There may be no such thing as internet gaming addiction. People play excessively not because they are hooked on gaming itself, but because they feel unhappy about other areas of their life, according to a study that followed thousands of online gamers over six months.

is referenced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a “condition of further study”, meaning the American Psychiatric Association thinks it warrants further research as a potential psychiatric condition.

The manual suggests that people suspected of suffering from gaming disorder must fulfil five or more criteria from a list of nine that include: lying about time spent gaming; jeopardising jobs, careers or education because of participation in gaming; and using gaming to relieve anxiety. They must also feel distress over their gaming habits for a – yet to be defined – period of time.

To investigate the potential prevalence of the disorder based on these criteria, at Cardiff University, UK, and her colleagues used a nationally representative sample informed by US census data to identify 2316 people over the age of 18 who regularly play games online.

Participants filled in a questionnaire covering aspects of their health, physical activity and lifestyle. At the start of the study, only nine participants met five or more criteria and experienced distress as a result of their gaming. However, none still met this criteria six months later and therefore weren’t diagnosed with addiction.

Three people matched four or more criteria at the beginning and end of the study. However, none felt ongoing distress over their gaming habits.

“We didn’t see a large number of people with clinical problems,” says Weinstein. “The study’s results suggest that it’s not clear how many resources should go to gaming addiction, compared to other addictions like drugs.”

Filling a hole

Further analysis by the team showed that people who displayed some of the proposed symptoms of gaming addiction had lower “needs fulfilment”, meaning they were unhappy in other areas of life, such as relationships or their career.

This suggests that gaming might be a displacement activity for people in an unhappy situation, rather than an addiction, says Weinstein.

Six months later, the symptoms of gaming disorder were reduced in those who had become more content since the first questionnaire. “This is initial evidence that having more needs fulfilment in life can make people feel better about their gaming,” says Weinstein.

Treatment for game addiction includes scrutinising life outside gaming, says , a clinical psychologist who specialises in internet addiction. “Addicted players need to examine the emotional motives that prompt them to play a game excessively and look for alternate ways to satisfy those needs,” she says.

Gaming addiction is a real problem that deserves recognition, says , a cyber-psychology researcher at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Using questionnaires to study addiction can be misleading as people tend to under-report bad behaviour, says Kuss. “If someone uses gaming to meet basic psychological needs, this could become a problem if they are not able to satisfy these needs in real life,” she says. “But to confirm this, we need clinical samples of people who are being treated for addiction in centres.”

Dose of dopamine?

A combination of rusty water and stainless steel taps, or faucets, can put people at risk of life-threatening legionnaires’ disease.

It’s already known that rust particles in a water system, which can come from iron pipes, encourage the growth of Legionella bacteria. These bacteria cause legionnaires’ disease, which can involve headaches, muscle pain, fever and confusion. The condition has been on the rise in Europe: in 2015, there were 7000 known cases, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) thinks there may be many more that went unreported.

Now it seems that the protective coating on stainless steel fixtures – currently a firm favourite for kitchen and bathroom sinks – can degrade over time, encouraging the growth of Legionella species.

To better understand how the material of sinks can influence legionnaires’, Wilco van der Lugt, a safety engineer who contributed to , and his team experimented with three kinds of tap commonly found in household water systems.

The researchers tested stainless steel, brass ceramic, and brass thermostatic mixer taps, each with clean water and water contaminated with either Legionella anisa, which is the most common strain in rust in the Netherlands, or both rust and the microbe. The team monitored this set-up for more than three years.

When rust was combined with Legionella anisa in the stainless steel tap, half the water samples ended up infected. The Legionella was much better able to survive and replicate in this combination than in the set-up that involved no rust, reaching concentrations of between 20,000 and 100,000 live bacteria cells per litre.

Safer taps

This outcome could be because the film coating of stainless steel taps degrades over time if rust particles are present in the water. By the third year of testing, the concentration of bacteria in this tap had shot up.

In contrast, the brass mixer tap seemed to be the safest, with only a quarter of samples from that experiment showing contamination, even when rust was present. Van der Lugt and his team thinks that taps for sale should be explicitly tested to assess their bacteria risk.

But Victor Yu at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says it isn’t possible to draw conclusions about safer tap design from the work, because this hasn’t yet been linked to people actually contracting legionnaires’ disease. He also notes that a different strain of Legionella is responsible for most cases in humans.

To avoid contracting legionnaires’ disease, the ECDC recommends keeping hot-water systems heated to between 50 and 60°C, and running taps regularly to avoid water standing for too long.

Read more: Deadly bagpipe infection is health warning to all wind musicians

Him or her?

The US Marine Mammal Commission, an organisation charged with restoring mammal populations in the world’s oceans, is set for the chop in president Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal.

, released on 23 May, includes a 16 per cent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s bodies and agencies. This would close down the MMC, an independent federal agency, which costs around US$3.41 million a year, or around one penny per American.

The sees itself as a “one-stop shop” for marine mammal science and policies, says its chairman Daryl Boness. The commission reviews human activities in the ocean -including shipping, military drills and fossil fuel extraction – and uses the latest science to ascertain the impact of such activities on marine mammals.

“The commission’s role as an oversight agency on all issues related to marine mammals is unique; no one else in the world meets this mandate,” Boness told the ��è����Ƶ. “This service to the public, marine mammals and their ecosystem would end.”

The MMC was established in 1972. Its own small-scale science projects cover topics such developing fishing nets that catch fewer mammals, and Whale Alert app to help sailors avoid whales and to alert authorities to injured or distressed whales.

The commission looks after the stocks of many threatened American sea mammals, including such iconic species as the Hawaiian monk seal, Florida manatees, beluga whales, orcas and polar bears. For example, in April it hosted a summit with researchers, industry representatives and politicians to reduce the entanglement of North Atlantic right whales in fishing gear.

Uproar over irreplaceable agency

��è����Ƶ of the commission’s possible demise has caused uproar among conservationists around the world. Ingrid Biedron, a marine scientist at , says no other organisation can fill the MMC’s footsteps.

“By law, the commission has access to all federal studies and data related to marine mammals, and by law, other federal agencies are required to consider and respond to the commission’s recommendations,” Biedron explains. “This is not the case for academic experts on marine mammals.”

Other marine agencies are also at risk under the 2018 budget proposal. The National Marine Fisheries Service would lose $22m off its Fisheries Research and Management Program, while its protected species programme would lose $7m and, according to Oceana, become effectively unable to carry out its responsibilities.

Boness says the cuts are a blow to America’s “strong environmental ethic”. He worries that, without the MMC, marine exploitation will continue “without the necessary checks and balances that help to ensure that those activities are done in the most environmentally conscientious way possible”.

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