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.
Honing in on when life on Earth evolved from single-celled to multicellular organisms is no easy task. Organisms that old lacked many distinguishing characteristics of modern life forms, making their fossils exceptionally rare.
But University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee paleontologist Stephen Dornbos and his research partners have discovered new clues in the quest. The team found fossils of two species of previously unknown ancient multicellular marine algae, what we now know as seaweed - and they're among the oldest examples of multicellular life on Earth.
Men are less likely than women to go to the doctor, more likely to choose a male doctor when they do go, but less likely to be honest with that doctor about their symptoms, Rutgers psychologists have found. The researchers believe this may contribute to men's dying earlier than women.
"The question that we wanted to answer was, why do men die earlier than women?" said Diana Sanchez, associate professor of psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences. "Men can expect to die five years earlier than women, and physiological differences don't explain that difference."
Sanchez and Mary Himmelstein, a doctoral student, have published studies in Preventive Medicine and The Journal of Health Psychology describing their research.
HOUSTON - (March 23, 2016) - Rice University students and their mentors have created a sterilization station for surgical instruments that can help minimize risk of infections to patients anywhere in the world.
The station built into a standard 20-foot steel shipping container houses all the equipment necessary to prepare surgical instruments for safe reuse, including a water system for decontamination and a solar-powered autoclave for steam sterilization. Autoclaves are standard in modern hospitals but badly needed in low-resource settings.
Solar storms trigger Jupiter's intense 'Northern Lights' by generating a new X-ray aurora that is eight times brighter than normal and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth's aurora borealis, new research finds.
It is the first time that Jupiter's X-ray aurora has been studied when a giant storm from the sun has arrived at the planet.
The dramatic findings complement NASA's Juno mission this summer, which aims to understand the relationship between the two biggest structures in the solar system - the region of space controlled by Jupiter's magnetic field (its magnetosphere) and that controlled by the solar wind.
Blowing tiny bubbles through seawater could help protect coral reefs and oyster farms from oceans turned increasingly acidic through human activities by stripping carbon dioxide (CO2) from coastal marine environments and transferring it to the atmosphere, Stanford scientists say.
Illuminating fishing nets is a cost-effective means of dramatically reducing the number of sea turtles getting caught and dying unnecessarily, conservation biologists at the University of Exeter have found.
Dr Jeffrey Mangel, a Darwin Initiative research fellow based in Peru, and Professor Brendan Godley, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University's Penryn Campus, were part of a team of researchers who found that attaching green battery powered light-emitting diodes (LED) to gillnets used by a small-scale fishery reduced the number of green turtle deaths by 64 per cent, without reducing the intended catch of fish.
Scientists have documented for the first time how competition among different malaria parasite strains in human hosts could influence the spread of drug resistance.
"We found that when hosts are co-infected with drug-resistant and drug-sensitive strains, both strains are competitively suppressed," says Mary Bushman, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in Emory University's Population Biology, Ecology and Evolution Graduate Program. "Anti-malarial therapy, by clearing drug-sensitive parasites from mixed infections, may result in competitive release of resistant strains."
WASHINGTON --When older adults in severely debilitated states show up for treatment in the emergency department, emergency physicians and staff must be able to identify and document their symptoms and decide whether to report their concerns to adult protective services. This is a difficult decision as the patient's symptoms may stem from willful neglect, unintentional neglect or sub-acute symptoms caused by an underlying illness than manifest as neglect. Two papers published online last Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine highlight a problem that promises to grow rapidly with the aging of the Baby Boom generation.
The signatory countries of the Kyoto Protocol and the newer Paris Agreement have committed to reduce global warming, but they can only use estimates and projections to verify whether they are actually achieving the necessary reduction in greenhouse gases.
The uncertainties are considerable and mistakes do happen.
Researchers funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) have developed a method to independently monitor these statistics by making direct measurements of the gases in the atmosphere.
Hardly any natural gas pipeline leaks
Commonly used antidepressants, known as 'selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors', are not associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular conditions, such as heart attacks and strokes, according to new research at The University of Nottingham.
Depression is known to increase the risk of cardiovascular problems, but whether antidepressants, particularly SSRIs, increase or reduce this risk remains controversial.
The results are significant because antidepressants are one of the most commonly prescribed drugs and cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death and disability worldwide.
Today, at the Microbiology Society's Annual Conference in Liverpool, scientists will show that the foam made by Trinidadian frogs represents a new, non-toxic antibiotic delivery system that may help to prevent infections.
While mating, Tungara frogs (Engystomops pustulosus) release a protein cocktail that they beat into a foam with their back legs. The frogs - less than 5 centimetres long - lay their eggs in these foam nests to protect them from disease, predators and environmental stresses.
Current climate models are too simplistic to really account for all of the factors in climate in the present, much less predict the future, but they are being used by policy makers to anticipate the effects of greenhouse gases as far out as a hundred years so it is important they gradually converge on accuracy before too much money is spent.
Today, at the Microbiology Society's Annual Conference, scientists discussed one missing piece of the puzzle in computer simulations - Arctic microbes that are increasing the rate at which glaciers melt.
