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.
Nomophobia, defined as smartphone separation anxiety, is when people perceive smartphones as part of their extended selves.Counselors, lawyers and therapists are aggressively pushing it as the fad diagnosis of 2017, but what behaviors and descriptors can help identify people with high nomophobia ? A new paper compares how people considered to have high and low nomophobic tendencies perceive and value their smartphones.
Cancer is a leading cause of illness and death worldwide. In 2015, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 8.8 million cancer-related deaths and nearly twice that are diagnosed each year. Since people are living longer, cancer diagnoses is likely to continue to increase by about 70% for at least the next two decades.Given that more cancers are likely in the developing world, the search is on for treatments that are simple and inexpensive to manufacture. The answer may lie in herbal medicine. The problem, as always, is that while there are numerous anecdotes about those, there are few studies.
Just like some people are overweight but healthy - an obesity paradox - some people are thin but have a three-fold higher risk of mortality and/or cardiovascular events. Weight is not the best way to understand metabolic health, according to an analysis of lean, overweight and obese people.A new paper claims that ~20 percent of normal weight adults are still metabolically unhealthy and have a higher risk of mortality and/or cardiovascular events than metabolically healthy obese subjects. Oddly, a reduced accumulation of fat in the lower body puts lean people at risk.One size does not fit all
Satellite data have detected widespread water within ancient explosive volcanic deposits on the Moon. That means its interior may contain more indigenous water than previously believed. The ancient deposits are believed to consist of glass beads formed by the explosive eruption of magma coming from the deep lunar interior.
There is ongoing concern about species extinction but it isn't just the fact that 99.999% of species have never been cataloged, so it's impossible to know how many are extinct, it's that Mother Nature may cause it long before we could.A new study suggests nature's ecological web is so tenuous that it's amazing anything survived this long; even the smell of a predator can have disastrous effects in populations of small size in flies. They spend less time eating, more time being vigilant, have less sex, and produce fewer offspring.
It's not an 80/20 rule but if you are addicted to opiods you are likely to be visiting a small number of physicians in Ontario, according to a new analysis.
At a distance of a mind-blowing 750 million light years from Earth, astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system made up of 10 radio telescopes across the U.S., say they've been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes.They did it by observing several frequencies of radio signals emitted by these supermassive black holes. Over time, they have essentially been able to plot their trajectory and confirm them as a visual binary system. In other words, they claim they've observed these black holes in orbit with one another, though it's really inference.
In early times, a raven could be a bad omen, and a new study finds that ancient people were not wrong in thinking the raven might be planning on using a negative event to full advantage. It turns out, according to the paper, they plan ahead, just like humans, and can even forgo an immediate reward in order to gain a better one in the future, which at least some humans do. Great apes too.Ravens and great apes have not shared a common ancestor for over 300 million years, so what explains it? Evolution is not a straight line and the authors speculate that the cognitive "planning" abilities they share in common re-appeared, on a separate evolutionary path, in the birds.
It won't matter if all the ice melts and seas rise 100 feet, even if frogs rain from the skies and dogs and cats are living together, one species will be around until the sun explodes.That species is the eight-legged micro-animal tardigrade, the world's most indestructible species.
Men who worry that women may not make the right decisions during a menstrual cycle, and women who claim biology is a valid excuse for being a jerk, you're both out of luck.An examination of three aspects of cognition across two menstrual cycles found that the levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone had no impact on working memory, cognitive bias or ability to pay attention to two things at once. While some hormones were associated with changes across one cycle in some of the women taking part, these effects didn't repeat in the following cycle. Overall, none of the hormones the team studied had any replicable, consistent effect on study participants' cognition.
A theory is a very precise thing in science - yet some scientists can't resist using the term to lend intellectual weight to what may be a hypothesis and is likely just reasonable speculation. It's a large part of the reason why the term has become colloquialized, and 'wellness' is equivalent to gravity in the minds of some.Physical science is not immune. String Theory put theory in the name, so it gets to skate on the edges of truth, but theoretical physicists are trying to recapture the Golden Age of the 1930s, plus write a bestselling book. Astrophysics should know better. Yet many have still used the word theory to describe the "glitch" and "wobble" detected among pulsars, despite having no basis for it.
It's been shown that there is no hiring deficit for women in science; women have been hired far more than men for new jobs. Yet women's groups have continued to point to total numbers as the problem, as if to say older men who have been supportive of more diversity and are making it happen on hiring committees should be fired without cause to open up more jobs for women.Only the weakest candidate wants to be hired as part of a quota. There has to be a better way.
