Cancer deaths rose to 10 million globally in 2019, up from 2010 when total cancer deaths numbered 8.29 million worldwide - but the headline masks some important health progress.

Cancer is not going up, despite claims by those who believe modern food, energy, and medicine are harming us. Diagnoses are going up, which means deaths are now more successfully categorized than in the past. And tracheal, bronchus, and lung cancer, the leading causes, will decline as the inroads America has made against smoking propagate throughout Europe and developing nations.

Though efforts to change mascots and team names have had some success, like the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, more than 2,000 mascots referencing Indigenous terms and images are estimated to exist in the U.S. today, from high school to pro sports, including the Atlanta Braves, with their “tomahawk chop” chant that gained renewed attention during the 2021 World Series.

There has long been something of a stigma about mental health issues. If a celebrity goes into an alcohol or drug clinic, 30 days later their career is back on track, but a reputation for depression makes filmmakers worry they won't be able to take the stress of a new project.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and depression brought on by isolation and non-stop media coverage, changed all that.  For the first time since national data have been tracked in the United States, stigma toward people with depression has declined,  There has even been a statistically significant drop in social rejection for people described as having major depression. 

Smoking remains the most prevalent lifestyle disease in the world, and for people who want to quit, there are lots of options, from "cold turkey" to vaping to patches and gums.

But among smokers who don't intend to quit, there is a clear winner in getting them to stop smoking anyway: vaping.

A nationally representative cohort study of 1,600 adult regular cigarette smokers who did not use e-cigarettes and did not plan to ever quit smoking did - e-cigarettes as smoking cessation tools led to 8-fold greater odds of cigarette discontinuation.

Over the course of evolutionary history, Greenlanders have benefited from a genetic variation that offers an incredible advantage; two copies of a gene variant make it so that they absorb sugar differently than other people do.

A new study finds that up to 3 percent of Greenland residents, based on analyzed data from 6,551 adult Greenlanders, have the sucrase-isomaltase variant, and experiments on mice may fill in reasons why those with the variant have lower BMI, weight, fat percentage, cholesterol levels and are generally significantly healthier.

For those that do, more sugar is not less healthy.

Popular imagery is that dinosaurs were a bland color, but most birds are have bland color palates as well. Then you have parrots or peacocks. In between the extremes of bland and flamboyant, there are pink pigeon feet, red rooster combs and yellow pelican pouches.

That may have been the case for dinosaurs as well. There’s a good chance that extinct dinosaurs rocked pops of color on similar body parts and may have flashed their colors to entice mates, just as birds do today, according to a study in the journal Evolution led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.