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.
A survey of 1,111 Americans who own houseplants wanted to find out which varieties are most popular and how much people spend on the hobby, but they also found out how much they anthropomorphize their leafy little friends.During the pandemic, 68 percent of Millennials took up a new hobby and nearly as many grew their houseplant collection. Perhaps that's become part of the new cultural dynamic. 57 said having a houseplant supported their mental health while 81 percent say houseplants are a reasonable substitute if they are far from nature.
A demographically representative sample of 5,000 single adults between the ages of 18 and 98 finds a big switch in a post-pandemic world; only 78 percent believe being physically attractive is most important, compared to 90 percent in 2020.And marriage is back. The number of singles who want a partner desiring marriage jumped from 58
percent
two years ago to 76
percent
this year, with men and younger adults leading in the change. Now, 42 percent of men are ready to find a long-term romantic relationship while women are just at 29 percent.Not this year, men are leading the charge in heart's desire.
Do cats adjust their behavior to what works to get what they want or do they nag humans until people begin to respond in more agreeable ways?Some cat owners, and probably most dog owners, might argue that cats engage in the latter and when it seems like the former it is just a lucky meeting of personalities. A new study in Animal Cognition finds they 'read the room' better than expected.Cats were presented with a solvable task (an easily accessible treat in a container with a loose lid) and an unsolvable task (a treat in a closed container) in the presence of either an attentive or inattentive caregiver.
For the last 10,000 years the earth has been in a warming cycle. The latest ice age ended around that time, a recurring phenomenon in nature where 90,000 of every 100,000 years were ice ages.How warm has it gotten compared to other warming bursts since the last ice age ended? A lot. Maps of global temperature changes for every 200-year interval going back 24,000 years finds that the magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the rest of the period - including when we were leaving an ice age.
As the crown jewel of Henry VIII’s, its flagship, the Mary Rose, patrolled the Atlantic with her heavy cannons for 34 years. It then spend 437 more buried beneath the turbulent English Channel before being recovered and placed on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England. The Mary Rose sank during a naval battle with France in 1543 and was excavated in 1982, along with 19,000 objects from the Tudor period. There remains one thing the 510-year-old English warship can't defeat; nature.
Even at prescription strength doses, purified omega-3 fatty acid did not reduce incidents of hospitalizations and/or deaths among people with COVID-19, according to results from Scientific Sessions 2021.
Dyslexia is well-known to impact reading ability but it has been unclear which brain processes are affected by the condition. Whether dyslexia is, at its core, a visual processing disorder is hotly debated among researchers. With reading and writing a key challenge among children with dyslexia, increasing understanding of its effects on the brain might improve existing interventions.
Anti-vaccine sentiment is not new but from the 1950s until the late 1990s it was isolated small pockets of deniers. With claims that MMR vaccines, and then preservatives in vaccines, caused autism, the west coast of America became overrun with vaccine denial. In 2021, anti-vaccine sentiment switched to middle America with COVID-19. The names change but health disinformation remains the same, as are ways to combat it. A recent study looked at combating typhoid misinformation in Sierra Leone and found that explicitly addressing falsehoods seems more effective in busting misbeliefs than simply stating scientific facts.
What do Taylor Swift, the Jonas brothers, and Miley Cyrus share in common? They're all great musicians and nice people. They were also home schooled. A new study examining how homeschooling affected adolescents’ character, health and well-being found that adolescents who are homeschooled are more likely to report greater character strengths and fewer risky health behaviors later in life, but are less likely to attain a college degree.
Over 6,000 light-years away from earth, in the constellation Puppis in the southern sky, is an emission nebula. Emission nebulae are diffuse clouds of gas that have become so charged by the energy of nearby massive stars that they glow with their own light. The radiation from these massive stars strips electrons from the nebula’s hydrogen atoms - ionization. As the energized electrons revert from their higher-energy state to a lower-energy state, they emit energy in the form of light, causing the nebula’s gas to glow.
A recent paper examined 45,079 cases of toxoplasmosis in wild mammals—a disease that has been linked to nervous system disorders, cancers and other debilitating chronic conditions—using data from 202 global studies and found wildlife living near dense urban areas, where there are lots of cats carrying the pararsite, were more likely to be infected.One infected cat can excrete as many as 500 million Toxoplasma oocysts (or eggs) in just two weeks. The oocysts can then live for years in soil and water with the potential to infect any bird or mammal, including humans. Toxoplasmosis is particularly dangerous for pregnant women.
A new paper reaffirms how humankind's embrace of agriculture, and resulting lower 'cost' of food, led to a cultural boom that resulted in mass migration and many of the world's major language families. If you speak modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian, you have a connection to neolithic millet farmers from the Liao River valley - Inner Mongolia and the provinces of Liaoning and Jilin in China. People speaking nearly 100 dialects and languages across 5,000 miles have a shared genetic ancestry stretching back 9,000 years, the research found.
