US student, 14, wins award for developing soap to treat skin cancer
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For these competitions, these kids only make impressive slides with huge hypotheticals. Most impressive hypothetical wins. No one's "developed" anything.
Also, it's pretty absurd to expect a soap to treat skin cancer. The evidence for the sun inducing skin cancer is not strong. Using something to then counteract the non-existent effect might just end up becoming responsible for a form of cancer itself. After all, it's much easier to get cancer than to cure it.
Say what!? The main cause of skin cancer is UV radiation from sunlight.
Go spend a day outside unprotected from the sun in the Australian summer and tell me otherwise. If you have a light skin pigmentation you’ll be in physical pain and cold shivers from the damage to your skin. Keep damaging your skin cells enough times and you have a recipe for skin cancer.
Australia and NZ have sky high rates of skin cancer (like significantly higher than any other countries in the world) because they have a large population of people with little natural protection living close to the equator where UV radiation is high.
That said, there probably is no such thing as “safe unprotected sun exposure” in Oz summer, at least if you’re not very dark-skinned. Very fair-skinned people can develop the beginnings of burn in a literal matter of minutes.
This is not true. The main cause of skin cancer for most people is often unrelated to sun exposure. And sunscreen, ironically enough, is a great contributor towards cancer.
The sun doesn't give us cancer. That it's somehow "harmful" for people to be in direct sunlight is an absurd notion. Getting strong sunlight everyday for an hour or two won't kill you or give you cancer. It'll be great for you.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/10/27/1209048...
I do, however, have no doubt young Bekele is off to a bright career.