Long before wheat and sugar, a popular craze against salt swept America. The salt in this case was the popular flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG), common in Chinese food, soups and meats.  Glutamic acid is also naturally present in our bodies.

It was used as an additive starting in 1908, it gives food  its savory umami flavor, but once it got public attention, anecdotes began to pour in about lots of non-specific symptoms that must be caused by it, despite the fact that hundreds of millions of Chinese people did not report headaches. 

Bacteria growing in near darkness can still harvest energy and produce oxygen from sunlight.

Cancer screening is one of the controversial aspects of health care; America has long had a 'defensive medicine' problem, where in some cases doctors and hospitals run many unnecessary tests to check off the boxes so that if something does go wrong, lawyers won't be shedding tears in court about how the greedy or incompetent medical community ruins lives.

Then in other cases doctors may be running tests with little value because the effect on patients is psychological or it won't be meaningful, such as in cancer screening for the elderly. 

Then there is the issue where it's good business. 

Getting informed consent from desperate people and their families for experimental treatments is quite easy.

Researchers have succeeded in reconstructing the sea ice conditions in the Fram Strait for this critical period at the end of the last glacial and thus in finding a direct connection between changes in sea ice cover and fluctuations in the Gulf Stream.

A nine meter long sediment core served as a window into the past for the geologists. It was drilled on a Fram Strait expedition conducted on the research vessel Maria. S. Merian and has such clearly defined layers that the scientists can read it like a book. 

Source: IPA

By Kerrie Foxwell-Norton, Griffith University

It’s tempting to view The Australian’s latest broadside at the ABC as just another salvo fired between our nation’s two biggest media organisations.

A new study has found that both type-1 diabetes and type-2 diabetes are the result of the same mechanism - the formation of toxic clumps of a hormone called amylin.

The results, based on 20 years' work in New Zealand, suggest that type-1 and type-2 diabetes could both be slowed down and potentially reversed by medicines that stop amylin forming these toxic clumps.

As well as producing insulin, cells in the pancreas also produce another hormone called amylin. Insulin and amylin normally work together to regulate the body's response to food intake. If they are no longer produced, then levels of sugar in the blood rise resulting in diabetes and causing damage to organs such as the heart, kidneys, eyes and nerves if blood sugar levels aren't properly controlled.

Even the most careful chosen meal can contain surprises and to defend against infectious microbial fifth columnists in the intestines, a dedicated contingent of immune cells keeps watch within the thin layer of tissue that divides the contents of the gut from the body itself. 

New research at Rockefeller University sheds light on the development of a unique class of immune cells known as intraepithelial lymphocytes (IELs) that reside in this critical interface. . 

Let’s say it straight. Mars is, without any doubt our next step in space exploration, sparking our imagination for many years in spaceflight history. After sending tons of scientific rovers, it’s about time to send human pioneers to start colonizing the Red Planet.

Everyone's heard of the birds and the bees - why do they leave out the flowers that are being fertilized?

Maybe because it is too complicated. The fertilization process for flowering plants is particularly complex and requires extensive communication between the male and female reproductive cells. New research from an international team reports
in Nature Communications about discoveries in the chemical signaling process that guides flowering plant fertilization.