A new paper finds that widely available retinal imaging techniques may help reveal more about brain disease and monitor treatment efficacy, including a currently untreatable form of childhood-onset dementia, Sanfilippo syndrome.

Sanfilippo syndrome is one of a group of about 70 inherited conditions which collectively affect 1 in 2800 children in Australia, and is more common than cystic fibrosis and better known diseases. Around the world 700,000 children and young people are living with childhood dementia. The researchers studied Sanfilippo syndrome in mouse models, discovering for the first time that advancement of retinal disease parallels that occurring in the brain. 

Modern science can tell us so much about the hazards of the world that it has become difficult for most people to understand absolute and relative risk. Environmentalists claim they need money to pay lawyers to ban chemicals, even if they are a drop in 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools while epidemiologists can statistically link any common food or product to cancer.

The 10+ Wheat Genomes Project, led by University of Saskatchewan Professor Curtis Pozniak, and the International Barley Pan Genome Sequencing Consortium, led by Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research Professor Nils Stein, have sequenced a suite of genomes of wheat and barley, opening up genetic variations for both.

Alternative Chinese medicine harms endangered species like pangolins, tigers and rhinos, but deniers of evidence-based medicine are often part of the same political tribe as professional conservationists. That confirmation bias about alternative medicine has limited conservation gains.

The use of endangered species in traditional Chinese medicine threatens species' survival. Noting inefficacy and providing various forms of scientific evidence are not influencing decisions and behaviors. Especially because environmentalists often use the same anti-corporate tropes that convince deniers of vaccines that science is a conspiracy.

Most of Ireland’s rocks are the wrong age for dinosaur fossils, either too old or too young. That doesn't mean dinosaurs weren't there, it means fossilization is a true anomaly and finding fossils makes it even more challenging to have hard evidence.

That has now been achieved. Two fossil bones found by the late citizen scientist Roger Byrne, and donated along with many other fossils to Ulster Museum, have been confirmed as early Jurassic rocks found in Islandmagee, on the east coast of County Antrim.

In 2013, the U.S. government told the World Bank they would not help fund centralized energy in developing nations unless it used their pet projects, wind and solar. Which developing nations could not use much less afford.

We set back sanitation and hygiene in places that need it most and forced them to continue doing what they had been doing; burning wood and dung for energy, including in home for cooking. Billions of people still do that because they lack centralized energy and the environmental costs are enormous. Even if those people had been allowed to switch to coal, emissions would plummet and they would be healthier.