Your Built-In Weight Loss System Works Like Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro

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Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro are weight loss and diabetes drugs that have made quite a splash in health news. They target regulatory pathways involved in both obesity and diabetes and are widely considered breakthroughs for weight loss and blood sugar control.But do these drugs point toward a root cause of metabolic disease? What inspired their development in the first place?It turns out your body produces natural versions of these drugs – also known as incretin hormones – in your gu ...read more

Originally Having a Stocky Build, the Gigantic Megalodon Gets a New Physique

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When you hear “megalodon,” what comes to mind? If the answer is a gigantic version of a great white shark, the latest revelation in megalodon research might make you reconsider. A recent find by researchers dashes this common perception of the extinct species and grants it a reimagined shape, describing it as more slender than the great white shark. What Shark Is Similar to the Megalodon?The modern great white shark has often been referenced when replicating the body of the megalodon (Otodu ...read more

How To Prevent America’s Aging Buildings From Collapsing

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Four recent catastrophic building collapses and a near miss are raising concerns about the state of America’s aging buildings and questions about who, if anyone, is checking their safety.Many cities have buildings showing signs of aging and in need of repair. In New York City, where a seven-story apartment building partially collapsed in December 2023, the median building age is about 90 years, and many neighborhoods were built before 1900.As a civil engineer, I study building failures, an ...read more

A Massive, Ancient Network of Cities Flourished in the Amazon for 1,000 Years

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A grand network of connected cities and villages existed in the Amazon for at least 1,000 years.A new discovery reveals a thriving level of social organization in the jungle from roughly 500 B.C. to 600 A.D. that was very different from that of the Indigenous Americans who have inhabited many parts of the Amazon today.“It’s really a fantastic archeological situation,” says Stéphen Rostain, an archaeologist with the French National Center for Scientific Research — a governmental institu ...read more

What’s the Best Diet For Healthy Sleep? Certain Food Choices May Help You Get More Z’s

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You probably already know that how you eat before bed affects your sleep. Maybe you’ve found yourself still lying awake at 2 a.m. after enjoying a cup of coffee with dessert. But did you know that your eating choices throughout the day may also affect your sleep at night?In fact, more and more evidence shows that overall dietary patterns can affect sleep quality and contribute to insomnia.I am a nutritional epidemiologist, and I’m trained to look at diets at the population level and ho ...read more

Foreign Objects Left Behind After Surgery Can Have Serious Impacts on the Body

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In 2020, a New Zealand woman in her 20s underwent a standard Caesarean section to give birth. The procedure seemed to go fine, but for months afterward, the woman suffered chronic abdominal pain. She visited her primary care physician multiple times because of it, and even made a trip to her local hospital’s emergency room when the pain was particularly severe. A year later, in 2021, an abdominal CT scan finally revealed the cause of her distress: a plastic wound retractor about the size of a ...read more

Iceland Battles A Lava Flow, But It’s Hard to Stop Molten Rock

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Fountains of lava erupted from the Sundhnúkur volcanic system in southwest Iceland on Jan. 14, 2024. As the world watched on webcams and social media, lava flows cut off roads and bubbled from a new fissure that invaded the outskirts of the coastal town of Grindavík, burning down at least three houses in their path.Nearby, construction vehicles that had been working for weeks to build large earthen dams and berms in an attempt to divert the lava’s flow had to pull back.The lava flow on Ja ...read more

Island Lizards Shrink and Horses Get Bigger Because of These Evolutionary Patterns

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A new computer model might explain why some animals shrink over time while others grow. It has to do a lot with their habitat and resource availability."Where direct competition is less, sizes tend to get bigger, even though being big and few in number can make animals more vulnerable to dying out – such as what happened with the dinosaurs," said Shovonlal Roy, study lead author who specialized in ecosystem modeling at the University of Reading, in a press release. The study was published in  ...read more

It’s Squirrel Appreciation Day!

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Every squirrel has a science story to tell, but, sadly, squirrels vastly outnumber squirrel scientists. That’s where you, the intrepid citizen scientist, come in. Try out the squirrel projects in this newsletter, along with other squirrel-centric and squirrel-adjacent projects you’ll find with the handy SciStarter Project Finder, and help sort out the many mysteries of our favorite wild rodent.Cheers!The SciStarter TeamWhat sorts of squirrels live near you? Researchers at Project Squirr ...read more

These Clues Get us Closer to Solving Jack the Ripper’s Identity

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It was the fall of 1888, and the inhabitants of London were frozen with fear. “The air of Whitechapel is thick with murders and rumors of murder,” an article in The Star announced in September. “Whitechapel is panic-stricken,” with its inhabitants too terrified to travel the twisting, smoggy streets alone. The widespread terror in Whitechapel was all thanks to the work of a “murderous maniac,” according to the article, “who stalks through the streets,” targeting “the most miser ...read more

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