Science

The number of young people living with debilitating and incurable bowel conditions worldwide is growing, but researchers now hope a one-of-a-kind microscope will help them understand such diseases and find new treatments.

According to the British Society of Gastroenterology, more than half a million people in the UK are living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis the two main forms.

While such conditions can develop at any age, experts say they are most often diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 40, blighting lives at a crucial time for education, work and relationships.

Now a new piece of kit could bring fresh hope to those affected by IBD.

“What this microscope technology and what the science we do in the lab can bring is really to understand the mechanism [of IBD] better,” said Dr Karina Pombo-Garcia, a group leader at the Rosalind Franklin Institute at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, where the microscope is housed.

“With IBD, and with other many diseases that we collaborate with other groups to study, there [are] some treatments, but maybe those treatments still are not maybe the best or the most targeted that we can do because we … fundamentally don’t understand the disease fully.”

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You can model a universal quantum computer as a kind of probabilistic computer by starting with bits with definite values (usually all initialized to 0) which then undergo stochastic hops at each logic gate.

The stochastic matrices can be computed by starting with |U|² as the base stochastic matrix and then modifying it as little as possible such that it correctly maps |ψ(t)|² to |ψ(t+1)|², which can be done with an algorithm known as iterative proportional fitting.

For this demo, I am using the same methodology, but representing the 0s and 1s of the bits as positions on a grid. So, there are 8 qubits associated with the y-position and 9 qubits associated with the x-position, so it can be displayed on a 512x256 grid.

Then, a unitary operator is being applied on top of its qubit memory state at every discrete time step, causing the bits to hop to a new value, which since they're being plotted on a grid, it causes the "particle" on the screen to move to a new value.

This isn't Bohmian mechanics since the trajectories are not deterministic and there is no guiding equation. The trajectories are random.

The study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smll.202507934

The last time the Standard BMI was officially updated through proper, official channels was in 1998 (1, 2, 3). At that time, the NIH changed the threshold for “overweight”, officially lowering it to a BMI of 25 and aligning it with World Health Organization guidelines. The only thing the Standard BMI does, via height and weight, is estimate body fat to assess health risks.

That is literally the only thing the BMI does, estimate body fat to assess health risks (4, 5, 1, 3). It does nothing else (no, it does not estimate health, only healthy weight). Yes, the accuracy of the BMI is debatable, for sure. However, the simple definition of the Standard BMI is not debatable — it is set in stone until changed via official protocol.

This is the current official Standard BMI scale:

18.49 or less – underweight, not a healthy weight due to too little regular white/yellow body fat (common adipose tissue)

18.5 to 24.99 – normal weight, healthy weight due to no excess regular white/yellow body fat (common adipose tissue)

25 to 29.99 – overweight, not a healthy weight due to too much/excess regular white/yellow body fat (common adipose tissue)

30+ – obese, not a healthy weight due to way too much/excess regular white/yellow body fat (common adipose tissue)

In 2016, the NIH released its first-ever (initial) definition for normal-weight obesity (skinny fat)(6):

“Normal-weight obesity syndrome is characterized by excess body fat in individuals with adequate body mass index (18.5-24.9 kg/m(2))”

Which directly contradicts the Standard BMI definition (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). No official change to the BMI happened – the BMI definition/scale did not change.

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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles/p/1397069/remote-work-increases-sleep-and-reduces-physical-activity-sedentary-behaviour-can-increa

Gluons carry a color charge so they actually attract each other and stick together, so you can theoretically strip away all the physical matter to leave just a knot of pure force behind which physicists call a glueball. People predicted these things back in the seventies but the math was brutally difficult to solve back then, then supercomputers finally calculated exactly what this particle should look like a couple of decades ago. A massive machine in Beijing then smashed electrons and positrons together for years to produce enough energy to catch one, and scientists dug through all the data to find a very specific energy spike that would be a marker of a glueball.

Once it was found, the next step was to prove that this thing was actually pure force. This was done by calculating the spin and quantum properties of the mystery particle to see how they compared to the models. The numbers matched perfectly and the signal was so strong that it couldn't be dismissed as a random fluke, but the team still faced a massive challenge to prove the particle contained absolutely no regular matter. Regular particles contain quarks that break apart into very recognizable pieces, but a glueball's mathematically forbidden from breaking down into those specific combinations. The researchers focused entirely on finding those forbidden fragments by analyzing a decade worth of data from the collider to look for normal matter signatures or unexpected reactions with light. And since they found absolutely nothing, that meant that the particle left no normal debris behind because they contained no physical matter.

We now know that pure force can ball up and exist as a physical entity on its own. You've probably heard about the Higgs particle giving things mass, but that only accounts for a tiny fraction of an atom's weight. The chaotic energy of these bizarre gluons is what generates the other 99% of the mass in the entire universe. The physicists pinned down a real glueball and fully validated the exact mechanism that gives mass to everything around us.

Ten research teams were honored at a satirical science awards ceremony that was hosted outside the U.S. for the first time due to travel concerns. A study of cockroach milk was among the winners.

You can read the full lists here:

• https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2026
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners

In short:

Archaeologists have found evidence of a person who used a psychoactive drug up to 25,000 years ago.

Tooth fossils in Indonesia suggest that ancient foragers in the region were sucking on betel nut, possibly as a painkiller.
What's next?

Human drug use is probably older than this sample, but evidence is harder to come by.

Turns out the cortisol spike from exercise suppresses the next cortisol response from a stressor. So you should exercise before stressful things.

This paper examines whether hiring discrimination against transgender women arises from gender identity, non-cisnormative appearance, or their interaction. In a German field experiment, I send 10,022 fictitious applications in matched pairs to real job postings. Applications randomly vary whether the applicant visually looks like a cisgender woman–that is, whether she "passes"–and whether she indirectly discloses a transgender identity through a male-to-female name change. Relative to otherwise similar cisgender women, applicants receive 4.1 percentage points (pp) fewer positive responses (9%) when they disclose a name change but pass and 4.6 pp fewer (10%) when they do not disclose but do not pass. Applicants with both signals receive 15.2 pp fewer responses (32%), significantly larger than the sum of individual penalties. The non-passing penalty is larger in postings with a male contact person and in customer-facing occupations; discrimination overall is larger when employers face less competition for workers. A follow-up survey experiment elicits perceptions of otherwise similar transgender and cisgender applicants to examine potential mechanisms and heterogeneity by characteristics unobservable in the field experiment.

A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the journal of JAMA Pediatrics found that puberty suppression in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents temporarily slows bone development, particularly at the lumbar spine. While absolute bone mineral density remained stable during puberty suppression, it increased modestly after gender-affirming hormone therapy, with partial recovery of bone health when compared to peers.

Puberty represents a key window for achieving peak bone mass, which plays an important role in determining fracture risk later in life. As the use of puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone therapy continues to expand in gender-diverse youth, understanding their long-term effects on skeletal health has become increasingly important.

A new systematic review and meta-analysis has found that while pubertal suppression with temporarily slows bone mineral accrual in transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) adolescents, subsequent gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) promotes substantial recovery in bone health. However, researchers say the extent of long-term "catch-up" remains uncertain, underscoring the importance of careful monitoring during treatment.

• Invidious, a privacy focused YouTube frontend: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=58x8FebkTSA

Video description:

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the newly launched Nancy Grace Roman telescope Links:

• https://science.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/9-things-to-know-about-nasas-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope/
• https://science.nasa.gov/roman-and-webb/

0:00 NASA Launched a new observatory - Roman telescope 
0:50 This was supposed to be a spy satellite 
2:10 Success story 
3:50 Why this telescope is so important 
5:40 Exoplanet search 
6:35 How is it different from JWST? 
8:10 Working with Webb 
8:55 Unique missions 
10:20 Exciting discoveries 
12:10 Why it's exciting for everyone 
13:10 Who is Nancy Grace Roman though?

If the cheetahs had evolved in lockstep with the pronghorns, this then raised the question of what they were eating in Alaska. At the time, the land would have been filled with a range of other herbivores, including bison, horses, and caribou.

But the data gleaned from the bones show, extraordinarily, that that is not what they were eating.

“They’re not just eating mostly fish,” explains Cassatt-Johnstone. “It seems like they’re eating almost exclusively fish.”

“When we compare our data to published modern data of carnivores that we know eat exclusively aquatic marine resources, we see that they’re sitting in a position right between orcas, which are exclusively fish eaters, and outer island wolves from British Columbia, which are commonly known as sea wolves because they eat almost exclusively fish.”

Study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)01003-1

Turns out that older brains may not simply hold onto memories more weakly. In some cases, they hold onto too much of the wrong thing, replaying scattered pieces of unrelated experiences and stitching them into false connections.