Western humans are rare in that we drink milk after weaning.  Milk is the staple food for infants and contains the sugar lactose but most mammals lose the ability to digest lactose, and thus milk, as they get older. 

The ability to digest the sugar is governed by the production of the enzyme lactase in the small intestine. As children get older, the lactase gene is gradually disabled, which means that no lactase is formed and the lactose enters the colon undigested, where it is typically converted into acids and hydrogen gas and, in many people, causes the painful symptoms of lactose intolerance.

Currently in the UK, when health care workers are "unequivocally guilty of willful or reckless neglect or mistreatment of patients" that is not criminal behavior but Dr. Jo Bibby, Director of Strategy at the Health Foundation, writing in BMJ, says the proposal, made in response to the Francis inquiry, will close a gap in the law and is one of many important steps to improving patient care, though won't prevent any deaths.

Where do new genes come from?

It's a long standing debate in evolutionary biology but a new paper in Science Express says that new genes are created from non-coding DNA, and more rapidly than expected.

If you think wilding was much more civilized when you were young, well, you're old.

Older people are more likely to regard the behavior of younger people as anti-social, even if it doesn't bother young people at all. One example is swearing. 80% of adults in a recent survey thought swearing in a public place was anti-social behavior compared while less than 43% of young people did. When it comes to skateboarding on the street, over 60% of adults were against it while less than 8% of young people were. Mysteriously, even douchebikery behavior by cyclists had a generation gap regarding how annoying it was.

A new paper has demonstrated the power of path tracking to measure social behavior and automatically determine dogs' personalities.

How dogs behave during walks reveals a lot about traits such as trainability, controllability, aggression, age and dominance. Dogs that consistently took the lead were more responsive to training, more controllable, older and more aggressive than the dogs that tended to follow.

Dogs that led more often had higher dominance ranks in everyday situations, assessed by a dominance questionnaire.