New statistics released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reveals that 50,000 more Americans age 55 and older got cosmetic procedures in 2018 than the previous year.

Aging gracefully is not in the cards for senior citizens with the means to change it, they now have choices, and those choices are likely spurred by the greater availability of later romances. Most common in her Ohio practice, says plastic surgeon Anne Taylor, MD; cosmetic fixes of the neck or double chin. Those are most prominent when looking down into a camera.

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #1

Tom, Dick and Harry explain a statistical method.


The mysterious Voynich Manuscript.


A simple analysis of a sufficiently large text can reveal much about the topic of that text, if the language is known.

If the text, as in the case of the Voynich Manuscript, is written in an unknown script, then the same simple analytical method can point the way to the underlying language, or language group.

Astronomers using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered a dizzying cosmic choreography among typical star-forming galaxies; their cool halo gas appears to be in step with the galactic disks, spinning in the same direction. 

This is the first-ever direct observational evidence showing that corotating halo gas is not only possible, but common. Their findings suggest that the whirling gas halo will eventually spiral in towards the disk.

Is honey healthier than bleached white table sugar or brown sugar or high fructose corn syrup? If you ask people selling nutritional fads yes, but if you ask your mitochondria, sugar is sugar. It's the total, which means calories, that matter. in our increasingly wealthy, sedentary society.

Many people feel the need to live in important times, so they complain about how much worse things are today.

But scientists studying the ancient ruins of Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, found that its inhabitants - 3,500 to 8,000 people at its peak - experienced overcrowding, infectious diseases, violence and environmental problems. And that was 9,000 years ago.

Sorry readers of The Guardian, it wasn't better then. One ne of the world's first large farming communities were also among the first humans to complain about modern urban living.

A new exploratory study in mice found that the complement system, part of the innate immune system, plays a protective role to slow retinal degeneration in retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited eye disease.

Retinitis pigmentosa is an incurable and unpreventable blinding eye disease that affects 1 in 4,000 people but if "in mice" isn't caution enough, even more is warranted. Other studies have found that the complement system worsens retinal degeneration because it mediates some aspects of inflammation and worsens damage in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness in people age 65 years and older. 

The concept of quasiparticles was coined by Nobel laureate Lev Davidovich Landau, who used it to describe collective states of lots of particles or rather their interactions due to electrical or magnetic forces. Due to this interaction, several particles act like one single one.

The assumption has been that quasiparticles in interacting quantum systems decay after a certain time but the opposite is the case, according to a recent paper: strong interactions can even stop decay entirely. Collective lattice vibrations in crystals, so-called phonons, are one example of such quasiparticles.

With a new executive order, President Trump has done something that the science community has wished would have been done since the 1980s; he has ordered his administration to streamline the federal regulatory process for agricultural biotechnology so that every new product is not treated like a new invention.

Social psychologists say we send out social cues not just with our facial expressions, but with the tilt of our heads as well.

An otherwise neutral expression looks more dominant when the head is tilted down. The authors speculate that is because tilting one's head downward leads to the artificial appearance of lowered and V-shaped eyebrows--which elicit perceptions of aggression, intimidation, and dominance.

But why does looking like a serial killer seem more dominant than someone with their head tilted back, a pose usually regarded as more confident? Dominant means something different to them than it does the public.

Free fingers have obvious advantages on land, and don't even get us started on opposable thumbs, but provides aquatic or gliding animals with more suitable webbed ones. But both amphibians and amniotes, which include mammals, reptiles, and birds, can have webbed digits. 

A new study has found that during embryo development, some animal species detect the presence of atmospheric oxygen, which triggers removal of interdigital webbing.