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.
Businesses would like to return to business as usual and government officials reliant on taxes desperately need a return to normal. The people arguing lockdowns need to occur indefinitely live on Twitter.How can it be done safely?The example of Bombardier Aviation in an analysis published in Canadian Medical Association Journal finds that creating "work bubbles" during the COVID-19 pandemic can help reduce the risk of company-wide outbreaks while helping essential businesses continue to function.
Hydroxychloroquine is an effective drug for the treatment of diseases like lupus and malaria and because it is used off-label for maladies that act in a biologically similar way to how COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, acts in the body, there has been discussion that clinical trials might show it having a positive therapeutic impact.Could it prevent COVID-19, though? A clinical trial of health care workers finds that it does not, though the good news is that because the trial was health care workers they had low rates of infection anyway, likely due to other prevention measures. Masks, hand-washing, and social distancing work.
To estimate infection rates of viruses like SARS-CoV-2, immunologists use a basic reproduction number, known as R0 (pronounced “R naught”) - an expression of the number of people likely to catch a disease from one contagious person - and a Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model.Yet as we have seen, those are only telling part of the science story. Coronavirus is in the same family as the common cold and for many COVID-19 will be just like the cold, and can spread like the cold. But when it comes to successful transmission, viruses only win they can optimize their aptitude to survive and reproduce in given conditions - which means they lose if we can optimize disease control measures.
In large systems of interacting particles in quantum mechanics, groups of particles can begin to behave like single particles. Physicists refer to such groups of particles as quasiparticles and while they live, they are useful in helping us understand superconductivity and superfluidity. But many quasiparticles die after less than one second. What kills them? How do quasiparticles die?A new paper goes beyond the usual suspect - quasiparticle decay into lower energy states - and identifies a new culprit: many-body dephasing.
Humans each have 23 pairs of chromosomes, the 23rd of which determines sex. Females carry two X sex chromosomes, males carry one X and one Y chromosome. Yet this male chromosome carries genes that females lack and those male genes are expressed in all cells of the body, but their only confirmed role has been limited determining male or female.
Yaws is a childhood disease causing highly infectious skin lesions. It is spread by touch and, in advanced cases, can leave sufferers with severe bone disfigurement. While it is easily curable in its early stages today, and is almost eradicated, the bone disfigurements are irreversible. Yet 4,000 years ago there was no treatment and a new study looked at skeletal remains from the Man Bac archaeological site, excavated in 2005 and 2007, in the Ninh Bình Province of Vietnam. After seeing what might be yaws on a photograph of Man Bac remains, a team of experts confirmed it - and University of Otago graduate student Melandri Vlok found a second example of the disease.
A new study shows there is even more reason to worry about the Zika and chikungunya viruses and the pests that spread them; increased risk of neurological diseases like stroke.
A new mathematical model seeks to predict economic performance of crops, which will allow breeders to obtain the plants with the highest possible quality. Using even the most advanced legacy tools, it is very difficult to create a new variety of plants and it usually takes 10-12 years. Using genomic selection models, this process can be accelerated several times, finds the new study, using a new mathematical model for predicting crop phenotypic traits as a function genotype.
Numerous criticisms of medical science have been articulated in recent years. Some critics argue that spurious disease categories are being invented, and existing disease categories expanded, for the aim of profit. Others say that the benefits of most new drugs are minimal and typically exaggerated by clinical research, and that the harms of these drugs are extensive and typically underestimated by clinical research.
In the old days, if you wanted to spread desirable characteristics in livestock you had to try breeding and hope for the best. The 19th century breakthroughs in genetics promised a future where trial and error was no longer the norm.Now, with desire to optimize food production and reduce environmental impact without harming choices for poor people, scientists have created pigs, goats and cattle that can serve as viable “surrogate sires” - male animals that produce sperm carrying only the genetic traits of donor animals.
We're living longer than ever, but that means we now have to think about new issues that were uncommon when life expectancy was low. Muscles shrink and their strength dwindles as we age. When that is excessive, the condition is called sarcopenia, and it affects every third person over the age of 80, reducing mobility, autonomy and quality of life.There may be hope in the form of a well-known drug, Rapamycin, that can delay the progression of age-related muscle weakness.
A brain-controlled prosthetic limb have shown that machine learning techniques helped an individual with paralysis learn to control motion using their brain activity without requiring extensive daily retraining. It is proof-of-concept for how future models can overcome limitations of prior brain-computer interface efforts, which existing had to be reset and recalibrated each day, almost like asking someone to learn to ride a bike over and over again each day.
