While it's going to make government accountants cringe, 2,000,000 people in England could be eligible for weight loss surgery, according to a paper in JRSM Open.

That figure far exceeds previous estimates of eligibility in England for bariatric surgery. People fulfilling the national criteria were more likely to be women, retired, have lower educational qualifications and have lower socioeconomic status. But in fuzzy estimates, proponents say spending the money on bariatric surgery – a set of surgical procedures performed on obese people to decrease their stomach size – now can greatly reduce the likelihood of obesity-related diseases including type 2 diabetes, stroke and coronary heart disease and eventual death due to those.

A wildfire started by three vagrants with drugs in their possession spread quickly in the foothills northeast of Los Angeles on January 16th, 2014. The plume of ash and smoke blanketed much of the metropolitan area and prompted air quality warnings, along with concerns about long-term effects to the climate.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites captured these images of the Colby fire just before (top) and just after noon on January 16. The morning image is clearer because the scene was centered under the satellite, while the afternoon image is fuzzy because the satellite was observing from an angle.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been explaining the value of spying on the American public throughout history, as a way of deflecting concern about his administration and government overreach. Critics will dismiss his claims along the lines of 'why it was wrong when Bush did what I do but it is right for me to do it now' rationalization, so he should instead leverage the value spying has in public health.

Traditional surveillance methods for detecting infectious diseases such Dengue Fever and Influenza take weeks because it relies on doctors reporting cases. Today, people tend to Google for an online diagnosis before visiting a GP and a paper in Lancet Infectious Diseases says Internet-based surveillance can be a big help.

Jon Entine is executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, where this article first appeared.