Small micron particulate matter, commonly called PM_2.5, needs an electron microscope to be visible to you but once real smog, PM₁₀, declined by the 1990s, air pollution activists began to tout this new killer. Since it is 1/4th the size of real pollution air quality maps could often be red, or at least yellow, and that is good business for trial lawyers.

The problem quickly became that no one ever died from it, humans would've been extinct 50,000 years ago if that were even possible, so they pivoted from deaths to hidden effects that can be claimed using statistics. 

Until Alfred the Great managed to isolate and contain invaders from Scandinavia, Lyminge, a monastery in Kent, was on the front line of long-running Viking hostility.

Lyminge endured repeated attacks for almost a century through effective defensive strategies, University of Reading archaeologists now say. Despite being in a region of Kent which bore the full brunt of Viking raids in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, they survived. rebuilt, and recovered more completely than historians previously thought. 


The excavation at Lyminge, Kent. Credit: Dr. Gabor Thomas

Stimuli-responsive polymers will bring next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots.

Even now, these materials have made robots that can walk, swim and jump. Now, a FAIRY can even fly. FAIRY is the nickname of the Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly program at Tampere University. It flies by wind and is controlled by light, using a soft actuator.

"The actuator is made of light-responsive liquid crystalline elastomer, which induces opening or closing actions of the bristles upon visible light excitation,” explains Hao Zeng, group leader of the project.

Since the 1960s, antioxidant supplements have been promoted as a miracle cure and that has never been true - preventing oxidation too much would be as bad as not preventing enough - but luckily few supplements make coenzyme Q bioavailable at all. Evolution created a way for the energy factories of our cells, mitochondria, to be thrown out of balance by pills.

Yet they can be thrown out of balance by nature. Coenzyme Q is entirely natural, and a lack of it leads to mitochondrial diseases like Leigh syndrome. But short of experimentally replacing mitochondrial DNA, it is hard to modify. For anything to change it must pass through the watery cell interior called cytoplasm to the surface of the cells in order to neutralize oxidized lipid species. 

The booster dose of either the BNT162b2 mRNA (Fosun-BioNTech, equivalent to Pfizer-BioNTech outside China) or CoronaVac (Sinovac) COVID-19 vaccine was correlated to a 90 percent reduction in death in people with multiple co-morbidities compared to 2 doses, according to a new study.

A new exploratory paper links sleeping pills to dementia but while the press release uses the term risk frequently, it minimizes a giant confounder; older people sleep less and people who have not yet received a dementia diagnosis may go on sleeping medication to try and mitigate restlessness.

Another confounder is that they only find a higher correlation in white people. Science does not work that way, but epidemiology and statistics can do anything.

Thanks to the fall armyworm, nearly all of Africa's maize crop is in jeopardy, finds a new study. 

The new projection was made using 3,175 geo-tagged occurrences and factoring in physiological and climatological requirements to geographically assess its range. They showed that almost 92 percent of Africa’s maize growing areas can mean year-round growth of fall armyworm while 95 percent are suitable for that plus pests like the maize stalk borer, Western corn rootworm and Asiatic witchweed.

Despite apparent beliefs on social media today, the modern anti-vaccine movement did not begin with the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. For decades prior to that, wealthy elites who believed that supplements and organic food were medicine led the world in denying their children vaccines.

Reducing the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV from blood donations is important for public health and the U.S. currently uses time-based deferrals to assess donor eligibility. Now the FDA is proposing individual risk-based questions to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV similar to policies in place in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.

Blood donations are important and FDA believes the implementation of the proposed individual risk-based questions will not compromise the safety or availability of the blood supply. The new draft recommendations are based on data from other countries with similar HIV epidemiology that have instituted this approach, as well as ongoing surveillance of the U.S. blood supply.

Food is not medicine, anyone claiming it is medicine is selling you something, like a diet plan, but nutrients can impact cancer cells.

How that applies consistently is unknown so a new tool hopes to create an exploratory method using mice. Mice don't translate well to humans, they are not little people, but they can exclude effects in humans and that has value also.