Using the Body Mass Index (BMI) to diagnose obesity should go the way of blood-letting, an international panel of 58 scientists argued in the British medical journal The Lancet. Doctors should instead measure how excess body fat affects the body — a measurement called adiposity. Physicians have used BMI in part because it’s a simple calculation that compares weight relative to health.The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission argues that BMI is more simplistic than simple, because it ...read more

The fictional Magic School Bus enables its passengers to explore scientific phenomena, such as dinosaurs. Now, a non-fictional Space Bus named Pandora is ready to investigate celestial mysteries, like exoplanets that orbit small stars.The team that conceived of and built Pandora — consisting of scientists from institutions including NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Arizona — announced its completion at an American Astronomical Society press briefing in Mary ...read more

At the beginning of the 20th century, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often called “the father of modern neuroscience,” made it clear: In adults, “the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, and immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated,” he wrote. The inability of adults to produce new neurons was pretty much the central dogma of neuroscience until the 1960s. But as with a lot of fathers in that decade, a younger person challenged Ramón y Cajal’s decree.In 1962, Josef Altma ...read more

Snapshots of colorful galaxies and planets show that the beauty of our universe knows no bounds, and recent images of glowing space gas and dust captured by NASA are no exception. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has caught yet another visual spectacle, depicting layers of interstellar material illuminated by a supernova in a phenomenon known as a thermal light echo.Getting a glimpse of the brilliant scene through JWST, a team at NASA created a 3D scan of the interstellar material that disp ...read more

They don’t always own up to it, but many parents play favorites, treating their more favored children differently than their less favored. According to recent research in the Psychology Bulletin, certain children tend to be the favorites, as parents may be more inclined to treat their daughters, as well as their agreeable and conscientious children, better.“Differential treatment from parents can have lasting consequences for children,” said Alexander Jensen, a study author and an associat ...read more

The desert is one of the harshest environments to live in. It can be extremely hot during the day and freezing cold at night. There is sparse vegetation and little shade. The terrain is often rough, and to top it all off, there is minimal water. Desert inhabitants must be adaptable to survive these harsh conditions. As humans, to thrive in desert life, we must find ways to stay hydrated, stay out of the sun, and find food and shelter. It’s much easier to survive in the desert now, with modern ...read more

To the Stone Age agriculturalists on Bornholm, a Danish island off the coast of Sweden, the best way to deal with bad weather was to sacrifice stones. That’s according to recent research in Antiquity, which reimagines the island’s sun stone artifacts as summons for the sun.The stones appeared at the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, site of Vasagård approximately 4,900 years ago, at around the same time as a devastating volcanic winter in Northern Europe. The objects may have been sacrificial do ...read more

When the German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse built the world’s first programmable computer in war time Berlin, it performed floating point arithmetic at a clock speed of between 5 and 10 Hz. The machine was deemed unnecessary for the German war effort and never used for everyday calculations. In 1943, it was destroyed during an Allied air raid. Nevertheless, the Z3, as it was called, gave Zuse a strong claim to be the inventor of the modern computer. After the war, the clock speed of computers ...read more

Hot yoga is a relatively intense exercise regime favored by millions, including celebrities and athletes who have helped it garner a level of popularity. It usually involves a series of yoga poses conducted in temperatures of up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) and humidity of around 40 percent, intended to recreate the tropical clime of Kolkata, India. Previously known as Bikram yoga, it is now referred to as hot yoga due to a series of serious allegations against its founder. Des ...read more

The year in space is off to a strong start for 2025 as two lunar landers from private companies — Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based iSpace — have officially launched from Earth and are now headed for the moon. This moment represents the first time two landers from different nations have launched on the same rocket, having taken to the sky on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during the early hours of January 15, 2025 at 1:11 a.m. EST.The Flight of the Blue Ghost The Firefly lander kicks o ...read more