Science and Technology (old posts, page 229)

Is exercise really better than drugs for cancer remission? It's an appealing idea – but it's misleading | Devi Sridhar

The healing power of exercise should never be underestimated, but be cautious about what recent headlines seem to suggest

  • Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

You might have seen the recent headlines on a new study on exercise and cancer recovery suggesting that “exercise is better than a drug” in preventing cancer returning. Cue a wave of commentary pitting “big pharma” against fitness, as if we must choose between pills and planks. It’s an appealing narrative – but it’s also misleading.

We don’t need to choose between the two. In fact, the best health outcomes often come from combining medicine with a broader view of health that includes movement, diet, social connection and mental wellbeing.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

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Iron age settlement found in Gloucestershire after detectorist unearths Roman swords

When Glen Manning discovered two cavalry swords, a later dig revealed two distinct chapters of British history

It began with an extraordinary piece of fortune: a metal detectorist on only his second expedition coming upon two very rare cavalry swords on the brink of being lost for ever.

A dig by professional archaeologists and volunteers at the spot in Gloucestershire has now found that the swords may have been buried in the grounds of a grand Roman villa built on the site of an iron age settlement.

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Richards: Introducing tmux-rs

Collin Richards has announced version 0.0.1 of tmux-rs, a port of the tmux terminal multiplexer to Rust.

For the [past] 6 months or so I've been quietly porting tmux from C to Rust. I've recently reached a big milestone: the code base is now 100% (unsafe) Rust. I'd like to share the process of porting the original codebase from ~67,000 lines of C code to ~81,000 lines of Rust (excluding comments and empty lines). You might be asking: why did you rewrite tmux in Rust? And yeah, I don't really have a good reason. It's a hobby project. Like gardening, but with more segfaults.

Richards says that the next goal for the project is to convert it to safe Rust. It is currently "not very difficult to get it to crash", but he wanted to share the project with other Rust fans now. The project is available on GitHub.

[$] Kernel API specification and validation

The kernel project makes a strong promise to its users: the kernel ABI will not be changed in ways that break user-space code. The occasional failure notwithstanding, kernel developers do try to live up to that promise. They are handicapped by one little problem, though: there is no description of what the kernel ABI is, and no comprehensive way to test whether a given change breaks it. The kernel API specification framework proposed (in its second revision) by Sasha Levin addresses some of those concerns, but the solution is incomplete and does not come for free.

The Guardian view on Labour’s NHS plan: it is right to celebrate medical science, but delivery is the hard part | Editorial

Local clinics and technology could drive improvement if reorganisation doesn’t slow things down

The NHS is a totemic institution in Labour’s history and that of the country, and voters care more about it than most things the government does. So the publication of Labour’s 10-year plan for health in England was a crucial opportunity for ministers to show that they are in tune with the public. Given that satisfaction with the health service has hit a record low of 21%, and doctors are again threatening to go on strike, the announcement was also a moment of peril – even before the damage suffered by the prime minister and chancellor earlier this week, when rebels forced a U-turn on planned cuts to welfare.

The overarching principles of Labour’s reforms were set out last year: more prevention, more technology, more care delivered in the community (as opposed to in hospital). So the challenge was to find something fresh, original and hopeful to say. The promise of science and the potential of localism are what Wes Streeting’s team has come up with. The strand of DNA pictured on the document’s cover points to high expectations of genomic medicine and other cutting-edge technology. Neighbourhood clinics, by contrast, represent a prosaic recognition of demand for more ordinary services and treatments, from an ageing and increasingly unhealthy population. The aim is to deliver most outpatient care away from hospitals by 2035.

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