Tiger blood, rhino horns, any number of natural supplements, including from endangered species, are used in the alternative medicine spheres - and that market is dominated by Asia.

Sea cucumbers are used in Chinese folk medicine but are also a luxury food product and that demand has meant once-thriving Mexican sea cucumber populations have been decimated due to poaching. China doesn't care where its products come from, so any certification could be as illegitimate as an organic food sticker from Russia.

Sea cucumbers are ecologically critical but a new literature review finds that Asian food markets have them on the brink of crisis. 

Prior to the latest coronavirus pandemic, many were indifferent about getting the flu vaccine. They shouldn't be. Co-infections are not common but a new study finds that adults in hospital who have COVID-19 and the flu at the same time are at much greater risk of severe disease and death - over four times more likely to require ventilation support and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they only had COVID-19.

A new mode of how antibodies navigate the surface of pathogens like coronaviruses compares the migration of these pathogen hunters to the random movements of a child on stepping stones.

Antibodies are often thought of as Y-shaped proteins but perhaps a more accurate way to envision them is to flip the picture upside down and regard antibodies as walking stick figures, stepping on antigens. Those two characteristic “Y” branches function as legs of sorts.

No one will miss the COVID-19 pandemic. Except maybe greenhouses.

New surveys show about one out of every three people began gardening in 2020 because they were home more due to SARS-CoV-2 restrictions and worries. Many also put in new grass lawns and did outdoor renovations, such as installing new plant beds and other landscaping.

With war in Ukraine, Europeans are worried a key source of their food, Russia and Ukraine, is at risk.

They are right to be concerned. Food is a strategic resource but European countries chose to embrace higher cost lower yield alternatives to modern agriculture at home because they got cheap food from the east.

If an additional 290,000,000,000 loaves of bread were available, that would ease the strain worldwide. That is how much wheat is lost each year due to pests and diseases that the so-called organic process can't prevent. But science can.

"Live cold, die old" may soon become folk wisdom if a new study holds up in mice is true for people.

Most of us have heard some form of the phrase "live fast, die young" and take it to mean reckless behavior leads to premature death. It certainly does in epidemiology but in science it means that animals with high metabolic rates ("living fast") tend to die sooner than those with slow metabolism. They burn out rather than fade away.