Research shows whipping horses doesn’t make them run faster, straighter or safe

the use of the whip to “encourage” horses to run faster and straighter has been shown to potentially be both painful and dangerous. It was found whips make no difference to horse steering, jockey safety, or even a horse’s speed.

https://theconversation.com/research-shows-whipping-horses-doesnt-m...

Mapping extreme microbes in the Amazon’s Boiling River

Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, biochemist Rosa Vásquez Espinoza investigates the medicinal properties of microbes flowing in a sacred boiling river.

Scientists gravitate towards microbes living in extreme environments, like the Boiling River, due to their medicinal value. 

Extremophiles are not exclusive to the Boiling River. They exist in other extreme environments, like in the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. But Yellowstone’s hot springs are highly acidic. The Boiling River has a different geochemical profile, and the mineral composition is also constantly changing—which makes the microbial ecology unique.

https://massivesci.com/articles/amazon-boiling-river-peru-microbes-...

GaToroid: revolutionizing the future of cancer treatment?

Hadron therapy is of great interest to the medical community as a pioneering radiation therapy that makes use of charged particles to deliver a highly localized dose to a tumor. Unlike traditional radiotherapy, because it minimizes radiation to any neighboring tissue, it may cause fewer side effects and avoid the generation of secondary tumors.

However, because a hadron is made up of charged particles, a magnetic field is needed to ensure that it goes to exactly the right place in the patient. This requires a complex assembly of magnets in giant machines. It also needs to rotate around the patient with 0.5 mm (5 human hairs!) of precision, making it an incredibly complex piece of engineering. Currently, there are only two facilities in the world, at Heidelberg in Germany where the machine is around 13 meters tall, 25 meters in length and weighing more than 600 tons, and Chiba in Japan, where it is 11 meters tall, 13 meters in length and 250 tons in weight, because it is superconductive.

Enter GaToroid, which aims not just to reduce the size of hadron therapy machines but also their complexity, using toroidal superconducting magnets, the idea of GaToroid is to have a machine that looks like an MRI, so instead of a gigantic rotating magnetic arm that moves around the patient, we have something circular that is in a steady state with the patient inside. This has enabled us to make the machine much smaller. However, unlike an MRI, the patient is not immersed in the magnetic field, but it is confined by the coils around them. The idea is that this technology will make hadron therapy far more accessible as it won’t require machines the size of a four-story building.

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/gatoroid-revolutionizing-the-future-of-ca...

https://researchnews.cc/news/3310/GaToroid--revolutionizing-the-fut...

Paracetamol poisonings up

Paracetamol is the most widely used painkiller in the world. “It is a very safe drug, but only for short-​term pain relief and as long as the daily dosage does not go above the recommended range. For adults, the recommended maximum daily dosage is 4,000 milligrams (4 grams), which equates to a maximum of four of the high-​dose tablets or eight of the lower-​dose tablets. When overdosed, paracetamol can cause severe poisoning, even resulting in liver failure with fatal outcomes or the need for liver transplantation.

One problem with paracetamol is that it is not effective for all patients or against all forms of pain. If the drug doesn’t help to ease someone’s symptoms, they may be tempted to increase the dosage without consulting a medical professional. That’s the real problem. This is also where the size of the tablets comes into play. It’s very easy to exceed the maximum daily dosage by taking just a few extra of the 1,000 milligram tablets, whereas, with the lower-​dose 500 milligram tablets, the risk of accidental overdose isn’t as great.

Experts advocate for a critical review of how the 1,000 milligram tablets are prescribed and dispensed. At the very least, packs of the 1,000 milligram tablets should contain a smaller number of tablets. As evidence grows that paracetamol is not suitable for chronic pain management, there is little need to have pack-​sizes of 40 or 100 tablets.  Physicians should prescribe the lower 500 milligram dose, which can be dose adjusted to reach the 1,000 milligrams by taking two tablets when necessary. This could minimize the risk of accidentally exceeding the daily limit.

By reducing the availability of the high-​dose formulation, experts think that some of the poisoning cases could be avoided. In the meantime, she says pharmacists can help draw attention to the dangers of exceeding the daily maximum when providing these the high-​dose tablets to patients.

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2020/10/paracetamo...

https://researchnews.cc/news/3306/Paracetamol-poisonings-up#.X5zxQY...

A color-changing material inspired by chameleon skin

Sci-com: What a link between chocolate and Nobel prizes reveals

https://theconversation.com/what-a-link-between-chocolate-and-nobel...

--

**Mouth Bacteria Have Been Linked to Severe Forms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

A genetic analysis of more than a dozen strains of one common bacterium, Campylobacter concisus, has uncovered a short sequence of DNA that might explain why this guy is a law-abiding citizen when at home in the mouth, but a potential terrorist in the gut.

"Oral bacteria enter the digestive system every day when we swallow food or saliva. Most of the bacteria are killed by acids in the stomach, but some can survive and colonise in the intestines. The bacteria might not have colonised for long, but the mouth keeps bringing a constant supply of new bacteria – that's the problem.

Generally speaking, many microbes in the genus Campylobacter are bad news for the human digestive system. If you've ever had a gut-wrenching stomach bug that's sent you running for the bathroom while on an overseas holiday, there's a good chance this tiny horror was behind it.

Since such disease-causing species are typically at home in other animals' intestines, we tend to pick them up by consuming contaminated meat or water.

C. concisus isn't quite like its more pathogenic cousins. This species we can call our own, living happily under an ocean of spit in virtually all healthy humans.

But in recent years, medical researchers have suspected C. concisus might not always be the peaceful citizen we'd expected it to be. Bacterial markers associated with the microbe are suspiciously linked with active incidences of the intestinal condition Crohn's disease, for example.

Together with ulcerative colitis, Crohn's falls into a category of IBD characterised by a serious inflammation of the gut wall and surrounding tissue. The result is anything from diarrhoea and discomfort to blood in the stool, agonising pain, and weight loss.

In the cases where drugs or lifestyle changes do little to help, surgical 

intervention can be necessary, making it one serious illness to contend with.

Exactly what sets these inflammatory bowel diseases off in the first place isn't entirely clear. Diet and stress are thought to merely aggravate symptoms, with genetics, medications, and environment all playing a potential role in their development.

https://www.sciencealert.com/your-mouth-bacteria-might-be-behind-se...

The Science of Nerdiness

It’s a neurotransmitter thing

Do you get excited and energized by the possibility of learning something new and complex? Do you get turned on by nuance? Do you get really stimulated by new ideas and imaginative scenarios?

If so, you may have an influx of dopamine in your synapses, but not where we traditionally think of this neurotransmitter flowing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-of-nerdiness...

Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs

Asymptomatic people who are infected with Covid-19 exhibit, by definition, no discernible physical symptoms of the disease. They are thus less likely to seek out testing for the virus, and could unknowingly spread the infection to others.

But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence.

In a paper published recently in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, the team reports on an AI model that distinguishes asymptomatic people from healthy individuals through forced-cough recordings, which people voluntarily submitted through web browsers and devices such as cellphones and laptops.

The researchers trained the model on tens of thousands of samples of coughs, as well as spoken words. When they fed the model new cough recordings, it accurately identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including 100 percent of coughs from asymptomatics — who reported they did not have symptoms but had tested positive for the virus.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-19-cough-cellphone-detection-1029

https://researchnews.cc/news/3340/Artificial-intelligence-model-det...

The pseudo-science of phrenology

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/nostalgia/from-the-archives/1668244...

Insects Play a Key (And Also Icky Role) in Decomposition by Turning Corpses Into Bones

Life after death: How insects rise from the dead and transform corpses into skeletons

While skeletons are universally considered symbols of death, the process of turning a newly dead animal into a bony skeleton relies on an explosion of life that ushers in the process of decomposition. Much of this transformative process is performed by wriggling, scuttling, scurrying insects.

Estimating risk of airborne COVID-19 with mask usage, social distancing

The continued increase in COVID-19 infection around the world has led scientists from many different fields, including biomedicine, epidemiology, virology, fluid dynamics, aerosol physics, and public policy, to study the dynamics of airborne transmission.

Employing basic concepts of fluid dynamics and the known factors in airborne transmission of diseases, the researchers propose the Contagion Airborne Transmission (CAT) inequality model. While not all factors in the CAT inequality model may be known, it can still be used to assess relative risks, since situational risk is proportional to exposure time.

Using the model, the researchers determined protection from transmission increases with physical distancing in an approximately linear proportion.

If you double your distance, you generally double your protection. This kind of scaling or rule can help inform policy."

The scientists also found even simple cloth masks provide significant protection and could reduce the spread of COVID-19.

 Any physical activity that increases the breathing rate and volume of people will increase the risk of transmission. These findings have important implications for the reopening of schools, gyms, or malls.

Rajat Mittal et al, A mathematical framework for estimating risk of airborne transmission of COVID-19 with application to face mask use and social distancing, Physics of Fluids (2020). DOI: 10.1063/5.0025476

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-airborne-covid-mask-usage-social.html...

Mythbusting: Five common misperceptions surrounding the environmental impacts of single-use plastics

Five misperceptions surrounding the environmental impacts of single-use plastic.

• Plastic packaging is the largest contributor to a product's environmental impact. In reality, the product inside the package usually has a much greater environmental impact.
• The environmental impacts of plastics are greater than any other packaging material. Actually, plastic generally has lower overall environmental impacts than single-use glass or metal in most impact categories.
• Reusable products are always better than single-use plastics. Actually, reusable products have lower environmental impacts only when they are reused enough times to offset the materials and energy used to make them.
• Recycling and composting should be the highest priority. Truth be told, the environmental benefits associated with recycling and composting tend to be small when compared with efforts to reduce overall consumption.
• "Zero waste" efforts that eliminate single-use plastics minimize the environmental impacts of an event. In reality, the benefits of diverting waste from the landfill are small. Waste reduction and mindful consumption, including a careful consideration of the types and quantities of products consumed, are far larger factors dictating the environmental impact of an event.

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-mythbusting-common-misperceptions-env...

Five misperceptions surrounding the environmental impacts of single-use plastic, Environmental Science & Technology (2020). pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c05295

Microplastics in groundwater (and our drinking water) present unknown risk

Microplastics (plastics <5mm) and their negative health impacts have been studied in oceans, rivers, and even soils, and scientists are beginning to grapple with the myriad human health impacts their presence might have. One understudied, but critical, link in the cycle is groundwater, which is often a source of drinking water.
While microplastics in groundwater likely affect human health, only a handful of studies have examined the abundance and movement of microplastics in groundwater. This gap means the potential for adverse health effects remains largely unknown.
Microplastics pose multiple physical and chemical risks to the ecosystems where they're present, and those risks are exacerbated by plastics' longevity in natural environments. Since they're plastic, they're very durable which is why plastic is great. But it doesn't degrade easily. Microplastics' ability to linger in their environments for decades or longer likely has cumulative detrimental effects on both the organisms and quality of the ecosystem. Their chemical threat stems largely from their ability to transport harmful compounds on their surfaces; when organisms at the base of the food chain ingest microplastics, they ingest the toxins, too. As larger organisms consume the smaller ones, the toxins can build up (a process called bioaccumulation), eventually resulting in responses like organ dysfunction, genetic mutation, or death. Cave ecosystems are known for being super fragile to begin with. All the cave organisms—salamanders, blind fish—are sensitive, so any contaminants that are introduced could damage those ecosystems.
Groundwater can stay in the same aquifer for tens to hundreds of years, or even longer. Combining that long residence time with plastics' resistance to degradation means that those chemical effects could effectively build up in the water and in any organisms within it, increasing the likelihood of toxic bioaccumulation. Together, these could result in long-term contamination of water sources with poorly-understood health effects and ecosystem damage.
Researchers found that while microplastics do increase in groundwater during a flood event, there's also a second peak in microplastics after the flooding has begun to wane. Their explanation is that there are two sources of microplastics for groundwater: those that are already in the subsurface, and those that are newly delivered from the surface. Finding so much plastic later on in the flood, thinking that it could be coming from the surface... is important to understand the sourcing of microplastics in the groundwater. Knowing where the plastic is coming from could help mitigate future contamination.

Paper 23-1: Quantifying microplastic debris sourcing and transport for a karst aquifer
Abstract Link: gsa.confex.com/gsa/2020AM/meet … app.cgi/Paper/355066

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-microplastics-groundwater-unknown.htm...

**How to figure out what you don't know

Increasingly, biologists are turning to computational modeling to make sense of complex systems. In neuroscience, researchers are adapting the kinds of algorithms used to forecast the weather or filter spam from your email to seek insight into how the brain's neural networks process information.

Testing various computational models of the nervous system, researchers have found that just because a model can make good predictions about data does not mean it reflects the underlying logic of the biological system it represents. Relying on such models without carefully evaluating their validity could lead to wrong conclusions about how the actual system works.

By building and comparing several models of neural signaling, Engel and Genkin found that good predictive power does not necessarily indicate that a model is a good representation of real neural networks. They found that the best models were instead those that were most consistent across multiple datasets. This approach won't necessarily work for all situations, however, and biologists may need alternative methods of evaluating their models. Most importantly, Genkin said, "We shouldn't take anything for granted. We should check every assumption we have."

Genkin, M., Engel, T.A. Moving beyond generalization to accurate interpretation of flexible models. Nat Mach Intell (2020). doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-00242-6

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-figure-dont.html?utm_source=nwl...

Researchers Decipher The Secret Ingredients of Ancient Egyptian Ink

An analysis of 12 ancient papyrus fragments has revealed some surprising details about how the Egyptians mixed their red and black ink – findings which could give us a lot more insight into how the earliest writers managed to get their words down on the page.

Ancient Egyptians were using inks to write at least as far back as 3200 BCE. However, the samples studied in this case were dated to 100-200 CE and originally collected from the famous Tebtunis temple library – the only large-scale institutional library known to have survived from the period.

Using a variety of synchrotron radiation techniques, including the use of high-powered X-rays to analyse microscopic samples, the researchers revealed the elemental, molecular, and structural composition of the inks in unprecedented detail.

The red inks, typically used to highlight headings, instructions, or keywords, were most likely coloured by the natural pigment ochre, the researchers say – traces of iron, aluminium, and hematite point to this being the case.

More intriguing was the discovery of lead-based compounds in both the black and the red inks, without any of the traditional lead-based pigments used for colouring. This suggests the lead was added for technical purposes. Lead-based driers prevent the binder from spreading too much, when ink or paint is applied on the surface of paper or papyrus.

As well as explaining how the ancient Egyptians kept their papyrus smudge-free, it also suggests some pretty specialised ink manufacturing techniques. The fact that the lead was not added as a pigment but as a drier infers that the ink had quite a complex recipe and could not be made by just anyone.

Insights into the composition of ancient Egyptian red and black inks on papyri achieved by synchrotron-based microanalyses

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/10/22/2004534117

https://www.sciencealert.com/chemical-analysis-has-revealed-the-adv...

The Mystery of The Platypus Deepens With The Discovery of Its Biofluorescent Fur

Scientists are seeing the  platypus in a whole new light. Under an ultraviolet lamp, this bizarre-looking creature appears even more peculiar than normal, glowing a soft, greenish-blue hue instead of the typical brown we're used to seeing.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-australian-platypus-is-the-latest-...

Doubts over a ‘possible sign of life’ on Venus show how science works

Further searches for reported hints of phosphine have been turning up empty

It was one of those “big, if true” stories. In September, scientists reported that Venus’ atmosphere seems to be laced with phosphine, a possible sign of life.

Now there’s increasing emphasis on the “if.” As scientists take fresh looks at the data behind the Venus announcement, and add other datasets to the mix, the original claim of inexplicable amounts of phosphine is being called into doubt. And that’s a good thing, many scientists say.

It’s exactly how science should work.

On September 14, astronomer Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales and colleagues reported that they had seen signs of phosphine in Venus’ clouds using two different telescopes (SN: 9/14/20). The phosphine seemed to be too abundant to exist without some kind of source replenishing it. That source could be strange microbes living in the clouds, or some weird unknown Venusian chemistry, the team said.

Greaves and colleagues first spotted phosphine with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and followed up with the powerful ALMA telescope array in Chile. But those ALMA data, and particularly the way they were handled, are now being called into question.

The key Venus observations were spectra, or plots of the light coming from the planet in a range of wavelengths. Different molecules block or absorb light at specific wavelengths, so searching for dips in a spectrum can reveal the chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere.

Phosphine showed up as a dip in Venus’ spectrum at about 1.12 millimeters, a wavelength of light that the molecule was thought to be absorbing. If Venus’ spectrum could be drawn as a straight line across all wavelengths of light, phosphine would make a deep valley at that wavelength.

But real data are never that easy to read. In real life, other sources — from Earth’s atmosphere to the inner workings of the telescope itself — introduce wiggles, or “noise,” into that nice straight line. The bigger the wiggles, the less scientists believe that the dips represent interesting molecules. Any particular dip might instead be just a random, extra-large wiggle.

That problem gets even worse when looking at a bright object such as Venus with a powerful telescope like ALMA

“The reason those bumps and wiggles are here at all is because of the intrinsic brightness of Venus, which makes it difficult to get a reliable measurement,” Cordiner says. “You could think of it as being dazzled by a bright light: If there’s a bright light in your vision, then your ability to pick out fainter details becomes diminished.”

So astronomers do a few different things to smooth out the data and let real signals shine through.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/venus-phosphine-possible-sign-l...

I.A.G. Snellen et al. Re-analysis of the 267-GHz ALMA observations of Venus: No statistic.... arXiv:2010.09761. Posted October 19, 2020.

T. Encrenaz et al. A stringent upper limit on the PH₃ abundance at the cloud top of Venus. Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press, 2020. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202039559.

**Nylon finally takes its place as a piezoelectric textile

Saleem Anwar et al. Piezoelectric Nylon‐11 Fibers for Electronic Textiles, Energy Harvesting and Sensing, Advanced Functional Materials (2020). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202004326

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-nylon-piezoelectric-textile.html?utm_...

New insight into how brain neurons influence choices

When you are faced with a choice—say, whether to have ice cream or chocolate cake for dessert—sets of brain cells just above your eyes fire as you weigh your options. Animal studies have shown that each option activates a distinct set of neurons in the brain. The more enticing the offer, the faster the corresponding neurons fire.

Now, a study in monkeys by researchers has shown that the activity of these neurons encodes the value of the options and determines the final decision. In the experiments, researchers let animals choose between different juice flavours. By changing the neurons' activity, the researchers changed how appealing the monkeys found each option, leading the animals to make different choices.

A detailed understanding of how options are valued and choices are made in the brain will help us understand how decision-making goes wrong in people with conditions such as addiction, eating disorders, depression and schizophrenia.

Values encoded in orbitofrontal cortex are causally related to economic choices, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2880-x , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2880-x

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-insight-brain-neurons-choice...

Bats can predict the future, researchers discover

Bats are quite skilled at predicting one thing: where to find dinner ( in the future). 

Bats calculate where their prey is headed by building on-the-fly predictive models of target motion from echoes researchers find. The models are so robust, bats can continue to track prey even when it temporarily vanishes behind echo-blocking obstacles like trees.

Although predicting object motion paths through vision has been extensively studied, these findings, published today in the journal PNAS, are the first to examine the comparable process in hearing. The work enhances the understanding of auditory-guided behaviours in animals and humans, including sight-impaired people who use listen to sounds to track objects in their surroundings.

Just the way a tennis player needs to find out when and where they will hit the ball, a bat needs to anticipate when and where it will make contact with the insect it's hunting. The insect is flying. The bat is also flying. In this very rapidly changing environment, if the bat were to just rely on the information it got from the most recent echo, it would miss the insect.

The bat uses the time delay between each echolocation call and the resulting echoes to determine how far away prey is. They tilt their heads to catch the changing intensity of echoes to figure out where the prey is in the horizontal plane. Bats must put together echo information about object distance and direction to successfully track an erratic moving insect.

But because bats are such good hunters, the research team thought that in addition, the bats must also be somehow using this information to predict where they prey is headed.

Researchers hypothesized that bats use both the velocity information from the timing of the echoes and further adjust their head aim. When they tested this model with their data, they saw it fit very well.

The question of prediction is important because an animal must plan ahead to decide what it's going to do next. A visual animal or a human has a stream of information coming in, but for bats it's remarkable because they're doing this with only brief acoustic snapshots.

Although bats are studied here, the findings apply to any animals that track moving sounds, and even to people, like the blind, who use clicks and cane taps to help them navigate while avoiding obstacles.

Angeles Salles el al., "Echolocating bats accumulate information from acoustic snapshots to predict auditory object motion," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2011719117

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-future.html?utm_source=nwletter&u...

Scientists identify specific brain region and circuits controlling attention

The attentional control that organisms need to succeed in their goals comes from two abilities: the focus to ignore distractions and the discipline to curb impulses. A new study  neuroscientists shows that these abilities are independent, but that the activity of norepinephrine-producing neurons in a single brain region, the locus coeruleus, controls both by targeting two distinct areas of the prefrontal cortex.

 Andrea Bari el al., "Differential attentional control mechanisms by two distinct noradrenergic coeruleo-frontal cortical pathways," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015635117

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-scientists-specific-brain-re...

New way of cooking rice removes arsenic and retains mineral nutrients, study shows

Cooking rice in a certain way removes over 50 percent of the naturally occurring arsenic in brown rice, and 74 percent in white rice, according to new research. Importantly, this new method does not reduce micronutrients in the rice.

This way of cooking rice ( called the "parboiling with absorption method" (PBA)), removes most of the arsenic, while keeping most nutrients in the cooked rice.

The PBA method involves parboiling the rice in pre-boiled water for five minutes before draining and refreshing the water, then cooking it on a lower heat to absorb all the water.

Manoj Menon et al. Improved rice cooking approach to maximize arsenic removal while preserving nutrient elements, Science of The Total Environment (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.143341

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-cooking-rice-arsenic-retains-mineral....

**Using radar to detect foreign objects in foods

Foreign objects—glass splinters, for example—that find their way into foods can be hazardous to consumers. Established X-ray techniques detect primarily metals—glass, plastic and wood pose a challenge. SAMMI, a new prototype, fills this gap: using radar, it has already detected glass splinters in sandwich cookies, as well as missing pieces of chocolate in advent calendars.

Any number of things can go awry during manufacture and cause glass splinters, metal shavings, wood splinters or plastic pieces to end up in the product. Product recalls not only damage companies financially, they also result in a loss of consumer confidence. Manufacturers therefore have a keen interest in inspecting their products for foreign objects. Currently, they do this primarily with X-ray machines, but these do not reliably detect all foreign objects. While they can easily identify metals, they often have difficulty with plastics, wood and glass. This means that, despite inspections, there is still a certain residual risk for manufacturers.

SAMMI, a prototype developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR, can now close this gap and provide greater security in food production. "Our system is based on millimeter waves and can augment established X-ray techniques," says Daniel Behrendt, business unit spokesperson at Fraunhofer FHR. "It detects the foreign matter that X-ray techniques can easily overlook—that is, glass splinters, plastics and wood. However, it is not able to penetrate metals, which in return is detected by X-ray techniques." Another advantage of the technology is that the millimeter waves used to inspect the foods pose no health risk.

The inspection works as follows: the food is placed on a conveyor belt and transported through the machine. Above the conveyor, the transmitting antenna rotates and transmits its waves through the product; below it, the receiving antenna receives these waves. The millimeter waves are uniquely attenuated by each of the different food materials and undergo a specific delay in their transit time. This makes it possible to identify not only the structure and composition of the food, but also the slightest deviations from those—such as are caused by foreign objects, for instance. Assigning a pixel to each measurement point and encoding the changes with different colors produces an image of the investigated object on which the foreign matter is immediately evident. Even packaged goods can be inspected in this way, non-destructively and without physical contact.

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-radar-foreign-foods.html?utm_so...

Put the baking soda back in the bottle: banned sodium bicarbonate ‘milkshakes’ don’t make racehorses faster

The controversial and banned practice of giving horses baking soda “milkshakes” before a race doesn’t work, according to our analysis of the available research.

Racing folklore says sodium bicarbonate milkshakes can boost racehorses’ endurance because the alkalinity of the baking soda helps counter the buildup of lactic acid in the blood when running.

But our systematic research review, recently published in the Journal of Equine Veterinary Science reveals milkshakes don’t boost horses’ athletic performance.

This means any trainer still tempted to flout the ban on this tactic would be endangering their horses’ welfare and risking heavy sanctions over a practice that is basically snake oil.

https://theconversation.com/put-the-baking-soda-back-in-the-bottle-...

Do I really need this crown? Dentists admit feeling pressured to offer unnecessary treatments

https://theconversation.com/do-i-really-need-this-crown-dentists-ad...

**Studying life at the extremes

Skilled surgeons boost colon cancer survival by 70%

Patients of more technically skilled surgeons, as assessed by review of operative video, have better long-term survival after surgery for the treatment of colon cancer, reports a new  Medicine study. Patients whose surgery was performed by a highly skilled surgeon had a 70 percent lower risk of dying over five years compared to patients with a lower skilled surgeon, the study found.

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/10/skilled-surgeons-boos...

https://researchnews.cc/news/3359/Skilled-surgeons-boost-colon-canc...

Small brain device proves big game changer for severely paralysed patients

A tiny device the size of a small paperclip has been shown to help patients with upper limb paralysis to text, email and even shop online in the first human trial. The device, Stentrode, has been implanted successfully in two patients, who both suffer from severe paralysis due to motor neuron disease (MND) also known amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and neither had complete ability to move their upper limbs. Published in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery, the results found the Stentrode was able to wirelessly restore the transmission of brain impulses out of the body. This enabled the patients to successfully complete daily tasks such as online banking, shopping and texting, which previously had not been available to them.
https://about.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2020/october/small-brain...

https://researchnews.cc/news/3364/Small-brain-device-proves-big-gam...

Novel biomarker and modelling could help better identify lethal arrhythmias
Researchers at the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at Kings College London, in collaboration with colleagues at the Royal Brompton & Hartfield NHS Foundation Trust, have identified a novel imaging-biomarker that can be used to help differentiate risk levels of lethal arrhythmias (irregular heartbeat) in patients with problematic left ventricles. For the first time, they have used detailed computational modelling to also understand why this biomarker is important, in the hopes it will help clinical translation and personalise medicine. Published in JACC: Electro Electrophysiology, the researchers also showed that patient-specific computational simulations alone could be used as a predictive tool to identify individual risk of arrhythmias.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/novel-biomarker-and-modelling-could-help...

https://researchnews.cc/news/3361/Novel-biomarker-and-modelling-cou...

Stentrode™: Translating thought into action

Antibiotic study wins research paper of the year

 The paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2019 and led by Cardiff University, in collaboration with Kings and the University of Oxford, has been awarded the prestigious honour from the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). The paper found a finger-prick blood test could help prevent unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The finger prick test measures the amount of C-reactive protein (CRP). This is a marker of inflammation that rises rapidly in the blood in response to serious infections. People who have a low CRP level can receive little benefit from antibiotic treatment. Testing the blood levels can safely reduce the use of antibiotics. 

https://researchnews.cc/news/3362/Antibiotic-study-wins-research-pa...

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Drones Are Being Sent Straight Into Volcanoes, For Life-Saving Science

With an estimated 300 active volcanoes on Earth, the challenge is how to monitor them all to send out early warnings before they erupt. Measuring volcanic gas emissions is also no easy task.

Now researchers have designed specially-adapted drones to help gather data from an active volcano in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Scientists have a few ways of forecasting when a volcano is going to blow. They can monitor earthquake activity in the area to detect tremors which almost always precede eruptions, and look out for bulging in the volcano's sloping walls as magma builds up underneath.

When clear skies allow, satellites can also rapidly detect and measure volcanic emissions of gases such as sulphur dioxide (SO2). Changes to these gas emissions can signal more activity in the volcano below.

Although volcanoes emit just a fraction of the carbon emissions humans do, researchers still want to be able to estimate what carbon dioxide (CO2) they do emit, to factor this into the carbon budget we have left to limit the effects of climate change.

Travelling to PNG, the international team set about testing two types of long-range drones equipped with gas sensors, cameras, and other devices during two field campaigns.

novel approach - that is, long-range and high-altitude [drone] operations enabling in situ measurements - is presently the only feasible means by which we can characterise gas chemistry at steep, hazardous, and highly active volcanoes like Manam," the research team concluded in their paper.

Future research will take more diligent work from scientists and flying time from drones, since the measurements from this study spanned just 10 days.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabb9103

https://www.sciencealert.com/drones-sent-into-degassing-volcanoes-f...

If You Have COVID-19, US Study Shows 50% of Your Household Will Get Sick Within Days

https://www.sciencealert.com/if-you-have-covid-19-us-study-shows-ha...

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Man Almost Dies From an Allergic Reaction to Cold Air After a Shower

Stepping out of a hot shower into a cold bathroom almost killed a Colorado man, who had developed a serious allergic reaction to cold temperatures.

The 34-year-old old man collapsed after getting out of the shower, and his family found him on the floor, according to a report of the case published October 27 in The Journal of Emergency Medicine.

The man was struggling to breathe and his skin was covered in hives. He was experiencing a life-threatening, whole-body allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis.

When paramedics arrived, his family told them that the man had a history of being "allergic to the cold weather", according to the report. He had previously experienced hives as a reaction to the cold, but not anaphylaxis.

These episodes started after he moved from Micronesia, which has a tropical climate, to Colorado, which sees colder temperatures, the report said.

Paramedics treated the man with epinephrine and oxygen, and rushed him to the emergency room. When he got to the hospital, he was sweating profusely and had hives all over his body.

Doctors diagnosed him with cold urticaria, an allergic reaction of the skin after exposure to cold temperatures, including cold air or cold water, according to the Mayo Clinic. People can also develop symptoms after consuming cold food or drinks, Live Science previously reported.

The most common symptom is a red, itchy rash (hives) after exposure to the cold; but in more serious cases, people can develop anaphylaxis, which can cause their blood pressure to plummet and airways to narrow, making breathing difficult.

Your favourite music can send your brain into a pleasure overload

About half of people get chills when listening to their favourite music. Neuroscientists based in France have now used EEG to link chills to multiple brain regions involved in activating reward and pleasure systems. 

Scientists tried to understand why this happens. When the participants experienced a chill, researchers saw specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (a region involved in emotional processing), the supplementary motor area (a mid-brain region involved in movement control) and the right temporal lobe (a region on the right side of the brain involved in auditory processing and musical appreciation). These regions work together to process music, trigger the brain's reward systems, and release dopamine—a "feel-good" hormone and neurotransmitter. Combined with the pleasurable anticipation of your favourite part of the song, this produces the tingly chill you experience—a physiological response thought to indicate greater cortical connectivity.

When experiencing musical chills, low frequency electrical signals called "theta activity"—a type of activity associated with successful memory performance in the context of high rewards and musical appreciation—either increase or decrease in the brain regions that are involved in musical processing.

What is most intriguing is that music seems to have no biological benefit to us. However, the implication of dopamine and of the reward system in processing of musical pleasure suggests an ancestral function for music.

This ancestral function may lie in the period of time we spend in anticipation of the "chill-inducing" part of the music. As we wait, our brains are busy predicting the future and release dopamine. Evolutionarily speaking, being able to predict what will happen next is essential for survival.

Why should we continue to study chills?

Researchers want to measure how cerebral and physiological activities of multiple participants are coupled in natural, social musical settings. Musical pleasure is a very interesting phenomenon that deserves to be investigated further, in order to understand why music is rewarding and unlock why music is essential in human lives.

Frontiers in Neuroscience (2020). DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2020.565815 , www.frontiersin.org/articles/1 … ins.2020.565815/full

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-favorite-music-brain-pleasur...

The brain's favorite type of music

Biologists shed light on mystery of how microbes evolve and affect hosts

researchers  have found that as microbes evolve and adapt to their unique hosts, they become less beneficial to hosts of other genotypes.

The findings suggest that there is probably not one universally healthy microbiome. Rather, transplanted microbes might need time to adapt to a new host before they bring benefits. Microbes became better adapted to their hosts through the evolution of more, rather than less, cooperation.

Rebecca T. Batstone et al, Experimental evolution makes microbes more cooperative with their local host genotype, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abb7222

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-biologists-mystery-microbes-evolve-af...

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When we put microbes from the beginning and the end of the experiment back onto hosts, we found they did best with the same hosts they evolved on, suggesting they adapted to their local host," said Batstone. "The derived microbes were more beneficial when they shared an evolutionary history with their host."

The researchers say the finding suggests that evolution might favour cooperation and that scientists might be able to use experimental evolution in a laboratory setting to make microbes that provide more benefits to their hosts.

"When plants or even animals arrive in new environments, perhaps as invasive species or because they are responding to a changing climate, the microbes they encounter may be initially poor partners. But these microbes might rapidly adapt and develop a more beneficial relationship

Self-watering soil could transform farming

A new type of soil created by engineers  can pull water from the air and distribute it to plants, potentially expanding the map of farmable land around the globe to previously inhospitable places and reducing water use in agriculture at a time of growing droughts.

The team's atmospheric water irrigation system uses super-moisture-absorbent gels to capture water from the air. When the soil is heated to a certain temperature, the gels release the water, making it available to plants. When the soil distributes water, some of it goes back into the air, increasing humidity and making it easier to continue the harvesting cycle.

 Xingyi Zhou et al, Super Moisture Absorbent Gels for Sustainable Agriculture via Atmospheric Water Irrigation, ACS Materials Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acsmaterialslett.0c00439

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-self-watering-soil-farming.html?utm_s...

Two centuries of Monarch butterflies show evolution of wing length

Monarch butterflies are known for their annual, multi-generation migrations in which individual insects can fly for thousands of miles. But Monarchs have also settled in some locations where their favorite food plants grow year round, so they no longer need to migrate.

Researchers now 

took a deep dive into museum collections to see how migration has shaped the species. Monarchs are native to North America, but have also established non-migrating populations in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and islands in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These island-hopping butterflies may have been blown by storms before being lucky enough to reach dry land.

Monarchs that established new, non-migrating populations also had those larger wings. But over time, the wings of these colonists got smaller.

The shift between longer and shorter wings shows two opposite selection forces at work. Migration selects for longer, larger forewings while non-migration seems to relax this and lead to smaller wings.

Alternatively, wing size could be influenced by other environmental factors depending on where butterflies are hatched and grow up. The non-migrating butterflies retained their smaller wings, showing that the effect is due to genetics and not the rearing environment.

These findings provide a compelling example of how migration-associated traits may be favoured during the early stages of range expansion, and also the rate of reductions in those same traits upon loss of migration.

Micah G. Freedman et al, Two centuries of monarch butterfly collections reveal contrasting effects of range expansion and migration loss on wing traits, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2001283117

New study confirms that migration leads to larger wings in monarch ...

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-centuries-monarch-butterflies-evoluti...

COVID-19 'super-spreading' events play outsized role in overall disease transmission

There have been many documented cases of COVID-19 "super-spreading" events, in which one person infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects many other people. But how much of a role do these events play in the overall spread of the disease? A new study  suggests that they have a much larger impact than expected.

The study of about 60 super-spreading events shows that events where one person infects more than six other people are much more common than would be expected if the range of transmission rates followed statistical distributions commonly used in epidemiology.

Based on their findings, the researchers also developed a mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission, which they used to show that limiting gatherings to 10 or fewer people could significantly reduce the number of super-spreading events and lower the overall number of infections.

Super-spreading events are likely more important than most of us had initially realized. Even though they are extreme events, they are probable and thus are likely occurring at a higher frequency than we thought. If we can control the super-spreading events, we have a much greater chance of getting this pandemic under control, according to this study.

Felix Wong et al, Evidence that coronavirus superspreading is fat-tailed, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2018490117

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-covid-super-spreading-events...

Hot or cold, weather alone has no significant effect on COVID-19 spread

The link between weather and COVID-19 is complicated. Weather influences the environment in which the coronavirus must survive before infecting a new host. But it also influences human behaviour, which moves the virus from one host to another.

Aa new study finding that temperature and humidity do not play a significant role in coronavirus spread.

That means whether it's hot or cold outside, the transmission of COVID-19 from one person to the next depends almost entirely on human behaviour.

The effect of weather is low and other features such as mobility have more impact than weather. In terms of relative importance, weather is one of the last parameters.

Across scales, the scientists found that the weather had nearly no influence. When it was compared with other factors using a statistical metric that breaks down the relative contribution of each factor toward a particular outcome, the weather's relative importance at the county scale was less than 3%, with no indication that a specific type of weather promoted spread over another.

In contrast, the data showed the clear influence of human behavior—and the outsized influence of individual behaviors. Taking trips and spending time away from home were the top two contributing factors to COVID-19 growth, with a relative importance of about 34% and 26% respectively. The next two important factors were population and urban density, with a relative importance of about 23% and 13% respectively.

Sajad Jamshidi et al, Global to USA County Scale Analysis of Weather, Urban Density, Mobility, Homestay, and Mask Use on COVID-19, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2020). DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17217847

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-hot-cold-weather-significant...

3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video are shared online daily. Can you sort real from fake?

Here is how you can do it …..This article explains how you can do it …..

https://theconversation.com/3-2-billion-images-and-720-000-hours-of...

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Physicists hone in on the perfect clock

Physicists have measured the energy of a thorium-229 nucleus’s lowest excited state, called thorium-229m, to the highest precision so far. This tiny nucleus could make for the most accurate clock yet if we could count the tick-tocks of the transition between the ground state of the th... — the lowest of all nuclear excited states. A nuclear clock would be less affected by external electromagnetic fields than today’s atomic clocks are, which lose a frankly unacceptable one second every 13 billion years.

Radical diagnostic could save millions of people at risk of dying from blood loss

In a world-first outcome that could save more than two million lives globally each year, researchers have developed a diagnostic using a glass slide, Teflon film and a piece of paper that can test for levels of fibrinogen concentration in blood in less than four minutes. Fibrinogen is a protein found in blood that is needed for clotting. When a patient experiences traumatic injury, such as a serious car accident, or major surgery and childbirth complications, fibrinogen is required in their blood to prevent major haemorrhaging and death from blood loss. Typically, heavily bleeding patients must be transported to a hospital or emergency centre where they undergo diagnostic tests before being treated. These tests are time consuming and costly as they require expensive equipment, specialised/trained personnel and can take up to half an hour.

When a patient is bleeding heavily and has received several blood transfusions, their levels of fibrinogen drop. Even after dozens of transfusions, patients keep bleeding. What they need is an injection of fibrinogen. However, if patients receive too much fibrinogen, they can also die.

This new diagnostic can eliminate the preparation time, labour and transportation difficulties of traditional techniques used in the hospital. It can diagnose hypofibrinogenemia in critically bleeding patients anywhere in the world, and can drastically reduce the time to treatment needed for fibrinogen replacement therapy. The test can take less than four minutes, about five times faster than the current gold standard methods.

1. Marek Bialkower, Clare A. Manderson, Heather McLiesh, Rico F. Tabor, Gil Garnier. Paper Diagnostic for Direct Measurement of Fibrinogen Concentration in Whole Blood. ACS Sensors, 2020; DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.0c01937

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201029105018.htm#:~:t....

https://researchnews.cc/news/3377/Radical-diagnostic-could-save-mil...

Researchers discover how birds deal with gusty conditions

Baking Soda Boosts T Cells’ Ability to Fight Leukemia

Early big-game hunters of the Americas were female, researchers suggest

For centuries, historians and scientists mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, men hunted and women gathered. However, a 9,000-year-old female hunter burial in the Andes Mountains of South America reveals a different story, according to new research conducted.

An archaeological discovery and analysis of early burial practices overturns the long-held 'man-the-hunter' hypothesis.

These findings are particularly timely in light of contemporary conversations surrounding gendered labour practices and inequality. Labour practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow 'natural.' But it's now clear that sexual division of labour was fundamentally different—likely more equitable—in our species' deep hunter-gatherer past.

During archaeological excavations at a high-altitude site called Wilamaya Patjxa in what is now Peru, researchers found an early burial that contained a hunting toolkit with projectile points and animal-processing tools. The objects accompanying people in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life, researchers said. It was determined that the hunter was likely female based on findings by the team's osteologist, James Watson of The University of Arizona. Watson's sex estimate was later confirmed by dental protein analysis.

 The surprising discovery of an early female hunter burial led the team to ask whether she was part of a broader pattern of female hunters or merely a one-off. Looking at published records of late Pleistocene and early Holocene burials throughout North and South America, the researchers identified 429 individuals from 107 sites. Of those, 27 individuals were associated with big-game hunting tools—11 were female and 15 were male. The sample was sufficient to "warrant the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial," researchers said. Moreover, the analysis identified the Wilamaya Patjxa female hunter as the earliest hunter burial in the Americas.

Statistical analysis shows that somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of hunters in these populations were female, the study said. This level of participation stands in stark contrast to recent hunter-gatherers, and even farming and capitalist societies, where hunting is a decidedly male activity with low levels of female participation, certainly under 30 percent

R. Haas el al., "Female hunters of the early Americas," Science Advances (2020). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup … .1126/sciadv.abd0310

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-early-big-game-hunters-americas-femal...

Using quantum properties of light to transmit information

Researchers have taken an important step toward developing a communications network that exchanges information across long distances by using photons, mass-less measures of light that are key elements of quantum computing and quantum communications systems.

The research team has designed a nanoscale node made out of magnetic and semiconducting materials that could interact with other nodes, using laser light to emit and accept photons.

The development of such a quantum network—designed to take advantage of the physical properties of light and matter characterized by quantum mechanics—promises faster, more efficient ways to communicate, compute, and detect objects and materials as compared to networks currently used for computing and communications.

Arunabh Mukherjee et al. Observation of site-controlled localized charged excitons in CrI3/WSe2 heterostructures, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19262-2

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-quantum-properties-transmit.html?utm_...

Study finds environmentally-friendly' tableware harms marine animals

A new  study compares the effects of two types of disposable dishes on the marine environment—regular plastic disposable dishes and more expensive bioplastic disposable dishes certified by various international organizations—and determines that the bioplastic dishes had a similar effect on marine animals as regular plastic dishes. Moreover, the study finds that bioplastic does not degrade rapidly in the marine environment.

People buy expensive disposable dishes and utensils with the special bioplastic standard seal of compliance on the assumption that they are being environmentally responsible. This study proves that while this may be good for their conscience, it can still damage the environment.

Bioplastics are made of natural, renewable materials, and biodegrade relatively fast under certain conditions. Disposable dishes and utensils made of bioplastics were granted various international standard seals and are marketed to consumers as environmentally friendly. However, they don't meet these expectations. 

In the short term, both types of plastic have a similar detrimental effect, according tot eh study. Bioplastics are made of natural materials and, in that sense, they are more beneficial environmentally speaking. But they may also contain toxins just like regular plastic dishes and they do not biodegrade quickly in the aquatic habitat. 

Guillermo Anderson et al, Potential effects of biodegradable single-use items in the sea: Polylactic acid (PLA) and solitary ascidians, Environmental Pollution (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.envpol.2020.115364

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-environmentally-friendly-tableware-ma...

Researchers recover 75,000 'deleted' files from pre-owned USB drives

Highly sensitive tax returns, contracts and bank statements were among 75,000 "deleted" files recovered by cybersecurity researchers as part of an  investigation into the risks of selling used USB drives over the internet.

The team made the startling discovery after purchasing just 100 devices on a popular online auction site and examining them further.

98 of the USBs seemed, at face value, to be empty. However, with publicly available tools it is worryingly easy to retrieve data.

Only 32 of the drives had been properly wiped. Partial files were extracted from 26 devices and every single file was extracted from the remaining 42 USB drives.

Many of the files extracted were determined to be of  high sensivity, and included files named "passwords", contracts, bank statements and tax returns. Other USB drives contained images with embedded location data.

so the researchers say, the way many computers delete files doesn't actually remove them. What happens is that the file is removed from the index so that they are effectively hidden from view. They're still there though and if you know how, you can easily recover them using publicly available forensics tools. Software is freely available that can permanently wipe USB drives, so if you are going to sell a device we would strongly recommend using that. If you're planning to discard a USB device without selling it, you should destroy it with a hammer—make it impossible for a third party to get hold of the data it stores. If you're planning to buy a new USB drive, the best way of mitigating the risks is to buy an encrypted device.

James Conacher et al. Caveat Venditor, Used USB Drive Owner, SSRN Electronic Journal (2020). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3631441

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-recover-deleted-pre-owned-usb.h...

Scientists find harmful chemicals in household dust

Since the 1970s, chemicals called brominated flame retardants (BFRs) have been added to a host of consumer and household products, ranging from electronics and mattresses to upholstery and carpets. While they were intended to improve fire safety, one form—polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs—has proved harmful to human health, specifically our hormonal systems.

the process used to add this chemical to manufactured goods attached the particles very loosely. As a result, the compound tends to shed over time through normal wear and tear.

A growing body of evidence suggests that concentrations of this chemical are higher indoors and that it is present in dust.

It is not feasible for people to rid their homes of all products and materials containing BRFs. But if dust is one source of our exposure, how can you reduce this exposure? Public awareness is very important. Maybe we need more frequent vacuuming of all the dust.

These findings point to the need to identify—and make consumers more aware of—safer alternatives that are free of brominated compounds. 

Peter Blanchard et al. Evaluating the use of synchrotron X-ray spectroscopy in investigating brominated flame retardants in indoor dust, Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s11356-020-10623-4

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-scientists-chemicals-household.html?u...

Effective science communication

ISS matures as science hub

ISS matures as science hub

Scientists aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have conducted about 3,000 experiments. More than 40% have been biology or biotechnology experiments. The studies have produced various insights into how humans and animals adapt to lengthy spaceflight. Male mice, for example, can still produce healthy offspring after floating in space for 35 days. A comparison of various biological factors of two identical twins — one an astronaut aboard the ISS for a year and the other on Earth showed that being in space changes telomere length, gene expression, the gut microbiome and the dimensions of the artery that brings blood to the brain. Many, but not all, of these reverted to normal levels after the astronaut returned to Earth. A lot of people don’t realize how much research has been done on the International Space Station around human health

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6436/eaau8650?utm_source...