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With war in Ukraine, Europeans are worried a key source of their food, Russia and Ukraine, is at risk.They are right to be concerned. Food is a strategic resource but European countries chose to embrace higher cost lower yield alternatives to modern agriculture at home because they got cheap food from the east.If an additional 290,000,000,000 loaves of bread were available, that would ease the strain worldwide. That is how much wheat is lost each year due to pests and diseases that the so-called organic process can't prevent. But science can.

"Live cold, die old" may soon become folk wisdom if a new study holds up in mice is true for people.Most of us have heard some form of the phrase "live fast, die young" and take it to mean reckless behavior leads to premature death. It certainly does in epidemiology but in science it means that animals with high metabolic rates ("living fast") tend to die sooner than those with slow metabolism. They burn out rather than fade away.

The public are often baffled why environmental journalists attend climate conferences in person, using the rationalization that they do their jobs better if they can talk to people outside formal interviews.What salesperson doesn't feel the same way? Science conferences are also well-attended, groups hosting them even note their high attendance, but the belief that any benefit from flying there and staying in a hotel is meaningful is usually held by people who enjoy going to conferences rather than empirical data. 

A small pilot study has concluded that even one night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation.In the experiment, 10 people slept for one night in dim light followed by one night with overhead room lighting while another 10 slept for two nights in dim light.

Though often get graphical representations of what an exoplanet that has been discovered might look like, in reality they are statistical wobbles.And a new study finds that of the some 5,000 planets detected outside our solar system, three are likely not planets, but stars. The new analysis of the data finds that Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b are probably between two and four times the size of Jupiter. So they are likely small stars instead.

The Krebs cycle is named after Hans Krebs, who discovered it in 1937, part of the race to discover the central hub of cellular metabolism. In a cell’s mitochondria, it is a core part of the process by which cells “burn” sugars to make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cell’s energy-carrying molecule. 

By coating soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way, scientists could design machines with arms made of flexible materials and robots embedded in their surface. Coating the surface of nanoparticles in a responsive, active material could mean tailoring the size and shape of drug delivery capsules and have a dramatic effect on how a drug interacts with cells in the body. This ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots and make it possible to determine the shape, movement and behavior of a soft solid not by its natural elasticity but by human-controlled activity on its surface.How it works

The transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers and ranchers remains a subject of debate. In Europe, where that happened thousands of years ago, based largely on genetic studies, the prevailing view is that the "Neolithic transition" occurred mainly by population replacement rather than cultural change.The old stuck to old ways, much like organic farmers and believers in alternative medicine do, while the young embraced progress as the elders died off. 

A recent study describes a new species of vampyropod based on a 328-million-year-old fossil and pushes back the age of the group by nearly 82 million years. And shows that the oldest ancestors of the group of animals that includes octopuses and vampire squids had not eight but 10 arms. Vampyropods are soft-bodied cephalopods typically characterized by eight arms and an internalized chitinous shell or fin supports. Because they lack hard structures, Vampyropoda are not well represented in the fossil record. The new study is based on a vampyropod fossil from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum. It was originally discovered in Montana and donated to the museum in 1988.

Few treatments exist for COVID-19 and the ones that do primarily focus solely on preventing the virus from replicating. A new potential treatment inhibits replication but also protects or repairs tissue, which is important because COVID-19 can cause symptoms that affect patients long after the viral infection has been cleared. It is a biologic substance created by reengineered human skin cells called dermal fibroblasts.

Electric cars are being artificially bolstered by government mandates and subsidies and are doing little to reduce emissions because the electricity they need is overwhelmingly not solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric.What would help are batteries that aren't stuck in the 20th century, like lithium-ion, which cost so much to replace that one Tesla owner blew up his car with dynamite rather than a cost for new batteries that was 50 percent of the original purchase price. And they can be dangerous.Lithium-ion explosion risk

Being a woman is correlated to being twice as men to develop Alzheimer's disease, but lacking a scientific foundation for why, epidemiology is limited to noting it on a population level and moving on.A new paper seeks to create a biological hypothesis. The authors say the C/EBPβ/AEP pathway is the core factor driving the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and searched for female hormones that are dramatically changed during menopause and tested which hormone selectively activates the C/EBPβ/AEP pathway. They have identified follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) as the major pathogenic factor.