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How the far-right became Europe’s new normal
Feb 07, 2020 17:50It was a scandal when a far-right party entered government two decades ago. Now it’s just routine. What happened? Twenty years ago, on Feb. 4, 2000, a shock wave reverberated from the heart of Europe: The far-right Freedom Party of Austria, founded in 1956 by National Socialist activists, entered government.
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Could ‘young’ blood stop us getting old?
Feb 06, 2020 13:25A clutch of scientific startups are trying to discover the secrets of parabiosis and use them to tackle age-related disease. By identifying factors in plasma that change with age, they aim to create therapies that either supplement what’s beneficial in young blood or to inhibit what’s detrimental in old. One is even beginning to report early clinical trial results.
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How smart were our ancestors? Answer isn’t in brain size, but blood flow
Feb 05, 2020 14:33Researchers have often assumed increases in intelligence in human ancestors (hominins) occurred as brains grew larger. This is not an unreasonable assumption; for living primates, the number of nerve cells in the brain is almost proportional to the brain’s volume. Other studies of mammals in general indicate the brain’s metabolic rate — how much energy it needs to run — is nearly proportional to its size.
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Personalized diets may be the future of nutrition, but the science isn’t all there yet
Feb 03, 2020 16:43Nutrition recommendations have focused on properties of food, debating whether focusing on calorie counts, carbohydrates, fats or proteins might be more important. But more studies are showing that people’s bodies can react very differently to the same foods, and standardized nutrition advice doesn’t fit everybody.
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Automation isn’t wiping out jobs. It’s that our engine of growth is winding down
Jan 29, 2020 10:23In the context of economic stagnation, even small increases in productivity are enough to destroy more manufacturing jobs than are created. The best explanation for this worsening economic stagnation is that, since the 1970s, more and more countries adopted export-led growth strategies, built up manufacturing sectors and began to compete in global markets. In this context, countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs.
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Lyme disease patients fight for their lives while academics fight each other
Jan 29, 2020 10:21A study from Johns Hopkins demonstrated that 23 percent of Lyme rashes are not properly diagnosed. The blood tests used to diagnose Lyme are four decades old and unacceptably inaccurate: A review of eight studies that evaluated the effectiveness of these tests revealed that they miss more cases than they diagnose. The result is that many people go undiagnosed and misdiagnosed, leading to a life that can be devastatingly altered or worse.
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Body temperature: What is the new normal?
Jan 15, 2020 16:13Body temperature can indicate and be influenced by many factors; lifestyle habits, age, and ambient temperature can all influence how our body disperses heat. Body temperature is also a marker of metabolic health.
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People with mental illness less likely to get cancer screening
Jan 06, 2020 16:29Lead author Dr. Marco Solmi, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Padua in Italy and colleagues said: “Early cancer screening has been shown to reduce mortality, and delayed cancer diagnosis among people with mental illness could be one reason they are also more likely to die of cancer than the general population.”
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End of disastrous 2019, start of unpredictable 2020
Jan 01, 2020 14:22Wednesday marks the start of the year 2020 of the Christian Gregorian calendar that was ushered in at midnight in the West and in societies influenced by western culture.
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High time for NATO’s end for the sake of global peace
Dec 13, 2019 14:15"NATO is the cause of the new arms race with Russia, including upgrading of nuclear arsenals. Therefore, the sooner it is disbanded the better for world peace and stability, since a relic of the cold war shouldn’t be reconfigured to prolong the US domination of Europe, or to pick up fights with Russia, China, and the Resistant Front of the Muslim World, or to launch suicidal space wars."