*By: Madison Alworth*
Jill Steinberg credits 23andMe with saving her life.
The mom of two decided eight years ago to take the ancestry and health tests for fun with her husband, Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg. As a result, she found out she carried the BRCA 1 gene mutation.
That means she had a much higher chance of developing breast cancer. In fact, 80% of those with the mutation are eventually diagnosed with the disease.
After receiving the news from 23andMe and consulting with her doctors, Steinberg decided to get a double mastectomy.
"It was life-changing news to find out," she said in an interview Friday. "But it was something that I could take, consult my doctors, and do something about. So I feel that I was able to save my own life, take my life into my own hands, and survive cancer before I got cancer."
Anne Wojcicki, CEO and founder of 23andMe, is happy to provide this kind of information to the public. She says she tells employees, "We really change lives. And it might be about ancestry, and it might be you found out something meaningful, but there's always something there to learn."
Investigators recently used genetic information to make an arrest in a decades-old case. A suspect was taken into custody this week in the Golden State Killer case. An [open-source DNA](https://www.wired.com/story/detectives-cracked-the-golden-state-killer-case-using-genetics/) database was used to finally draw a connection between the suspect and the crimes.
Instances like that have some people ー even those not trying to conceal crimes ー worried that genetic and other records stored online could eventually get into the wrong hands. But Wojcicki said that keeping 23andMe customers' information private and secure is a top priority.
"We do everything we can to protect our customers," explains Wojcicki. "We have no business if I can't protect the privacy of our customers."
For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/how-23andme-is-saving-lives).
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
