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.
Astronomers using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered a dizzying cosmic choreography among typical star-forming galaxies; their cool halo gas appears to be in step with the galactic disks, spinning in the same direction. This is the first-ever direct observational evidence showing that corotating halo gas is not only possible, but common. Their findings suggest that the whirling gas halo will eventually spiral in towards the disk.
Many people feel the need to live in important times, so they complain about how much worse things are today.
But scientists studying the ancient ruins of Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, found that its inhabitants - 3,500 to 8,000 people at its peak - experienced overcrowding, infectious diseases, violence and environmental problems. And that was 9,000 years ago.
Sorry readers of The Guardian, it wasn't better then. One ne of the world's first large farming communities were also among the first humans to complain about modern urban living.
A new exploratory study in mice found that the complement system, part of the innate immune system, plays a protective role to slow retinal degeneration in retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited eye disease. Retinitis pigmentosa is an incurable and unpreventable blinding eye disease that affects 1 in 4,000 people but if "in mice" isn't caution enough, even more is warranted. Other studies have found that the complement system worsens retinal degeneration because it mediates some aspects of inflammation and worsens damage in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness in people age 65 years and older.
The concept of quasiparticles was coined by Nobel laureate Lev Davidovich Landau, who used it to describe collective states of lots of particles or rather their interactions due to electrical or magnetic forces. Due to this interaction, several particles act like one single one.The assumption has been that quasiparticles in interacting quantum systems decay after a certain time but the opposite is the case, according to a recent paper: strong interactions can even stop decay entirely. Collective lattice vibrations in crystals, so-called phonons, are one example of such quasiparticles.
Social psychologists say we send out social cues not just with our facial expressions, but with the tilt of our heads as well.An otherwise neutral expression looks more dominant when the head is tilted down. The authors speculate that is because tilting one's head downward leads to the artificial appearance of lowered and V-shaped eyebrows--which elicit perceptions of aggression, intimidation, and dominance.But why does looking like a serial killer seem more dominant than someone with their head tilted back, a pose usually regarded as more confident? Dominant means something different to them than it does the public.
Free fingers have obvious advantages on land, and don't even get us started on opposable thumbs, but provides aquatic or gliding animals with more suitable webbed ones. But both amphibians and amniotes, which include mammals, reptiles, and birds, can have webbed digits. A new study has found that during embryo development, some animal species detect the presence of atmospheric oxygen, which triggers removal of interdigital webbing.
A familiar table salt ingredient has been hiding in plain sight on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, finds a recent analysis. Using a visible light spectral analysis, planetary scientists have discovered that the yellow color visible on portions of the surface of Europa is actually sodium chloride, a compound known on Earth as table salt, which is also the principal component of sea salt.
The discovery suggests that the salty subsurface ocean of Europa may chemically resemble Earth's oceans more than previously thought, challenging decades of supposition about the composition of those waters and making them potentially a lot more interesting for study.
Cannabis, known as marijuana in the U.S., Cannabis has been cultivated for millennia in East Asia and like many drugs exported from there to become one of the most widely used psychoactive drugs in the world today. But now archaeologists have tracked down its earliest known use: 2,500-year-old funerary incense burners from the Jirzankal Cemetery in the eastern Pamirs.
Each year, 1 million men in the U.S. undergo biopsies to determine whether they have prostate cancer because ultrasound imaging cannot clearly display the location of tumors in the prostate gland.Ultrasound has been used to visualize the prostate in order to take a representative sampling of tissue to biopsy but with MRI doctors can see specific lesions in the prostate and only take tissue samples from those spots. Why aren't those two sampling methods used in combination?A multidisciplinary team has found that biopsy guided by magnetic resonance imaging increases the rate of prostate cancer detection.
If you read the Harry Potter series of novels or saw the films, you've known that fiction has people moving in and out of photographs - now that magic has been brought to real life.The University of Washington algorithm Photo Wake-Up was posted in preprint form on arXiv in December and created a buzz because it can take a person from a 2D photo or a work of art and make them run, walk or jump out of the frame. The system also allows users to view the animation in three dimensions using augmented reality tools. Next week at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Long Beach, California, the researchers will be showing results.
The Neolithic period, the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of civilizations, began about 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture in the Epipalaeolithic Near East. It spread to other parts of the world.It provides not just the first evidence of farming, it also provides early evidence of gender inequality. according to a paper by researchers from the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Seville who study prehistoric societies in the Neolithic Period in the Iberian Peninsula.
When we think of agriculture, we don't think of nomadic hunter-gatherers who simply followed nature rather than harnessing it. But they engaged in trade also. Millet, originally domesticated in China, was likely consumed at low levels by pastoralists inhabiting the far-flung regions of Siberia and southeastern Kazakhstan, possibly as early as the late third millennium but with the expansion of trans-regional networks across the steppe, when objects and ideas were first regularly exchanged over long-distances, millet consumption began to increase.
