Your standing desk, a sleeping spider and a 1972 school law

A standing desk, a vertical mouse, a chair that promises better posture: office ergonomics sells the idea that the right equipment can ease an aching neck or arm. A new Cochrane review checked that promise against the trials and found little support for people who already hurt.

The review updates a 2013 version and pulls together 20 randomized or quasi-randomized trials with 2,478 participants. Most looked at general work-related arm, neck or shoulder complaints. Four studied specific conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome. The interventions ranged from standing desks to vertical mice to training programs.

Compared with no treatment, usual care or a placebo, the ergonomic changes made little to no difference to pain, day-to-day function, sick leave or recovery. Against exercise, ergonomics may have improved quality of life. The evidence on adding it to other treatments was too uncertain to interpret.

The trials themselves are part of the problem. Many had design flaws, and the authors rated certainty low to moderate. The review also covered only treatment of existing complaints, so it says nothing about whether a better setup prevents pain to begin with. Some groups may still benefit, particularly when ergonomics is one piece of a broader program. The authors' main conclusion is a request for better trials.

Ask people outright whether they have ever stretched the truth to get antibiotics, and a lot of them say yes.

In an online survey of 959 US adults this year, 268, about 28%, said they had misrepresented symptoms to a clinician to get the drugs. Some exaggerated symptoms they really had (26%). Others invented symptoms (about 17%). Cold-like symptoms were the most common ones misrepresented, and it usually paid off: 77% of those who did it said it worked at least once.

Parents do it too. In a companion survey of 236 parents and guardians, 63 (about 27%) said they had misrepresented a child's symptoms, and 87% of them said they had succeeded at least once.

The reasons sound less like scheming than frustration. Most said they felt really sick, believed antibiotics were the only thing that would help, or needed to get back to their responsibilities. Misrepresenting was more common among younger adults, people who often felt clinicians didn't take their symptoms seriously, people who needed help reading health materials, and people who believed antibiotic resistance is a hoax. Knowing more about antibiotics went with lower odds. About 29% said they regretted it.

Unneeded antibiotics can cause side effects and feed resistance, and these surveys suggest part of the overuse starts with patients who feel unheard. The numbers come with real limits. Both surveys used online panels rather than random samples, so the percentages may not hold nationwide, and self-reports can tilt either way. The design also can't show what causes the behavior.

How do you tell whether a spider is asleep? A motionless spider might just be waiting.

Researchers studying the Australian jumping spider Portia fimbriata filmed the animals overnight with infrared cameras and played sounds to check whether a still spider would react. That let them separate sleep from simple stillness. The spiders were active by day, kept a daily rhythm even without outside time cues, and made up for lost rest after being disturbed: behavioral signs scientists use to recognize sleep.

The stranger finding came during recurring stretches of the night. The spiders showed eye movements and muscle twitches, and they were harder to rouse. Those features resemble REM sleep, the human sleep stage named for its rapid eye movements. The authors conclude that the spider shows behavioral sleep with a REM-like substate.

A spider's brain is built very differently from ours, so finding a similar pattern there is a clue about why sleep stages evolved, and a new puzzle about what REM sleep actually does.

The evidence is behavioral only. Nobody measured brain activity, and the work covers a single species. Twitching eyes don't show that spiders dream, or that their REM-like state works like ours.

For two decades, colorectal cancer in the US had been on a long slide. Using registry data covering 45.8% of the population, a new NEJM Evidence report finds the age-adjusted rate fell from 55.2 cases per 100,000 people in 2000 to 36.7 in 2022. In 2023 it rose to 38.3, which the authors describe as the first apparent increase since that registry series began.

The sharpest rise was at ages 45 to 49, at 12.76% a year from 2019 to 2023. Part of that has a known explanation: screening now starts at 45 instead of 50, so more existing cancers are found sooner.

That explanation doesn't cover older people. Rates also rose at ages 65 to 69 and stopped falling at 70 to 74. Leaving out the 2020 and 2021 pandemic years didn't make the increase disappear.

Registry numbers show a trend, not its cause, and the researchers haven't identified which risk factors are behind it. One year's uptick also has to hold up in future updates before it counts as a new direction.

Dementia research has a long-running puzzle about education. People who stay in school longer tend to be diagnosed with dementia less often, but they also tend to differ in wealth, health and family background. That makes it hard to tell whether school itself does anything.

A study in PNAS used a British law to get closer to an answer. In 1972, the UK raised the minimum school-leaving age from 15 to 16 for anyone born on or after September 1, 1957. A child born in late August of that year could leave at 15; one born days later had to stay another year. The reform raised the share of students staying until at least 16 by 14 percentage points.

People born just before and just after the cutoff should otherwise be very similar, so later differences between them can be tied more convincingly to the extra schooling. This approach, called regression discontinuity, comes closer to testing cause and effect than most dementia studies can. The researchers applied it to UK Biobank participants, identified Alzheimer's disease and related dementias through medical histories, hospital records and death registries, and followed people through age 65.

The extra education lowered the incidence of these dementias. It also weakened the link between genetic predisposition and dementia, which suggests a higher inherited risk does not settle the outcome. The additional year was also linked to higher household income and fewer strokes and heart attacks, though the study doesn't establish which of these, if any, connects schooling to the brain.

A natural experiment is still not a randomized trial. Stopping at 65 is a serious constraint too: dementia is uncommon at that age, so the estimates are imprecise. The open question is whether the gap from one extra teenage year persists, grows or fades into the ages when dementia becomes common.