News Articles

Members of the United States military who are injuried abroad often return to the U.S. for treatment and must be transported by aeromedical evacuation between medical facilities. Evacuations can lead to their own chronic and acute stress, on top of the injuries and potential psychological trauma. 

Increased consumption of omega 3 fats is widely promoted because of a recent belief that it will protect against, or even reverse, conditions such as type 2 diabetes. Fads always start with a kernel of scientific truth, as happened with acai berries, chocolate, red wine, and whatever probiotic or yogurt is being for the microbiome sold this week. Omega 3 is a type of fat and small amounts are essential for good health and can be found in the food that we eat.But a systematic review commissioned by the World Health Organization and published today in the British Medical Journal finds that omega 3 supplements offer no benefit.

Though an entire $2 billion industry has been built scaring people about the modern world (which has promoted a $35 billion supplement market and a $110 billion Organic industry) we're in a Golden Age.Even the poorest people can afford food, what were once booms and busts of famine and plenty have now leveled off, poverty declines are ahead of U.N. goals, and even centralized energy in developing countries, which could help a billion people, is attainable if western states stop telling poor nations they can only get World Bank help if it's not coal, natural gas, or nuclear. And we can prevent cancer for the first time. 

Will beer and fights become the newest health craze?Though the stereotype of Australian men is the tough, beer-drinking Alpha - they popularized running face-first while rappelling down cliffs among armies across the world - but they must live pretty health lives because they lead the world in longevity.Australian men, on average, live to 74.1. And women are doing well also. Only Switzerland surpasses the land down under for females. Lagged Cohort Life Expectancy

Type 2 diabetes develops when the body becomes resistant to insulin or the pancreas becomes unable to produce enough insulin.  Though there is sometimes a genetic factor but it is overwhelmingly a lifestyle disease caused by being overweight and inactive. The pancreas simply becomes overworked.

Having one of the most powerful bites in the animal kingdom, crocodiles must be able to bite hard to eat their food such as turtles, wildebeest and other large prey.  Well, so do we, but we don't have exceptionally tough teeth and neither do crocodiles. However, we do have relatively thick enamel on our teeth, which can get ruined over time without proper care. Crocodiles don't even have that. They have thin tooth enamel, the opposite of humans and other hard-biting species, as their plant-eating ancestors did. But unlike humans, when their teeth go bad, they seem to just grow new ones.Fossilized crocodile teeth. Image: University of Missouri

Mars may seem hospitable only for cute robots now, but 3 to 4 billion years ago it was warm enough to have rainstorms and flowing water, followed by a longer cold period where the water froze - a lot like earth. Scientists have long known that water was abundant on ancient Mars, but there has been no consensus on whether liquid water was common, or whether it was largely frozen in ice. Was the temperature high enough to allow the water to flow? Did this happen over an extended period, or just occasionally? Was the surface a desert or frozen? Warm conditions make it much more likely that life would have developed independently on the surface of ancient Mars.

If you read English newspaper The Guardian, you will be convinced farming is killing us all. Instead of being the negative they persistently insist, food is a basic resource, we will literally die without it, and the modern world is creating more food at affordable cost with less environmental strain and less energy than once even dreamed possible. Actual data show all land use combined, types of farming, forestry, etc. are only 23 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and not all greenhouse gases are equal.

An archaeological excavation on Mount Zion in Jerusalem has found clear evidence of the Babylonian conquest from 587/586 B.C. The discovery is of a deposit including layers of ash, arrowheads dating from the period, as well as Iron Age potsherds, lamps and a significant piece of period jewelry - a gold and silver tassel or earring. There are also signs of a significant Iron Age structure in the associated area, but the building, beneath layers from later periods, has yet to be excavated.

The use of social media is ubiquitous in today's culture. A recent Pew Research report found that, among 18 to 29-year-olds, over 90 percent use some form of social media while essentially 100 percent of young Americans (ages 18-29) have mobile phones, 94 percent of which are smartphones. 

High-volume hydraulic fracturing, colloquially called fracking, injects water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into petroleum-bearing rock formations to recover previously inaccessible oil and natural gas. While it was experimented with since the 1940s, it only became viable in the 1990s and early 2000s and it led to the current shale gas boom that started about 15 years ago. 

The Juno mission, designed to help scientists better understand Jupiter's origin and evolution, was launched in 2011 to map its gravitational and magnetic fields and probe the planet's deep, internal structure.It's found some mysterious gravitational readings which experts infer mean Jupiter's core is less dense and more extended that expected. Jupiter began as a dense, rocky or icy planet that later gathered its thick atmosphere from the primordial disk of gas and dust that birthed our sun so what if the recent data could be explained by a giant impact that stirred Jupiter's core, mixing the dense contents of its core with less dense layers above. Like another planet.