Though the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago is what made humans the apex predator, a new analysis reveals that the stage was set long before farming became science. 

Excavations at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains, on the border of KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, and Swaziland, show that someone was cooking starchy Hypoxis angustifolia rhizomes plants, such as the Yellow Star flower, 170,000 years ago. It also suggests they probably used wooden sticks to extract plants from the ground.

If you intended to holiday at a place that underwent a disaster it might be a good idea to keep your plans, especially if you are civic-minded and are willing to help.

Such "volunteer tourism" can actually help communities recover from natural disasters, a new study finds.

Most people will do nothing of the kind, they will send "thoughts and prayers" on Twitter and go anywhere else, but if you are a volunteer tourist (willing to help) rather than a disaster tourist(you want to take selfies) it will bring practical benefits, along with intangible economic ones.

Formaldehyde is one of the most studied, and regulated, chemical substances in commerce today. For decades, this substance has been continuously studied to help ensure regulated safe exposure levels for formaldehyde are protective.

If you were to ask a group of medical professionals to name the most significant public health achievements of the past century, antibiotics and widespread vaccination against infectious diseases would almost certainly top the list.

Short summary: Soleimani is an Iranian leader, who is highly respected in Iran, and played a key role in the fight against ISIS. However, he was classified by the US as terrorist because of his position as leader of the Quds, a numerically small black ops type operations supplying weapons to shia militants and the mastermind of operations targeting US soldiers and civilians.

Here is my short tweet about it

Not long ago, I was watching a documentary The Pharaoh in the Suburb on Channel 5 (UK terrestrial television) which told us that

The discovery of a gigantic statue in a suburb of Cairo shed light on an almost forgotten period of Egyptian history, and the accomplishments of one of the greatest pharaohs of all, Psamtik I, who reigned 664–610 BC.

The statue was discovered in March 2017, and here he is after being excavated:

A ring of hydrogen gas with a diameter of 380,000 light-years- 4 times that of our Milky Way - has been discovered shrouding the galaxy named AGC 203001, 260 million light-years away from us.

The Civil Defense Caves in Dubois, Idaho, utilized as potential fallout shelters during the Cold War, are actually ancient lava tubes. Since they are easily accessible caves they have become popular family treks. In August of 1979, one such trek had a family hunting for arrowheads who instead found a headless male torso wrapped in burlap. The only clue was a dark red sweater.

A decade later, a youngster exploring the same cave found two arms and two legs, also wrapped in burlap. Naturally, the search began for a head but no luck.

The "Buffalo Cave Torso" went to the FBI and then the Smithsonian without resolution, but the Othram forensic genomics company, Idaho State University, and the Clark County Sheriff’s Office say they have solved it. 

To future scholars, the 2020s may be the decade that the public discovered epidemiologists don't understand the difference between a hazard, absolute risk, and relative risk. And that skepticism in the next decade will have resulted from too many shoddy claims and spurious correlations in this one.

A high body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight relative to height, has been linked to cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, and that has led to guidelines based on low BMI, despite it being a population-level statistical correlation with little individual clinical relevance.  A large weightlifter may not be unhealthy while a thin person with a terrible diet is no role model.

A new study in JAMA Oncology increases confusion about what BMI does and does not tell us because it finds a statistical correlation between high BMI and cancer outcomes.  In clinical trials of atezolizumab, a common immunotherapy treatment for non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), there was improved responsiveness to the drug in those with a high BMI.