Articles by creative

Earth

Trying to quit smoking using eCigs? Might actually make it harder!

Electronic cigarettes are widely promoted and used to help smokers quit traditional cigarettes, but a new analysis from UC San Francisco found that adult smokers who use e-cigarettes are actually 28 percent less likely to stop smoking cigarettes.The study — a systematic review and meta-analysis of published data — is the largest to quantify whether e-cigarettes assist smokers in quitting cigarettes.The findings will be published online January 14 in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.“As currently being used, e-cigarettes are associated with significantly less quitting among smokers,” concluded first author Sara Kalkhoran, MD who was a clinical fellow at the UCSF School of Medicine when the research was conducted. She is now at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 

Earth

Eastern US Earthquake shook North Anna nuclear plant in Virginia more than it was designed to handle

Last month’s record earthquake in the eastern United States may have shaken a Virginia nuclear plant twice as hard as it was designed to withstand, a spokesman for the U.S. nuclear safety regulator said on Thursday. But Dominion Resources told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the ground under the plant exceeded its “design basis” only by about 10 to 20 percent, and it plans to prove in the next month that its reactors are safe to restart. The discrepancy is one of many items the NRC and company must deal with, in the first instance in which an operating U.S. nuclear power plant has experienced a quake beyond its design parameters. The NRC must sign off on Dominion’s restart plans for the North Anna plant, about 12 miles from the quake’s epicenter — and determine how it will make that decision.