Expectant and new parents are under a great deal of pressure; every action is scrutinized by those around them, and food marketers and activist groups exploit their fear by telling them one food process will lead to higher grades in school while another food process will lead to obesity, cancer, endocrine disruption and anything else environmental fundraisers can dream up.

It takes no time to make such claims and exploit people for money but far longer to do studies to show if the claims are real. 

A chronic inflammatory process that may trigger cardiovascular problems could be solved by what's in a cup of coffee, according to a recent paper.

Using survey data, medical and family histories and blood samples of over 100 human participants in the Stanford-Ellison cohort, a long-term program begun 10 years to study the immunology of aging(1), has revealed a fundamental inflammatory mechanism associated with human aging and implicates this inflammatory process as a driver of cardiovascular disease and increased rates of mortality overall. Metabolites, or breakdown products, of nucleic acids — the molecules that serve as building blocks for our genes — circulating in the blood can trigger this inflammatory process, the study found.

In 2006, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore predicted that we only had 10 years to stave off our carbon dioxide doom, with plummeting yields in Africa, the Himalayas melting and other doomsday scenarios happening by 2016. 

From 5,000 to 11,000 years ago, what is now the Sahara Desert had 10X the rainfall it does today and was home to hunter-gatherers who lived in the region's savannahs and wooded grasslands. By analyzing marine sediments, rainfall patterns in the Sahara during that 'Green Sahara' period have been pinpointed.

Elderly women who sit more than 10 hours a day have accelerated biological aging, according to an epidemiology paper. They have older cells? 

It's the increasingly popular shorter telomeres hypothesis. Telomeres are tiny caps found on the ends of DNA strands, like the plastic tips of shoelaces, that protect chromosomes from deterioration. It has been found that they progressively shorten with age, just one of the reasons why we are considered to be biologically programmed to die. 

Many viruses face a choice after they have infected their hosts: to replicate quickly, killing the cell in the process, or to become dormant and lie in wait. HIV, herpes, and a number of other human viruses behave this way and, in fact, even the viruses that attack bacteria – phages – face similar decisions when invading a cell.

What causes a virus to choose dormancy over immediate gratification? Prof. Rotem Sorek and his group in the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Molecular Genetics have now discovered that, during infection, viruses secrete small molecules into their environment that other viruses can pick up and “read.” In this way, they can actually coordinate their attack, turning simple messages into a fairly sophisticated strategy.