Sometimes, good memory can be bad news.It turns out fat cells have excellent memory. Researchers published a study in Nature that explains how that memory works and why it is so persistent. The work describes the genetic and cellular mechanisms that make the "Yo-Yo effect," a common phenomenon where a person can lose weight, but it returns right away.The Persistence of Fat CellsThis result has especially profound implications in the U.S. where about 40 percent of adults are either overweight or ...read more
You are what you eat — a case especially true for the prehistoric creatures that roamed Earth before us. According to a recent study published in Nature, which analyzed fossilized dinosaur poop, or coprolites, the key to survival in prehistoric times was a diet of plants instead of meat. An international team from Uppsala University in Sweden and researchers from Norway, Hungary, and Poland examined hundreds of dinosaur coprolites and identified the different plants and animals these creature ...read more
The holidays are full of delicious and indulgent food and drinks. It’s hard to resist dreaming about cookies, specialty cakes, rich meats, and super saucy side dishes.Lots of the healthy raw ingredients used in holiday foods can end up overshadowed by sugar and starch. While adding extra sugar may be tasty, it’s not necessarily good for metabolism. Understanding the food and culinary science behind what you’re cooking means you can make a few alterations to a recipe and still have a delici ...read more
It can be difficult to clock the speeds of animals that lived over 66 million years ago. There’s no speedometer to know how fast they could run or even any muscular soft tissue to fully understand the anatomy of the most speedy predators. Still, paleontologists do have some ideas about how fast our favorite dinosaur predators could run.The only direct evidence we have of dinosaur locomotion comes from trackways or the fossilized footprints of dinosaurs, says Scott Persons, an assistant profess ...read more
The almost perfectly preserved skull of a prehistoric bird could be a sort of “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the evolution of avian intelligence — a process that has been a mystery until now. The research team determined the bird — Navaornis hestiae — was from the Mesozoic Era (about 252 million to 66 million years ago) and was roughly the size of a starling. The bird likely lived around 80 million years ago and died out before the fifth mass extinction event that wiped out most no ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine