There are claims by some that many diseases we now get more frequently are "lifestyle" diseases, caused by decadent Western  problems like plentiful food and too much science. Instead, it has also been posited, we simply are not killed by lots of other things young (organic food, lack of medicine. unheated homes) and that makes diseases of age look like diseases of lifestyle.

A new study adds to that, using using modern imaging techniques on hearts more than 400 years old found at an archaeological site. Archaeologists with the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research excavating the basement of the Convent of the Jacobins in Rennes, France, unearthed several grave sites dating back to the late 16th or early 17th century. 

Dietary restriction enhances the expression of the circadian clock genes in peripheral tissue, according to research in Cell Metabolism which found that dietary restriction, induced by reducing protein in the diet, increased the amplitude of circadian clocks and enhanced the cycles of fat breakdown and fat synthesis.

This improvement in fat metabolism may be a key mechanism in explaining why dietary restriction extends lifespan in several species, including the flies in this study. 

Army ants build living bridges by linking their bodies to span gaps and create shortcuts across rainforests in Central and South America. An international team of researchers has now discovered these bridges can move from their original building point to span large gaps and change position as required.

The bridges stop moving when they become so long that the increasing costs incurred by locking workers into the structure outweigh the benefit that the colony gains from further shortening their trail. Bridges dismantle when the ants in the structure sense the traffic walking over them slows down below a critical threshold.

A new analysis led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that while most U.S. health insurance plans deny benefits to transgender men and women for medical care necessary to transition to the opposite sex, paying for sex reassignment surgery and hormones is actually cost-effective.

How does the price impact your evaluation of a restaurant meal?

Psychologists have long believed that we judge experiences based on their most intense moment (the peak) and the last part of the experience (end). But that can change dramatically depending on how much customers are paying for the experience., according to a new paper which investigated how the price of pizza changed the relationship between a consumer's overall evaluation of the meal and the evaluation of each individual slice of pizza.

An international team of astrophysicists led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.

The finding reported Thursday in the journal Science tracks the star -- about the size of our sun -- as it shifts from its customary path, slips into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole and is sucked in, said Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins.

"These events are extremely rare," van Velzen said. "It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months."