Some parents with a lesbian, gay or bisexual child report just as much struggle to adjust two years after the fact as they did when they first learned of their child's sexual orientation, according to a recent survey. That has nothing to do with caring for their child, most do, but it informs how to make the adjustment easier for everyone involved.

New statistics released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reveals that 50,000 more Americans age 55 and older got cosmetic procedures in 2018 than the previous year.

Aging gracefully is not in the cards for senior citizens with the means to change it, they now have choices, and those choices are likely spurred by the greater availability of later romances. Most common in her Ohio practice, says plastic surgeon Anne Taylor, MD; cosmetic fixes of the neck or double chin. Those are most prominent when looking down into a camera.

Astronomers using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered a dizzying cosmic choreography among typical star-forming galaxies; their cool halo gas appears to be in step with the galactic disks, spinning in the same direction. 

This is the first-ever direct observational evidence showing that corotating halo gas is not only possible, but common. Their findings suggest that the whirling gas halo will eventually spiral in towards the disk.

Many people feel the need to live in important times, so they complain about how much worse things are today.

But scientists studying the ancient ruins of Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, found that its inhabitants - 3,500 to 8,000 people at its peak - experienced overcrowding, infectious diseases, violence and environmental problems. And that was 9,000 years ago.

Sorry readers of The Guardian, it wasn't better then. One ne of the world's first large farming communities were also among the first humans to complain about modern urban living.

A new exploratory study in mice found that the complement system, part of the innate immune system, plays a protective role to slow retinal degeneration in retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited eye disease.

Retinitis pigmentosa is an incurable and unpreventable blinding eye disease that affects 1 in 4,000 people but if "in mice" isn't caution enough, even more is warranted. Other studies have found that the complement system worsens retinal degeneration because it mediates some aspects of inflammation and worsens damage in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness in people age 65 years and older. 

The concept of quasiparticles was coined by Nobel laureate Lev Davidovich Landau, who used it to describe collective states of lots of particles or rather their interactions due to electrical or magnetic forces. Due to this interaction, several particles act like one single one.

The assumption has been that quasiparticles in interacting quantum systems decay after a certain time but the opposite is the case, according to a recent paper: strong interactions can even stop decay entirely. Collective lattice vibrations in crystals, so-called phonons, are one example of such quasiparticles.