For doctors, looking at a person’s birth date doesn’t tell them much. Sure, a person might be 75 on paper, but genes, lifestyle and environment all play into health. So it's important to get a good understanding of our how old our bodies really are — a biological age rather than chronological age.
A new study, published Monday in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, found that a simple urine test could deliver valuable information about our biological age.
Age is Just a Number
In ...read more
Meanwhile, frigid polar air has spilled south into Eurasia and western North America. Is there a connection to human-caused warming?
It's happening again: In the dead of winter, warm air from the south is surging across the Arctic toward the North Pole.
Today, weather models suggest that temperatures there have indeed soared to above freezing.
Meanwhile, cold polar air has spilled south into Eurasia and western North America. It's almost as if someone left the Arctic's refrigerator do ...read more
What happens when you're hit by something going 15,000 miles per hour? Total obliteration, more or less.
That's a very real scenario that spacecraft engineers must keep in mind every time they put something in space. Collisions with objects in orbit are rare, but they do happen. In the past, paint chips have left craters in the space shuttle and a French satellite was disabled in 1996 after its gravity-gradient boom was severed by a chunk from an exploded rocket.
Shields Up!
To protec ...read more
Life finds a way, even in the most inhospitable conditions.
In extreme environments such as that present in the hyper-arid center of the Atacama Desert, there are still signs of life. In the most Mars-like location on Earth, a microbial community survives, showing episodic biological activity in the near absence of any moisture. In dry areas at of the desert's core, where everything is bombarded by intense ultraviolet radiation, Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues detected microbes ...read more
It seems simple right, leave your keys in the key bowl on the kitchen counter and you won’t lose them? Simple? Yes. Do we keep to this routine daily? On occasion.
Keys these days seem to grow a pair of legs and find themselves their own “safe spot”, and on a regular basis. According to the "Lost & Found Survey" by Pixie, 28 percent of Americans lose their key at least once a week. That’s a substantial amount of time that could be spent actually getting to work or sch ...read more
“Rockets can’t fly in space! There’s no air for the engine to burn in space! And there’s no air for the rocket to push against in space! WE’VE NEVER LEFT EARTH!”
So goes the cry of people who don’t believe we landed on the Moon — at least, this is one of their claims. But it’s wrong. In spite of what they think, rockets can and do fly in a vacuum. Fuel and oxidizer mix and ignite in a combustion chamber causing a controlled explosion that is ...read more
The global footprint of fishing is even bigger than expected. But a novel monitoring tool could help put it on a more sustainable path.
To satisfy our hunger, we humans catch something on the order of one trillion fish ever year — a yield that amounts to more than 90 million tons of animal flesh.
We're clearly the top predator of the seas. But just how much of the oceans are being fished at an industrial scale, what are the patterns, and how are they changi ...read more
A new Lancet paper about antidepressants caused quite a stir this week. Headlines proclaimed that "It's official - antidepressants work", "Study proves anti-depressants are effective", and "Antidepressants work. Period."
Wew.
The truth is that while the Lancet paper is a nice piece of work, it tells us very little that we didn't already know, and it has a number of limitations. The media reaction to the paper is frankly bananas, as we'll see below.
Here's why the new study doesn't t ...read more
It should have been their big break. By all rights, the crown was theirs, won with years of blood, sweat and slime. Maybe, in some far-distant astral plane where justice matters, they're the rightful victors.
But the history books are closed now. Palaina attenboroughi, the second snail to be named after David Attenborough in 2017, was a murmur that never became a shout.
The fame, the media frenzy, the glamour shots — the spoils of victory are all too obvious. And Attenboro ...read more
Walk the remote shores of the Great Lakes, far outside the city, and you’ll find miles of sandy beaches and quiet tranquility. You’ll also find plastic straws. Pink ones, white ones, clear ones. They’re everywhere.
In fact, visit any coastline around the world and you’re likely to find plastic straws. Conservation groups highlight them as one of the items most frequently collected during beach clean ups.
The reason isn’t hard to grasp. Whether you order an iced co ...read more
