CNN will no longer run ads for Juul or other e-cigarettes, following reports of a deadly lung illness linked to them. The Daily Beast reports that CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker announced the news at an employee meeting; the network also confirmed it in a statement to the outlet. However, it says the policy may change in the future as health agencies continue to investigate the disease.

“Given the recent news reports of serious illnesses and deaths linked to the product category and the subsequent warnings ... CNN has revised its policies regarding e-cigarette advertising, and will not air ads in this category effective immediately,” a spokesperson told The Daily Beast. The ban might be lifted if “new facts come to light” during the investigations.

Juul and other e-cigarettes have been successfully marketed through social media. But Juul launched a multimillion-dollar campaign with TV, print, and radio ads this year. The Food and Drug Administration recently warned Juul that its claims — which present vaping as a less harmful or even “totally safe” alternative to smoking — were not legally approved.

Six people have reportedly died from a lung disease linked to vaping, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 380 “confirmed and probable” cases have been identified across 36 states and the US Virgin Islands. More than 450 possible cases have been investigated. The exact cause of the disease is unclear — some reports have blamed illegally modified cannabis vapes, but health officials haven’t ruled out a threat from legal nicotine e-cigarettes either. The CDC and American Medical Association have urged people to refrain from vaping altogether.

So far, e-cigarettes have often fallen outside the purview of existing tobacco laws. Regulation may be on its way, though. President Donald Trump suggested a ban of all non-tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes, and some states and cities have already made them illegal.

Overall, research on e-cigarettes’ health effects is still highly incomplete. Some evidence suggests that they’re less harmful than traditional cigarettes, but that’s very different from being “safe.” And e-cigarettes, particularly ones from the dominant brand Juul, have become popular with teens who may later take up smoking at increased rates.

Cigarette ads have been banned from TV since 1970.

Graphene and gold could lead the way to better health by helping us test new drugs, deliver drugs more accurately, and even monitor cancer.

In one study published today in the journal Science Advances, scientists figured out how to control the beating of human heart cells in a dish using just light and graphene. Right now, all potential drugs are tested on heart cells to make sure that, say, pain medication won’t give you a heart attack. These heart cells in question are grown on glass or plastic dishes. But glass and plastic don’t conduct electricity, and our hearts do — which means that the tests aren’t as realistic as they could be.

Graphene, however, converts light into electricity and it’s not toxic either. In today’s study, scientists learned to precisely control the amount of electricity graphene generates by changing how much light they shine on the material. When they grew heart cells on the graphene, they could manipulate the cells too, says study co-author Alex Savtchenko, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. They could make it beat 1.5 times faster, three times faster, 10 times faster, or whatever they needed.

This means scientists can make the graphene imitate a pattern of electricity similar to various heart diseases, which makes it easier to test heart medications and other new drugs. Later on, Savtchenko hopes this method can be used to build a better pacemaker. Pacemakers control the beating of the heart and are usually made from electrodes that can cause internal scarring. Instead of electrodes, Savtchenko imagines, we could have a small, long-lasting piece of graphene attached to a heart muscle. (The graphene would be controlled by a tiny light source implanted nearby and wouldn’t cause scarring.) Even further on, graphene could be used to control the electricity in the brain and help treat neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. “The human heart is fantastically resilient, but it’s still just a pump,” he says. There’s a lot more that can be done.

Another material with a lot of potential in medicine is gold. Gold nanoparticles are safe for the body and chemically stable. These nanoparticles can be coated with a specific drug, and they’re so small that they can move through the body easily and go straight to where the drug is needed.

That’s the idea, but when you inject a gold nanoparticle into the body, it is immediately covered by proteins already in the blood called serum proteins, says Enrico Ferrari, a nanotechnologist at the University of Lincoln. The serum proteins alert the body’s immune system, which will attack the particle in the same way it fights all other bodily invaders. Our bodies want to keep the particle from getting to its source, according to Ferrari, and if it succeeds, the drug will degrade and end up in the spleen instead of where it was supposed to go.

So Ferrari developed a new way of making nanoparticles and his results were recently published in Nature Communications. He added a layer of proteins that prevents the serum protein from attacking. Think of this new layer like an adapter, says Ferrari. One side binds very well to the gold and keeps the serum proteins at bay. The other side is engineered so it can more easily find the specific target in the body that the drug needs to reach. In theory, this new method can be tried with any type of drug and gold nanoparticle, and Ferrari wants to work with other scientists to bring this beyond the lab.

Gold nanoparticles can also be used to monitor cancer, says Matt Trau, a chemist at the University of Queensland. (Trau is the author of a different study, also recently published in the journal Nature Communications.) Cancer tumors often shed tiny cells that circulate through the blood. The cells, called circulating tumor cells (CTCs), are all fairly different from each other and can create more tumors, so it’s important to keep an eye on them. There are some clues as to where the CTCs might be — these cells often have a lot of a particular type of protein — but they’re still very hard to catch. Imagine trying to catch 10 criminals in all of New York City, says Trau. When the “criminals” are cancer cells, you have to make sure you get it right because if you don’t, you’ll make the wrong decision about treatment.

Trau and his team engineered various gold nanoparticles so that they could track one of four different types of CTCs. “You prepare all the particles, you mix them together, and you throw the particles into the blood sample,” he says. Essentially, these nanoparticles are trained to seek out and attach to the specific type of protein that marks a CTC. When you shine a fluorescent line on the particles, they emit a unique “barcode.” If the nanoparticle finds and attaches to the protein target, the barcode changes so you know which CTC it found and how many. Different particles are engineered to find different CTCs.

For the study, Trau tested the new technique on samples of blood that were taken from already deceased melanoma patients before, during, and after treatment. The nanoparticles showed the different types of tumor cells in every sample, how the immune system was reacting, and whether there were side effects. Now, his team wants to use this method to look at more blood samples and other types of CTCs. Though they only looked at four this time, they could easily look for many more. And they want to trial this in real time. “If only we saw this in real time, we could have made decisions about changing the patient dose,” he says. “These are insights into cancer that we haven’t seen before.”

Is tea medicine? What about special Collagen Beautèa that promises to support your bones? This week, The Wall Street Journal reported on the growing popularity of foods and beverages enhanced with collagen, an ingredient used in wrinkle cream that hasn’t really been proven to be helpful when you eat it. The line between “food” and “medicine” has always been blurry, and, traditionally, the US Food and Drug Administration only regulates the latter. But as people start chasing foods with more fanciful health promises, it’s time that the FDA takes a closer look before we waste our dollars and endanger our health.

Though collagen is a protein found in bones, it is most commonly known for being an ingredient in skin cream, often to prevent wrinkles. But why stop at skin? Last year, 281 new food and supplement products featuring collagen were introduced in the US, the WSJ reported, citing Innova Market Insights. And while there’s little evidence that eating collagen will harm you, there is also no solid research suggesting that eating collagen will help either.

For now, it’s unlikely that people will poison themselves with collagen-infused energy bars, though animal bones do hold lead, which might be harmful in the long run. (Still, the far greater risk is that people are wasting money.) But as health and “wellness” become more and more popular, and we’re all told to live our best lives, we’re going to hear more and more of these claims. It’s no longer enough for a food to just be “healthy” and not processed. We also want food to make our skin better, strengthen our joints, and keep our hair from falling out.

These collagen bars and teas are considered “functional foods,” or foods that claim to be healthy beyond just basic nutrition. Technically, the FDA does regulate “functional foods,” but in practice, it doesn’t; the FDA has no official definition for functional foods. That makes regulation impossible.

It’s understandable that it’s difficult to come up with a precise definition. What does it even mean for something to be healthy “beyond basic nutrition”? Already, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic argues that “for critically and chronically ill people, food is medicine,” but you don’t need to be chronically ill to know that food can make us feel better or worse. There have been studies linking certain diets to lower rates of depression, or discussing the health benefits of bananas. Food clearly has an effect on our well-being, and it can affect our health, so it’s natural to think that if good food can make us healthy, why can’t enhanced food make us even healthier?

Collagen Beautèa uses the language of science, citing “clinically backed collagen protein,” despite the fact that most studies that find a benefit are small and funded by a company that sells these foods. Consumers don’t have time to evaluate peer-reviewed research and figure this out to save their money. That’s exactly why we have regulatory agencies like the FDA.

The FDA has long been criticized for not regulating supplements, which leads to supplements having illegal stimulants in them. In this era of wellness, the FDA needs to overhaul its policies. It needs to regulate supplements to regulate what’s in them and be aggressive about monitoring functional foods and restricting the claims people can make about what these foods will and won’t do for your body. We want to be healthy, but the question of what’s “healthy” is a massive, complicated endeavor that most of us can’t figure out. It’s easier to just buy the damn tea and the supplements your friend is suggesting. It’s only human. And so the FDA needs to step in and protect our health before we harm ourselves in pursuit of it.

Most of the time, people want to sweat less. But the very liquid that we try so hard to avoid producing is a goldmine of data — and researchers want to harness it to do everything from combat stress to keep our phones more secure.

Sweat contains a mix of chemicals that not only tell us a lot about our current state, but is extremely distinctive to each of us. In other words, it can be a real giveaway, and there’s almost no chance of chance of any two people having the same sweat profile. In a paper recently published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, University at Albany forensic chemist Jan Halámek and his team analyzed 25 real samples of sweat taken from volunteers, and 50 fake sweat samples (which are basically artificial mixtures of the chemicals in sweat). By looking at the concentration of three chemicals (urea, glutamate, and lactate) in the sweat, they found that it was very simple to tell each of the sweat samples apart.

So, Halámek wants to apply this idea to the crime scene. Because people are always sweating, it’s easier to find sweat at a crime scene than it is to find fingerprints. Halámek’s team can use a strip they developed to pick up a sweat sample, and they claim to be able to do an analysis in minutes with less than a drop of sweat.

The idea isn’t that you can use sweat like DNA to track down an individual and match it. The exact amount of chemicals in sweat vary throughout the day, so that would be tricky. Instead, this method could be used to narrow down the possible suspects. Sweat spots can show whether there were one, two, or more people at the scene. We already know from some of Halámek’s previous research that you can use sweat to figure out gender (even in month-old samples). Now, his team is working to develop a “forensic toolbox”: they’re figuring out how to identify even more attributes from sweat, like gender, age, and food habits. “I hope to be able to one day analyze sweat at a crime scene and then say, ‘we are looking for someone who is tall, white, female, in very good physical shape’ or ‘an old male with liver disease,’” he says.

While the chemicals in sweat won’t help forensics experts match sweat to individuals, that very same feature means we can use sweat to unlock our mobile devices instead of passcodes, facial recognition, or even fingerprints. “Fingerprints remain the same and can be faked, but the sweat composition is always changing,” says Halámek. “So if I steal a sweat sample somehow, it will not be valid to unlock your phone after a few hours.”

How would this work? And if your sweat is always changing, how would you get back into your own phone? The key is that levels of chemicals in sweat change in predictable ways. When you get a new phone, you would touch it with your finger at various times of day, so that the phone learned the chemical analysis of your sweat at 2PM and 9PM. Over time and with enough data, an algorithm would learn how your sweat fluctuated, so it could tell whether it was you. Of course, it’s possible to trick this too, but it would take a lot more work.

To collect and analyze sweat, you need people to actually sweat. Phillip Simmers, a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering at the University of Cincinnati, says that scientists can induce sweat by putting a dime-sized electrode (often made into a patch) on someone’s hand, adding a stimulant gel, and running a light current. After stimulating a spot on the skin for a few minutes, that spot will sweat for 24 hours. But as someone sweats, it dilutes the gel, making it difficult to reach the skin — which means it’s harder to estimate the right dose of gel and stimulate a very precise amount of sweat. Plus, as gel and sweat get mixed up, the sensors have more trouble analyzing just the sweat particles.

To address this issue, Simmers and his team developed a special membrane. (This research was recently published in the journal Biomicrofluidics.) Their membrane maintains almost all the original concentration of the gel even after a day — meaning that the gel and sweat don’t get mixed up. Simmers and colleagues are now trying to use the membrane on biosensors. His coauthors include University of Cincinnati bioengineer Jason Heikenfeld, who founded a startup named Eccrine Systems that aims to make advanced wearables that accurately monitor sweat.

Similarly, the organization NextFlex (which works with academics, companies, and the Department of Defense) has been working on sweat patches that can help monitor hydration and stress. This patch looks like a large bandage that sticks on the skin and has several layers, says Scott Miller, NextFlex’s director of strategic programs. It collects sweat and sends it to a sensor inside the bandage. The sensor can measure the level of whichever chemical is relevant, and then analyze and wirelessly send that information to another system.

The Air Force is interested in the patch to monitor hydration, according to Miller. “The entire Department of Defense has interests in looking at the hydration state of soldiers and airmen who end up becoming dehydrated and suffering health consequences in training and real-world scenarios,” he says. “Having a device that could allow a trainer or a staff sergeant to identify these people and help them take a break before they get injured would be really helpful.” Taken out of the defense context, it could be helpful in sports for athletes.

Another possibility is to use the patch to measure stress, or more accurately, monitor hormones such as cortisol that are linked to sweat. The most obvious application is to think of pilots in a cockpit, says Miller, but it could be aircraft mechanics, drone operators, students, anyone who works in a factory.

Traditionally, blood has been the gold standard for health monitoring, but it’s expensive and you need professors. Wearables like the Fitbit tell you when your heart rate is going up, but not more than that; it won’t tell you why. Sweat, on the other hand, doesn’t hurt to collect, and it still contains different hormones, proteins, and ions to detect disease. Additionally, sensors are being built to measure the contents of sweat, including blood sugar, which could one day help diabetics, and ethanol, which can tell if someone’s been drinking. It could be used to monitor the byproducts of medication to tell if someone hasn’t taken their medication in a while and remind them to do it. “There’s a lot of work being done in this area and a bunch of different sensors, and the possibilities are truly amazing,” Simmers says.

Lab-grown meat is on its way, and the government is trying to figure out how to regulate it. This week, the US House of Representatives released a draft spending bill that proposes that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulate lab-grown meat and figure out how it should be labeled — which is a contentious topic since Big Cattle doesn’t want it to be called “meat.” Regulation is important, and there’s plenty more to learn, but the USDA shouldn’t be the only one regulating. And when the product comes to market, yes, it should be called “meat.”

Traditional meat, of course, comes from animals that are raised and slaughtered. Lab-grown meat (also called “in-vitro meat,” “cultured meat,” or “clean meat”) is made from animal stem cells grown in a lab. But because the stem cells are typically fed with a serum derived from the blood of calf fetuses, the product uses animal products and isn’t vegan. Still, the pitch for lab-grown meat is that it saves animals and also helps the environment because lab-grown meat doesn’t take much land or energy to grow. Plus, lab-grown meat doesn’t directly create methane emissions, while methane emissions from cows accounted for 16 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2015.

Because of the way that government agencies work, it hasn’t even been clear who should regulate lab meat. The USDA traditionally regulates meat, while the US Food and Drug Administration regulates food safety and additives. The proposal that the USDA be in charge of regulation is in line with what the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association wanted, but some lab-meat advocates fear that USDA will be biased against them in favor of traditional meat. If the USDA will be regulating lab meat, it should at least collaborate with the FDA. There are no slaughterhouses for the USDA to inspect anyway, and the FDA has already been regulating food technology, like the genetically engineered salmon it approved. It makes the most sense for the two to work together.

The who question aside, there is also the question of naming. Earlier this year, the US Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) filed a government petition asking that “meat” be defined so that lab-grown meat is excluded because it is “not derived from animals born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner.”

Labeling and regulation are important, and there’s a lot we genuinely don’t know about how cultured meat compares. “We’re finding there aren’t even real standards about what makes a chicken muscle cell a chicken muscle cell,” Isha Datar, executive director of the nonprofit research institute New Harvest, told Science Magazine. “There’s actually an enormous amount of things that we would have to clarify in order to say that [lab-grown meat] is equivalent to the animal products that we are familiar with.”

These questions need to be clarified. But if we get to the point where we do have standards, and the two products are the same except in how they were raised, forcing one thing to be called, for example, “animal cell tissue” and the other “meat” ignores the fact that meat is animal cell tissue. This attempt to call one and not the other “meat” ignores how we use language and ignores the fact that both are, functionally, what most consumers think of as meat. When most people think of meat, our most immediate associations are with a type of food and a taste and texture, not visions of the farm where cattle graze, or much to do with “the traditional way they are harvested.”

Supposedly, lab meat is coming whether we like it or not. Five years ago, the first lab-grown hamburger cost over $300,000. In 2015, the same company claimed that it had gotten the cost down to $11 per burger. It’ll be a while before there’s a viable lab-meat industry, but the CEO of clean-meat company Just has said he hopes to have his products in restaurants by the end of the year. Large companies, too, are betting that consumers will bite: Tyson just co-led a $2.2 million investment in an Israel lab-meat startup.

That’s the vision, but there are problems with the narrative. There’s a lot of hype in the industry and no good consumer product yet, and it absolutely needs to be carefully regulated to make sure that it adheres to all our standards of food safety. One 2016 survey found that, though only about 20 percent of Americans were unwilling to try cultured meat, many had plenty of reasonable concerns, like price, whether the burger tastes good, and wanting to know more about how it’s made. And it’s even fair for cattle producers to say that terms like “clean meat” have a somewhat misleading, holier-than-thou tone, considering the product is still made with animal blood.

If the consumer product pulls through, its manufacturers will probably want to differentiate their product themselves — after all, the hope is that vegetarians who wouldn’t touch what USCA considers “real meat” might eat this alternative protein. But they should still be able to call it a form of “meat.” Insisting it’s not plays into the traditional meat industry’s desire for dominance, at the cost of a product that could help alleviate ethical and environmental conundrums. Like the arguments for labeling genetically modified fruits and vegetables, trying to force it into another category is meant to prey on a fear of the unfamiliar and new, even when “the unfamiliar” is perfectly safe and could be better.