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.
When we think of marsupials (carrying young in a pouch) they are small and cute (opossum, wombat) to a little more menacing (kangaroos in boxing gloves) but nothing like Palorchestid marsupials, an extinct group of Australian megafauna, who were large, had strange tapir-like skulls, and large claws.Over the course of their evolution, palorchestids grew even larger and stranger. Using limb proportions as a proxy for body size, these authors estimated that the latest and largest of the palorchestids weighed over 2,000 lbs. Furthermore, their forelimbs were extremely muscular and were likely adapted for grabbing or scraping at leaves and branches.
No matter how far back in recorded time you go, you were once an intruder. Native Americans of 1800 were genetically different from the natives who lived in North America of 1600, who had little in common with those 1400. Yet none of them were original settlers.And when we think of Vikings, we think of ancient people hundreds of years before that, but they were once intruders too, and they caused a unique population of Icelandic walrus to disappear 1,100 years ago as they expanded.
The final results of of the latest annual Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program found that samples are again below the tolerance levels set by the EPA. The FDA evaluates foods annually for pesticide residues. Final results from the surveys are released after they have undergone a thorough quality assurance review.But organic pesticides are not separated out. However, there is no reason to believe organic farmers are under any less cost pressure than regular farmers. Both have to maximize yields while minimizing costs and for farmers that often means real-time data on soil conditions and problems in order to use as few costly chemicals as possible.
At the Ubicomp 2019 conference,University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate students Ali Kiaghadi and S. Zohreh Homayounfar debuted health-monitoring sleepwear they call "phyjamas."The electronically active garments contain unobtrusive, portable devices for monitoring heart rate and respiratory rhythm during sleep.The inventors designed a new fabric-based pressure sensor and combined that with a triboelectric sensor - one activated by a change in physical contact - to develop a distributed sensor suite that could be integrated into loose-fitting clothing like pajamas. They also developed data analytics to fuse signals from many points that took into account the quality of the signal coming in from each location.
Projects and welfare systems established to provide support by normalizing disabled people instead contribute to their further marginalization, finds a new analysis.The paper in Organization Studies investigated a program that allocated computers to disabled people, to help people improve sociability through electronic interactions.
In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt set sail on a 5-year, 8000-km voyage through Latin America. His journey through the Andes Mountains, captured by his famous vegetation zonation figure featuring Mount Chimborazo, canonized the place of mountains in understanding Earth's biodiversity. One puzzle for scientists since von Humboldt 250 years ago, and certainly later with Darwin, Wallace, and Mendel, was global pattern of mountain biodiversity, and the extraordinarily high richness in tropical mountains in particular. Two new papers focus on the fact that the high level of biodiversity found on mountains is far beyond what would be expected from prevailing hypotheses.
A team of ecologists exposed Zonotrichia leucophrys (white-crowned sparrows) to the seed treatment known as imidacloprid (in the class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids) and say the measured weight mass declined in just a few hours, which led to the birds delaying migration. But their study was so small it can only be considered exploratory.Neonicotinoids are seed treatments, they were created to reduce broad spectrum spraying, like the dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) that Nixon appointee William Ruckelshaus banned domestically over the findings of experts in 1972. But this new paper claims the replacements for broad spraying may be just as harmful.
A recent paper has linked two types of heart problems and one of the most commonly prescribed classes of antibiotics.Data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's adverse reporting system plus a private insurance health claims database in the U.S. that captures demographics, drug identification, dose prescribed and treatment duration, identified 12,505 cases of valvular regurgitation with 125,020 case-control subjects in a random sample of more than nine million patients.
One of biology's most fundamental sets of building blocks may have special properties that helped bootstrap itself into its modern form - or it may be "cui bono?" thinking where people find an event, find a fact, and assume the fact caused the event, like we get in endocrine disruption and too much modern epidemiology.
Hemophilia, a rare inherited bleeding disorder in which blood doesn't clot normally - meaning any cut can be deadly - is a lot less rare than previously estimated. A new paper states that as many as 1,125,000 men around the world have it, 418,000 with a severe version of the mostly undiagnosed disease, which is 3X greater than the 400,000 people previously estimated.
Though bees can live for years, their mating period is brief so male honeybees use a bee version of Flunitrazepam (Rohypnol - colloquially roofies) to improve their chances of being the successful dad. They inject vision-imparing toxins during sex that cause temporary blindness in females and keep them from flying off to other males.The toxins identified in a new study are proteins contained in male bees' seminal fluid which helps maintain sperm. All honeybees make these proteins, though some may make more of it than others, and honeybee seminal fluid toxins can not only kill the sperm of rivals, it can cause temporary blindness, it turns out.
During puberty, male and female brains clearly become more distinct, with boys showing an increase in connectivity in certain brain areas previously identified as conferring risk for mood problems in adolescents, and girls showing a decrease in connectivity as puberty progresses. The researchers analyzed brain scans of 147 girls and 157 boys, aged between 13 and 15, from centers in Dublin, London, Dresden, Mannheim, and Paris.They were at varying puberty stages, from having not started their puberty to being fully mature. The researchers took images of the brain activity while the adolescent volunteers were lying still in an MRI scanner.
