More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
Sulfurihydrogenibium yellowstonense (Sulfuri), the bacterium that controls the formation of rocks that look like pasta on Earth is ancient and thrives in harsh environments that are similar to conditions on Mars.That's why cute robots on the surface might want to look for fusilli or some other noodle.
In only 10 percent of flowering plant species do female and male flowers exist on separate plants, where they typically remain female or male throughout their lifetime. The other 90 percent combine both sexes in one plant.
The "loser effect"- avoiding violence after losing a fight - evolves independently of any change in fighting ability, according to results after scientists studied male broad-horned flour beetles, which regularly fight over females, to see how long they avoided fights after a defeat. Most would not start a fight for about four days after a loss, but researchers selectively bred the beetles for a shorter duration of this loser effect and found that it evolved to be shorter - despite no improvement in fighting prowess.
A Neptunian planet named NGTS-4b has been found in what should be a 'Neptunian Desert' using the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) observing facility, designed to search for transiting planets on bright stars. NGTS-4b is so small other ground surveys wouldn't have spotted it.But small is relative. Though NGTS-4b is 20% smaller than Neptune, that is about 3 times the size of Earth, and 20 times our Earth in mass. It has been nicknamed the 'Forbidden' planet by researchers and is hotter than Mercury at 1,000 degrees Celsius. It orbits around the star in only 1.3 days - the equivalent of Earth's orbit around the sun of one year.
Palm oil is being blamed for a lot but two academic conservationists note that those who ask to boycott all palm oil due to its contribution to deforestation should also consider boycotting coffee, chocolate and coconut if they wish to be consistent.Are you against or really against palm oil? Ask anyone who has followed any environmental news related to palm oil if they are for or against it and they will most likely say 'Against.' They'll mention destroyed orangutan habitats and rainforests disappearing.
Evolution will happen, in medicines like antibiotics, and in crop protection like herbicides. Though some groups may continue to use older, less effective products such as organic copper sulfate, evidence-based agriculture works to create new products that do less environmental damage, such as neonicotinoids.
Were dinosaurs green? You'd think so going by pop culture imagery but there is no way to know if they were green or grey or something else.
Have you read this week a claim by the Harvard School of Public Health that Food Z is linked to cancer or from our U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) claims Chemical X is linked to Harm Y?It's technically true, though in high-profile cases like with the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France, what they leave out is that to create their statistical hazard, they use studies with up up to 10,000 times the normal dose. To create hazard, they torture data but because they were able to get a p-value>.05 they declare it statistically significant.
Eating sensibly is an important part of a healthy lifestyle but for some people this preoccupation with healthy eating can become physically and socially impairing. The condition, called Orthorexia Nervosa, is a patholofical obsession with "clean eating" and a new study finds it's more common among those who have a history of an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive traits, dieting, poor body image, and an irrational drive for thinness.
Advocates for getting rid of gasoline love to use images from the 19th century, asking why the public is not using modern alternatives. They try to allege it is a corporate effort to suppress competitors but the argument doesn't work very well when they also argue in other areas that companies are only inventing new products to have something to sell.
Cigarette smoking among kids has continued to fall and since, as we have long noted, "smoking is a pediatric disease". if people don't take it up as children they likely never will. That will pay public health dividends. But with a problem about to be eliminated so is hundreds of billions of dollars that have been given to anti-smoking advocates, and many of them are scrambling to justify why their funding should continue.
An entire generation of parents was brought up believing that if hospitals used antimicrobial soap, then homes deserved it too. An entire generation of doctors were brought up in a defensive medicine culture and taught that if a patient really wanted something, like antibiotics for a flu, they had to get it, or lawyers and politicians would be using them for media soundbites. An entire generation of the public were taught that every drug should have the lower cost of generic versions, which has stymied creativity. An entire generation of regulators told us that the solution to a drug like Vioxx harming anyone was to double the cost and time of studies needed for approval.
