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.
Tiger blood, rhino horns, any number of natural supplements, including from endangered species, are used in the alternative medicine spheres - and that market is dominated by Asia.Sea cucumbers are used in Chinese folk medicine but are also a luxury food product and that demand has meant once-thriving Mexican sea cucumber populations have been decimated due to poaching. China doesn't care where its products come from, so any certification could be as illegitimate as an organic food sticker from Russia.Sea cucumbers are ecologically critical but a new literature review finds that Asian food markets have them on the brink of crisis.
Prior to the latest coronavirus pandemic, many were indifferent about getting the flu vaccine. They shouldn't be. Co-infections are not common but a new study finds that adults in hospital who have COVID-19 and the flu at the same time are at much greater risk of severe disease and death - over four times more likely to require ventilation support and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they only had COVID-19.
A new mode of how antibodies navigate the surface of pathogens like coronaviruses compares the migration of these pathogen hunters to the random movements of a child on stepping stones.Antibodies are often thought of as Y-shaped proteins but perhaps a more accurate way to envision them is to flip the picture upside down and regard antibodies as walking stick figures, stepping on antigens. Those two characteristic “Y” branches function as legs of sorts.
No one will miss the COVID-19 pandemic. Except maybe greenhouses.New surveys show about one out of every three people began gardening in 2020 because they were home more due to SARS-CoV-2 restrictions and worries. Many also put in new grass lawns and did outdoor renovations, such as installing new plant beds and other landscaping.
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.
