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The morning of February 4, 2007, started off like any other for 25-year-old Lashanda Salinas. She got up and made the 20-minute commute to her job as a front desk clerk at a Nashville hotel where she greeted guests and checked them in. Hours later, her life changed. Salinas was speaking with a customer when two police officers walked into the hotel lobby. (Norwood, 3/12)

For more than five years, Helen Cruz lived on the streets of Grants Pass. A small, rural town of roughly 40,000 people, the city has now found itself at the center of a homeless crisis plaguing major cities across the U.S. “We’re in this situation not because we want to be. We’re in this situation because we don’t have a choice right now,” Cruz, 49, said in an interview. For years, Grants Pass has been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit with homeless residents like Cruz, who argue that anti-camping ordinances enacted by the city — including fines for sleeping in any park or public space — violate their constitutional rights. (Kreutz and Keyes, 3/12)

The three 6-year-old girls stood on the sidelines as their coach swabbed their hands. Then they ran onto a lush green turf field and played soccer for 90 minutes straight — no stepping off the pitch. This wasn’t just a practice. It was part of a small experiment conducted in the suburban foothills of San Diego last summer. Salar Parvini, 44, the children’s assistant soccer coach, swabbed his hands too, and shipped the samples taken before and after the practice to a lab in Lancaster, Pa. There, scientists would test them for “forever chemicals,” also known as PFAS, a broad class of man-made chemicals linked with a variety of health concerns, from high cholesterol to cancer. (Amenabar, 3/12)

For years, people who had polycystic ovary syndrome and were also overweight were told that their symptoms would improve if they lost weight via a restrictive diet. In 2018, a leading group of PCOS experts recommended that overweight or obese women with the hormonal disorder consider reducing their caloric intake by up to 750 calories a day. That guidance helped to spawn questionable diet programs on social media, and reinforced an impression among people with PCOS that if only they could successfully alter their diets, they would feel better. But the recommendations were not based on robust PCOS studies, and researchers now say that there is no solid evidence to suggest that a restrictive diet in the long-term has any significant impact on PCOS symptoms. (Gupta, 3/11)

To keep himself healthy into his eighth decade, David Sandler recently decided to go beyond his regular workouts and try something experimental: taking rapamycin, an unproven but increasingly popular drug to promote longevity. The medication has gained a large following thanks to longevity researchers and celebrity doctors who, citing animal studies, contend that rapamycin could be a game changer in the quest to fend off age-related diseases. The drug is going mainstream as an anti-aging treatment, even though rapamycin’s regulatory approval is for treating transplant patients. There is no evidence that it can extend human life. (Gilbert, 3/15)