Posted:
Want fewer morning aches? You might need to change the way you sleep
Bigg Boss 19- Daily Discussion Thread - 14th Oct 2025
Bigg Boss 19: Daily Discussion Thread - 15th Oct '25
ASTHIN KA SAANP 14.10
KARWA CHAUTH 15.10
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai October 15, 2025 EDT.
Alia Bhatt is being roasted on Insta on Jigra BA post
Kajal,Vidya and Tanya ka Gharelu Kalesh
Dost Dost na raha
Sonakshi Sinha Pregnancy Rumours
Pankaj Dheer Passes Away
Rhea Chakraborty and her brother get their passports back
Want fewer morning aches? You might need to change the way you sleep
Is it true that … you get shorter as you get older?
Some loss of height is inevitable, but diet, exercise and a healthy lifestyle can help slow the decline in bone and muscle mass as we age
Why We’ve Been Chasing 10,000 Steps for Decades—and What Japanese Walking Gets Right Instead
The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace
More terminally ill Coloradans than ever are turning to Denver Health’s Medical Aid in Dying clinic. We spent the summer witnessing the quiet decisions and final moments of those who chose when—and how—to say goodbye.
China is going after American firms
to hit back atDonald Trump
Itsinvestigation of Qualcomm may be the latest example
The Economist, Shanghai,October 11, 2025
WHENHE FIRES his trade weapons atChina, President Donald Trump often appears to shoot from the hip. Officials inBeijing, by contrast, are said to deliberate much more, convening high-levelmeetings among ministries and regulators to determine their country’s nextsteps.
Thisprocess may have been at work on October 10th when the State Administration forMarket Regulation (SAMR), China’s antitrust watchdog, said it was investigatingQualcomm, an American semiconductor-maker, and the transport ministry leviednew docking fees on American-owned ships. A day earlier the Ministry ofCommerce had announced new controls on exports of rare-earth minerals. To MrTrump, the package came as a surprise affront after months of relative calm inrelations between the two countries.
SAMR saidthe probe into Qualcomm was routine and was caused by the company’s failure toreport its acquisition in June of Autotalks, an Israeli smart-transportcompany. Although the deal’s size, $80m, fell below the usual reportingthreshold, SAMR had stated in the past that the transaction would need itsapproval. Qualcomm has acknowledged that it did not report the deal.
Yet thetiming is suspicious. After all, in the past few years China has beenfortifying its legal and regulatory frameworks in what Xi Jinping, the country’ssupreme leader, views as an “international legal struggle”. Officials can addforeign companies to an “unreliable-entities list”. A Foreign Relations Actallows the government to go after anyone deemed to pose a threat to nationalsecurity. Its export-control regime now resembles America’s sophisticatedsystem: the measures announced on October 9th are similar to ones used by theDepartment of Commerce.
SAMR isshaping up to be one of China’s best-equipped regulators. It has widened itsjurisdiction in recent years. Chinese firms fear its new willingness to crackdown on local monopolies, as it did with Alibaba,an e-commerce giant, in 2021. It is also undertaking more probes of smalltransactions abroad, such as Qualcomm’s deal in Israel, which was hardlynoticed when first announced in 2023.
Thereis little doubt that SAMR’s antitrustinvestigations have been enlisted in the battle with Mr Trump. When fightingover trade broke out in his first term, SAMR useda probe into another Qualcomm acquisition—of NXP, aDutch chipmaker—to gain leverage. When the American president hit China withtariffs in February, it unveiled a probe into Google, one of America’s techchampions. Then, as a new phase of the trade war began in April, SAMR quicklyannounced an investigation into the China unit of DuPont, an American chemicalsfirm. That probe was just as quickly suspended in late July, ahead of tradetalks. The actions against Google were reportedly halted in mid-September asthe countries negotiated the fate of the American business of TikTok, aChinese-owned video app.
But SAMR’sinvestigations are more than just tactics in the trade war. The authority isbecoming more useful in China’s fight for tech supremacy,too. Its probe into Google may have been well-timed as retaliation, but itsmain target was probably the dominance of the American firm’s operating systemin Chinese smartphones. Around 70% of them use its Android OS; mostof the rest use Apple’s iOS. It is no secret that China’s technocrats view dependence onAmerican software as a weakness and would like to see widespread adoption of alocal version. SAMR’s investigation could be one tool for promoting a home-grownsystem.
Thesame applies to a probe into Nvidia, the dominant maker ofartificial-intelligence chips, which began late last year. SAMR’sjustification was flimsy. The watchdog said in September that the giantAmerican firm had broken China’s anti-monopoly laws in the acquisition in 2020of Mellanox, an Israeli supplier of computer networks. SAMR approvedthe deal at the time, and did not specify which conditions Nvidia had breached.
But itis clear that China’s leaders are wary of dependence on America’s mostsophisticated chips, even if they are needed to run the best AI machines.Chinese tech firms have been told to stop using Nvidia’s AI chips.Customs officials are cracking down on advanced-chip imports, the FinancialTimes has reported. SAMR’sinvestigations often double as trade-war leverage and a mechanism forsupply-chain security, says Angela Zhang, the author of “Chinese AntitrustExceptionalism”. They can “kill two birds with one stone”, she says.
Theprobe into Qualcomm is dual-pronged, too. Its acquisition target, Autotalks,makes intelligent-transport systems that connect cars with their surroundings.The connected-car industry is one that China seeks to dominate, along withelectric vehicles and autonomous driving. Qualcomm is a leading competitor inconnected-car technology; Chinese technocrats may want to slow the build-up inits capabilities. Outsiders may never know what takes place in China’s highesttrade-war councils, but it is increasingly clear that antitrust probes are partof their arsenal. ■
How a hatter and railroad clerk kickstarted cancer research
100 years ago, this unlikely duo discovered the first cancer ‘germ.’
In 1925, The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, published a blockbuster finding so significant that its editors offered a rare prelude: “The two communications which follow mark an event in the history of medicine. They form a detailed description of a prolonged and intensive research into the origin of malignant new growths, and they may present a solution of the central problem of cancer.”
On the day the studies were scheduled to be released, word began to spread beyond the scientific community. “A crowd gathered in a street outside the office of The Lancet,” wrote Peter Vischer for Popular Science. “At first it was just such an indescribable gathering as happens hundreds of times a day, for no particular reason, in New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco. But this crowd swelled minute by minute until it bulged through the Strand and disrupted the normal traffic of the street.”
The crowd, Vischer explained, “was quiet and patient, throbbing with a deep excitement.” The rumor electrifying London was that the cancer “germ” had been spied under a microscope for the first time.
By the 1920s, the discovery of new germs had become almost routine. For nearly half a century, during the so-called golden age of bacteriology, scientists had been busy identifying the microbes responsible for many of humanity’s deadliest afflictions. Cholera, tuberculosis, tetanus, pneumonia—all had been traced to specific “germs.”
A new germ discovery, even for a disease as feared and poorly understood as cancer, might have been just another headline. What set this announcement apart, however, was the unlikely researchers behind the discovery: a well-regarded London hatter and a former railway station clerk, both outsiders to the formal medical establishment.
The hatter and railway clerk who transformed cancer research
Joseph Edwin Barnard, the hatter, led what might be loosely described as a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of life—though without the gothic horror elements of Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic 19th century yarn. By day, Barnard made hats in the distinguished London hattery, J. Barnard & Sons, founded by his father. By night, he rushed to his private laboratory, driven to unmask ever-smaller microbes. Barnard tinkered with novel microscopy techniques, including ultraviolet light and photographic plates, developing custom lenses and equipment to see beyond the limits of conventional optics.
The former railway station clerk William Ewart Gye’s path to medicine was just as unconventional and far more mysterious—something that might have puzzled even Arthur Conan Doyle’s formidable 19th century detective, Sherlock Holmes. Born in 1889 as William Ewart Bullock, the railway clerk changed his surname to Gye in 1919. The reasons remain murky.
One theory suggests that Gye wanted to avoid confusion with William Bulloch, a prominent bacteriologist at London Hospital and a professor emeritus at the University of London. Another theory suggests that in a show of support he took the surname of his wife, Elsa Gye, a fascinating suffragette who had reclaimed her maiden name after campaigning for women’s right to vote. Taking his wife’s name also happened to neatly clear up the name confusion that dogged Gye.
However, Popular Science reported an even more mysterious story behind the name change—that an ailing benefactor named William Ewart Gye (who confusingly had the same first name and middle name as the microscope-obsessed Gye) financed Gye’s medical education and early cancer research, and that Gye changed his name in gratitude. Yet another theory suggests that the benefactor was not an acquaintance, but rather Gye’s father-in-law. Whatever the truth, the name change only intensified his enigmatic reputation in the medical community.
How an unlikely team-up advanced cancer research
When Gye and Barnard first met in London, their partnership fused two complementary skillsets sorely needed at the time to advance cancer research: Gye’s mastery of experimental biology and germ theory, which he had acquired through long hours in the lab, and Barnard’s exceptional skill with microscopes and imaging techniques. Together, the unusual duo set out to solve cancer’s mystery.
Their collaboration built on decades of progress that began in the 1870s when Robert Koch, a doctor from East Prussia, developed pioneering techniques to view “germs” under his microscope. Koch’s novel contributions, which included using dyes to improve specimen contrast, and microphotography to capture microbial images, led to the discovery of anthrax and other pathogens. At the same time, French chemist, Louis Pasteur, was developing vaccines based on these discoveries.
By the 1920s, science and medicine were driven by a fairly straightforward premise: find the germ, the cure will follow. That’s why Gye and Barnard’s discovery of “particulate bodies” was announced by The Lancet’s editors as “an event in the history of medicine.” Barnard’s article in The Lancet included photographs of what they had captured under his microscope. Some cells “appear to have a thickened wall,” Barnard wrote, “while others are thin and of low visibility.” Barnard believed this difference in thickness came from the virus replicating within the cell walls.
By confirming the presence of a cancer virus, the hope and expectation was that a cancer vaccine would soon be on the horizon. As Vischer reported for Popular Science in October 1925, “Gye and his colleagues in the British Medical Research Council now are busy with experiments to develop a cancer vaccine that will make it impossible for the germ to secure a foothold in the body.”
Though Barnard was considered an amateur by the medical establishment, his moonlighting contributions were extraordinary. By combining ultraviolet light with custom, precision lenses, he created instruments sensitive enough to capture individual microorganisms. To do so required special ultraviolet light with very short wavelengths measured in the billionths of meters—the smaller the wavelength, the smaller the object that can be seen. Barnard’s microscope was the first to achieve such fine-grained resolution.
Meanwhile, Gye’s painstaking research led him to propose a two-factor theory of cancer, which he described in The Lancet in 1925. “The virus alone is ineffective,” Gye wrote. “A second specific factor, obtained from tumour extracts, ruptures the cell defences and enables the virus to infect.”
His theory suggested that cancer did not arise from a germ alone, like tuberculosis. Nor did it solely originate from damaged cells or external irritants (what we today would call carcinogens). Instead, cancer, he theorized, arose from the interaction of cells damaged by outside factors and a virus. Gye’s experiments showed that he could not produce a tumor using just a virus-containing liquid or just an extract of tumor tissue. But when he combined these two factors, tumors reliably formed in chickens.
How cancer research today builds on Gye and Barnard’s work
Gye’s two-factor theory wasn’t entirely correct, but it pointed cancer researchers in the right direction. A century on, we still don’t have “a solution of the central problem of cancer.” Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that The Lancet’s prelude was not hyperbolic. As the editors suggested, the discovery would prove to be one of the most profound events in medical history, setting the stage for modern cancer research at the molecular level.
Today, we know that cancer is not a single disease caused by a specific germ coupled with damaged cells or outside irritants, but rather a complex group of diseases driven by genetic mutations, environmental factors, and, in some cases, viruses such as HPV (human papillomavirus) or EBV (Epstein-Barr virus). Instead of hunting for a single germ, modern cancer researchers point their powerful lenses on the internal machinery of cells. Today, tools like electron microscopes and super-resolution imaging are used to suss out internal cellular structures and molecular pathways that control cell growth and death.
While the optimism of 1925 has been tempered by a century of complex discoveries without a simple solution, enormous progress has been made in cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment. Even though cancer remains a leading cause of death, life-prolonging treatment protocols have emerged to transform patient outcomes and offer real hope for the future. In the end, Gye’s and Barnard’s discovery wasn’t just about seeing a cancer germ for the first time, it was about what science can achieve when it remains accessible to outsiders and mavericks with the passion and determination to make a difference.
Bill Gourgey is a Popular Science contributor and unofficial digital archeologist who enjoys excavating PopSci’s vast archives to update noteworthy stories (yes, merry-go-rounds are noteworthy).
