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The archaeological record is littered with feces, a potential goldmine for insights into ancient health and diet, parasite evolution, and the ecology and evolution of the microbiome. The main problem for researchers is determining whose feces is under examination. A recent study published in the journal PeerJ, led by Maxime Borry and Christina Warinner of Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), presents “CoproID: a reliable method of inferring sources of paleofeces....

Do you feel like you’ve been locked in a small room for months on end, isolated from the people that you love? Welcome to Netflix’s Away and ‘the bubble’ of five scientists on the world’s first manned mission to Mars. Enduring a life very similar to our Melbourne COVID-19 lockdown, the international team of scientists travel 45.697 million miles to Mars, not from Earth, but from the Moon, experiencing space difficulties while trying to focus on hope, humanity and how we need one another if we are to achieve impossible things....

It’s a conundrum that many health-conscious people face, and a new study from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has a solution. This recent study reveals a little bit of daily activity might well be the most beneficial approach, at least for muscular strength. Fortunately, it also implies that you don’t need to put in a ton of effort every day. In a four-week training study conducted in partnership with Niigata University and Nishi Kyushu University in Japan, three participant groups each performed an arm resistance exercise while improvements in muscle strength and thickness were measured and compared....

The Sun would need to be about 20 times more massive to end its life as a black hole. Stars that are born this size or larger can explode into a supernova at the end of their lifetimes before collapsing back into a black hole, an object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Some smaller stars are big enough to go supernova, but too small to become black holes — they’ll collapse into super-dense structures called neutron stars after exploding as a supernova....

Talk about high turnover. A meat-eating dinosaur species that lived in Madagascar some 70 million years ago replaced all its teeth every couple of months or so, a new study has found, surprising even the researchers. In fact, Majungasaurus grew new teeth roughly two to 13 times faster than those of other carnivorous dinosaurs, says paper lead author Michael D. D’Emic, an assistant professor of biology at Adelphi University. Majungasaurus would form a new tooth in each socket every couple of months....

Parental alcohol consumption linked to raised risk of congenital heart disease. Aspiring parents should both avoid drinking alcohol prior to conception to protect against congenital heart defects, according to research published today (October 2, 2019) in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Drinking alcohol three months before pregnancy or during the first trimester was associated with a 44% raised risk of congenital heart disease for fathers and 16% for mothers, compared to not drinking....

Changes within enamel cells point to mechanism by which excessive fluoride leads to fluorosis. Exposing teeth to excessive fluoride alters calcium signaling, mitochondrial function, and gene expression in the cells forming tooth enamel — a novel explanation for how dental fluorosis, a condition caused by overexposure to fluoride during childhood, arises. The study, led by researchers at NYU College of Dentistry, is published in Science Signaling. Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that helps to prevent cavities by promoting mineralization and making tooth enamel more resistant to acid....

Researchers say treatment of long COVID could be hampered by lack of consensus in identifying and diagnosing the condition. In a new report, researchers say the challenges of treating long COVID are amplified by a critical issue: we do not know what constitutes long COVID or how to formally diagnose it, an issue that is further exacerbated by limited research data of varying quality and consistency. Early reports foretell a difficult challenge with long COVID, which researchers call Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC)....

For the first time, scientists have created single layers of a naturally occurring rare mineral called tungstenite, or WS2. The resulting sheet of stacked sulfur and tungsten atoms forms a honeycomb pattern of triangles that have been shown to have unusual light-emitting, or photoluminescent, properties. According to team leader Mauricio Terrones, a professor of physics and of materials science and engineering at Penn State, the triangular structures have potential applications in optical technology; for example, for use in light detectors and lasers....

Every year, 3.5 million metric tons of sodden diapers end up in landfills. The superabsorbent material inside these diapers is made up of a matrix of polymers that expand once dampness hits them. Polymers are a long chain of repeating units, and in this case, the absorbent material in diapers is based on the polymer polyacrylic acid. A University of Michigan team has developed a technique to untangle these absorbent polymers and recycle them into materials similar to the gooey adhesives used in sticky notes and bandages....

Two independent clinical studies – one by researchers at the Center for Cell-Based Therapy (CTC) in Ribeirão Preto, state of São Paulo (Brazil), on the monoclonal antibody eculizumab, and the other by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA) on an experimental drug called AMY-101 – observed a significant anti-inflammatory effect that contributed to a faster recovery by severe COVID-19 patients. The results of the two studies, which set out to compare the compounds’ therapeutic potential, are reported in an article published in Clinical Immunology....

Red dwarfs are the coolest kind of star. As such, they potentially allow liquid water to exist on planets that are quite close to them. In the search for habitable worlds beyond the borders of our solar system, this is a big advantage: the distance between an exoplanet and its star is a crucial factor for its detection. The closer the two are, the higher the chance that astronomers can detect the planet from Earth....

These were the somewhat unexpected results of a study recently published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry by researchers at the Agricultural Research Service and their University of California-Davis colleagues. “We looked at the inflammatory reactions of 20 volunteers at 0, 3, and 6 hours after eating a standardized meal containing 38 percent fat and their responses were completely unique. No two were exactly the same,” explained molecular biologist Danielle G....

As need for cooling rises in step with world temperatures, energy-efficient, climate-friendly appliances are critical to reaching Paris Agreement goals; 3.6 billion appliances in use now, 14 billion will be required by 2050 to meet all needs. Coordinated international action on energy-efficient, climate-friendly cooling could avoid as much as 460 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions — roughly equal to eight years of global emissions at 2018 levels — over the next four decades, according to the Cooling Emissions and Policy Synthesis Report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Energy Agency (IEA)....

Superconductivity only occurs in pairs. Therefore, in order for conductance without electrical resistance to take place in specific materials, the charge carriers must pair up. In traditional superconductors, the current is made up of electrons and pairing is facilitated by the collective movements of the crystal lattice, referred to as phonons. This mechanism is well understood. However, in recent decades, a growing number of materials have been found that don’t fit within this conventional theoretical framework....

The approach, which monitors the traffic that courses ceaselessly through networks of transcontinental telecommunication cables, successfully detected storm swell events and earthquakes across a nine-month observation period. “This approach requires no new infrastructure or instrumentation, but instead relies on utilizing observations already made to extract the telecommunications data received at the end of the cable,” writes William Wilcock in a related Perspective. The new study suggests that the approach could transform our oceanwide web-work of fiber optics into a continuous, real-time earthquake and tsunami monitoring and detection system....

Stephan’s Quintet is a group of five galaxies—NGC 7317, NGC 7318a, NGC 7318b, NGC 7319, and NGC 7320— generally located about 270 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The group provides a pristine laboratory for the study of galaxy collisions and their impact on the surrounding environment. Typically galaxy collisions and mergers trigger a burst of star formation; that’s not the case in Stephan’s Quintet. Instead, this violent activity is taking place in the intergalactic medium, away from the galaxies in places where there is little to no star formation to obstruct the view....

Vitamin D deficiency may impair muscle function due to a reduction in energy production in the muscles, according to a mouse study published in the Journal of Endocrinology. Vitamin D deficient mice were found to have impaired muscle mitochondrial function, which may have implications for muscle function, performance, and recovery. This may suggest that preventing vitamin D deficiency in older adults could help maintain better muscle strength and function and reduce age-related muscle deterioration, but further studies are needed to confirm this....

As cities contemplate new zoning regulations regarding alcohol, the implications of those policies can have life-or-death outcomes. “There is an ongoing violence epidemic in Baltimore, with recent years breaking records for the number of homicides,” write the authors, led by Pamela J. Trangenstein, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “This study suggests that there is potential to prevent violent crimes by reducing alcohol outlet density in Baltimore City....

Exposure during the first trimester of pregnancy to mixtures of suspected endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in consumer products is related to lower IQ in children by age 7, according to a study by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Karlstad University, Sweden, published in Environment International today (October 24, 2019). This study is among the first to look at prenatal suspected endocrine-disrupting chemical mixtures in relation to neurodevelopment....