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F* cancer. On my mother's side, her mom and sister died of breast cancer, her other sister caught it early, her brother died of cancer (throat or lung, not sure). She removed her breast 20 years ago at almost 50, went through chemo and radiotherapy, she was a survivor, cured. Just a month ago got headaches and turns out new brain tumor. Neurosurgeons removed it, but against all odds nothing to do with the old cancer, not a metastasis, but a new primary wildtype glial grade 4 tumor. It's just not fair.
If incidences of cancer of any type are 1 in 100,000 for the population at large, then generally any slice of that population will have similar odds. Which includes people with cancer.

So those who already have cancer, have a chance to develop a second cancer.

It is very not fair.

We all die eventually. All you can do is live your best life. Unfortunately we don't all get the same hand from the dealer.
A grade 4 glioma doesn't even give you a fighting chance, there is only survival from months to maybe over a year.
Even if smoking didnt cause cancer it would still be terrible.

6 months since i quit using nic gums.

trying to get off vaping, myself, and it is both "not that hard" and... a very sticky habit. good for you. was never a smoker, but that doesn't make it a good habit.
I found the physical addiction much harder to kick. I switched to no-nicotine e-liquid and felt very little in the way of withdrawals. But months later I was still reaching for a phantom vape to puff on. It's been almost two years now and I never think about it anymore.
This might not work for your current lifestyle (if you need to be able to properly use your brain for any meaningful portion of the day), but an effective method, at least for people already using thc, is to replace the nicotine vape with a thc cartridge and essentially stupify yourself every time you think about vaping. And be cognizant of the anxiety etc, so that you continue despite it. Stick to that for a week or two and it works surprisingly well.
good job!
Anecdotally, whenever I go swimming with my kids in the summer, and I don't put sunscreen on right away, but let myself get some intense direct sun, I feel good and sleep really well that night.

As long as I don't let myself get in a red, sunburn situation.

The number one reason I wear an Apple Watch all summer is the UV index complication. If the number is at 4 and trending down I let the kids run free.
Interestingly the best time to go out is at solar noon, when the UVB/UVA ratio is higher. Just go for a shorter amount of time to compensate for the higher overall intensity.
Vitamin D levels are directly tied to melatonin production, that's why the less sun you get the worse your sleep gets. Vitamin D also lowers inflamation throughout the body.
I can spend a solid hour in the sun before I start to burn, assuming I have a hat on my head.

I've also noticed some correlation between my diet and how fast I burn. Whenever my metabolism is running at/near ketogenesis, it seems like it takes a lot longer for the sun to affect me.

Just so you know, burning & cancer isn't the only reason to avoid strong sunlight - it also causes skin aging (i.e. wrinkles). If you don't want to be super wrinkly when you're old, wear suncream!
Most likely that’s the nitric oxide (not to be confused with nitrous oxide) that is a biproduct of vitamin d synthesis which requires UV light. It is a natural muscle relaxer and is generally considered good for blood pressure and heart health in general.
Vitamin D deficiency
I typically do the same thing. I only wear sunscreen if I am planning on being in direct sun for an extended period of time where I can't easily get back in the shade.

The more you're able to build up a base tan the less you need it to avoid a burn at least.

This is why Zinc is needed to prevent cancer[1].

The gene they are focusing on in the study [2] is Methylated-DNA--protein-cysteine methyltransferase (MGMT) and it needs zinc as a cofactor [3].

Not enough zinc, lower MGMT, and less DNA protection and repair.

Nutritional deficiencies and genetic differences increase the risk of cancer.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-023-03818-6 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10821-z [3] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/P16455/entry

That would imply that red meat eaters would be less likely to get cancer which doesn't seem to be the case. I'm not saying that zinc isn't a factor, but I think that saying a blanket "Zinc is needed to prevent cancer" is irresponsible. We should be so lucky that we can narrow it down to a single dietary element or be able to blame it simply upon nutrition.
Very common press release/headline meme: the question in the title of the article is literally never answered (or the opposite of the headline's claim is true). This research plainly DOES NOT explain why certain mice got cancer and others didn't, let alone why smoking/UV rays cause cancer in some humans but not others. There was no control group for exposed mice that would've allowed them to look at which biological differences made one group get tumors and the others not (the study doesn't appear to actually be interested in that question).

The language here is also pretty hyperbolic. We've known for decades that certain gene mutations cause increased cancer risk in the context of a certain genetic background (BRCA1/2, etc.). Using language like "for the first time" is just juvenile, or purposeful lying at worst.

As a millennial growing up it was beaten into our head that smoking was a death sentence. I recently looked up what the actual cancer rate among smokers was... about 125k people in the US die of lung cancer annual. 25 million people smoke annually. That is a 0.5% chance for occasional smokers. Even if you smoke a pack a day your entire life, the cancer rate is less than 15%.

I am in no way saying it is okay to smoke, there are obviously other health risks associated with it... but researching that made me feel much better about that one pack a year I buy for vacation.

Cigarettes kill about 480,000 people in the US annually. Lung cancer isn't the only kind of cancer you get from smoking cigarettes, and cancer isn't the only way it can lead to your death, so it seems very strange to only pay attention to lung cancer here.

You don't need lung cancer to have an absolutely miserable decline and death from COPD, for example.

https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...

The actual infection rates for some STIs are also similarly low, per-encounter. But they are high enough that if you are promiscuous and have a large number of at-risk encounters then you will eventually get a bad roll of the dice.
And that 125k includes people who don't smoke and never have. Sometimes the DNA in a single cell just gets fucked up in just the right way to cause cancer. Smoking just increases the odds.
A pack a year is unlikely to kill you, but as others have said lung cancer is not the only worry. I work in healthcare, I see COPD all the time. It may or may not kill you, but it's a guaranteed PITA even if well-managed
Cancer is not the only complication...
Authors seemed to have considered genetic implications of the driver mutation and downstream effects, but there are considerations to be made ahead of this point too. This sort of damage for example is typically detected and repaired. The fidelity of that repair mechanism is liable to vary among the population for many reasons.
My mother smoked from age 12 until she was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 45. But the lung cancer was the result of metastasis from an advanced uterine cancer. A friend's mother, another long-time smoker, developed bladder cancer. Smoking's damage can manifest itself in multiple ways.
In mice
Mice are used for inhalation and skin studies because they're cheap, we know their genome, they have a short lifespan for whole lifecycle observation and they're ideal for mapping to human respiratory and skin responses.
Mice smoke?
So sick of this fake "gotcha" qualifier in HN comment sections.
I've only ever smoked like a quarter of one cigarette when I was eighteen and I thought it was fucking gross so I never picked up the habit (fortunately).

That said, I'm a pretty pale dude and my sister has gotten skin cancer twice now [1], so I've started getting a bit worried that that's going to happen to me. I've started wearing a baseball cap every time I go outside to protect my scalp (since my body has decided I don't need nearly as much hair anymore), I almost never go outside without jeans and often now a hoodie even when it's relatively warm outside. If I think I'm going to be outside for more than ~30 minutes, I wear sunscreen on the exposed parts.

I have to admit that I kind of hate it. I don't like the slimy feeling of sunscreen on my skin, I don't really like how hats feel on my head, and of course wearing a lot of clothes when it's warm outside isn't terribly comfortable.

[1] Fortunately caught very early since she gets frequent checks, so she's fine.

Also share the icky for greasy sunscreen. But there are some with a matte dry texture that not only serves the purpose but also make your skin looks nicer, since it levels out those small color variations. It’s a big market, so they really do research on those things.
Strong recommend a UV umbrella. I also hate the feeling of sunscreen and will also fry the minute I so much as look at the sun.

Also, linen clothing. Far more comfortable in heat while keeping you covered. Hoodies and jeans sounds miserable.

Sun shirts are a great option for me at least.
A fairly bad sunburn was the reality check I needed to start scheduling annual screenings. 30 minutes or so a year for peace of mind.
Check out mineral based sunscreens, I have sensitive skin and I find them infinitely more tolerable.
Timing is also a big part. Going out for an hour at 1 pm can be a burn while going from 7 to sunset for the week might not even register.

If you must go out at certain times then the clothing selections from others are probably the best bet.

Take a look at sun protective gear like Coolibar. It’s actually very pleasant to wear even in summer.
A bit offtopic, but have you tried different sunscreen types? There are quite a lot of formulations from matte creams to solid sticks. Mentioned because I remember avoiding sunscreens precisely because of that slimy feeling I got from the drugstore ones, that is, until I found an "invisible" one that doesn't feel like anything at all on my skin.
Jim Simons (mathematician turned billionaire trader) was a chainsmoker and claimed that he had his genome analyzed and found he was unlikely to get cancer. I always wondered whether he'd really done that or whether it was just a flippant response to an interviewer's question about his smoking habits.
Is there any info for a way to check this on your SNPs from genome sequencing data?
Isn't this sort of like asking "Why does getting shot kill some but not other?" It depends on which part of the body was shot, and which part of the DNA was damaged.
The way I read the article was that cancer is caused by deficiencies in the body's repair mechanism. It appears as if some have a more robust mechanism than others, depending on genetics.
No. Genetics and nutrition make a big difference here. It is like one person is wearing a bullet proof vest and both were shot in the same place.
Glad, so I can continue smoking :-))