It is well-known that the gravity from the moon impacts ocean tides, sailors knew it long before anyone knew what gravity even was. 

A new literature review and small meta-analysis hopes to add to the body of work showing how much gravity impacts plants and animals as well. The meta-analysis was of three previously published cases in which gravitational causality was not fully explored: the swimming activity of isopods, small shell-less crustaceans whose appearance on Earth dates from at least 300 million years ago; reproductive effort in coral; and growth modulation in sunflower seedlings inferred from autoluminescence. 

Cancer deaths rose to 10 million globally in 2019, up from 2010 when total cancer deaths numbered 8.29 million worldwide - but the headline masks some important health progress.

Cancer is not going up, despite claims by those who believe modern food, energy, and medicine are harming us. Diagnoses are going up, which means deaths are now more successfully categorized than in the past. And tracheal, bronchus, and lung cancer, the leading causes, will decline as the inroads America has made against smoking propagate throughout Europe and developing nations.

In the 1966 Harry Harrison novel "Make Room! Make Room!" concerns about population control were the driver of the plot and the storytellers were various people in New York City when the world has reached a population of 7 billion. You have probably never heard of the novel, but you likely have heard of the movie version, "Soylent Green", starring the incomparable Charlton Heston.

The neutron, discovered in 1932 by Chadwick, is a fascinating particle whose existence allows for the stability of heavy nuclei and a wealth of atoms of different properties. Without neutrons, Hydrogen would be the only stable element: protons cannot be brought together and bound in a stable system, so e.g. Helium-2 (an atom made of two protons with two electrons) is very short-lived, as are atoms with more protons and no neutrons. So our Universe would be a very dull place.

Though efforts to change mascots and team names have had some success, like the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, more than 2,000 mascots referencing Indigenous terms and images are estimated to exist in the U.S. today, from high school to pro sports, including the Atlanta Braves, with their “tomahawk chop” chant that gained renewed attention during the 2021 World Series.

There has long been something of a stigma about mental health issues. If a celebrity goes into an alcohol or drug clinic, 30 days later their career is back on track, but a reputation for depression makes filmmakers worry they won't be able to take the stress of a new project.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and depression brought on by isolation and non-stop media coverage, changed all that.  For the first time since national data have been tracked in the United States, stigma toward people with depression has declined,  There has even been a statistically significant drop in social rejection for people described as having major depression. 

Smoking remains the most prevalent lifestyle disease in the world, and for people who want to quit, there are lots of options, from "cold turkey" to vaping to patches and gums.

But among smokers who don't intend to quit, there is a clear winner in getting them to stop smoking anyway: vaping.

A nationally representative cohort study of 1,600 adult regular cigarette smokers who did not use e-cigarettes and did not plan to ever quit smoking did - e-cigarettes as smoking cessation tools led to 8-fold greater odds of cigarette discontinuation.

Over the course of evolutionary history, Greenlanders have benefited from a genetic variation that offers an incredible advantage; two copies of a gene variant make it so that they absorb sugar differently than other people do.

A new study finds that up to 3 percent of Greenland residents, based on analyzed data from 6,551 adult Greenlanders, have the sucrase-isomaltase variant, and experiments on mice may fill in reasons why those with the variant have lower BMI, weight, fat percentage, cholesterol levels and are generally significantly healthier.

For those that do, more sugar is not less healthy.

Popular imagery is that dinosaurs were a bland color, but most birds are have bland color palates as well. Then you have parrots or peacocks. In between the extremes of bland and flamboyant, there are pink pigeon feet, red rooster combs and yellow pelican pouches.

That may have been the case for dinosaurs as well. There’s a good chance that extinct dinosaurs rocked pops of color on similar body parts and may have flashed their colors to entice mates, just as birds do today, according to a study in the journal Evolution led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

A new study finds that what once were just alcohol-related car crashes have now involved marijuana as the former illegal drug has been legalized and normalized in the last 20 years.  Fatal car accidents involving alcohol have remained relatively constant over the last two decades, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with 2019 reaching the lowest levels since 1982.