There are two kinds of people in this world: those who eat breakfast and those who skip it. Maybe that’s exaggerating things a little, but the debate over whether or not adults should eat The Most Important Meal of the Day, especially for weight loss, can be polarizing — and not just for the average person. Researchers, too, have been arguing this point for years. Now, a new literature review says there’s a possibility that eating breakfast might not help us shed pounds. To ...read more

Pandas are picky eaters. The conservation icons live off a nearly exclusive diet of bamboo. Now, researchers have shown that ancient pandas once had a much broader palette and lived in a wider region. The discovery overturns a long-held belief that while pandas descended from meat-eating animals, they have been dining on bamboo for millions of years. “It has been widely accepted that giant pandas exclusively feed [on] bamboo [since] a long time ago -- 2 millions years,” said Fu ...read more

Public health guidelines, such as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, have long emphasized reducing dietary fat intake, but nutritionists and other health scientists now have more recent evidence that not all fats have adverse effects. Dietary fats differ with regard to their effects on health and risk for chronic diseases, particularly in regard to effects on risk for heart disease. Indeed, some nutrition experts now believe that certain types of dietary fat may even reduce cardiovascu ...read more

The 1950s were a bizarre period in American history. An economic boom brought joy to a generation home from war, and also harbored a strange level of distrust, of enemies both internal and external, in a nation not quite at war, but not quite at peace either. Technology was advancing in leaps and bounds, and the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union was underway. To America's dismay, the Soviets were winning – at least at first. But before ...read more

A dinosaur relative about the size of an iguana, which lived at the bottom of the world 250 million years ago, is throwing paleontologists for a loop. Antarctanax shackletoni, named for explorer Ernest Shackleton, hints at unexpected biodiversity on the now-frozen continent of Antarctica. About 252 million years ago, the greatest mass extinction known walloped life on Earth. An estimated 90 percent of all living things perished. In the wake of this event, known as the end-Permian or Gre ...read more

Most parents’ first glimpse of their children comes in ultrasound images taken months before birth. But ultrasound could soon offer much more than prenatal portraits. In the past few years, researchers have opened a new door for ultrasound, developing techniques that harness the familiar, safe and noninvasive sound waves to control genes, alter brain function and deliver drugs to targets with millimeter precision. The advance of what’s being termed sonogenetics offers a new twist on ...read more

Sea stars, also commonly called starfish, are among the most abundant animals along the U.S. West Coast. But now scientists say an epidemic spurred by warming ocean waters is decimating sunflower sea stars, a critical predator in kelp forests. The sea stars’ collapse could wipe out the shallow water ecosystems that provide a home for seals, sea otters and commercially important fish. “The epidemic was catastrophic and widespread,” said Drew Harvell, a marine ecologist at Corne ...read more

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that their digital appearance is based on their “residual self-image.” That is, the characters look how they imagine themselves to look, based on their own mental models of themselves. In the real world, scientists have been trying to teach robots that trick as well. That's because, unlike the warring machines of the matrix, a real-life robot with an accurate self-image might benefit humanity. It’d allow for faster programming and more accura ...read more

Nestled in the foothills of southern Siberia's Altai Mountains, Denisova Cave has yielded numerous artifacts, as well as fossils of many animals and at least two hominins: Neanderthals and Denisovans. The cave is the only place in the world known to have remains of the Denisovans, who, like Neanderthals, were our close evolutionary cousins. The site is one of the most significant for understanding human evolution, but study of it has been hampered by difficulty dating the finds. Today ...read more

The brain of a fruit fly is captured here using a new, large-scale 3-D imaging technique developed by a multi-institutional group of researchers led by MIT and Harvard University. The method is shockingly fast, and millions of synapses can be analyzed in just a few days. That's much faster than previously possible. The technique makes use of expanding brain tissue and what’s called lattice light-sheet microscopy. Here, the fruit fly brain is about the size of a poppy s ...read more