A recent study describes a new species of vampyropod based on a 328-million-year-old fossil and pushes back the age of the group by nearly 82 million years. And shows that the oldest ancestors of the group of animals that includes octopuses and vampire squids had not eight but 10 arms. 

Vampyropods are soft-bodied cephalopods typically characterized by eight arms and an internalized chitinous shell or fin supports. Because they lack hard structures, Vampyropoda are not well represented in the fossil record. The new study is based on a vampyropod fossil from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum. It was originally discovered in Montana and donated to the museum in 1988.

Few treatments exist for COVID-19 and the ones that do primarily focus solely on preventing the virus from replicating.

A new potential treatment inhibits replication but also protects or repairs tissue, which is important because COVID-19 can cause symptoms that affect patients long after the viral infection has been cleared. It is a biologic substance created by reengineered human skin cells called dermal fibroblasts.

Electric cars are being artificially bolstered by government mandates and subsidies and are doing little to reduce emissions because the electricity they need is overwhelmingly not solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric.

What would help are batteries that aren't stuck in the 20th century, like lithium-ion, which cost so much to replace that one Tesla owner blew up his car with dynamite rather than a cost for new batteries that was 50 percent of the original purchase price. And they can be dangerous.

Lithium-ion explosion risk

Being a woman is correlated to being twice as men to develop Alzheimer's disease, but lacking a scientific foundation for why, epidemiology is limited to noting it on a population level and moving on.

A new paper seeks to create a biological hypothesis. The authors say the C/EBPβ/AEP pathway is the core factor driving the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and searched for female hormones that are dramatically changed during menopause and tested which hormone selectively activates the C/EBPβ/AEP pathway. They have identified follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) as the major pathogenic factor.

President Biden is touting his strong economic performance but the public disagrees; his approval rating is in the 30th percentile because an expanding economy as framed by politicians still means high inflation to people paying taxes. The psychological impacts of bad economic performance are evident also; when times are good, spending makes people happy. When times are bad, spending is stressful. Customers even leave worse reviews, according to a new paper.

One of the most important examples of early art in Europe, a 11 cm high figurine colloquially dubbed a 'Venus' and found in Willendorf, Austria, is made of a rock called "oolite" which is not found in or around Willendorf. 

New high-resolution tomographic images lead the authors to concluse the material from which the Venus was carved likely comes from northern Italy or possible eastern Ukraine, which sheds new light on the mobility of the first modern humans south and north of the Alps.