It used to be that allergies were somewhat rare but if you go to an allergist today, you are almost certain to be declared allergic, or at least sensitive, to something. How much of that is actual biological change versus how much is that the country that purchases 85% of the world's prescription medication loves to get medical diagnoses is unclear.

Now the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology believes that nearly half of the population of the EU have allergies to something. A survey of Americans in 2020 estimated that approximately 30 percent of Americans of all ages have allergies. Since they are self-reported surveys rather than dianoses, what is unclear is how many of those are people claiming issues like gluten sensitivity.

Though it is common to see environmental videos of birds caught in plastic, less well known is that, like cats, seabirds love to eat it.

Paracelsus famously noted that the dose makes the poison but in the 1990s some activist scientists began claiming that any dose is a poison, so even if birds excrete the plastic, chemicals can "bioaccumulate" and cause harm.

Telescopes and inference told scientists that the asteroid Bennu was covered in large swaths of fine regolith, smaller than a few centimeters. What they found when OSIRIS-REx arrived at Bennu was something else: A surface covered in boulders.

The surprise lack of fine regolith became even more interesting when mission scientists observed evidence of processes capable of grinding boulders into fine regolith. Yet they had not.

Pancreatic cancer tends to develop from chronic inflammation that happens when a mutation has caused digestive enzymes to digest the pancreas itself.

What if we could go 'back in time' and reverse that process?

Purdue University Professor Bumsoo Han and his team built is a lifelike reproduction of a pancreatic structure called the acinus, which produces and secretes those digestive enzymes into the small intestine. The goal is reprogram the cancerous acinar cells that produce those enzymes, and perhaps completely reset the pancreas. 

In 2019, three free-ranging cheetahs in the Namib Desert died within 24 hours of each other. Scholars set out to determine why.

On October 5th 2019, the carcass of a GPS-collared cheetah in the Namib desert was found dead from the air. After they went in on foot to investigate, two other cheetahs were also found dead. The GPS data showed they had all died within a short period of each other so the team then identified a cluster of GPS locations approximately two kilometers away from the location where they were found dead.

For a pilot study, a team examined blood samples from 50 patients and 16 healthy subjects. Using atomic force microscopy technology, they analyzed the surface of around 1000 red blood cells per person without knowing anything about their state of health. 

They were able to detect the presence of suspicious proteins, beta-amyloid peptides and tau proteins associated with the neurodegenerative disease commonly called dementia. but also to determine their variable shape and form as well as their amounts.