A new study has found that after just five days of eating a high-fat diet, the way in which the body's muscle processes nutrients changes.

When food is eaten, the level of glucose in the blood rises. The body's muscle is a major clearinghouse for this glucose. It may break it down for energy, or it can store it for later use. Since muscle makes up about 30 percent of our body weight and it is such an important site for glucose metabolism, if normal metabolism is altered, it can have consequences on the rest of the body and can lead to health issues.

 By identifying and comparing the sequences of more than 400 receptors in the genomes of two fruit flies and three mosquito species, entomologists have unlocked one of the hormonal mechanisms that allow mosquitoes to produce eggs. They identified a single gene for a receptor with an unknown function within the species distribution.  

The one common element in recent American weather has been its diversity. The West Coast has been drier than usual while the East Coast has had more snow. Fish are swimming into new waters and so hungry seals that don't follow them aare washing up on California beaches. 

A long-lived patch of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, is part of what's wreaking much of this mayhem, according to two papers Geophysical Research Letters. No, that warm blob was not caused by climate change, though it has many of the same effects for West Coast weather. 

On one side of the political spectrum in America and across a broader swath of Europe, science is controversial - especially genetic engineering. But genetic engineering has been done since humans first deduced they could shape the natural world, if anything it has gotten precise in a way that was never possible before.

Now it mean even help fight against cancer - and it may do so using Salmonella, more famous as a bacteria that lives in intestines.

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is one of the most Earthlike places in the solar system. 

It has a thick, hazy atmosphere and surface rivers, mountains, lakes and dunes, which is why the Cassini-Huygens is studying it. But sometimes new data bring new mysteries, such as the seemingly wind-created sand dunes spotted by Cassini near the moon's equator, and the contrary winds just above.

It's become a popular idea among endurance athletes that salt consumption during competition will help, but a new study finds no evidence that is true.

A small kernel of truth is involved in the belief, the authors write in the the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine - that there are sodium losses due to sweat during exercise and our bodies function on a principle of thermoregulation - but then some endurance athletes have taken that to believe they should consume large quantities of salt or other electrolyte supplements containing sodium during training and competition to improve performance.