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Mounting evidence suggests that environmental factors are likely implicated in the development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Globally, close to 7 million people have the condition, with this number expected to rise over the next decade, say the researchers. One factor associated with IBD risk in younger people is the use of antibiotics, but it’s not clear if this association might also apply to older people. To explore this further, the researchers drew on national medical data from 2000 to 2018 for Danish citizens aged 10 and upwards who hadn’t been diagnosed with IBD....

The micro-fossil seaweeds — a form of algae known as Proterocladus antiquus — are barely visible to the naked eye at 2 millimeters in length, or roughly the size of a typical flea. Professor Shuhai Xiao said the fossils are the oldest green seaweeds ever found. They were imprinted in rock taken from an area of dry land — formerly ocean — near the city of Dalian in the Liaoning Province of northern China....

The development may have broad implications for efficient harvesting, storing, and control of energy flow for mechanical and optical applications. Their proof-of-concept experiment may have broad implications for efficient harvesting, storing, and control of energy flow for mechanical and optical applicationsThe findings may facilitate improved technology for monitoring the structural integrity of bridges and other structural componentsThe discovery may also lead to improved methods for energy harvesting and storage, wireless charging of electric vehicles, and may also have applications in quantum computing and ultralow-energy photonics...

According to a recent study from Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center (UH), gay men are more than twice as likely as heterosexual males to develop inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) when both groups participate in high-risk sexual activity. The study was recently published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Gut. “To our knowledge, this is the first large population-based study that demonstrates a higher prevalence of IBD in men who engage in high-risk same-sex sexual activity,” said Emad Mansoor, study lead author and assistant professor at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and UH....

The observations by the Breakthrough Listen team at the University of California, Berkeley using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia show that the fast radio bursts from this object, called FRB 121102, are nearly 100 percent linearly polarized, an indication that the source of the bursts is embedded in strong magnetic fields like those around a massive black hole. The measurements confirm observations by another team of astronomers from the Netherlands, which detected the polarized bursts using the William E....

When the brain’s primary “learning center” is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways — often far from the damaged site. The research, conducted by UCLA’s Michael Fanselow and Moriel Zelikowsky in collaboration with Bryce Vissel, a group leader of the neuroscience research program at Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, appears this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....