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In the Cradles of Civilization, there are entire cities covered in sand that were once thriving places. The climate shifted and humans did with it. One of our greatest cultural achievements has been our ability to adapt to a natural world that is out to destroy and rebuild everything, including us.A new study shows we were adapting to diverse areas and environmental changes long before the creation of agriculture and resulting civilizations. Even before worldwide migration, we were bending African forests and deserts. Failing to do so was why the probably earliest migration efforts seemed to have disappeared with barely a trace. 

Screen time is a concern for parents and mental health advocates but looking at screen time may be treating the symptom rather than the disease. What is a true harbinger for risk of mental health problems is addictive behavior in young people.National surveys have documented rising screen use but a new paper mapped longitudinal trajectories of addictive use specifically, rather generic limits on screen time.The data were social media use of nearly 4,300 children enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, starting at age 8, and how use changed over the next four years. 

Some 88 million years ago, Madagascar broke off from India.Isolated from all other landmasses, plants and animals evolved in seclusion, creating a biodiversity hotspot unlike anywhere else on Earth. One way biodiversity spreads is by endozoochory, which is the process name for animals eating plant seeds and then pooping them out somewhere else, which may cause them to grow in the new location. Birds are an obvious mode of transport but a new study takes a look at the role lizard poop has played. 

Human evolution and culture have been shaped by our increasing ability to communicate. A new review from China believes that brain-computer interfaces mark the next leap: a direct connection between mind and machine. They note breakthroughs in neural signal decoding, AI, and bioengineering but what should really worry residents of a communist dictatorship is how they believe it will shape autonomy, identity, and mental privacy.

University of Southern Denmark recently demonstrated a soft robot capable of navigating complex terrains using a combination of inflatable actuators and a patterned "kirigami" skin, all moving via rectilinear motion.You probably think it looks like a worm and it can certainly go places only small things could go.It's not very fast, only 11 millimeters per second, but it can twist, turn, and navigate through tight spots thanks to its anisotropic anchoring and flexible skin. Credit: SDU Soft Robotics

When most people think of hurricanes, they imagine winds gusting over 100 miler per hour, but water has been responsible for 86 percent of all direct hurricane and tropical storm fatalities in the United States for almost this entire century.Floods, rip currents, and storm surges are the big risk, with freshwater flooding inland accounting for over half of drownings. To help with real-time, the Southeast Atlantic (SEA) Econet network of atmospheric and hydrological monitoring stations provide the real-time data used by the National Weather Service.

Diets high in phytosterols, such as vegetarian diets, have long been linked to lower risk of heart disease and diabetes by lowering low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol but food surveys, questionnaires, and diaries are not reliable enough to make clinical determinations while in mouse experiments the doses were too human to be relevant in the real world.

There is no balance of nature and never has been, the universe is always looking for new ways to kill and create, which is why pathogens evolve resistance to drugs over time. It is estimated that antimicrobial resistance causes over 1,000,000 deaths each year and is involved in 35,000,000 more, if estimates by the United Nations World Health Organisation are accurate. Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus sp., two gram-positive pathogens highly likely to develop resistance to known treatments, can cause dangerous hospital-acquired and community-acquired infections.

It is a time-honored tradition for the young to ridicule the old and vice-versa but some warning signs in the elderly may be serious. Elderly people are often financially savvy, and get more so with age - unless Alzheimer’s begins to set in, according to a new paper.

Anti-science activists have been in a war on food coloring for decades, and with one of their own having power in the new presidential administration, have even banned some, but artificial dyes have been used in many products for millennia.

The science and medical response to activists claims that drinking water, weedkillers, and food coloring are killing people is to ask, where are the dead bodies?They were there because those don't cause cancer, any more than manufacturing a PM2.5 air quality standard 30 years ago saves any lives, because they were never causing deaths.

Telehealth, replies to messages or a quick video consulation with a health care provider, are designed to save time for everyone and reduce costs.It may also be causing greater rates of physician burnout, according to a recent paper. Female physicians seem to be impacted most, according to the survey results. They spend more time on them, but get more messages they feel are negative or demeaning , and more frequently list messages as a source of burnout.Greta Branford, M.D., and colleagues looked at data from a year’s worth of patient portal messages handled by University of Michigan primary care physicians, and survey results.