Soy products have repeatedly been found to help cholesterol levels. But do they do enough to make a difference? (Credit: 1989studio/Shutterstock)
If you pick up a carton of soy milk, chances are you’ll spot some sort of verbiage boasting the beverage’s heart health benefits. But it’s not the only soy-based food product bearing a “heart healthy” badge. That’s because, in 1999, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency responsible for supervi ...read more
Stromboli erupting on July 3, 2019. Image by Anil Charley/Twitter.
There is the strong tendency in humans to look for patterns, even when none exist. This is amplified by the modern effect of news media, where certain events make headlines for reasons not necessarily related to the severity of the event.
We see this frequently in geology, where a news-making eruption or earthquake then starts a cascade of reports of other eruptions and earthquakes that follow, even if they aren't disaste ...read more
On July 13, 1969, Apollo 11’s Saturn V sat on launchpad 39A at Cape Canaveral. The pre-launch countdown was already underway though the actual final countdown wouldn't start for another day and a half. Nevertheless, there was plenty of activity buzzing around the Cape, but the big news in space that day wasn't the impending manned lunar landing attempt. It was Luna 15, the Soviet mission that would reach the Moon while Apollo 11 was in orbit.
The Luna Program
The Luna program was ...read more
(Credit: Jay Mantri/Shutterstock)
Climate change is devastating coral reefs, raising sea levels and displacing people across the globe. Now researchers say the best solution is also the simplest: plant more forests. In a new analysis out Thursday in the journal Science, scientists report restoring forests could cut atmospheric carbon by 25 percent.
“We all knew restoring forests could play a part in tackling
climate change, but we had no scientific understanding of what impact this
c ...read more
(Credit: Natthawut Raruen/Shutterstock)
Elephants might be popular in zoos and older kids’ TV shows, but they’re not doing so great in the wild. Asian elephants are classified as endangered, thanks in large part to human activity. But the big beasts are brainy, and they’re trying apparently trying new things in the face of these changing conditions to survive and even thrive.
At least, that’s what a team of Indian researchers describes in a Scientific Reports paper ...read more
Astronauts and cosmonauts aren't at any elevated risk from radiation damage -- at least so far. (Credit: NASA)
As NASA and other agencies look forward to placing humans on the Moon, Mars, and other destinations far beyond Earth’s sheltering atmosphere and magnetic fields, their worries about the harmful radiation that permeates space will only grow.
Many aspects of how the human body will react to long periods in space remain unknown. But using the small group of people who have alre ...read more
(Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of Arizona) and J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute))
As though in preparation for summer festivities, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this cosmic fireworks show from Eta Carinae. The double star system, glowing in red, white, and blue, has exploded several times. The most recent explosion was nearly 200 years ago, in 1838, when an event called the Great Eruption set this fireworks show off.
Hubble has been photographing Eta Carinae for 25 years, ...read more
The planet GJ 3470 b has a rocky core and a thick hydrogen and helium atmosphere, and circles quite close to its dim red star. (Credit: NASA/ESA/L. Hustak)
The Kepler Space Telescope revealed planets outside our solar system by the thousands. With this wave of discoveries, astronomers realized something peculiar: the most common type of planet in the galaxy is one our solar system doesn’t have. It’s a planet between the size of Earth and Neptune, known either as a super-Earth or a ...read more
Lichens come in many colors. (Credit: Field Museum)
65 million years ago, a meteor catastrophically changed our planet’s biodiversity. All non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. By some estimates, 15,000 teragrams (that’s equal to the mass of 10 million redwood trees) of soot darkened the air. Lush and flowering plants that had proliferated around 40 million years earlier were decimated, deprived of life-giving sunlight. Surrounded by death, fungi flourished – their favorite food ...read more
(Credit: aijiro/Shutterstock)
Nearly a third of all deaths in the world are due to heart diseases. Now, a new study suggests that an infusion of gut bacteria might hold promise for treating cardiovascular conditions.
The proof-of-concept study looked at obese people given a daily supplement of helpful bacteria that had been killed with heat, or pasteurized. The study paves the way for a larger human trial aimed at turning the discovery into a commercially-available food supplement that co ...read more
