Two teams have announced the fifth and most prominent way that the Higgs boson - "the God particle" as it was once called - decays into other particles called bottom quarks. This pathway is the last to be detected of the five main signature pathways that can identify the Higgs particle.

Quarks are tiny constituents of protons, which themselves are some of the building blocks of atoms. The bottom quark is one of the six types of quarks that make up the menagerie of particles in the "standard model" that explains matter and their interactions

Three new species of fossil primates have been named, residents of San Diego County from a time when southern California was filled with lush tropical forests.

The three previously unknown omomyoid primates lived 42 million to 46 million years ago. The researchers named these new species Ekwiiyemakius walshi, Gunnelltarsius randalli and Brontomomys cerutti. 

People who go on low carbohydrate diets often report that they lose weight. And they do, because it is a crash diet. But as a long-term solution that and other fad diets are unsafe, as shown in a large study presented today at the European Society of Cardiology today.

The study prospectively examined the relationship between low carbohydrate diets, all-cause death, and deaths from coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease (including stroke), and cancer in a nationally representative sample of 24,825 participants of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) during 1999 to 2010.

Some researchers, clinicians, professional organizations, and health charities have been waging a war on sugar, calling for dietary recommendations to be changed and even for a sin tax on sugar, all claiming it will reduce obesity and cardiovascular diseases. In 2014, the World Health Organisation even recommended that adults and children reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than ten percent of their total energy intake. 

Tafamidis meglumine (trade name: Vyndaqel®) was approved in November 2011 for the treatment of transthyretin amyloidosis in adults, a rare disorder ("orphan disease") caused by a defective gene and is associated with progressive nerve damage. Now it has been shown to improve survival and reduce hospitalizations for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, a rare heart condition, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2018 and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In countries that have embraced centralized energy and migrated away from individual cooking with dung or wood, both public health and the emissions have improved. So why not pay for all developed countries to switch? The World Bank wanted to do that half a decade ago but it became political; countries like the U.S. agreed only to contribute if they used solar or wind, which are not viable even in America much less in a poor nation. It was another case of wealthy countries with plenty of energy passing their guilt along to Africa and Asia.