Patients taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most common form of antidepressant, who are given the most widely prescribed opioid, hydrocodone (Vicodin) experience less pain relief, a finding whch could help combat the opioid epidemic, as poorly managed pain may lead to eventual illegal and dangerous opioid use. 

Up to 15 percent of Americans take an antidepressant while hydrocodone and codeine are often prescribed to patients who have recently undergone surgery. If they are taking an antidepressant and it leads to greater pain, they may want to increase their dosage.  Because pain medication is prevalent they focused on surgical patients.

Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, according to a paper in Current Anthropology.

The paper argues that our early ancestors acquired a taste for fat by eating marrow scavenged from the skeletal remains of large animals that had been killed and eaten by other predators. The argument challenges the widely held view among anthropologists that eating meat was the critical factor in setting the stage for the evolution of humans. This is anthropology, so they may be making a distinction without a difference; in a calorie-poor landscape all was eaten.

A team of scholars has found that magnetic waves in the Sun’s corona, its outermost layer of atmosphere, react to sound waves escaping from the inside of the Sun.

Alfvénic waves are in plasma and have been found to play a crucial role in transporting energy around the Sun and the solar system. They were previously thought to originate at the Sun’s surface, where boiling hydrogen reaches temperatures of 6,000 degrees and churns the Sun’s magnetic field. However, researchers have found evidence that the magnetic waves also react – or are excited – higher in the atmosphere by sound waves leaking out from the inside of the Sun and the sound waves leave a distinctive marker on the magnetic waves.

Bees have tiny brains but that is all relative; It seems they also possess complex number skills.

Lots of animals count as shown by how many engage in foraging, shoaling, and resource management arithmetic, addition and subtraction, is rare, only a few nonhuman vertebrates do it.

Senckenberg scientist Ingmar Werneburg, together with an international team, re-examined the An examination of the skull structure of Tyrannosaurus rex using “anatomical network analysis” found that the carnivorous dinosaur had an extremely flexible skull structure.

Tyrannosaurus rex – the “King of the Tyrant Lizards” – owes its name in part to its impressive teeth and skull. Researchers compared the skull of T. rex with the skull construction of modern terrestrial vertebrates  to examine which skull bones are connected to each other and found that different bone modules led to a highly flexible muzzle that aided in tearing apart prey animals. 

Wildlife is abundant in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, found a month-long camera study which found 10 mammal and five bird species scavenging fish carcasses placed on the shoreline of rivers and canals there. Among the species were white-tailed eagles, American mink and river otter.

A previous study also found abundant gray wolves in this ecological zone of about 1,000 square miles that was abandoned by humans after the 1986 nuclear accident which made the name Chernobyl famous.  The new results provide evidence that aquatic nutrient resources can flow to terrestrial landscapes and become available to terrestrial as well as semiaquatic wildlife, like otter and mink.