In the 1980s, scientists captured the precise mechanics of a protein machine. It looked strange, to researchers its tall thin structure with stubby legs invoked the enchanted broomstick that stole the show in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Disney's 1940 Fantasia film.
A new study finds that people of 1914 may have had worse memory than people of 1814. The reason is partially hydrogenated oil - trans fats - that became a cheaper, healthier replacement for the saturated fats in butter. Crystallized cottonseed oil - Crisco - came onto the marketplace in 1911 and it revolutionized pie crusts but now the government says they should be banned and they now have a new reason why.
A single gram of turmeric at breakfast could help improve the memory of people who are in the very early stages of diabetes and potentially at greater risk of cognitive impairment.
Turmeric is widely used in Asian cooking. Its characteristic yellow color is due to curcumin, which accounts for 3 to 6 per cent of turmeric and has been found in some studies to reduce the risk of dementia. The finding has particular significance given that the world's aging population and higher risk of dementia.
Monash University Professor Wahlqvist recently led a study in Taiwan that tested the working memory of men and women aged 60 or older who had recently been diagnosed with untreated pre-diabetes.
Cocaine users complaining of chest pain may have microvascular dysfunction, improper blood flow through the smallest blood vessels that may not be detected in regular testing, putting these patients at risk for heart complications or death, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014.
It is a weekly event in epidemiology - some medical or health outcome is linked to socioeconomic inequality, as if more spending makes people healthy.
In America, and to a much less extent in Europe, there can be a lot of angst when an aerospace engineer wears the wrong shirt on television. Women have a great deal of power in western nations, so much so that they can overwhelm science breakthroughs with cultural Gerrymandering.
We like to think of evolution as a fine-tuning process, one that whittles away genetic imperfections and redundancies and converges on a more efficient system because of 'survival of the fittest'.
But natural selection is just one mechanism of evolution and what is fittest at one point may not have been fittest at another, yet could still be inherited. Our bodies are full of parts that we inherited and either don't work anymore or are rather buggy and other parts have simply found a way to make work.
Increasing the amount of omega-3s in your diet will likely decrease your risk of getting heart disease, according to Penn State nutritionists who cite evidence supporting the heart-health benefits of eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid (EPA and DHA), marine-derived omega-3 fatty acids.
Empires have risen and fallen and often it has been due to changes in the climate. When agriculture was a more demanding endeavor people wanted the most fertile lands and as that shifted, so did cities.
For that reason, climate change has often been cited as the most logical reason for a huge population collapse in Europe at the end of the Bronze Age. Now archaeologists and environmentalists say they can prove definitively that climate change could not have been the culprit. Because the changes in climate that scientists believed to coincide with the fall in population in fact occurred at least two generations later.
"Dark matter" is a blanket term for inferred matter that is undetected but must exist in order for gravity at very large scales to make any sense at all.
Based on inference, 27 percent of the universe is generally acknowledged to be dark matter, even though it is not visible and eludes direct detection and measurement. Whatever dark energy might turn out to be gets a number of about 68 percent of the universe. The rest of the universe, what we can detect and feel, is what we know to be matter.
Scientists have found that transplanting a microbe that occurs naturally in eastern cottonwood trees boosts the ability of willow and lawn grass to withstand the effects of the industrial pollutant phenanthrene.
Because the plants can then take up 25 to 40 percent more of the pollutant than untreated plants they could be useful in phytoremediation, the process of using plants to remove toxins from contaminated sites, without all the environmentalist political lobbying drama of using genetically modified plants to do the same thing.
Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa) and various genetically modified relatives are the most popular and economically significant members of the genus Cornus in the nursery and landscape industries. These deciduous trees are highly valued for their spring display of pink, red, or white bracts, brilliant red fall foliage, and exfoliating bark and in the US sales of dogwoods account for more than $30 million dollars each year.
What's in a name? Apparently a lot. So much so that social mobility in England hasn't changed much since pre-Industrial times.
After William the Conqueror defeated King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, making England a French country rather than an Anglo-Saxon one, he rewarded his supporters with lands taken from those who had been loyal to his opponent. He was very good to them - but he wanted his levies. So if your name appeared in the original Domesday Book, you were going to get a tax bill, but the benefits were so substantial you are more likely to be upper class even today.
