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.
NGC 4490, nicknamed the "Cocoon Galaxy" because of its shape, has "a clear double nucleus structure," according to a new paper.It's only realized now because while one nucleus can be seen in optical wavelengths, the other is hidden in dust and can only be seen in infrared and radio wavelengths.The work started when first author Allen Lawrence was taking undergraduate astronomy classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had the chance to study one of two galaxy systems and picked NGC 4490, which is interacting with a smaller galaxy, NGC 4485. The system is about 20 percent of the size of the Milky Way, located in the Northern Hemisphere and about 30 million light years from Earth.
It doesn't seem like it if you watch political news but humans are unusually cooperative. We are unique in that we often cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers. Nurses, firefighters, helping someone who dropped a package, standing in line, there is no natural selection benefit to that. In a natural selection-dominated world, the cheats, nepotists, and cronies would always win but unlike most of the animal kingdom, those behaviors are considered deviant.Why do we cooperate? Language, intelligence, religion, the desire to hunt large game, there is no shortage of speculation about why we became Apex Cooperators.
Neanderthal DNA sequences are more common in modern Africans than previously known, and different non-African populations have levels of Neanderthal ancestry surprisingly similar to each other, according to a new study in Cell. Researchers arrived at these findings by developing a new statistical method, called IBDmix, to identify Neanderthal sequences in the genomes of modern humans. The results also suggest that African genomes contain Neanderthal sequences in part due to back-migration of ancestors of present-day Europeans.
Sometimes bees die off in large groups. Since the first beekeeping recorded in history, in the 10th century, there have been documented cases where entire hives perished. Some blamed bad bee husbandry, some blamed weather, and then in recent cases some tried to blame pesticides.
New genetic analysis of 10 genome sequences of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from nine patients in Wuhan finds that the virus is most closely related to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses, according to a study published in The Lancet.The authors say that although their analysis suggests that bats might be the original host of the virus, an animal sold at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan might represent an intermediate host that enables the emergence of the virus in humans.
Pyrus calleryana (Callery pear) is a tree native to China and Vietnam that California government introduced a hundred years ago after natural fire blight wiped out much of the European pear crops grown in the state. Since the callery pear was highly resistant to fire they wanted to graft it to the European pear trees, so researchers traveled to China, then took a four-day boat ride from Wuhan up the Yangtze to where the natural trees grew in abundance. As a bonus, they found it could grow anywhere, and that meant it could grow as landscape even in a state that is mostly desert and artificially watered like California.
Plutella xylostella (diamondback moth) does tremendous damage to brassica crops such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and canola. A new strain of diamondback moth developed by Oxitec Ltd, (OX4319L) is modified to control pest diamondback moth in a targeted manner. It limits its pest counterparts because they find and mate with pest females, but they pass along a self-limiting gene to offspring, which prevents female caterpillars from surviving. With sustained releases, the pest population is suppressed in a targeted, ecologically sustainable way. After releases stop, the self-limiting insects decline and disappear from the environment within a few generations.
Surveys sought to find out how common suicidal ideation and mental health disorders were during combat deployment and to examine the associated risk factors. Some of the greatest risks were being white, having past non-combat trauma, and past major depressive disorder.
An exploratory result, published in Military Medicine, finds that soldiers with traumatic brain injury are more likely than soldiers with other serious injuries to experience a range of mental health disorders.The retrospective analysis examined the cases of 4,980 military members who were severely injured during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2011. Nearly a third of them suffered moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI).
People can deny a lot of science without making a huge difference in their lives; no one will die if they deny evolution. Gravity, on the other hand, will kill you. You can't just jump off a building and deny it exists and expect a positive outcome.This unseen force dominates our entire lives so completely we forget it exists. We drop pencils and struggle to walk uphill and go on with our lives. How people account for this invisible influence while moving through the world was the subject of a recent experiment, and the results showed we regard it a lot differently when we can see it instead of feeling it through changes in weight and balance.
Oseltamivir, which goes by the brand name Tamiflu and is sold by Hoffmann-La Roche, has long claimed to shorten the duration of flu severity, to skepticism and sometimes even derision from the evidence-based science community.A recently unsealed whistleblower lawsuit claims the company bilked U.S. taxpayers out of $1.5 billion by misrepresenting clinical studies and and publishing misleading articles falsely stating that Tamiflu reduces complications, severity, hospitalizations, mortality and transmission of influenza. And that's just when they encouraged government stockpiling, it does not include people who bought it with their own money, based on aggressive marketing campaigns which used the articles as evidence, the lawsuit alleges.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Horizon Therapeutics Ireland DAC approval for teprotumumab-trbw as treatment in adults with thyroid eye disease, a rare condition where the muscles and fatty tissues behind the eye become inflamed, causing the eyes to be pushed forward and bulge outwards (proptosis). The compound is approved under the brand name Tepezza and is the first drug approved for the treatment of thyroid eye disease.
