Rachel Feltman: Happy September, listeners! Let’s lean into those new school year vibes by learning a little something. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman—and this is your weekly science news roundup.
First, some good news for anyone glued to their phone, which—I mean, if you’re not, congratulations, I guess. A new paper offers reassurance that cell phones don’t give you brain cancer, which is great, phew....
So how did we get here? Back in 2011 the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency classified mobile phone radiation as possibly carcinogenic. That's a category that means there's limited evidence that something could possibly raise cancer risk, but it's far from definitive.
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You know what else falls into that category? So-called traditional Asian pickled vegetables. And listen, if eating pickled daikon is how I go, so be it.
The point is that a few studies suggesting something might potentially be carcinogenic can get something put on this list, and it doesn’t mean it’s time to throw the kimchi out with the bathwater. But unsurprisingly, the idea that cell phones might cause cancer was scary enough—and universally applicable enough because, again, we’re all glued to our phones—for advocacy groups, headlines and even some regulators to latch onto.
In a new review led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency and commissioned by the WHO researchers sifted through about 5,100 studies on the subject and they found just 63 that satisfied their criteria for inclusion.
When they looked at those, the researchers said there was no apparent link between phone use and brain and head cancers. We’ll have to keep an eye on things as technology evolves, of course, and the same group is now exploring cancers less obviously linkable to cell phone use, such as leukemia, to make sure there’s no link there, either.
And of course, phones don’t have to give you cancer to be bad for you. Last week, Sweden’s public health authority—which has a name I won’t even try to pronounce, you’re welcome—issued new recommendations on how parents should regulate screen time, and the guidelines are harsh.
They say that kids under the age of two shouldn’t be exposed to any screens at all, two to five year olds should stick to an hour or less, and teens should max out at three hours a day, not including school work.
That’s actually not too different from the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, though the U.S. organization grants that children under two years old should be able to video chat with adult supervision and says 18-to-24-month-olds can enjoy educational programming in the presence of a caregiver.
While these sorts of guidelines include screens of all kinds, Internet-connected devices, and particularly phones, are often the focus. Earlier this year a study commissioned by the president of France concluded that no child under the age of 11 should have a phone of any kind, no kid under the age of 13 should have a smartphone, and those 15 and older should only be allowed on "ethical" social media sites, rather than profit-driven platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat.
That same report said that children under three should be kept away from screens if possible. According to a translation by the Guardian, that’s to protect them from the “strategy of capturing children’s attention, using all forms of cognitive bias to shut children away on their screens, control them, re-engage them and monetise them” and turn them into “merchandise.”
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Speaking of protecting kids, Oregon’s latest measles outbreak is officially the state’s worst one in three decades. Numbers are also rising nationwide, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reporting 236 cases so far this year compared with just 59 cases in all of 2023.
Health experts say that falling vaccination rates are the clear and avoidable cause. Nonmedical vaccine exemption rates for kindergartners in Oregon have risen from about 1% to 8.8% since 2000. When it comes to measles specifically, as of the 2022–2023 school year, the nationwide vaccination rate for kindergarteners was just over 93%—that’s almost 2 percentage points lower than the threshold for herd immunity, which would help prevent the spread of measles.
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Measles is incredibly contagious and can cause lifelong health issues and even death. So make sure your kids are vaccinated! Now is also the perfect time to go get your flu shot, too—and if you haven’t had COVID in the last few months, throw in that new booster while you’re at it.
And now for something completely different: as Welcome to Night Vale’s Cecil Palmer once said, “There is a thin semantic line separating weird and beautiful, and that line is covered in jellyfish.” Adorable, troubling, fascinating, deeply unsettling: all of these adjectives could easily describe the invasive freshwater jellyfish multiplying in lakes, ponds and quarries in British Columbia, Canada, especially because the species is commonly known as the “peach blossom jellyfish,” which is just too cute. Like, literally, too cute for an invasive species. Come on—make them easier to hate.
Last month a paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology predicted that climate change will likely extend this invader’s range. It also confirmed that all 100 jellyfish sampled shared the same genetic material—in other words, they’re essentially clones formed from one single prolific polyp or polyp cluster. As one of the researchers explained, polyps are tiny and hard to spot, which means there could be ticking jellyfish time bombs lurking in lakes we haven’t even begun to worry about yet.
The one upside is that these all-male clones won’t get the evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction, which means they’ll be way less likely to adapt to new environments. These jellyfish have never been reported to sting humans, probably because their stinging cells are designed to paralyze wee little zooplankton and seem unable to pierce human skin. But there’s some concern that they might start outcompeting local species, including young salmon, when it comes to finding food.
Now I’ll give you all a little space.
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You may have seen headlines about a mysterious pulsing noise coming out of a speaker on the ill-fated Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which brought astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams up to the International Space Station but will not be bringing them back down.
Last week NASA confirmed that this was just feedback resulting from the audio connection between Starliner and the space station. NASA emphasized that this is a common occurrence, caused no risk to the crew, and that it’s standard procedure for astronauts to report sounds like this to mission control.
The subtext is definitely that NASA knows we’re all laser-focused on everything that might possibly be going wrong with Starliner, you know, the spacecraft that definitely-did-not-strand two astronauts in space for months longer than intended, and they would like us to please find something else to talk about.
But speaking of Starliner, at least one last time, NASA has officially started prepping to send the spacecraft back to Earth without a crew.
At the time of this recording, the space agency was hoping to see Starliner undock at 6:04 P.M. Eastern on Friday, September 6. Did it land in White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, about six hours later? Hopefully. But maybe the weather didn’t cooperate and they had to postpone, or something else went wrong.
I’m not going to make the podcast team work over the weekend for this, so it’s kind of a Schrödinger’s Starliner situation. (Also, that’s a joke, so please don’t e-mail me explaining how this isn’t at all like Schrödinger’s cat. E-mail me about literally anything else—I would love to hear from you.)
That’s all for this week’s news roundup. But if you need more space—okay, fine—tune in again on Friday for a conversation with someone who’s actually up there right now. And in the meantime, we’ll be back on Wednesday with a look at how the events of 9/11 changed the field of forensic science.
If you’re loving this show—I get it, it’s pretty great—so, do us a favor and leave a comment, a like a review, a rating, whatever, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also send us questions, comments and suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover at ScienceQuickly@sciam.com.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. This episode was edited by Anaissa Ruiz Tejada. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!
