(ChildofMidnight/Wikimedia Commons)
A few snippets of science to round out your week.
- Milk didn’t always do a body good. But the combination of a genetic mutation and the discovery that milk could be fermented may have fueled — quite literally — the rise of farming in prehistoric Europe.
- Not only might urine power cell phones of the future, but it (rather, cells that get flushed with it) might also help dentists grow new teeth for you.
- A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but a ductal carcinoma in situ isn’t really a carcinoma or a cancer and shouldn’t necessarily be treated like one. To save patients from overtreatment — and, frankly, fear — and given that many of the lesions doctors detect will never grow into anything fatal, a panel of cancer doctors and researchers are calling for tighter definitions for which cellular overgrowths should be labeled “cancer.”
- New genome studies are helping scientists make sense of how we sense scents.
- The Chelyabinsk meteor that made a dramatic entrance over Siberia earlier this year might have made its home in a cluster of space rocks first seen in 2011.
- As primitive birds go, Archaeopteryx may have been flashy and all, but it was otherwise pretty unremarkable, according to a new study of the brain cases of fossils from several species of ancient birds.
- Are you ruled by your heart or your gut? Given that the medications you take for your heart can be changed by bacteria in your gut — a phenomenon probed in a recent study — I think the answer is: your microbes.
- See, even farming amoebas use pesticides. They just happen to be organic.
- “Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth.” And they weren’t even talking about Wall Street. Boom!
- How would you have liked to be wheeled into an operating room for surgery and, just before the anesthetic took hold, see the surgical team walk in in space suits?
- Say hello to your robot phlebotomist. It’s just as likely to miss your vein as a human one. Keep working on it, guys.
- Does your sweet tooth mean you’re a drunkard? Maaayyyybeeeeee…….
