Nearly 70 years ago, results of a Swedish experiment, now called the Vipeholm studies, correlated frequent candy consumption and tooth decay. With the benefit of scientific hindsight, this is no surprise. What is a surprise is how different cultures reacted.
For example, instead of public awareness campaigns highlighting the effects of carbohydrates on oral health, as Americans might expect, Sweden asked people to cut back on candy drastically, to eating candy one day per week. Thus was born lördagsgodis - “Saturday sweets.” Parents only let their kids eat candy on Saturday.
A recent blood group analysis of three Neanderthals and one Denisovan confirm their African origin, Eurasian dispersal, and interbreeding with early Homo sapiens. Intriguingly, it also added evidence of low genetic diversity and possible demographic fragility.
Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct hominin lineages but were present throughout Eurasia from 300,000 to 40,000 years ago. This paper isn't the first time they have been sequenced but using the genes underlying blood groups in previously sequenced genomes of one Denisovan and three Neanderthal females who lived 100,000 to 40,000 years ago allowed scholars to identify their blood groups.
Blood pressure is a risk factor for a heart event and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) are common prescriptions.
Both types of medicines work on the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, a group of related hormones that act together to regulate blood pressure. ACE inhibitors lower blood pressure by blocking an enzyme early in the system so that less angiotensin, a chemical that narrows blood vessels, is produced, and blood vessels can remain wider and more relaxed. ARBs block receptors in the blood vessels that angiotensin attaches to, diminishing its vessel-constricting effect.
"Shark Week" is a Discovery Channel event each summer, unsurprisingly about sharks. It came into existence because "Jaws" the book and then the film were huge hits and they never left the public consciousness after that.
Now Shark Week is much the same, a part of the cultural lexicon. They used to market it,
one year they even killed me off in a shark attack as part of their promotional stunt, but now I bet they don't have to do much at all. Yet when you grow to be important, you are going to those who want to bring you down a little. Big tree fall hard, as the saying goes.
A short while ago a prominent physicist made the offhand claim that bees were dying because of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids - seed treatments that protect plants from pests at their most vulnerable stage and result in far less chemical use than mass spraying. It's not true, and bees are not dying off anywhere, but that claim was still made by environmental fundraising brochures and lawyers hoping to sue so it's no surprise Mother Jones readers believe it.
But a scientist? That should be odd. Yet it isn't.
A
just completed clinical trial of K.Vita (Betashot), a dietary treatment for children and adults with severe forms of epilepsy, found it was well tolerated and reduced seizures.
The product was developed to offset the risks of the ketogenic diet, which mimics a fasting state by altering the metabolism to use body fat as the primary fuel source. Ketosis is when the body switches from carbohydrates to fat for body fuel.
It has shown some success with drug-resistant epilepsies but the restrictive high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can cause constipation, low blood sugar, and stomach problems.
Americans are inherently skeptical, and American adults lead the world in science literacy, so those two things combine to show up in debates about climate change and other sciences.
When you are literate and skeptical it is easy to know just enough to be wrong, when it comes to climate or nuclear energy, vaccines, and agriculture. The difference between the first one and the latter three is the political demographic that is skeptical about them. Politics infects everything.
That is why the each side paints issues they embrace in black and white; you can't be skeptical, you either accept what they accept or you are a denier.
Alternative polyadenylation (APA) is an RNA processing mechanism that regulates gene expression by generating different ends on RNA transcripts of the same gene. Though it affects more than half of human genes, the significance of APA was poorly understood.
Now a new study by The Wistar Institute describes an important function of APA in allowing certain mRNAs to reach specific sites of protein synthesis and reveals that length, sequence and structural properties can determine the destination (and fate) of mRNAs within the cell.
A study by the Silent Spring Institute(1), with funding from the politically sympathetic National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences during the days of organic industry keynote speaker and Ramazzini Institute member Linda Birnbaum, claims that hundreds of chemicals are endocrine disruptors.
