You might think microbreweries are novel and trendy. Okay, they may be trendy but they are not novel. An ancient microbrewery dating around 5,000 years old was recently unearthed in China at the archaeological site of Mijiaya. 

Analyzing the remnants of the grains used has even provided a recipe for ancient Chinese beer!

Alcoholic drinks have a long and complicated history. Indeed, long before humans even came on the scene, other animals were indulging in fruit that had naturally fermented.

While watching the Stanley Cup match on Saturday, the first period ended and legendary sportscaster Bob Costas appeared on the screen with the Lexus Intermission Report.It made me chuckle seeing an overt corporate placement because the day before, a blogger at the political website Mother Jones named Tom Philpott had asked me on Twitter what I thought of a new EPA paper on the herbicide atrazine.

Be interested to hear thoughts on EPA atrazine report from @HankCampbell and @JonEntine https://t.co/5XGVg0iR7V

With CERN's Large Hadron Collider slowly but steadily cranking up its instantaneous luminosity, expectations are rising on the results that CMS and ATLAS will present at the 2016 summer conferences, in particular ICHEP (which will take place in Chicago at the beginning of August). The data being collected will be used to draw some conclusions on the tentative signal of a diphoton resonance, as well as on the other 3-sigma effects seen by about 0.13 % of the searches carried out on previous data this far.

Anxiety may be a first world problem - and a young female one at that.

A review of reviews (so calibrate your expectations) in Brain and Behavior finds that women are almost twice as likely to experience anxiety as men, and people from Western Europe and North America are more likely to suffer from anxiety than people from other cultures.

Anxiety disorders are a non-specific blanket term for excessive worry, fear and a tendency to avoid potentially stressful situations including social gatherings. Pretend money estimates claim these disorders cost $42.3 million in the U.S. In the European Union, over 60 million people are affected by anxiety disorders in a given year, likely because of all that worry about cell phones, ugly fruit and GMOs.

You don't see a lot of celebrities advertising kale - which is okay, kale is not all that healthy, but at least it has a health halo. Not so for soda and other sugary drinks, fast food and sweets, and those are among the most common food and beverage products endorsed by famous music personalities.

They are directly to blame for obesity, claims lead author Marie Bragg, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone, in Pediatrics.

Unsurprisingly, Big Lettuce did not hire celebrities to do endorsements, nor did music stars endorse fruits, vegetables, or whole grains. Only one endorsed a natural food deemed healthy -pistachios - over a 14-year period covering dozens of advertisements. Yes, dozens.  

JCU Associate Professor Zoltan Sarnyai said it was the first meta-analysis study to compare the level of cortisol in a waking patient's body with the stage of schizophrenia they are suffering.

Dr Sarnyai said it means doctors may be able to eventually identify those who will develop full-blown psychosis from amongst those who present with early stages of the disease.

"Only some 20 to 30 per cent of individuals who are at high-risk of developing psychosis due to their clinical presentation or family history actually do so. Identifying those people early is where the cortisol measurement comes in.

Up to 25 percent of of lung cancer patients also have autoimmune disease, which may make them unsuitable for increasingly popular immunotherapy treatments.

Astronomers have used Hubble to measure the distances to stars in nineteen galaxies more accurately than previously possible. They found that the Universe is currently expanding faster than the rate derived from measurements of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. If confirmed, this apparent inconsistency may be an important clue to understanding three of the Universe's most elusive components: dark matter, dark energy and neutrinos.

Dentin is one of the most durable biological materials in the human body. Researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin were able to show that the reason for this can be traced to its nanostructures and specifically to the interactions between the organic and inorganic components. Measurements performed at BESSYII, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin's synchrotron radiation source, showed that it is the mechanical coupling between the collagen protein fibers and mineral nanoparticles which renders dentin capable of withstanding extreme forces. Results from this research have been recently published in the journal Chemistry of Materials*.

AN expandable tube that unblocks the bowel before surgery could lead to fewer cancer patients -- diagnosed as emergencies -- needing a colostomy bag.
The Cancer Research UK-funded CReST trial presented at the 2016 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago today (Sunday)* found that less than half (45 per cent) of those who had their bowel unblocked by the tube, which uses body heat to expand, needed a colostomy bag.

But more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of those who had emergency surgery to remove the tumour and the blockage were fitted with bags.
Around 41,100 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year in the UK with up to 20 per cent diagnosed as emergencies -- with some of these patients having their bowel blocked by the tumour.