Category: Research Discoveries

For anyone with asthma who has ever felt too intimidated or too worn out to start a formal exercise program, a new study offers a welcome shortcut. Getting people to walk more and sit less, with coaching and a fitness tracker, worked about as well as structured treadmill workouts for controlling asthma symptoms.

Researchers in Brazil put 52 adults with moderate to severe, poorly controlled asthma through one of two eight-week programs, according to findings published in the journal Pulmonology. One group did supervised treadmill training twice a week. The other met with a health coach once a week and used a wearable activity tracker to nudge them into moving more throughout the day, without any formal exercise sessions. Both groups ended up breathing easier, feeling less anxious, and reporting a better quality of life, and those gains mostly held up four months later.

That result matters because starting an exercise routine can feel like a tall order for someone who struggles to catch their breath climbing stairs. Many people with asthma avoid physical activity altogether because they fear triggering symptoms, and that inactivity itself has been linked to worse disease control. There is more than one path to feeling better here, and patients do not have to choose the toughest one.

Setting Up the Asthma Control Study

Researchers recruited adults between 18 and 65 who had moderate to severe asthma that was not well controlled, based on their medication needs and symptom scores. Participants also had to be physically inactive at the start, getting less than the recommended amount of moderate to vigorous activity each week, as measured by a small motion-tracking device worn on the body.

Fifty-two people were randomly split into two groups. Twenty-seven were assigned to treadmill training, working out twice a week for 45 minutes a session over eight weeks, at an intensity set by an individual fitness test. The other 25 were assigned to a coaching program, meeting with a health professional once a week for up to 90 minutes. Instead of formal workouts, that group focused on building daily habits: they wore a commercial fitness tracker set to buzz when they hit a step goal or when they had been sitting still for an hour, and reviewed their progress with a coach who helped them set realistic goals and work through obstacles.

Both groups also attended an asthma education session, and everyone kept taking their prescribed asthma medications throughout. Researchers checked in three times: before the programs started, right after the eight weeks ended, and again four months later. They measured asthma symptom control using a standard questionnaire, along with quality of life, anxiety and depression symptoms, sleep, body composition, and how much people actually moved during the day.

Nearly 9 in 10 participants were women. A typical participant was carrying extra weight, dealing with multiple health conditions, and showing signs of anxiety or depression along with a lower quality of life. That combination lines up with what other research has found about who tends to struggle most with uncontrolled asthma.

What Researchers Found About Asthma Control

Both groups saw meaningful drops in their asthma symptom scores by the end of the eight weeks, large enough by standard scoring guidelines to count as a real improvement in day-to-day symptoms. That improvement held up four months later in both groups, with no meaningful gap between the treadmill group and the coaching group. Roughly two-thirds of participants in each group still showed a clinically meaningful improvement at the four-month mark.

Quality of life scores climbed in both groups too, again by an amount considered clinically meaningful, and those gains also stuck around at follow-up. Anxiety and depression symptoms eased in both groups as well. Neither group showed changes in sleep quality or body composition.

A couple of results ran counter to expectations. Aerobic training usually lifts a person’s peak fitness, but the treadmill group saw no such bump, which the researchers tied to participants already having fairly well-preserved lung and heart fitness at the start, or to the program running only eight weeks. The coaching group’s daily step counts did climb over the eight weeks, though the researchers felt the gains fell short of what earlier behavioral programs have produced and pointed to that group’s higher body weight, which other studies have linked to a weaker response. Either way, both groups logged more weekly minutes of moderate to vigorous activity, the kind that gets the heart working.

Both groups also reported fewer personal and everyday barriers to being active after their programs, such as feeling too tired or not having a safe place to exercise, and those improvements remained at follow-up.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/skipping-the-gym-walking-more-controlled-asthma-about-as-well-as-treadmill-workouts/

Blood Vessels, Ovaries, and Prostates Don’t Age on the Same Clock

What 300,000 People’s Diets Reveal About Preventing High Blood Pressure

Masculine, Still Image-Conscious: Appearance Concerns Pushed Men To Diet More Than Health Scares

A toddler finds a gummy on the coffee table. It looks like candy. It smells sweet. Before anyone notices, the child has swallowed it. That gummy might contain marijuana, and it might not be the only edible drug parents now have to worry about vanishing off counters and out of purses.

A new study published in BMC Public Health looked at more than two decades of calls to United States poison centers and found something startling: the rate at which young children accidentally swallowed recreational drugs jumped by 3,307% between 2000 and 2024. That is not a typo. What started as roughly one ingestion per 100,000 children in 2000 climbed to nearly 36 per 100,000 by 2024, with the sharpest climb kicking off around 2013.

A research team led by Nationwide Children’s Hospital analyzed data from the National Poison Data System, which collects information from poison centers across the country. They zeroed in on children younger than 6 who accidentally swallowed drugs like marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, psychedelic mushrooms, and opioids such as fentanyl and heroin. The goal was to figure out who these kids were, what they swallowed, and how badly it hurt them.

How Many Kids Are Swallowing Recreational Drugs?

Across the 24 years, researchers reviewed 41,612 cases of children under 6 who swallowed a recreational drug and were reported to poison centers. Most of these kids, 57.6%, were younger than 3. That tracks with how toddlers explore the world: everything goes in the mouth, and anything left on a low table or in an open purse is fair game.

Nearly all of the cases, 96.4%, happened at home, and 95.9% involved just one drug rather than a mix. Marijuana and related products made up the overwhelming share of ingestions at 84.7%. Cocaine and methamphetamine accounted for 8.4%, psilocybin mushrooms for 3.5%, opioids for 2.8%, and ketamine and similar drugs for 0.6%.

About half of the children (50.6%) had no effect or only mild symptoms. Another 30.8% had moderate effects, and 5% suffered what poison centers call a major effect, meaning symptoms were life-threatening or caused lasting harm. Six children died during the study period, and all six were younger than 3.

Age made a real difference in how badly a child was hurt. Kids under 3 were about 54% more likely to suffer a major effect than kids aged 3 to 5, and about 23% more likely to end up in intensive care. Study authors suggest younger kids weigh less, so the same amount of a drug may hit them harder relative to their size. Toddlers also struggle to tell adults something is wrong, which can delay treatment.

Marijuana Edibles Are Driving the Recreational Drugs Surge

Edible forms of marijuana like gummies and baked goods accounted for nearly half of all cases in the study, 47.9%. Edible cases began appearing in the study data in 2013 and grew fast, eventually overtaking other forms of marijuana around 2019.

Researchers tie this rise to the wave of state laws legalizing marijuana and the growing number of edible products showing up in people’s homes. Oddly, edible marijuana ingestions were actually less likely than other drugs to cause a major health effect or land a child in intensive care. But there were so many cases that these products still accounted for a large share of hospital admissions.

Opioids, Stimulants, and Mushrooms: Fewer Cases, Rougher Outcomes

Opioids made up a small slice of the total cases, just 2.8%, but their impact was outsized. Ingestions involving opioids were about 2.6 times more likely to be linked to an intensive care stay compared with other drugs combined. Fentanyl stood out most: it was involved in almost two-thirds of opioid cases and was roughly 7.7 times more likely to be linked to a major effect than all other substances combined. Four of the six deaths in the study were linked to fentanyl.

Cocaine and methamphetamine told a similar story. They accounted for 8.4% of cases but were about twice as likely to be linked to an intensive care stay or a major effect compared with other drugs combined. Two of the six deaths involved cocaine. Dissociative drugs, a category that includes ketamine and PCP-related substances that can cause hallucinations and a sense of detachment from reality, made up less than 1% of cases but were about 1.6 times more likely to be linked to intensive care admission than the other drug categories combined.

Psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in certain mushrooms, produced one of the more unexpected findings. Ingestions involving psilocybin mushroom products rose sharply starting around 2018, climbing more than 1,400% by 2024. By the last two years of the study, psychedelic ingestions had grown to outpace every other drug category except marijuana.

Researchers suspect this jump tracks with psilocybin’s expanding legal status for therapy and its growing popularity as a recreational drug. They also flagged a separate problem: independent testing of some mushroom-branded gummies and chocolates has found inconsistent labeling, meaning products marketed as psilocybin may actually contain other substances entirely. That makes it harder to know exactly what children are being exposed to.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/toddlers-poisoned-by-marijuana-gummies-at-record-rates-study-warns/

Results Show The Average American Is Out Of Energy Before 3 P.M.

Coconut oil has long had a place in kitchens and beauty products, but researchers are now making a serious case for putting it in jet engines. New research found that aviation biofuel made from coconut oil can power a small jet engine about as efficiently as traditional jet fuel, with lower unburned hydrocarbon emissions, though the blends burn more fuel and emit slightly more carbon monoxide.

Aviation accounts for a meaningful share of global carbon dioxide emissions, and pressure on the industry to find cleaner fuel options has intensified in recent years. The International Civil Aviation Organization has identified sustainable aviation fuel, commonly called SAF, as the single most effective strategy available for cutting aviation’s carbon footprint. But many current methods for producing SAF are themselves energy-hungry and costly, which chips away at the environmental benefit. The new study, published in the journal Fuel, zeroes in on a production approach designed to sidestep that problem entirely, using a technique that requires far less energy to make the fuel in the first place.

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University tested biofuels made from coconut oil through what they call a “co-solvent method,” a process that mixes acetone with alcohol and coconut oil to produce high-purity biofuel without the intense heat and pressure required by conventional production methods. Rather than stopping at production, the team took the next step and burned the fuel in a small jet engine, measuring both engine performance and exhaust emissions.

A Greener Way to Make Coconut Oil Jet Fuel

Most SAF production routes involve intense industrial processes, including high-temperature refining steps that drain energy out of the fuel’s lifecycle before a single flight takes place. The co-solvent method works differently. By adding acetone to a mixture of alcohol and coconut oil, normally incompatible liquids blend uniformly and react completely at relatively low temperatures, producing biofuel with purity levels exceeding 97%.

Coconut itself offers a practical advantage as a raw material. Roughly 30% of the coconut is discarded after extracting its internal moisture during processing. This study used oil from material the researchers describe as discarded and non-edible, including the large seeds and leftover flesh, so the fuel draws on parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste. The process also produces biodiesel suitable for vehicles and marine vessels, plus high-quality glycerin as a byproduct.

Two types of biofuel were produced and tested: one made using methanol and another made using ethanol. Both are plant-based fuels commonly studied for diesel engines, but this research examined their behavior in a jet engine, a question that has received comparatively little scientific attention.

Inside the Engine: How Coconut Oil Jet Fuel Actually Performs

Researchers tested the fuel in a small commercial jet engine capable of reaching speeds up to 130,000 rotations per minute. Researchers blended the biofuels with conventional kerosene at ratios of 10%, 30%, and 50% biofuel by volume, then ran the engine across a range of speeds. Measurements included fuel consumption, engine efficiency, and exhaust concentrations of four pollutants: unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitric oxide.

In terms of fuel efficiency, the biofuel blends required more fuel to produce the same amount of thrust. At 80,000 rotations per minute, a 50% methanol-based blend consumed about 16.8% more fuel than pure kerosene, while the ethanol-based version consumed about 19.6% more. This is largely because the biofuels carry less energy per kilogram than kerosene, so more must be burned to maintain the same output level.

Despite burning more fuel by weight, the blends converted heat into usable work at rates comparable to pure kerosene. At 100,000 rotations per minute, the thermal efficiency of the highest biofuel blend differed from pure kerosene by a small margin, and thrust output remained consistent across all blend ratios tested.

What Comes Out of the Exhaust

Emissions are where coconut oil-based jet fuel shows some of its most encouraging results. Increasing the proportion of biofuel in the blend consistently reduced unburned hydrocarbon emissions. At a 50% blend ratio, hydrocarbon concentrations in the exhaust dropped by roughly 5% to 40% compared to pure kerosene, depending on engine speed. Researchers said the drop was likely tied in part to fuel composition, since the coconut-derived biofuels contain none of the ring-shaped, aromatic hydrocarbon molecules present in conventional jet fuel.

Carbon dioxide emissions remained at levels consistent with pure kerosene across all blending ratios tested. While higher biofuel content increased total fuel consumption, the CO2 in the exhaust did not rise proportionally. Researchers say that pattern may point to some unburned biofuel leaving the engine, a question they flagged for future investigation.

Carbon monoxide emissions, a product of incomplete combustion, did increase modestly at higher blend ratios. A 50% blend produced roughly 3% to 17% more carbon monoxide than pure kerosene depending on engine speed. Researchers linked this to the biofuels being harder to ignite than kerosene and carrying less energy, both of which can create fuel-rich zones inside the combustion chamber where oxygen runs short.

Nitric oxide emissions, which can contribute to ozone depletion at high altitudes, were broadly comparable between the biofuel blends and pure kerosene. A 30% methanol-based blend showed nitric oxide concentrations 20% to 30% lower than pure kerosene across all operating conditions tested, a result the authors say requires further study to fully explain.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/coconut-oil-jet-fuel-matches-kerosenes-efficiency-in-engine-tests/

When a 35-year-old man went in for a cardiology appointment in 2005, thyroid trouble was the last thing on his mind. His cardiologist felt something unusual in his neck and ordered an ultrasound. That single scan set off a chain of discoveries that would later give doctors the chance to act on his children’s inherited cancer risk before either child developed the disease.

That man’s story sits at the heart of a virtual tumor board article published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, written by specialists in endocrinology, surgery, oncology, genetics, and radiation medicine. Together, they used his 20-year medical journey to illustrate how, for this one family, a single genetic test reshaped the way a rare form of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma was managed across generations, allowing doctors to spot the inherited risk early and step in before it reached his children as clinical disease.

Medullary thyroid carcinoma is not the common kind of thyroid cancer that usually comes to mind. It grows from a different type of cell, does not respond to the radioactive iodine treatment used for other thyroid cancers, and in as many as one in four cases, it is inherited. Before genetic testing, hereditary forms of the disease were usually recognized only after cancer had already appeared in a family, signaled by a thyroid nodule, rising calcitonin, or a suggestive family history. A genetic test targeting the RET gene gave doctors a way to identify at-risk relatives in advance.

A Cancer Hidden in Plain Sight

When surgeons operated on that 35-year-old man in 2005, they expected to find papillary thyroid carcinoma, the most common and usually treatable form of the disease, based on a needle biopsy done beforehand. Instead, the tissue removed during surgery revealed medullary thyroid carcinoma. The cancer was present in multiple spots across both sides of his thyroid, and his blood showed sharply elevated calcitonin, a hormone produced by the specific cells where this cancer originates. His calcitonin level measured 1,160 picograms per milliliter against a reference range of less than 9.8.

Surgeons removed the thyroid and the lymph nodes from the center of his neck. All 19 removed lymph nodes came back negative for cancer. That was good news. But then came the genetic test.

Results confirmed he carried a mutation in the RET gene at a location called codon 609, a change linked to a hereditary syndrome called multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2A. That finding instantly shifted the story from one man’s cancer to his entire family’s risk.

One Genetic Test Changed Three Generations

A certified genetic counselor worked with the family to understand who else might carry the mutation, a process called cascade testing. That testing identified additional carriers across multiple generations, including the patient’s brother, son, and daughter.

What happened next shows the difference between catching this mutation early versus late. The patient’s brother, not screened until age 37, had already developed metastatic disease by the time the mutation was found in him. His preoperative calcitonin level was 2,450 picograms per milliliter. He underwent total thyroidectomy with bilateral neck dissection and now has persistent disease, currently being treated with a targeted drug called selpercatinib.

Identified only through genetic testing, the patient’s son and daughter underwent preventive thyroid removal at ages 6 and 3, respectively, and are now 25 and 22. Both have had undetectable calcitonin ever since and show no evidence of disease. According to the patient perspective section of the report, learning that his children were carriers felt initially overwhelming and painful, but the clarity provided by testing quickly transformed that fear into a sense of direction and control over the disease.

What 20 Years of Follow-Up Revealed About This Thyroid Cancer

After his initial surgery, the patient achieved undetectable calcitonin levels and stayed in that state for three years. In 2008, calcitonin began rising again, and by 2013, imaging confirmed multiple liver metastases. Even so, the disease advanced unusually slowly. From 2013 to 2025, his calcitonin rose from 850 to 1,820 picograms per milliliter, an increase of roughly 80 picograms per milliliter per year. His calcitonin doubling time, a marker doctors use to gauge how fast the cancer is progressing, stretched from about 13 months in the earliest phase to more than 24 months by the time liver metastases were found in 2013, and beyond 60 months in the years that followed.

Because this patient’s disease was progressing slowly and he had no symptoms, his medical team chose careful monitoring over immediate drug therapy rather than treating based on numbers alone. Then, in 2025, FDG-PET-CT imaging revealed new hypermetabolic lesions, and MRI confirmed bone metastases in the spine, though he remained without symptoms and without any compression of the spinal cord. As of the report, surveillance continues with bisphosphonate support to address the bone involvement.

This 20-year history is both unusual and instructive. It shows that patients with certain RET mutations can experience long periods of stable disease even after metastasis, and that knowing a patient’s genetic profile allows doctors to plan treatment deliberately rather than reactively.

How New Drugs Have Transformed Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma Treatment

For years, doctors treating advanced medullary thyroid carcinoma relied on drugs that targeted multiple cell signals at once. While those medications helped slow the disease, they carried significant side effects including high blood pressure, severe diarrhea, fatigue, and skin problems on the hands and feet. Many patients required dose reductions or had to stop the drugs entirely.

A newer class of drugs, designed to block only the RET protein specifically, has sharply improved outcomes. In two large clinical trials referenced in the paper, LIBRETTO-001 and ARROW, these targeted drugs produced response rates ranging from 69% to 79% in patients with RET-mutated medullary thyroid carcinoma, with far better tolerability than earlier treatments. A critical finding from those trials was that response rates to selective RET inhibitors were similar whether the RET mutation was inherited or acquired by the tumor, meaning the same drugs appear effective for both types of patients.

About half of sporadic MTCs carry somatic RET mutations in the tumor itself, so testing the tumor directly is needed to determine whether these targeted drugs will work for those patients.

Multiple specialists contributed to this report, including pathologists, endocrinologists, surgeons, oncologists, radiation doctors, and a medical geneticist, each examining the same patient’s case through their own lens. That structure was deliberate. No single specialty has the full picture of hereditary MTC.

Radiation therapy plays a narrow but meaningful role here. Because this cancer does not absorb radioactive iodine the way common thyroid cancers do, external radiation is reserved for specific situations: patients with high-risk features after surgery, tumors that could not be fully removed, or painful bone and spinal metastases. In this patient’s case, with bone metastases detected but no pain or neurological symptoms, the team opted to hold radiation in reserve for future need.

Studies cited in the paper show that countries where genetic screening became routine saw the average age of MTC diagnosis drop by years or even decades. In a German cohort, the average age at diagnosis decreased from 35.6 to 23.0 years after routine screening began. In a Norwegian study, the proportion of patients who achieved remission increased from 50% to 89% following the introduction of systematic genetic testing.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/gene-test-revealed-inherited-cancer-risk-across-three-generations-of-one-family/

Younger Adults With Eczema Face Surprisingly High Shingles Risk

Staying clear of diabetes, high blood pressure, and smoking through middle age may promote more than a decade of extra dementia-free years compared to peers carrying all three conditions. A large, long-running community-based study published in Neurology® Open Access and tracking 12,409 participants from four U.S. communities found that the gap in dementia-free years between the healthiest and least healthy midlife groups was 12.6 years, a number researchers say offers a clear, personal way to think about heart health and brain aging.

Dementia already looms large over American life. Roughly 42% of middle-aged adults in the U.S. may develop the condition during their lifetime, according to prior research cited in the study. Most conversations about preventing it focus on the odds of getting it at all, rather than something more personal: how many good cognitive years a person actually gets to enjoy. This study set out to answer that second question directly.

Researchers Followed 12,000 People for Nearly 30 Years

Researchers drew on data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study, a long-running project that began enrolling participants between 1987 and 1989 across four U.S. locations: Forsyth County, North Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; the Minneapolis suburbs; and Washington County, Maryland. The team focused on 12,409 participants who were alive and free of dementia at age 55, with an average starting age of about 56. Just over half were women.

At a baseline checkup in the early 1990s, researchers noted whether each participant had diabetes, high blood pressure, or was a current smoker, then gave everyone a simple score from zero to three based on how many of those three conditions applied. From there, participants were tracked for a median of about 26 years, in some cases all the way to 2022. Over that stretch, 3,008 people developed dementia and 5,238 died without ever developing it.

Doctors did not rely on guesswork to identify dementia cases. Participants took cognitive tests in person, completed phone interviews when they could not make it to a visit, and had their hospital and death records checked continuously. An expert panel confirmed every diagnosis.

The More Risk Factors, the Fewer Good Years

A clear step-down pattern emerged. People with none of the three risk factors averaged 30.1 dementia-free years between ages 55 and 95. Add one risk factor and that number dropped to 26.3. Two dropped it to 21.0. All three brought it down to 17.5, a 12.6-year difference from the healthiest group. Only 176 participants landed in that highest-risk group, a small enough sample that the exact number carries more uncertainty than the figures for the larger groups.

Here is the twist: people with all three risk factors were nearly three times as likely to develop dementia as those with none, but they were more than five times as likely to die of something else first, before dementia ever got the chance to set in. By age 75, 10% of the highest-risk group had developed dementia, compared to just 3% of the healthiest group. By age 95, those numbers had essentially flipped, with the healthiest group reaching a 42% dementia rate while the highest-risk group topped out at just 23%. That is not because bad health protects against dementia. It is because the unhealthiest participants were, tragically, dying earlier from other causes.

Race and Sex Gaps in Dementia-Free Years Are Real

More risk factors meant fewer good years for every group researchers looked at, though the numbers were not identical across the board.

Women outlived men in dementia-free years at every risk level, averaging 18.1 years versus 16.6 for men among those with all three conditions. Women also had a higher lifetime rate of dementia by age 95, 40.3% compared to 32.8% for men, likely simply because they tend to live longer, giving the disease more years in which to appear.

Black participants had shorter dementia-free years than white participants at every risk level too. Among those with all three conditions, Black participants averaged 16.0 dementia-free years compared to 19.6 for white participants. Black participants also made up 60.2% of the highest-risk group despite representing a smaller share of the overall study population. Researchers say that heavier burden of health risk likely contributes to the disparity, and that addressing the social and economic forces behind it will matter just as much as clinical treatment.

People carrying a gene variant called APOE-ε4, which is linked to higher dementia risk, had fewer dementia-free years than non-carriers at every single risk level, from zero risk factors up through all three.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/midlife-risk-factors-dementia/

 

For women trying to conceive later in life, the uterus itself can be just as much of an obstacle as egg quality. Even with the best fertility treatments available, including donor eggs from younger women, older mothers still face higher rates of failed implantation and pregnancy loss. Scientists have long suspected the aging uterus plays a major role, but the biological reasons behind it have been frustratingly hard to pin down. Now, a new study points to a surprising association that hides in plain sight: the gradual disappearance of beneficial bacteria from the uterus as women age.

Researchers from Peking University Third Hospital, writing in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, found that in this study’s cohort, as women grew older, a group of protective bacteria called Lactobacillus declined in the lining of the uterus. That loss was associated with the uterine lining becoming less hospitable to embryos. The scientists also identified a specific member of that bacterial family, Lactobacillus gasseri, and found that treating aged mice with it reduced signs of uterine cellular aging and improved embryo implantation.

Its active ingredient appears to be not the bacterium itself, but a coating-like substance the microbe secretes, called an exopolysaccharide, or EPS. In lab-grown human uterine cells and in mouse tissue, EPS reduced markers of cellular aging, and experiments using a strain engineered to lack EPS showed the substance was responsible for much of the bacterium’s benefit. Researchers describe EPS as an early-stage experimental candidate, one they suggest could eventually be worth exploring as a postbiotic approach, while emphasizing that further pharmacological and translational work would be needed before any clinical use becomes realistic.

What Researchers Found About Age-Related Fertility Decline

To build their case, the team combined human patient data, cell-based lab experiments, and mouse tests. They enrolled 149 women being seen for infertility at a single hospital in Beijing between 2021 and 2022. Participants were divided into three age groups: women under 30, women between 30 and 35, and women 35 and older. During a routine surgical procedure, small tissue samples were collected from the uterine lining of each participant.

Using genetic sequencing techniques that identify bacteria by their unique DNA signatures, the researchers mapped the microbial communities living in each woman’s uterus. They then tracked embryo transfer outcomes over the following year for the subset of women who went on to attempt in vitro fertilization.

At the broader group level, clinical pregnancy rates after embryo transfer did not differ significantly across the three age groups, coming in at 65.0%, 57.1%, and 61.3% respectively, a pattern the researchers attributed to factors such as embryo selection and the limited size of the follow-up group. But when they looked within each age group, women who became pregnant consistently showed higher levels of Lactobacillus in their uterine lining than women who did not. Women who conceived also tended to have higher levels of the species L. crispatus, while those who did not conceive more often had higher levels of L. iners and another bacterium, Gardnerella vaginalis.

Zeroing In on the Right Bacteria

With an association established between uterine bacteria and fertility outcomes, the team set out to identify which specific strain would be most therapeutically useful. They isolated five different Lactobacillus species from the reproductive tracts of healthy women and put each through a series of head-to-head tests, measuring how well each fought off harmful bacteria, how strongly it attached to uterine cells, and how effectively it neutralized the cellular damage associated with aging.

L. gasseri emerged as the strongest overall candidate across multiple measures, particularly in its ability to counteract oxidative stress, essentially the cellular equivalent of rust. Oxidative stress, caused by an accumulation of unstable molecules called free radicals, is one of the main drivers of cellular aging. L. gasseri also produced the highest amount of EPS compared to the other strains tested. The other strains were not without merit: L. delbrueckii showed strong pathogen inhibition and biofilm activity, and L. crispatus demonstrated anti-inflammatory effects in co-culture experiments with uterine cells.

To test whether L. gasseri could actually slow down uterine aging, the researchers treated older female mice with the bacteria delivered directly into the vagina over 28 days. Compared to untreated older mice, the treated animals showed significant reductions in biological markers of cellular aging in their uterine tissue. The treated mice also showed improved embryo implantation rates.

How a Bacterial Substance Appears to Turn Back the Clock

When the team stripped away the bacteria and tested purified EPS alone on lab-grown human uterine cells, the substance reproduced many of the same anti-aging effects. It reduced the proportion of cells showing signs of aging, lowered levels of an inflammatory signaling cluster associated with aging cells, and reduced oxidative stress markers.

Gene expression analysis in mouse uterine tissue pointed to a specific biological pathway as a likely explanation. A communication network inside cells called the Hippo-YAP pathway, which helps regulate how cells grow, age, and respond to stress, was found to be overactive in older uteri. L. gasseri and its EPS appeared to dial that activity back down to healthier levels in the mouse model. When the researchers blocked the key protein in this pathway, called YAP, the protective effects of both the bacteria and their EPS were eliminated, showing that YAP is required for these effects and that Hippo-YAP signaling is at least part of the mechanism at work.

To confirm the link between EPS and these effects, the team also engineered a version of L. gasseri that could not produce EPS. That modified strain lost much of its protective power in mice. When EPS was added back externally, the beneficial effects were largely restored.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/an-aging-uterus-loses-protective-bacteria-lab-tested-byproduct-could-help-reverse-damage/

Some people can stand outside on a summer evening and walk back in without a single bite. Others get absolutely devoured. It turns out this isn’t bad luck or imagination. Mosquitoes appear to be responding to different chemical and microbial cues on each person’s skin. A new study tested 119 people against three different disease-carrying mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, and Culex quinquefasciatus, and found something that could reshape how scientists think about mosquito repellents: each species ranked participants differently in the lab, so the person who acts as a magnet for one type may barely register with another.

For years, researchers have known that body odor plays a role in mosquito attraction. Most previous work, though, focused on a single mosquito species at a time, leaving a big question unanswered: do all mosquitoes prefer the same people? According to the research, published in the journal iScience, the answer is mostly no. Different species ranked the same group of people in very different orders of preference, meaning a person who is highly attractive to one species is not necessarily on the menu for another. Among the 119 participants, no one was a top target for all three species, and no one was at the bottom of the list for all three either.

One sex-based difference also stood out. One of the three species, Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue, Zika, and yellow fever, showed a slight but statistically significant preference for male participants over female ones, a pattern the other two species did not share.

Who Was Tested and How

Researchers at Florida International University, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Zürich, recruited 119 volunteers from Miami, Florida, aged 18 to 59. Participants were racially and ethnically diverse, and the group was split nearly evenly by sex, with 61 males and 58 females. To keep the results clean, participants were told not to shower the night before their visit and to skip deodorants, perfumes, or scented skin products.

Each volunteer stuck their left forearm into a specially built device, essentially a sealed tube that allowed mosquitoes to respond to a person’s natural scent without any physical contact. For two of the mosquito species, live arms were used. For the third species, Culex quinquefasciatus, a night-biting mosquito that also transmits West Nile virus, participants wore a thin nylon sleeve over their arms for 12 to 16 hours to capture their scent, since those mosquitoes were tested separately under low-light conditions that mimic nighttime.

Three species were tested in total: Aedes aegypti, which primarily targets humans and spreads dengue and Zika; Aedes albopictus, a related species with a broader diet that spreads similar viruses; and Culex quinquefasciatus, the night-biting species associated with West Nile virus. Across all 119 participants, Aedes aegypti showed the highest average attraction rate at about 89%, Culex quinquefasciatus came in around 43%, and Aedes albopictus had the lowest average at about 27%. These differences in overall enthusiasm for humans may reflect how deeply each species has evolved to rely on human blood, though the study’s design does not directly establish that connection.

What Mosquitoes Are Actually Smelling

To figure out what made certain people more or less attractive, the research team collected the invisible cloud of chemicals coming off each participant’s arm and analyzed it to identify individual compounds. At the same time, they swabbed participants’ forearms to study the bacteria on their skin, cataloging 246 distinct bacterial taxa across the 119 participants.

Only one of those taxa appeared in every participant, a notable result given how much the skin’s microbial makeup varies from person to person. That variability, the researchers argue, is a key part of why mosquitoes respond so differently to different people.

For Aedes aegypti, the dengue-and Zika-spreading species, high attraction was closely linked to Staphylococcus bacteria on the skin, a pattern specific to this species and consistent with earlier research. People who were least attractive to this species tended to have more Pseudomonas bacteria on their arms, a pattern previously associated with reduced mosquito attraction. When it came to airborne chemicals, high attraction for this species was tied to the absence of certain compounds rather than the presence of appealing ones, hinting that these mosquitoes may home in on people who simply lack natural deterrents.

For Aedes albopictus, the broader-diet species, the pattern flipped. High attraction was linked to the presence of specific appealing chemicals, including one compound previously tied to how mosquitoes evolved a preference for humans in the first place. Researchers found 13 volatiles were more common among people who scored highly on attraction to this species, compared with just one such chemical for Aedes aegypti. That broader set of appealing odors aligns with this mosquito’s more opportunistic nature, since it feeds on a wider range of animals rather than specializing on humans.

For Culex quinquefasciatus, the night-biting, West Nile-associated species, high attraction was again tied more to the absence of certain compounds than to the presence of appealing ones. No bacterial species were significantly linked to high attraction here, though bacteria in the Actinomyces group were associated with low attraction.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/why-some-people-attract-more-mosquitoes-than-others/

Standing on one leg for up to 30 seconds sounds like a party trick. In a study of more than 13,000 older adults, better performance on that simple balance test was associated with a lower risk of dying over the following seven years.

Researchers followed 13,423 community-dwelling adults aged 65 and older in Taiwan for a median of seven years, measuring their physical fitness through a battery of practical tests. Older adults who performed best on balance, agility, and lower-body strength tests were far less likely to die during the follow-up period than those who performed worst. Even after accounting for existing health conditions, income, body weight, and self-reported exercise habits, the connection held.

Doctors typically size up an older patient’s risk by counting diagnoses: high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease. Fitness testing, the researchers argue, measures something a diagnosis list misses, which is how much functional capacity a person’s body still has in reserve. Published in JAMA Network Open, the study is among the largest to test that idea across several fitness domains at once.

What the Physical Fitness Tests Actually Measured

This was a cohort study, meaning researchers measured something about a group of people at one point in time, then followed them to see what happened. Between January 11, 2015, and November 25, 2016, participants completed standardized fitness assessments at 46 testing stations spread across 22 cities and counties in Taiwan. Those results were linked to national health insurance records, which tracked deaths through December 31, 2022.

Of the 13,423 participants in the final analysis, the average age was about 73. Roughly 62.5% were women. Over the follow-up period, 1,631 participants, about 12% of the group, died.

Seven tests covered four areas of fitness. Balance and agility were measured two ways: standing on one leg with eyes open for up to 30 seconds, and an “8-foot up-and-go” test that required rising from a chair, walking 8 feet around a cone, returning, and sitting back down, all timed as one continuous movement. Muscle strength was measured two ways as well: how many times someone could stand up from a chair and sit back down in 30 seconds without using their arms, and how many times they could curl a hand weight in 30 seconds. Heart and lung endurance came from a 2-minute step test, counting how many times a participant could lift each knee to a marked height while marching in place. Flexibility was checked with two reaching tests, one behind the back and one toward the toes while seated.

Participants were then ranked into five equal groups, from lowest to highest performance, for each test. Landing in the top group consistently meant a far lower risk of dying than landing in the bottom one.

Balance and Agility Showed the Steepest Survival Gap

Across several tests, top performers had roughly half, and in some cases less than half, the mortality risk of bottom performers, even after adjusting for age, sex, body weight, income, education, existing conditions, and self-reported physical activity.

On the 8-foot up-and-go, the best performers had a mortality risk about 59% lower than the worst. On the one-leg stance, the gap was about 50%. Lower-body strength and heart-and-lung endurance each landed in the range of 42% to 45%.

Flexibility behaved differently. Extreme stiffness was linked to higher mortality risk, but gains beyond a moderate, functional range of motion produced no further survival benefit. Extreme stiffness appeared to matter far more than exceptional flexibility did.

Combining all seven scores into a single fitness index sharpened the picture. Participants in the top fifth of overall fitness had about 61% lower mortality risk than those in the bottom fifth, a stronger association than any individual test produced on its own. And the pattern was graded: at every step up the index, from worst to best, mortality risk fell.

Most of that difference was concentrated between the very lowest group and the ones just above it. Researchers took that pattern to mean the biggest health gains may come when someone moves out of the worst-performing tier, and argued for prioritizing the least-fit older adults.

Why Balance and Lower-Body Strength Carry So Much Weight

Balance and lower-body strength likely stand out because of their role in preventing falls. Impaired balance, slowed mobility, and weak legs are established risk factors for falls and the fractures that follow, especially broken hips, which rank among the leading causes of hospitalization, disability, and death in older adults. A one-leg stance or a timed up-and-go may catch early declines in muscle control and coordination well before a person ever trips. That remains an interpretation rather than a proven chain of events, since the study tracked deaths from any cause and never measured whether fewer falls or fractures accounted for the gap.

Men and women showed somewhat different patterns. Among men, balance and agility carried the lowest mortality risk, followed by heart and lung fitness. Among women, lower-body strength mattered about as much as balance and agility. Researchers pointed to the higher rates of osteoporosis in older women, along with reports of higher sarcopenia prevalence under certain definitions, as reasons that preserving leg strength and mobility may matter especially for them.

One detail stands out for anyone who assumes a self-report is good enough: the fitness results stayed tied to mortality even after researchers statistically accounted for whether participants said they got regular exercise. Only about a third of the group, 32.8%, reported being regularly active. Measured performance added information that a questionnaire about habits did not capture on its own.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/balance-agility-test-predict-dying-risk-7-years/

Media Skepticism, Not Just COVID News, Predicted Vaccine Conspiracy Beliefs

Most college students used to picture graduation as a finish line. A growing number now seem to see it as a starting gun in a job market they fear AI will reshape. In a new survey of 2,000 American students pursuing higher education, less than half said they feel good about the job market waiting for them after they toss their caps.

Just 45% described themselves as optimistic about the market they will enter post-graduation. That number matters because it comes from the people with the most on the line: students who are paying tuition, taking on debt, and betting years of their lives on the promise that a degree still pays off. Nearly seven in 10, some 69%, said they are worried about landing a job once they graduate, and they pointed to a specific concern. They fear that artificial intelligence is being used to replace human workers in parts of the economy.

That anxiety carries a dramatic nickname in the survey: the “job apocalypse,” a blunt phrase for the worry that whole categories of work could thin out or vanish before today’s undergraduates ever clock in. Commissioned by the AI company Superhuman and conducted by Talker Research, the survey set out to measure how deep that dread runs and what students are doing about it. Both answers turned out to be bigger than a single worried mood.

Bracing for a Job Apocalypse

Fear, it turns out, is changing real decisions, not just gut feelings. Roughly a third of students, 34%, said they are pursuing a higher education degree specifically to avoid the job apocalypse, treating a diploma as a kind of insurance policy against automation. Others reported steering their entire academic path around the threat. About 22% said they changed their major or concentration because of job market concerns, and 12% said they adjusted their career path altogether.

Those shifts add up to a portrait of a generation editing its plans in real time. A student who once leaned toward a field now shadowed by automation may pivot toward something that feels more machine-proof. Another may pile on credentials in hopes that more education equals more security. Whether those bets pay off is an open question, but the survey makes clear the bets are being placed, and placed early.

Underneath the major-swapping sits a quieter hustle. A full 91% of students said they are working to build new skills outside of their regular college courses, unwilling to let a syllabus alone decide their fate. Classroom credits, in other words, no longer feel like enough armor against a labor market many of them expect to be harsh.

Fighting the Job Apocalypse With AI, Not Against It

Then comes the twist. Rather than running from the technology they blame for their nerves, many students are running toward it. Meanwhile, 43% of students said they are using AI itself to learn new skills, turning the perceived threat into a study partner.

That embrace shows up across the survey. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said learning about AI while in college is essential for their career, and almost half, 48%, said learning to use AI properly, including ethically and responsibly, is the single most important skill they expect to gain in college. For a cohort that fears AI could cost them a paycheck, betting on AI fluency as their best safeguard is a pragmatic bet.

Superhuman’s head of education, Jenny Maxwell, framed the pattern as students choosing offense over panic. “AI is having a massive impact on the world, and we know it can be scary for college students who are trying to set themselves up for success in an ever-changing job market,” Maxwell said. “But it’s clear that students understand that learning how to use AI effectively is actually the strongest defense against a potential ‘job apocalypse.’ We believe that it’s not AI that will take most jobs, but someone who uses AI to do their best and most productive work over someone who doesn’t.”

Read that way, the survey describes a generation trying to make itself harder to replace. That logic is simple, if unproven: a worker who commands the tools stands a better chance than one who ignores them. Whether employers actually reward that fluency the way students hope is something no survey can promise.

A Critical-Thinking Cost Students See Coming

For all their willingness to lean on AI, students are not naive about the price of leaning too hard. Sixty-nine percent said it is important to strike a balance between using AI and sharpening their own critical thinking skills, and the survey warns that balance might be slipping. Fully 81% said they believe people are at risk of losing critical thinking skills because of an over-reliance on AI.

Worry about mental atrophy appears to shape the kind of help students actually want from AI. Instead of asking the technology to do their thinking for them, most requested support around the edges of their work. Slightly more than half, 54%, said they would value spelling and grammar help to polish their writing, and 40% wanted reminders about deadlines for projects and assignments.

Beyond the basics, students described a wish list that keeps a human in the driver’s seat. About a third, 33%, said they would appreciate AI that knows their specific class requirements, and the same share wanted a personal assistant to keep them on track through the year. One in four, 25%, said they would want AI guided by input from their own professors, a sign that many still trust a human expert to set the terms.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/fear-of-ai-job-apocalypse-reshaping-how-college-students-plan-their-futures/

Each Heatwave Could Make You Biologically 6 Months ‘Older’, Researchers Say

The Belief That Leadership Isn’t Just for Certain People Helped Some Teens See Themselves as Leaders

Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania have developed a bioengineered chewing gum that can reduce harmful viruses and bacteria linked to head and neck cancer.

Head and neck cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide, which affects the mouth, throat, voice box, nose, and nearby tissues. A lot of these cases are linked to tobacco and alcohol use. However, there’s also a rise in cancer cases linked to human papillomavirus (HPV) infections. Researchers have been looking for simple, affordable ways to reduce these infections before they lead to serious disease. A new study has found an unusual solution: a specially designed chewing gum.

Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania have developed a bioengineered chewing gum that can reduce harmful viruses and bacteria linked to head and neck cancer. While the gum is still being studied and is not available for the public, early findings are promising. Researchers believe it could one day become a simple addition to existing cancer prevention strategies, especially for people at higher risk. However, experts say that it is not a replacement for vaccination, regular screenings, or medical treatment.

What Did The Study Find?

The researchers, led by Henry Daniell of the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, tested a specially engineered chewing gum made using lablab beans. The gum contains natural antiviral and antibacterial ingredients designed to target harmful microbes found in the mouth.

In laboratory tests using saliva and oral rinse samples from patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), the gum reduced HPV levels by as much as 93% in saliva and about 80% in oral rinse samples. It also almost completely removed two harmful bacteria, Porphyromonas gingivalis and Fusobacterium nucleatum, which have been linked to poorer outcomes in head and neck cancer.

Why Are HPV And Oral Bacteria Important?

HPV is a common virus that spreads through close skin-to-skin contact, including sexual contact. While most HPV infections clear on their own, some high-risk types can remain in the body and increase the risk of cancers, including cancers of the throat.

Researchers have also identified certain bacteria that may create an environment that helps cancer grow or makes treatment less effective. Higher levels of P. gingivalis and F. nucleatum have been linked to worse survival in some patients with head and neck cancer. By lowering both HPV and these harmful bacteria, the chewing gum may help reduce one of the factors linked to cancer development or progression.

How Does The Gum Work?

The gum uses two important components:

• FRIL, a naturally occurring antiviral protein found in lablab beans, helps reduce HPV
• Protegrin, an antimicrobial peptide, targets harmful bacteria in the mouth

As a person chews the gum, these substances are released into saliva, allowing them to act directly where the virus and bacteria are present. This may make the treatment both effective and easy to use without affecting the rest of the body.

Does It Harm Good Bacteria?

One of the most encouraging findings from the study was that the gum appeared to leave beneficial bacteria in the mouth largely untouched. This is important because the mouth contains a healthy microbiome that helps with digestion, protects against infections, and supports overall oral health. Many antibiotics can kill both harmful and beneficial bacteria, but this chewing gum seemed to target the microbes linked to cancer while preserving the healthy ones.

Source : https://www.ndtv.com/health/can-a-chewing-gum-help-reduce-risk-of-head-and-neck-cancer-new-study-says-yes-11870696?pfrom=home-ndtv_lateststories

 

Two-Week Study Pinpoints the True Daily Trigger of Problematic Internet Use

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/

Each Heatwave Could Make You Biologically 6 Months ‘Older’, Researchers Say

Summer heat is more than a seasonal discomfort. A new study suggests it may be aging people from the inside out, faster than the calendar ever could. Researchers found that exposure to extreme heat events was linked to accelerated biological aging in middle-aged and older adults. Under the study’s strictest heatwave definition, each additional heatwave event was associated with pushing the body’s internal clock forward by roughly half a year, though the size of that effect varied considerably depending on how heatwaves were defined, and was weaker or statistically insignificant under looser definitions. As heatwaves grow more frequent and more intense worldwide, that finding carries serious consequences for public health.

Biological age and calendar age are not always the same thing. A person who is 58 years old on paper might have a body that functions more like a 62-year-old, or a 54-year-old, depending on how their cells, organs, and metabolism are holding up. Scientists can estimate this “biological age” by measuring things like blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and other indicators of how the body is really doing. When biological age outpaces calendar age, it signals faster physical deterioration and has been linked to higher risks of heart disease, cognitive decline, and earlier death. This study asked a pointed question: could repeated exposure to extreme heat be pushing that biological clock forward?

Researchers analyzed data from more than 2,300 adults across China and found strong evidence of an association, particularly under the stricter definitions of what counts as a heatwave. The clearest links between heat and faster aging appeared under those more demanding definitions, and each extra day of heat exposure added incrementally to the effect. Urban residents, people with higher body weight, and those living in southern or subtropical parts of the country faced the sharpest acceleration.

Gauging Biological Aging From Heatwave Exposure
To measure biological aging, researchers used a validated method that combines eight different blood and health markers into a single estimate of how old a person’s body actually functions. Those markers included cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, kidney function indicators, and an inflammation signal. By comparing this biological age to a person’s actual calendar age, researchers calculated what they called “biological age acceleration,” essentially how far ahead of schedule the body was aging.

Participants were drawn from a large national health survey of Chinese adults. Out of those enrolled, 2,318 adults aged 45 and older met the study’s requirements. Their average age was 58.7 years, just over half were women, and most lived in rural areas. Biological age measurements were taken at two points in time: 2011 and 2015.

Heatwave exposure for each participant was measured using weather data from the 12 months before each biological age assessment. Researchers pulled daily temperature records from 50 cities across China and defined heatwaves in 12 different ways, varying both how hot it had to be and how many consecutive days the heat had to last. Under the strictest definition, at least four consecutive days where temperatures exceeded the hottest 2.5% of days typical for that city, each additional heatwave event was associated with a 0.531-year increase in biological age acceleration. Each additional day of heatwave exposure added another 0.057 years to that biological age gap. Associations were weaker or not statistically significant under looser heatwave definitions, meaning the strength of the finding depended meaningfully on how heatwaves were measured.

People who experienced more intense heatwave exposure were aging biologically at a measurably faster pace than their peers who experienced milder heat conditions, even after researchers accounted for factors like smoking, drinking, weight changes, depression, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

Who Got Hit Hardest by Heatwave-Driven Aging
Not everyone was equally affected. Heatwaves tracked more strongly with faster biological aging in certain groups. People with a body mass index at or above 23 kg/m² showed a more pronounced effect compared to leaner individuals. Urban dwellers experienced stronger aging effects than rural residents. Those living in southern China or subtropical climate zones also showed greater acceleration.

Researchers noted several possible reasons for these patterns. Carrying more body weight can make it harder to stay cool, placing additional strain on the heart and circulatory system. Urban areas tend to trap heat more than rural ones, a phenomenon known as the “urban heat island effect,” where buildings, pavement, and limited green space push temperatures even higher at night. People in southern and subtropical zones already contend with higher baseline temperatures, meaning heatwaves pile additional thermal stress on top of an already demanding climate.

No meaningful differences in the heatwave effect emerged between men and women, or across different age groups.

Metabolic Stress Behind Heatwave-Driven Aging
Beyond tracking who aged faster, the research team also tried to understand why. In the human participants, heatwave exposure was consistently tied to higher levels of total cholesterol and a blood sugar marker called HbA1c, which reflects average blood sugar over roughly three months. Both of these markers are components of the biological age algorithm used in the study, so they are best understood as part of a broader pattern of metabolic stress associated with heat exposure rather than as independently proven disease mechanisms.

To probe a possible biological explanation, researchers reanalyzed existing gene-activity data from aged mice that had been exposed to repeated heat conditions in a separate experiment. Liver tissue from those mice showed 29 genes switched on or off differently compared with unexposed controls. These genes clustered around two biological processes: fat metabolism and the body’s ability to use blood sugar efficiently, a function that declines in a condition known as insulin resistance.

Heat stress, the researchers explained, can trigger a cascade of internal disruptions, including cellular damage from unstable molecules, problems with the energy-producing parts of cells, and strain on the system responsible for building proteins correctly. All of these processes are closely tied to how quickly a body ages at the cellular level.

Animal work involved a small sample and should be considered exploratory. But combined with the human data, the pattern offered a suggestive biological picture: heat may throw off the body’s ability to regulate fat and blood sugar, and that metabolic disruption could contribute to accelerated aging.

Between 2011 and 2015, about 58.8% of the study participants showed accelerated biological aging, meaning their bodies aged faster than their calendar years would predict. On average, biological age across the group increased from 57.3 years in 2011 to 62.3 years in 2015. Findings held up across multiple rounds of sensitivity testing, including analyses that removed participants with extreme or minimal changes in biological age and models that accounted for regional differences in climate and urbanization.

As climate change drives more frequent and severe heatwaves globally, the collision of a warming planet and a rapidly aging population creates a compounding risk that existing public health systems may not be equipped to handle. Extreme heat poses more than a short-term danger. For older adults especially, it may be steadily eroding the body’s biological reserves, one sweltering summer at a time.

Source: https://studyfinds.com/scorching-summers-may-be-speeding-up-how-fast-your-body-ages/

The Protein Network That Cleans Up Workout Damage, and Why It Doesn’t Last

Financial stress is something millions of people know all too well. Most have dealt with the anxiety of an overdue bill or smaller than expected paycheck at some point. Now, a sweeping new study tracking people across seven decades suggests that kind of hardship may be linked to something far more lasting than day-to-day stress: measurable differences in the brain that show up decades later.

Researchers followed a group of British adults from birth through their early 70s. Those who experienced financial hardship at multiple points tended to score lower on memory and mental-speed tests by middle age. Later in life, brain scans showed a pattern consistent with tissue loss in certain regions. For a few smaller groups, including men and people carrying a particular Alzheimer’s-linked gene, the pattern looked even stronger, though those pieces of the puzzle are still tentative.

Published in the journal Innovation in Aging, the study draws on data from the 1946 British birth cohort, a landmark project that has tracked thousands of people born in a single week in March 1946. With decades of financial records and repeated cognitive testing, researchers had a rare chance to see how money troubles that stretch across a lifetime relate to brain health, rather than relying on a single snapshot.

Nearly 3,000 People Were Tracked From Birth Through Their 70s

Researchers drew on two groups within the cohort. The main group, 2,759 people who were still alive at 69, took cognitive tests at ages 53, 63, and 69. A smaller group of about 400 people also came in for brain scans between ages 69 and 74.

Money trouble was tracked two ways: whether household income fell into the bottom fifth of the group at ages 26, 43, and 53, and whether people said they struggled to cover basic needs at ages 36, 43, and 53. Anyone who hit either mark at two or more checkpoints was labeled as having faced it persistently, which didn’t necessarily mean an unbroken decade of poverty, just hardship that kept resurfacing.

To measure mental sharpness, participants took a timed letter-search test for processing speed and a word-recall test for memory. Brain scans measured the physical size of different regions, including the fluid-filled chambers that expand as surrounding tissue shrinks. A smaller subset also had their brains checked for amyloid, a sticky protein tied to Alzheimer’s, though that piece applied only to people carrying a specific gene variant, not everyone in the study.

Financial Hardship Was Linked to Lower Scores by Age 53

People with more exposure to low income or financial strain scored lower on both memory and processing speed by age 53, years before most people start thinking about memory loss at all. The clearest differences showed up among those who’d faced hardship repeatedly rather than just once or twice, though the study wasn’t designed to prove a single rough patch is harmless either.

Years later, at ages 69 to 71, brain scans told a related story: people with a history of persistent low income had noticeably larger fluid-filled spaces in the brain, the kind that grow as nearby tissue shrinks. Interestingly, people who already scored lower on memory tests at 53 didn’t decline much further afterward. Researchers think that’s not a hopeful sign so much as evidence the damage had, in a sense, already been done by midlife, leaving less room left to lose.

Accounting for other possible explanations, like childhood intelligence, mental health history, and education, didn’t change the picture. That doesn’t prove hardship alone caused these differences, since money troubles are often tangled up with other stresses, but it rules out some of the more obvious alternatives.

Source : https://studyfinds.com/financial-hardship-memory-decline/

For many new mothers, breastfeeding is no longer only a matter of medical advice. On Instagram, it has hardened into something closer to a moral obligation, and a new study puts Spanish parenting influencers at the center of that conversation.

Researchers at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona analyzed 592 public comments on Instagram posts from five Spanish momfluencer accounts, all run by women who present themselves as authorities on motherhood and breastfeeding. Writing in the journal Media & Jornalismo, they found that exclusive breastfeeding had turned into what the authors call a “symbolic device” and a “marker of maternal success.” In that framing, a mother who couldn’t or didn’t nurse exclusively was seen as doing more than making a personal choice, and some commenters called mothers who used formula lazy or selfish.

Instagram, the study shows, can take a private parenting decision and turn it into a public performance of what it means to be a “good mother.” For many women in those comment sections, falling short of that standard carried a heavy emotional cost.

How Spanish Momfluencers Are Reshaping Breastfeeding Norms
To build their sample, the authors spent two months observing public Instagram accounts run by Spanish women who describe themselves as prescribers of motherhood and breastfeeding, several of them with professional credentials in nursing or midwifery. From five of these accounts, they selected 15 posts that had sparked debate, each with at least 30 comments and 700 likes, then combed through the comments for patterns in how mothers talked about feeding choices, guilt, family support, and social pressure. Beyond what was said outright, they also traced the assumptions and unspoken rules underneath those conversations.

Formula was generally not treated as a legitimate option in these spaces. One post carried a title flatly rejecting the idea that formula feeding is the easy way out, casting it as something mothers turn to only when a health problem forces their hand. Breastfeeding mothers, by contrast, described their own experience in raw terms: exhaustion, pain, and broken sleep, alongside pride and a deep sense of bonding.

Guilt and Sacrifice: Breastfeeding as the “Good Mother” Test
One of the strongest patterns was guilt. Mothers wrote about agonizing over feeding decisions in ways that went well beyond the practical, and several said they pushed through real physical pain and sleep loss mainly out of fear of being judged as bad mothers if they stopped. One commenter recounted breastfeeding her son for two years while waking as many as seven times a night, until the exhaustion tipped into depression and she left her paid job.

Yet many of the same comments recast that suffering as proof of love. Nursing was described as the most rewarding and most sacrificing part of motherhood, even as women admitted how brutal it could be. Pain wasn’t framed as a problem to fix. For a lot of commenters, it read as evidence of devotion.

Criticism of the pressure to breastfeed rarely grew into a broader social or political argument. Most of it stayed personal, framed as one woman’s private struggle rather than a sign of a system that leaves working parents stranded. Spain grants four months of paid maternity leave, while health guidance urges exclusive breastfeeding for six. A handful of commenters flagged that gap, and one argued the government should simply extend paid leave instead of forcing mothers to improvise their way across it. Those structural complaints, though, were the exception.

Fathers on the Sidelines
Another clear finding was how seldom fathers showed up as equal partners. When they did appear, it was usually as helpers rather than people equally on the hook. Some mothers recounted pediatricians framing the father’s job as helping out in other, lesser ways, language that quietly slots him into a secondary role rather than a shared one.

Some comments mentioned fathers getting tired or impatient, but treated it as a scheduling headache rather than a question of shared duty. One mother wrote that her partner blamed breastfeeding for all their relationship troubles, and that the two had slept apart since their baby was two months old. Of the 592 comments studied, only two mentioned any family outside the traditional mother-father setup, and neither drew a single reply.

Source: https://studyfinds.com/breastfeeding-becomes-moral-test-for-mothers-on-instagram-study-finds/

Parkinson’s disease slowly destroys the brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical messenger essential for controlling movement. For decades, a drug called levodopa, usually paired with carbidopa, has been the go-to treatment for managing symptoms. Over time, though, some patients develop fluctuating responses, involuntary movements and other complications that make the drug harder to manage. Now a new study in mice points to an unlikely helper that might boost how well levodopa works: freeze-dried bee venom.

Researchers at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico gave mice a toxin-induced brain lesion that mimics some features of Parkinson’s disease, then tested whether adding bee venom to standard levodopa treatment could improve how the animals moved and remembered things. The study, published in the journal Neuroprotection, found that mice getting the combination moved better and did significantly better on a short-term memory test than mice getting levodopa alone.

Parkinson’s is best known for tremors and stiff, halting movement, but it quietly wrecks memory too, a side of the disease that gets far less attention. A treatment that could help with both would be worth watching closely.

A Toxin Injection Created One-Sided Brain Damage in Mice
Researchers injected a toxin that wipes out dopamine-producing brain cells into just one side of the brain in adult male mice. That one-sided approach lets researchers compare the damaged side against the healthy side in the same animal, making it easier to spot movement problems.

Four groups of mice were studied: healthy controls given saline, untreated brain-damaged mice, mice given levodopa and carbidopa from day 13 through day 30, and mice given that same combination plus freeze-dried bee venom every 48 hours, an hour after each levodopa dose. Group sizes ranged from six to seven animals, small but typical for this kind of early-stage animal research.

Researchers then put the mice through three tests. One checked whether the mice used both front paws evenly while exploring a clear tube, since brain-damaged mice tend to lean on their good side. Another counted how often mice grabbed food from both sides of a narrow corridor, a task that’s especially sensitive to dopamine loss. The last one checked whether mice noticed a new object placed among familiar ones, something healthy mice do naturally but memory-impaired mice often miss.

Bee Venom Group Matched Healthy Mice on Movement Tests
By day 30, mice on levodopa alone still leaned heavily on their good paw. Mice getting bee venom alongside levodopa used both paws about as evenly as healthy mice did, a real step up from both the untreated group and the levodopa-only group.

A similar pattern showed up in the food-grabbing test. Mice on the combination treatment retrieved food from both sides of the corridor far more evenly than either the levodopa-only group or the untreated mice, suggesting an extra boost for coordinated movement.

Memory results stood out most. Mice that got only the toxin, and even those on levodopa alone, stopped noticing new objects by day 21 and day 30, a sign of memory trouble. Mice getting bee venom kept noticing new objects just as well as healthy mice did, at both time points. (One wrinkle worth flagging: the paper also shows this same group already scoring better on the memory test on day 13, before treatment had even started. That’s a timing inconsistency the study doesn’t explain, and it should be sorted out before the finding is taken at face value.)

A Bee Venom Compound Can Reach the Brain and Affect Neurons
Bee venom is packed with active compounds, one of which, a tiny molecule called apamin, can slip past the barrier that normally keeps most substances out of the brain. Earlier research suggests apamin changes how easily brain cells fire and adapt, though scientists are still figuring out exactly how.

Bee venom has also been used in traditional medicine for inflammation for centuries, and earlier lab studies hint that it might calm brain inflammation and help dopamine-producing cells survive. This study did not test any of that directly. The authors are upfront that these explanations are still guesses, borrowed from earlier research rather than anything measured here.

Researchers Never Directly Measured the Brain Cells
Here’s the biggest gap: researchers never actually looked at the brain cells themselves. They confirmed the injections landed in the right spot, but didn’t count how many dopamine-producing cells survived or measure inflammation. That means there’s no way yet to know why bee venom seems to help, and the results shouldn’t be read as proof that it protected any brain cells.

It’s also worth remembering this was a small, short mouse study, just 17 days of treatment in a handful of male mice, and mouse results often don’t hold up in people. The authors themselves say the next step is digging into the actual brain tissue to see what’s really going on.

Whatever is happening at the cellular level, the mice on bee venom kept moving and remembering better than the ones on levodopa alone. Parkinson’s still has no cure, and levodopa still tends to get harder to manage over the years. If bee venom holds up under more rigorous testing, it may turn out to be a simple add-on that helps a decades-old drug do its job a little longer.

Source: https://studyfinds.com/bee-venom-helps-parkinsons-drug/

One Type of Mouth Bacteria Keeps Turning Up in People With Hand Arthritis

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Why Your Waistline May Reveal More Cancer Risk Than the Scale Does

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/

 

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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/

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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.

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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/