It's no secret that a lot of people eat when they are depressed, and that social distancing, fear, and isolation during COVID-19 lockdowns and other government restrictions caused some depression to be worse.

Being young is always a time of struggle and the pandemic saw a resulting surge in obesity, which has meant a surge in type 2 diabetes.

Mitochondria provide the lion’s share of energy that cells need to function normally, so genetic defects in mitochondria can cause severe diseases that can be devastating if not caught and treated early.

Mitochondria remain important throughout our lives. People with higher mitochondria function age 'better.' 

Yet how mitochondrial defects lead to disease and aging has not been well understood. A paper published today in Aging Cell links mitochondrial dysfunction to the shortening of telomeres,  specialized DNA sequences that act as caps that stabilize the ends of chromosomes, and premature aging. 

A common first step in embryonic development is that an egg meets a sperm but in a Weizmann Institute of Science study published today in Cell, researchers have grown synthetic embryo models of mice outside the womb by starting solely with stem cells cultured in a petri dish.

Without the use of fertilized eggs.

To most physicists, time is a relative construct. A clock changes position in three real dimensions, the earth rotates. If the effects in the real world change, like gravity, so does the perception of time. That does not make time a 'fourth' dimension outside stories.

Yet a few theoretical physicists argue that because time does march on, it is like an arrow. This 'arrow of time' would move into the future, and to bolster their idea they invoke the second law of thermodynamics: the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time.

If you get sleepy in the middle of hot days, you are not alone. You are not even alone in the animal kingdom.

Biology may be behind it.

We know that many people have a harder time sleeping in the summer and be slow to get out of bed on colder mornings and new study hopes to connect sensory neurons and neurons that control this cycle.

The work is only in fruit flies, so it goes in the exploratory pile despite the hyper-coverage such studies get in corporate media, but they found that fruit flies are pre-programmed to take a nap in the middle of the day. They believe there is a brain thermometer only active in hot temperatures.

There is concern about US states making their own abortion laws in the US, but in Germany most abortion is illegal. It is only allowed for medical or criminal reasons within 12 weeks of conception, and lack of body autonomy may be why most Germans are fine with mandatory COVID-19 vaccines.

The Multicentre Epilepsy Lesion Detection project (MELD) used over 1,000 patient MRI scans from 22 global epilepsy centers to develop an algorithm which provides reports of where abnormalities are in cases of drug-resistant focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) – a leading cause of epilepsy.

Around 1 percent of the world’s population have the serious neurological condition epilepsy, that is characterized by frequent seizures. While drugs treatments are available for the majority of people with epilepsy, 20 to 30 percent do not respond to medications.

A recently published paper