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.
Bees face a variety of challenges in the modern world. Changes to land use and evolving parasites have always been significant issues. For as long as beekeeping records have been kept, 1,100 years, there have been accounts of colony collapse disorder. Just about the only thing science has determined is not killing them off periodically are neonicotinoid pesticides, the one thing environmentalists insist is the problem.While not in crisis, they rebounded fine after the latest periodic blip in numbers, it's good to think about how to prevent losses without incurring the cost of chemicals. One way, according to a new paper, is to prevent spread between species.
In Australia, native people have long contended that native stingless bee honey had special health properties. Like the well-known Apis mellifera honeybees, stingless bees live in permanent colonies made up of a single queen and workers, who collect pollen and nectar to feed larvae within the colony.And a new paper does find that nearly 85 percent of its sugar is trehalulose, not maltose, and trehalulose has a lower glycemic index, but claims that makes it healthier are going to deceive the public. Sugar is still sugar. Claims that native peoples who eat a lot of it have lower diabetes ignore too many other confounders to count.
There is no magic food that causes weight gain, in every study people who consume fewer calories than they burn lose weight while people who consume more gain it. Energy balance, like evolution and Einstein, has survived all challengers. Yet the biology underlying the breakdown of stored fat molecules is not well known. A new paper posits that nerves embedded in fat tissue have previously unrecognized capability. If they receive the right signal, they have an astonishing capacity to grow. At least in mice.
We're going to learn a lot more about how bats do all of the things they do, in part due to the work of the Bat1K consortium to sequence the genome of six widely divergent living bat species.
Is it possible to predict nonlinear behavior, such as when a protest will become a riot? Perhaps, though parameters bring special challenges.We've seen the weaknesses of numerical modeling when it comes to disease epidemiology, and many of those concerns were evident before SARS-CoV-2 took the world by storm. In Chile of 2019, social unrest disrupted the daily routines of many citizens so scholars recently combined well-known epidemic models with tools from the physics of chaos and interpreted their findings through the lens of social science as economics.
In many groups, everyone seems to agree more or less all the time. Meetings are dominated by a few individuals or even one while everyone else plays along - until you talk to people individually. Why does such meeting inertia happen? For some, voicing disagreement is difficult. Some may want the meeting to be over, so piping up five minutes before it is scheduled to end brings rancor that has nothing to do with the content. Some may want to just get along. Others believe that the process is working so nothing needs to change.Yet if you ask leaders they will tell you "it's working" is destructive, even if they subtly invoke it.
Though there is concern about inequality in outcomes when it comes to medicine, how much is due to lifestyle choices and the co-morbidities they bring and if any is prejudice by care providers is unclear.Yet data can inform smaller populations. And an analysis of women with the SARS-CoV-2 infection who gave birth at two hospitals in northern Manhattan during the height of New York City's COVID-19 pandemic, the national epicenter, did not find a difference in impact on obstetric complications and symptoms of COVID-19 in different groups of women, regardless of income, race or ethnicity.
Leeches are found on every continent in freshwater habitats where there is little flow. They are popular bait for fishing, and doctors continue to use them in medical treatments. Environmentalists have even been using them to advance their beliefs that trace levels of "endocrine disrupting" chemicals are harmful.
Music is in most aspects of our lives we probably don't even notice it - but it can be noticed in our brains.A new study examined the brains of non-musicians, western classical musicians, and eastern classical musicians, as they were exposed to unfamiliar rhythms and non-rhythmic patterns. As you would expect, trained musicians have mastered auditory statistical learning, so they showed greater powers of rhythmic prediction compared to non-musicians, but what was intriguing were differences between those trained in Japanese and Western classical music.
In some good news for 2020, it is confirmed that SARS-CoV-2, the 2019 form of coronavirus that has led to worldwide COVID-19 disease, is not transmitted by mosquitoes, so ecologically useless disease vectors like Aedes aegypti, that carry so many other diseases, can't get blame for the spread of this one during the summer season.The World Health Organisation had already said mosquitoes did not transmit it, but they also claimed that it did not spread human-to-human and that China was a reliable source of data, so their credibility is suspect. While their hand-picked epidemiologists may trust the word of dictatorships, scientists elsewhere don't, so the new study is the first independent assurance that mosquitoes won't make this worse.
Bad things come in threes, it is said, and nothing shows that more than The Carnian Age; the first stage of three in the mass extinction era of the Late Triassic Epoch 228 to 217 million years ago.It had three features; dramatic climate change with much higher humidity, the first dinosaurs appeared, and gigantic volcanic eruptions called the Wrangellia large igneous province spewed out greenhouse gases.For dinosaurs, climate change was a good thing because plant life grew, thanks to the humid conditions and higher carbon dioxide. That event, now called the Carnian Pluvial Episode, may have been caused by the Wrangellia volcanic eruptions. The confluence of events seems to have spurred the early diversification of dinosaurs.
Social justice warriors in the feminist movement often fail to advocate for the rights of black women, according to new research, and it's for a reason that highlights hidden bias problems in modern performative activism - social justice for the Instagram photo - movement. Social justice warriors see black women as less like white women and more like black men.
