News Articles

Leonardo Da Vinci had no children but he has relatives. A new study shows how many and corrects some genealogical errors and documents the continuous male line, from father to son, of the Da Vinci family (later Vinci), from progenitor Michele (born 1331) to grandson Leonardo (6th generation, born 1452) to today; 21 generations in all, including five family branches. It identifies 14 living descendants.Leonardo himself had (at least) 22 half-brothers but no children. The five family branches are traced from Leonardo's father, ser Piero (5th generation), and half-brother Domenico (6th). Since the 15th generation, data have been collected on over 225 individuals. 

Gold should be uniformly scattered throughout the Earth's crust, not in giant deposits, because it is unreactive. It is one of the most inert metals in the whole Periodic Table, it doesn't easily react with other substances, so it should not have come together in sufficient quantity to mine.Yet it did, and became prized for its purity and stability and later for its rarity. It's still rare. The World Gold Council estimates that all the gold ever mined in the world would fit into a 20x20x20-meter cube. Chemists may have found an answer as to why it should not form into deposits yet did, and it may also explain why many gold miners were at risk from arsenic poisoning.

At an archaeological site in the City of David in Jerusalem, scholars have found an unexplained cache of fossilized shark teeth in an area where there should be none - nearly 40 miles from where they should have naturally occurred nearly 3,000 years ago, just after the death of King Solomon.Since the teeth were from 66,000,000 years ago, Late Cretaceous, The answer would seem to be simple; they were fossilized, found, and then moved. But why? Did did the owners know they were ancient fossils?

Two new gravitational-wave events, dubbed GW200105 and GW200115, were detected on Jan. 5, 2020, and Jan. 15, 2020, but they happened 900,000,000 years ago.It took that long for the gravitational waves from two black holes gobbling up their neutron star companions to finally hit Earth.This first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star occurred during the second half of the LIGO and Virgo detectors third observing run, called O3b. Although multiple observatories carried out several follow-up observations, none observed light from either event, consistent with the measured masses and distances.

Most people don't recall the LinkedIn data breach from nine years ago, the Adobe customer cyber attackers from eight years back, that Equifax exposed private information of millions of people just four years ago.Those are the high profile ones but most participants in a recent University of Michigan study remained unaware that their email addresses and other personal information had been compromised in five data breaches on average. Most breaches never make the news, and often they involved little or no notification to those impacted. 

The popular belief is that sexual activity must have declined during the pandemic, but that relies on the trope that young people go to bars and sleep with strangers and that lessened.Some people were instead getting busy during the pandemic more than ever before. Older men with erectile dysfunction prescriptions. The qualifier "prescriptions" is because the number of men using them dwarfs the cases of actual erectile problems, the pill just makes it better.In a review of National Sales Perspective data, the researchers found that sales of prescription daily-use erectile dysfunction drugs, such as tadalafil, soared after March 2020, when the country went into the nationwide lockdown.

Cheese and insulin are two products most people don't realize were GMOs long before they became the target of anti-science groups. GMOs were instead embraced by activists like Rachel Carson, who saw them as a way to produce a lot more of things like insulin - no pigs needed - while using a lot fewer pesticides for plant crops.In western nations it remains controversial - though a weedkiller has been found safe by European science authorities yet again it is "socially dead" - but elsewhere not only is science still acceptable, people want more of it.

It is no surprise that cancer survivors often express gratitude for being alive and mention God or a divine acknowledgement that had improved their health and well-being.Is there evidence spirituality helps? It may be that healthier levels of cortisol, a biomarker commonly associated with stress, among breast cancer survivors is key. 

Many new mothers will become pregnant again, and given that a new paper argues for continue anti-smoking campaigns after children are born to reduce the risk of future preterm births.
The longitudinal analysis of surveys results examined the records and histories across 23 years, of 63,540 Australian women with more than one child, who smoked during their first pregnancy.

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and AVITA Medical have halted recruitment for the ongoing pediatric burn study of RECELL spray-on skin for the best possible reason; it has been shown to work.This expanded use just received FDA approval for pediatric burn patients as well as extensive burns covering more than 50 percent of a body’s total surface area.The most common treatment for burns is skin grafting – a painful treatment that can be disfiguring, and sometimes results in additional complications as a child grows. Large burn injuries often do not have enough viable skin available for conventional skin grafting. 

Two recent articles showed showed changes in the focus and funding of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease therapies. And they suggested the change might be evidenced by today, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seemed ready to approve aducanumab (Biogen) as the first new drug therapy to Alzheimer's patients in nearly 20 years.Namely the emergence of taxpayer-funded government and nonprofit organizations as the primary drivers of research. 

The Tibetan plateau covers nearly 1,600,000 square miles. With an average altitude of nearly 14,000 feet, Tibet is called the Roof of the World for good reason. It contains the world's two highest peaks, Mount Everest and K2, and the vast Himalayan mountain range towers higher than anywhere else on Earth.Some researchers contend it has been that height for most of its existence while others argue the roof of the world has gotten higher.