Sometimes it’s good not to wash the dishes. Food preparation tools recovered from an Israel archeological excavation that started in 1989 have pushed back evidence of ancient hominid plant processing by about 400,000 years — all because they weren’t cleaned. Starch residue on flat basalt anvils and small, round pounding rocks also add grist to the argument that the Paleo Diet included heavy portions of plants, rather than the meat-dominant version many people have now adopted as a weight-l ...read more

Getting enough sleep is crucial to your physical and mental well-being. Yet, lack of sleep is something many of us experience. New findings published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine state that 1 in 7 adults have difficulty falling asleep, while 1 in 6 adults have trouble staying asleep. There can be several reasons for this, according to the Harvard Medical School. These include poor diet and lack of exercise, along with sleep disorders such as sleep apnea. However, one major iss ...read more

There are many factors that are associated with healthy (and not-so-healthy) hearts. A new study says that airplane noise may be one of them. Published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the study suggests that people who live in areas with louder airplane noise levels may have a higher risk of heart abnormalities that are associated with heart attacks, heart rhythm aberrations, and strokes.“Our study is observational so we cannot say with certainty that high levels of aircr ...read more

Approximately one-third of American adults take a multivitamin in an effort to address nutritional deficiencies or specific dietary needs. While they are an option to replace nutrients you may not be getting from food, it is worth mentioning that multivitamins vary in quality and dosage amounts. However, not everyone is able to receive the maximum benefit regular multivitamins offer. For a variety of reasons, a better option may be methylated multivitamins.What Is a Methylated Vitamin?When a vi ...read more

Every so often, all we see of Mars is an orb covered by dust from the wind. Understanding how and why the planet sometimes becomes completely engulfed in grit will help scientists better predict that phenomenon. Such foresight could be essential to the success of future missions there.A team of scientists from Colorado University at Boulder have taken steps toward forecasting the storms. Heshani Pieris, a graduate student there, presented data at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Decembe ...read more

To get a global view of Earth’s magnetosphere, NASA’s Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) is set for a trip to the moon. Scheduled to take off from the Kennedy Space Center in or after mid-January, the instrument will take the first full images of the magnetic field around Earth, which will help researchers reveal how the field fends off solar winds and weather. “We’re trying to get this big picture of Earth’s space environment,” said Boston University physicist and LE ...read more

It’s perhaps historically appropriate that the word “ironic” contains “iron.” Mining and smelting minerals like iron represented technological highs at the Roman Empire’s peak. But those activities also produced enough lead pollution to impair its citizens’ IQs, according to a new study in PNAS.“Detailed ice core records of Arctic lead pollution, together with sophisticated atmospheric modeling and modern epidemiology, indicate that human industrial activities were measurably dam ...read more

New research from the University of Arizona (U of A) claims that Pluto may not have been created with a bang, but with a kiss. The study, published in Nature Geoscience, looks at how Pluto and its moon, Charon, originated after colliding. Instead of destroying each other, the two celestial bodies began to spiral together like a cosmic snowman before separating into two bodies again. What’s unique about the separation is that Pluto and Charon still share the same orbit. This new discovery is ...read more

The clock is ticking for the binary star T Coronae Borealis, as it’s only a matter of time before it explodes in a blaze of light that will be visible here on Earth. Although astronomers aren’t sure exactly when this spectacle will unfold, they say the binary star — given the fiery nickname, the Blaze Star — is likely to ignite later in 2025. The Explosive Cycle of T CrBT Coronae Borealis (T CrB) is a nova located about 3,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Corona Borealis ( ...read more

After so many years of learning how microbes work, researchers are now digitally recreating their inner workings to tackle challenges ranging from climate change to space colonization.In my work as a computational biologist, I research ways to get microbes to produce more useful chemicals, such as fuels and bioplastics, that can be used in the energy, agricultural, or pharmaceutical industries. Traditionally, researchers have to conduct several trial-and-error experiments on Petri dishes in orde ...read more