald’s Franchisees Say the Brand Is in a ‘Deep Depression’ and ‘Facing Its Final Days’

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“We are in the throes of a deep depression, and nothing is changing,” one franchisee wrote in response to the survey by Nomura analyst Mark Kalinowski. “Probably 30% of operators are insolvent.”

Another wrote, “The CEO is sowing the seeds of our demise. We are a quick-serve fast-food restaurant, not a fast casual like Five Guys or Chipotle. The system may be facing its final days.”

More than a dozen franchisees expressed frustration with McDonald’s management, saying that CEO Steve Easterbrook’s turnaround plan — which includes initiatives like all-day breakfast and a shift to digital ordering kiosks — is a distraction from the core issues of McDonald’s, like food quality and customer service . . .

Several franchisees complained about all-day breakfast, saying that it has complicated kitchen operations and goes against Easterbrook’s repeated promises to simplify the menu.

“The system is very lost at the moment,” one franchisee wrote. “Our menu boards are still bloated, and we are still trying to be too many things to too many people. … Things are broken from the franchisee perspective.” (Read more from “McDonald’s Franchisees Say the Brand Is in a ‘Deep Depression’ and ‘Facing Its Final Days'” HERE)

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Your Smart Home Knows a Lot About You

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How much does your smart home know about you? That was the question that Charles Givre, a data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, set out to answer in a recent experiment. Givre has an account on Wink, a platform designed to control, from a single screen, his Internet-connected home devices, such as door locks, window shades and LED lights. He wanted to learn what could be learned from his usage behavior. It turned out it was a little too much.

Earlier this month, at a big data conference in New York, Givre presented his results. By accessing his Wink account, he (or anyone with his login information) could identify his social media accounts, the names of his devices (like “Charles’s iPad) and his network information. An app that monitors his grill’s propane tank recorded the tank’s latitude and longitude, thus revealing the exact location of his house. From his Nest thermostat, he could figure out when his house was occupied and when it was not.

The goal of his experiment, Givre said, was not to demonstrate security flaws in his devices, but to document the wealth of information that they amass through everyday use. To access his usage history, some accounts required verification keys; others only asked for Givre’s email address and password. He wrote programs to “ping” his devices to gather new information about what was going on in his home in real time, and to find patterns there. He noted that his smart devices seemed to transmit information securely on its way to the companies’ servers, “but most of the interesting stuff was in the cloud anyway.”

As the trend toward networked “smart homes” and “connected cars” continues, security precautions are more important than ever. The Federal Trade Commission put out a report this year with best practices about how companies should notify their customers about data retention. Device makers say that customers can opt in or out of sharing their personal information with developers and third-party apps. But customers may not always be aware of just how much information their devices are collecting about them in the first place. (Read more from “Your Smart Home Knows a Lot About You” HERE)

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X-Rated Audio Shocks Customers at Target Store

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Shoppers at a Target store in San Jose stopped in their tracks Wednesday morning when a sexually explicit recording began blaring over the store’s public address system.

Chris Minor, who was shopping at the Westgate Mall store, said the material was X-rated and had profanities. Minor recorded the incident, along with the reactions of fellow shoppers, on his cell phone. Customers, which included mothers with babies, were stunned . . .

“I felt violated, and my body said wait a minute, this ain’t right. So I was uneasy,” he said. “I thought it may have been Halloween related, maybe an employee playing games, but this was rated-X material, which made me feel very uncomfortable. I was taken aback, very frustrated, and appalled, and angered by what I heard,” Minor told KPIX 5.

Minor said the store apologized over the PA system, and then the explicit recording started again. (Read more from “X-Rated Audio Shocks Customers at Target Store” HERE)

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Top Physicist: Obama Picked the Wrong Side on Climate Change

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The climate models used by alarmist scientists to predict global warming are getting worse, not better; carbon dioxide does far more good than harm; and President Obama has backed the “wrong side” in the war on “climate change.”

So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson, the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.

It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation.

(Read more from “Top Physicist: Obama Picked the Wrong Side on Climate Change” HERE)

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In Chattanooga’s Wake, DHS Wants to Revive Terrorism Alert System

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By Kevin Baron. President Barack Obama’s top homeland security official has ordered a review of the nation’s terrorism alert system to reflect what he called the growing threat of attacks originating within the United States.

The U.S. has never used the National Terrorism Alert System, a two-level system that replaced the oft-derided color-coded terrorism alerts installed after 9/11 to spread the word about potential attacks from abroad. But after a “homegrown violent extremist” killed five service members in Chattanooga, Tenn. — and amid the expectation of more terrorist-inspired attacks — the Department of Homeland Security wants to revise and jumpstart the system.

“I’ve asked our folks to consider whether we should revise that system to accommodate how the terrorism threat has evolved,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army in Washington, D.C.“That review is underway now.”

Instead of the post-9/11 green-to-red progression, the NTAS has just two states of alert. An “elevated threat” means there is a credible threat against the United States. An “imminent threat” alerts the public to just that, “a credible, specific, and impending terrorist threat against the United States.”

Under the old system, DHS took much criticism that the nation was being held on constant orange alert for no good reason. But the department has since been criticized for never issuing any alerts. U.S. intelligence and national and local law enforcement officials have opted to keep the public in the dark to avoid panic with a sudden terrorism alert. (Read more from “In Chattanooga’s Wake, DHS Wants to Revive Terrorism Alert System” HERE)

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NYPD Has Super-Secret X-Ray Vans

By Yoav Gonen and Shawn Cohen. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton won’t let the NYCLU — or anyone else — bully him for details on the NYPD’s super-secret X-ray vans.

The top cop was asked Tuesday about the counter-terror vehicles, called Z Backscatter Vans, in light of the NYCLU’s request to file an amicus brief arguing that the NYPD should have to release records about the X-ray vans.

“They’re not used to scan people for weapons,” Bratton insisted. “The devices we have, the vehicles if you will, are all used lawfully and if the ACLU and others don’t think that’s the case, we’ll see them in court — where they’ll lose! At this time and the nature of what’s going on in the world, that concern of theirs is unfounded.”

He declined to give more specific details about the devices themselves.

“Those are issues I’d prefer not to divulge to the public at this time,” Bratton said. “I will not talk about anything at all about this — it falls into the range of security and counter-terrorism activity that we engage in.” (Read more from “NYPD Has Super-Secret X-Ray Vans” HERE)

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Finally, the Government Has Decided to Eliminate Pork — From This Menu

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The nation’s pork producers are in an uproar after the federal government abruptly removed bacon, pork chops, pork links, ham and all other pig products from the national menu for 206,000 federal inmates . . .

The Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for running 122 federal penitentiaries and feeding their inmates three meals a day, said the decision was based on a survey of prisoners’ food preferences: . . .

“Why keep pushing food that people don’t want to eat?” asked Edmond Ross, a spokesman for the prison bureau. “Pork has been the lowest-rated food by inmates for several years,” It also apparently got more expensive for the government to buy, although he did not provide specifics.

The National Pork Producers Council isn’t buying it. “I find it hard to believe that a survey would have found a majority of any population saying, ‘No thanks, I don’t want any bacon,’” said Dave Warner, a spokesman for the Washington-based trade association, which represents the nation’s hog farmers.

“We’re going to find out how this came about and go from there,” Warner said. “We wouldn’t rule out any options to resolve this.” He said the association “is still formulating our strategy” to reverse the prison decision, which the industry first learned about Monday when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram called for comment. (Read more from “Finally, the Government Has Decided to Eliminate Pork — From This Menu” HERE)

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