As nutrition researcher Marion Nestle puts it: “Many — if not most — studies demonstrating that breakfast eaters are healthier and manage weight better than non-breakfast eaters were sponsored by Kellogg or other breakfast cereal companies whose businesses depend on people believing that breakfast means ready-to-eat cereal.” Eating breakfast doesn’t help with weight loss and may even promote weight gain

More recently, researchers have published randomized controlled trials that can better pinpoint the effects that eating or skipping breakfast have on weight loss. Instead, the people who ate breakfast consumed 260 more calories per day and weighed a pound more than the breakfast skippers, so “caution is needed when recommending breakfast for weight loss in adults, as it may have the opposite effect.”

For a few years now, Bishop, a 29-year-old programmer and Bitcoin investor, has been leaving a trail of comments about human “enhancement” on the web. According to the e-mail, sent in May, Bishop and his partner in the enterprise, Max Berry, a former biotech company lab scientist, were “starting a company focused on the production of designer babies and human germline genetic engineering.” A copy of his business proposal says his venture plans to let parents have transgenic children who can “grow muscle without weightlifting,” who possess genes from long-lived “supercentenarians,” or who are endowed with the AB+ blood type, meaning they could receive a transfusion from baby enthusiasts Bryan Bishop (left) and Max Berry at the Genome Project-Write conference.

Though Kirkpatrick does acknowledge that the science behind oregano oil’s alleged powers is a little weak, she doesn’t unequivocally deny that it could help alleviate cold symptoms — it’s an appropriately skeptical stance that I appreciate. There may be little scientific research into oregano oil’s anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties — it hasn’t gotten nearly the same amount of attention as, say, echinacea — but I could simply interpret this to mean that the scientific community simply hasn’t yet come around to its beneficial properties. I shill out an embarrassing amount of money on weird powders that supposedly make me hotter and tinctures that ease me into a pleasant fugue state, but in buying oregano oil, I’m accepting that my immune system will yet again fail me in the future.

In Chicago, for example, wind gusts of up to 24 miles per hours will generate a temperature with wind chill of minus 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind chill index was adopted by NWS in the 1970s and then updated in 2001 to reflect modern understandings of human body temperature. The temperature of the air is the same on both days, but gusts of wind strip heat away from the body, making a person physically colder than they would be on a less windy day.

In the latest IVG achievement from Saitou’s lab, Yamashiro led researchers in a study that used the technique to grow a very early stage version of a human egg — called an oogonia — from human stem cells derived from blood. To reach the point where a fertility technician can punch out a piece of skin and transform it into sperm or eggs, scientists need to understand every key step in how a person is made, from how early sex cells develop in an embryo to what happens during puberty about 13 years later — and shrink the complexity and timeline of that development into a petri dish. (Because it is difficult to get human fetal tissue, she is growing the human egg cells in fetal mouse ovaries.)

In 2008, two psychiatrists theorized that disruptions in the normal functioning of the CSTC loop was largely responsible for the altered states of consciousness experienced by people who take LSD, psilocybin, and other classical psychedelics. In particular, this CSTC model focused on the thalamus, a region of the brain that processes sensory information, regulates the information that gets passed to the cortex, which is responsible for consciousness, attention, memory, and other major brain functions. LSD targets many of the receptors that regulate the CSTC loop, so by imaging the brains of their subjects when they were on LSD and when they were sober, the researchers could see how LSD affects the normal functioning of the CSTC loop.

China’s recent scientific achievements – including its embryo gene-editing research and historic moon landing – appear to be surrounded by secrecy. In fact, China later condemned the research, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal – blaming the scientist. But my research on China’s life sciences over the last 14 years suggests that the culture actually stems from something else: a sense of sociopolitical insecurity.

Using brain-scanning technology, artificial intelligence, and speech synthesizers, scientists have converted brain patterns into intelligible verbal speech—an advance that could eventually give voice to those without. New research published today in Scientific Advances takes us an important step closer to that goal, but instead of capturing an individual’s internal thoughts to reconstruct speech, it uses the brain patterns produced while listening to speech. “Since the goal of this work is to restore speech communication in those who have lost the ability to talk, we aimed to learn the direct mapping from the brain signal to the speech sound itself,” he told Gizmodo.

Patterns in cases of IBD have led researchers to find out if air pollution is one of these environmental triggers, including data showing that they are more common in urban than rural areas, and that more developed nations have higher rates of IBD. It’s thought that air pollution plays a part in the development of IBD by changing the gut microbiome, which causes an immune response and inflammation. While he didn’t find an association between newly diagnosed cases of IBD and levels of air pollution on the whole, he found that Crohn’s disease was more commonly found in young people with higher exposures to nitrogen dioxide.

After ten years of puzzling over this unexpected imbalance between polar auroras, researchers led by Anders Ohma, a graduate student at the University of Bergen in Norway, think the answer could be the tilted pressure that the solar wind exerts on Earth’s magnetic field. First, a quick refresher on auroras: These lights are caused when the solar wind, which carries charged particles and plasma from the Sun, slams into Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar particles are funneled into Earth’s magnetic field lines, which run from pole to pole, until they run out of energy in the atmosphere.