The cliché “you are what you eat” has been used for hundreds of years to illustrate the link between diet and health. Now, an international team of researchers has found the molecular proof of this concept, demonstrating how diet ultimately affects immunity through the gut microbiome. The work, conducted in mice, reveals that what animals […]

Imagine you’re walking through a chain supermarket, headed for the dairy section. You’ve done it a million times: Take a right at the entrance, away from the produce, and walk past two-dozen aisles of canned soups, boxed macaroni and other staples. The rows of industrial refrigerators should be right … about … here. But they’re […]

Imagine your car starting the moment you get in because it recognizes the jacket you’re wearing. Consider the value of a hospital gown that continuously measures and transmits a patient’s vital signs. These are just two applications made possible by a new “body area network”-enabling fabric invented by engineers at the University of California, Irvine. […]

Immunotherapies, which harness the body’s natural defenses to combat disease, have revolutionized the treatment of aggressive and deadly cancers. But often, these therapies — especially those based on immune cells — must be tailored to the individual patient, costing valuable time and pushing their price into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, in a study […]

There is a well-known connection between sleep disruption and risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Multiple studies in humans and mouse models indicate that sleep disruptions raise the risk of AD by increasing the accumulation of disease-relevant proteins such as amyloid-beta (A-beta) in the brain. The lab of Dr. Jeannie Chin at Baylor College of Medicine and her […]

Oregon State University research has uncovered the first fossil evidence of a rare botanical condition known as precocious germination in which seeds sprout before leaving the fruit. In a paper published in Historical Biology, George Poinar Jr. of the Oregon State College of Science describes a pine cone, approximately 40 million years old, encased in […]

Climate models are used to predict how the climate will likely respond to rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the coming decades, a timescale crucial to meeting the terms of the Paris Agreement. That’s why it’s necessary to keep developing and refining such models to better support climate policies. What will Earth be like in 50 […]

Perseverance, a word which captures the undaunted will of people across the world to never give up, despite the many challenges of the last twelve months, is Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2021. Just as it takes perseverance to land a rover on Mars, it takes perseverance to face challenges and disruption to our […]

The largest annual scientific study on single adults shows that COVID-19 has caused a dramatic shift in people’s priorities when it comes to dating, sex and love. Faculty from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University say some of the changes could last well beyond the pandemic. This is the 11th year for Match.com’s “Singles in America” study, […]

Without doubt, one of the most eccentric and certainly one of the most controversial figures of the entire Early Modern period was the iconoclastic Swiss physician Theophrastus von Hohenheim (c. 1493–1541), more popularly known as Paracelsus. Trying to write about Paracelsus is complicated by the fact that he is the source of numerous myths and […]