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While Angelina Jolie's announcement that she had a preventive double mastectomy raised awareness of breast cancer, it did not lead to more people understanding how gene mutations actually affect breast cancer risk.

researchers noted that the risk of developing breast cancer is between 5 and 15 percent for women without the BRCA mutation.

To sexualize a person in a video game (or any medium really) is to reduce them to an object; to reduce their value down to a sexual thing.  

Even better: let’s leave sexualization out of our games.  Sexy is cool and is but a single variety of character personality.  Sexualization is a whole other thing.  And for women, a largely negative thing.

1 in 8 Women, will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime

MOST woman in Britain can probably name the signs of breast cancer. But how many of us could identify just one symptom of an even more deadly disease, ovarian cancer?

In fact, the shocking answer is only three per cent - which may explain why we have one of the worst survival rates in Europe.

Three quarters of women are only diagnosed once the cancer has spread, so it's not surprising that, out of the 7,000 new cases every year, only a third of women will live for five years.

Children who received at least three years (M = 4.6 years) of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills) and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills). Duration of training also predicted these outcomes. Contrary to previous research, instrumental music training was not associated with heightened spatial skills, phonemic awareness, or mathematical abilities

identification is a process that involves perception toward the character, adopts goals of the character, and consists of “increasing loss of self-awareness and its temporary replacement with heightened emotional and cognitive connections with a character”

However, the difference between video games and the traditional media must be noted before applying Cohen’s theory in video game research. For one thing, the audience and the media are two different social entities in the traditional media, but the boundary is vague in video games (Klimmt et al., 2010). Video games with avatars provide higher levels of interactivity, selectivity and personalization (Bryant & Love, 1996). When the avatar encounters a situation, socializes, achieves or fails, it is the player behind the avatar who is making the move and experiencing the emotions attached.

We know, from Japanese scientists, that dolphins and small whales are heavily contaminated by mercury.  No one should be eating meat from dolphins and small whales.

Yet the Japanese government, fully aware of the dangers of mercury contamination, ignores this problem and allows mercury-poisoned dolphin and whale meat to be sold in markets.  Japanese consumers are exposed to danger but not warned.

Mercury is the second most toxic poison in the world, second only to plutonium.  Mercury attacks the brain and the nervous system, causing horrible damage to eyesight, hearing, and motor-skills, as well as interfering with memory and thought processes leading to dementia.

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages: The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.