People who drink a lot of sugary drinks have a high risk of developing cancer, researchers announced last week. However, the evidence cannot yet confirm a direct connection between the two. The researchers said the findings of a large study in France suggest that limiting the amount of sugar-sweetened drinks may help reduce the number of cancer cases. Drinking sugary        drinks has become more common worldwide in the last several decades. Sugar drinks are linked to obesity-the condition of being extremely overweight-which increases a person’s cancer risk.

The study was published in The BMJ British medical journal. It looked at data from just over 100,000 French adults-21 percent of them men and 79 percent women. The researchers noted how many sugary drinks each of them had, and followed them for up to nine years-between 2009 and 2018. The researchers appraised their risk for all types of cancer, and some individual ones such as breast, colon and prostate cancers.

The scientists found that a 100 milliliters increase in sugary drinks was linked to an 18 percent increased risk of overall cancer and a 22 percent increased risk of breast cancer. The researchers looked at those who drank fruity juices and those who drank other sweet drinks. Both groups, they found, showed a higher risk of cancer overall.

For prostate and colorectal cancers, no link was found. The researchers said this might have been because there was only a limited number of cases of these cancers in the study group.

Experts not directly involved in the work said it was a well-run study, but noted that its results could not establish cause and effect. Amelia Lake is an expert in public health nutrition at Britain’s Teesside University. She said that while this study does not provide a definite cause and effect between sugar and cancer, it does add to the importance of efforts to reduce sugar intake. “The message from the totality of evidence on excess sugar tonsureption and various health outcomes is clear,” she said.

To a chef, the sounds of lip smacking, slurping and swallowing are the highest form of flattery (恭维). But to someone with a certain type of misophonia (恐音症), these same sounds can be torturous. Brain scans are now helping scientists start to understand why.

People with misophonia experience strong discomfort, annoyance or disgust when they hear particular triggers. These can include chewing, swallowing, slurping, throat clearing, coughing and even audible breathing. Researchers previously thought this reaction might be caused by the brain overactively processing certain sounds. Now, however, a new study published in Journal of Neuroscience has linked some forms of misophonia to heightened “mirroring” behavior in the brain: those affected feel distress while their brains act as if they were imitating the triggering mouth movements.

“This is the first breakthrough in misophonia research in 25 years,” says psychologist Jennifer J. Brout, who directs the International Misophonia Research Network and was not involved in the new study.

The research team, led by Neweastle University neuroscientist Sukhbinder Kumar, analyzed brain activity in people with and without misophonia when they were at rest and while they listened to sounds. These included misophonia triggers (such as chewing), generally unpleasant sounds (like a crying baby）, and neutral sounds. The brain’s auditory (听觉的) cortex, which processes sound, reacted similarly in subjects with and without misophonia. But in both the resting state and listening trials, people with misophonia showed stronger connections between the auditory cortex and brain regions that control movements of the face, mouth and throat, while the controlled group didn’t. Kumar found this connection became most active in participants with misophonia when they heard triggers specific to the condition.

“Just by listening to the sound, they activate the motor cortex more strongly. So in a way it was as if they were doing the action themselves,” Kumar says. Some mirroring is typical in most humans when witnessing others’ actions; the researchers do not yet know why an excessive(过分的) mirroring response might cause such a negative reaction, and hope to address that in future research. “Possibilities include a sense of loss of control, invasion of personal space, or interference with current goals and actions,” the study authors write.

Fatima Husain, an Illinois University professor of speech and hearing science, who was not involved in the study, says potential misophonia therapies could build on the new findings by counseling patients about handling unconscious motor responses to triggering sounds—not just coping with the sounds themselves. If this works, she adds, one should expect to see reduced connected activity between the auditory and motor cortices.

As the whole nation joins efforts to fight the novel coronavirus outbreak, scientists in China have started efforts aimed at developing vaccines and drugs for the virus.

The Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday it will soon start research and development of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus after managing to isolate strains of the virus on Friday.

Zhang Yanjun, director of the center's microbiological laboratory, said it obtained the qualification to undertake such research on Jan 22, and isolated the first strain from the sputum samples of a confirmed patient last week, paving the way for work on a vaccine and the development of anti-virus medicines and rapid test kits.

Zhang said his laboratory was working on genome testing of the virus, but it might take some time before the new vaccine is developed as "more clinical trials are needed".

Li Lanjuan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said it will take at least a month to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, the news website ifeng.com reported.

At the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, researchers have started to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, the center said on Sunday.

Scientists from the center have isolated the virus, and are working to select the proper strain for vaccine production, Xu Wenbo, head of the center's viral disease control and prevention institute, said.

Research and development of a vaccine was complex work, he said, usually requiring between two and three years before availability for use, while adding it could be possible to develop a new vaccine in a few months in emergency conditions with priority approval.

The Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences also announced on Monday that it has set up a special team comprised of senior experts from home and abroad to organize research on the new virus, including researching and developing innovative drugs and treatment.