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.
Epidemiologists looked at data from from 1999 to 2020 and noted that death rates due to poisonings, firearms, and all other injuries increased substantially in the U.S., many of them due to suicide attempts.The demography analysis of 3,813,894 deaths collated by the National Center for Health Statistics due to non-natural causes was simplistic - age, sex, race, ethnicity, and belief about intent, then separating out criminal acts for things like gun deaths and if there was no clear intent of suicide, listing drug overdoses as accidental, while parsing motor vehicle injuries and falls as well.
Nearly 3 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, and for half that time they were butchering each other - a new paper says 1.45 million years of killing each other for food.
The brain and the digestive tract are in constant communication, relaying signals that help to control feeding, and the implication that this communication network may also influence our mental state - as if "hangry" is science any more than a child getting hyperactive if they eat a piece of candy is - means it has been linked to everything from autism to Parkinson's disease. Because there is very little science, it is mostly suggestion used to sell supplements and yogurt that makes you poop. A new technology hopes to introduce data to brain-gut mysticism.
Stars die in lots of ways. Most low-mass stars like our Sun shed their outer layers and eventually fade to white dwarf stars. Larger ones prefer to burn out rather than fade away so they go supernova and create ultradense objects like neutron stars and black holes. When two stellar remnants form a binary system, they also can collide. Yet a new paper shows there may be a fourth way - a collision where non-binary stars in dense regions can be forced together. The work used a long-duration gamma-ray burst with the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
If you have traveled, you have seen someone who is a frequent traveler be offered an upgrade but decline because they are with someone else and want to stay together. This is rare in other species. Yet not all experiences get equal treatment - if a parent is traveling with a child they may take the upgrade to give it to the child - and a new paper sought to understand how consumers make trade-offs between experience quality and togetherness. The authors write that consumers prioritize physical togetherness with relationship partners over opportunities that would improve an experience in real time.
Cooperative breeders, where we count on the help of others to raise offspring,is not unique to humans. It may only appear that way.A new paper amassed data from 90 human populations comprising 80,223 individuals from many parts of the world — both historical and contemporary. They compared the records for men and women to lifetime data for 45 different nonhuman, free-ranging mammals. The argue that humans are a non-exceptional species of mammal. Says first author Cody Ross, PhD, anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute; “we can quite successfully model reproductive inequality in humans and nonhumans using the same predictors.”
A new demography paper argues that there is a reason more black women have voted for Democrats than men have since 1980 - more black men are in jail.
CRISPR/Cas9 technology has led to a “homing gene drive system” based on a specific
Drosophila suzukii gene called doublesex that can suppress populations of D. suzukii
vinegar flies – the “spotted-wing Drosophila” that devastate soft-skinned fruit in North America, Europe and parts of South America.
A new study suggests alcoholism coupled with genetic susceptibility is associated with changes to gene expression indicative of disease progression in the brains of mice that are genetically predisposed to Alzheimer’s. When repeatedly exposed to intoxicating amounts of alcohol, these mice showed signs of cognitive decline approximately two months sooner than they usually would.
If you have been to a zoo and been around our primate evolutionary cousins with kids, you may have had an awkward moment or two. They are going to masturbate, and don't care who's watching.A new study says more is better. The Postcopulatory Selection Hypothesis believes it helps shed low-quality semen while the The Pathogen Avoidance Hypothesis believes it may reduce the risk of contracting sexually-transmitted infections. Primates have been doing it for at least 40 million years so something keeps it going.
A traditional endoscopy, while valuable for detecting high-risk lesions, is an expensive, invasive procedure. There are ingestible cameras but are not controlled by physicians, they are just swallowed and the body does the rest.
Two cases of Yersinia pestis in human remains found in a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and one in a ring cairn monument in Levens in Cumbria show that the Plague may have erupted a few times in severe form across Europe, and it was even in England as far back as 2000 B.C.In the 1960s, coronavirus was discovered as distinct from the common cold so future analyses may also find pandemics that occurred long before 2003, 2012, and 2019. 'The plague', as it became known in the Middle Ages, has previously been identified in Eurasia between during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, so we now know it was easily transmitted. Even to an island.
