Research

Your diet exerts considerable influence over your health, and that's partly due to its effect on gut bacteria. The foods you regularly eat have a distinct impact on your gut microbiome, which is easily influenced by things like whether you get enough dietary fiber every day or not. A new study has found that consuming specific types of food and beverages may fuel pro-inflammatory gut bacteria changes and lead to health issues.

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High blood pressure is a common condition that, if left untreated, can lead to a variety of health conditions later in life, including heart disease and stroke. According to a new study from the University of California - San Francisco, reducing your odds of developing high blood pressure in midlife will require more than the minimum recommended amount of exercise every week.

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A groundbreaking experiment blending human and monkey cells could pave the way to artificially-grown replacement organs - while raising new ethical questions about so-called chimeric hybrids. It's the latest expansion of stem cell research, which has simultaneously fascinated scientists hoping to unlock new disease treatments and more, while horrifying groups concerned about the ethics or misuse of the technology.

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Engineers from the University of California, Berkeley have announced the creation of a very small wireless implantable to provide real-time measurements of tissue oxygen levels deep within the body. The device is very small at approximately the size of a ladybug, and is powered by ultrasound waves. Researchers believe the device could help medical professionals monitor the health of transplanted organs or tissue and provide them with early warning signs of tissue failure or organ rejection.

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DARPA has announced that it has awarded contracts for the first phase of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program. The program's stated goal is to demonstrate a nuclear thermal propulsion system above low Earth orbit by 2025. The trio of prime contractors selected by DARPA includes General Atomics, Blue Origin, and Lockheed Martin.

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If you thought the first image of a black hole in distant galaxy M87 was something special two years ago, a newly-released video pulling together the work of 19 observatories will just about blow you away. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the 25 billion mile wide black hole for the very first time, but don't let the name fool you into imagining one telescope with an astronomer's eye pressed to the viewfinder.

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It's notoriously difficult to predict volcanic corruptions. There are often signs that a volcano is likely to erupt in the future, including an increase in seismic activity, changes in gas emissions, and sudden ground deformation but accurately predicting eruptions is hard. Part of the challenge is that no two volcanoes behave exactly the same way before they erupt and another part is because only a few of the active volcanoes around the world have monitoring systems in place.

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NASA is talking about a new space telescope that will launch in the mid-2020s. The new telescope is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or simply the Roman Space Telescope. It's an infrared telescope that will help NASA peer into the infrared universe in an unprecedented fashion. One of the most important things that the Roman Space Telescope will allow NASA to do is detect solitary small black holes for the first time.

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When it comes to ants, some are very small, like the fire ants that plague the Southern US, and some are quite large. One of the larger varieties of ant is the Indian jumping ant that is about an inch long. As the name suggests, the ants inhabit India's floodplains and can jump about four inches into the air and capture and kill prey about twice its size. The ants also have an incredible ability to adjust the size of their brains.

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If you consume cannabis products on occasion, you may experience a side effect that impacts vision -- and yet fail to realize that it's occurring. That's according to a new study from the University of Granada, which found multiple vision changes that occurred after consuming the substance, ones that the majority of users didn't recognize or underestimated.

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Researchers from Utrecht University and TU Wien (Vienna) have created special light waves that can penetrate opaque materials as if the material wasn't there. The beam of light can pass through a distorted medium and project the same picture onto a detector that would be detected without the medium in the way.

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While lots of people out there don't want anything to do with walking through a spiderweb or the arachnids themselves, at some point, most of us have probably stood back and admired the complexity of a spiderweb. Spiders can weave strands of silk into incredibly intricate 3D webs serving as both the home for the spider and hunting grounds for prey. Scientists at MIT have translated the structure of a spiderweb into music.

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