A dementia diagnosis for a loved one is something that causes great anxiety in families, and those feelings are often compounded by decisions surrounding nursing home care. A new study addresses life expectancy after a dementia diagnosis and establishes estimates on when those who are diagnosed are usually admitted to a nursing home.The study, recently published in the medical journal The BMJ, acts as a systematic review of previous studies on survival from dementia diagnosis and nursing home ad ...read more

The headline in the L.A. Times says it all: 5 dead, more than 1,100 structures destroyed as firestorm besieges L.A. County By the time you are reading this, the devastation will almost certainly be worse.Since the Palisades Fire exploded on Tuesday, Jan. 7, other blazes have blown up, including the Eaton Fire near Pasadena, and the Hurst Fire around Sylmar. As I'm writing this on Wednesday evening, Jan. 8, more than 27,000 acres are burning, according to California's Department of Forestry and F ...read more

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