Category: Research Discoveries

Millions of Americans take antidepressants every day. Millions more reach for diet sodas, sugar-free gum, or low-calorie snacks sweetened with natural and artificial sweeteners. What happens when both of those things meet in the gut at the same time? According to a new study, the answer may be more tangled than previously thought.

Researchers tested 39 commercially available sweeteners, the kind found in everything from soft drinks and candy to cereal and baby formula, against 25 gut bacterial strains and species to see how they interact. Reporting in Molecular Systems Biology, the team found that three-quarters of the sweeteners directly affected the growth of at least one bacterial strain. A bigger surprise came when sweeteners were combined with other commonly ingested compounds, including the widely prescribed antidepressant duloxetine. Those combinations produced more than 100 previously unreported interactions, some of which appeared to harm bacteria closely linked to human health.

Conducted entirely in a laboratory setting, the study does not prove that the same effects occur in a living human body. But the scale of the screening and the depth of the follow-up analysis make it one of the most thorough looks yet at what low-calorie sweeteners might be doing to the microscopic community living in the human digestive system.

How a Sweetener and an Antidepressant Gang Up on Gut Bacteria

Of all the findings in the study, one combination stood out. Isosteviol, a compound derived from the stevia plant and used as a sweetener ingredient, combined with duloxetine, the antidepressant sold under the brand name Cymbalta, to suppress two types of bacteria that scientists associate with a healthy gut, hitting one of them especially hard.

One of those bacteria, Roseburia intestinalis, has been linked to blood sugar regulation and protection against intestinal inflammation. The other, Parabacteroides merdae, is a common gut resident tied to a healthy microbial community. When isosteviol and duloxetine were present together, their combined suppressive effect on these bacteria was greater than what either compound caused on its own.

Duloxetine is no niche medication. In 2022 and 2023, it ranked as the 31st-most-prescribed drug in the United States, with more than 18 million prescriptions filled and more than 4 million patients taking it, according to data cited in the study. Given how widely stevia-derived sweeteners are used in food products, many people may routinely consume both.

How Scientists Tested 39 Sweeteners Against Gut Bacteria

Based at the MRC Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, the research team built their experiment around 25 gut bacterial strains and species chosen to represent the broad range of bacteria found in a healthy human gut: friendly probiotic species, common residents, and some opportunistic troublemakers.

Against these bacteria, the team screened all 39 sweeteners they could obtain in pure form, covering both natural options like stevia compounds and monk fruit extract and synthetic ones like saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose. Every sweetener was tested individually against every bacterial strain, producing 975 unique pairings. Interactions counted as real only if they held up across multiple independent experiments and multiple concentrations, a strict standard that filtered out false positives.

For the combination testing, the researchers screened the same 39 sweeteners alongside four compounds commonly consumed with sweeteners: advantame (another sweetener increasingly used in processed foods), caffeine, vanillin (a flavor compound found in everything from cakes to baby formula), and duloxetine. That expanded the analysis to 3,900 three-way interactions between sweeteners, bacteria, and the added compounds.

In total, the combination screen identified 102 significant interactions involving nine gut bacterial species. Most of them, 68 out of 102, were cases where one compound softened the impact of the other. But 34 were cases where the combination hit harder than either compound alone. The strongest of all the compounds involved is isosteviol, followed by duloxetine, acting on Roseburia intestinalis.

Beyond Slowed Growth: Effects on Gut Bacteria and Human Cells

Finding that a sweetener and an antidepressant can together suppress specific gut bacteria would be notable on its own. The researchers went further, building a miniature artificial gut community comprising all 25 bacterial strains and exposing it to the isosteviol-duloxetine combination over several growth cycles to observe how the community changed under pressure.

Combined treatment caused a significant drop in overall species diversity. Of the 25 bacteria, 24 grew less in isolation after exposure to both compounds together.

To understand what was happening at a molecular level, the team analyzed changes in proteins made by Roseburia intestinalis and Parabacteroides merdae after exposure. The compounds appeared to interfere with the bacteria’s ability to manage what moves in and out of the cell, specifically disrupting proteins that carry small molecules across the outer membrane. A separate genetic analysis using a library of bacterial mutants identified the same membrane transport proteins as key determinants of bacterial survival of the isosteviol-duloxetine combination.

One of the more arresting downstream results involved the spent liquid from the bacterial community, essentially the chemical output that bacteria produce and release. Applied to human cells in a dish, fluid from communities treated with the isosteviol-duloxetine combination was significantly more toxic to HeLa cells than fluid from untreated communities. Researchers ruled out the compounds themselves as the direct cause; the altered bacterial output appeared to drive the effect.

When Caco-2 cells, a human cell line modeled on the lining of the colon, were exposed to the same bacterial fluid, secretion of two immune signaling proteins, interleukin-6 and interleukin-8, fell by more than 75% compared with fluid from untreated communities. These proteins are part of the gut’s immune defense. Their suppression could, depending on the context, indicate a weakened ability to fight off pathogens, though the researchers note that the significance would depend on a person’s individual health.

Bacteria exposed to the combination also produced different amounts of butyric acid, a compound tied to anti-inflammatory effects, improved insulin sensitivity, and protection against diet-related obesity, and one that gut cells burn for energy. In Roseburia intestinalis, butyric acid dropped by more than 25% after co-exposure. These are the kinds of bacterial outputs that researchers link to broader human health.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/could-common-antidepressant-and-sweetener-combo-quietly-fight-gut-bacteria/

Skipping breakfast before a gym session is hard enough. A new study points to an odd trick that might make the empty-stomach grind a little easier: a whiff of chocolate. Men who breathed in the scent of chocolate before and during a weight session cranked out more repetitions than they did after smelling plain water, and they managed it without rating the harder workout as any more punishing than usual.

No one ate a single square. Every bit of the boost came from smell alone. When the same men sniffed dark chocolate, they reported feeling less hungry and more full before lifting. When they sniffed milk chocolate, they mostly rated the scent as more pleasant. Both scents beat water on total reps completed.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, the research is preliminary, so it shows that the two happened together rather than nailing down exactly why. Still, the basic result is hard to ignore: a smell, and nothing more, nudged how much work tired muscles were willing to do.

How the Chocolate Smell Study Worked

Twenty-three healthy men took part at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. All were seasoned lifters, training at least twice a week for a minimum of two years, with an average age of about 23. Each showed up having fasted overnight for at least 10 hours, copying the state of someone who trains first thing in the morning on an empty stomach.

Each man completed three separate sessions spaced at least four days apart. One session paired the workout with the smell of dark chocolate (90% cocoa), another with milk chocolate, and a third with plain water for comparison. By design, neither the participants nor the staff counting reps were told which scent was which, a standard step to limit bias. Scents were prepared as liquids in small glass jars, and each man inhaled for 30 seconds at a time, both before lifting and between sets.

For the workout itself, participants did repeated sets of leg extensions, a seated machine move that targets the muscles at the front of the thigh, using a weight set to 80% of the most they could lift 10 times. They kept going until they couldn’t finish another set. After each set they rated how hungry they felt, how much they wanted to eat, how pleasant the smell was, and how hard the effort felt.

More Reps From the Chocolate Smell

Dark chocolate produced the biggest jump: 18 more total reps than water, and nine more than milk chocolate. Milk chocolate landed in the middle, beating water by nine reps. Counted in whole sets, dark chocolate added one full set over both the water and milk chocolate conditions.

Curiously, all that extra work didn’t register as extra suffering. Effort ratings climbed as the sets piled up, exactly as expected, but they came out about the same no matter which scent sat in the jar. The chocolate smells helped men grind out more without making any single set feel tougher.

Appetite is where the two scents parted ways. Dark chocolate reliably dialed down hunger and the urge to eat while raising the sense of fullness. Milk chocolate did none of that; it simply smelled better to the participants. Across every condition, the less hungry a man felt going in, the more reps he tended to finish.

What the Science Can’t Explain Yet

Researchers ran the numbers to see whether lower hunger or greater pleasantness could account for the extra reps. Those tests came back inconclusive. The study can show that chocolate scents and stronger performance traveled together; it can’t yet prove the scent caused the gain or trace the biology behind it. Hormones, brain signals, and other bodily measures that might confirm a mechanism simply weren’t recorded.

One leading guess ties back to appetite. Smelling a familiar food can trigger what scientists call a cephalic-phase response, the body’s head start on digestion that begins before any food arrives. A rich, bitter dark chocolate scent may cue that response and quiet hunger for a while, which could free a lifter from the nagging pull of an empty stomach. That fits earlier research linking lower pre-workout hunger to better lifting, though the authors treat it as a plausible story rather than settled fact.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/whiff-of-chocolate-before-workout-may-curb-hunger-lift-reps-new-study-shows/

People who speak more than one language seem to have younger brains, according to research presented Monday at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026 [1].

Our brains are made up of billions of nerve cells which need to communicate with one another. As we age, the connectivity in our brains tends to deteriorate and, as a result, our memory and the speed of our thinking also decline.

The new research found that the more languages people speak, the younger their brains appear. Learning an extra language at a younger age and learning to become highly fluent in another language also seem to slow brain aging.

The research was presented by Dr. Lucia Amoruso from the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastián, Spain, who worked with a team from the Latin American Brain Health Institute at the Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Chile, the Cognitive Neuroscience Center at the Universidad de San Andres, Argentina, and the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

The researchers recently published a study [2] showing that in countries where people typically speak more than one language, people seem to age more slowly. In the new study, the researchers carried out detailed analysis on a group of people from the Basque region of Spain who spoke between one and four different languages including combinations of Spanish, Basque, French and English.

They began with a group of 728 people to create a “brain aging clock.” They used a technique called magnetoencephalography which measures brain activity by the faint magnetic fields produced when brain cells are active. The researchers used artificial intelligence to process data on brain activity in people of different ages to show what is a normal level of brain connectivity at any given age.

Then the team used this clock to gauge the ‘brain age’ of a second group of 144 people.

When they compared people’s real age with the age of their brain, they found that those who spoke two languages had brains that appeared around six years younger than those who spoke only one language. For people who spoke three languages, their brains were around seven years younger, and for those who spoke four languages, their brains were around 13 years younger.

Dr. Amoruso said: “In simple terms, people who spoke more languages tended to have brains that looked younger than expected for their chronological age. The effect was not only related to the number of languages spoken. Higher language proficiency and earlier acquisition of a second language were also associated with more delayed brain aging. This suggests that multilingual experience matters as a gradient: it is not simply about being bilingual or not, but about the depth and duration of language experience.”

The researchers took account of factors such as people’s age, sex and education, but caution that they cannot rule out the potential influence of other factors that may have an impact on the brain, such as lifestyle and social engagement.

Dr. Amoruso and the team now hope to carry out similar work in people with neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, where brain aging and resilience are especially important. They also plan to look at whether speaking two or more languages that are very similar could have a bigger effect on the brain, as managing closely related languages may require greater language control.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/speaking-another-language-could-slow-aging-in-the-brain/

Scientists Use Tragic Childhood Syndrome To Argue DNA Tags Help Cause Old Age Decline

Cancer has a dirty trick: it can put itself to sleep. When tumor cells slip into a kind of biological hibernation, they become hard to kill, shrugging off treatment and lying low until conditions improve, then waking up and bringing the disease back. For decades, researchers have struggled to shut down this hiding strategy without causing serious harm elsewhere in the body. A team in Switzerland has now built a molecule that flips on and off with flashes of light, giving scientists a precise new way to probe, and possibly disrupt, the way sleeping cancer cells hide.

Behind this cellular sleep state, at least in certain cancers, sits a protein called the glucocorticoid receptor, a sensor inside cells that reacts to stress hormones. When it switches on, it can push cancer cells, especially in some solid tumors such as lung cancer, into a drug-resistant, dormant state. The obvious fix would be to destroy the receptor outright, but there is a catch: the same receptor does important jobs all over the body, including calming inflammation. Removing it everywhere would cause real damage. What was needed was a way to hit the receptor inside a tumor and leave the rest of the body alone.

That is what the team set out to build. Their solution, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a class of molecules called photoPROTACs: drug-like compounds engineered to destroy the stress hormone receptor, but only when a specific color of light switches them on. Shine the right light on them, and they go to work. Keep them in the dark, and they stay idle.

A Kill Switch for a Stress Hormone Receptor

It helps to know what a PROTAC is. A PROTAC is a molecule that grabs onto a specific protein inside a cell and tags it for destruction by the cell’s own waste-disposal system. It works like slapping a “delete me” sticky note on an unwanted protein. PROTACs have stirred huge excitement in medicine because they can eliminate proteins that ordinary drugs cannot touch.

Conventional PROTACs have a problem: they are always on. Once taken, they work throughout the entire body, destroying their target in cancer cells and healthy cells alike. For a receptor this important to normal health, that is a dealbreaker.

To get around it, the team embedded a light-sensitive part directly into the PROTAC molecule. By adding a chemical structure that physically changes shape depending on the wavelength of light hitting it, they created a molecular switch. In one shape, called the E-form, the molecule has the right geometry to do its job and destroy the receptor. In the other, the Z-form, it bends into a configuration that leaves it far less active. The switch runs both ways: one wavelength turns the molecule on, another turns it off.

Building the Light-Activated Cancer Switch

Researchers built and tested several versions of these light-switchable molecules, hunting for the best balance of stability and responsiveness. Two lead compounds, KH-5-306 and KH-5-309, stood out. Both flipped almost completely between their active and inactive shapes under different wavelengths of light and showed no signs of wearing out after repeated exposure.

Inside cells, both compounds destroyed the stress hormone receptor in their active E-form at very low doses. Switched to the inactive Z-form, the effect dropped sharply, though the inactive form still held on to some activity. Because the Z-form naturally drifts back toward the active E-form at body temperature, researchers kept it locked in place during experiments by hitting the cells with brief bursts of ultraviolet light every 30 minutes, a lab-only workaround they confirmed did not harm the cells or disturb the biology under study, and not a method meant for patients.

Additional tests confirmed the receptor destruction ran through the cell’s normal disposal machinery: when a separate inhibitor blocked that machinery, the photoPROTACs stopped working. The compounds also left a closely related receptor alone, even at higher doses, a sign the molecules were hitting their intended target and not damaging look-alikes. And the effect proved temporary. When the active compound was washed away after 12 hours, receptor levels started climbing back within 24.

Waking Up Sleeping Lung Cancer Cells

With the chemistry checked, researchers moved to a test closer to real medicine. They took human lung cancer cells and treated them with dexamethasone, a common steroid that switches on the glucocorticoid receptor and nudges these cells into a dormancy-like state. That setup mirrors a real problem: dexamethasone is routinely given to cancer patients to manage inflammation and treatment side effects, yet it may quietly push tumor cells toward this drug-resistant sleep.

After confirming that dexamethasone triggered the expected dormancy response, the team tested whether the lead photoPROTAC, KH-5-309, could reverse it. Cells treated with the active E-form saw the dormancy-linked gene activity roll back toward normal, and a sweep across thousands of genes confirmed the shift toward a more active state. By contrast, the inactive Z-form left those genes essentially untouched, behaving in this experiment as a neutral control on par with no treatment at all.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/scientists-built-cancer-kill-switch-that-turns-on-with-flash-of-light-study-shows/

Slathering on lotion after a morning shower feels like a task checked off for the whole day. A new study suggests that confidence may be misplaced. Researchers tested four popular moisturizers and found that, under the conditions tested, the measurable hydration boost they give skin generally fell back toward untreated skin within roughly three to five hours, long before bedtime rolled around.

Dry skin is more than a cosmetic nuisance. When the outer layer loses too much water, it grows more open to infection, sun damage, and conditions such as eczema, the chronic itchy rash that leaves skin red and flaking. Doctors often recommend moisturizers to help support that protective outer layer, and most of these products work by pulling water into the skin and trying to hold it in place. Yet advice on how often to reapply has mostly run on habit, not hard numbers.

Published in the journal SKIN, this research set out to put a clock on the question. By measuring how long four common moisturizers kept skin more hydrated than bare, untreated skin, the team produced something the drugstore aisle rarely offers: an evidence-based estimate of how long that extra hydration may last after a single application.

How the Moisturizer Study Was Done

Thirty healthy adult volunteers signed up, and researchers dabbed four store-bought moisturizers onto separate spots along their forearms. The lineup covered a ceramide and hyaluronic acid cream (CeraVe Moisturizing Cream), a glycerin and petrolatum cream (Cetaphil Moisturizing Cream), a urea and shea butter repair cream (Eucerin Advanced Repair Crème), and a multi-hyaluronic acid botanical serum (SkinMedica HA5). One spot on each arm got nothing at all, serving as a plain-skin benchmark.

To track hydration, the team relied on an FDA-cleared device that reads how much water sits in the skin without ever breaking the surface, essentially a moisture meter pressed against the arm. Readings came at the start, then at one hour, four hours, and 24 hours after application. Spots were assigned at random across participants so that no single product always landed on the same patch of arm, a small step that keeps one lucky location from skewing the numbers. Between checks, volunteers went about ordinary life and simply avoided washing or scrubbing the test patches. Lab readings happened under steady temperature and humidity, while the hours in between unfolded wherever daily life took each person.

What the Moisturizer Study Found

Over the full day, only the botanical serum kept skin measurably more hydrated than untreated skin in the researchers’ 24-hour statistical analysis. Averaged across the entire day, the three creams showed no meaningful difference from untreated skin, a result that sounds damning until you look at the timing instead of the daily average.

That timing told a different story. Using a statistical model, researchers estimated the point when each product’s hydration benefit fell back to the level of untreated skin. The glycerin and petrolatum cream held its lead for about three hours, the urea and shea butter cream for roughly three and a half, and the serum stretched to nearly five hours. Short-lived gains like these wash out when smoothed over a full day, which is why the creams looked flat in the 24-hour average while still appearing to provide measurable hydration in the early hours after application.

One product behaved differently. Rather than producing a noticeable rise and decline in hydration, the ceramide cream closely tracked untreated skin throughout the study. Researchers offered a cautious possibility: it may help stabilize the skin barrier instead of producing a measurable spike in water content, a quieter effect their measurements were not designed to capture directly. They stressed that this explanation remains speculative. It does raise an interesting question, though, about whether an effective moisturizer always has to produce a dramatic hydration spike or whether maintaining steadier conditions could also be beneficial.

What the Findings Mean for Reapplying

For someone managing a condition that demands steady moisture, a once-in-the-morning, once-at-night routine could leave stretches of the afternoon when skin hydration has fallen back toward untreated levels, at least under the single-application conditions this study tested. Eczema and similar conditions flare when the skin barrier becomes compromised, so maintaining hydration is often an important part of care. Whether topping up more often would improve outcomes is a question the researchers did not test directly, so the practical advice stops short of recommending a specific reapplication schedule. Anyone considering changing their skincare routine, particularly for a medical skin condition, should discuss it with a healthcare professional.

Cost muddies the picture too. The serum lasted longest in this study but also carries the highest price, while the cheaper, easier-to-find creams showed shorter hydration intervals. Spending more bought more hours here, yet the study never examined whether reapplying a lower-cost moisturizer more frequently could produce similar results.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/your-morning-moisturizers-hydration-boost-may-fade-by-lunch-study-finds/

 

How Much You Weighed at Birth May Determine How Hard Your Kidneys Work Under Pressure

Scientists Discover How Pomegranate Triggers the Gut’s Own Repair System

Dengue Has Already Found a Foothold in California, and Climate Change Could Make It Far Worse

Two Studies Find Gut Fungi Drive Childhood Allergy Risk, With Mouse Research Pointing to Infant Antibiotics as a Culprit

That Mid-Afternoon Energy Crash May Have a Simple Fix: A 5-Minute Walk Every Hour

Do Cats Help With Stress? Study Finds Cat Interaction May Not Always Soothe Owners

Some national pride goes beyond flying a flag or cheering at the Olympics. It runs on a quieter, more brittle conviction that one’s country is exceptional, perhaps even the greatest, and that the rest of the world stubbornly refuses to admit it. Psychologists have a name for that mindset: national narcissism.

While national narcissism appears to be a comfort for many of its adherents, according to a new study that tracked hundreds of young adults over time, holding it was linked to higher stress down the road.

Researchers long assumed the relationship ran in one direction. People who feel bad about themselves, the thinking went, grab onto an inflated sense of national pride like an emotional life raft, with stress, depression, and a bruised sense of self-worth pushing them toward grand beliefs about their nation. Research published in the Journal of Research in Personality complicates that story.

Rather than emotional pain feeding national narcissism, the data points the predictive arrow the other way, and the relief people might hope to get from the mindset does not seem to arrive, at least within the window the study covered.

That twist matters because so much public commentary treats wounded pride as the cause and grievance as the symptom. These findings flip the order, at least for young adults: the belief appears to come first, and the stress follows.

Inside the National Narcissism Study

A team based in the Czech Republic and Poland followed 688 Czech young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 across two survey rounds set roughly a year apart. Most participants were women, and the group ran the gamut from full-time students to working adults and people outside the workforce. Participants answered questions about their national pride, stress levels, depressive feelings, and personality, including a measure of how emotionally reactive they tend to be in general.

To gauge national narcissism, participants rated how strongly they agreed with statements capturing the idea that their nation deserves far more recognition than it gets, scored on a scale from one to four. Stress was measured by asking how often, over the past month, someone felt unable to control important things in life. Depression was screened with two questions about feeling down or losing interest in activities. Researchers then leaned on a statistical method that tracks how one trait at an earlier point predicts another later on, which let them untangle the direction of the links.

With nearly 700 participants, the sample was large enough to catch even modest relationships between the variables. Researchers also controlled for each person’s general tendency toward negative moods, so the results would not simply reflect the fact that some people are gloomier by nature.

National Narcissism Came First, Stress Followed

Only one predictive link surfaced in the analysis: national narcissism in the first round predicted higher stress by the second. Neither stress nor depressive symptoms predicted stronger national narcissism later on. That pattern held whether participants were in their late teens or their late twenties, and it did not shift across the status measures the researchers tested, including education, employment, and financial strain.

Going in, the team expected that people in lower-status spots, younger participants or those with thinner financial cushions, might show a tighter link between emotional distress and national narcissism, since they arguably have more to gain by hitching their self-worth to national identity. That expectation did not pan out. Results looked much the same across the board.

There was one more wrinkle. Stress and depressive symptoms both tracked closely with a person’s baseline tendency toward negative moods, as expected. National narcissism behaved differently: it was not tied to that emotional baseline in the same way, which hints that the belief is not just another expression of a gloomy disposition.

An Endless Chase for Recognition

Why would believing a nation is secretly great breed stress rather than ease it? Drawing on a psychological framework about how people react when their self-worth feels threatened, the authors describe national narcissism as a chase with no finish line. Someone who draws importance from a nation’s supposed greatness stays exposed to a steady drip of threats: foreign criticism, unflattering news coverage, political setbacks, or simply the sense that the world is shortchanging their country. Living in that state of constant vigilance, the authors argue, wears a person down.

They also flag that national narcissism predicted stress but not depressive symptoms over the year studied. One reading is that the puffed-up self-image these beliefs carry may shield people from low mood in the short run, even as the endless hunger for outside validation keeps stress simmering. Another possibility the authors raise is that the heavier emotional toll may need longer than a year to show itself.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/national-narcissism-linked-rising-stress-young-adults/

Quitting the day job to work for yourself carries a certain mythology: the bold young founder, the garage startup, the freedom of answering to no one. A new study that followed thousands of Americans for more than three decades muddies that picture in a blunt way. For a large share of those who struck out on their own, particularly people who did it later in life and never registered a formal company, the move was linked to lower well-being and no extra money to show for it.

That finding lands against a long-running argument about who entrepreneurs really are. Some research has cast self-employment as a young person’s pursuit, fueled by risk appetite that fades with age. Other work puts the peak in midlife, when savings and connections pile up. Researchers Seok-Woo Kwon and Xiaoying Wang of the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business argue both camps may be partly right, and partly fooled by their own math. When everyone gets averaged into a single curve, very different lives get blended into a number that describes almost no one.

Kwon and Wang pulled those lives back apart. Drawing on a federal survey that has tracked the same nationally representative group of 12,686 Americans since 1979, when participants were teenagers, they traced who became self-employed, when, for how long, and how those paths related to their finances and well-being by around age 50. As the study notes, “The key theoretical insight is that there is no single relationship between age and entrepreneurship.” Instead, several different relationships run side by side, each with its own logic.

Four Entrepreneurial Careers Hiding Inside One Average

Analyzed the usual way, with everyone treated as variations on a single trend, self-employment looks like it climbs steadily with age, rising from about 2 percent of people at 18 to roughly 17 percent by 50. That curve is tidy but misleading, because one line averaged across the whole group can hide people moving in opposite directions. A second method sorted participants by their actual year-by-year patterns instead of forcing them onto one trend, and four distinct paths fell out.

Most people, about 69 percent, never really went into business for themselves at all. A small core of career-persistent entrepreneurs, around 6 percent, jumped in young and stayed in, with roughly 80 percent of the group self-employed by their mid-30s and holding there. The remaining two groups dabbled and moved on. Early-adulthood entrepreneurs, about 12 percent, spiked in their twenties and early thirties, then drifted back to conventional jobs. Middle-aged entrepreneurs, about 13 percent, did the reverse, staying employed through their twenties before ramping up after their mid-30s.

Those opposite shapes matter because they cancel each other out in an average. A sample heavy with midlife starters looks like a midlife peak; a sample heavy with young, persistent founders looks like a young person’s trend. Same country, same decades, different conclusions, depending on who happens to be in the room.

Incorporation, Not Timing, Tracked the Payoff

Here is the split that should make anyone weighing self-employment pause: whether the venture was incorporated mattered more for life outcomes than when it started. Incorporating means registering a formal company rather than operating as a freelancer or informal sole proprietor, and the two roads led to opposite destinations.

People who built incorporated businesses tended to come out ahead on both money and mood. Career-persistent incorporated founders showed the largest lifetime-earnings premium, with midlife incorporated starters close behind, and several of these groups reported higher life satisfaction than people who never went into business. Unincorporated self-employment told a darker story. It was tied to lower well-being and produced no measurable earnings advantage at all.

The grimmest combination was starting an unincorporated venture in middle age. That group reported the steepest drop in well-being of anyone studied, with no financial gain to offset it. Some of those midlife starters were chasing opportunity, but others may have been pushed toward it by weaker job-market options or career pressure, a difference the authors say programs aimed at would-be founders ought to screen for before cheering anyone on.

Family Business at the Dinner Table

Where do these paths come from? Long before anyone files paperwork, family shapes the odds. Kwon and Wang tested three kinds of early advantage measured at or before age 18: cultural (magazines, newspapers, and a library card in the home), social (a parent or other family member in the household who owned a business), and economic (family income).

Growing up around a family business was the strongest and most consistent predictor of going into business later, across every path. A childhood steeped in reading material had a narrower role, linked mainly to keeping a formal company running over the long haul rather than to starting one. Family income, the factor many people would bet on first, barely moved the needle on which path someone followed. Money in the household, in other words, mattered less than a working example of someone who ran their own shop.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/self-employment-often-doesnt-pay-off-decades-long-study-of-entrepreneurs-shows/

Ancient DNA Hidden in Pacific Islanders Reveals Three Separate Encounters With a Mystery Ancestor

The United States government’s recent release of hundreds of previously classified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) cases spanning the 1940s to the present, along with the new Steven Spielberg movie, Disclosure Day, about extraterrestrial life, has fuelled the idea that aliens are visiting Earth.

In fact, polls in Australia, the U.S. and elsewhere indicate around a third of the public believes aliens are here.

However, while what we know about the universe suggests aliens may exist, there are three compelling reasons why they probably aren’t visiting us.

Space is Big – Very Big

To begin with, space is vast – beyond our imagination.

Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun, is about 40 trillion kilometers away, 268,000 times farther than the Sun is from Earth. That’s 4.3 light years as astronomers measure it. A light year is the distance light travels in one year at 300,000km per second.

We can only travel across space at a fraction of the speed of light with current technology. Even our fastest spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe, travels at a top speed of roughly 191 kilometers per second – 0.064% the speed of light.

At that speed, it would take about 6,650 years to reach Proxima Centauri, and that’s just in our local stellar neighborhood. So interstellar travel within human lifespans would require much higher velocities.

Let’s assume we did have the means to travel close to the speed of light. That introduces the first problem with traveling at that velocity. Albert Einstein demonstrated that time is relative; the rate of time flow is not the same everywhere in the universe. The faster a spaceship travels from Earth, the slower time will pass for its passengers. This is called time dilation.

For example, when NASA astronaut Scott Kelly arrived back on Earth from a year on the International Space Station, he was milliseconds younger than his identical twin because time moves more slowly for objects in motion, and the International Space Station travels at roughly 28,150 kilometers per hour.

This difference was negligible for the Kelly twins. But for any aliens cartwheeling through our skies, it would be significantly more because of the journey to Earth and back from a distant star system at a necessarily higher speed. They would go home to a planet much older than the one they left – perhaps by a century or more. They would be time exiles.

Unimaginably high energy requirements

Then there’s the unimaginably high energy requirement for interstellar travel.

The mass of the spaceship increases with velocity, so an increasing amount of energy is required to accelerate it.

At the speed of light, the ship becomes infinitely massive, requiring an infinite amount of energy. This is clearly impossible.

Another significant issue is that space is a vacuum – but not completely. There are just enough particles to worry about. They can potentially cause fatal radiation for passengers and the instruments of a high-velocity spacecraft, or destroy it. Sparsely spread hydrogen atoms turn into intense radiation at near light speed, and the heat that is generated would ablate and eventually destroy the hull.

Faster-than-light travel, according to physicist Miguel Alcubierre, is possible, but it comes with its own set of issues and a currently impossible energy requirement.

That raises the question of why spend all this energy to travel to Earth? Anything we have, an advanced civilisation (as they would have to be to get here) would be able to make on their planet.

A Unique Biosphere

Yet another issue is our biosphere, unique to Earth as far as scientists know.

Life and the planet co-evolved. Complex life would not exist on Earth if cyanobacteria, a type of single-celled microbe, had not pumped oxygen into our mostly nitrogen atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago.

It’s therefore not toxic for us, but oxygen is reactive and could be highly corrosive for aliens. And while they could wear protective suits like humans do when going to inhospitable environments, reports of visiting aliens do not include any descriptions of spacesuits.

So, Are Aliens Out There?

If aliens are not here, are they out there? It’s an interesting question, scientifically and philosophically. Scientists do not have enough information yet, but they are working on the question.

About 6,200 exoplanets have been found in more than 4,700 solar systems, though none are like Earth or our Solar System.

Most stars could have at least one planet, and there are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. The number of planets is therefore astronomical, and some may be habitable.

Closer to home, there are worlds with potential for microbial life either past or present – Mars, Europa (a moon of Jupiter), and Enceladus and Titan (moons of Saturn). If we discover life began twice in our Solar System, that will increase the odds of life elsewhere.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/aliens-might-exist-reasons-why-theyre-not-visiting-us/

Your Parents’ DNA May Shape Your Traits in Ways You Didn’t Directly Inherit

Aging Ankles Trade Efficiency for Stability, and New Research Shows Exactly When the Switch Happens

Standing on a bus that lurches forward. Catching a stumble on an icy sidewalk. For younger people, these moments of lost balance are handled almost automatically. Fast, lower-level brainstem circuits fire off corrective signals before anyone even realizes what happened. But as people age, the brain has to recruit backup. A new study finds that older adults and those with Parkinson’s disease rely more on the brain’s higher-level regions just to stay upright, and that this shift can be detected without ever scanning the brain itself.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Ohio University, and the University of Padova built a computer model that breaks down the muscle responses people produce when knocked off balance into separate parts, each linked to a different level of the nervous system. By analyzing how quickly and intensely leg muscles fire after a person is physically pushed off balance, the team could infer which pathways were likely contributing, whether fast, automatic circuits deep in the brain or slower circuits linked to higher-level brain regions.

Falls are among the leading causes of injury and death in older adults, and balance problems are a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease. Yet doctors have had limited tools to understand why a particular person’s balance is faltering at a brain level. This study, published in eNeuro, offers a potential new way to peer inside the nervous system’s balance-control chain of command using nothing more than muscle recordings and a moving platform.

How Researchers Tested Balance in Older Adults and Parkinson’s Patients

Nineteen older adults without Parkinson’s disease and 17 individuals with Parkinson’s were recruited for the study. Participants with Parkinson’s were asked to stop taking their medications for at least 12 hours before testing so the researchers could observe the disease’s effects without the masking influence of drugs. Each person’s neurologist approved this temporary medication pause.

Participants stood barefoot on a motorized platform that could slide forward or backward without warning. Each person received 48 pushes across six conditions that varied by direction and intensity. Medium and large pushes were adjusted based on each person’s height so the physical challenge was comparable across participants. Everyone was told to cross their arms, stare at a fixed point about 15 feet away, and try to recover their balance without taking a step.

While participants wobbled and corrected, sensors tracked their body motion and electrodes on their lower legs recorded electrical activity in two muscles: one along the shin and one in the calf. These two muscles work in opposition. When one contracts to pull the body forward, the other resists. Together, they offer a window into how the nervous system orchestrates a balance correction.

A Math Model That Separates Fast Brain Circuits From Slow Ones

At the centerpiece of the study was a mathematical model the researchers call a “neuromechanical model.” It reconstructs recorded muscle activity by combining information about how the body moved with time delays that correspond to known speeds of different brain pathways. Faster signals, arriving roughly 120 milliseconds after the push, are consistent with processing in lower, more automatic brain regions. Slower signals, arriving around 200 milliseconds, match the timing expected when information has to travel up to the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, and back down again.

Splitting each balance-correcting muscle response into two components, the model found the first kicked in around 119 milliseconds in older adults without Parkinson’s and 116 milliseconds in those with the disease. The second arrived around 200 milliseconds in older adults and 215 milliseconds in Parkinson’s participants. Both components grew stronger as the pushes got bigger, which makes intuitive sense: a harder shove demands a bigger correction. And the two-loop model was far more accurate than a simpler, single-loop version, with reconstruction accuracy improving by roughly 10 percent when the second, slower loop was included.

Why Muscles Sometimes Fight Against Their Own Balance

Beyond the main muscle that corrects balance, the researchers also examined what happens in the opposing muscle, the one that sometimes fires at exactly the wrong time. This kind of opposing muscle activity is commonly observed in older adults and people with Parkinson’s, creating a tug-of-war in the legs.

Carved into two pieces by the model, opposing muscle activity breaks down into a “destabilizing component” that actually works against balance recovery and a “stabilizing component” that helps the body adjust as the platform slows down. That destabilizing burst arrived at about 181 milliseconds in older adults and 173 milliseconds in those with Parkinson’s, a timing window consistent with circuits running through a cluster of brain structures heavily damaged in Parkinson’s disease.

Among older adults without Parkinson’s, higher levels of this destabilizing muscle activity were linked to worse scores on a clinical balance test that evaluates things like sensory awareness, dynamic walking, and the ability to recover from a push. Put simply, the people whose muscles fought hardest against their own balance corrections tended to be the ones who struggled most on standardized assessments.

That correlation did not hold in the Parkinson’s group. Researchers suggest this disconnect may reflect the broader neurological changes that accumulate as Parkinson’s progresses, making the relationship between any single muscle-activity pattern and overall balance ability harder to pin down.

One difference did emerge between groups: people with Parkinson’s showed a larger acceleration-driven component of the destabilizing opposing muscle activity during forward pushes compared to older adults without the disease. This fits with a well-known feature of Parkinson’s in which muscles contract inappropriately when they should be relaxing.

How Aging Shifts the Balance Burden to Higher Brain Regions

When comparing their findings to previously published data from younger adults, a notable pattern emerged. Older adults, with or without Parkinson’s, appeared to engage the slower, thinking-brain response at smaller push intensities than younger adults did. In younger people, the faster automatic circuits seemed to handle mild disturbances on their own, only calling in reinforcements from higher brain regions when the challenge ramped up. Older adults, by contrast, seemed to need that backup even for gentler pushes.

This observation lines up with a well-established idea in brain science: as people age, the brain compensates for declining automatic processes by calling on additional resources from its outer layers. It is the neural equivalent of needing reading glasses. The hardware still works, but it needs more help to do the same job.

Worth noting is that direct statistical comparisons between the older adult data and the previously published younger adult data were not possible because the experimental setups differed. Still, the pattern is consistent with evidence suggesting that this kind of brain over-recruitment is a signature of aging balance control.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/older-brains-work-harder-falling-muscle-test/

A diagonal earlobe crease called Frank’s sign may signal hidden heart disease risk, especially alongside diabetes, hypertension, smoking, or obesity.

When people think about warning signs of heart disease, symptoms like chest pain, breathlessness, fatigue, or irregular heartbeat usually come to mind. But doctors say there may be another subtle clue hiding in plain sight – right on your ears.

A small wrinkle or diagonal crease on the earlobe, known as Frank’s sign, has increasingly been linked to cardiovascular disease in several medical studies. While it may look harmless, experts believe this tiny mark could signal underlying problems with blood vessels and heart health.

Guava Juice May Boost Hemoglobin in Women

Scientists Destroyed a Few Dozen Neurons in a Fish and Watched Its Social Life Fall Apart

The rise of remote work since the pandemic has made businesses more reluctant to hire young, inexperienced workers and is the key driver of higher unemployment rates for recent college graduates, a study released Monday has found.

The study, by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, compared occupations that can be done remotely — such as software development — with those that are done in person, such as nursing. The study finds that the unemployment rate among young college graduates in “remotable” jobs rose by about 1 percentage point from 2017-2019 to 2022-2024.

Yet for older workers in those fields — those aged 29 and over — the jobless rate declined slightly, leading to a notably higher unemployment rate for younger college graduates in remotable occupations compared with older workers.

Yet in non-remotable jobs, there has been little gap in the unemployment rates between older and younger college grads, the study finds. A similar pattern exists for those without college degrees, the New York Fed said.

The study, led by New York Fed research economist Natalia Emanuel, concludes that businesses are reluctant to hire new college grads into remote work because it is harder to train and mentor them if they work outside of the office. The authors of the study calculate that remote work is responsible for nearly two-thirds of the rise in the unemployment rate for young college graduates since the pandemic.

“Remote work has weakened incentives to hire young workers by impeding on-the-job training,” the study said. “Employers may not want to hire fresh graduates onto distributed teams because it is more difficult to teach them the requisite skills from afar.”

The study lands amid widespread concern over the employment prospects of college graduates as artificial intelligence makes inroads into a variety of white-collar jobs, including finance, law, entertainment, and media. This spring, college graduates have been booing references to AI during commencement speeches.

But the study notes that the worsening employment picture for young college grads pre-dates the development of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT. And when the authors looked at the exposure different occupations had to AI, it found that AI had little impact on youth unemployment.

The unemployment rate for college grads under 29 rose 20% from before the pandemic to 3.7%, on average, in 2022-2025, the New York Fed said. For college grads aged 22 through 27, unemployment reached 5.8% last year, the highest outside the pandemic since 2012.

The study’s findings are consistent with the low-hire, low-fire state of the job market, where layoffs are low and the unemployment rate is mostly stable, but those out of work are struggling to find new jobs.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/ai-unemployment-remote-work-hiring-1942a6b0c8dc6f17a30878735a0256ae

Women Over 50 With Low Protein Intake Face Dramatically Higher Odds of Losing Basic Physical Independence

Board-Certified Physicians Put Popular LLMs Through Their Paces, and Found Real Problems

A new national survey found that nearly half of American adults (48%) feel their lives are seriously lacking in fun right now. Even more jarring, 12% say they can’t even remember the last time they had a full free day to enjoy themselves. It is not a trivial complaint. Researchers found that people who do manage to carve out regular fun report feeling less stressed, more motivated, and closer to the people they love. For the growing share of adults who can’t seem to get there, that gap has real costs.

On paper, fun sounds simple. In practice, it keeps losing to everything else on the calendar.

Why Americans Are Not Having Enough Fun

Talker Research surveyed 5,000 U.S. adults (100 per state) on behalf of Dave & Buster’s between April 21 and May 1, 2026. Participants were asked about how often they had fun, what they liked to do, what got in the way, and what might help them prioritize it more. All respondents were internet-accessible adults, surveyed online.

When asked what kinds of activities count as fun, the answers were decidedly low-key. Watching TV topped the list at 77%, followed by spending time with family or friends (69%), dining out (59%), outdoor activities (50%), personal hobbies (49%), and playing games (48%). A third of respondents (37%) said they regularly think of something fun to do, only to scale it back or cancel when something more pressing comes up. Another 33% said adult responsibilities frequently force them to scrap fun plans altogether.

The average American who says they are not getting enough fun estimates they would need about 17 extra hours per week to fix that.

The Biggest Obstacles to Having Fun as an Adult

Money and time are doing most of the damage. Among those who said it is harder to have fun than it was a decade ago (52% of respondents) the top explanations were straightforward: 51% said they can no longer afford the same activities, 45% said their social circle has shrunk, and 42% pointed to having more responsibilities than before.

Cost and budget pressures were the most commonly cited barrier to fun overall, flagged by 57% of respondents. After that came personal schedule conflicts (34%), work obligations (31%), friends and family not having time (29%), general burnout (22%), and not knowing what to do (16%).

When asked what would help them prioritize fun more, the answers pointed in a clear direction. More than half (55%) said low-cost options would make the biggest difference. Beyond price, respondents said more free time (41%), more exciting options to choose from (32%), better coordination with friends (29%), feeling like an activity was worth the investment (29%), and less stress at work (22%) would all help.

Fun Reduces Stress and Strengthens Relationships, Survey Finds

When fun does happen, people notice the difference. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) said having fun helps them feel less stressed. More than half reported it made them feel more motivated (57%) and closer to the people in their lives (56%). And 89% said having fun with others helps them build and maintain stronger relationships.

“We’ve always believed that fun is one of the most powerful ways people connect,” said Melissa Powers, vice president of marketing at Dave & Buster’s. “Our State of Fun report makes it clear that people are craving more shared, in-person experiences & fun in their lives, but factors like cost, busy schedules and a lack of fresh entertainment options often get in the way.”

Powers also noted a broader pattern in how people are using their leisure time: “As life becomes increasingly busy and digitally driven, people are looking for places where they can connect in real life, share experiences and simply enjoy being together.”

Not everyone agreed that fun has gotten harder to come by. A smaller share (28%) said finding something fun to do is actually easier than it was 10 years ago. Among that group, the most common reasons were having fewer responsibilities (40%), having adult money (36%), being around people who enjoy having fun (34%), and having a better work-life balance (30%).

Source : https://studyfinds.com/half-americans-say-no-fun-in-life/

For most people, cheese is a guilty pleasure: something delicious but probably not great for you. That assumption may be worth revisiting. A recent study took a close look at three traditional British artisan cheeses and tracked how their bacterial communities and chemical profiles shifted from production to the moment they hit the dinner table. What researchers found raises real questions about what’s happening inside aging cheese and what that means for the trillions of microbes living in your gut.

Cheese has long been dismissed as a health-food nonstarter because of its fat and salt content. But scientists have been building a case for years that certain cheeses may actually reduce the risk of heart disease, strengthen bones, and even lower the odds of early death. No one has fully explained why. This new study, led by researchers at the University of Reading in the UK, takes a step toward answering that question by mapping exactly which bacteria are present in these cheeses and which chemical compounds they produce as the cheeses ripen.

Researchers studied three artisan cheeses made at Nettlebed Creamery in Henley, UK: a soft, white-rind cheese called Bix, a semisoft orange-rind cheese called Highmoor, and a firmer cheese called Witheridge that ages wrapped in hay. Each style represents a distinct cheesemaking tradition, and by the time the study was done, the differences between them were significant. The resultes are published in ACS Food Science & Technology.

How Researchers Tracked Bacterial Life Inside Artisan Cheese

To track changes in the cheeses, researchers collected samples at different stages of maturation and used two main tools. One was a DNA analysis technique that reads the genetic signatures of bacteria present in a sample, or essentially a census of microbial life inside each cheese. The other was a method that identifies and measures chemical compounds by exposing a sample to a powerful magnetic field. Together, these tools gave the team a detailed picture of both who was living in the cheese and what those microbes were producing.

Highmoor and Witheridge were sampled at a young stage, at a midpoint in maturation, and again when fully mature. Bix, which matures in just over a week, had only two sample points: young and mature. A fourth sample was also included: a version of Witheridge made with unpasteurized, or “raw,” milk, which allowed for a direct comparison with the standard pasteurized version.

What the Bacteria Revealed

Each cheese told a different story. Bix, the soft white-rind variety, had the shortest aging period — just nine days before packaging — and its bacterial population was dominated throughout by a species called Lactococcus lactis, recognized for its potential probiotic properties. Because Bix is also ripened using yeasts and molds that weren’t captured by the analysis method used in this study, the researchers noted that the cheese may actually have more microbial complexity than the data shows.

Highmoor, the orange-rind variety, showed a sharp jump in bacterial diversity between its young and midpoint samples, likely driven by the growth of rind bacteria during the washing process. In this technique, the cheese’s surface is repeatedly treated with a saltwater solution to encourage specific microbes responsible for its characteristic pinkish-orange color, pungent smell, and sticky texture. One bacterium found in Highmoor, Propionibacterium freudenreichii, is deliberately added to give the cheese its nutty flavor. It also produces a compound called propionate, which has been shown to have anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties and may play a role in regulating appetite and cholesterol production.

Witheridge, the hay-aged cheese, was the most dramatic case. Between its youngest and most mature samples, the number of observed bacterial species increased 3.8-fold. That’s the highest diversity seen across all three cheeses. Researchers believe the hay itself plays a role in this, stimulating the growth of bacterial species that wouldn’t normally thrive in a cheese environment, particularly during the months-long period when the cheese is vacuum-sealed with hay and left to ferment without oxygen. “As hay is a source of protein and fiber, we hypothesize that it stimulates the growth of bacteria that do not otherwise thrive in the cheese environment, particularly during the period where the hay was fermenting on the surface of the cheese anaerobically,” the authors write.

When the pasteurized version of Witheridge was compared to the raw milk version, the raw version showed a large number of bacterial species that couldn’t be accounted for. These were likely populations that survived because pasteurization, the heat treatment that kills many microbes, was never applied.

What the Chemistry Showed Inside Aging Cheese

On the chemical side, one of the most consistent findings across all three cheeses was the near-complete disappearance of lactose, the natural sugar in milk, as each cheese matured. In the youngest samples of Bix and Highmoor, lactose was clearly present. By the midpoint and mature stages, it was gone entirely. Bacteria convert lactose into other compounds, including lactic acid, as part of their normal metabolism. For people who are lactose intolerant, this could matter: mature cheeses appear to have their lactose almost fully consumed before they ever reach the shelf.

Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, were barely detectable in young samples of all three cheeses but increased noticeably as each cheese aged. Witheridge had the highest concentrations of these amino acids among the mature cheeses, which the researchers suggest may be partly due to that cheese having the lowest moisture content, making everything more concentrated.

Small molecules produced by bacterial fermentation — increasingly linked to gut health — were also detected in the mature cheeses. Propionate was found in both mature Highmoor and mature Witheridge. Butyrate, a compound associated with maintaining the lining of the gut, was found in mature Bix and Witheridge; the paper notes it may originate from clostridia, a common contaminant in cheese whose spores can survive pasteurization, so its source in these cheeses is uncertain. These are the same compounds that gut bacteria produce when they ferment dietary fiber, and their presence raises the possibility that these cheeses could contribute similar compounds to the gut; though how they behave after consumption still needs testing in people.

One unexpected finding involved the white rind on Bix. A mold used to create that rind produces a type of dietary fiber that research suggests can influence the immune system and alter bacterial communities in the gut, potentially acting as a prebiotic, a substance that feeds and supports beneficial gut bacteria. That soft, bloomy rind, the part many people cut off and discard, may actually be one of the most nutritionally interesting components of the cheese.

Not everything in the data is good news. Witheridge contained relatively high levels of a compound called succinate. While succinate plays a role in energy metabolism and immune regulation, high concentrations of it in the gut have been linked to inflammation and the growth of harmful bacteria. The authors note, however, that this only becomes a concern in excessive amounts, and that in moderate quantities it can actually support immune defense. They also pointed out that the DNA-based method used to identify bacteria cannot distinguish between living and dead cells, which means some of the potentially beneficial bacteria found in the mature cheeses may no longer be alive by the time the cheese is eaten.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/rich-salty-cheese-good-gut-health/

Ice Age Icebergs Left 3,000 Scratch Marks in the Great Lakes, and They Recorded Winds Blowing the Wrong Way

Along a meandering river in a warm and arid region that is now Thailand roughly 113 million years ago, a plant-eating behemoth almost 27m long browsed on the treetops without much fear of predators due to its sheer size. This was Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis, the largest-known dinosaur from Southeast Asia.

Researchers have unearthed skeletal remains of Nagatitan, a member of the dinosaur lineage called sauropods known for having a long neck, long tail, small head and four columnar legs.

The fossils of this Cretaceous Period dinosaur were first spotted by a villager in Thailand’s northeastern province of Chaiyaphum. Scientists over a period of years then dug up spine, rib, pelvis and leg bones including a front leg bone – the humerus – measuring 1.78m long.

Based on the dimensions of its humerus and femur, the corresponding hind leg bone, the researchers estimated Nagatitan’s body mass at 25 to 28 tons. Its head and teeth were not among the fossils recovered, but the researchers have a good idea of its feeding preferences based on other sauropods.

“Nagatitan was probably a bulk browser that focused on consuming high volumes of vegetation that required little to no chewing such as conifers and possibly seed ferns,” said Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul, a University College London doctoral student in palaeontology and lead author of the research published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The climate was probably subtropical, with some forests, but also savanna-like and shrubland habitats. Nagatitan lived alongside various other dinosaurs as well as flying reptiles called pterosaurs. The rivers were teeming with crocodiles and fish including freshwater sharks.

The ecosystem’s largest predator was a relative of the giant African meat-eating dinosaur Carcharodontosaurus, probably about 8m long and around 3.5 tons.

“At that size, it was dwarfed by Nagatitan. At full size, Nagatitan likely had very little to fear in terms of predation,” Sethapanichsakul said.

 

Source:https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/southeast-asia-largest-dinosaur-thailand-dig-up-nagatitan-chaiyaphumensis-6121511

Caring for a Loved One May Slow or Speed Mental Decline, Depending on the Burden

People With Stronger Focus May Pay Less Attention to Social Media Posts, Study Finds

Recent research has highlighted that walking approximately 8,500 steps each day might effectively prevent weight regain in individuals who have lost weight. Traditionally, the guideline for daily step count has been set at 10,000; however, this new finding indicates a lower threshold may suffice.

The study, conducted by specialists in the field of health and nutrition, found that maintaining this level of physical activity is crucial in solidifying weight loss achievements. The goal of 8,500 steps per day was determined based on observations of participants who had previously lost weight and aimed to sustain their new body weight.

Participants reported greater ease in adhering to this more attainable target compared to the higher 10,000 steps. The research implies that expectations around physical activity need to be re-evaluated to align better with individual capabilities without compromising health objectives.

Experts highlight that while walking is an effective and accessible form of exercise, the quantity should be tailored according to personal fitness levels. Consistency in this activity is deemed essential not only for physical health but also for mental well-being.

Dr. Emily Roberts, a prominent figure in weight management research, stated, “Walking is one of the simplest and most effective ways to maintain weight loss. Setting realistic targets can motivate individuals to stay active long-term.”

Source : https://www.indianewsnetwork.com/en/walking-8-500-steps-daily-may-help-prevent-weight-regain-20260511

A large new analysis of randomized trials has found that regular exercise can meaningfully boost the odds of staying smoke-free, and that even a single short workout can blunt the urge to light up for up to 30 minutes afterward.

Quitting smoking has never been easy. Standard treatments like nicotine patches, prescription medications, and counseling can roughly double or triple quit rates, but in the real world, fewer than one in five people manages to stay smoke-free at the 12-month mark. Relapse is common, fueled by side effects, cost, limited access to specialists, and the persistent pull of cravings. For many people, medication isn’t an option at all, whether because of health conditions, cost, or simply a preference to avoid drugs. That gap has researchers looking hard at behavioral strategies, and exercise keeps rising to the top of the list.

A team of researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis, a rigorous study that pools and analyzes findings from many individual trials, pulling together results from 59 randomized controlled trials involving more than 9,000 adults. Published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, the analysis makes a compelling case that exercise deserves a serious role in how smoking cessation is approached, both by individuals trying to quit and by the healthcare providers helping them.

The Numbers Behind the Sweat

The analysis separated the 59 trials into two categories: studies that looked at what happens after a single workout session, and studies that tracked people who exercised regularly over a longer period.

On the long-term side, pooling data from 23 trials involving more than 5,500 participants, the researchers found that people in exercise programs were 15% more likely to stay smoke-free throughout a defined follow-up period compared to those in control groups. A separate measure, looking at whether people had avoided smoking in the seven days before a check-in point, showed an even stronger result: a 21% higher likelihood of remaining smoke-free among exercisers. Regular exercise was also linked to smoking fewer cigarettes per day, with an average reduction of about two cigarettes daily compared to non-exercising control groups.

Those numbers may not sound dramatic, but they matter. In the world of smoking cessation, modest improvements compound over time, and any strategy that chips away at tobacco use carries real health benefits.

When Just One Workout Makes a Difference

Perhaps the most immediately practical finding involves what happens right after a single exercise session. Across 10 trials, a single bout of exercise produced moderate-to-large reductions in cravings immediately after finishing, with effects still detectable at the 10-minute, 20-minute, and 30-minute marks post-exercise.

Intensity mattered. High-intensity exercise produced the largest drop in cravings, followed by moderate-intensity activity. Low-intensity exercise showed only a small effect that wasn’t statistically meaningful. Sessions as short as 5 to 30 minutes were found to be effective for managing acute cravings.

The proposed explanation involves brain chemistry. Exercise is thought to trigger temporary increases in the brain’s feel-good signaling systems, including pathways tied to dopamine and natural opioid-like compounds, while also reducing the stress hormone cortisol. These changes may dial down the reward-seeking pull that makes cravings so hard to resist.

Not All Exercise Is Created Equal

When it came to what type of exercise was most beneficial for long-term quitting, aerobic exercise, think brisk walking, cycling, or treadmill workouts, showed the clearest, most consistent benefits. Other forms like resistance training, yoga, and high-intensity interval training appeared in fewer studies and produced more mixed or limited results, though some suggested potential benefits for cravings. The researchers noted that the evidence base for these non-aerobic options is simply not yet large enough to draw firm conclusions.

Session frequency also appeared to play a role. Programs involving one to two sessions per week showed larger effects on staying smoke-free than those requiring more frequent sessions, though the researchers cautioned that this finding warrants careful interpretation given the variability across study designs.

A Tool Most Smokers Haven’t Tried

Unlike prescription medications, exercise is generally low-risk for most people and does not require a prescription, though people with heart, lung, mobility, or other health concerns should check with a clinician before starting vigorous activity. Unlike some digital programs or counseling services, exercise can often be done without internet access or a specialist, especially when it is as simple as a brisk walk.

The paper also notes that exercise may help with several problems that often make quitting harder, including mood, sleep, anxiety, depression, and post-cessation weight gain, all common forces that push people back toward cigarettes.

One notable gap: not a single trial in the entire body of evidence examined whether exercise helps people quit vaping or e-cigarettes. Given how rapidly e-cigarette use has grown and how common dual use, smoking traditional cigarettes while also vaping, has become, the researchers called this absence a critical oversight. Future research, the authors stressed, needs to address this directly.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/exercise-quit-smoking/

Study Links UPFs To Rising Dementia Risk Scores

A stick of chewing gum probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about cancer prevention. But a new study suggests it might be worth a second look. Researchers loaded a gum with proteins derived from an edible bean and tested it against the specific viruses and bacteria most strongly tied to head and neck cancer. In lab experiments using real patient samples, the results were notable enough to push this idea toward clinical trials.

All of this work was done in a laboratory, not in living patients. No one chewed the gum and was monitored for health outcomes. Human clinical trials will be needed before anyone can say whether it works in practice. Still, the early data offers an intriguing glimpse of what might be possible.

Head and neck cancer, the kind that strikes the mouth, throat, and tonsils, accounts for an estimated 890,000 new cases worldwide every year, with roughly half of patients dying after treatment. Radiation can disrupt the mouth’s bacterial balance, reducing helpful bacteria and allowing harmful microbes to increase. Scientists have known for years that three specific oral microbes, HPV and two types of bacteria called Porphyromonas gingivalis (Pg) and Fusobacterium nucleatum (Fn), show up at much higher levels in cancer patients and are tied to worse outcomes. The researchers behind this study argue that practical, affordable ways to lower these microbes in the mouth are still needed.

A team from the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, the Veterans Administration Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, and the University of Kansas Medical Center set out to address that. Their approach was simple in concept: load a chewing gum with plant-derived proteins that attack cancer-associated microbes right where they live. The results, published in Scientific Reports, suggest these gums could one day serve as a powerful add-on to existing cancer treatments or even as a preventive tool for people at high risk.

How the Bean-Based Chewing Gum Study Worked

This was a lab-based study, meaning the researchers collected real biological samples from cancer patients and healthy volunteers, then tested the gum ingredients on those samples rather than having patients chew the gum directly. Saliva samples came from patients treated at the VA hospital in Los Angeles, while mouth-rinse samples were collected at the University of Kansas Medical Center. In total, the study drew on samples from dozens of head and neck cancer patients and cancer-free participants.

The gum contains two active ingredients. The first is a protein called FRIL, found naturally in the lablab bean, a legume eaten around the world. FRIL works like a molecular trap: it latches onto sugar structures on the surface of viruses, clumping virus particles together into large clusters that can no longer infect cells. The second ingredient is protegrin-1, an antimicrobial peptide first identified in pigs that has already been tested in advanced human clinical trials for mouth sores caused by chemotherapy. Protegrin-1 is especially effective at killing certain types of bacteria thanks to its shape, which is locked in place by chemical bonds that make it unusually stable.

To test the antiviral gum, the team mixed bean gum extract with patient samples and measured how much HPV remained free in the liquid. For the antibacterial tests, they combined the bean gum extract with protegrin-1 and let the mixture sit with patient samples for one hour at body temperature. They then grew bacteria from the treated and untreated samples on specialized plates designed to detect specific microbes and counted the colonies that formed.

Bean Gum Cleared HPV and Killed 99% of Cancer-Linked Oral Bacteria

The HPV results were eye-opening. Researchers found the virus in every single saliva sample from cancer patients and in about 75% of mouth-rinse samples. When treated with the bean gum extract, about 93% of HPV in saliva was trapped and removed. In mouth-rinse samples, about 80% of HPV-positive cases showed the virus being clumped together, with 13 out of 22 positive samples showing complete virus removal. Spinning the samples at high speed without the bean extract did nothing to remove the virus. It was the FRIL protein doing the work.

Cancer patients harbored staggering amounts of the two dangerous bacteria compared to cancer-free participants. Saliva from cancer patients contained roughly 1,000 times more Pg and Fn than samples from healthy controls, and mouth-rinse samples showed about 100 times more. A single dose of the bean gum plus protegrin-1 combination wiped out more than 99% of both bacteria across all sample types, a reduction the researchers described as statistically highly significant.

Just as telling as what the treatment killed is what it spared. Streptococcus bacteria, which include many species that are normal, healthy residents of the mouth, survived the treatment largely intact. Many Streptococcus species produce protective sugar coatings that shield them from protegrin-1’s attack. The bacteria linked to cancer, Pg and Fn, lack this protection, making them vulnerable. That built-in selectivity is a real advantage over radiation therapy, which can disrupt the entire oral bacterial community without discrimination.

The study also screened for other microbes. A bacterium called Leptotrichia buccalis, tied to precancerous mouth conditions, turned up in 97% of cancer patients’ mouth-rinse samples at levels 100 times higher than in healthy participants, and the treatment killed more than 99% of it. A yeast sometimes linked to oral cancer, Candida albicans, appeared at low rates in cancer patients and was absent from all healthy participant samples.

Why a Chewing Gum Could Go Where HPV Vaccines Cannot

One-third of men globally are infected with HPV according to a major review of 65 studies spanning 45,000 males across 35 countries, and one-fifth carry the high-risk HPV-16 strain most commonly linked to cancer. Although HPV vaccines exist in more than 100 countries, the rate of throat cancer has actually increased since vaccination programs began. HPV vaccines are injected into muscle and trigger a body-wide immune response, but they do not produce the type of immune defense that protects the moist surfaces of the mouth and throat. Vaccinated individuals can still harbor and transmit the virus orally. A gum that traps and removes HPV directly in the mouth could, in theory, offer a layer of protection that vaccines currently cannot, though this potential has not yet been tested in real-world conditions.

Safety is also part of the picture. The bean powder carries an FDA designation as “Generally Regarded as Safe,” and the dose in a single gum tablet is more than 6,000 times less than the amount consumed safely in human toxicology testing. The chewing gum formula has already been submitted to the FDA and approved for evaluation in a clinical trial targeting coronavirus infection and transmission. The individual components have established safety profiles, but the effectiveness and safety of this specific formulation for targeting oral cancer microbes still need to be validated in human trials.

Beyond the surface of the mouth, the researchers point out that FRIL can enter human cells and block viruses at a deeper level, and that protegrin-1 has been shown to get inside head and neck cancer cells. Prolonged local delivery through chewing could, in theory, fight microbes both outside and inside cancer cells. Whether this plays out in a patient’s mouth remains to be demonstrated.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/chewing-gum-fights-mouth-cancer-hpv/

 

The top predator prowling the seas during the age of the dinosaurs 100 million years ago may have been the octopus.

New analyses of fossilized jaws reveal that massive, kraken-like octopuses once hunted alongside other marine predators. They boasted eight arms and long bodies that extended more than 60 feet (18 meters), rivaling other carnivorous marine reptiles.

“These krakens must have been a fearsome sight to behold,” University of Alabama paleontologist Adiel Klompmaker said in an email. He had no role in the new research.

Dinosaur fans know that late Cretaceous-era waters were ruled by sharp-toothed sharks and sea reptiles known as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs.

Why do octopuses get left out of the mix? Scientists have studied giant octopus relatives that roamed when dinosaurs were around, and researched some small octopuses that drilled into clams. But since their soft bodies don’t preserve well, it’s hard to figure out exactly how big the creatures got.

There’s also a perception that squishy invertebrates — creatures without backbones — weren’t formidable enough to join the ranks of top predators. But octopus’ beaks made of stiffened chitin are tough enough to crush shelled and bony critters.

In the new study, researchers studied the jaws of 15 ancient octopus fossils that were previously found in Japan and Canada’s Vancouver Island. They also identified 12 more jaws from Japan using a technique they created called digital fossil mining, which closely scans rocks in cross-sections to reveal fossils hiding inside.

They compared the jaws to that of modern-day octopuses to estimate how large the creatures may have been, and determined that the ancient octopuses ranged from 23 to 62 feet (7 to 19 meters) in length. The largest jaw was substantially bigger than that of any modern octopus, said co-author and paleontologist Yasuhiro Iba with Hokkaido University in an email.

They also found that the largest creatures’ jaws had significant wear and tear including scratches, chips and rounded edges, suggesting that “the animals repeatedly crushed hard prey such as shells and bones,” said Iba.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Without access to the octopuses’ stomach contents, it’s hard to know for sure what they were eating or whether they truly competed with other top predators for their meals. They could have snacked on fish or snails, snatching prey with flexible arms and breaking it apart with their beaks.

Looking for octopus fossils in other places might help scientists get a clearer idea of how they factor into ancient food webs, said paleontologist Neil Landman with the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“It’s a big old planet,” said Landman, who wasn’t involved with the new research. “So we have lots to look at to piece together the marine ecosystem through time.”

Source: https://apnews.com/article/kraken-cretaceous-octopus-fossil-ab911a3fcae1f32443770308348cfbe6

A stick of chewing gum probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about cancer prevention. But a new study suggests it might be worth a second look. Researchers loaded a gum with proteins derived from an edible bean and tested it against the specific viruses and bacteria most strongly tied to head and neck cancer. In lab experiments using real patient samples, the results were notable enough to push this idea toward clinical trials.

All of this work was done in a laboratory, not in living patients. No one chewed the gum and was monitored for health outcomes. Human clinical trials will be needed before anyone can say whether it works in practice. Still, the early data offers an intriguing glimpse of what might be possible.

Head and neck cancer, the kind that strikes the mouth, throat, and tonsils, accounts for an estimated 890,000 new cases worldwide every year, with roughly half of patients dying after treatment. Radiation can disrupt the mouth’s bacterial balance, reducing helpful bacteria and allowing harmful microbes to increase. Scientists have known for years that three specific oral microbes, HPV and two types of bacteria called Porphyromonas gingivalis (Pg) and Fusobacterium nucleatum (Fn), show up at much higher levels in cancer patients and are tied to worse outcomes. The researchers behind this study argue that practical, affordable ways to lower these microbes in the mouth are still needed.

A team from the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, the Veterans Administration Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, and the University of Kansas Medical Center set out to address that. Their approach was simple in concept: load a chewing gum with plant-derived proteins that attack cancer-associated microbes right where they live. The results, published in Scientific Reports, suggest these gums could one day serve as a powerful add-on to existing cancer treatments or even as a preventive tool for people at high risk.

How the Bean-Based Chewing Gum Study Worked

This was a lab-based study, meaning the researchers collected real biological samples from cancer patients and healthy volunteers, then tested the gum ingredients on those samples rather than having patients chew the gum directly. Saliva samples came from patients treated at the VA hospital in Los Angeles, while mouth-rinse samples were collected at the University of Kansas Medical Center. In total, the study drew on samples from dozens of head and neck cancer patients and cancer-free participants.

The gum contains two active ingredients. The first is a protein called FRIL, found naturally in the lablab bean, a legume eaten around the world. FRIL works like a molecular trap: it latches onto sugar structures on the surface of viruses, clumping virus particles together into large clusters that can no longer infect cells. The second ingredient is protegrin-1, an antimicrobial peptide first identified in pigs that has already been tested in advanced human clinical trials for mouth sores caused by chemotherapy. Protegrin-1 is especially effective at killing certain types of bacteria thanks to its shape, which is locked in place by chemical bonds that make it unusually stable.

To test the antiviral gum, the team mixed bean gum extract with patient samples and measured how much HPV remained free in the liquid. For the antibacterial tests, they combined the bean gum extract with protegrin-1 and let the mixture sit with patient samples for one hour at body temperature. They then grew bacteria from the treated and untreated samples on specialized plates designed to detect specific microbes and counted the colonies that formed.

Bean Gum Cleared HPV and Killed 99% of Cancer-Linked Oral Bacteria

The HPV results were eye-opening. Researchers found the virus in every single saliva sample from cancer patients and in about 75% of mouth-rinse samples. When treated with the bean gum extract, about 93% of HPV in saliva was trapped and removed. In mouth-rinse samples, about 80% of HPV-positive cases showed the virus being clumped together, with 13 out of 22 positive samples showing complete virus removal. Spinning the samples at high speed without the bean extract did nothing to remove the virus. It was the FRIL protein doing the work.

Cancer patients harbored staggering amounts of the two dangerous bacteria compared to cancer-free participants. Saliva from cancer patients contained roughly 1,000 times more Pg and Fn than samples from healthy controls, and mouth-rinse samples showed about 100 times more. A single dose of the bean gum plus protegrin-1 combination wiped out more than 99% of both bacteria across all sample types, a reduction the researchers described as statistically highly significant.

Just as telling as what the treatment killed is what it spared. Streptococcus bacteria, which include many species that are normal, healthy residents of the mouth, survived the treatment largely intact. Many Streptococcus species produce protective sugar coatings that shield them from protegrin-1’s attack. The bacteria linked to cancer, Pg and Fn, lack this protection, making them vulnerable. That built-in selectivity is a real advantage over radiation therapy, which can disrupt the entire oral bacterial community without discrimination.

The study also screened for other microbes. A bacterium called Leptotrichia buccalis, tied to precancerous mouth conditions, turned up in 97% of cancer patients’ mouth-rinse samples at levels 100 times higher than in healthy participants, and the treatment killed more than 99% of it. A yeast sometimes linked to oral cancer, Candida albicans, appeared at low rates in cancer patients and was absent from all healthy participant samples.

Why a Chewing Gum Could Go Where HPV Vaccines Cannot

One-third of men globally are infected with HPV according to a major review of 65 studies spanning 45,000 males across 35 countries, and one-fifth carry the high-risk HPV-16 strain most commonly linked to cancer. Although HPV vaccines exist in more than 100 countries, the rate of throat cancer has actually increased since vaccination programs began. HPV vaccines are injected into muscle and trigger a body-wide immune response, but they do not produce the type of immune defense that protects the moist surfaces of the mouth and throat. Vaccinated individuals can still harbor and transmit the virus orally. A gum that traps and removes HPV directly in the mouth could, in theory, offer a layer of protection that vaccines currently cannot, though this potential has not yet been tested in real-world conditions.

Safety is also part of the picture. The bean powder carries an FDA designation as “Generally Regarded as Safe,” and the dose in a single gum tablet is more than 6,000 times less than the amount consumed safely in human toxicology testing. The chewing gum formula has already been submitted to the FDA and approved for evaluation in a clinical trial targeting coronavirus infection and transmission. The individual components have established safety profiles, but the effectiveness and safety of this specific formulation for targeting oral cancer microbes still need to be validated in human trials.

Beyond the surface of the mouth, the researchers point out that FRIL can enter human cells and block viruses at a deeper level, and that protegrin-1 has been shown to get inside head and neck cancer cells. Prolonged local delivery through chewing could, in theory, fight microbes both outside and inside cancer cells. Whether this plays out in a patient’s mouth remains to be demonstrated.

It’s also worth noting the bean gum tablets used in these experiments had been stored at room temperature for up to 33 months and still worked. That kind of shelf stability could make the product practical and affordable at a global scale, particularly given that plant-based medicines approved by the FDA cost less than 3% of comparable drugs produced through other methods.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/chewing-gum-fights-mouth-cancer-hpv/

 

A crab scuttling sideways across a beach is one of the most recognizable movements in the animal kingdom. The shuffle is so iconic that “crabwalk” has become part of everyday language. But scientists have long debated a deceptively simple question: Did crabs figure out this trick once, or did different groups independently arrive at it? A new study has an answer, and it turns out sideways walking appears to have evolved just once, a single behavioral shift that may have helped fuel the explosion of crab species across the planet.

Published in the journal eLife, the study filmed 50 living crab species and mapped their walking styles onto a family tree spanning hundreds of millions of years. Sideways movement appears to have originated in the ancestor of a massive group called true crabs. Based on previously published divergence estimates, that shift may have occurred around 200 million years ago near the start of the Jurassic period. According to the researchers, it may have helped crabs expand into a huge range of habitats, from deep-sea floors to tropical forests, and contributed to true crabs growing into roughly 7,900 species alive today.

Some lineages later reverted to walking forward again, multiple times independently. Those reversions tended to occur in species that had found other ways to avoid predators, like hiding inside clam shells or camouflaging themselves with seaweed. Once crabs no longer needed the escape advantage of darting sideways, some gave it up.

How Researchers Studied Crabs Walking Sideways
Scientists at Nagasaki University in Japan set up circular arenas, large plastic pools between roughly 2.5 and 4.5 feet across, filled with whatever environment each species naturally lives in. Each crab was given time to settle down, then released in the center and filmed for 10 minutes. Researchers tracked two landmarks on each crab’s shell frame by frame to determine which direction the animal moved relative to where its body was pointing.

Every movement was classified as forward, sideways, or backward, with backward movements rare enough to be excluded. A scoring system called the Forward-Sideways Index produced a value ranging from +1 for a purely forward-walking crab to -1 for a purely sideways-walking one. Of the 50 species studied, 35 were sideways movers and 15 were forward movers, with very little overlap between the two groups. Crabs, it seems, are fully committed to one direction or the other.

Crabs Walking Sideways Evolved Just Once on the Family Tree
Walking styles were then mapped onto an evolutionary tree of crabs built from genetic data covering 344 species. Statistical models pointed to a single origin of sideways walking at the base of a group that includes the vast majority of living true crabs. Earlier-branching lineages retained the forward-walking habit of their ancestors, and the probability that the common ancestor of all true crabs walked forward was estimated at 91 percent.

Model estimates put the number of independent reversions from sideways back to forward walking at around 10, while forward-to-sideways transitions happened roughly four times, mostly representing the original gain. One notable example: snow crabs likely underwent a secondary reversion back to sideways walking after their close relatives in the spider crab family had already switched to forward movement.

Why Crabs Walking Sideways Gave Them a Survival Edge
Sideways-walking crabs can bolt left or right with roughly equal swiftness, making their escape route unpredictable to a predator. Experiments with crab-like robots have backed this up: sideways movement turns out to be faster and more efficient than forward walking for a body built like a crab’s.

This escape advantage may help explain the species diversity gap between sideways-walking crabs and their closest relatives. Eubrachyura, the focal group where sideways movement dominates, contains about 7,468 described species, compared to just 110 in its nearest sister group and around 46 in the next closest relative.

If the external dating estimates hold, the origin of sideways walking lines up with the early Jurassic, right after the mass extinction that closed out the Triassic. That extinction would have opened ecological real estate: shallow marine habitats were expanding and competition was reduced. A crab that could escape predators by darting unpredictably in multiple directions would have had a serious edge. The researchers caution that separating the role of this behavioral shift from external factors like post-extinction opportunity will require further study.

The Crabs That Gave Up Sideways Walking
According to the authors, maintaining the sideways-walking body plan may come with tradeoffs, including changes to nerve wiring and joint flexibility that limit behaviors like burrowing and mating. When the pressure to escape predators was lifted by some other strategy, forward walking crept back in.

Many animals have converged on looking like a crab, a phenomenon called carcinization, but the study’s behavioral data show they don’t necessarily move like one. Porcelain crabs move mostly backward. King crabs and coconut crabs walk forward. Across the entire sweep of animal evolution, walking perpendicular to where your head points appears to be essentially a one-off invention, and only in true crabs has it stuck around long enough to reshape an entire group’s place in the natural world.

Source: https://studyfinds.com/why-crabs-walk-sideways/

Interest in magic mushrooms has surged in recent years, and new federal data put a number on just how widespread use has become. A federal survey found that roughly 8 million Americans used psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, last year.

Up to three in ten older adults die with significant amyloid plaques and Tau tangles in their brains yet never showed a single sign of mental decline while alive. Scientists have now identified a new mouse model that mimics this puzzling resilience, and the discovery was guided by artificial intelligence.

For decades, Alzheimer’s research has been shadowed by a strange paradox. Autopsies of elderly people who were mentally sharp until the day they died sometimes reveal brains loaded with the same protein damage found in patients with devastating dementia. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of cognitively intact older adults carry this level of brain pathology yet never lose their memory or thinking abilities, a condition researchers call “asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.” Nobody fully understands why some brains hold up while others collapse under the same burden.

A team at the University of California San Diego and Weill Cornell Medicine identified a living laboratory mouse that carries the molecular fingerprints of Alzheimer’s in its brain but learns and remembers just fine. The discovery came from an AI system trained to decode Alzheimer’s at the genetic level, sorting through large databases of human brain tissue data to identify a reliable genetic signature of the disease. Researchers then applied that signature to established mouse strains, revealing one that could serve as a stand-in for this silent form of Alzheimer’s. Having such a model opens the door to studying resilience directly and to developing treatments that could protect the brain before irreversible damage sets in.

AI Identified a New Alzheimer’s Mouse Model Using Gene Logic

The study, published in Acta Neuropathologica Communications, used a computational tool called the Boolean Network Explorer, or BoNE. Rather than looking for loose statistical correlations between genes, BoNE identifies strict, directional relationships between pairs of genes. These logical rules hold more stable across datasets than many traditional approaches, making them far less likely to shift depending on which group of patients is studied.

Researchers fed BoNE data from 70 cognitively normal individuals and 219 Alzheimer’s cases, and the tool produced a network of gene relationships capturing the core biology of the disease. From this, the team distilled a signature of 40 genes: 20 that ramp up in Alzheimer’s and 20 that dial down. When tested against 35 independent datasets spanning multiple brain regions, it outperformed 24 previously published Alzheimer’s gene signatures in its ability to tell diseased brains apart from healthy ones. It also picked up disease signals earliest in brain regions known to be affected first, confirming the AI had latched onto genuine disease biology rather than statistical noise.

From Human Data to a Living Mouse With Alzheimer’s Resilience

With a validated genetic signature in hand, researchers applied it to gene activity data from five widely used genetically engineered mouse strains. The goal was to find a mouse whose brain looked like Alzheimer’s at the molecular level but whose behavior told a different story.

A protein called Chromogranin A, or CgA, proved to be the key. CgA is found in nerve cells and support cells in the brain, its levels are elevated in the spinal fluid of Alzheimer’s patients, and it has been found tangled up with the toxic nerve fiber knots that characterize the disease. In earlier work, the researchers showed that deleting the CgA gene in mice engineered to develop a brain-tangling disease reduced damage and improved survival.

When the AI signature was applied to brain tissue from these CgA-deleted mice, the results split along sex lines. Male mice lacking CgA but carrying the disease genes showed Alzheimer’s-like molecular and pathological features, yet performed normally on tests of spatial learning and memory. Their brains had the disease markers; their minds did not. Female mice with the same genetic setup showed something more dramatic: their genetic scores clustered with healthy mice, and their brains showed additional layers of protection at every level examined.

Female Mice Showed Near-Complete Protection From Tau Damage

At the tiny junctions between nerve cells where memories are formed, healthy mice showed dense clusters of small bubble-like packages that ferry chemical signals across the gap. Diseased mice had lost most of them. Males lacking CgA recovered some of that density, but females lacking CgA came closest to matching healthy animals, retaining the kind of robust signaling machinery that memory depends on.

When researchers examined toxic Tau tangles, the sex divide was sharper still. Males lacking CgA still showed substantial tangles. Females lacking CgA were largely free of these tangles across multiple brain regions, with roughly a 23 percent reduction in one memory-center region and about a 33 percent reduction in another, compared to diseased mice.

These sex differences mirror a complicated reality in human Alzheimer’s research. Women face a higher lifetime risk of the disease and at symptomatic stages often carry a heavier Tau burden than men. But some studies suggest women may show greater early cognitive resilience, an advantage that appears to fade as disease advances. The mouse model captures this dynamic, pointing to female-specific protective mechanisms that may operate early but could eventually be overwhelmed.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/ai-unlocks-decades-old-alzheimers-mystery/

Loneliness doesn’t just ache emotionally. For older adults across Europe, feeling persistently lonely is tied to measurably worse memory, though not because it speeds up decline over time. A large new study tracking more than 10,000 Europeans over six years found that adults reporting high loneliness had lower memory scores from the start, but loneliness was not associated with faster memory loss as people aged, suggesting the gap is present from the outset rather than opening up gradually.

Many researchers have long believed loneliness acts like a slow poison on the brain, gradually wearing down thinking skills and eventually increasing dementia risk. But this study, published in the journal Aging & Mental Health, adds an important wrinkle to that view. Prior evidence is genuinely mixed, with some studies finding loneliness accelerates cognitive decline and others finding no effect at all. What this research contributes is a closer look at memory specifically, across a large, geographically diverse sample, over a defined six-year window.

That scope matters. If loneliness is a marker of already-lower memory performance rather than a force that accelerates decline, it changes how doctors and policymakers should think about stepping in, and when.

How Loneliness and Memory Were Measured

Researchers drew on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, known as SHARE, one of the largest ongoing studies of aging across the continent. They analyzed information from three waves of data collection spanning 2012 to 2019, covering participants from 12 countries including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Belgium, and Austria.

Altogether, 10,217 adults aged 65 to 94 made up the final sample. All had completed a loneliness assessment at the study’s starting point and taken part in all three waves. People already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, or who had trouble performing daily tasks, were excluded. Loneliness was measured using a three-question scale asking how often someone feels they lack companionship, feel left out, or feel isolated. Participants were sorted into low, average, and high loneliness groups; the low and average groups were combined and compared against the high loneliness group. About 7.7% fell into the high loneliness category.

Memory was tested at each wave using a word recall task. Participants heard a list of 10 words read aloud and tried to repeat back as many as possible within one minute for immediate recall, then did the same five minutes later for delayed recall.

Loneliness Linked to Lower Memory From the Start

At the study’s outset, the average immediate recall score was 5.4 out of 10 and delayed recall averaged 4.8. Adults with high loneliness started noticeably lower: immediate recall of 4.9 and delayed recall of 3.5, compared with 5.4 and 4.1 for everyone else. The differences were statistically significant.

When researchers tracked how memory changed over time, everyone’s scores declined slightly each year at roughly the same rate, regardless of loneliness level. High loneliness was associated with lower starting scores for both immediate and delayed recall, but had no measurable effect on how fast memory faded over six years.

Age was by far the strongest factor driving both lower baseline memory and faster decline. Adults aged 75 to 84 and those 85 and older showed significantly steeper drops compared to those aged 65 to 74. Diabetes also played a role in delayed recall, where it was linked to a faster rate of decline. Depression, high blood pressure, and poor self-rated health were all tied to lower memory scores at baseline but, like loneliness, didn’t change the speed of decline.

Being female, reporting good health, staying physically active, and participating in social activities such as volunteering, attending clubs, or taking classes were all linked to higher baseline memory scores.

Geographic patterns also emerged. Southern European countries reported the highest rates of high loneliness, while northern and central regions reported the lowest. Southern and eastern countries also showed weaker baseline memory scores, though researchers cautioned against reading those gaps as proof that geography causes memory problems. Historical factors, including nutritional hardship during and after World War II when many of these older adults were children, and socioeconomic stress could help explain the difference.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/feeling-lonely-already-affecting-memory/

Good Friends, Less Pain, and a Sense of Purpose: What Helps Older Adults Flourish

Getting older doesn’t have to mean a decline in mental health. A sweeping new study of 2,024 older Canadians found that roughly 74% weren’t just free of mental illness but were genuinely flourishing, reporting frequent happiness, life satisfaction, and a sense of purpose. That’s a far more optimistic picture of aging than most people expect.

But what separates seniors who thrive from those who struggle? Researchers from the University of Toronto and the Public Health Agency of Canada analyzed a nationally representative survey to identify which factors are most strongly linked to what psychologists call “complete mental health.” Going well beyond the absence of a diagnosis, the concept requires no mental illness, suicidal thoughts, or substance use problems over the past year, plus a mix of frequent happiness, meaning, and strong social and psychological well-being.

Published in PLOS ONE, the study drew its data from the 2022 Mental Health and Access to Care Survey, conducted by Statistics Canada. Researchers restricted their analysis to respondents aged 65 and older living across the country’s ten provinces.

How Researchers Defined Complete Mental Health
Qualifying as having complete mental health required clearing three bars at once: no mental illness, substance use disorder, or suicidal thoughts in the previous 12 months; feeling happy or satisfied with life almost every day in the past month; and regularly experiencing a range of positive feelings, including things like feeling useful, having purpose, and generally liking who they are. About 95% of older adults in the sample met the first criterion, while roughly 74% cleared the full, higher bar.

That gap matters. Nearly one in five older adults wasn’t technically ill but also wasn’t flourishing, and the study set out to understand what made the difference.

Social Bonds, Spirituality, and Complete Mental Health in Later Life
Social support stood out as one of the most powerful factors. Older adults who said they could count on others to help manage major stress were about twice as likely to achieve complete mental health compared to those who couldn’t. Being married or in a long-term partnership also made a meaningful difference, with partnered individuals showing roughly 33% higher odds of flourishing even after accounting for other factors.

Religious or spiritual beliefs played a stronger role than many might expect. Older adults who rated religion or spirituality as “very important” in daily life had about twice the odds of complete mental health compared to those who said it held no importance. Researchers note that faith communities may offer both social connection and a framework for finding meaning during hard times, two things consistently tied to better well-being in later life.

Physical health mattered enormously. Older adults who rated their own health as excellent had more than three times the odds of complete mental health compared to those who rated theirs as poor. Freedom from chronic pain, the ability to handle household tasks independently, and getting adequate sleep were all independently linked to better outcomes. Moderate physical activity in the week before the survey was tied to 24% higher odds of flourishing.

Older adults without a history of childhood adversity, including abuse or exposure to domestic violence, also fared better, still linked to higher odds of flourishing even after accounting for many other factors.

When a Difficult Past Leaves a Mark
A person’s mental health history proved to be among the strongest predictors of flourishing. Older adults who had never been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder had three times the odds of complete mental health, while those without a lifetime history of major depression had about 1.8 times the odds. Never having had a substance use disorder also boosted the likelihood of flourishing.

Men were more likely than women to report both no recent mental disorders and overall flourishing, though the study did not examine reasons for that difference.

Geography produced one of the more counterintuitive findings. Living in a large urban center was associated with 38% lower odds of complete mental health compared to rural living, a pattern that aligns with other research, which has suggested that factors like social isolation, noise, and air pollution may play a role.

Income produced mixed and unclear results. Higher earnings weren’t tied to flourishing once other factors were accounted for. More puzzling, those in the lowest income bracket actually had the highest rates of being free from mental disorders, outpacing higher earners, an unexpected pattern that runs counter to most prior research. Researchers flagged the finding as inconclusive and said it needs further study.

 

For years, ‘Pohlsepia mazonensis’ was believed to be the earliest known octopus, with what appeared to be eight tentacles, eyes, and possibly an ink sas

For over 20 years, a fossil named ‘Pohlsepia mazonensis’ was celebrated as the world’s oldest known octopus, dating back roughly 300 million years. It even made its way into the Guinness Book of World Records, shaping how scientists understood the evolution of these intelligent sea creatures. But new research now reveals that this ancient marine animal has been misidentified all along.

The fossil, was discovered at the Mazon Creek site in Illinois, USA. For years, it was believed to be the earliest known octopus, with what appeared to be eight tentacles, eyes, and possibly an ink sac, features that perfectly matched modern octopuses.

Using cutting-edge synchrotron imaging, scientists were able to peer deep inside the fossil like never before. What they found changed everything- rows of tiny teeth that simply do not match an octopus.

Lead researcher Thomas Clements from the University of Reading explained, “We basically used a wide selection of new analytical techniques to discover hidden anatomical characteristics within the rock. And we were able to determine that it is not an octopus, but is actually a very decomposed nautiloid.”

The fossil had decayed so much before it was preserved that it created a case of mistaken identity lasting over a decade.

Octopuses typically have fewer teeth per row, but this fossil had 11, a clear sign it belonged to a different group altogether. Instead, researchers now say the creature is more closely related to a nautilus, a shelled marine animal that still exists today.

So how did experts misread it for decades? The answer lies in decay.

Before fossilisation, the animal’s body had already started breaking down, masking key features like its shell. What remained looked soft and sack-like, eerily similar to an octopus.

Source: https://www.news18.com/viral/why-is-a-300-million-year-old-octopus-trending-the-fossil-everyone-got-wrong-for-decades-ws-l-10026849.html

Solid, liquid, gas. Most people learn about three states of matter in school and leave it at that. But deep inside planets far larger than Earth, where pressures millions of times greater than anything on our surface squeeze atoms into forms that defy easy description, matter can enter states that don’t fit neatly into any of those categories.

Now, a team of researchers has predicted a carbon-hydrogen compound that, under crushing pressure and extreme heat, enters a state where hydrogen atoms move in a tightly constrained way, mostly along a single direction while simultaneously spinning within a flat plane, like beads twisting on a wire as they slide along it.

Published in Nature Communications, the study used computer simulations to map how a simple carbon-hydrogen compound behaves under the kinds of pressures found deep inside massive planets. What emerged was a newly predicted state of matter, one in which carbon atoms lock into a rigid, corkscrew-shaped crystal framework while hydrogen atoms move in this constrained, partially rotational way. Researchers called this a “quasi-1D superionic” phase, distinct from solids, liquids, plastics, and even the three-dimensional superionic states scientists have studied for years.

To understand why any of this matters, it helps to know a bit about superionic materials. In a superionic state, one type of atom forms a solid crystal while another flows through it almost like a liquid. Superionic water ice, for instance, has been produced in laboratory experiments under extreme pressure, with oxygen atoms staying locked in place while hydrogen moves freely in all directions. Scientists believe such materials exist deep inside ice giant planets, helping to generate their famously lopsided magnetic fields. In the newly predicted quasi-1D state, hydrogen’s movement is tightly constrained to one dominant axis combined with rotation in a plane, and that directional bias shapes how the material conducts electricity and heat.

A New State of Matter Built from Carbon and Hydrogen

Researchers Cong Liu, R.E. Cohen, and Jian Sun relied on computational methods rather than attempting to recreate planetary interiors in a laboratory, combining first-principles physics simulations with machine-learning tools that allowed them to model atomic interactions over longer timescales and larger systems than traditional approaches alone would permit.

Starting from the question of which carbon-hydrogen structures could remain stable under enormous pressures, the team identified a compound with equal parts carbon and hydrogen (written as CH) that holds together above roughly 1,000 gigapascals. At those pressures, electrons rearrange themselves in a way that makes the material electrically conductive. But the really surprising behavior only emerged when the simulations turned up the heat.

As temperature rose, the carbon atoms locked into a rigid, spiraling lattice shaped like a corkscrew. Hydrogen atoms, meanwhile, began rotating within a flat plane while simultaneously drifting along a single perpendicular axis, the spinning-and-sliding motion described above. As temperatures climbed further, hydrogen eventually broke free of those constraints and began moving in all three directions, entering a more familiar 3D superionic state. At even higher temperatures, the whole compound melted into a fluid. Simulations produced a phase diagram charting all four states: solid, quasi-1D superionic, 3D superionic, and fluid, mapped across rising pressure and temperature.

What Makes This Phase Unusual

Because hydrogen moves mainly along one axis while also rotating within a plane, the material’s ability to conduct electricity and heat depends heavily on direction. Conductivity along the primary axis of hydrogen flow is notably higher than in perpendicular directions. Electronic transport dominates the overall conductivity; the contribution from the mobile hydrogen atoms themselves turns out to be negligible by comparison.

Carbon’s framework structure in this compound is also striking in its own right. It is “chiral,” meaning it cannot be overlapped with its own mirror image, much like a left hand cannot be placed directly over a right. That property emerges naturally from the extreme conditions, producing a twisting scaffold through which hydrogen threads its path.

What This Means for Giant Planet Science

Carbon-hydrogen chemistry in extreme environments has attracted scientific interest for years, partly because methane (the simplest hydrocarbon) is abundant in the atmospheres of ice giant planets. Under pressure, methane breaks apart, potentially producing materials including diamond. What happens to simpler carbon-hydrogen compounds under even more extreme conditions has been less understood.

Among the states predicted in this study, the 3D superionic phase falls within temperature and pressure ranges that, according to existing models of Neptune’s interior, may be relevant to that planet. The quasi-1D phase, however, requires pressures more extreme than what’s expected inside Uranus or Neptune specifically. The researchers themselves note that those pressures are unlikely to occur in those particular planets, and they make no direct claim of planetary or magnetic modeling relevance for the quasi-1D state. More massive worlds, sub-Neptune exoplanets in particular, could plausibly reach the conditions where this phase would stabilize.

Rather than a prediction about what’s happening inside Uranus or Neptune right now, this is better understood as a new piece in the larger puzzle of how carbon and hydrogen behave under compression, and what that might mean for the interior dynamics of a wider class of planets far beyond our solar system.

Why Directional Transport Changes the Picture

Many models of how giant planets generate magnetic fields assume that interior materials conduct electricity and heat equally in all directions. A material that conducts primarily along one axis would behave very differently, potentially channeling energy and electric charge in preferred directions through a planet’s deep layers.

Uranus and Neptune already have strikingly unusual magnetic fields compared to Earth’s. While Earth’s field is relatively symmetric and roughly aligned with its rotation axis, those of Uranus and Neptune are tilted, offset from the planetary centers, and far more irregular. Understanding why demands better models of what planetary interiors are made of and how those materials move heat and electricity, and results like this one help fill in that picture.

No probe has ever descended into the deep layers of Uranus or Neptune, and laboratory experiments capable of reaching the pressures involved are still in their early stages. Computational predictions like this one serve as a roadmap, giving experimentalists targets to pursue and giving planetary scientists new physical mechanisms to test against future data. NASA has identified a Uranus orbiter and probe as a high priority for the coming decades, and work like this will shape what scientists know to look for.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/new-state-of-matter/

Every day, millions of people reach for hand soaps, cleaning sprays, and laundry products stamped with the word “antibacterial,” believing they’re getting extra protection. A growing body of evidence suggests those added germ-killing chemicals aren’t just unnecessary in most household situations. According to a new viewpoint paper published in Environmental Science & Technology, they may help create conditions that make dangerous infections harder to treat.

Drug-resistant bacteria, often called superbugs, already kill more than one million people a year worldwide. That toll is projected to reach two million annual deaths by 2050. Global health efforts have mostly zeroed in on antibiotic overuse in hospitals and on farms, but an international team of researchers argues there’s a critically overlooked front in that fight: the bathroom sink, the kitchen counter, and the washing machine.

Corresponding author Miriam L. Diamond, a professor at the University of Toronto, and her co-authors make the case that germ-killing chemicals in everyday consumer goods are seeping into waterways, soils, and even drinking water, creating conditions that breed resistant bacteria. Their paper calls for action at every level, from international health policy down to individual shopping choices.

The Chemical in Antibacterial Soap Turning Up Everywhere

At the heart of the paper’s concern is a chemical called benzalkonium chloride, sometimes listed on product labels as ADBAC. It belongs to a family of compounds called quaternary ammonium compounds, or QACs, and it shows up in hand soaps, cleaning sprays, clothing, plastics, and personal care products. Researchers have detected it in a wide range of places, including wastewater, rivers, soils, and even drinking water. Human studies have found it in blood and breastmilk.

When bacteria encounter low-level, repeated doses of benzalkonium chloride, concentrations too weak to kill them outright, something troubling happens. Resistant species thrive, and those bacteria develop resistance not only to the cleaning chemical itself but to clinically important antibiotics as well, including fluoroquinolones, beta-lactams, and tetracyclines, drug classes that doctors rely on to treat serious infections. Lab studies and real-world field research have documented this across gym surfaces, sewage sludge, soil, and drinking water sources.

Bacteria pull off this trick through several shared defense mechanisms: molecular pumps that flush out toxic chemicals, changes to their outer membranes, and the ability to swap resistance genes with entirely different species. Once those defenses develop, they stick around long after the chemical exposure ends.

Other germ-killing ingredients in consumer products raise similar concerns. Chlorhexidine, for example, has been shown in lab studies to encourage resistance in a dangerous bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae to colistin, described in the paper as a last-resort treatment used when nearly every other antibiotic option has failed.

From Household Drains to Drinking Water

One of the more alarming pathways described in the paper traces these chemicals from household drains to wastewater treatment plants and back into the broader environment. About a quarter of QACs used globally each year enter the environment through disposal, discharge, or runoff. Most of the rest flow to wastewater treatment plants, which also receive waste from hospitals carrying heavy loads of germ-killing chemicals and resistant organisms.

At those facilities, the chemicals mostly bind to solid waste byproducts, but liquid discharges can still carry concentrations high enough to favor resistant bacteria. Wastewater plants are themselves recognized hotspots for resistance: dense, diverse bacterial populations mingling under chemical stress create conditions that can help microbes trade resistance genes with one another. When contaminated solid waste is then spread on agricultural land, a common practice, the chemicals move into soils and surface waters, extending the problem further. Benzalkonium chloride is particularly persistent in waterway sediments because it binds tightly to particles, shielding it from breaking down.

Antibacterial Soap Offers No Clear Added Benefit Over Regular Soap

Perhaps the most uncomfortable conclusion in the paper is that many of these germ-killing products offer no clear added public health benefit in most everyday settings. Major health authorities, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, already recommend plain soap and water over antibacterial soap for consumers, citing a lack of added benefit alongside concerns about ingredient toxicity and resistance.

Antibacterial laundry sanitizers land in the same category. According to the paper, disinfection is not necessary for routine household laundering, and ordinary detergent combined with hot water removes most microbes from fabrics just fine. Consumers are paying extra for products laced with chemicals that provide no safety advantage but quietly contribute to a worsening global health crisis.

A Four-Part Plan to Curb Antibacterial Overuse

Diamond and her co-authors lay out a four-part response. At the international level, they argue that global resistance frameworks should set explicit targets for reducing unnecessary germ-killing chemicals in consumer products and expand monitoring to track these compounds in wastewater and surface waters.

Nationally, governments should restrict germ-killing ingredients in household products where evidence of effectiveness is weak and resistance potential is clear. Worth noting, the United Kingdom has already introduced a private members’ bill to Parliament that would restrict antimicrobials in consumer goods. Public awareness campaigns should also correct widespread misconceptions about whether antibacterial products are actually necessary for daily hygiene.

On the industry side, the authors call for levies on environmentally persistent germ-killing chemicals as an economic push toward safer formulations. At the individual level, when genuine disinfection is needed at home, hydrogen peroxide and alcohol-based products can achieve similar or better germ-killing results in many situations, with shorter contact times and a lower demonstrated potential to drive resistance.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/antibacterial-soap-fueling-global-health-crisis/

 

In a darkened control room in Navi Mumbai, 100 operators oversee bots monitoring 30,000 ATMs across India.

Their cameras, sensors and bots do the work that 60,000 security guards once did.

That control room is a small window into something much larger.

Across India, the quiet machinery of automation has been reshaping – and in many cases, eliminating – the jobs that the middle class was built on. And the middle class is only now beginning to reckon with what that means.

As stable incomes come under pressure, many are turning to riskier ways of making money to bridge the gap.

Consider VS, a 27-year-old BTech graduate from a small town near Bhilwara city in western Rajasthan state. He earns 14,000 rupees ($151; £113) a month as a freelance salesperson.

Last year, he lost 1.3m rupees – nearly his entire family’s savings – trading Futures and Options (F&O) on the stock market. He is one of nine million Indians doing the same thing – and are collectively losing over $12bn a year. That figure is roughly equal to the federal government’s entire annual education budget.

These are not gamblers. They are educated, aspirational people with nowhere else to put their ambitions.

Or consider Rahul Singh, a delivery agent with a food delivery app. Singh explained that he borrowed money not just to finance his home renovation, which is a discretionary spend, but also for “covering essential expenses, such as rent, medical bills and any other unforeseen expenses, which were critical for survival”.

VS and Singh come from different layers of India’s vast middle class and they are socially and economically different. But their predicament is anything but different.

These are not cautionary tales about individual failure. They are portraits of a class under pressure – the 40 million income taxpayers who earn between 500,000 ($5,283; £3,969) and 10m rupees annually, and who form the productive core of the Indian economy.

Something is going wrong for them, as we discovered while researching our new book, and it is happening on multiple fronts at once.

White-collar job creation – the kind of employment that an engineering or commerce degree was supposed to guarantee – has fallen from 11% growth before 2020 to just 1% today, according to Naukri Jobspeak Index.

The decline didn’t begin with AI. Automation had been hollowing out middle-skill work since the early 2000s, quietly eliminating the clerical roles, bookkeeping jobs and sales positions that once absorbed India’s graduates.

But AI has dramatically accelerated the disruption. India’s IT services sector – the country’s largest graduate employer with eight million workers – is in active retrenchment.

The government’s own planning body, Niti Aayog, estimates that by 2031, AI could eliminate close to three million IT and customer service jobs. The CEOs of India’s most profitable companies speak openly to us about using AI to cut salary bills by a third.

At one large private bank, a single AI tool now handles 95% of customer queries that once required a 3,000-strong call centre team.

Into this contracting market, eight million new graduates arrive every year.

The results are becoming hard to ignore. At IIT Bombay – one of India’s top technology institutes that was once a near-guaranteed passport to prosperity – fresh graduates are leaving with lower salaries than their predecessors.

Across IITs nationally, 8,000 of 21,500 graduates remain unemployed. The IIT degree, long India’s most coveted credential, is beginning to look less like a golden ticket and more like a lottery.

Even for those who find work, something has quietly gone wrong with the economics of middle-class life.

Over the past decade, the average middle-class income taxpayer’s annual income has grown by around 50,000 rupees – roughly the price of a decent smartphone. In isolation, that sounds like progress. Against the actual cost of living, it is a slow erosion.

Recent research shows a vegetarian thali (an Indian meal comprising several small dishes) now costs 11% more each year, an entry-level car or motorcycle rises by 7 to 8% annually and medical costs climb at 14%.

Our estimate – based on spending patterns for typical middle-class households across rent (10-13%), food (7-9%), healthcare (around 14%) and education (8-10%) – suggests that the true cost of living is doubling roughly every eight years, implying an effective inflation rate of about 9% for this group.

A family that lived comfortably on 1m rupees in 2016 would now need close to 2m a year.

Their salary, in most cases, has barely moved. The middle class is on a treadmill, and every year the belt speeds up.

The debt is real, and it is growing.

The gap between what people earn and what life costs has to be filled somehow. Increasingly, it is being filled with borrowed money. India’s non-housing household debt as a share of income now exceeds that of the United States and China.

Nearly half of all Indian families have taken personal loans; 67% of borrowers had their first loan before the age of 30. For those carrying debt, nearly 40% of annual income goes to servicing it.

This borrowing isn’t building anything. It is financing holidays, smartphones, school fees and hospital bills – consumption and survival, not investment.

Between 5% to 10% of retail borrowers are caught in what lenders call a debt trap: taking new loans to pay old ones, with no clear exit.

In western Pune city’s Hinjewadi tech park, young engineers with degrees and debt queue up each morning for walk-in interviews at BPO firms, hoping to land data entry jobs paying 18,000 rupees a month. This is what the compression looks like at ground level.

The consequences are rippling outward.

FMCG volume growth has dropped from 11% some 14 years ago to 3% today. Car sales are stagnant. Consumer durables growth has collapsed from 11% to 1-2%.

When we speak with the leadership of India’s largest consumer companies, there is a particular expression – stunned, a little lost – that keeps appearing. The Indian consumer, they are slowly realising, has stopped spending. Not as a lifestyle choice but because they can’t – after a brief, post-Goods and Services Tax (GST)-cut burst of spending that now appears to be fading.

This matters beyond household balance sheets. Consumption accounts for 60% of India’s GDP. India’s post-1991 growth model was built on a specific and elegant logic: middle-class spending creates demand, demand creates jobs, jobs create more spending. A virtuous cycle, three decades in the making. That cycle has broken.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg5g3pjy06o

Nobody taught Ayumu to make a drum. Nobody taught him to keep a beat. Yet for more than two years, the 23-year-old chimpanzee living at a research center in Japan has been prying wooden floorboards off a walkway, repurposing them as percussion instruments, and staging structured, multi-part rhythmic performances. He is, as far as researchers know, part of a rare documented case of a chimpanzee repurposing objects as instruments and using them in extended, organized displays, and what he does with that instrument may offer clues about how human music evolved.

Where music came from is one of the more genuinely open questions in human evolutionary science. One leading theory holds that rhythmic sound-making grew out of older, emotion-driven vocal behaviors common across primates, a kind of ancient shared root between calling out and playing music. Ayumu’s behavior, spontaneous and untrained, offers a behavioral case that, for the first time, offers a behavioral case that brings together tool use, rhythm, and emotional expression in a way rarely documented in non-human animals.

Researchers at Kyoto University’s Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior documented his performances over more than two years and published their findings in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

How Ayumu Invented His Own Chimpanzee Drumming Tool

Observations ran from February 2023 to March 2025. Whenever Ayumu’s displays could be heard, researchers filmed the sessions. Over the study period, they captured 89 distinct sequences across 37 observation days.

At least twice, Ayumu was filmed removing floorboards from the corridor walkway himself, meeting the scientific definition of tool-making. No other chimpanzee in the group consistently did the same. He had prior experience with electronic keyboards and touch panels at the center, but had never received any training in drumming or rhythm production. He arrived at this behavior entirely on his own.

Each recorded sequence was broken down into its parts: tool-assisted drumming, bodily drumming against a wire fence, object dragging, object rocking, walkway running, and object throwing. Two trained observers coded the footage independently and reached a strong reliability score. Statistical analyses then asked a simple question: was the order in which Ayumu moved through those behaviors random, or did it follow a pattern?

What Researchers Found in Ayumu’s Chimpanzee Drumming Displays

Ayumu’s sequences were not random. Two transitions occurred far more often than chance would predict: drumming consistently led to dragging, and dragging consistently led to throwing. That progression, from slow heavy percussion to rapid scraping to a climactic throw, resembles the introduction-development-climax structure of the pant-hoot, the chimpanzee’s signature long-distance call. In wild chimpanzees, object throwing is typically associated with the vocal peak of a pant-hoot, and the same pattern appeared here. Ayumu’s sequence closely resembled what pant-hoots do vocally.

His rhythm also held up under scrutiny. Analysis of the timing between drum hits showed that Ayumu favored a steady, even beat rather than random or erratic intervals. A regular beat is one of the most consistently documented features of human music across every culture ever studied. His sequences ran between two and fourteen distinct components each, with the whole performance sometimes lasting several minutes, far longer than the few seconds of drumming typically observed in wild chimpanzees.

When Ayumu drummed with the fabricated floorboard rather than his bare hands and feet, his rhythm was measurably more consistent. Studies of human drummers have found similar patterns. Tapping with sticks produces a more stable rhythm than tapping with fingers alone.

A Drummer Who Grins While He Plays

Perhaps the most unexpected detail was what was happening on Ayumu’s face. During many sessions, he displayed what primatologists call a play face, a relaxed open-mouthed expression associated with positive, non-aggressive arousal. On a handful of occasions, he also showed a silent bared teeth expression, typically linked to friendly, tension-reducing social signals. Neither expression had previously been documented during pant-hoot displays.

Researchers noted that “Ayumu’s drumming suggests not only a display, but also the experience of intrinsically positive emotions associated with the production of sounds, similar to human musical performance.” Research on human music across cultures has found that musical performance frequently expresses high-arousal, positive emotional states. Ayumu’s face during his performances fits that same profile.

Ayumu is the alpha male of his group of 11 adult chimpanzees, a social position researchers note may have contributed to his repeated use of loud, conspicuous drumming as a display. No other chimpanzee in the group adopted the same behavior consistently throughout the study.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/chimpanzee-playing-music/

That Fitness App May Not Be So Healthy After All, Especially For Teens

That Fitness App May Not Be So Healthy After All, Especially For Teens

6 in 10 Adults Don’t Lift Weights, but New Research Says Almost Any Routine Works

A pill that tens of millions of Americans already take every morning may do something scientists have long hoped to prove: slow the biological clock ticking inside their cells.

A large randomized clinical trial published in Nature Medicine found that adults who took a daily multivitamin-multimineral supplement for two years showed measurably slower biological aging compared to those who took a placebo. Researchers tracked the effect using epigenetic clocks, molecular tools that read chemical marks on DNA to estimate how fast a person’s body is aging, independent of how many birthdays they’ve had.

The effect was modest, not dramatic. But in a field where most anti-aging research involves extreme interventions like severe caloric restriction or experimental drugs, the idea that an over-the-counter multivitamin could register a detectable change in the biology of aging is worth taking seriously.

What Epigenetic Clocks Actually Measure

As people age, chemical tags accumulate on their DNA in predictable patterns. Scientists have learned to read those patterns as a kind of biological age, one that can differ meaningfully from a person’s actual age. Two 70-year-olds can look quite different at the cellular level. One’s cells may behave like those of a 65-year-old; the other’s may behave more like those of a 75-year-old. Those differences are linked to real health outcomes, including cognitive decline, cancer risk, and cardiovascular disease.

Researchers focused on two well-validated epigenetic clocks, PCGrimAge and PCPhenoAge, both trained to predict mortality and disease risk rather than simply estimate age. Adults taking a daily multivitamin-multimineral supplement, specifically Centrum Silver, showed a slower rate of increase on both measures over two years. Over that period, the difference translated to roughly two and a half to five months of reduced biological aging compared to placebo. That’s a small number, but it’s a number produced by a supplement most older Americans can walk into any pharmacy and buy for under $20.

Who Benefited Most From Daily Multivitamin Use

The data held a particularly interesting finding for people who were already aging faster than their chronological age at the start of the study. Among participants whose biological age was running ahead of their actual age, the multivitamin’s effect was considerably stronger than it was in the rest of the group. For those with the most accelerated biological aging at baseline, the slowing effect on PCGrimAge was considerably stronger than it was for participants whose biological age was tracking normally, while those in the normal or decelerated range saw little to no benefit at all.

A pattern in the nutritional data may help explain why. Participants with accelerated biological aging tended to have lower levels of key nutrients like folate and lutein at baseline, and multivitamin use appeared to raise those levels over time. One reasonable interpretation: when nutritional gaps are quietly driving faster cellular aging, filling them in may ease some of that biological strain. Since COSMOS participants were generally healthy older adults, the benefit could be even more pronounced in populations with poorer diets or greater nutritional deficiencies.

The trial also tested cocoa extract, rich in compounds called flavanols that have shown cardiovascular benefits in other research. Despite earlier lab-based signals that flavanols might influence DNA methylation, the cocoa extract had no meaningful effect on any of the five epigenetic clocks tested. The researchers suggested that its cardiovascular benefits, which have been documented in the broader COSMOS trial, may operate through biological pathways that these particular aging clocks don’t capture.

How The Multivitamin Study Was Run

The findings come from COSMOS, a large randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that enrolled more than 21,000 adults across the United States. For this specific analysis, 958 participants, women 65 and older and men 60 and older, were randomly selected for DNA methylation testing, with blood samples drawn at the start of the study and at one and two years of follow-up. Their average age was 70, and roughly half were women. Compliance was high throughout, with more than 91 percent of the multivitamin group still taking the supplement as directed at the two-year mark.

Five epigenetic clocks were evaluated in total. Statistically significant slowing appeared only in the two second-generation clocks, PCGrimAge and PCPhenoAge, though trends in the right direction were visible across most of the others. The third-generation clock, DunedinPACE, which measures the speed of biological decline across multiple organ systems, showed a nonsignificant trend toward slowing in the multivitamin group as well.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/taking-a-daily-multivitamin-might-help-slow-how-fast-you-age/

Low Testosterone May Worsen Fructose-Related Fatty Liver Risk

Severe COVID-19 raises lung cancer risk by 24%, study of 76 million Americans finds

Somewhere between the ear and conscious awareness, something gets lost. A new study found that after just 12 minutes of passive exposure to labeled AI and human voices, the brain begins processing them as measurably distinct categories. Consciously, though, participants remained essentially unable to tell the difference. Their ability to correctly identify AI voices barely changed. Their brain activity, on the other hand, told a different story.

Published in eNeuro by researchers at Tianjin University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the study used brain recordings to track how the auditory system responds to AI-generated speech before and after a brief training session, then compared that neural data to what participants consciously reported. What emerged was a clear disconnect: the brain was quietly adapting to synthetic voices in ways that never surfaced as better detection ability. Researchers call it a neural-behavioral dissociation, and understanding it may hold the key to building training programs that can help people catch voice deepfakes before they cause harm.

“Our study shows that even when listeners cannot behaviorally distinguish AI-generated voices from real human voices, brief perceptual training enables their brains to detect subtle acoustic differences,” the authors wrote. Given how rapidly AI voice technology is advancing, and how easily it can be used for fraud and impersonation, closing that gap between brain and behavior is now a practical concern as much as a scientific one.

How Researchers Built and Tested the AI-Generated Voices

Three native Mandarin speakers, two women and one man, each recorded 67 short sentences. Those recordings were then fed into GPT-SoVITS, a widely available open-source voice-cloning tool, to produce two types of synthetic speech per speaker. One version was fine-tuned on each speaker’s own recordings, producing a close imitation of their voice. A second version was generated without additional fine-tuning, relying solely on short audio samples, which still sounded human but bore a weaker resemblance to the specific speaker.

Thirty adults between ages 20 and 32, all native Mandarin speakers with no neurological history, participated while wearing a 64-electrode EEG cap that records electrical brain activity in real time. In the first session, they listened to 297 randomly ordered sentences drawn from all three voice types and pressed a button after each one to label the speaker as human or AI. No feedback was given on their guesses.

Then came the training phase. Participants heard nine longer audio clips, one per speaker-voice combination, explicitly labeled as either human or AI. No instructions told them what to listen for. The whole thing lasted roughly 12 minutes. After that, a second test session began with a fresh set of sentences.

Why AI Voice Detection Fails at the Conscious Level

Behavioral results were discouraging but not surprising. Participants performed poorly at distinguishing human from AI speech in both sessions. Statistical analysis confirmed that training produced no significant improvement in conscious discrimination ability. What did shift was strategy: after training, participants became more likely to label voices as AI-generated overall, a sign of increased caution rather than sharpened skill.

Part of what makes conscious detection so difficult may come down to the acoustic properties of the voices themselves. Analysis of the speech recordings revealed that AI-generated voices differ from human ones in the fine, rapid fluctuations that characterize natural speech, the micro-level variations in how a voice moves through individual sounds. Modern AI synthesis does an impressive job mimicking the broad, overall character of a human voice, but it may fall short in precisely reproducing these moment-to-moment dynamics. These acoustic differences may contribute to why listeners struggle to identify synthetic voices, though the study did not establish this as a definitive cause.

Where the Brain and Behavior Split on Deepfake Voice Detection

EEG recordings told a story the behavioral data couldn’t. Using a method called temporal response function analysis, which tracks how closely the brain’s electrical activity follows the contours of incoming sound over time, researchers compared neural responses to human and AI voices before and after training. Before training, no meaningful neural distinctions emerged between voice types. After training, the brain showed clear, statistically significant differences in how it processed human versus AI speech at approximately 55 milliseconds, 210 milliseconds, and 455 milliseconds following each sound, spanning early acoustic processing all the way through to higher-level interpretation.

In plain terms, after just 12 minutes of labeled exposure, the brain had begun responding differently to AI and human voices, even as the individual kept pressing the wrong button.

Broader analyses of brain wave patterns and spatial electrical activity across the scalp found no significant differences between voice types, suggesting the training effect was specific to how the brain tracks fine acoustic detail in real time rather than reflecting widespread changes in neural activity.

What Short-Term Training Could Mean for Catching AI Voice Fakes

The neural data suggests the auditory system may already register subtle differences between human and AI speech, even when listeners cannot consciously act on them. Rather than building a detection skill from scratch, future training programs might help listeners learn to use acoustic cues the brain already registers.

Twelve minutes of passive, labeled exposure was enough to reshape brain responses but not enough to change behavior. Researchers suggest that longer training, or protocols designed to direct a listener’s attention toward the acoustic cues that distinguish human from synthetic speech, could eventually bridge that gap. Whether hearing a familiar person’s voice cloned by AI would make detection easier or harder is an open question the study’s design could not address, but it is one with obvious real-world stakes.

AI voice-cloning tools are already being used to impersonate relatives, employers, and public figures, and most people tested under controlled conditions cannot reliably identify them. The auditory system’s sensitivity to synthetic voices, quiet as it is, may offer a foundation for training programs that haven’t yet been built. Getting that sensitivity into conscious awareness is the next challenge.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/ai-voice-recognized-by-brain/

Most men past 40 have heard that testosterone drops with age. What far fewer know is that declining testosterone may increase vulnerability to fat buildup in the liver, especially in men who regularly drink sodas, fruit juices, or other high-fructose beverages.

New research in mice shows the combination of low testosterone and high fructose intake does something neither condition manages on its own: a rapid acceleration of fat buildup in the liver. That finding matters for a lot of men. Roughly 5.58 million Americans between the ages of 40 and 79 currently live with both low testosterone and excessive fructose consumption at the same time. Most likely don’t realize they fall into that overlap, and few conversations about low testosterone include any discussion of liver health.

Published in the American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism, the study also uncovered a previously unrecognized piece of the puzzle. Changes in gut bacteria that cause a compound called pyruvate to accumulate and promote fat buildup in liver cells.

Low Testosterone and High Fructose Are Both More Common Than Men Realize

Testosterone begins declining gradually after a man’s 30s. About 17% of men between 40 and 79 meet the clinical definition of low testosterone, with symptoms often mistaken for normal aging: fatigue, abdominal weight gain, reduced muscle tone. What rarely enters that conversation is what low testosterone does to the liver, and how diet makes it worse.

At the same time, an estimated 43% of Americans consume more sugar than health guidelines recommend. Fructose, found in sodas, energy drinks, packaged snacks, and fruit-flavored beverages, is processed almost entirely by the liver. When it arrives in excess, the liver converts it into fat. Both low testosterone and high fructose intake are recognized risk factors for fatty liver disease, a condition estimated to affect about 30% of people worldwide. Their combined effect, however, had never been directly studied until now.

What Researchers Found When Both Risk Factors Were Combined

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University divided male mice into six groups. Some were surgically castrated to eliminate testosterone, while others underwent a sham procedure that left hormone levels intact. Within each group, mice received plain water, a 10% fructose solution comparable to many common soft drinks, or fructose water plus antibiotics to suppress gut bacteria. After eight weeks, the results were telling.

Castration alone did not significantly increase liver fat. Fructose alone produced only a modest, borderline rise. Combining both conditions drove liver fat and cholesterol levels well beyond what either factor caused independently, and histological analysis confirmed fatty changes in the liver that were absent in the other groups.

Liver enzymes that typically signal cell damage remained normal even in the worst-affected mice. That means the liver was accumulating fat silently, at an early stage before serious or irreversible damage sets in. Early fatty liver disease often produces no symptoms at all, which is precisely what makes it easy to miss.

How Gut Bacteria Drive the Damage

One of the more revealing results came from the antibiotic-treated mice. Animals that received both castration and fructose alongside antibiotics showed substantially less liver fat than those without the drugs. Since antibiotics suppress gut bacteria, that outcome pointed directly to the microbiome as a key driver.

Analysis of the bacteria living in the gut confirmed that the combination of castration and fructose shifted gut microbial composition in ways that neither condition produced alone. Measurements of chemical byproducts in the cecum, a pouch in the gut where many bacterial compounds collect, showed that levels of a molecule called pyruvate were significantly elevated only in the combined group. Antibiotic treatment brought those levels back down.

Pyruvate sits at a metabolic crossroads. Under normal conditions, gut bacteria convert it into other compounds and clear it efficiently. In the combined condition, certain bacterial species responsible for that conversion appeared less active, allowing pyruvate to accumulate and potentially influence liver metabolism. To confirm that pyruvate could directly drive fat accumulation, the team cultured isolated mouse liver cells with pyruvate, fructose, or both. Neither compound alone caused significant fat buildup. Together, they produced a sharp, statistically significant surge in fat inside the cells. As the researchers noted, this is “the first study to investigate the effects of pyruvate on the steatosis of primary hepatocytes.”

Pyruvate’s role here is worth pausing on. It has long been studied as an energy molecule, not a driver of liver disease. If further research confirms that gut-derived pyruvate contributes to fatty liver in humans, it could point toward a new and largely overlooked target for treatment, one tied directly to the bacterial landscape of the gut.

Separately, the researchers found that gene activity inside the liver itself also changed in the combined group, with genes governing fat production and fructose processing ramping up in ways that antibiotics did not reverse. That suggests the gut-pyruvate pathway is only part of the story, and that low testosterone and fructose together alter liver function through more than one route.

For middle-aged men managing declining testosterone, this raises a question that almost never comes up in clinical settings: what role is diet playing alongside it? As the researchers put it, “risk factors for hepatic steatosis can exert a greater impact on disease development through complex mechanisms under certain conditions.” For millions of American men, that may describe their situation right now, without anyone having told them so.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/low-testosterone-high-fructose-liver-disease/

These popular beverages often have many other ingredients, like vitamins and plant extracts. Here’s what you should know about them.

A growing number of Americans, especially younger ones, are reaching for energy drinks in order to stay up late or level up their workout. About two-thirds of teens report drinking them at least occasionally, and most who drink one a day are under 35.

These beverages can have 100mg to 300mg of caffeine per serving, usually more than a cup of black coffee. There’s no question that high doses of caffeine can boost your energy. But energy drinks often include other healthy-sounding ingredients, such as B vitamins and plant extracts, which brands claim can boost focus and stamina or reduce fatigue.

“I generally greet that with a healthy dose of skepticism,” said Joe Zagorski, a toxicologist and assistant professor at Michigan State University. He added that there was very little scientific evidence showing any health benefit from the additives and vitamins in energy drinks.

Most likely, Dr Zagorski said, “the vast majority of the effects you’ll get from an energy drink are because of the caffeine.”

WHAT’S IN ENERGY DRINKS?

It can be difficult to know for sure. That’s because some products are marketed as beverages, while others are marketed as supplements, meaning they are regulated differently. Beverages are generally required to list ingredients, though not the exact amounts, Dr Zagorski said. But those marketed as supplements may not be required to list individual ingredients at all. Some use vague terms, like “focus blend” or “energy blend” to describe their ingredients.

Exactly what’s in an energy drink varies by brand, but here are a few common ingredients.

PLANT-DERIVED CHEMICALS

Energy drinks typically contain plant-based ingredients or extracts, including guarana, yerba mate and green tea, said Dr John Higgins, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston who researches energy drinks. Some of these botanicals act like stimulants, but others simply contain additional caffeine, which isn’t always included in the amount listed on the label. This means regular drinkers may exceed 400mg of caffeine a day, the safe upper limit for most people, Dr Higgins said.

Energy drinks can also contain ginseng and ginkgo biloba, which are not technically stimulants but can increase blood flow. Combined with caffeine, some such ingredients can lead to adverse effects, like heart palpitations or increased blood pressure, said Dr Anna Svatikova, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who’s done research on energy drinks and heart health.

B VITAMINS

B vitamins are essential for helping your body convert food into energy, and they’re commonly found in energy drinks, said Richard Bloomer, a professor and director of the Center for Nutraceutical and Dietary Supplement Research at the University of Memphis.

But some of the beverages contain amounts of Vitamin B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B6 (pyridoxine) and B12 (cobalamin) that exceed the recommended daily value, Dr Higgins said. Long-term, high doses of B vitamins could lead to low blood pressure, liver damage and neuropathy in some instances.

Most people get all the Vitamin B they need from a balanced diet, Dr Bloomer said, and they’ll excrete the excess in their urine. There’s a lack of clinical evidence that consuming more than you need will increase your energy or focus, Dr Svatikova added.

Vitamin B deficiency is more common in older adults, people with gastrointestinal issues and vegans or those on other restricted diets. A blood test is needed to determine if you’re Vitamin B deficient, but if you are, you’re better off taking a supplement than consuming an energy drink, Dr Bloomer said.

AMINO ACIDS

Energy drinks often include small amounts of amino acids like taurine, which is found in protein-rich foods, like meat and fish; and your body produces it naturally, Dr Svatikova said. There is some limited evidence that taurine combined with caffeine can enhance performance and exercise capacity, she said.

Taurine can have side effects, though. It may interact with antidepressants and other medications. Research in animals has shown a connection between caffeine, taurine and heart arrhythmias.

Some energy drinks also contain L-theanine, an amino acid found in tea leaves. Older, small studies have shown that when paired with caffeine, it may improve mood, cognition, focus and alertness. But larger, longer-term studies are needed to confirm this, Dr Svatikova said.

More research is also needed to better understand the long-term health impact of consuming taurine and L-theanine individually or together, Dr Svatikova said.

ADDED SUGAR

Energy drinks can contain significant amounts of added sugar, sometimes up to 60g per serving, said Dr Bloomer, who called the beverages “a can of sugar water with added caffeine.”

The US Department of Agriculture now recommends limiting added sugars to no more than 10g per meal and suggests avoiding “sugar-sweetened beverages,” including energy drinks.

Excess sugar is known to increase irritability and raise the risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, Dr Svatikova said.

SHOULD YOU AVOID ENERGY DRINKS?

The occasional energy drink is probably safe for most healthy people, Dr Zagorski said. But pay attention to the serving size: One bottle or can may contain multiple servings, which he said could dramatically increase your caffeine and sugar intake.

You should know your individual caffeine tolerance, Dr Svatikova added. For some, excess caffeine can cause jitters, irritability, sleeplessness, an upset stomach, anxiety, heart palpitations, irregular heartbeats, increased blood pressure and, potentially, cardiac arrest, she said.

It’s also not fully clear how additional ingredients in energy drinks, like plant extracts, could contribute to these effects, Dr Svatikova said.

Source : https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/wellness/energy-drinks-benefits-caffeine-578801

Microwave ovens use non-ionising radiation to heat food. It is harmless in itself, but using plastic containers for the food can increase the risk.

Cancer is still considered to be a death sentence in many households, and because the disease is becoming increasingly common, it is understandable for people to be extra cautious about things of regular use that can increase their risk.

Radiations have long been considered carcinogenic. As a result, there has been a fear of microwave ovens, which, as the name suggests, use microwave radiation to heat or cook food, increasing the risk of cancer.

However, that is not exactly the case, noted Dr Jayesh Sharma, Raipur-based oncologist with over 25 years of experience. Taking to Instagram on February 23, he explained why microwaves are generally safe, and what is the one thing we should be cautious about while using the gadget.

See more

Can microwave oven cause cancer?

According to Dr Sharma, the answer to the question is both yes and no, though in a majority scenario, it is the first option.

“Microwave is a type of electromagnetic radiation,” explained the senior cancer surgeon. “And from a biological perspective, they are of two types: ionising and non-ionising.”

Ionising radiations are those which have sufficient energy to hit an atom and split it into pieces. Thus, when an ionising radiation hits the DNA molecule, it can result in mutations at an atomic level of the DNA and therefore increase the risk of cancer.

Examples of such radiation are ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and radiation released during a nuclear explosion, shared Dr Sharma.

Non-ionising radiation does not have enough energy to break apart an atom. “The best example of non-ionising radiation is visible light,” shared Dr Sharma.

Microwave is also a non-ionising radiation that has even less energy than visible light rays, he noted. As such, there is no chance of microwave radiation breaking any atom. It can only be used to heat up food.

“If heating food leads to cancer, then it would apply to all cooking methods,” noted the oncologist. Since that is not the case, heating food in a microwave oven is safe.

Hidden danger of microwave oven use

Despite microwave ovens being generally safe and non-carcinogenic, there is one thing to keep in mind while using them to heat food. One often gets food delivered in plastic containers from restaurants and uses microwave ovens to heat food in the container itself.

Source : https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/health/can-heating-food-in-microwave-oven-increase-cancer-risk-raipur-oncologist-with-25-years-of-experience-explains-101772201069430.html

 

A cancer diagnosis upends every aspect of an individual’s life, from sleep and appetite to work and relationships. All of it shifts the moment a doctor delivers that news. Now, a sweeping study finds how a patient reacts to such news may influence their risk of dying sooner.

Researchers found that cancer patients who developed anxiety, depression, or another mental health disorder within the first year of their diagnosis were 51% more likely to die from any cause during the roughly three years that followed, specifically months 12 through 35 after diagnosis, than patients who did not.

That figure comes from an analysis of nearly 372,000 cancer patients across the University of California health system, one of the largest studies of its kind ever conducted in the United States. The findings were published in Cancer, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. What sets this study apart from earlier work is its foundation.

Instead of relying on patient surveys or self-reported symptoms, researchers used clinically documented diagnoses pulled directly from a decade’s worth of hospital records. These were conditions a doctor confirmed, not just feelings a patient described on a questionnaire. It’s worth noting that the study is observational, meaning it identifies an association between mental health disorders and earlier death, but cannot prove that one directly causes the other.

When a Cancer Diagnosis Triggers a Mental Health Crisis

Researchers pulled records from all University of California-affiliated hospitals, tracking adult patients newly diagnosed with cancer between 2013 and 2023. To keep the analysis clean, only patients with no prior mental health history were included. The question was simple: how many would develop a new psychological condition, such as an anxiety disorder, depression, or a psychotic disorder, within 12 months of learning they had cancer?

About one in ten did. Of the nearly 372,000 patients studied, roughly 39,700 received a new mental health diagnosis within that first year. Generalized anxiety disorder was the most common, making up 43% of new cases. Major depressive disorder came next at 35.5%, followed by reactive and adjustment disorder at around 10.5%.

The timing of these diagnoses was itself revealing. Mental health conditions started ticking upward about three months before a cancer diagnosis was even officially recorded, likely because patients were already living with symptoms that sent them to a doctor in the first place. Then came a sharp spike in the six months right after the cancer diagnosis landed. That concentrated early window became the heart of what researchers wanted to study.

Mental Health and Cancer Survival: The Numbers Behind the Risk

In the first 12 to 35 months after diagnosis, patients who developed a mental health condition were 51% more likely to die from any cause than those who did not, even after researchers accounted for age, sex, race, and other existing health conditions. That’s a substantial gap.

It didn’t last forever. By years three through five, that elevated risk dropped to 17% above average. By years five through ten, the difference had essentially vanished. The association between mental health disorders and survival was strongest early on, hitting hardest in that vulnerable early stretch.

For patients who developed a mental health disorder and were also prescribed medication for it, antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, or antipsychotics, the early mortality risk was steeper still, more than double that of patients with no mental health diagnosis. Researchers suggest this may reflect how severe those cases were, since doctors typically prescribe psychotropic medications for moderate to severe symptoms. However, because the study did not include data on cancer stage or why specific medications were prescribed, it cannot determine whether the higher risk reflects symptom severity, more advanced cancer, or other factors entirely.

Not All Cancers Hit the Same Way

The type of cancer a patient had mattered too. Pancreatic cancer patients, who face a disease with roughly an 11% five-year survival rate, were more than three times as likely to develop a new mental health condition compared to prostate cancer patients, who served as the study’s comparison group. That gap makes sense intuitively. A diagnosis with a brutal prognosis generates a different kind of fear than one with high survival odds. But mapping that intuition across hundreds of thousands of patients gives it a weight that gut feeling alone cannot.

Among patients who did develop a mental health condition in that first year, breast cancer was the most commonly represented cancer type at 16.6% of that group, followed by blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma at 13.3%.

A Prescribing Pattern Worth Examining

Of the patients who received a new mental health diagnosis, 35% were prescribed at least one psychotropic medication. Benzodiazepines, sedatives like Valium and Xanax, turned out to be the most commonly prescribed, with nearly a quarter of all cancer patients in the cohort receiving one at some point. That rate ran well ahead of SSRIs, the antidepressant class that clinical guidelines generally recommend first for anxiety and depression.

Researchers flagged that as worth paying attention to. The study did not test whether benzodiazepines directly increased mortality in this group, but the authors noted that prior research has linked these drugs to higher mortality risk and adverse interactions in patients with serious medical conditions, raising questions about whether cancer patients are consistently getting the most appropriate psychiatric care.

That still leaves roughly two-thirds of patients who received a mental health diagnosis but no medication at all. Access, personal preference, or clinical judgment could all explain that, and the data cannot say which. What the data can say is that mental health conditions after a cancer diagnosis are common, cluster in a specific and early window, and are associated with measurable consequences for survival.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/mental-health-cancer-mortality/

Most things fall apart in water. Paper, cardboard, and many eco-friendly alternatives to plastic turn soft and useless the moment they get soaked. Researchers have now created a biodegradable material that does the opposite: submerge it, and it grows nearly 50% stronger.

That single property could matter enormously. Every year, the world generates roughly 400 million tons of persistent plastic waste, much of it designed specifically to resist water. Bottles, cups, food containers, and packaging dominate because few biodegradable materials have matched conventional plastics in wet conditions. Research published in Nature Communications suggests that a molecule already being produced by nature in enormous quantities may help close that gap.

The material is made from chitosan, derived from shrimp shells, combined with trace amounts of nickel. Chitosan comes from chitin, a structural molecule found in crustacean shells and insect exoskeletons, with an estimated renewable biosynthesis rate of about 100 billion tons per year globally. Most of it currently goes to waste, discarded as a byproduct of shrimp and crab processing, or used in low-value applications like water filtration. Despite that abundance, chitosan-based materials have long been held back by one stubborn flaw: they weaken and dissolve in water. The team, based at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona, appears to have solved that problem using an approach borrowed from nature itself.

How a Shrimp Shell Material Becomes Stronger Than Common Plastics

The inspiration came from a sandworm. Researchers knew that when zinc is removed from the fangs of a worm called Nereis virens, the fangs lose their structural strength when submerged. That observation led the team to ask whether trace metals might help chitosan actually use water, rather than be weakened by it.

To test the idea, they dissolved chitosan flakes, sourced from shrimp-processing factory byproducts in India, in a weak acetic acid solution, roughly one-fifth the concentration of regular table vinegar. Nickel chloride dissolved in water was then mixed in, poured into molds, and dried. The result was a series of thin, green-tinted films at varying nickel concentrations.

In dry conditions, the films matched the strength of common plastics like polypropylene or polystyrene. Once submerged, they reached the range of engineering plastics such as polycarbonate and PETG, the kind used in water bottles and structural components. The researchers described this behavior as “never achieved artificially.”

To understand why, picture the chitosan chains as a loosely woven net. When nickel and water move into the gaps between those chains, they act like cinches, pulling everything tighter rather than loosening it. Most materials work in reverse, their internal structure loosening when water gets in. This one locks down.

A Biodegradable Plastic Alternative Built to Survive Water

When a freshly made film is first submerged, about 87% of the nickel washes out. Only a small fraction of what was originally added actually drives the strengthening effect. That released nickel is not discarded. The researchers built a zero-waste production cycle in which the wash water from one batch feeds directly into the next. As the paper noted, “the nickel content of a discarded AAA battery (2.2 g) would be sufficient to manufacture more than a dozen typical drinking cups (4.7 g each) using nickel-doped chitosan.”

The team molded the material into cups and containers and confirmed it holds water without leaking for at least a week. A film more than three square meters in area was produced without processing problems, suggesting the approach is not confined to laboratory scales. In a standard soil burial test, the material reached its half-life in about four months. Most conventional plastics take centuries under the same conditions.

Both chitosan and nickel have existing FDA-approved medical uses individually, though the combined material would require further safety evaluation before any medical applications move forward.

No new synthetic polymer chemistry was required here. Shrimp shells and a trace of a common metal, combined with a process inspired by how crabs build their exoskeletons, produced something rare in synthetic materials: a substance that performs better in water than in dry air. The researchers believe medical applications and waterproof coatings for other biodegradable materials are realistic next steps, with more complex shaping and large-scale manufacturing still to be worked out. For now, what exists is a proof of concept built from seafood scraps and a battery’s worth of nickel, and the early results are hard to ignore.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/plastic-alternative-made-from-shrimp-stronger-when-wet/

The Findings Raise New Questions About Alzheimer’s Prevention

Is the street you live on lined with leafy trees, or mostly grass and pavement? That simple difference might be affecting your heart in ways scientists are just beginning to understand.

A study tracking nearly 90,000 nurses across America for 18 years found neighborhoods with more visible trees showed about 4% lower rates of heart attack and stroke, while areas with more grass showed about 6% higher rates. These are relative differences comparing neighborhoods with varying amounts of visible vegetation, not guaranteed changes for any one person. After analyzing 350 million street-view photographs using artificial intelligence, researchers discovered that not all green space appears equal for cardiovascular health.

For decades, public health experts have urged people to get outside and enjoy nature. Parks, gardens, open spaces: it all seemed equally beneficial. But this research reveals something more complicated. From high above, a satellite can’t tell the difference between a tree-shaded avenue and a grass-covered suburb. Both look green. Yet for your cardiovascular system, the distinction matters.

How Scientists Measured Trees and Cardiovascular Disease Risk

Researchers used Google Street View images from across the country, training computers to identify exactly what appeared in each photo: trees, grass, shrubs, and other plants. They created detailed maps showing what someone would actually see walking through urban and suburban areas nationwide.

Then they matched those maps to health records from the Nurses’ Health Study, which has been following female nurses since 1976. The 88,788 women in this analysis lived everywhere from dense cities to rural towns. Every two years, they reported any heart attacks or strokes, which researchers verified through medical records. Over 18 years, doctors confirmed 6,065 cardiovascular events.

Even after accounting for smoking, diet, exercise, income, education, and air pollution levels, the pattern held. Trees seemed to protect hearts. Grass didn’t.

Why the Association Might Exist

Researchers suggest several reasons why trees and grass might show different associations with heart health, though the study didn’t directly prove these pathways.

Trees may offer protective mechanisms that grass cannot. Their leaves trap pollution particles that would otherwise enter lungs. A mature tree canopy cools a neighborhood far more effectively than a lawn. That’s critical during heat waves that stress the cardiovascular system. Thick branches muffle traffic noise, and prior research has linked chronic noise exposure to higher blood pressure and heart disease risk. Tree-lined streets also tend to encourage more walking and social interaction, and shaded sidewalks feel more inviting than exposed concrete.

Grass offers few of these potential benefits. Regular mowing creates noise and air pollution. Grass provides minimal cooling on hot days and does little to filter pollutants from the air. Open, sun-baked stretches of grass don’t exactly invite leisurely strolls.

Importantly, the study’s authors note that grass might also signal something else about a neighborhood rather than directly causing harm. Areas dominated by lawns but lacking trees often have sprawling, car-dependent layouts where people drive everywhere instead of walking. The analysis couldn’t fully separate grass itself from these neighborhood design patterns, meaning the observed associations could reflect these broader environmental differences.

The findings held across wildly different settings: crowded cities and quiet suburbs, polluted areas and clean ones, wealthy neighborhoods and modest ones, North and South, East and West. Whatever’s going on, it’s not limited to one type of community.

The Distance That Matters

The protective effect showed up most clearly within the 500-meter neighborhood buffer researchers used as their main measure, about one-third of a mile from someone’s home. Right outside your front door matters less than you might think. When researchers looked only at the immediate 100 meters, the associations mostly disappeared. But expand to the neighborhood level, and the pattern emerged strongly.

That’s actually good news for urban planning. You don’t need every single yard packed with trees. What matters is creating tree-covered neighborhoods where canopy extends over streets and sidewalks, cooling and cleaning the air across a wider area. One homeowner planting a tree helps a little. A community planting hundreds helps a lot.

What This Means for Your Neighborhood

Cities nationwide face tough choices about trees right now. Climate change brings more droughts, diseases, and storms that kill urban forests. New construction often means cutting down mature trees. Tight budgets force parks departments to choose between planting trees or maintaining grass.

This research offers clear guidance: prioritize trees. The findings suggest tree planting may deliver more cardiovascular benefit than investments focused mainly on turfgrass. Protecting existing mature trees during development could be as important as adding new parks.

Dr. Peter James, who led the study at the University of California, Davis, pointed out that scientists have been measuring green space wrong for years. “Aggregating green space into a single exposure category limits epidemiological research and potential interventions to increase health-promoting green space,” his team wrote.

Street-view imagery changes that. Computers can now analyze what people actually see at ground level, distinguishing between a tree canopy overhead and a stretch of grass beside the road. That specificity makes the research far more useful for anyone trying to improve public health through urban design.

What We Still Don’t Know

The study, published in Environmental Epidemiology, followed only female nurses, 93% of them white, which raises questions about whether the same patterns apply to men or more diverse populations. The researchers could track where participants lived but not where they spent their days or whether they actually went outside. Someone living on a tree-lined street who never walks there might not get the same benefits.

The harmful associations with grass might not be directly caused by the grass itself but rather by the kinds of neighborhoods that tend to have lots of grass and few trees. The analysis couldn’t fully separate those overlapping factors.

Interestingly, when researchers included traditional satellite-based greenness measures in their analysis, those showed no association with heart disease once street-level tree and grass measurements were accounted for. This reinforces that what matters isn’t just whether an area looks green from space, but what specific plants people actually see and experience at ground level.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/trees-associated-lower-heart-disease-risk-grass-higher-risk/

Experts have acknowledged significant technical challenges, including the wall’s survival in extreme Antarctic conditions and long-term ocean exposure.

Scientists have raised concerns over the Thwaites Glacier, which is nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier,” as it is melting at an unprecedented rate because of climate change fueled by human activities. The rapid melting rate would result in a rise of global sea levels by 65cm, putting millions at risk of coastal flooding.

Notably, Thwaites Glacier contributes 4% to global annual sea-level rise, and its collapse could destabilise the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would cause catastrophic sea-level rise. The glacier’s melting is a pressing concern, with researchers drilling into the ice to study the impact of warm ocean water.

In an effort to mitigate the impact, a team of scientists and engineers is proposing a radical solution: building a 150-meter-tall underwater wall to block warm ocean currents from melting the glacier, Euro News reported.

The proposed wall, which is a part of the Seabed Anchored Curtain Project, would stretch 80km across the seabed in front of the glacier, protecting it from warm ocean waters. The project involves a three-year research phase to design, test, and construct the curtain, with a budget of $10 million.

“We are proud to support the Seabed Curtain project, a groundbreaking initiative in climate research and ocean preservation in the Arctic,” Thomas Wilhelmsen, Chair of Tom Wilhelmsen’s Foundation, said as quoted on the official website.

“The project’s innovative approach to reducing ice melting in the Arctic Ocean through technology and collaboration across disciplines strongly aligns with the foundation’s values of sustainability, knowledge, and international cooperation.”

“We believe this project has the potential to make a meaningful contribution to the global climate effort and help protect vulnerable ecosystems in the northern regions.”

Source : https://www.ndtv.com/feature/scientists-aim-at-building-150-metre-wall-to-mitigate-doomsday-glacier-melting-crisis-10967606

Getting (and staying) fit isn’t cheap.

Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” generated a cultural whirlwind: chart-topping success, social media saturation and frenzied debate over her artistic evolution.

Nonetheless, despite this warm reception, opinions on Swift are deeply polarized by party. Democrats are far more likely to view her positively; Republicans are more likely to hold negative views. This partisan divide remains in place even after accounting for age, gender and other demographic differences.

We are political scientists who conduct research on public opinion. In our just-published study, “Mirrorball Politics,” we draw on national survey data to examine how Americans feel about Swift and what those feelings reveal about our politics. What we find is striking: Swift has become a cultural mirror, reflecting our society’s deepest social and political fault lines.

In other words, liking or disliking Swift has become yet another way Americans signal who they are politically. Young women love her, but young men don’t – and that gap matters.

This is part of a broader trend in which cultural preferences and political identity have collapsed into each other. The type of beer you drink, the kind of car you drive, the stores you shop at and now the musical artists you admire have become markers of political belonging – and difference.

Popular entertainment used to be a common space where Americans, regardless of whether they were Republicans or Democrats, could come together and have some fun. Those shared spaces are shrinking – and with them the opportunity for connection across partisan divides.

The Swifties Gap

That’s why feelings toward Swift offer warning signs for the future of American politics.

One of the starkest divides we found is between young men and young women. Gen Z women – those born between 1997 and 2012 – admire Swift. Gen Z men, not so much. On a 100-point scale measuring attitudes toward Swift, young women averaged 55, while young men averaged 43 – a statistically significant difference that was not present among older Americans.

This gender gap mirrors the widening political divide among younger Americans that played a pivotal role in the 2024 presidential election. Although a modest gender gap has been a consistent, defining feature of American electoral politics since 1980, the gap among young Americans is huge.

Young women are markedly progressive in their politics. Young men, by contrast, are trending rightward.

Many young men express skepticism toward feminism, discomfort with shifts in gender norms and a growing attraction to more conservative cultural messaging.

Haters Gonna Hate

This yawning gender gap is also reflected in views regarding Swift.

The strongest predictor of negative views of the singer, aside from partisanship, is “hostile sexism.” This is defined as negative attitudes toward women and a sense that men should dominate.

Our study finds that individuals who believe that women’s achievements come at men’s expense, or that women have too much power, are far more likely to dislike Swift. This effect is especially strong among men and particularly among Republican men.

Swift’s enormous success, artistic autonomy and cultural influence appear to trigger anxieties about women’s power in public life. The backlash is not about her lyrics or her image. It’s about what she represents: a confident, self-directed woman at the center of American culture.

This dynamic reveals the broader challenges facing women in positions of authority, including in politics. Hostile sexism remains a force in American society and a formidable barrier for any woman aspiring to the presidency.

Swift As A Visible Symbol

Swift didn’t create these divisions – she is simply reflecting them back. But the intensity of the reaction to her success reveals how conflicted America remains about women’s power.

Our study also shows that people who scored high on hostile sexism were much more likely to hold negative views of Kamala Harris during the presidential election of 2024. This mirrors findings from earlier research showing that hostile sexism was one of the strongest reasons voters did not support Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/partisan-polarization-limits-taylor-swifts-popularity/

Taking a moment to reflect before judging your own performance sounds like solid advice. But new research suggests that for people experiencing anxiety symptoms, pausing to second-guess themselves might deepen their self-doubt.

Scientists at University College London and the University of Copenhagen have discovered that anxiety-driven underconfidence grows stronger the longer someone takes to judge how they did on a decision they just made. The study, published in Psychological Medicine, analyzed confidence ratings from 1,447 people across multiple decision-making tasks. For anxious individuals, extra time for introspection actually makes their self-doubt worse.

The researchers found that people with higher anxiety symptoms accumulate negatively biased thoughts about their performance over time, deepening underconfidence as they spend more time reflecting.

How Scientists Measured Confidence in Real-Time

Researchers pooled data from four experiments where participants completed visual decision-making tasks, such as identifying which color appeared more frequently on screen or remembering objects from a brief display. After each decision, participants rated their confidence on a scale, and scientists measured how long they took to provide that rating.

The study collected information about participants’ anxiety levels using standardized questionnaires and tracked gender differences across the sample. Sample sizes for individual experiments ranged from 300 to 433 participants, all recruited online. The researchers excluded trials with unusually fast or slow response times to ensure data quality.

Anxiety and the Snowball Effect

The key finding emerged when researchers plotted confidence levels against the time participants took to report them. For people with higher anxiety symptoms, confidence dropped more steeply as they spent additional seconds contemplating their performance. The gap between low-anxiety and high-anxiety individuals widened with every passing moment of reflection.

This pattern held across multiple experiments and different types of tasks, showing the effect is robust and not limited to one specific scenario.

What makes this particularly notable is that the effect worked in the opposite direction for gender-related underconfidence. On average, women reported lower confidence than men immediately after making decisions, but that gap narrowed when they took more time to reflect. By the longest response times, the gender difference in confidence essentially disappeared.

Computational Models Reveal Why Time Helps Some but Hurts Others

To understand what drives these opposite patterns, researchers built a computational model based on drift-diffusion theory, which treats decision-making as an evidence accumulation process. Information builds up over time until it crosses a threshold that triggers a choice.

The team extended this framework to model different sources of distorted confidence: two kinds of confidence drag. One involves starting with a lower baseline of confidence. The other involves a downward pull that grows the longer someone thinks about their performance.

When they fit this model to individual participants’ data, anxiety stood out because confidence got worse with more reflection time, suggesting negative self-doubt built up during that extra time. People with anxiety symptoms showed both a lower starting point for confidence and this ongoing accumulation of negative thoughts about their performance.

Gender-related underconfidence, by contrast, stemmed only from that lower starting point, without the ongoing buildup of negative thoughts.

What the Patterns Might Mean

One possibility is that extra reflection gives anxious people more room to replay mistakes or imagine they got it wrong, even when their performance hasn’t changed. For the gender gap, extra time may let people double-check the decision in their mind and override a snap feeling of being probably wrong.

The study also offers a potential window into why anxiety might fuel rumination: the tendency to get stuck in negative thought loops. If people with anxiety symptoms are accumulating biased negative evidence about their abilities over time, extended reflection literally makes them feel worse about themselves, creating a feedback loop that reinforces self-doubt.

It’s worth noting that this study looked at split-second confidence ratings in simple online tasks, not treatment approaches or real-world performance reviews. The study focused on immediate post-decision reflection, typically lasting only a few seconds. Whether these patterns extend to longer-term rumination or self-evaluation remains an open question. The tasks used were also relatively simple perceptual and memory challenges, so whether the same dynamics would apply to evaluating performance in complex real-world situations like job interviews or creative projects is unclear.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/second-thoughts-may-be-distorted-by-anxiety/

When former athletes with severe brain damage experience cognitive issues, doctors have been quick to blame Alzheimer’s disease in recent years. Notably, however, autopsies later revealed many of those patients actually had no Alzheimer’s at all. They had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Researchers estimate CTE was misdiagnosed as dementia in 40% of advanced cases.

The finding comes from a Boston University study of 614 brain donors, including 366 with CTE. Among the 99 donors with advanced CTE who had been diagnosed with dementia during life, only 17% of physicians correctly identified CTE as the cause. The misdiagnosis rate points to a troubling gap in how doctors recognize this disease.

The study, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, also revealed differences by disease stage. Among donors with the most severe CTE (stage IV), roughly 8 in 10 had dementia before death, compared to just 16% of those without CTE. Those with stage IV were more than four times as likely to have had dementia. But surprisingly, early-stage CTE showed no connection to memory problems at all. Moreover, despite common assumptions, CTE severity had no link to depression or behavioral issues.

How the Disease Progresses

CTE comes in four stages as abnormal proteins gradually spread through the brain. Early stages (I and II) involve small pockets of damage in the frontal regions. By stage III, the proteins reach deeper memory areas. Stage IV means widespread damage across much of the brain.

Family members of the deceased athletes filled out detailed surveys about memory problems, personality changes, and daily functioning before death. Researchers combined these accounts with medical records to determine who had dementia.

The connection became clear at advanced stages. Stage IV donors scored about twice as high on cognitive difficulty assessments as people without CTE. They struggled far more with basic tasks like managing finances or remembering appointments.

Early-Stage CTE Shows No Symptoms

Early-stage CTE showed no link to dementia or memory problems at all. Stages I and II looked essentially the same as having no CTE.

“It is uncertain if low-stage CTE clinically manifests,” the authors wrote. This suggests the brain can initially tolerate small amounts of damage before symptoms appear.

This finding challenges assumptions that any amount of CTE causes problems. The brain appears capable of withstanding limited damage without triggering memory loss or personality changes. It’s only when the disease reaches advanced stages that dementia becomes highly likely.

Why the Confusion Happens

Both CTE and Alzheimer’s attack memory first, and patients show similar symptoms in the doctor’s office. Former football players often struggle to recall recent events and conversations, just like Alzheimer’s patients do. Without a brain scan that can detect CTE, doctors often assume the more common diagnosis.

Vascular dementia accounted for another 10% of misdiagnoses, and 38% of doctors labeled the condition as “dementia unspecified or unknown.” Among all the physicians who diagnosed dementia in patients with advanced CTE, only 17% correctly identified CTE as the cause.

This raises a troubling possibility: some former athletes with dementia may be told they have Alzheimer’s when the real cause is CTE. The study can’t put a number on how often this happens among living people, but the mismatch researchers found in autopsy cases suggests it could be more common than anyone realizes.

Severe CTE Strongly Linked to Dementia

CTE severity had no connection to depression, anxiety, or impulsiveness in this study. That finding contradicts popular assumptions that CTE directly causes the mood and behavior problems many former athletes experience.

More likely, those symptoms come from multiple sources. Brain imaging often shows damage to white matter (the brain’s wiring) and blood vessels in former players. Chronic pain, sleep problems, and past substance use probably contribute too. CTE might be one factor among many, rather than the sole culprit for behavioral issues.

Some former athletes struggle with anger, depression, or impulsive behavior for years before memory problems appear. This study suggests those early struggles may not come from CTE itself, but from the accumulated toll of repeated hits, injuries, and the lifestyle that often accompanies professional sports.

Even after researchers accounted for blood vessel damage and other brain issues, the link between severe CTE and dementia held firm. Mood symptoms remained unconnected to disease stage.

What This Means for Athletes

The study focused almost entirely on male athletes, with 80% having played American football. Most with severe CTE had played at the college or professional level for many years. Those with the worst brain damage had typically started playing young and continued for decades.

The good news, if any exists here, is that mild CTE may not cause symptoms. The brain appears capable of withstanding limited damage without triggering memory loss or personality changes. The bad news is that once CTE reaches advanced stages, dementia becomes highly likely.

Researchers also found that age matters less than disease severity. Even when they looked specifically at donors 52 and older to control for natural aging, advanced CTE still carried the same elevated dementia risk. The disease itself, not just getting older, drives cognitive decline.

The Challenge of CTE Diagnosis

Right now, doctors cannot diagnose CTE in living people. Brain tissue must be examined under a microscope after death to spot the telltale protein deposits around blood vessels. This leaves athletes and their families in limbo, wondering whether symptoms stem from CTE or something else entirely.

Tornado warnings sent to smartphones typically only give local residents around 15 minutes to take shelter. That’s barely enough time to gather family, grab essentials, and find somewhere safe to ride out the weather event. Now, scientists say they’ve identified atmospheric clues that appear up to an hour before a tornado touches down. These signals may someday help forecasters issue warnings earlier.

Researchers analyzing an experimental weather prediction system have pinpointed specific environmental patterns that helped separate storms that went on to produce tornadoes from similar storms that produced large hail instead. The work hints at a future where warnings could arrive with enough lead time for people to make better decisions about seeking shelter.

The key lies in what’s happening close to the ground. Tornado-producing storms showed dramatically stronger low-level wind patterns that favor rotation in the lowest 500 meters (roughly 1,600 feet) compared to storms that only hurled giant hailstones. These differences weren’t subtle. They persisted for the entire hour leading up to tornadoes and showed up consistently across storms from Texas to Nebraska.

Reading the Storm’s Environment

The Warn-on-Forecast System, developed by NOAA, updates every 15 minutes by ingesting the latest radar and satellite data. The weather model creates a constantly evolving picture of developing storms.

For this study, published in Weather and Forecasting, researchers examined 41 severe thunderstorms between 2017 and 2023. Fifteen produced tornadoes rated EF1 or stronger. That’s powerful enough to tear roofs off houses. The other 26 produced golf ball-sized hail or larger but no tornadoes.

The computer model revealed something forecasters couldn’t easily see before: small pockets of especially favorable low-level wind patterns in the storm’s inflow region. These conditions that favor tornado formation appeared much stronger and larger around tornado-producing storms.

Researchers also tracked how conditions changed as air flowed toward each storm during the hour before severe weather struck. Air feeding into tornadic storms encountered increasingly favorable conditions along the way, like a car accelerating downhill. Air approaching hail storms showed less dramatic changes.

The Cloud Base Connection

Another telling difference appeared overhead. Tornado-producing storms had cloud bases (the bottom of the clouds) that hung 1,600 to 3,300 feet closer to the ground than hail-only storms. Lower clouds mean the rotating column of air has less distance to stretch before reaching the surface.

This pattern held steady throughout the pre-tornado period, not just in the final minutes.

Interestingly, some atmospheric measurements that meteorologists typically examine showed little difference between the two storm types. The overall energy available to fuel storms and the rotation extending higher into the atmosphere were similar whether tornadoes formed or not. The crucial distinctions happened in that critical zone near the ground.

From Research to Reality

The study focused on storms in the Great Plains during May, when tornado season peaks. Whether these patterns hold true for winter tornadoes in the Southeast or storms in other regions remains an open question with the current sample size.

The Warn-on-Forecast System only runs on days when severe weather seems likely, and it covers specific geographic areas, meaning it misses plenty of tornadoes that occur on lower-risk days or outside its domain. The researchers examined a modest 41 storms, acknowledging that broader patterns might emerge with more data.

The model’s three-kilometer resolution means it can’t simulate actual tornadoes forming, but it captures the environmental conditions that make them possible. For forecasters watching storms develop in real time, knowing which supercells are moving into these tornado-favoring setups could eventually translate into earlier warnings.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/computers-can-flag-tornado-storms-much-earlier-than-radar/

 

Creatine is one of the most popular sports supplements out there. It’s shown to help build muscle and improve strength, boost speed and power in athletes and benefit sports performance all round.

Research also suggests this superstar nutrient may have other health benefits, including for brain function, memory, bone health and even mood.

While creatine has been a mainstay supplement for gym enthusiasts, most of the research on this supplement’s benefits has been conducted on men. With recent increased advertising specifically promoting creatine for women, there is growing interest in whether this nutrient can also be equally beneficial for them.

It’s already clear from the research that creatine could benefit women by reducing fatigue during exercise. It may also be particularly beneficial for maintaining muscle as women get older.

Creatine is a natural compound produced in the body from several amino acids (the building blocks from protein). We can also get it from protein-rich foods, such as meat and seafood.

Creatine plays a role in short-term energy, particularly during intense exercise, helping us to recover quicker between exercises. This makes it possible to do more work each time we train, leading to around 20% greater performance gains when regularly taking the supplement.

We naturally use around 2g-4g of creatine per day. But as our bodies don’t store much creatine, this is why we need to consume it in our diet or get it from supplements. Think of it like a short-term energy store that needs topping up.

Around 1kg of raw beef or seafood would supply around 3g-5g of creatine. However, cooking can reduce creatine content. This makes it challenging to consistently get enough from the diet alone, which is where supplements can be useful.

Research also shows that vegans, vegetarians and women tend to have diets lower in creatine – meaning lower overall body stores. However, women do appear to store a bit more creatine in their muscles than men, suggesting they may respond to it slower or differently than men.

The most studied form of creatine is creatine monohydrate. This can be taken as a powder, capsule or gummy. If women consume around 3g-5g of creatine a day as a supplement, it will help gradually increase muscle creatine stores over a period of two to four weeks.

But if you’re looking to boost muscle stores faster, research shows taking around 20g of creatine a day for seven days (before dropping down to 3g-5g daily) can safely boost stores.

Creatine Benefits For Women

There are many factors which influence a women’s health over their lifetime. This includes hormonal changes, the gradual loss of muscle that comes with aging, loss of bone density and slower metabolism post-menopause – as well as fluctuating energy levels and poor concentration or focus.

Resistance exercise may be beneficial in mitigating some of these changes, particularly in supporting muscle mass and function, bone health and energy levels.

This is where creatine comes in. Doing resistance training for several weeks while taking around 3g-5g of additional creatine per day can enable you to maintain the quality and consistency of your training. This combination can be particularly beneficial for strength in mid to later life.

Women who take creatine consistently are shown to have improved muscle function, which ultimately can impact quality of life. There’s also some evidence that taking it alongside resistance training may support bone health in postmenopausal women – although not all studies agree on this.

It’s worth noting as well that creatine does not appear to lead to weight gain or cause a bulky, muscular appearance, which are often concerns for women thinking about taking the supplement.

More recently, research has been exploring whether creatine can affect brain health, cognitive function and possibly even mood in older women. Evidence also shows that in younger women, it can improve mood and cognitive function after a bad nights’ sleep.

There’s emerging evidence as well that taking 5g of creatine daily can help younger women sleep longer (particularly on days they’ve done a workout). The same dose may also improve sleep quality in perimenopausal women – possibly by supporting the energy required by the brain.

Another study also reported greater reductions in depressive symptoms in women taking 5g of creatine daily alongside antidepressants, compared to those just taking antidepressants.

Given many women report experiencing symptoms such as “brain fog,” poor concentration, stress, low energy and poor sleep during their menstrual cycle and throughout the menopause, this could make creatine a low-cost solution for many of these symptoms. However, a higher dose of creatine may be needed daily (around 5g-10g) to increase the brain’s creatine stores.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/should-women-use-creatine/

A group of volunteers spent days locked in a small hotel room with people actively infected with flu. They played games, shared objects and exercised together in conditions designed to help the virus spread. Yet not a single person caught influenza.

The unexpected finding comes from a well-designed study that set out to answer a basic question: how does flu really spread?

Influenza, the virus responsible for flu, is known to spread through aerosols (microscopic droplets) released when an infected person coughs, sneezes or even breathes normally. It can also pass from person to person via contaminated surfaces such as door handles or phones, known as fomite transmission.

How efficiently the virus spreads depends on several factors, including how much virus an infected person sheds, the temperature and humidity of a room and how close people are to one another.

To tease apart which of these factors matter most, researchers at the University of Maryland in the US ran a real-world transmission experiment using people who had caught flu naturally.

They brought together groups of participants in a hotel room, mixing people with active influenza infections, referred to as donors, with uninfected volunteers, referred to as recipients. The aim was simple: see whether flu would spread under conditions designed to favor transmission.

Despite prolonged close contact over several days, no recipient became infected.

This approach differed from earlier studies in which healthy volunteers were deliberately infected with influenza for research. By using naturally infected “donors,” the researchers hoped to better reflect how flu spreads outside the laboratory.

Two versions of the experiment were carried out. In one, a single donor shared a room with eight recipients. In the other, four donors shared with three recipients. Donors were aged 20 to 22, while recipients were aged between 25 and 45.

The room was kept at temperatures and humidity levels thought to favor influenza transmission, at 22°C to 25°C, and 20% to 45% humidity. Before quarantining the participants, the researchers closed off major uncontrolled air pathways – such as windows, doors and a leak in the fan coil units – to deliberately create low ventilation and poor air quality.

Over three to seven days, participants spent hours together in the confined space. They played card games at close range, took part in dance or yoga classes and passed around shared objects such as markers, microphones or tablet computers.

The researchers monitored transmission by measuring virus levels in exhaled air, saliva and mouth swabs from donors. Shared objects and the room air were also tested for viral particles. Participants recorded symptoms including coughing, sneezing, headaches and other common signs of flu.

Why Transmission Failed

Several samples from donors confirmed active influenza infection. But none of the recipients tested positive. A few reported mild symptoms such as headaches, but there was no clear evidence of flu infection in any of them.

The researchers suggest three main reasons why transmission may not have occurred: low virus shedding from donors, partial immunity among recipients and the way air circulated in the room.

Children are widely thought to drive the spread of influenza, but this study involved only adults. Adult donors in the experiment released relatively small amounts of virus. This may reflect the strains they were infected with, their age or the fact that they showed few symptoms. Very little coughing or sneezing was observed, which would have limited the amount of virus entering the air.

Recipients may also have been less susceptible. They had all lived through many flu seasons and several had received flu vaccinations in previous years, with one vaccinated in the current season. This prior exposure may have given them some background immunity.

Although temperature and humidity were set to favor transmission, the high level of air recirculation caused by fans may have disrupted clouds of virus-laden air. Instead of lingering around donors, these plumes may have been broken up and diluted, reducing how much virus recipients inhaled.

Taken together, the findings point to coughing and sneezing as key drivers of influenza spread, particularly from people who shed large amounts of virus, sometimes described as super spreaders. Immunity in those exposed and air movement in indoor spaces also appear to be crucial.

The study does not suggest that influenza is harmless or difficult to catch. Each year, millions, and possibly billions, of cases occur worldwide, with strong evidence that aerosol transmission plays a central role. Instead, it shows that the circumstances that allow flu to spread are more nuanced than simply sharing a room with an infected person.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/flu-transmission-study-didnt-spread-infections/

Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” generated a cultural whirlwind: chart-topping success, social media saturation and frenzied debate over her artistic evolution.

Nonetheless, despite this warm reception, opinions on Swift are deeply polarized by party. Democrats are far more likely to view her positively; Republicans are more likely to hold negative views. This partisan divide remains in place even after accounting for age, gender and other demographic differences.

We are political scientists who conduct research on public opinion. In our just-published study, “Mirrorball Politics,” we draw on national survey data to examine how Americans feel about Swift and what those feelings reveal about our politics. What we find is striking: Swift has become a cultural mirror, reflecting our society’s deepest social and political fault lines.

In other words, liking or disliking Swift has become yet another way Americans signal who they are politically. Young women love her, but young men don’t – and that gap matters.

This is part of a broader trend in which cultural preferences and political identity have collapsed into each other. The type of beer you drink, the kind of car you drive, the stores you shop at and now the musical artists you admire have become markers of political belonging – and difference.

Popular entertainment used to be a common space where Americans, regardless of whether they were Republicans or Democrats, could come together and have some fun. Those shared spaces are shrinking – and with them the opportunity for connection across partisan divides.

The Swifties Gap

That’s why feelings toward Swift offer warning signs for the future of American politics.

One of the starkest divides we found is between young men and young women. Gen Z women – those born between 1997 and 2012 – admire Swift. Gen Z men, not so much. On a 100-point scale measuring attitudes toward Swift, young women averaged 55, while young men averaged 43 – a statistically significant difference that was not present among older Americans.

This gender gap mirrors the widening political divide among younger Americans that played a pivotal role in the 2024 presidential election. Although a modest gender gap has been a consistent, defining feature of American electoral politics since 1980, the gap among young Americans is huge.

Young women are markedly progressive in their politics. Young men, by contrast, are trending rightward.

Many young men express skepticism toward feminism, discomfort with shifts in gender norms and a growing attraction to more conservative cultural messaging.

Haters Gonna Hate

This yawning gender gap is also reflected in views regarding Swift.

The strongest predictor of negative views of the singer, aside from partisanship, is “hostile sexism.” This is defined as negative attitudes toward women and a sense that men should dominate.

Our study finds that individuals who believe that women’s achievements come at men’s expense, or that women have too much power, are far more likely to dislike Swift. This effect is especially strong among men and particularly among Republican men.

Swift’s enormous success, artistic autonomy and cultural influence appear to trigger anxieties about women’s power in public life. The backlash is not about her lyrics or her image. It’s about what she represents: a confident, self-directed woman at the center of American culture.

This dynamic reveals the broader challenges facing women in positions of authority, including in politics. Hostile sexism remains a force in American society and a formidable barrier for any woman aspiring to the presidency.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/partisan-polarization-limits-taylor-swifts-popularity/

 

A group of volunteers spent days locked in a small hotel room with people actively infected with flu. They played games, shared objects and exercised together in conditions designed to help the virus spread. Yet not a single person caught influenza.

The unexpected finding comes from a well-designed study that set out to answer a basic question: how does flu really spread?

Influenza, the virus responsible for flu, is known to spread through aerosols (microscopic droplets) released when an infected person coughs, sneezes or even breathes normally. It can also pass from person to person via contaminated surfaces such as door handles or phones, known as fomite transmission.

How efficiently the virus spreads depends on several factors, including how much virus an infected person sheds, the temperature and humidity of a room and how close people are to one another.

To tease apart which of these factors matter most, researchers at the University of Maryland in the US ran a real-world transmission experiment using people who had caught flu naturally.

They brought together groups of participants in a hotel room, mixing people with active influenza infections, referred to as donors, with uninfected volunteers, referred to as recipients. The aim was simple: see whether flu would spread under conditions designed to favor transmission.

Despite prolonged close contact over several days, no recipient became infected.

This approach differed from earlier studies in which healthy volunteers were deliberately infected with influenza for research. By using naturally infected “donors,” the researchers hoped to better reflect how flu spreads outside the laboratory.

Two versions of the experiment were carried out. In one, a single donor shared a room with eight recipients. In the other, four donors shared with three recipients. Donors were aged 20 to 22, while recipients were aged between 25 and 45.

The room was kept at temperatures and humidity levels thought to favor influenza transmission, at 22°C to 25°C, and 20% to 45% humidity. Before quarantining the participants, the researchers closed off major uncontrolled air pathways – such as windows, doors and a leak in the fan coil units – to deliberately create low ventilation and poor air quality.

Over three to seven days, participants spent hours together in the confined space. They played card games at close range, took part in dance or yoga classes and passed around shared objects such as markers, microphones or tablet computers.

The researchers monitored transmission by measuring virus levels in exhaled air, saliva and mouth swabs from donors. Shared objects and the room air were also tested for viral particles. Participants recorded symptoms including coughing, sneezing, headaches and other common signs of flu.

Why Transmission Failed

Several samples from donors confirmed active influenza infection. But none of the recipients tested positive. A few reported mild symptoms such as headaches, but there was no clear evidence of flu infection in any of them.

The researchers suggest three main reasons why transmission may not have occurred: low virus shedding from donors, partial immunity among recipients and the way air circulated in the room.

Children are widely thought to drive the spread of influenza, but this study involved only adults. Adult donors in the experiment released relatively small amounts of virus. This may reflect the strains they were infected with, their age or the fact that they showed few symptoms. Very little coughing or sneezing was observed, which would have limited the amount of virus entering the air.

Recipients may also have been less susceptible. They had all lived through many flu seasons and several had received flu vaccinations in previous years, with one vaccinated in the current season. This prior exposure may have given them some background immunity.

Although temperature and humidity were set to favor transmission, the high level of air recirculation caused by fans may have disrupted clouds of virus-laden air. Instead of lingering around donors, these plumes may have been broken up and diluted, reducing how much virus recipients inhaled.

Taken together, the findings point to coughing and sneezing as key drivers of influenza spread, particularly from people who shed large amounts of virus, sometimes described as super spreaders. Immunity in those exposed and air movement in indoor spaces also appear to be crucial.

The study does not suggest that influenza is harmless or difficult to catch. Each year, millions, and possibly billions, of cases occur worldwide, with strong evidence that aerosol transmission plays a central role. Instead, it shows that the circumstances that allow flu to spread are more nuanced than simply sharing a room with an infected person.

Not everyone sheds virus at the same level and not everyone is equally vulnerable. Aerosol spread is most likely during coughing and sneezing, so people with these symptoms should isolate where possible and wear a well-fitted mask to reduce virus release into the air. Good ventilation and air circulation are especially important in small, poorly ventilated spaces.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/flu-transmission-study-didnt-spread-infections/

Committing to an exercise regimen isn’t easy, but a younger brain is a strong motivator. When researchers asked middle-aged adults to practice aerobic exercise regularly for a year, their brains became significantly “younger,” so to speak.

After 12 months of regular workouts, participants’ brains appeared about seven months younger than when they started. MRI scans analyzed by machine learning algorithms showed measurable structural changes associated with younger brains.

Scientists checked several likely explanations for why this may have happened, and none of them panned out. Fitness improved. Blood pressure didn’t budge. Weight stayed the same. Brain growth factors didn’t show clear changes. None of those factors accounted for the brain age shift.

“The pathways by which these effects occur remain unknown,” researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and AdventHealth Research Institute wrote in the Journal of Sport and Health Science.

The study tracked 130 adults between ages 26 and 58, none of them particularly active to start. Half were assigned to an exercise program, half to a control group that just received general health information. The exercise group committed to 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week, the same recommendation countless doctors give to their patients. Two sessions per week happened in a university lab with supervision, and the rest at home (walking, jogging, treadmills, bikes, ellipticals, etc.).

What Brain Age Actually Measures

To better understand “brain age,” researchers fed thousands of MRI scans into a computer, teaching it what a typical 30-year-old brain looks like versus a typical 50-year-old brain. The patterns involve brain volume, structure, and other subtle neurological features.

When someone gets a brain scan, the computer predicts their age based purely on what it sees. If you’re 45 but your brain looks more like that of a typical 48-year-old, you’re aging faster than average. If your brain looks 42, you’re aging slower.

In other studies, each extra year on this brain-aging measure has been linked to about a 3% higher risk of developing dementia down the road. People whose brains look older than their age tend to die earlier and show cognitive decline sooner. Your brain age in midlife may be forecasting your mental sharpness in your 70s and 80s.

The Fitness Connection Nobody Can Explain

Before the study started, researchers found something in the baseline measurements. People who were more fit had younger-looking brains. For every meaningful bump in measured cardio fitness, brain age looked nearly two years younger on average.

So when the exercise group got fitter over the year (and they did, measurably) researchers expected that would explain everything. It didn’t. Yes, fitness improved. Yes, brain age dropped. However, the statistical analysis showed fitness improvements didn’t account for the brain changes.

Body composition? No change in either group. Blood pressure? Same story. BDNF, a protein often linked to brain health, didn’t show a clear, meaningful increase in exercisers, and it didn’t explain the brain age changes anyway.

The researchers ticked through the usual suspects they’d measured. Nothing added up.

“That was a surprise,” said lead author Dr. Lu Wan, a data scientist at the AdventHealth Research Institute, in a statement. “We expected improvements in fitness or blood pressure to account for the effect, but they didn’t. Exercise may be acting through additional mechanisms we haven’t captured yet, such as subtle changes in brain structure, inflammation, vascular health or other molecular factors.”

What Might Be Happening (Besides What They Measured)

Of course, the brain doesn’t exist in isolation. Exercise triggers a cascade of changes throughout the body, and researchers only measured a handful of possibilities.

Maybe exercise altered inflammatory signals in ways the study didn’t capture. Perhaps it improved blood flow to the brain through mechanisms that wouldn’t show up in simple blood pressure readings. Mitochondria, the tiny power plants in cells, might have gotten more efficient. Metabolic changes could have occurred that weren’t tracked.

Alternatively, brains may have responded to exercise through pathways science hasn’t fully mapped yet. The study wasn’t designed to measure every possible mechanism, just the most obvious candidates.

What researchers do know is that 150 minutes of weekly aerobic exercise (two and a half hours, broken up however one wants) was enough to produce measurable changes in brain structure within a year.

Why Your 30s, 40s, and 50s Matter

Most brain aging studies focus on people in their 70s and 80s, after cognitive decline has already started. This study deliberately targeted younger adults because midlife appears to be a pivot point.

Risk factors that show up in your 40s (high blood pressure, obesity, inactivity) predict dementia risk 20 or 30 years later. But midlife is also when intervention might matter most. Your brain is still resilient enough to respond, but aging processes have begun.

The participants in this study weren’t elderly, weren’t sick, and weren’t already showing cognitive problems. They were regular people, two-thirds of them women, averaging 41 years old. Most were sedentary, reporting less than 100 minutes of exercise per week before the study started. In other words, they looked like a lot of American adults.

Their brains at the study’s start were aging normally on average, though individual participants varied quite a bit. Twelve months of exercise changed that trajectory.

The Exercise Program That Worked

Nothing about the workout regimen required a gym membership or special equipment. Participants walked, jogged, or used whatever cardio equipment they had access to. Heart rate monitors ensured they worked hard enough, breathing heavily but still able to talk, working at about 60-75% of their maximum heart rate.

The group stuck with it remarkably well. They completed 93% of their prescribed exercise minutes. Lab attendance hit 73%, and people made up the difference at home.

Meanwhile, the control group’s fitness declined slightly over the year, as tends to happen when sedentary people stay sedentary. Their brain age drifted slightly upward on average.

The pandemic also complicated things. Some participants couldn’t complete final assessments, and for several months in 2020, lab sessions shut down entirely. Still, 89% of the exercise group returned once facilities reopened, and the results held.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/aerobic-exercise-brain-younger/

 

Near the equator, the Sun hurries below the horizon in a matter of minutes. Darkness seeps from the surrounding forest. Nearly 10,000 years ago, at the base of a mountain in Africa, people’s shadows stretch up the wall of a natural overhang of stone.

They’re lit by a ferocious fire that’s been burning for hours, visible even to people miles away. The wind carries the smell of burning. This fire will linger in community memory for generations − and in the archaeological record for far longer.

We are a team of bioarchaeologists, archaeologists and forensic anthropologists who, with our colleagues, recently discovered the earliest evidence of cremation – the transformation of a body from flesh to burned bone fragments and ashes – in Africa and the earliest example of an adult pyre cremation in the world.

It’s no easy task to produce, create and maintain an open fire strong enough to completely burn a human body. While the earliest cremation in the world dates to about 40,000 years ago in Australia, that body was not fully burned.

It is far more effective to use a pyre: an intentionally built structure of combustible fuel. Pyres appear in the archaeological record only about 11,500 years ago, with the earliest known example containing a cremated child under a house floor in Alaska.

Many cultures have practiced cremation, and the bones, ash and other residues from these events help archaeologists piece together past funeral rituals. Our scientific paper, published in the journal Science Advances, describes a spectacular event that happened about 9,500 years ago in Malawi in south-central Africa, challenging long-held notions about how hunter-gatherers treat their dead.

The Discovery

At first it was just a hint of ash, then more. It expanded downward and outward, becoming thicker and harder. Pockets of dark earth briefly appeared and disappeared under trowels and brushes until one of the excavators stopped. They pointed to a small bone at the base of a 1½-foot (0.5-meter) wall of archaeological ash revealed under a natural stone overhang at the Hora 1 archaeological site in northern Malawi.

The bone was the broken end of a humerus, from the upper arm of a person. And clinging to the very end of it was the matching end of the lower arm, the radius. Here was a human elbow joint, burned and fractured, preserved in sediments full of debris from the daily lives of Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

We wondered whether this could be a funeral pyre, but such structures are extremely rare in the archaeological record.

Finding a cremated person from the Stone Age also seemed impossible because cremation is not generally practiced by African foragers, either living or ancient. The earliest evidence of burned human remains from Africa date to around 7,500 years ago, but that body was incompletely burned, and there was no evidence of a pyre.

The first clear cases of cremation date to around 3,300 years ago, carried out by early pastoralists in eastern Africa. But overall the practice remained rare and is associated with food-producing societies and not hunter-gatherers.

We found more charred human remains in a small cluster, while the ash layer itself was as large as a queen bed. The blaze must have been enormous.

When we returned from fieldwork and received our first radiocarbon dates, we were shocked again: The event had happened about 9,500 years ago.

Piecing Together The Events

We built a team of specialists to piece together what had happened. By applying forensic and bioarchaeological techniques, we confirmed that all the bones belonged to a single person who was cremated shortly after her death.

This was a small adult, probably a woman, just under 5 feet (1.5 meters) in height. In life, she was physically active, with a strong upper body, but had evidence of a partially healed bone infection on her arm. Bone development and the beginnings of arthritis suggested she was probably middle-aged when she died.

Patterns of warping, cracks and discoloration caused by fire damage showed her body was burned with some flesh still on it, in a fire reaching at least 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 degrees Celsius). Under the microscope we could see tiny incisions along her arms and at muscle connections on her legs, revealing that people tending the pyre used stone tools to help the process along by removing flesh.

Within the pyre ash, we found many small pointed chips of stone that suggested people had added tools to the fire as it burned.

And the way the bones were clustered inside such a large fire showed that this was not a case of cannibalism: It was some other kind of ritual.

Perhaps most surprisingly, we found no evidence of her head. Skull bones and teeth usually preserve well in cremations because they are very dense. While we can’t know for sure, the absence of these body parts suggest her head may have been removed before or during the cremation as part of the funeral ritual.

A Communal Spectacle

We determined that the pyre must have been built and maintained by multiple people who were actively engaged in the event. During new excavations the following year, we found even more bone fragments from the same ancient woman, displaced and colored differently from in the main pyre. These additional remains suggest that the body was manipulated, attended and moved during the cremation.

Microscopic analysis of ash samples from across the pyre included blackened fungus, reddened soil from termite structures, and microscopic plant remains. These helped us estimate that people collected at least 70 pounds (30 kg) of deadwood to do the task and stoked the fire for hours to days.

We also learned that this was not the first fire at the Hora 1 site – nor its last. To our astonishment, what had seemed during fieldwork to be a single massive pile of ash was in fact a layered series of burning events. Radiocarbon dating of the ash samples showed that people began lighting fires on that spot by about 10,240 years ago. The same location was used to construct the cremation pyre several hundred years later. As the pyre smoldered, new fires were kindled on top of it, resulting in fused ashes in microscopic layers.

Within a few hundred years of the main event, another large fire was built again at the exact same place. While there is no evidence that anyone else was cremated in the subsequent fires, the fact that people repeatedly returned to the spot for this purpose suggests its significance lived on in community memory.

A New View Of Ancient Cremation

What does all of this tell us about ancient hunter-gatherers in the region?

For one, it shows that entire communities were engaged in a mortuary spectacle of extraordinary scale. An open pyre can take more than a day of constant tending and an enormous amount of fuel to fully reduce a body, and during this time the sights and smells of burning wood and other remains are impossible to hide.

This scale of mortuary effort is unexpected for this time and place. In the African record, complex multigenerational mortuary rituals tied to specific places are generally not associated with a hunting-and-gathering way of life.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/oldest-cremation-africa-mystery/

Both age and menopause appear to influence attraction – but in different ways.

Women’s preferences for masculine features in men shift as they age and transition through menopause, according to research exploring how attraction evolves throughout the female lifespan.

The small study of 122 Polish women aged 19 to 70 found distinct patterns across age groups and menopausal stages. Older women preferred men with fuller beards and lighter builds, while postmenopausal women rated feminized faces as less attractive compared to younger women.

Published in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, the study examined how women at three different life stages evaluated photographs of men that had been digitally altered to show varying degrees of facial masculinity, beardedness, body shape, and muscle mass.

Age Shapes Preferences for Facial Hair and Build
Women’s age emerged as a significant factor in their assessments. Older women rated men with medium and full facial hair as more attractive than younger women did. This preference may reflect associations between beards and maturity, status, and resource acquisition rather than purely reproductive signals.

Light muscularity also became more attractive to older women. Well-built physiques signal genetic fitness and physical strength, traits that younger women in their reproductive years may prioritize. As women age and reproductive concerns diminish, lighter musculature suggesting health and approachability becomes more appealing than intimidating displays of strength.

Menopausal Status Shows Distinct Effects
Beyond age, menopausal status itself influenced some preferences. The research team included 45 premenopausal women, 30 perimenopausal women, and 47 postmenopausal women. Each viewed digitally modified photographs of a 22-year-old male model altered to show different facial structures, amounts of facial hair, body types, and muscle development.

Postmenopausal women rated feminized male faces as less attractive than women in other life stages. This finding is complicated, however, because age alone seemed to push preferences slightly in the opposite direction—older women across the board rated feminized faces as somewhat more attractive, but this effect was small.

Postmenopausal women also showed a trend toward rating V-shaped body silhouettes as less attractive, though this result was weaker and reached only borderline statistical significance. They perceived men with medium muscularity as more aggressive than other groups did. Age and menopausal status had no effect on how women judged social dominance.

What Might Explain These Changes
Hormonal changes during menopause may help explain these shifting preferences. Declining estrogen levels affect not just physical symptoms but potentially also how women perceive and evaluate potential partners. The study didn’t measure hormone levels directly, but the pattern fits with what researchers know about reproductive biology.

During reproductive years, women tend to prefer traits signaling genetic fitness and reproductive success, such as masculinized features, muscular bodies, and aggressive dominance. As women transition through menopause, their priorities may shift toward characteristics supporting long-term relationships and social cooperation rather than reproductive potential.

This aligns with the “grandmother hypothesis,” which explains the extended post-reproductive period in human females. After ovarian function ceases, women may redirect attention from mate selection toward caring for grandchildren and supporting family networks. A postmenopausal woman focuses on helping her daughters raise children rather than seeking partners with the best reproductive genetics.

Understanding Attraction Across the Lifespan
The findings suggest that attraction isn’t static across a woman’s life. What women find appealing in men appears to shift with different life stages in ways that may reflect changing biological priorities.

Researchers carefully modified the photographs to ensure consistent changes across all images. Women evaluated each variation on a 10-point scale for physical attractiveness, perceived aggression, and social dominance. The controlled methodology allowed the team to isolate which specific features drove different reactions across age groups.

The study focused specifically on secondary sexual characteristics—traits like facial structure, body shape, and hair distribution that distinguish males from females beyond reproductive organs. These features serve as biological signals that women may interpret differently depending on their life stage.

Whether a woman is in her reproductive years or post-menopause appears to influence what she notices and values in male appearance, though the mechanisms behind these changes require further research to fully understand.

Source: https://studyfinds.org/menopause-changes-what-women-find-attractive/

Mice given processed fats struggled to adapt to winter.

Deep beneath the surface of our planet lies the Earth’s core, a solid ball of iron under crushing pressure. Now, however, scientists conducting laboratory experiments have found evidence suggesting it may not be a uniform sphere after all.

Instead, lab tests on iron mixed with silicon and carbon show properties consistent with a layered structure, with different chemical compositions at different depths. If correct, this hidden structure would have formed as the core crystallized from the center outward, naturally sorting lightweight elements toward the outer layers while leaving the center more iron-rich.

The work addresses a puzzle that has bothered geophysicists for decades. When earthquake waves travel through the inner core, they move at different speeds depending on which direction they’re headed, a property called anisotropy. Stranger still, this effect isn’t uniform. The outer portions of the inner core show weak anisotropy while the central region shows much stronger anisotropy. A compelling explanation has been difficult to pin down – until now.

A research team at the University of Münster in Germany may have found an answer by recreating inner core conditions in their lab. They squeezed iron mixed with small amounts of silicon and carbon (proportions scientists think may match the actual core) to crushing pressures in a diamond vise while heating it to extreme temperatures. When they measured how this material would affect seismic waves, something clicked: the silicon-carbon mixture showed low anisotropy, roughly consistent with what seismologists infer for the outer portion of the inner core. Pure iron, by contrast, showed high anisotropy matching observations from the center.

The results, published in Nature Communications, suggest Earth’s core could be chemically stratified rather than uniform.

How Freezing Iron Could Have Created Layers

The core didn’t start out solid. As Earth cooled over geological time, conditions at the center eventually allowed iron to begin crystallizing despite the crushing pressure. That process continues today, with the boundary between solid inner core and liquid outer core slowly advancing outward.

Crucially, as molten iron freezes onto the growing inner core, silicon and carbon get incorporated at levels that depend on temperature and pressure. Studies of iron alloys show that cooler temperatures and lower pressures both favor more silicon and carbon dissolving into solid iron. Since pressure drops as you move from center to edge, each successive layer that crystallized could have incorporated progressively more of these lightweight elements.

Think of it like making rock candy. As sugar solution slowly crystallizes, different conditions at different times can create layers with slightly different properties. Except this is 800 miles across, made of iron instead of sugar, and formed over vast stretches of geological time. If the model is correct, the oldest, most iron-rich material sits at the center while younger, more silicon-and-carbon-rich material forms the outer layers.

Squeezing Samples to Extreme Pressures

The team couldn’t drill to the core, obviously. Instead, they brought approximations of core conditions to a lab in Germany using diamond anvil cells, which are devices that squeeze microscopic samples between two diamonds to create enormous pressures. They also heated the samples with electrical resistance.

The experiments hit pressures up to 128 gigapascals and temperatures up to 1,100 Kelvin. That’s not quite as extreme as the actual inner core, which experiences roughly three times more pressure and much higher temperatures; but close enough to help constrain models that project the behavior to true core conditions.

Powerful X-rays from a synchrotron facility revealed how the samples’ crystal structure deformed under stress. When iron is squeezed in one direction, the atomic layers can shift and align. This alignment controls how seismic waves travel through the material. By measuring the alignment in their tiny samples, the researchers could predict what earthquake waves might experience passing through a planetary volume of the same material.

Silicon and Carbon Change the Picture

The key finding: pure iron and the silicon-carbon alloy behave quite differently. Pure iron squeezed and heated to conditions approaching the core’s develops strong alignment that can make seismic waves travel several percent faster in one direction than another, often on the order of 6-7% in models. The iron-silicon-carbon mixture? Closer to 2%.

That’s consistent with what seismologists observe. The outer portion of the inner core shows roughly 2% anisotropy. The central region shows higher values, around 4-6%. If silicon and carbon concentrations increase toward the edge, as the crystallization process would predict, the seismic observations align with the laboratory findings.

The research also revealed that adding carbon strengthens the iron alloy significantly, making it more resistant to deformation. This affects how the material could develop its aligned structure over geological time as the core continues to evolve.

Why This Matters Beyond Cool Science

More broadly, because the core helps power Earth’s magnetic field through churning motions in the liquid outer core, understanding the solid inner core’s structure matters for modeling how this magnetic shield works. The field protects Earth’s surface from harmful solar radiation and has helped maintain habitable conditions over geological history.

Chemical layers in the solid inner core could influence heat flow and interactions at the boundary with the liquid outer core, potentially affecting the magnetic field’s pattern and stability. Knowing the inner core may have stratified structure helps scientists build better models of these deep Earth processes.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/earths-core-may-have-an-onion-like-structure/

 

Mold lurking behind walls and under floors can sicken families for months before anyone realizes what’s wrong. Traditional mold testing requires swabbing surfaces, sending samples to labs, and waiting three to seven days for results, all while potentially harmful spores continue circulating through living spaces. Researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have created an electronic “nose” that measures air samples in about 30 minutes and identifies toxic mold species with performance levels approaching laboratory-grade testing in controlled conditions.

The device works similarly to mold-detection dogs but eliminates the need for expensive animal training and provides something dogs cannot: precise identification of mold species. Published in Advanced Sensor Research, the study shows that sensor technology can distinguish between Stachybotrys chartarum and Chaetomium globosum, two of the most common and concerning molds found in water-damaged buildings. Both species thrive on moisture-compromised materials like drywall and wallpaper, producing metabolites linked to irritant and inflammatory responses in humans.

Indoor mold creates health and financial problems in many damp buildings. Current detection methods rely on visual inspection, air sampling, or surface swabs followed by laboratory culturing, a process that delays remediation efforts. While mold-detection dogs offer faster screening, their training is costly and time-intensive, and the animals can only signal mold presence without differentiating between species, a critical limitation when determining health risks and remediation strategies.

Electronic Nose Mold Detection Using Chemical Signatures
The innovative e-nose uses tin oxide nanowires as its sensing material. These microscopic wires change their electrical resistance when exposed to different volatile organic compounds, the chemical signatures that molds emit as metabolic byproducts. Each mold species gives off its own characteristic mix of gases that the sensor can recognize.

The device contains 16 individual sub-sensors, each coated with the same tin oxide nanowires but positioned to detect slight variations in the chemical signals. When ultraviolet light activates the nanowires, they become sensitive to gas molecules in the air. Mold compounds either directly oxidize or reduce the sensor surface, or they alter how oxygen interacts with it, changing the electrical resistance in measurable ways.

Researchers grew both mold species on two different substrates to simulate real-world variability: one substrate mixed agar with shredded gypsum board (mimicking drywall), while the other combined agar with wheat flour (representing paper and cellulose materials). Samples were incubated at 25 degrees Celsius with 60% humidity for at least 10 days until mold fully colonized the growth surface. The team conducted eight measurements for each mold species over two weeks. In their lab setup, each air sample was measured for about 30 minutes, and the system used that signal pattern to classify what it detected. The measurements generated about 324,000 data points through resampling.

Machine Learning Boosts Mold Detection Performance to 98.4%
The research team tested several approaches to classify the sensor data. Their initial method used conventional linear discriminant analysis, a statistical technique that finds patterns distinguishing different groups. This approach included seven categories: clean air, gypsum substrate alone, wheat substrate alone, and each mold species on each substrate type. Conventional analysis produced an F1-score of only 83.74%, with many samples overlapping. (Think of F1-score as a single report-card number that rewards both catching true mold signals and avoiding false alarms.)

The team then simplified the model by removing substrate dependency, merging samples into broader categories of Stachybotrys, Chaetomium, and “no mold.” When researchers created separate analysis systems for gypsum-based samples and wheat-based samples, the F1-score jumped to 92.64% for gypsum and 98.09% for wheat substrates.

The strongest results came from an ensemble approach combining multiple analysis models with a subsequent classification algorithm. This system creates numerous individual models, each trained on different subsets of the data, then synthesizes their predictions. The best-performing approach reached an average F1-score of 98.37% across all seven original categories, performance approaching laboratory-grade testing. To prevent false positives, the team implemented a majority voting system where the final prediction is only accepted if more than half of the individual models agree.

Translating Laboratory Success to Real Buildings
The study was conducted under controlled laboratory conditions, which differ substantially from occupied buildings. Real indoor environments contain numerous volatile compounds from building materials, cleaning products, cooking, and human activities that could interfere with mold detection. The researchers suggest that baseline measurements in mold-free areas of a building could allow mold detection using outlier analysis, flagging areas where chemical signatures deviate from the clean baseline.

The study focused on two mold species, but buildings commonly harbor others like Aspergillus and Penicillium. These also produce characteristic chemical signatures, suggesting the e-nose technology could expand to detect them. Additional research is needed to determine which species can be reliably identified individually versus which might be grouped into broader categories, and how well the sensors perform in actual buildings with naturally occurring mold contamination.

Source: https://studyfinds.org/electronic-nose-mold-detection/

It might seem worlds away from the Earth we know. But can Star Trek teach us anything about the economics of our own society?

Set in the mid-23rd century, the original Star Trek series told the story of the starship Enterprise. Its crew were led by the human Captain James Kirk and the half-Vulcan Mr Spock.

From post-scarcity societies to hyper-capitalist alien cultures, the now legendary sci-fi franchise the show spawned offers surprisingly rich material for economists and curious minds alike.

As we wind down for the holiday season, let’s take a light-hearted journey into one of pop culture’s most enduring sci-fi universes.

A Society Without Money?

There is macroeconomics in Star Trek, but not as we know it. Scarcity seems much less of an issue in the Star Trek world.

That’s because, within the interstellar government known as The Federation, machines called replicators generate food and other objects. Money is claimed to be no longer used.

Some scholars interpret Star Trek’s relative absence of money in Marxian terms as a step towards a classless society. There are, however, passing references to “credits”. In one episode, a villain is accused of having used counterfeit currency to purchase a ship.

In another, Kirk describes a pile of diamonds as an “incredible fortune in stones.” It seems even in the 23rd century, money still has some uses.

Logic And Emotions

In one early episode, the engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott famously tells Captain Kirk he “can’t change the laws of physics.” But the laws of economics also still operate. Despite material wealth, everyone still only has 24 hours in their day and has to make choices.

There are still what economists call “opportunity costs”: doing one thing means having less time for another. So, we can learn about economics from Star Trek, just as we can from Star Wars.

Underpinning many classical economic theories was the concept of “homo economicus” or the “economic man”. This is the idea that humans are rational and self-interested and will always make decisions that maximise their personal benefit.

Spock seems to fit this description. He is unemotional, or at least suppresses his emotions. He prides himself on always making logical decisions.

More recently, however, the field of behavioral economics has challenged this view of human beings as perfectly rational.

It argues human beings are more like Kirk – we try to make good decisions but are sometimes swayed by impatience or influenced by a wide range of emotions. Behavioral economists are trying to predict what Kirk would do, rather than Spock.

Hyper-Capitalist Aliens

Across the entire franchise, viewers are introduced to a variety of alien races. They are at different levels of technological progress – but not that different.

One of the most vivid illustrations of economic behaviour comes from the Ferengi, who feature prominently in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series. The Ferengi are a mercantile alien race whose culture revolves around the accumulation of wealth and profit. They aren’t members of the “post-money” Federation.

They live by a codified set of business maxims, the “Rules of Acquisition”. These rules reflect their deeply ingrained profit-seeking ethos. Some of the more memorable include:

These rules encapsulate the Ferengi’s relentless pursuit of profit, and their efforts to increase economic rent through various means including manipulation of market and institutional structures.

An Unscrupulous Boss

A prime example is Quark, the archetypal Ferengi who owns a popular bar and restaurant. Quark exploits his monopsony power – being the sole employer in a niche market – to underpay staff and impose harsh working conditions.

This is a practical demonstration of Rule 211: “Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don’t hesitate to step on them.”

But in one episode, Quark’s employees go on strike, prompting him to use underhanded tactics to suppress collective bargaining and maintain control.

This storyline mirrors real-world labour market dynamics and the tension between capital and labour.

Monopoly Power

In the series Star Trek: Voyager, we see how access to key technology and asymmetric information can lead to monopoly power and exploitation.

In the episode “False Profits”, two Ferengi stranded on a primitive planet use replicator technology to produce goods, presenting themselves as divine sages.

Their technological advantage allows them to extract maximum rent from the unsuspecting locals.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/can-you-live-long-and-prosper-by-learning-economics-from-star-trek-highly-illogical/

Fathers exposed to microplastics before conception may be setting their daughters up for metabolic problems later in life. A new mouse study shows when male mice consumed plastic particles before breeding, their female offspring developed insulin resistance on a high-fat diet while male offspring remained largely unaffected.

Research from the University of California, Riverside found an unusual pattern. Female descendants of microplastic-exposed fathers showed significantly impaired insulin tolerance despite maintaining normal body weight and fat mass. Their brothers had reduced fat deposits but normal insulin function.

Male mice received microplastics daily for four weeks before mating with unexposed females. The dose matched amounts humans might encounter through everyday exposure to contaminated food and water. The fathers themselves showed no health changes from the exposure.

Daughters Develop Insulin Resistance

When fed a Western-style high-fat diet after weaning, female offspring from exposed fathers failed insulin tolerance tests. Blood glucose levels dropped more slowly after insulin injection compared to controls, showing their bodies struggled to respond properly to the hormone. This condition, called insulin resistance, increases risk for Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Examining liver tissue revealed why. Female offspring from microplastic-exposed fathers had elevated levels of inflammatory proteins. One protein called IKKβ acts as a central coordinator of inflammatory responses and has been directly linked to obesity-related insulin resistance in previous research. None of these changes appeared in male offspring.

Sperm RNA Carries Environmental Signals

The study, published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, identifies a potential mechanism behind these sex-specific effects. Microplastic exposure substantially changed small RNA molecules in sperm. These molecular fragments act like instructions that can influence which genes turn on or off in developing embryos.

Scientists used an advanced sequencing technique that overcomes limitations of traditional methods by detecting chemically modified RNA molecules. The analysis uncovered more than 4,000 changes in small RNAs from sperm of microplastic-exposed mice.

To test whether these altered RNAs could affect development, researchers introduced three candidates into mouse embryonic stem cells. All three changed expression of genes important for metabolism and development. One RNA fragment increased expression of an inflammatory gene while decreasing a gene that helps cells respond to insulin. Two other RNA fragments decreased expression of genes involved in muscle development, gut formation, and glucose transport.

These experimental results in stem cells match some problems observed in female offspring: elevated inflammation and impaired insulin signaling.

Why Female Offspring Are More Vulnerable

The sex-specific pattern observed in this study fits with findings from other research on paternal environmental exposures. Studies have found that fathers fed high-fat diets or exposed to arsenic produced female offspring with glucose intolerance, while male offspring remained unaffected.

Scientists don’t fully understand why female offspring appear more vulnerable. Possibilities include differences in sex chromosomes, sex hormone effects, and distinct patterns in how male versus female embryos reset their gene activity patterns during early development.

Male offspring weren’t completely unaffected by paternal microplastic exposure, but their changes differed from their sisters. Males from exposed fathers had significantly reduced belly fat despite similar overall body weight. Female offspring showed the opposite pattern—reduced muscle mass with normal fat mass.

Human Microplastic Exposure

Humans face widespread exposure to microplastics through contaminated food, water, and air. Recent studies have detected plastic particles in human blood, placentas, liver, kidneys, and brain tissue. Researchers have also found them in testicular tissue, semen, and placentas.

The health consequences need more investigation, though emerging evidence links microplastics to increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic dysfunction, and premature aging. Most research has focused on direct exposure effects rather than potential impacts on future generations.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/microplastics-fathers-daughters-insulin-resistance/

For decades, dietary guidelines have warned against high-fat cheese because of concerns about saturated fat and heart health. Now, a Swedish study that followed 27,670 people for nearly 30 years has uncovered a surprising benefit associated with fatty cheeses. Those who ate more high-fat cheese showed lower rates of dementia.

The research found that participants consuming at least 50 grams daily of cheese with more than 20% fat content had a 13% lower risk of developing dementia compared to those eating less than 15 grams daily. Compared with non-consumers, those eating 20 grams or more per day of high-fat cream showed a 16% lower dementia risk.

Not all dairy products showed these associations. Milk, fermented milk products (like yogurt), low-fat cheese, and low-fat cream showed no clear links to dementia risk overall. Butter was more complicated. In one analysis, higher butter intake was linked to higher Alzheimer’s risk. When it comes to brain health, the type and fat content of dairy products may matter more than simply eating “more dairy” or “less dairy.”

30-Year Study Tracked Nearly 28,000 People

Researchers used data from the Malmö Diet and Cancer cohort, where participants underwent detailed dietary assessments between 1991 and 1996. The evaluation combined three methods: a seven-day food diary, a 168-item food frequency questionnaire, and a 45-60 minute dietary interview conducted by trained personnel.

The study, published in Neurology, identified 3,208 dementia cases through Swedish health registries by December 2020. Cases diagnosed through 2014 underwent additional validation by trained physicians who reviewed symptoms, cognitive test results, brain imaging, and biomarkers when available. The validated cases included 1,126 with Alzheimer’s disease and 451 with vascular dementia.

Participants were followed from their baseline examination until dementia diagnosis, death, emigration, or December 2020 (whichever came first). The median follow-up period was about 25 years.

Genetics May Influence Cheese’s Brain Benefits

Among people without the APOE e4 gene variant, a major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, eating more high-fat cheese was associated with a 13% lower risk of Alzheimer’s specifically. The gene variant had no effect on the cheese-dementia association overall, but it modified the relationship with Alzheimer’s disease itself.

About 30% of study participants carried at least one copy of the APOE e4 variant.

People who consumed the most high-fat cheese tended to be younger, have lower body mass indexes, and have higher education levels. They also had lower rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. They were less likely to use cholesterol-lowering medications. However, they were more likely to be current or past smokers and had higher alcohol consumption.

The researchers adjusted their analyses for age, sex, education level, physical activity, smoking status, alcohol consumption, family history of cardiovascular disease, marital status, living alone, diet quality, body mass index, and hypertension. Even after accounting for all these factors, the protective associations with high-fat cheese and cream remained.

Strongest Protection Against Vascular Dementia

High-fat cheese consumption showed particularly strong protective effects against vascular dementia, the second most common form of dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain. People eating 50 grams or more daily had a 29% lower risk of vascular dementia compared to those consuming less than 15 grams daily.

High-fat cream consumption also showed inverse associations with both Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia when researchers analyzed intake as a continuous variable rather than categories.

The researchers used specific thresholds to categorize dairy products. High-fat cheese meant more than 20% fat, high-fat cream meant more than 30% fat, and high-fat milk and fermented milk meant more than 2.5% fat.

How Researchers Tried to Reduce ‘Reverse Causation’

A major concern in dementia research is reverse causation (the possibility that early cognitive decline changes eating habits years before diagnosis occurs). Dementia can have a long preclinical phase during which subtle brain changes begin but symptoms haven’t appeared yet.

The researchers addressed this by excluding dementia cases that occurred within the first 10 years of follow-up. Surprisingly, this strengthened the protective associations with high-fat cheese, suggesting the findings aren’t simply due to sick people changing their diets before diagnosis.

The study also examined people who reported no substantial diet changes during a five-year follow-up examination. Among this subset, the associations weakened and no longer reached statistical significance, though they remained in the protective direction.

Why High-Fat Cheese May Benefit Brain Health

Cheese is a whole food with protein, calcium, and other compounds packaged together in a way that may affect how the body responds to it. Previous randomized controlled trials have shown that regular-fat cheese doesn’t cause the adverse changes in blood cholesterol that researchers once feared when they issued blanket warnings about saturated fat.

Some animal studies suggest that regular-fat cheese may provide metabolic benefits by altering gut bacteria and altering fat absorption. Regular-fat cheese has been linked to increased fecal fat excretion, meaning the body may absorb less of the fat consumed. The cheese-making process and fermentation may also create beneficial compounds not found in milk.

Mendelian randomization studies, which use genetic variants to infer causal relationships, have linked cheese consumption to lower risks of diabetes and high blood pressure (both risk factors for dementia).

An unmeasured factor would need to substantially increase dementia risk to completely explain away the observed protective association with high-fat cheese. That threshold exceeds the effect sizes of several established dementia risk factors like smoking, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

Butter consumption showed a different pattern. Among people consuming 40 grams or more daily, there was a 27% higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease compared to non-consumers. However, among participants with higher overall diet quality, butter consumption was inversely associated with dementia risk. The authors stress this finding is speculative and might relate to overall dietary fat intake (butter might be protective in an otherwise low-fat diet, but increases risk when added to a diet already high in fat).

Low-fat milk consumption showed an unexpected finding. People consuming 500 grams or more daily (about two cups) had a 24% higher risk of dementia when follow-up ended in 2014. However, this association wasn’t significant when the follow-up was extended to 2020, despite increased statistical power from more cases.

Neither high-fat nor low-fat fermented milk products showed associations with dementia risk in the overall analysis. Regular milk, regardless of fat content, showed no significant associations with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or vascular dementia.

The researchers conducted substitution analyses to estimate what might happen if people replaced 20 grams of high-fat cheese with equivalent amounts of other foods. Replacing high-fat cheese with milk, fermented milk, high-fat red meat, or processed meat was associated with increased dementia risk.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/eating-high-fat-cheese-daily-lower-dementia-risk-but-not-milk-yogurt/

 

Stuck in front of our screens all day, we often ignore our senses beyond sound and vision. And yet they are always at work. When we’re more alert we feel the rough and smooth surfaces of objects, the stiffness in our shoulders, the softness of bread.

In the morning, we may feel the tingle of toothpaste, hear and feel the running water in the shower, smell the shampoo, and later the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.

Aristotle told us there were five senses. But he also told us the world was made up of five elements and we no longer believe that. And modern research is showing we may actually have dozens of senses.

Almost all of our experience is multisensory. We don’t see, and hear, smell and touch in separate parcels. They occur simultaneously in a unified experience of the world around us and of ourselves.

What we feel affects what we see and what we see affects what we hear. Different odors in shampoo can affect how you perceive the texture of hair. The fragrance of rose makes hair seem silkier, for instance.

Odors in low-fat yogurts can make them feel richer and thicker on the palate without adding more emulsifiers. Perception of odors in the mouth, rising to the nasal passage, are modified by the viscosity of the liquids we consume.

My long-term collaborator, professor Charles Spence from the Crossmodal Laboratory in Oxford, told me his neuroscience colleagues believe there are anywhere between 22 and 33 senses.

These include proprioception, which enables us to know where our limbs are without looking at them. Our sense of balance draws on the vestibular system of ear canals as well as sight and proprioception.

Another example is interoception, by which we sense changes in our own bodies such as a slight increase in our heart rate and hunger. We also have a sense of agency when moving our limbs: a feeling that can go missing in stroke patients who sometimes even believe someone else is moving their arm.

There is the sense of ownership. Stroke patients sometimes feel their, for instance, arm is not their own even though they may still feel sensations in it.

Some of the traditional senses are combinations of several senses. Touch, for instance involves pain, temperature, itch and tactile sensations. When we taste something we are actually experiencing a combination of three senses: touch, smell and taste – or gustation – which combine to produce the flavors we perceive in food and drinks.

Gustation, covers sensations produced by receptors on the tongue that enable us to detect salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (savory). What about mint, mango, melon, strawberry, raspberry?

We don’t have raspberry receptors on the tongue, nor is raspberry flavor some combination of sweet, sour and bitter. There is no taste arithmetic for fruit flavors.

We perceive them through the combined workings of the tongue and the nose. It is smell that contributes the lion’s share to what we call tasting.

This is not inhaling odors from the environment, though. Odor compounds are released as we chew or sip, traveling from the mouth to the nose though the nasal pharynx at the back of throat.

Touch plays its part too, binding tastes and smells together and fixing our preferences for runny or firm eggs, and the velvety, luxuriousness gooeyness of chocolate.

Sight is influenced by our vestibular system. When you are on board an aircraft on the ground, look down the cabin. Look again when you are in the climb.

It will “look” to you as though the front of the cabin is higher than you are, although optically, everything is in the same relation to you as it was on the ground. What you “see” is the combined effect of sight and your ear canals telling you that you are titling backwards.

The senses offer a rich seam of research and philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists work together at the Centre for the Study of the Senses at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.

In 2013, the centre launched its Rethinking the Senses project, directed by my colleague, the late Professor Sir Colin Blakemore. We discovered how modifying the sound of your own footsteps can make your body feel lighter or heavier.

We learned how audioguides in Tate Britain art museum that address the listener as if the model in a portrait was speaking enable visitors to remember more visual details of the painting. We discovered how aircraft noise interferes with our perception of taste and why you should always drink tomato juice on a plane.

While our perception of salt, sweet and sour is reduced in the presence of white noise, umami is not, and tomatoes, and tomato juice is rich in umami. This means the aircraft’s noise will taste enhance the savory flavor.

At our latest interactive exhibition, Senses Unwrapped at Coal Drops Yard in London’s King’s Cross, people can discover for themselves how their senses work and why they don’t work as we think they do.

For example, the size-weight illusion is illustrated by a set of small, medium and large curling stones. People can lift each one and decide which is heaviest. The smallest one feels heaviest, but people can them place them on balancing scales and discover that they are all the same weight.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/humans-33-senses/

Most people in relationships would never admit it out loud, but a surprising number are keeping their options open. One in six Americans currently in a relationship confesses there’s someone else in their life they’d actually leave their partner for if that person showed romantic interest.

That revelation comes from a new survey of 1,279 people in relationships, which uncovered some uncomfortable truths about modern commitment. While having a wandering eye is one thing, having a specific person in mind as a potential exit strategy takes it further.

The Gender Gap in Relationship Commitment

Research conducted by Talker Research as part of a lifestyle omnibus found that 16% of coupled Americans have identified someone who could pull them away from their current relationship. Men are far more likely to have this backup plan, with 19% admitting there’s someone they’d leave their partner for, compared to just 12% of women.

Perhaps even more telling: one in five Americans (20%) in relationships don’t actually consider their current partner to be their soulmate. Women are slightly more likely than men to feel this way, with 14% of women expressing doubt compared to 11% of men. The survey doesn’t prove these are the same people with backup plans, but the combination raises an obvious question. Why stay if the conviction isn’t there?

Millennials emerge as the generation most likely to believe in the soulmate concept and feel their current partner is “the one.” Maybe growing up immersed in romantic comedies set their expectations sky-high, or perhaps they’re just more willing to walk away from relationships that feel like compromises.

When Attraction Becomes Something More

Clinical psychologist Adam Horvath explained why these feelings might be more universal than people admit. “It is not uncommon to think we could leave our partner for the new, exciting, mysterious other one, but it matters how we respond to these feelings,” Horvath said. “If you often find yourself emotionally invested outside your relationship, that’s a signal to look at why your boundaries are dropping.”

Horvath emphasized that attraction to others doesn’t automatically make someone a bad partner. “We’re human. Attraction does not turn off when we say ‘I choose you.’ What matters is what we do with our feelings, and whether we’re honest with ourselves about why they’re there,” he explained. “Having a daydream about someone else isn’t rare or pathological, and it doesn’t automatically mean you are a bad partner, let alone that your relationship is doomed.”

The psychologist pointed out that noticing romantic interest in others is hardwired biology. “Developing feelings for someone is quite normal, as our brains are wired to notice a romantic interest. It’s biology, not betrayal,” he said.

The Fantasy Partner Problem

The trouble starts when people begin comparing their actual partner to a fantasy version of someone else. “Where it gets tricky is when we think these feelings are meaningful, and in fact, they are our way out. When we compare our real partner to a fantasy of someone else, and check out because ‘there’s something better,’” Horvath explained. “That’s less about the crush and more about something missing that the backup person represents: Playfulness, romance, excitement. Or sometimes simply just something new.”

For many Americans, monogamy might be more about choosing to stay than about not wanting to stray. Whether having a “what if” person in the back of your mind is normal human psychology or a red flag about your relationship depends on how each person handles it.

But the survey data tells a clear story. If these percentages hold nationally, they would translate to millions of Americans in relationships while simultaneously identifying someone they’d rather be with. That person at work who makes them laugh, the ex who got away, the friend who “gets them” in ways their partner doesn’t. These backup options aren’t just passing crushes but specific people who could theoretically change everything if they made a move.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/many-adults-have-backup-person-theyd-leave-their-partner-for/

Anyone who has beheld Luke “The Nuke” Littler’s stellar abilities on the darts circuit will have seen the exceptional talent he displays. In January, he became the youngest World Champion in history at just 17 years old. In October, he captured his first World Grand Prix title. But what does it actually take to become a professional darts player?

Many may be wondering whether darts skills are simply innate in some people, or if Littler is just an exceptionally quick learner.

Elite technique requires a combination of both physical and mental athleticism. You need to have the skills to hit very small targets when stepping up to the oche, all while maintaining the mental strength needed to stay composed under pressure – knowing that even the smallest miss can have big consequences.

1. Coordination

There are lots of different ways in which coordination – one of the critical functions of our nervous system – lends itself to success in darts. Every single throw requires a smooth and accurate trajectory.

Coordination is controlled by the cerebellum, which is located at the back of the brain. This complex region, sometimes referred to as “the little brain,” helps regulate both fine muscle control and posture. It’s a key region when it comes to darts skills.

For instance, the cerebellum helps with hand-eye coordination. To hit a perfect 180, you’re aiming for that tiny treble 20 on the inner ring, three times over. It requires the player to set that target, judge the distance from the board and calculate an appropriate angle at which to throw. It’s also critical in the learning process of how to improve your aim over time.

Stance, posture and balance are paramount too, and also coordinated by the cerebellum. Even the slightest wobble can affect the trajectory of the dart on release.

2. Arm Mechanics

A recipe for success also involves a honed and accurate throw.

The mechanics of a good throw include the transition between taking aim, the pullback move to gather energy, through to a smooth release and eliminating any jerks which might send the dart off course.

The chief muscle groups that allow for this are found in the hand, wrist and forearm. They contain multiple smaller muscles which flex and extend the wrist and fingers. These are capable of working together to enable a wide variety of precise movements in gripping, aiming and releasing the dart.

It’s generally quite difficult to target these small muscles by working out in the gym, so this is where training through repetition is key to nailing the right throw.

The throw is also governed by rhythm: the target setting, the speed of the pullback stroke and the timing of the release.

Every professional dart player has their own throw technique. For instance, Phil Taylor demonstrated a fast, yet measured throw, while Luke Littler favors a relaxed, instinctive rhythm. But the individual rhythm all goes back to those intricate nerve pathways and the small muscles which coordinate it.

3. A ‘Quiet Eye’

Obviously vision is also fundamental to darts – but it’s not as simple as just regarding the board.

This is where the concept of a “quiet eye” comes in – where the eyes lock in upon the target just before a throw is made. A quiet eye ensures the gaze remains fixed upon the target, ensuring the throw is accurate.

A quiet eye is a technique important in many sports other than darts – including clay shooting, snooker and archery. A quiet eye lends important visual information to the motor system, which allows for maximum synchronization between the brain and body.

Several studies have explored the effect the quiet eye phenomenon has on target sports and what underpins it. First, there’s evidence that shows expert players typically have a longer quiet eye phase than amateurs. Although this usually only amounts to half a second longer or so, this is still significant in coordinating between the brain and body, allowing the player to execute that perfect shot.

Second, the measured gaze of professional players appear to be more stable and unwavering – with no eye flicking or deviation from the target.

Through target fixation, critically timing their movements and repeating their shots, players can train their quiet eye.

4. The Brain And Body Connection

The connection between brain and body appears to be key – and is exemplified by players who lost their ability in darts.

There’s actually a condition referred to as “dartitis,” which is defined by an inability to throw. Dartitis is often associated with stress, fatigue or burnout.

It can even affect top players – most notably multiple World Champion Eric Bristow, who had to retrain in order to play normally again after developing dartitis. This can involve going back to basics and rebuilding the throw – sometimes even switching to the other hand.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/darts-athletic-skill-to-hit-bullseye/

Since researchers first established the link between diet, cholesterol and heart disease in the 1950s, risk for heart disease has been partly assessed based on a patient’s cholesterol levels, which can be routinely measured via blood work at the doctor’s office.

However, accumulating evidence over the past two decades demonstrates that a biomarker called C-reactive protein – which signals the presence of low-grade inflammation – is a better predictor of risk for heart disease than cholesterol.

As a result, in September 2025, the American College of Cardiology published new recommendations for universal screening of C-reactive protein levels in all patients, alongside measuring cholesterol levels.

What Is C-Reactive Protein?

C-reactive protein is created by the liver in response to infections, tissue damage, chronic inflammatory states from conditions like autoimmune diseases, and metabolic disturbances like obesity and diabetes. Essentially, it is a marker of inflammation – meaning immune system activation – in the body.

C-reactive protein can be easily measured with blood work at the doctor’s office. A low C-reactive protein level – under 1 milligram per deciliter – signifies minimal inflammation in the body, which is protective against heart disease. An elevated C-reactive protein level of greater than 3 milligrams per deciliter, signifies increased levels of inflammation and thus increased risk for heart disease. About 52% of Americans have an elevated level of C-reactive protein in their blood.

Research shows that C-reactive protein is a better predictive marker for heart attacks and strokes than “bad,” or LDL cholesterol, short for low-density lipoprotein, as well as another commonly measured genetically inherited biomarker called lipoprotein(a). One study found that C-reactive protein can predict heart disease just as well as blood pressure can.

Why Does Inflammation Matter in Heart Disease?

Inflammation plays a crucial role at every stage in the development and buildup of fatty plaque in the arteries, which causes a condition called atherosclerosis that can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

From the moment a blood vessel is damaged, be it from high blood sugar or cigarette smoke, immune cells immediately infiltrate the area. Those immune cells subsequently engulf cholesterol particles that are typically floating around in the blood stream to form a fatty plaque that resides in the wall of the vessel.

This process continues for decades until eventually, one day, immune mediators rupture the cap that encloses the plaque. This triggers the formation of a blood clot that obstructs blood flow, starves the surrounding tissues of oxygen and ultimately causes a heart attack or stroke.

Hence, cholesterol is only part of the story; it is, in fact, the immune system that facilitates each step in the processes that drive heart disease.

Can Diet Influence C-Reactive Protein Levels?

Lifestyle can significantly influence the amount of C-reactive protein produced by the liver.

Numerous foods and nutrients have been shown to lower C-reactive protein levels, including dietary fiber from foods like beans, vegetables, nuts and seeds, as well as berries, olive oil, green tea, chia seeds and flaxseeds.

Weight loss and exercise can also reduce C-reactive protein levels.

Does Cholesterol Still Matter for Heart Disease Risk?

Though cholesterol may not be the most important predictor of risk for heart disease, it does remain highly relevant.

However, it’s not just the amount of cholesterol – or more specifically the amount of bad, or LDL, cholesterol – that matters. Two people with the same cholesterol level don’t necessarily have the same risk for heart disease. This is because risk is determined more so by the number of particles that the bad cholesterol is packaged into, as opposed to the total mass of bad cholesterol that’s floating around. More particles means higher risk.

That is why a blood test known as apolipoprotein B, which measures the number of cholesterol particles, is a better predictor of risk for heart disease than measurements of total amounts of bad cholesterol.

Like cholesterol and C-reactive protein, apolipoprotein B is also influenced by lifestyle factors like exercise, weight loss and diet. Nutrients like fiber, nuts and omega-3 fatty acids are associated with a decreased number of cholesterol particles, while increased sugar intake is associated with a larger number of cholesterol particles.

Furthermore, lipoprotein(a), a protein that lives in the wall surrounding cholesterol particles, is another marker that can predict heart disease more accurately than cholesterol levels. This is because the presence of lipoprotein(a) makes cholesterol particles sticky, so to speak, and thus more likely to get trapped in an atherosclerotic plaque.

However, unlike other risk factors, lipoprotein(a) levels are purely genetic, thus not influenced by lifestyle, and need only be measured once in a lifetime.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/c-reactive-protein-leading-heart-disease-risk-marker/

The skull had the brow of a descendant but the face of an ancestor. When researchers finished reconstructing the DAN5/P1 cranium from Ethiopia’s Afar region, dated to between 1.6 and 1.5 million years ago, they found themselves staring at an evolutionary contradiction: a single individual who appeared to belong to two different chapters of human history at once.

Homo erectus, the species that first looked recognizably like us with its large brain, prominent brow ridge, and smaller teeth, has long been considered a turning point in human evolution. The species is often described as a package of changes arriving together, but this newly reconstructed skull from the Gona research area indicates the pieces did not always move in lockstep.

The brain inside DAN5/P1 was small, just 598 cubic centimeters, closer to the earlier Homo habilis than to the larger-brained Homo erectus fossils found in Kenya from the same time period. Yet its jutting brow ridge and certain features of the braincase matched Homo erectus. Its face, meanwhile, retained the flat cheekbones and narrow nasal opening of species that should have been fading from the scene.

An international team led by Karen L. Baab of Midwestern University published their findings in Nature Communications. After years of digital reconstruction using micro-CT scans, they pieced together a mostly complete Early Pleistocene Homo cranium from the Horn of Africa, only the sixth such specimen recovered from the continent. What emerged was a fossil that defies easy classification and complicates our understanding of how Homo erectus came to be.

“The presence of such a morphological mosaic contemporaneous with or postdating the emergence of the indisputable H. erectus craniodental complex around 1.6 Ma implies an intricate evolutionary transition from early Homo to H. erectus,” the researchers wrote.

How Researchers Reconstructed the Homo Erectus Skull

The DAN5/P1 fossil was discovered at the Dana Aoule North site in Gona, part of Ethiopia’s Afar region. Initially, only the braincase had been fully studied. The face remained a puzzle, broken into fragments during fossilization and cemented together by sediment over millennia.

To reconstruct it, the team took micro-CT scans of five facial bone fragments: portions of both sides of the upper jaw, a piece of the region below the eye sockets, part of the cheekbone, and several teeth including premolars and molars. From these scans, they generated 3D surface models that could be digitally manipulated and fitted together.

Reassembly required matching each piece according to anatomical landmarks. Sutures had to align. Break lines had to correspond. The frontal process of the upper jaw, for instance, had to be angled so it would properly meet the frontal bone while simultaneously matching curvatures implied by surrounding structures. After the face was assembled, the team attached it to the previously reconstructed braincase.

To account for uncertainty in how the face connected to the braincase, the researchers also created an alternative reconstruction with slightly different positioning. Both versions produced similar results in subsequent statistical analyses, lending confidence that the findings were not artifacts of reconstruction choices.

A Face from the Past on a Skull from the Future

Comparing DAN5/P1 to other early human fossils revealed its split identity. The braincase aligned with Homo erectus in several respects: a thick, projecting brow ridge with a continuous groove behind it, circular eye sockets, and the long, low profile characteristic of the species.

But the face pointed backward in time. The area below the eye sockets was flat from side to side rather than curving outward as in typical African Homo erectus. The nasal opening lacked the pronounced widening seen in roughly contemporaneous Kenyan fossils like KNM-ER 3733 and the adolescent KNM-WT 15000. The cheekbone’s attachment point sat more toward the front of the face than expected, a trait linked to earlier Homo species.

The roof of the mouth was large relative to brain size, placing DAN5/P1 closer to early Homo and to Homo erectus fossils from Dmanisi, Georgia, than to East African Homo erectus. The teeth were also substantial. The first and third molars fell within the size range of Homo habilis and at the upper end of variation for African Homo erectus.

Statistical analyses of skull shape placed DAN5/P1 within the Homo erectus range but nearest to two specific fossils: the adolescent KNM-WT 15000 from Kenya and the subadult D2700 from Georgia. When the researchers analyzed midface shape alone, DAN5/P1 clustered with Homo habilis specimens instead. Its single closest match in overall shape was KNM-ER 1813, a classic Homo habilis skull from Kenya.

“DAN5/P1 is, to our knowledge, the first African fossil to exhibit a mixture of H. erectus and early Homo features,” the team reported.

Two Populations, Two Evolutionary Speeds

The combination of ancestral and more advanced features in a single skull from this time period complicates the conventional timeline. By 1.6 million years ago, Homo erectus was supposed to have already arrived as a coherent package. Famous Kenyan fossils from roughly the same period, including KNM-ER 3733 and KNM-WT 15000, display the full suite of Homo erectus traits: larger brains, smaller teeth, wider nasal openings, and curved architecture below the eyes.

Yet DAN5/P1 lived at essentially the same time with a brain barely larger than Homo habilis, teeth to match, and a face that looked like it belonged to an earlier era. The brow ridge announced membership in Homo erectus. Almost everything else pointed to something more primitive.

The researchers interpret this as evidence that different populations of early humans were evolving at different rates across East Africa. The rift basin landscape, combined with low population densities, may have allowed groups in the Horn of Africa and the Lake Turkana region of Kenya to diverge over time. The Horn of Africa population, represented by DAN5/P1, retained more ancestral features. The Kenyan population developed more derived characteristics.

“The evolutionary contrasts in brain size and face morphology embodied by the broadly contemporaneous DAN5/P1 and Kenyan fossils, KNM-ER 3733 and KNM-WT 15000, imply complex population structure rather than simple coexistence of two different lineages,” the researchers wrote.

This interpretation casts Homo erectus as a species showing substantial regional variation rather than uniform characteristics everywhere it lived.

Advanced Tools Found at the Same Site as Small-Brained Fossil

Both simple and advanced stone tools turned up at the DAN5 site. Mode 1 tools, basic cores and flakes, appeared alongside Mode 2 Acheulean tools, the more sophisticated hand axes associated with Homo erectus.

Acheulean technology is typically linked to larger-brained populations. The longstanding assumption has been that expanding brains drove technological innovation. But at Gona, these advanced tools appear in the same context as a fossil with a brain volume comparable to Homo habilis, the earlier species credited only with simpler tools.

Evidence from the site also points to a broadened diet and access to animal resources. A similar pattern appears at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, where small-brained fossils occur alongside evidence of meat consumption and varied tool use.

“The Gona evidence, along with that from Dmanisi, hints that key behavioral/technological innovations may precede major morphological transformations,” the team noted.

If accurate, the assumed connection between brain size and cognitive ability in early human evolution may have been less direct than researchers believed.

Surprising Similarities to a Much Younger Species

DAN5/P1 also shares certain features with Homo naledi, a much younger Middle Pleistocene species discovered in South African caves. Both possess small brains, flat nasal regions, forward-positioned cheekbones, and a distinct bump at the back of the skull.

The researchers caution against reading too much into these resemblances. Vast stretches of time and thousands of kilometers separate the two fossils, and shared primitive traits do not necessarily indicate a direct evolutionary link. But the parallels add to mounting evidence that small-brained Homo populations persisted in Africa long after larger-brained forms had emerged.

One Skull, Many Questions

Only six largely complete Early Pleistocene Homo skulls have been recovered from Africa. Each new discovery reshapes the narrative, and DAN5/P1 is no exception. Here was an individual whose brow announced membership in Homo erectus while whose face and teeth belonged to an earlier inheritance, found at a site that also yielded both simple and advanced stone tools.

The fossil confirms that the emergence of Homo erectus involved considerable variation across populations. Different groups existed simultaneously in East Africa, evolving at different rates and retaining different features. The transition from early Homo to Homo erectus appears to have been gradual and uneven, with different traits shifting at different speeds in different places.

DAN5/P1 does not settle the debate over where Homo erectus originated or how it spread across Africa and into Eurasia. Some researchers have proposed a Eurasian origin based on early Homo erectus-like features appearing in Georgia. The ancestral morphology preserved in DAN5/P1, however, remains compatible with local evolution of the species in East Africa.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/homo-erectus-skull-discovery-rewrites-human-evolution-timeline/

In the wake of Sunday’s tragic Bondi shooting, conspiracy theories and deliberate misinformation have spread on social media.

One thing some people have latched onto is the idea Google Trends data show a spike in searches for “Naveed Akram” – the name of one of the attackers – from Tel Aviv (or other locations) before the shooting occurred. In a surprising lateral jump, this is taken to show Akram must be an Israeli agent.

Similar stories did the rounds when US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was killed in September, and after an attack on US National Guard members in November.

So what’s going on here? Google told the ABC Google Trends may sometimes show searches when none actually happened due to “statistical noise.”

I have studied the mechanics of Google Trends extensively in my research, and I can confirm this is true – and the “noise” can lead to strange results, especially when looking at searches for unusual terms or coming from small areas.

How Does Google Trends Work?

Google Trends shows information about what users are searching for at different places and times. The data it uses are what statisticians call a “time series,” but they are unusual in a couple of ways.

First, you can very easily select different time scales, such as minute-by-minute and year-by-year.

Second is the fact the data are only a small sample of the true gigantic volume of Google searches. Time series normally contain all available data (such as these statistics on annual hospitalizations).

Statistical Noise and Rare Searches

However, my research has shown that queries related to terms that are not widely searched (such as “Naveed Akram” before the shooting) or in small geographical regions (where there are fewer people doing searches) can display a wide variation of results from one sample to the next.

Many of the misleading social media posts show Trends results from a small region (such as only the city of Tel Aviv), which exacerbates the variation. The high variation causes a very distinct pattern of zero or near-zero values with some isolated big spikes, which is very evident in the post below.

These spikes are often caused by “statistical noise” in the data – small random fluctuations that are smoothed out when we look at a larger number of events. You can see this clearly when you compare with searches that have high volume.

How Google Trends Results Change Over Time

Another misconception about the data is related to time. Some posts mention how the displayed results seem to change from one view to the next. This is, in fact, exactly what to expect with Google Trends data.

This is a combination of the time scale used and the fact Google uses only a sample of the full data. To get accurate results, one has to aggregate many samples of Google Trends data.

However, this presents a new challenge. For short-term data (such as that typically used in these social media posts), Google continually updates results in real time. For longer-term data, Google only adds one new sample per day (though we have developed methods to get around this).

What the Numbers in Google Trends Really Mean

A third misconception is that the numbers shown on Google Trends charts are the number of searches for a given term. However, the Google Trends help again explains that the values are “normalized to the time and location” and then “scaled on a range of 0 to 100.”

This means the time point in the series with the highest number of searches is set to 100, and all other points are scaled relative to that. So if the maximum number of searches was ten, it would show up as 100 – and if there were three searches at another time, this would show up as 30 (although Google does suppress very low-volume searches).

In a sense, the number for each time point represents the likelihood that a search containing the specified terms would occur in that place at that time.

So a post about search trends for the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk claiming there are “Less than 1 in 1 BILLION odds of it happening” is incorrect.

It is, in fact, highly probable: if “Tyler James Robinson” (Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer) had 30 searches, and “Lance Twiggs” (Robinson’s partner) had 40, one would see exactly this pattern (if 40 is scaled to 100; 30 is accordingly scaled to 75).

Source : https://studyfinds.org/misreading-google-trends-fueling-bondi-attack-conspiracies/

Romance and the heart have long been synonymous on a symbolic level, but modern science now indicates the connection may be literal. Researchers are calling for romantic relationships to be incorporated far more heavily in treatment programs for heart patients.

A major review published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology analyzed how including romantic partners in cardiac care affects recovery and found that while 77% of studies showed improved medication adherence, exercise habits, and smoking cessation, only three studies measured relationship quality—and none found improvements. So, it appears romantic partnerships affect heart health through powerful biological mechanisms, yet cardiac rehabilitation programs rarely address these crucial personal relationships.

Researchers analyzed 12 clinical trials involving nearly 1,500 couples to determine whether including romantic partners in cardiac rehabilitation improves outcomes. The biological rationale for partner involvement is compelling: large population studies show that relationship quality affects heart disease risk with effect sizes comparable to quitting smoking or maintaining healthy weight. Satisfied partners show better heart rate variability, lower blood pressure, and reduced inflammatory markers, while relationship distress triggers the same stress responses that damage the cardiovascular system.

The study, conducted at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, found that unmarried people are over 40% more likely to have cardiovascular disease and die from a myocardial infarction than married people. But the protection doesn’t come from a wedding ring. Studies tracking relationship quality over time show that marital satisfaction matters far more than marital status alone.

The Body Keeps Score of Relationship Stress

The body responds to relationship dynamics in measurable ways. During arguments about relationship problems, both partners experience elevated heart rates and surges in cortisol stress hormones. Women in distressed relationships face a nearly 10-fold increase in uncontrolled hypertension compared to satisfied women. Among satisfied couples, every unit increase in relationship support correlates with a 28% improvement in heart rate variability, a key marker of cardiovascular health.

Physical intimacy plays a direct role. On days when couples engage in more affectionate touch like hugging, cortisol levels drop measurably. This isn’t just emotional comfort translating to feeling better. The physical act of intimate connection triggers hormonal changes that protect the heart.

Chronic relationship distress mobilizes circulating lipids and increases inflammatory markers including interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein. These same inflammatory processes contribute to atherosclerosis development and cardiovascular disease progression. In observational research, the magnitude of these effects appears comparable to traditional risk factors that doctors routinely monitor and treat.

Partners in satisfying relationships engage in better health behaviors, creating a cascade of cardiovascular benefits. Men who perceive strong partner support eat more fruits and vegetables. Both sexes consume more alcohol when experiencing marital strain. A single unit increase in relationship quality over 10 years correlates with lower weight and a 22% decrease in obesity risk.

Health behaviors sync between partners. If one spouse exercises regularly, the other has a 67% higher chance of becoming active. When one partner quits smoking, the other is 48% more likely to quit successfully. This concordance works both ways. If one partner maintains unhealthy habits, the other faces major barriers to change despite good intentions.

How Including Partners Changes Outcomes

The research team reviewed interventions designed to include partners in cardiac care. Most programs involved nurses teaching couples about medication management, exercise routines, and dietary changes over three months, typically starting right after hospital discharge.

Results showed clear benefits for health behaviors. About 77% of studies measuring exercise, medication adherence, or smoking cessation found improvements when partners participated. Patients in couples programs maintained physical activity levels while those going solo let gym routines slide. Medication adherence stayed higher, and smoking quit rates improved.

Cardiovascular outcomes showed mixed results. Some studies reported improved cholesterol levels and fewer doctor visits for patients in couples programs. Others found no differences in blood pressure, cardiac events, or functional status. The inconsistency likely reflects that most studies weren’t designed or powered to detect changes in relatively rare cardiac events.

Mental health outcomes varied widely. About 63% of studies found some improvements in anxiety or depression, but which partner benefited and when differed across programs. Some helped patients feel less depressed, others helped partners cope better with caregiving stress, and several found no mental health changes at all.

The Missing Piece: Relationship Quality Itself

Despite the well-established biological links between relationship quality and heart health, only three studies actually measured relationship quality. None of those three found improvements.

This reveals a fundamental flaw in current approaches. Most programs treat partners as helpers who can remind patients to take pills and accompany them on walks. Only two studies used actual couples therapy methods that directly addressed relationship dynamics, emotional connection, and communication patterns.

Those relationship-focused programs showed promise. Patients reported reduced concerns about the future, improved self-rated health, and better coping strategies. One program using mindfulness-based couples therapy reduced patient anxiety and depression. Another using solution-focused therapy decreased depressive symptoms and improved self-rated health scores.

The majority of programs focused almost entirely on health education and behavior change while largely not addressing the relationship itself. This approach may help couples coordinate medication schedules but does little to address relationship distress that’s actively damaging cardiovascular health through elevated cortisol, increased inflammation, and poor blood pressure control.

Researchers found that roughly 30% of people with cardiovascular disease report significant distress in their romantic relationships. For these couples, standard health education programs that don’t address relationship problems may miss the primary mechanism through which the partner could help.

The biological data makes the case clearly. Relationship distress isn’t just emotionally difficult for heart patients. It’s a physiological stressor that activates cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune responses in ways that directly worsen disease progression. Happy relationships aren’t just nice to have. They provide measurable protection through reduced stress hormones, better blood pressure control, lower inflammatory markers, and improved health behaviors.

What Cardiac Rehabilitation Should Do Differently

The researchers propose that cardiac rehabilitation programs start screening for relationship quality, much like they currently screen for depression and anxiety. Brief questionnaires taking just minutes could identify which couples need extra support. Programs would then offer different levels of intervention based on each couple’s specific needs.

All patients would receive basic education about how relationships affect heart health through biological mechanisms. Those experiencing mild to moderate relationship difficulties would join structured relationship enhancement programs. Couples facing serious, long-standing problems would get referrals to specialized therapists in the community.

This stepped care approach would use existing staff more efficiently. Nurses who currently deliver health education could expand their role with proper training. Allied health professionals like social workers or psychologists could provide relationship enhancement sessions within existing program structures.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/romantic-partnerships-affect-heart-health/

The future is now…and it’s tiny.

On average, Americans will spend close to $2 million dollars on major debt payments before their life ends. That staggering figure, according to an eye-opening study, represents every car loan, mortgage payment, student loan bill, and credit card balance between age 18 and death at 78.

A new analysis by JG Wentworth concludes that the average American will pay off $1,786,810 in debt across their lifetime. That’s money tied up in monthly obligations rather than available for savings, investing, or simply having more breathing room in the budget.

The study breaks down exactly where that $1.8 million goes over 60 years of adult life. The calculation includes four major debt categories affecting most Americans: mortgages, auto loans, student debt, and credit cards. Each follows a predictable pattern, spiking at key life stages and gradually declining through years of payments. The total includes both principal and interest, though credit card interest was excluded due to variable rates.

That $1.8 million average masks enormous regional variations. Hawaiian residents will pay off $2,570,976 over their lifetime, while West Virginians face just $1,391,240. The gap between most and least expensive states spans nearly $1.2 million, driven largely by housing costs.

Debt Peaks at Two Critical Ages

In this model, debt typically starts when someone turns 18. Between a first car loan and an initial credit card, young adults begin with $20,718 in obligations. That drops to $5,764 by age 22 as they work and make payments.

College loans often come due at 23, pushing debt back up to $42,242. For many people in the analysis, debt stays relatively manageable through their late 20s and early 30s as they buy second cars and pay down student loans.

At 38, everything changes. First-time homebuyers see their debt explode from $17,139 to $320,092 overnight. That single purchase multiplies debt nearly 20-fold.

Americans spend their 40s and 50s gradually chipping away at that first mortgage. Debt declines steadily until age 61, when the typical American buys a second home. At this peak moment, total debt hits its lifetime high: $370,259.

By retirement age 67, people have reduced their burden to $212,596. From 75 to 78, only credit card debt remains at about $6,754 per year.

Your Home Consumes $1.1 Million

Housing debt alone accounts for $1,117,860—that’s 62.6% of the $1.8 million lifetime total. The analysis assumed Americans purchase two homes: a first at age 38 with a 30-year mortgage, and a second at 61 with a 15-year term.

California homebuyers face the steepest housing costs at $1,844,069 across two homes. Hawaii follows at $1,829,064, while Washington residents pay $1,635,236.

West Virginia offers the cheapest homeownership at $784,006 for two houses. Iowa and Mississippi residents also pay less than $830,000 for two homes over their lifetimes.

The enormous variation in housing costs explains why some state residents pay nearly twice as much in lifetime debt. In Hawaii, mortgage payments consume 71.1% of lifetime debt.

Cars, Credit Cards, and College Add $670,000 More

Auto financing adds $245,297 to lifetime debt totals. The average American purchases four cars over their lifetime, with the second typically bought around age 30. Alaska residents pay the most ($290,056) due to higher vehicle prices, while New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine residents pay around $200,000.

Credit card debt costs $387,985 over 60 years. Balances start low for young adults at $3,456 annually, peak during middle age at $9,557 per year, then drop after 60. About half of credit card users carry revolving balances rather than paying in full each month. Alaskans rack up $484,620 in lifetime credit card debt, while Iowans carry just $319,740.

Student loans represent the smallest slice at $35,668 on average. The study focused on federal undergraduate borrowing, which represents the vast majority of student debt. Maryland graduates face $43,692 in student debt, while North Dakota students pay just $29,647.

One 15-Year Window of Relief

Between ages 23 and 38, many Americans experience their only sustained period of manageable debt. During these working years, they steadily pay down initial obligations without taking on massive new loans.

Then homeownership resets everything. After roughly 23 years of paying on that first 30-year mortgage, the model assumes many buyers take on a second home at age 61. That creates another 15 years of debt extending almost to death at 78.

Three decades of adult life (ages 38-67) center on paying off two houses. The $1.8 million lifetime debt total reflects how housing obligations structure finances for most Americans.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/true-cost-of-american-dream-millions-in-debt/

The ‘Hallmarks of Aging’ Framework Has A Major Problem That Nobody Talked About Until Now

Most provocatively, they suggest the field needs to confront an uncomfortable possibility: despite decades of research and thousands of papers on aging, scientists may still lack a deep mechanistic understanding of what drives age-dependent decline. They’ve catalogued correlates of aging, identified factors that extend lifespan by postponing specific diseases, and developed predictive biomarkers. But understanding the underlying process that makes organisms more vulnerable over time may remain elusive.

This matters beyond academic debates. As longevity interventions move from mice to humans, the distinction between preventing specific diseases and genuinely slowing aging determines which treatments to pursue, how to test them, and what outcomes to measure. Getting it wrong wastes resources and, more importantly, delays finding interventions that might actually work.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/nobody-dies-from-old-age-studies-reveal-what-kills-us/

Ocean temperatures warmed by human-caused climate change fed the intense rainfall that triggered deadly floods and landslides across Asia in recent weeks, according to an analysis released Wednesday.

The rapid study by World Weather Attribution focused on heavy rainfall from cyclones Senyar and Ditwah in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka starting late last month. The analysis found that warmer sea surface temperatures over the North Indian Ocean added energy to the cyclones.

Floods and landslides triggered by the storms have killed more than 1,600 people, with hundreds more still missing. The cyclones are the latest in a series of deadly weather disasters affecting Southeast Asia this year, resulting in loss of life and property damage.

“It rains a lot here but never like this. Usually, rain stops around September but this year it has been really bad. Every region of Sri Lanka has been affected, and our region has been the worst impacted,” said Shanmugavadivu Arunachalam, a 59-year-old schoolteacher in the mountain town of Hatton in Sri Lanka’s Central Province.

Warmer sea surface temperatures

Sea surface temperatures over the North Indian Ocean were 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average over the past three decades, according to the WWA researchers.

Without global warming, the sea surface temperatures would have been about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than they were, according to the analysis. The warmer ocean temperatures provided heat and moisture to the storms.

When measuring overall temperatures, the world is currently 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than global average during pre-industrial times in the 19th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“When the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture. As a result, it rains more in a warmer atmosphere as compared to a world without climate change,” said Mariam Zachariah, with the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and one of the report’s authors.

Using tested methods to measure climate impacts quickly

The WWA is a collection of researchers who use peer-reviewed methods to conduct rapid studies examining how extreme weather events are linked to climate change.

“Anytime we decide to do a study, we know what is the procedure that we have to follow,” said Zachariah, who added that they review the findings in house and send some of their analysis for peer review, even after an early version is made public.

The speed at which the WWA releases their analysis helps inform the general public about the impacts of climate change, according to Zachariah.

“We want people everywhere to know about why something happened in their neighborhood,” Zachariah said. “But also be aware about the reasons behind some of the events unfurling across the world.”

The WWA often estimates how much worse climate change made a disaster using specific probabilities. In this case, though, the researchers said they could not estimate the precise contribution of climate change to the storms and ensuing heavy rains because of limitations in climate models for the affected islands.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-asia-cyclones-ef733af1a6b5acf08335e672e8476c32

These amphibians are all too happy to endure a few stings for a decent meal.

Watching Dogs Lifts Mood, But There’s a Catch for Pet Owners

Most people consider the pain and permanence before getting a tattoo. Few think about the carcinogenic chemicals they’re injecting into their skin.

Swedish researchers identified 2,880 individuals diagnosed with melanoma and used questionnaires to gather detailed information about tattoo exposure, sun habits, and other risk factors. The population-based study published in the European Journal of Epidemiology found that tattooed individuals face a 29 percent increased risk of developing cutaneous melanoma compared to those without tattoos. Among the 1,598 cases who responded (56% response rate) and their matched controls, 22 percent of melanoma cases had tattoos before diagnosis, compared to 20 percent of controls.

The concern centers on what’s in tattoo ink. Black ink often contains high levels of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, some classified as carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Colored inks rely heavily on azo pigments, which break down into carcinogenic aromatic amines when exposed to ultraviolet radiation from sun, tanning beds, or laser removal treatments. Heavy metals appear across all ink colors.

What’s in Tattoo Ink?

Researchers calculated the increased melanoma risk after adjusting for known factors like UV exposure, skin type, sunbed use, and sunburn history. The association held even after accounting for these traditional melanoma risk factors, suggesting tattoo exposure may represent an additional risk factor.

Tattoos containing both black and colored ink showed a 38 percent increased risk compared to non-tattooed individuals. People tattooed for 10 to 15 years faced the highest melanoma risk, with a 67 percent increase. Shorter exposure duration of under five years also showed elevated risk at 60 percent, though confidence intervals were wider.

Only 30 percent of melanomas developed at the tattoo site. This finding surprised researchers, who note that the systemic nature of the risk points to tattoo ink components potentially affecting the immune system rather than causing localized skin changes alone. Studies in firefighters and petroleum workers exposed to similar chemicals show increased melanoma risk despite systemic rather than localized exposure.

Regulation Failures and Fraudulent Labeling

The European Union implemented regulations in January 2022 limiting 4,000 chemicals in tattoo ink. European regulatory authorities have found through market surveillance that many inks still contain toxic chemicals above permitted levels. Fraudulent labeling compounds the problem, with banned pigments masked by listing legal alternatives.

Subgroup analysis revealed increased risk for both in-situ melanomas (33 percent increase) and invasive melanomas (25 percent rise). Superficial spreading melanoma risk increased 40 percent, while melanocytic nevus with severe atypia showed a 39 percent increase.

When researchers excluded cases with previous melanoma diagnoses to focus only on first-time cases, tattooed individuals still showed a 23 percent increased risk. Excluding individuals taking immunosuppressive medications raised the risk estimate to 32 percent, which researchers note aligns with the hypothesis that tattoo ink could affect immune function, though this requires further investigation.

Study Demographics and Tattoo Patterns

The study population consisted of individuals aged 20 to 60 years diagnosed with melanoma in 2017. Sweden provided an ideal setting with comprehensive national cancer registry data covering over 99 percent of skin cancers. Participants reported tattoo details including size, color, number of sessions, and duration of exposure.

Most tattooed participants received their first tattoo around age 24 or 25. Professional tattoo artists in Sweden performed 90 percent of tattoos, though 7 to 8 percent came from non-professionals. Decorative tattoos were most common, followed by cosmetic applications like permanent makeup.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/tattoos-linked-to-higher-skin-cancer-risk/

Study Reveals A ‘Friends-and-Neighbors Effect’ That Distorts Tax Preferences

A mysterious fossil foot discovered in Ethiopia more than a decade ago has now been linked to its most likely owner, and the revelation adds an important twist to the story of how our ancient relatives lived.

The foot probably belonged to Australopithecus deyiremeda, a 3.4-million-year-old human ancestor that shared the East African region with the famous “Lucy” species. But unlike Lucy’s kind, which was evolving toward more human-like walking, this species kept its tree-climbing abilities, new research reveals.

Scientists from Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins spent years searching for the missing pieces of this evolutionary puzzle. When they discovered the peculiar foot bones in 2012 at the Woranso-Mille site in Ethiopia, they knew they had something special. The foot had long, curved toes built for grasping branches and a flexible structure that looked very different from the rigid, arched feet of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis.

But there was a problem. Without teeth or jaw bones from the same individual, researchers couldn’t definitively identify which species the foot belonged to. The puzzle deepened because the foot came from the same geological layers that had produced fossils of A. deyiremeda, a species named just three years earlier, but the connection couldn’t be proven.

Now, newly discovered fossils have provided strong evidence for the connection. A juvenile jawbone with nearly intact baby and adult teeth, along with several isolated teeth from different individuals, all show the distinctive dental features of A. deyiremeda. These specimens came from the exact same ancient riverbed deposits as the foot, giving scientists solid reasons to link the two.

Curved Toes and Grasping Feet Suggest Tree-Climbing Lifestyle

The findings, published in Nature, show the story of human evolution was never as simple as textbooks made it seem. While Lucy’s species was developing feet adapted for efficient walking on the ground, A. deyiremeda took a different path, keeping features that made it comfortable in the trees as well as on the ground.

The foot bones tell the story. Long toe bones curve from front to back like those of modern apes. The second metatarsal bone (one of the long bones in the middle of the foot) shows unusual twisting and curvature. Most telling of all, the big toe bone is gracile and curved in ways that would have allowed A. deyiremeda to grasp tree branches.

“The foot displays morphological features that suggest a greater ability for grasping than modern humans and most fossil hominins,” the researchers write. The foot structure shows clear adaptations for climbing that simply aren’t present in A. afarensis fossils from the same time period.

The partial foot also lacks the rigid arch structure that makes human feet efficient for walking. Instead, it retains flexibility in the midfoot region, useful for wrapping around branches but less ideal for the kind of obligate bipedality that characterized Lucy’s kind.

Ancient Teeth Solve Decade-Old Mystery

Connecting the foot to A. deyiremeda required detective work spanning more than a decade. The breakthrough came with specimen BRT-VP-2/135, a juvenile jaw discovered about 300 meters from where the foot had been found. The jaw preserves both baby teeth and adult teeth still forming inside the bone, offering a wealth of diagnostic information.

Using micro-CT scanning technology, researchers could examine teeth that weren’t visible from the outside, still tucked away in their developmental crypts within the jawbone. The scans revealed features distinctive to A. deyiremeda that don’t appear in A. afarensis.

The canine teeth lack the prominent vertical ridge on the inner surface that characterizes A. afarensis canines. The premolars have a more primitive shape with cusps positioned more centrally and oriented at different angles than those of Lucy’s species. The upper canines and first molars are smaller than any other australopith species measured, and the molars are much narrower from side to side.

The jaw itself was missing the lateral hollow (an indentation on the outer surface) that’s diagnostic of A. afarensis jaws. Every detail pointed to A. deyiremeda.

Additional isolated teeth from the same geological horizon showed the same distinctive features. With multiple specimens all displaying the diagnostic traits of A. deyiremeda and coming from the exact location and time period as the mysterious foot, researchers had strong evidence to make the connection.

Chemical Analysis Shows Forest Diet Different from Lucy’s

Chemical analysis of tooth enamel provided a window into what A. deyiremeda ate millions of years ago. The research team drilled tiny samples of enamel powder from eight fossil teeth and analyzed their carbon isotopes. Plants use different photosynthetic pathways that leave distinct chemical signatures, and these signatures get locked into tooth enamel as it forms.

The results showed A. deyiremeda ate primarily what scientists call C3 foods, which come from forests and woodlands. These include fruits, leaves, seeds, and underground storage organs like roots and tubers. The isotope values (ranging from -12.4 to -8.8 per mil) matched those of earlier human ancestors like Ardipithecus ramidus and early Australopithecus anamensis, both of which lived in wooded environments.

By contrast, A. afarensis living at nearby sites during the same time period had much more variable isotope values. Lucy’s species ate from both forest plants and grasses from more open habitats, showing dietary flexibility that A. deyiremeda apparently lacked or didn’t need.

The dietary evidence fits well with the foot anatomy. A species spending significant time in trees would naturally have better access to forest foods. The combination of climbing-adapted feet and forest-food diet creates a coherent picture of A. deyiremeda‘s lifestyle.

Early Humans Took Multiple Paths to Walking Upright

For decades, the story of Lucy’s species dominated discussions about how our ancestors transitioned from living in trees to walking upright on the ground. But A. deyiremeda shows there wasn’t just one path.

Both species walked on two legs at least some of the time. But while A. afarensis was evolving rigid feet with arches that made walking more efficient, A. deyiremeda kept feet that could do double duty, handling both ground-based walking and tree climbing.

Study authors point out that large grinding teeth evolved before obligate human-like bipedality. A. deyiremeda had big molars adapted for processing tough plant foods, but it hadn’t given up its climbing adaptations. The package of features didn’t evolve as a unit, the way simple evolutionary narratives might suggest.

This mosaic evolution, where different body parts evolve at different rates and in different directions, appears to have been common among mid-Pliocene human ancestors. Multiple species coexisted, each experimenting with different combinations of primitive and derived features.

The juvenile jaw that helped solve the mystery belonged to an individual who died around 4.5 years old, based on tooth development patterns. The child still had baby teeth in place alongside emerging permanent teeth. The developmental pattern looked more like a chimpanzee’s than a modern human child’s, with incisors delayed in their formation relative to the first molars.

The research team worked at the Woranso-Mille site in Ethiopia’s Afar region, where erosion exposes layers of ancient sediments. The fossils came from sandstone deposits above a volcanic ash layer dated to 3.469 million years ago. Twenty-five hominin specimens have been recovered from the Burtele localities so far.

The evidence joins a growing body of research showing that human evolution wasn’t a simple progression from tree-dwelling apes to ground-walking humans. Instead, the mid-Pliocene saw multiple species coexisting in East Africa, each experimenting with different strategies for moving, eating, and surviving. A. deyiremeda kept its climbing abilities while also walking on two legs, while A. afarensis went further down the path toward obligate bipedality.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/mystery-foot-tree-climbing-human-ancestor-australopithecus/

Easter Island’s famous stone heads have puzzled researchers for decades, but not for the reasons most people think. The real mystery wasn’t how ancient Polynesians carved and moved these massive sculptures across a remote Pacific island. Instead, scientists have long pondered how a society with no clear island-wide government managed to produce more than 1,000 giant statues.

Now, research using drone technology and 3D modeling has answered that question by mapping the primary quarry where these statues, called moai, were carved. Multiple small groups, likely family clans of around 15 to 25 people each, worked simultaneously in separate areas of the quarry without any boss coordinating their efforts. Each group had its own workspace, used different carving techniques, and operated independently while somehow maintaining a shared artistic vision.

The study, published in PLOS ONE, upends assumptions about what it takes to build monuments. Researchers had long debated whether Easter Island, known locally as Rapa Nui, was ruled by a centralized authority that controlled statue production. After all, coordinating the creation of over 1,000 multi-ton sculptures sounds like it would require serious organizational muscle.

The evidence points to something more interesting: a decentralized network of semi-autonomous communities that competed while cooperating, maintained distinct identities while sharing cultural practices, and built monuments without building a bureaucracy.

11,000 Drone Photos Reveal Hidden Patterns

Researchers from Binghamton University and the University of Arizona spent months flying drones over Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater that served as Easter Island’s primary statue factory. They captured 11,686 photographs and used software to stitch them into the first comprehensive 3D model of the quarry.

The level of detail was extraordinary. The model captured individual chisel marks, unfinished statues still attached to bedrock, and even the exact angles at which carvers approached the volcanic rock. This allowed researchers to see patterns that traditional ground surveys had missed.

The analysis revealed 426 moai in various stages of completion, 341 trenches cut to outline blocks for carving, and 133 empty spaces where statues had been successfully removed. More crucially, it showed 30 distinct workshop areas distributed across the crater, each separated by unworked bedrock or natural boundaries.

Each workshop contained the full toolkit of production features: trenches, partially carved statues, and the voids left by completed figures. This redundancy is telling. If production had been centrally organized, researchers would expect to see specialized areas, some for roughing out shapes and others for detailed work. Instead, each zone functioned as a complete, self-contained operation.

Competing Clans Used Different Carving Methods

The carvers didn’t even use standardized techniques. Researchers identified at least three distinct approaches to quarrying. The most common method, found in 143 cases, involved carving facial details first before outlining the head and body. In 120 instances, workers cut complete outlines of rectangular blocks before adding any decorative details. Five statues were carved sideways into near-vertical cliff faces, a completely different approach dictated by local geology.

The variation shows that different groups adapted to their specific locations in the quarry rather than following instructions from a central authority. Yet despite these technical differences, the statues themselves remained remarkably uniform in style. All featured the characteristic elongated heads, pronounced brows, and straight backs that define Rapa Nui’s aesthetic.

This combination of technical diversity and stylistic consistency points to information sharing between independent groups. Families or clans apparently communicated about artistic standards while maintaining autonomy over production methods.

The physical constraints of the workshops also reveal the scale of operations. Each workspace could accommodate perhaps four to six active carvers at a time, with another 10 to 20 people supporting them by making tools, preparing ropes, or providing food. These are kin-group numbers, not the massive labor forces that centralized projects would require.

Previous experiments have shown that teams of 15 to 50 people could “walk” even the largest moai across the island using ropes and coordinated rocking motions. Placing the cylindrical red stone “hats” atop finished statues required only about 15 people. The entire production chain, from quarrying to transport to final installation, operated at a scale consistent with extended family groups rather than island-wide mobilization.

How Competition Fueled Easter Island’s Monument Building

This decentralized pattern matches other recent findings about Easter Island’s social organization. Analysis of settlement patterns shows spatially discrete communities with their own ceremonial platforms and redundant architectural features. Studies of obsidian tools reveal highly localized material culture with limited sharing between communities. Road systems radiating from the quarry follow separate paths rather than forming an integrated network.

Historical accounts from the island’s first European visitors consistently described a society organized into competing mata, or clans, each with its own territory and chiefs. These clans maintained distinct identities and sometimes fought, but they also shared a common culture and language. The quarry evidence now extends this pattern to the island’s most labor-intensive and symbolically important activity.

Competition between clans could be fierce. While the spiritual and cultural significance of moai remained central, competition over status and resources likely fed into the statue building as groups sought to demonstrate their clan’s prestige through larger and more numerous monuments.

The research team notes that this decentralized system may have offered advantages beyond simply getting statues carved. Shared control over the quarry may have helped prevent any one group from monopolizing this resource or overusing the volcanic stone. Allowing multiple groups to develop their own techniques enabled flexible responses to geological challenges.

The finding has broader reach for understanding how societies build monumental architecture. The assumption that pyramids, cathedrals, or giant statues require kings, pharaohs, or centralized states turns out to be just that: an assumption. Rapa Nui demonstrates that communities can coordinate complex projects through horizontal social networks rather than vertical chains of command.

The study also provides a baseline for heritage management. The comprehensive 3D model documents the quarry’s current condition in unprecedented detail, creating a reference point for monitoring erosion, climate impacts, and tourism effects on this UNESCO World Heritage site. The publicly accessible model enables future researchers to test new hypotheses without conducting their own field surveys.

Easter Island’s statues have long symbolized both human ambition and environmental limits. The new findings add another layer. Monumentality doesn’t require monarchy, coordination can emerge from cooperation rather than coercion, and some of history’s most impressive achievements may have been bottom-up efforts rather than top-down projects.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/11000-drone-photos-solved-easter-island-mystery/

Professional Santas across America describe their work in terms that sound less like a seasonal gig and more like something they were meant to do. They talk about being “called” to the role, experiencing life-changing moments when they first don the red suit, and feeling a profound sense of purpose that extends far beyond spreading holiday cheer.

A study published in the Academy of Management Journal reveals that professional Santa work operates as a calling rather than simply a job, with Santas reporting the role provides deep personal, moral, or social significance. Researchers interviewed 53 professional Santas and drew on nearly 1,300 survey responses collected across several studies to understand how workers navigate a calling when they don’t perfectly match society’s expectations for the role.

To protect their identities, researchers assigned each Santa a pseudonym based on constellations and galaxies, reflecting both the professional Santa tradition of being addressed as “Santa” and the magical, otherworldly nature of the work.

Santa Apus, a Black professional Santa, described the moment he knew this was his path. After leaving a voicemail for a major retailer, the hiring manager gushed about his voice and presence. But when she learned he was African American, her tone shifted completely. “Are you African American? Are you Black?” she asked. When he confirmed, she told him, “We don’t hire any Black Santas or Hispanic Santas. We aren’t ready for that.”

The rejection stung, but it didn’t extinguish his sense of purpose. He saw Santa work as part of his ministry, explaining: “I want to make this part of my ministry. To help bring people closer to Christ and to help us celebrate Christ’s birthday.”

The research identified three distinct groups of professional Santas based on how closely they match the culturally embedded Santa prototype: white, male, white-haired, real-bearded, overweight, extroverted, able-bodied, heterosexual, and Christian. Those who naturally fit this mold described feeling confident about stepping into the role. Those who partially matched it struggled with feelings of inadequacy. And those who deviated significantly sometimes faced rejection or pushback from parts of the Santa community.

The Identity Struggle Behind the Beard
Santa Hercules, who identifies as introverted, described the internal tension of sitting in the chair during a mall visit. Kids would wave and call out to him, but inside he wrestled with doubt: “You’re sitting in the chair, and you’re in there. But at the same time, inside I’m going, ‘What the heck, man? You’re just Hercules, man. What the heck?’”

Santas who partially matched the prototype developed creative backstories to explain their deviations. A skinny Santa told parents he was a “healthy Santa,” joking with children about why he looked different: “What, how do you think I would look after I have been around to 4,978,296,485 homes and eaten their cookies?” A hearing-impaired Santa would point to his cochlear implant and tell children: “Well, that’s a microphone to the North Pole. Bernard, the head elf, is listening to what you’re talking about, because he doesn’t want Santa to make any mistakes.”

Another Santa who had lost 192 pounds worried about no longer fitting the part but reframed his transformation: “I’m more fit as Santa instead of fitting the part.”

These explanations helped bridge the gap between their actual characteristics and what people expected.

The Physical and Emotional Transformation
Many Santas described extensive preparation to embody the role. They bleach their beards multiple times in the weeks before their first booking, invest in expensive custom suits, and practice their “ho, ho, ho” laugh until it becomes natural. One Santa worked so hard on his laugh that it became automatic. He explained how he asked another professional Santa about his authentic-sounding laugh: “He goes, ‘I had to teach myself to laugh like that, so that it’s natural. It’s not a, “Ho, ho, ho.” That’s how I sound when I laugh.‘ So I really worked at [it]. Now that’s how I laugh.”

For some, the transformation felt almost spiritual. Santa Phoenix described the experience: “I’m not putting something fake on. It is me and I have to really become that person, or let that person become me, and let it flow through me.”

Female Santas face unique challenges in a role defined by masculinity. Santa Lynx described the physical toll of appearing male: “I actually have either a binder or I have trans-tape… I try to make the girls go into my spine, which I think I still have a bruise from January, but anyway, you have to make sure…because Santa doesn’t have them double-Ds.” She spends up to 90 minutes applying her beard and makeup, compared to the five to 10 minutes it takes naturally bearded Santas to prepare.

Despite receiving hate mail and being denied entrance to Santa school because of her gender, she persists. She recalled being told: “You can’t be in the Santa school.” When she asked why, the response was: “Well, the men and I were talking, and we figured it’d be distracting to you [to learn in a group full of men].” The organizer suggested: “We can enroll you in the Mrs. Claus school or you can have your elf come and take our elf courses.” But Santa Lynx believes Santa embodies something more universal: “Santa can embody that acceptance and joy and love and understanding.”

Two Paths: Year-Round Santa or Seasonal Role
The researchers discovered that professional Santas split into two camps when the season ends. Some live as Santa 365 days a year, wearing red daily, driving cars with Santa-themed license plates, and carrying Santa coins to hand out to well-behaved children they encounter.

One Santa explained his year-round commitment: “That’s where my heart is. And, that’s why, eight years ago, I decided I’d live this way year-round, because that is who I am.” Another described the constant visibility: “You’re never off. You’re never not Santa. And you lose a little bit of your identity because you can’t let your hair down and be yourself and do all that because you don’t know who’s watching you.”

Santa Cygnus described how the role has merged with his identity: “And now my circle of friends know that I do Santa. So, you asked to start with, ‘Should I call you Cygnus, Santa Cygnus, whatever?’ I’m accustomed to being called Santa Cygnus now, because people just do it. It’s kind of become part of me.”

Other Santas carefully compartmentalize the role. They enjoy the work tremendously during the season but return to being themselves for most of the year. One explained his boundary: “Personally, I don’t want to be Santa 24/7, and I also just think that there’s so much about me that I want to live me. I don’t want to live a character.”

Another Santa described the seasonal nature of his work: “I can work [Santa jobs] four months out of the year…I’m more Santa when I’m at work [portraying Santa Claus]. When you put the suit on, that’s when you have to be that person.”

The study found that how much Santas identify with the role determines whether they practice continuous or episodic calling enactment. Those who strongly identify with being Santa integrate it into every aspect of their lives. Those with lower identification enjoy the seasonal nature of the work and use the off-season to honor other parts of themselves.

Breaking Traditional Santa Stereotypes
Santas who significantly deviate from the traditional prototype often reinterpret what Santa represents. They focus on higher-order values like kindness, generosity, and unconditional love rather than specific physical characteristics.

Santa Reticulum, who is gay, argued that people often view Santa through too narrow a lens: “I think you also exclude a lot of people if you are just being Santa for Christians.” He worries that treating Santa as strictly Christian leaves people out and prefers to see Santa as someone who accepts everyone without judgment.

Santa Lepus, who is Jewish, described how he views the role: “Santa is a guy who is truly accepting of the world and not judgmental.” He sees Santa as transcending religious boundaries and focuses on universal values of acceptance.

Atheist Santas in the study described staying away from religious aspects entirely. Santa Equuleus explained his perspective: “All of the things I like about Santa Claus are not religious. It’s this idea of being kind to people with no expectation of anything in return, except maybe cookies and milk, and even that is not a requirement. It’s just you’re kind to people for the sake of being kind.”

Despite facing rejection and having to downplay certain characteristics, these non-traditional Santas uniformly described living the role year-round. They found that once they connected with Santa’s core values, they could fully identify with the role even while looking different from what society expects.

Inside the Professional Santa Community
The Santa world includes training schools, professional associations, and local networks. Organizations like the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas and the International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas set standards for membership, though some have begun relaxing requirements. The IBRBS now accepts fake-bearded Santas as associate members, though only real-bearded Santas can become full voting members.

These communities provide support, training, and job referrals. One Santa described the camaraderie: “We meet once a month for lunch and we all dress up as summertime Santas and we go out with our red shirts and our red tennis shoes and our full beards and we have a luncheon. We get together and we share stories, especially with the younger ones that are coming in, the newer Santas to give them insight about this.”

Several mentioned attending multiple Santa schools to improve their craft, with one Santa earning what he called a “Master’s degree at SantaClausology.”

However, the community also enforces boundaries about who counts as a legitimate Santa. Some Santas described colleagues who use scooters or wheelchairs as “bad Santas” who should retire. Female Santas reported receiving pushback from multiple directions within the community.

Source: https://studyfinds.org/thousands-of-adults-say-becoming-santa-is-their-lifes-calling/

H5N1 bird flu has infected growing numbers of people worldwide in recent years, but this week saw something new: the first recorded human case of an H5N5 avian influenza virus. What is this virus and how concerned about it should we be?

What Happened?

In early November, a resident of Grays Harbor, a county on the south-west Pacific coast of Washington state about 100 miles from Seattle, became severely unwell with flu-like symptoms including high fever, respiratory distress and confusion.

They were admitted to hospital, and on November 14 officials confirmed that tests showed infection with an H5N5 avian influenza virus. The patient, an older adult with underlying conditions, was treated in hospital, but sadly they died on November 21.

This was the first reported human infection with an H5N5 influenza virus.

What is H5N5 Influenza Virus?

H5N5 influenza viruses are a type of avian influenza (bird flu) – an influenza A virus that infects birds.

Bird flu viruses are classified as either “high pathogenicity” or “low pathogenicity” based on the severity of symptoms they cause in poultry. (Their severity also varies in other bird species.) This H5N5 strain, like the widespread and much-reported-on H5N1 strain, is one of the high pathogenicity forms.

Where Did it Come From?

This hasn’t yet been formally confirmed. However, the patient kept a flock of backyard poultry that were exposed to wild birds, which suggests how they might have caught the virus.

H5N5 is found in wild birds around the world, and it is relatively common for it to pass from them into flocks of poultry. This is, however, the first time an H5N5 influenza virus has been found to go one step further and infect a human.

What Does the Name Mean? Is it Similar to H5N1?

Influenza A viruses are one of the major branches of the influenza virus family, and are divided into subtypes based on differences in the two proteins that form spikes on the surface of virus particles: haemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA).

Both proteins are good targets for the immune system’s antibodies. The proteins rapidly mutate as the virus evolves to evade these antibodies, and the different forms that result are used to categorize influenza A viruses.

The bird flu viruses H5N1 and H5N5 both have HA proteins of the same H5 subtype (though recognizably distinct from each other), but have NA proteins of different subtypes. Just as humans can be infected by different influenza A virus subtypes during the same winter season (H1N1 and H3N2), genetic studies show us this H5N5 virus is distinct from the dominant H5N1 strain that is also circulating in birds worldwide.

Should We Be Worried About What Happens Next?

H5N5 is an ecological and agricultural threat. Although bird flu vaccines exist, at the moment, political and economic factors make it hard to use them in US poultry. Instead, the virus must be controlled by surveillance, housing poultry indoors, increasing farm biosecurity and, as a last resort, by mass culling of infected poultry.

This is challenging enough, but bird flu also demands our attention because the virus is a potential cause of new pandemics.

In the long run, this risk is very significant. However, it is worth remembering that, although influenza is better at changing its host species and creating pandemics than any other virus, that is still an incredibly hard thing for the virus to do.

The vast majority of “spillover” infections of bird flu into humans are one-off events. They can vary unpredictably in their effects. Most are quite mild (for example, causing conjunctivitis), but some can be very severe, as was the case in this first recorded case of H5N5. But after infecting one human, most avian influenza viruses go no further.

Scientists will watch for several warning signs that a virus may be adapting to humans, especially any hint of person-to-person spread. There is no sign that this has happened here.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/first-human-bird-flu-death-h5n5/

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