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.
Though numerical models and popular films like An Inconvenient Truth projected Arctic ice collapse due to global warming and then climate change, the reverse was true in the real world. Ice expanded. That changed in 2015 and a new model estimates why. The authors say the Southern Ocean which surrounds Antarctica has gotten warmer, bringing salty water from the deep up to the surface.Those water changes led to record-breaking lows in 2023, which could destabilize the world’s ocean current systems, and it will be due to three changes.In 2013, they write stronger winds led to salty Circumpolar Deep Water getting closer to the surface.
You may have read that Asian cultures respect the elderly more than Europe but Asian senior citizens may not agree. However, it may not be that young people have gotten less respectful, it could be that young people are wealthier than in the past. And that makes them lonelier.Over the last 40 years, the wealth of countries like the United States and Japan have increased substantially. Poor people now have a life that the poor even two generations ago could not imagine would be possible. Yet a new cross-temporal meta-analysis says that despite the changes in wealth which make socializing more possible, young people report more loneliness.
A new tool drawing on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words and diverse real-world texts claims to have found that human language is systematically biased, but not against things. It is instead biased toward safety and that has impacted everything from psychology claims to how Large Language Models (LLMs, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence and AI).
There are concerns about projected warming on the Earth’s surface and in the lower atmosphere even while the planet’s upper atmosphere has cooled.It's not a paradox, it's a pattern and a recent paper described the mechanics of how it works. The short answer is that carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts differently to wavelengths of light. Closer to earth, CO2 traps it but it makes the stratosphere better at radiating, which cools it—but because it becomes colder, the Earth system ends up losing less heat to space overall, strengthening warming below.
We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we know as folded rocks in the mountain ranges of the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia.
One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused the same two genes - ivory and optix - to evolve near identical color patterns.
There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how strongly hypothetical dark photons interact with normal photons wouldn't even involve a new and expensive dedicated facility, says Tokyo Metropolitan University Associate Professor Wen Yin.
Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific determination of what that even means.There are metrics but standard 0-to-10 scales and questionnaires are subjective and basically only useful for justifying treatments to insurance companies, they are clinically not much help.Pain patients were demonized by the Obama administration in their war on Big Pharma and "opiods" that many in Congress now claim to support and that may be why both doctors and patients minimize their symptoms on official forms. No patient wants to be told their pain is just recreational desire while doctors are the easy targets for government. That plus general recall bias and confusion about what a pain scale really means clouds the issue.
An analysis of 6.14 million maternal-child health records has linked prescription medications to higher rates of Autism Spectrum Disorder in offspring. Sterol biosynthesis–inhibiting medications (SBIMs) inhibit the cholesterol synthesis pathway and are include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, beta-blockers and statins; aripiprazole, atorvastatin, bupropion, buspirone, fluoxetine, haloperidol, metoprolol, nebivolol, pravastatin, propranolol, rosuvastatin, sertraline, simvastatin, cariprazine and trazodone. These include some of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, accounting for more than 400 million annual prescriptions.
Fibromyalgia is the term for a poorly-understood condition where people experience pain and fatigue while moving but have no testable inflammation or damage. Because fatigue is a non-specific symptom, fibromyalgia becomes a 'diagnosis of exclusion', where pain persists but testable conditions are ruled out. It is said to affect about four percent of the population.
Older people who eat large amounts of meat have a lower risk of dementia and cognitive decline than they should have with a gene that some link to increased risk. The gene that has been linked to increased risk is Apolipoprotein E, which plays a role in the transport of cholesterol and fats in the brain and blood. The gene exists in three main variants: epsilon 2, 3 and 4. Since each person inherits two APOE genes, one from each parent, giving six possible genotypes): 2/2, 2/3, 2/4, 3/3, 3/4 and 4/4. In Sweden, where the study was done, approximately 30 per cent of the population are carriers of the gene combinations APOE 3/4 or APOE 4/4.
A new DNA analysis reveals that long before the Incan Empire took over Peru, animals were being transported across the Andes, a trek that also involved rainforests, highlands and deserts. The analysis was of parrot feathers discovered at Pachacamac, Peru, a religious hub that is far outside the birds’ native rainforest range. The burial feather assemblage included the Scarlet Macaw, Blue-and-yellow Macaw, Red-and-green Macaw and Mealy Amazon. DNA sequencing, isotope chemistry and computational landscape modeling says the western side of the Andes was just as inhospitable to these species one thousand years ago as it is today.
