The doctors attributed his cancer — adenocarcinoma, which usually occurs in the lower portion of the esophagus — to gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) — basically, chronic heartburn. Globally, most esophageal cancer is designated as squamous cell carcinoma, which typically occurs in the upper and middle part of the esophagus and is associated with alcohol and tobacco use. Still, data from the National Cancer Institute shows the incidence rate of esophageal adenocarcinoma has increased for all age groups 30 and older since the 1970s — though the disease skews heavily toward older white men, while squamous cell carcinoma remains more common in African-Americans.

Missouri has banned the use of the word “meat” to apply to anything that isn’t derived from an animal, and the National Farmers Union in the U.S. is lobbying for the word “meat” to be removed from the labelling of synthetic meat products like those sold by Impossible Foods. A global turn away from meat would also require livestock farmers to find alternative livelihoods.Chris Davis at Impossible Foods believes rainforests could even recover their historic ranges. Industrial farming of cows and chickens is far from pleasant, and farmers could switch from producing low-value products for animal feed, such as corn and soy, to high value products for use in synthetic meat and dairy production.

The New Orleans Lakefront Airport was built by the Louisiana governor Huey P. Long on a tongue of fill that sticks out into Lake Pontchartrain. Its terminal was designed by the same architect Long had used to build a new Louisiana state capitol and a new governor’s mansion, and it was originally named for one of Long’s cronies, Abraham Shushan. In the last seven thousand years, the river has avulsed six times, and each time it has set about laying down a new bulge of land.

Some believe that the discovery might herald a new category for how quantum particles interact and behave — one that defies physicists’ assumptions that such a system follows an inexorable march toward thermalization. “The available quantum system can exist in so many possible states that it would be extremely hard for them to come back and find where they came from,” said Zlatko Papić, a physicist at the University of Leeds in England. In the 1980s, the physicist Eric Heller of Harvard was exploring quantum chaos: What happens when you apply quantum mechanics to chaotic systems?

A deep dive into the world of Generation Rescue has revealed that the organization doesn’t just promote ineffective or medically unproven or downright debunked treatments for autism (all of which has been demonstrated before): The organization and the people associated with it profit from them, too. In two cases, Generation Rescue has heavily promoted products owned by past board members, at the time they served on the board: hyperbaric oxygen chambers and B12 lollipops, both of which have been presented on GR’s website as near-miraculous treatments for symptoms of autism. One of Generation Rescue’s often-cited medical experts, who’s appeared repeatedly at their conferences, is a past member of their medical advisory board, and is quoted more than once on their website, is a doctor who was placed on probation in 2011 for prescribing chelation and other questionable medical treatments to a 7-year-old child.

In a strange paradox, the San Andreas produces only big earthquakes because it is what seismologists consider a “weak” fault. The motion of that ripple across the “rug” of the San Andreas Fault creates the seismic energy that we experience as an earthquake. Some people think that modern technology has solved much of the fire problem because the two big California earthquakes of the late twentieth century, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco and the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, did not lead to devastating fire

Drawing on evidence across multiple continents, scientists say these Snowball Earth events may have paved the way for the Cambrian explosion of life that followed — the period when complex, multicellular organisms began to diversify and spread across the planet. When Caltech geologist Joe Kirschvink coined the term Snowball Earth in 1989 — merging ideas that some geologists, climate physicists and planetary chemists had been thinking about for decades  — many earth scientists were skeptical that these cataclysmic events could really have occurred. For a long time we had a lot of evidence for glaciation at low latitude and in the warmest parts of the Earth, but we didn’t really have a good idea of the dates of these events.

Cow 401 and her herdmates were the product of two and a half years of research, Van Eenennaam’s attempt to create a strain of gene-edited cattle specially suited to the needs of the beef industry. Since beef ranchers generally prefer males to females (more meat for the money), Van Eenennaam believed there could someday be a market for these Crispr’d animals. If and when the FDA decides to weigh in, says Hank Greely, a bioethicist and professor of law at Stanford, it will have to reckon with the unique risks of gene editing—that an edit might produce new allergens, for example, or spread from livestock to their wild cousins.

In 2015, researchers made history by detecting gravitational waves from colliding black holes for the first time — and this was such a milestone that three U.S. physicists almost immediately won the Nobel Prize for their work on the project. The 2017 Nobel Prize in physics laureates (from left) Barry C. Barish, Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, pose during a joint news conference in December 2017 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm. Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

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Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

The 2017 Nobel Prize in physics laureates (from left) Barry C. Barish, Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, pose during a joint news conference in December 2017 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm.

Now a study in the journal Brain reveals differences in the sensory nerves that enter the spinal cords of men and women with neuropathic pain, which is persistent shooting or burning pain. Tailoring new medicines to men or women would be revolutionary, particularly considering that it took many years for women (and female animals) to get included in pain research at all. Mogil once emailed a researcher, asking whether a pain drug worked better in men than women.