The Creature From Frankenstein At Hamburg State Opera

ScienceAlert

Neanderthal Extinction Linked to Genetic Crisis 100,000 Years Ago

The extinction of the Neanderthals is one of the most intriguing mysteries in paleoanthropology, with researchers speculating everything fro

The extinction of the Neanderthals is one of the most intriguing mysteries in paleoanthropology, with researchers speculating everything from shifts in the climate to war with modern humans may have escalated their demise. Many have wondered if our lost human cousins simply didn't have enough variety to cope with these changes. A new study backs up the hypothesis that a dramatic decline in the diversity of their genes prior to their extinction is likely to have played a major role.

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pssssst hey. hey. free and expansive database of folk and fairy tales. you can thank me later

people who work/study in quantitative bio-adjacent fields, rise up. computational neuroscience where you get to see someone's thoughts in feelings in graph form??? so cool. biophysics where you can pass blood plasma through an electric field to determine whether a patient has cancer or not?? unbelievable. biomedical engineering where you can literally build a device to pump someone's heart and be the difference between their life and death??? oh my god. disease modelling, being able to predict AND prevent communities being affected by disease on a large scale through your analysis of data??? i love science

Futurity

Could a drug offer the benefits of exercise?

A drug led obese mice to lose weight by convincing the body's muscles that they're exercising more than they really are, say researchers.

New research with mice shows promising results that could lead to the development of a weight-loss drug that mimics exercise. As reported in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the compound led obese mice to lose weight by convincing the body’s muscles that they are exercising more than they really are, boosting metabolism. It also increased endurance, helping mice run nearly 50% further than they could before. All without the mice lifting a paw. The drug belongs to a class known as “exercise mimetics,” which provide some of the benefits of exercise without increasing physical activity. The new treatment, currently in the early stages of development, could one day be tested in people to treat diseases like obesity, diabetes, and age-related muscle loss. The research comes as drugs like Ozempic have provided a breakthrough in reducing appetite, helping treat these metabolic diseases. But the new drug, SLU-PP-332, doesn’t affect appetite or food intake. Nor does it cause mice to exercise more. Instead, the drug boosts a natural metabolic pathway that typically responds to exercise. In effect, the drug makes the body act like it is training for a marathon, leading to increased energy expenditure and faster metabolism of fat in the body.

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Femme du Djelfa, Algeria

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

In 1561 an innkeeper called Hew Draper was imprisoned in the Tower of London for sorcery. Whilst incarcerated he made these carvings in the walls which displayed astrological symbols and numbers.

Mosaic floor from a villa in Baiae, an ancient Roman luxury town which was submerged centuries ago due to volcanic activity in the area.

Photos: © Edoardo Ruspantini

The Campi Flegrei Archaeological Park. World Heritage Site

from @nationalparknews on ig . “These wolves make a nap in the snow look so cozy! This Yellowstone National Park pack was captured on video lying in some fresh powder, relaxing in the winter sun.”