Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
The cochlear implant has helped many regain hearing functionality and a new study shows a potential roadmap for those whose cochlear nerve is too damaged; the auditory brainstem implant.The current auditory brainstem implant and its rigid structure does not allow for good tissue contact, which means a majority of the electrodes must be switched off due to unwanted side effects such as dizziness or facial twitching. A soft, thin-film version with electrodes embedded in silicone leads to a pliable array less than a millimeter thick.Superior conformity means patients will no longer get vague sounds and little speech intelligibility - and fewer side effects.
Duckweed split into different species 59 million years ago, when the climate was more extreme than even the most aggressive climate simulation produced now.A new study, genome sequences for five duckweed species, reveals how duckweed can essentially farm itself, and because it can double in mass after two days what that might mean for the future of food science.
It's easy for Greenpeace employees in cities to talk about farming but in the real world, without pesticides we'd lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetables, and 32 percent of cereal crops. Most farmers want to optimize razor-thin margins and protect their biggest asset, land, so they are cautious about spraying too much, but the organic process leads to startling amounts of nitrogen runoff into rivers and ground water. A study claims 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution while the old ways of German farmers recently showed they were exposing everything to wasted chemicals. Seed treatments like neonicotinoids have gone a long way to reducing runoff but some products can only be sprayed.
The world is producing more food using fewer pesticides than ever, thanks to modern science. The gap between modern pesticide usage and organic food pesticides needed per calorie of food got so large, up to 600% more organic pesticides used, that California stopped itemizing organic pesticides separately to improve the optics of the organic industry.
Today, the best way to prevent malaria remains DDT. Though banned in the US by a politician over the objections of scientists, it is still recommended by the United Nations for use where malaria has not been wiped out. Our FDA even wrote the book on how to spray it in homes.Despite 70 years of effort, viable affordable replacements remain elusive but a new program hopes LLMs could help find one. The National Institutes of Health
funded a proposal to use machine learning techniques combined with cheminformatics to help generate new mosquito repellents.
The Kilometre Cubic Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) collaboration has reported detection of a neutrino with an estimated energy of about 220 PeV (220 million billion electron volts) by its ARCA detector. The event, KM3-230213A, is the first evidence that neutrinos of such high energies are produced in the Universe and the most energetic neutrino ever observed.
A new Artificial Intelligence analysis of data of ovarian cancer patients links birth control pills to a 26% reduced risk for those had ever used it, and 43% for those who had used the it after the age of 45.That does not mean you should take it as a way to prevent cancer, it is an endocrine disruptor that binds to estrogen with 20,000X the effect of compounds like BPA that environmentalists tried to claim are too risky in food containers, and this study is EXPLORATORY. With enough data, Australians could link voting for the Liberal Party to lower risk of diseases. Epidemiology can link anything to anything.
A new study examined the effects of marijuana use of 1,003 adults aged 22 to 36 from the Human Connectome Project collected between August 2012 and 2015 and found that 63% of heavy lifetime cannabis users exhibited reduced brain activity during a working memory task, while 68% of recent users also demonstrated a similar impact.
While off-label uses of medication may be controversial in political media, in science and health they lead to important gains. A new example is the cardiac disease drug digoxin used at a low and safe dosage for one week for nine patients with metastatic breast cancer.
An analysis of 300 million United Kingdom Ministry of Transport test records, which tries to estimate the ‘health’ of every vehicle on UK roads between 2005 and 2022 and determine potential vehicle longevity (basically survival rates for different powertrains) has concluded that electric vehicles now match the lifespans of conventional counterparts and may even be more reliable.
"Long Covid", the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in Wuhan, China in 2019 and spread worldwide, causing millions of deaths, is difficult to pin down.Pediatricians report it affects on average 0.5% of children who got the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that caused COVID-19. It has a few names, like Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, but Long Covid is the common term, and is generally characterized as persistence of COVID-19 symptoms 12 weeks or more weeks after the disease.
Soybeans greatly benefit from nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which reduces the need for fertilizer, and a new study shows that gene-edited bacteria can supply the equivalent of 35 pounds of nitrogen from the air during early corn growth as well. Agricultural scientists tested products from Pivot Bio called PROVEN and PROVEN 40, which includes one and two species of soil bacteria, respectively, that turn atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available forms. An edited gene involved in nitrogen fixation makes more of it available so more of it at planting means the bacteria colonize plant roots.
