Though the world is facing on obesity crisis, at least in the U.S. the culprit is not sugar, it's too many calories of other kinds.

Americans are actually eating less sugar than two decades ago, partially thanks to non-nutritive sweeteners.

The analysis used a nationally representative dataset on household purchases at the barcode level (Nielsen Homescan) in 2002 and 2018 linked with Nutrition Facts Panel (NFP) data and ingredient information using commercial nutrition databases that are updated regularly to capture reformulations. Keyword searches were performed on ingredient lists to classify products containing various types of non-nutritive sweeteners.

Don't be fooled by those tourist volcanoes that reliably produce small basaltic lava eruptions. A new study shows they hide the same chemically diverse magmas in their underground plumbing systems as volcanoes that generate explosive activity.

Some volcanoes in Iceland, Hawai'i and the Galápagos Islands consistently produce lava flows of molten basaltic rock which form long rivers of fire down their flanks. They are so slow, you can outwalk them, and therefore so predictable you can visit them but unless you build a house in front of one, they are safe. 

Yet they share chemistry in common with Vesuvius or Mt. St. Helens, which means they are not as timid as we think.

By Catherine Meyers, Inside Science 

(Inside Science) -- If you’ve heard the name Rosalind Franklin, you’ve probably also heard the names James Watson and Francis Crick. Watson and Crick form the famous duo most widely credited with figuring out the spiral staircase shape of DNA, and Franklin’s public image has become inextricably linked to the story of how it all happened.

Scientific publishing is not known for moving rapidly. In normal times, publishing new research can take months, if not years. Researchers prepare a first version of a paper on new findings and submit it to a journal, where it is often rejected, before being resubmitted to another journal, peer-reviewed, revised and, eventually, hopefully published.

All scientists are familiar with the process, but few love it or the time it takes. And even after all this effort – for which neither the authors, the peer reviewers, nor most journal editors, are paid – most research papers end up locked away behind expensive journal paywalls. They can only be read by those with access to funds or to institutions that can afford subscriptions.

Using the genome-editing technology CRISPR, researchers can make targeted cuts to the genome or insert useful genes, called a gene knock-in, and they have done it with the cattle SRY gene, responsible for initiating male development, into a bovine embryo.

This first demonstration of a targeted gene knock-in for large sequences of DNA via embryo-mediated genome editing in cattle will mean it produces male offspring 75 percent of the time.

That's not to increase sexism, it's a benefit because male cattle are about 15 percent more efficient at converting feed into weight gain than females. That keeps costs low, especially on the checklist now when we have seen how precarious food supply can be for the poor, and it's better for the environment.

In a 1972 book, "The Mountain People", Colin Turnbull deemed the the Ik ethnic group of hunter-gatherers in the Uganda mountains 

There was a huge confounder in his work that scientists would've noted immediately and now fellow anthropologists have caught; since the observations were done during a severe famine in the mid-1960s, they did not uncover typical behavior of the Ik. Instead, sharing and cooperating re-emerged once resources were plentiful enough.

A protein in the viruses causing COVID-19 and SARS is almost identical, which means existing FDA-approved drugs, already tested in mice infected with SARS, could improve the outcomes for COVID-19 patients experiencing severe respiratory symptoms.

In order to evolve you must first survive, and Darwin posited that this "survival of the fittest" was a driver in natural selection. To the casual reader in 1859, cooperation was hard to reconcile with that, but humans had become the apex predator by both cooperating and competing. 

Cooperation is actually quite common. We have bacteria in our guts which can be helpful or harmful but are often helpful. Root bacteria fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, thus making it available to plants. In return, the plant supplies its root bacteria with nutritious sugars. Our own energy cells, mitochondria, have to have been created after mutually benefiting by trading energy for protection - they even have their own genome.

A recent survey results analysis sought to quantify the happiness of married, formerly married and single people at the end of their lives - to find out just how much love and marriage played into overall well-being. 

The 7,532 participants were surveyed periodically from ages 18 to 60 and the psychologists sought to determine who reported to be happiest at the end of their lives.

Bees face a variety of challenges in the modern world. Changes to land use and evolving parasites have always been significant issues. For as long as beekeeping records have been kept, 1,100 years, there have been accounts of colony collapse disorder. Just about the only thing science has determined is not killing them off periodically are neonicotinoid pesticides, the one thing environmentalists insist is the problem.

While not in crisis, they rebounded fine after the latest periodic blip in numbers, it's good to think about how to prevent losses without incurring the cost of chemicals. One way, according to a new paper, is to prevent spread between species.