'More Chinese women choosing singledom as economy stutters'

 Freelance copywriter Chai Wanrou thinks marriage is an unfair institution. Like many young women in China, she is part of a growing movement that envisions a future with no husband and no children, presenting the government with a challenge it could do without.

"Regardless of whether you're extremely successful or just ordinary, women still make the biggest sacrifices at home," the 28-year-old feminist said at a cafe in the northwestern city of Xian.

"Many who got married in previous generations, especially women, sacrificed themselves and their career development, and didn't get the happy life they were promised. Living my own life well is difficult enough nowadays," she told Reuters.

President Xi Jinping last year stressed the need to "cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing" as China's population fell for a second consecutive year and new births reached historic lows.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang also vowed to "work towards a birth-friendly society" and boost childcare services in this year's government work report.

The Communist Party views the nuclear family as the bedrock of social stability, with unmarried mothers stigmatised and largely denied benefits. But a growing number of educated women, facing unprecedented insecurity amid record youth unemployment and an economic downturn, are espousing "singleism" instead.

China's single population aged over 15 hit a record 239 million in 2021, according to official data. Marriage registrations rebounded slightly last year due to a pandemic backlog, after reaching historic lows in 2022. A 2021 Communist Youth League survey of some 2,900 unmarried urban young people found that 44% of women do not plan to marry.

Marriage, however, is still regarded as a milestone of adulthood in China and the proportion of adults who never marry remains low. But in an other sign of its declining popularity, many Chinese are delaying tying the knot, with the average age of first marriage rising to 28.67 in 2020 from 24.89 in 2010, according to census data.

In Shanghai, this figure reached 30.6 for men and 29.2 for women last year, according to city statistics.

"Feminist activism is basically not allowed (in China), but refusing marriage and childbirth can be said to be ... a form of non-violent disobedience towards the patriarchal state," said Lü Pin, a Chinese feminist activist based in the United States.

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After decades of improving women's education levels, workforce participation and social mobility, Chinese authorities now face a dilemma as the same group of women have become increasingly resistant to their propaganda.

Long-term single lifestyles are gradually becoming more widespread in China, giving rise to online communities of mostly single women who seek solidarity from like-minded people.

Posts with the hashtags "No marriage, no children" from female influencers often in their thirties or forties on Xiaohongshu, China's Instagram, regularly gain thousands of likes.

One anti-marriage forum on Douban, another social media platform, has 9,200 members, while another dedicated to "singleism" has 3,600 members who discuss collective retirement plans, among other topics.

Liao Yueyi, a 24-year-old unemployed graduate in the southern city of Nanning, recently declared to her mother that she "wakes up from nightmares about having children".

"No marriage or kids is a decision I've made after deep consideration. I don't owe anyone an apology, my parents have accepted it," she posted on WeChat.

Instead she has decided to "lie flat" - a Chinese expression that means doing just enough to get by - and save money for future travels.

"I think it's okay to date or cohabit, but children are a huge asset investment with minimal returns," she said, adding that she has discussed renting a house with some female friends when they all retire.

Many of the women interviewed cited a desire for self-exploration, disillusionment with patriarchal Chinese family dynamics and a lack of "enlightened" male partners as the main factors behind their decision to stay single and childless.

Gender equality also plays a role: all the women said it was difficult to find a man who valued their autonomy and believed in equal division of household labour.

"There's an oversupply of highly educated women and not enough highly educated men," said Xiaoling Shu, professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis. Decades of the one-child policy have led to 32.3 million more men than women in 2022, according to official data.

"College-educated women become stronger believers in advocating for their rights and status in society," Shu said. "Well-educated women in search of supportive life partners find fewer suitable men who also endorse women's rights."

While not all the women interviewed identified as feminist or viewed themselves as deliberately defying the government, their actions reflect a broader trend of Chinese female empowerment expressed through personal choices.

And even though some analysts believe that the number of people who remain single for life will not grow exponentially in the future, delayed marriages and falling fertility are likely to pose a threat to China's demographic goals.

"In the long run, women's enthusiasm for marriage and childbirth will only continue to decrease," said feminist Lü.

"I believe this is the most important long-term crisis that China will face."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-chinese-women-choosing-singledom-011018843.html

Former Google engineer indicted for stealing AI secrets to aid Chinese firms

 A former Google software engineer was indicted in California on Tuesday on charges of stealing trade secrets related to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that he took to benefit a pair of companies based in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was charged with four counts of trade secret theft for transferring Google's trade secrets and other confidential information to Chinese companies. Ding, 38, began working for Google in 2019 and worked on the tech giant's supercomputing data centers developing software that allowed graphics processing units (GPUs) to function efficiently for machine learning, AI applications or other purposes required by Google or its clients.

According to the indictment, Ding uploaded over 500 unique files containing Google's confidential information, including trade secrets, into a personal Google cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023. Ding exfiltrated these files by copying data from Google source files in Apple Notes on his company-issued laptop, and then converting those notes into PDF files and uploading them from Google's network to evade detection.

Less than a month after his unauthorized upload activity started, Ding was offered a CTO job with a Chinese company known as Rongshu for $14,800 a month plus a bonus and stock. Rongshu's business aimed to develop software to accelerate machine learning on GPU chips and trained AI models.

Ding also founded a company called Zhisuan that proposed to develop a cluster management system to accelerate machine learning workloads and training large AI models powered by supercomputing chips, according to the indictment. 

The company received funding from a PRC-based startup incubator and touted its ability to replicate and improve upon Google's platform to "develop a computational power platform suited to China's national condition."

Google detected Ding's upload activity while he was in China in December 2023, and on Dec. 8 he told an investigator from the company that he wanted to use the information as evidence of his work at Google and signed an affidavit that he would delete any sensitive Google data in his possession.

Less than a week later, Ding booked a one-way flight from San Francisco to Beijing, and on Dec. 26 he tendered his resignation effective Jan. 5, 2024, the indictment said. In late December, Google learned that Ding had presented as the CEO of Zhisuan at an investor conference in Beijing the month before and found his unauthorized uploads after searching his network activity history.

Google security personnel retrieved his company laptop and mobile device from his residence on Jan. 4, and the FBI executed search warrants to secure electronic devices and other evidence on Jan. 6 and 13, according to the indictment.

"While Linwei Ding was employed as a software engineer at Google, he was secretly working to enrich himself and two companies based in the People's Republic of China," said U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey in a press release. "By stealing Google's trade secrets about its artificial intelligence supercomputing systems, Ding gave himself and the companies that he affiliated with in the PRC an unfair competitive advantage."

"The stolen information concerns both Google's hardware infrastructure and its AI software platform. Generally, the information concerns the technology that allows Google's supercomputing data centers to train large AI models through machine learning. While doing this, Ding was secretly tied to two PRC-based technology companies. Both were artificial intelligence companies," Ramsey added in a video statement.

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
GOOGL	ALPHABET INC.	131.40	-1.27	-0.96%

A Google spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement: "We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement. We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely."

The company said that its investigation found it was one junior employee acting on their own and isn't a pervasive problem at Google. It also noted that employee activity on Google's network was logged, including file transfers to platforms like Google Drive and DropBox.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/former-google-engineer-indicted-stealing-ai-secrets-aid-chinese-firms

Despite their prevalence, arthritis, neck and back pain receive few research dollars

 Musculoskeletal diseases—a diverse category of conditions affecting bones, joints, muscles, and connective tissues—affect more than 1 in 3 people in the United States and are a leading driver of health care spending with an estimated cost of more than $380 billion in 2016, putting them ahead of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Conditions that impact many people, incur high financial costs to individuals and society and negatively impact quality of life for individuals and their loved ones are said to carry a high disease burden.

Investigators led by Ara Nazarian, Ph.D., at the Musculoskeletal Translational Innovation Initiative in the Carl J. Shapiro Department of Orthopedic Studies at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), evaluated the relationship between the disease burden for 60 conditions and the federal funding assigned to research dedicated to them.

The team's results, published in The Lancet Regional Health—Americas, revealed that federal funding for musculoskeletal diseases is disproportionately low despite their significant and growing impact.

"There's a huge mismatch; if you stand up in front of any audience and ask how many people have or know someone who suffers from arthritis or back pain, every hand is going to go in the air, yet musculoskeletal diseases garner less than 2% of federal research dollars," said Nazarian, who is also an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School. "To bring funding into alignment with the level of disease burden would require an approximately ten-fold increase to start with."

Nazarian and colleagues looked at National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in 2019 and 2021 for 60 illnesses, including various cancers, cardiovascular diseases, substance use disorders, Alzheimer's disease and dementias, and musculoskeletal diseases. Next, using data from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study, the team quantified the cumulative costs of each condition as measured in disability-adjusted life-years (DALY), a measurement of the economic and social impact of disability on quality of life.

DALY calculations allow investigators to compare low-grade chronic conditions such as low back pain to acute causes of injury and death. (For example, the World Health Organization has reported that depression is responsible for more years lost to disability than diabetes in the U.S.)

While analysis revealed an overall positive association between disease burden and federal funding levels, musculoskeletal diseases were clearly underfunded relative to their cumulative personal and social impacts.

Rheumatoid arthritis, a progressive, debilitating autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the joints, received 67% of the funding predicted based on its impact; low back pain, which costs the U.S. health care system an estimated $100 billion a year, received just 14% of the predicted research dollars. Neck pain, affecting up to half of all people nationally and globally each year, received less than 1%—just 0.83%—of the predicted funding.

"With modern medicine, people are living longer, but they are also spending more of those years living with chronic disabling diseases," Nazarian said. "The lack of effective therapies limits our ability to manage these conditions. There is a great need for special attention to the intensifying burden of musculoskeletal issues that cause pain, impair mobility, and prevent individuals from living full and healthy lives."

The research found that without federal funding through NIH's National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), innovation in musculoskeletal research is stalling. Federal dollars are needed to train the next generation of scientists and fuel the basic science that will shed new light on these complex diseases.

"Robust basic and translational research work lays important groundwork for breakthroughs in the field, which industry can then take the next steps to translate them into therapeutic solutions for the population," Nazarian said. "However, without proper public investment in the early stages of research, many good ideas and solutions that can fundamentally change people's lives will never see the light of the day."

More information: Andrew T. Nguyen et al, Musculoskeletal health: an ecological study assessing disease burden and research funding, The Lancet Regional Health - Americas (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.lana.2023.100661

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-prevalence-arthritis-neck-pain-dollars.html

Lung cancer cells protected from cigarette smoke damage, researchers find

 Lung cancer cells survive better and exhibit less cell damage when exposed to cigarette smoke in cell culture experiments compared to non-cancerous lung cells. New research by a team of undergraduate students led by a Penn State molecular biologist may have revealed how lung cancer cells can persist in smoke. The mechanism could be related to how cancer cells develop resistance to pharmaceutical treatments as well.

The team found that a protein, which is expressed at high levels in some lung cancer cells and acts as a pump to transport molecules across the cell membrane, could potentially be clearing the damaging molecules coming from cigarette smoke. These molecules, if left uncleared inside the cells, can lead to protein aggregation that can damage and eventually kill lung cells.

A paper describing the research appeared in PLOS One.

"Cigarette smoke contains carcinogenic compounds, such as hydrocarbons and reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, that can damage cells in various ways," said Maria Krasilnikova, associate research professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State and the lead author of the paper. "One way these compounds can damage cells is by causing proteins to misfold, which can lead to the formation of protein aggregates."

Protein aggregates can gum up the inner workings of the cell and eventually lead to cell death, the researchers explained. These aggregates have been implicated in several neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's, and also in cancer progression, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The researchers first compared the level of protein aggregation between a lung cancer cell line and non-cancerous cells when grown in a culture that contained cigarette smoke condensates. They found that after 24 hours of exposure to cigarette smoke, the cancer cells had lower levels of protein aggregates than non-cancerous cells from a monkey kidney cell line and two human lung cell lines.

"We then looked at how the cells grew and survived in various concentrations of cigarette smoke condensates over seven days," Krasilnikova said. "Amazingly, the cancer cells could continue to grow in about 10 times the concentration of cigarette smoke than the non-cancerous cells. So, we wanted to investigate how the cancer cells were able to maintain this growth in a toxic environment at a mechanistic level."

The research team focused on the role of a cell surface pump, called ABCG2, that was known to be highly expressed in the lung cancer cell line and has also been associated with breast cancer.

"We observed that the cancer cells were difficult to stain with a fluorescent blue dye that we use to stain DNA to help us see the cells," Krasilnikova said. "ABCG2 had been shown to pump the dye out of cells, so we knew it must be highly active in these cells and hypothesized that it might also pump the carcinogenic compounds from cigarette smoke out of the cells."

To test this hypothesis, the research team inhibited the activity of ABCG2 in the cancer cells in two ways and tested how the cells then reacted to cigarette smoke exposure. They used febuxostat, a medication used to treat gout and a known inhibitor of ABCG2 activity, and, separately, downregulated ABCG2 using a genetic method called RNA interference. In both cases, they saw an increase in protein aggregation in the cancer cells when ABCG2 was inhibited.

"It seems clear that ABCG2 plays an important role in how the cancer cells were able to maintain lower levels of protein aggregation and grow and survive better when exposed to cigarette smoke," Krasilnikova said. "We think it must be doing this by pumping the carcinogenic compounds from cigarette smoke out of the cells, allowing them to survive in the toxic environment."

Cell surface pumps, including ABCG2, have also been implicated in the development of multidrug resistance in cancers, presumably by pumping the damaging chemotherapy drugs out of cancer cells.

"It is well known that smoking during cancer treatment worsens the prognosis," Krasilnikova said. "This could be due to a shared mechanism in the cancer cells that allows them to survive better in toxic environments. Our results suggest that the increase in ABCG2 activity in cancer cells, as well as other similar pumps, is likely to be one of these mechanisms."

More information: Emmanuella O. Ajenu et al, ABCG2 transporter reduces protein aggregation in cigarette smoke condensate-exposed A549 lung cancer cells, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0297661

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-lung-cancer-cells-cigarette.html

'Why some RNA drugs work better than others'

 Spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA, is the leading genetic cause of infant death. Less than a decade ago, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Adrian Krainer showed this brutal disease can be treated by tweaking a process called RNA splicing. This breakthrough resulted in Spinraza, the first effective treatment for SMA. It also opened a new frontier in drug development.

Now, CSHL research could push RNA-splicing drugs even further. CSHL Associate Professor Justin Kinney, Krainer, and postdoc Yuma Ishigami have figured out why some splicing-based drugs tend to work better than others.

RNA splicing determines which gene segments are used to build a protein. Krainer had designed Spinraza to home in on the exact spot where the drug would modify the production of a specific protein SMA patients need. Not all splice-modifying drugs are so intentionally constructed. Some have been found to change RNA splicing without scientists fully understanding how. That's true for a recently approved SMA drug, risdiplam.

The Kinney and Krainer labs analyzed risdiplam's interactions with RNA to better understand how this drug works. They also examined RNA's interaction with another drug, branaplam. The researchers measured the drugs' effects on splicing throughout the genome and on hundreds of variations of their intended targets. From there, they modeled how each drug identifies its targets among all RNA inside a cell.

Both risdiplam and branaplam alter RNA splicing to generate the protein needed to treat SMA. However, the researchers found that risdiplam is more specific. Their quantitative models explain how. In the simplest terms, branaplam binds to RNA in two different ways—whereas risdiplam only binds in one way. This finding could help researchers alter the chemical structure of branaplam so that it might someday treat Huntington's disease—a fatal, currently incurable neurodegenerative disorder.

The researchers also found something else. Combining splice-modifying drugs that target the same gene segment in different ways usually has a greater effect than either drug alone.

"You get synergistic interactions," Kinney explains. "We found synergy is a general property of splice-modifying drugs. This might provide a basis for using drug cocktails instead of individual drugs."

The finding could help researchers identify drug combinations with the potential to improve patient outcomes. And that could lead to new therapeutic strategies for SMA and other diseases. For example, the Krainer lab recently investigated RNA splicing in pancreatic cancer.

"Our new study provides insights into the action and specificity of splice-modifying drugs," Krainer says. "This should facilitate the development of more effective drugs and drug combinations for a variety of diseases."

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

More information: Yuma Ishigami et al, Specificity, synergy, and mechanisms of splice-modifying drugs, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46090-5

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-rna-drugs.html

'With the State of the Union on deck, the bookies warn: Biden is in deep trouble'

 If you're trying to handicap November's presidential election eight months out, don't just look at the polls. Following the betting.

And as President Joe Biden gears up for Thursday night's State of the Union speech, the news for him is doubly grim.

First, he is now badly trailing Donald Trump, who has emerged as the clear betting favorite to win in November and be elected to a second term as president.

Second, the betting markets are now starting to price in a non-trivial chance that the situation for Biden is so bad that he will end up dropping out of the race altogether, for political or other reasons.

Trump leads Biden in the betting by a wide margin, with a 55% chance of winning compared to Biden's 33% chance. [You can see all the odds here]

(The percentages don't add to 100% in part because of the bookmakers' profit margins. For legal reasons, most of the betting on our elections has to take place with bookmakers based overseas, typically in London).

Biden fares better in the main, U.S.-based market, Predictit. But he still trails Trump there, 48% to 43% - exactly matching the two candidates' polling numbers in seven battleground states, according to a recent Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll.

Predictit is a small-odds, peer-to-peer betting market run as an experiment by a university (weirdly, New Zealand's Victoria University) under a federal waiver.

Meanwhile, Cambridge University professor Tom Auld, an expert in political betting, points out that gamblers now give the Democrats a much better chance of holding onto the White House than they are giving to Biden personally.

"Although Trump is well ahead of Biden, the Republicans are only slightly ahead of the Democrats," he tells me. The market, he says, is pricing in a significant and rising chance that Biden drops out. This could be for medical or political reasons. (He adds that the market also sees a smaller chance that Trump drops out for some reason).

It's an open question whether anyone cares much about the annual State of the Union speech outside of Washington and the media. But the grim political outlook for Biden raises the stakes for the address.

Based on comments from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, it's likely to be the usual exercise in political box-ticking. Jean-Pierre mentioned 17 different items that Biden plans to mention in his speech, from tackling "junk fees" to "ending cancer as we know it." Of more interest to most observers will be his performance. His key challenge is to reassure voters he will be able to serve as president for another four years.

Trump, meanwhile, is continuing to attack Biden over immigration, crime and inflation.

A Trump victory in November would be among the biggest comebacks in U.S. political history - surely matching or perhaps dwarfing those by, say, Richard Nixon in 1968, or Grover Cleveland in 1892. And it would be a result that was almost inconceivable three years ago, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by his supporters on Capitol Hill.

Betting is no more infallible than opinion polls, but as a political barometer it has several advantages. First, it's an attempt to predict a result, whereas what people tell pollsters right now is just about how they feel. Second, the people making bets are risking real money. It costs you nothing to say something to a pollster.

Still, this gloomy picture for Democrats among the bookies reflects the latest polling data. There was the survey in battleground states just mentioned. And a recent Wall Street Journal poll of nationwide registered voters gives Trump the edge, 47% to 45%.

Even worse for Democrats: In the past, Trump's actual vote share has significantly beaten his poll numbers. In the 2016 election, he beat his poll averages by about 2 percentage points. (He got 46% of the vote in the election. But in the polls conducted in the final days of the campaign he averaged just 44%. And this was in the polls conducted after FBI Director James Comey's October surprise, where he announced he was reopening his investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails).

In the 2020 election the gap was even bigger, three percentage points or more. Trump ended up with 46.8% of the vote. But the final polls just before the election gave him only 43.5%. (And for those polls in the previous week he averaged about 44%.)

The polls in 2020 were so off that they generated a lot of news coverage.

The explanation is almost certainly that a certain segment of Trump voters are either reluctant to admit it to pollsters, or just refuse to participate.

"Don't look at the polls, because nobody's going to admit they're going to vote for Donald Trump," a smart old friend told me in the summer of 2020. "If you really want to know who people are going to vote for, don't ask them who they're going to vote for. Ask them who they think their neighbors are going to vote for." A few polls which did this at the time showed much stronger support for Trump.

So, right now, the race is down to Trump-Biden. Trump is leading in polls which traditionally understate his true support, and he is way ahead at the bookies, where people are betting real money on what they think is going to happen.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240306941/with-the-state-of-the-union-on-deck-the-bookies-warn-biden-is-in-deep-trouble

Cancer-causing chemical found in Clinique, Clearasil acne treatments, U.S. lab reports

 High levels of cancer-causing chemical benzene were detected in some acne treatments from brands including Estee Lauder's Clinique, Target's Up & Up and Reckitt Benckiser-owned Clearasil, said independent U.S. laboratory Valisure.

Valisure has also filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, calling on the regulator to recall the products, conduct an investigation and revise industry guidance, the New Haven, Connecticut-based lab said on Wednesday.

Estee Lauder shares fell 2%. Benzene was also detected in Proactiv, PanOxyl, Walgreens' acne soap bar and Walmart's Equate Beauty acne cream among others, according to Valisure.

Benzene could form at "unacceptably high levels" in both prescription and over-the-counter benzoyl peroxide acne treatment products, Valisure said.

Reckitt said in a statement the findings "reflect unrealistic scenarios rather than real-world conditions," adding all Clearasil products were safe "when used and stored as directed on their labels."

Estee Lauder said Clinique uses benzoyl peroxide in one product, which "is safe for use as intended."

Target and Walmart did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment. The FDA has not yet responded to Valisure's petition.

The carcinogen has already been found in several consumer products, including sunscreens, hand sanitizers and dry shampoo, leading to recalls of products made by companies including Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

But the detection of benzene in the acne treatment products was "substantially different" from the other cases, Valisure said.

"The benzene we found in sunscreens and other consumer products were impurities that came from contaminated ingredients; however, the benzene in benzoyl peroxide products is coming from the benzoyl peroxide itself," said Valisure Co-Founder and President David Light.

Valisure's tests showed some products could form more than 800 times the conditionally restricted FDA concentration limit for benzene.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cancer-causing-chemical-found-acne-123754521.html