Scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine have found a molecular defect present in almost all Parkinson's patients which, when targeted and addressed, may help identify people who are vulnerable to the disease and prevent the disease's progression.

“We’ve identified a molecular marker that could allow doctors to diagnose Parkinson’s accurately, early and in a clinically practical way,” said Xinnan Wang, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurosurgery. “This marker could be used to assess drug candidates’ capacity to counter the defect and stall the disease’s progression.”

The scientists also identified a compound that appears to reverse the defect in cells taken from Parkinson’s patients. In animal models of the disease, the compound prevented the death of the neurons whose loss underlies the disease.

(Image credit: Louis Hansel/Unsplash)

I made a tuna casserole, and it turns out that I’ve been right all along. The American idea of classic comfort food is often revolting. Like eating sadness. pic.twitter.com/z0PTgLNOyT

— emily nunn (@EmilyRNunn) June 1, 2019

Most of us know about tuna noodle casserole, but does it stand up today? First, Emily Nunn laid out the argument that the dish is a disappointment in her article The Comfort Food Myth. The classic dish began as a desperation meal for those who couldn't afford better, became a convenience recipe using canned soup in the 1950s, and is now only eaten as a nostalgic comfort food. As such, the only recipe many people can enjoy is the exact one from their childhood.

Samantha Irby responded with another article, Tuna Noodle Casserole: It Only *Sounds* Disgusting. Her position is that there is nothing wrong with comfort food, and she even tells us how to make tuna casserole if you don't already know.

First you need to call your mama, ask her to leave the old Corningware baking dish she stole from your grandma on her front steps, then swing by there on your way home from the grocery store and pick it up because tuna casserole just doesn’t taste right unless it’s from a weird, faded glass dish that only old people care about.

Ahem, you can borrow my CorningWare only if you promise to bring it back within a week. Grandma replaced my thievery decades ago. But I'm kidding myself. One kid won't eat tuna and the other won't eat noodles, and neither will touch mushroom soup. Anyway, Nunn's article from July is still getting vehement responses from people on both sides of the tuna casserole debate. -via Metafilter

A deer stormed into a clothing store in Cortina d’Ampezzo, a Italian mountain resort on the Italian Dolomites. The deer, estimated to be 4 or 5 years old, got trapped inside among the Tirolese outfits the store sold. Cortina’s shopping square was blocked in order to allow veterinarians to catch the animal, anesthetize it, and bring it back to the wild. The deer was brought back to the woods then freed, Cortian mayor Gianpaolo Ghedina reassured AP News. 

image credti: via Time

Nathalie Nguyen, an artist known online as the “3D sorceress” creates the most unique shoe designs in 3d, as if these shoes come out straight from a nerd’s fever dream. Unfortunately, these one-of-a-kind shoe designs are only in 3D rendering, but that doesn’t stop us or the Internet from going crazy over these bad-ass shoes. Nguyen shares to Paper Magazine that the inspiration from her shoe designs come from picking and pulling details from shoes they like and making new designs from them: 

Tricked out with everything from jets to coils, rollerblades, and knobs to molted metals all strapped with buckle closures or suspended on gravity-defying soles, these designs are transcendent, science-fiction imaginings of what footwear can be. "We figured we could start conceptualizing these ideas in a 3D space because our passion wasn't in manufacturing and producing consumer goods, it was showing our work as artists," Nguyen says. As for producing their product in real life, it's still a challenge to create samples with all custom parts that don't completely break the bank for the emerging brand.

image credit: via happy99online on Instagram

Many a restaurant has at least one bottle of this legendary concoction on each of its tables. Here are 11 things you probably didn't know about what is arguably the South's most famous hot sauce.

4. It was originally packaged in cologne bottles.For a long time, there was a rumor that the first batches of Tabasco were bottled in used or discarded cologne bottles. Since then, the company has made it clear that the cologne bottles commissioned by founder Edmund McIlhenny were brand spankin’ new. The bottles were then fitted with sprinkler caps (after people were found to be accidentally pouring too much onto their food!), corked, and sealed with green wax.

Star Wars fans love to pick apart every scene- and for some movies, they've had 40 years to do it. The Empire Strikes Back is still by consensus the best Star Wars film, but one scene has bothered Mike Ryan for years. When Leia, Han, and Chewbacca arrive at Cloud City, they have a nice reunion with Lando Calrission, take time to shower and change, and then they proceed to a banquet room for "a little refreshment." Darth Vader, who'd been there since before our heroes landed, is waiting to arrest them. So why arrange a dinner? No one got to eat anything. Was there food? Was Vader behind that plan? Ryan imagines a deleted scene that explains all that.

Lando: “Do you want us to set the table? With plates and everything?”

Vader: “Yes.”

Fett: “Are we actually going to eat?”

Vader: “No.”

Fett: “So what happens then?’

Vader: “I guess we just capture them.”

Lando: “I swear you could just do all that right now without this choreographed dinner table plan.”

Vader: [Force chokes Lando]

Lando: “Gaaaa … okay, the dinner table plan is a good plan.”

There's more to it, including Vader's rehearsed bon mots to add drama to the scene, at Uproxx.

It might not happen as soon as some people think, but one day, humans will travel from Earth to Mars. It won't be just an exploratory stop, either, so they'll have to produce food. What will people eat on Mars? According to the movie The Martian, it's potatoes. Planetary scientist Kevin Cannon and colleague Daniel Britt crunched the data and published a paper titled Feeding One Million People on Mars. It charts a path toward self-sufficiency for a large colony over the course of a hundred years. Cannon talked to Smithsonian about their plan.

What practical factors did you consider when thinking about food production on Mars?

What turns out to be the real limiting factor is the amount of land that you require. The reason why that's so important on Mars is that when you think about land, you're really talking about building an enclosed structure. You have to pressurize it, you have to heat it and you have to light it to protect against the Martian environment. There's almost no atmosphere. It's very cold. So, land turns out to be the most important driver. The more land you have to use to grow food, then the more construction, the more power, et cetera.

How did you determine which food sources would be well-suited for life on Mars?

We looked at this in a very general way. We thought, okay, let's start from plants, because that's what most people assumed in the past when they thought about what people would be eating on space missions. And let's go a little bit beyond that to some protein sources. So, we looked at what's being done on Earth and we honed in on insect-based foods that turned out to be very efficient for Mars, as well as what's called cellular agriculture. That’s this idea of growing meat from cells in these large bioreactors. It’s something that's actually coming a lot sooner than people think on Earth, and it's very well-adapted for producing food in space.

Read the rest of the interview at Smithsonian.

Where were you in 1979? Wherever it was, you were probably listening to this music. The video is a smoothly-edited mashup of 50 songs from the year 1979, from the Sugarhill Gang to the Talking Heads to Van Halen. And even if you weren't born yet forty years ago, you'll still enjoy it. There's a list of the artists at the YouTube page. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the names of all the songs used. -via Metafilter

Ze Frank explores the inner nine lives of cats who are ready to share their concerns with a therapist. It's not easy being a pet. One can only hope that these poor, traumatized creatures can find some peace.

Here's an honest opinion from Matt Miller of Esquire on Todd Phillips' Joker: it's in desperate need of a hero aka Batman.

I haven't seen the film myself but if the review gives a more or less accurate depiction of the story, then there are two things: one, it has done an excellent portrayal of the birth and inner workings of a villain; and two, it has successfully produced the affect it intended on the audience.

However, there is still something to be said about a sequel. Miller talks about not having closure by the end of the film. Due to the nihilistic perspective of the story, seeing that it's from the point of view of the famous Batman villain, it doesn't show a "happy ending".

And sure, it might just be setting up an origin story for Batman. Whether or not it will happen is anyone's guess. But showing this caricature of Joker could probably help give more substance to the character and to the circumstances that led him to his present situation.

In other words, the film helps us understand where the character is coming from. On the other hand, if the film becomes a box office hit, then we might see a sequel sooner rather than later.

(Image credit: DC Films/Warner Bros. Pictures; IMDb)

Over one in three adults aged 18 to 25 reported to have problematic levels of loneliness, according to a new report from Swinburne University and VicHealth.

1,520 Victorians aged 12 to 25 were surveyed. They examined their levels of loneliness, and they were asked about their symptoms of depression and social anxiety.

Over all, the report showed that one in four people aged 12 to 25 felt lonely for three or more days during the last week.

Among 18 to 25 year olds, one in three (35%) reported feeling lonely three or more times a week. We also found that higher levels of loneliness increases a young adult’s risk of developing depression by 12% and social anxiety by 10%.

Adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported better outcomes, with one in seven (13%) feeling lonely three or more times a week. Participants in this age group were also less likely to report symptoms of depression and social anxiety than the 18 to 25 year olds.

Thankfully, there is hope, and we can do something to help these young adults.

Find out more about this over at The Conversation.

(Image Credit: Free-Photos/ Pixabay)

Japanese cuisine has some of the most intricate meal preparations and traditions which have been passed down from one generation to the next. But that doesn't mean that such rigidity leaves no room for creativity or innovation. On the contrary, culinary art is a space where one's imagination and skill flourishes and evolves over time.

In an obscure place in Broadway Alley, not visible from the streets of Seattle, lies Hideaki Taneda's humble restaurant where he serves a fusion of two Japanese styles of cuisine: kaiseki and sushi.

Taneda keeps the lights on high, Japanese style, so his audience can watch him wrap sweet Canadian shrimp around uni and dot snow crab with glowing granules of caviar—“I want to show them my skill.” He’s not messing around.

He is, however, taking some liberties with two different branches of Japanese food. Before he left Tokyo, he spent six years at a restaurant that cross-pollinated kaiseki and sushi.

“It’s not very common in Japan,” he acknowledges. His own restaurant returns to this approach, embedding certain kaiseki traditions into a framework more familiar to Americans—the sushi omakase.

(Image credit: Hilary McMullen/Seattle Met)

This is Dr. Alec Couros, a professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina in Canada. Since 2007, Couros took photos of himself and his daughter sitting on the couch while they hold their respective laptops. While his daughter grew up on the photos, Couros did not, and he seems to be getting younger as time passed by.

Not only does it look like he doesn’t age, in fact, at 48 years old, he looks much younger, more energetic, more full of life, and more handsome than before.

In an exclusive and in-depth interview, Dr. Couros talked to Bored Panda about the photos with his daughter, how he changed his life, as well as about the foundation of a healthy relationship between parents and children.

Check out the full interview over at the site.

(Image Credit: courosa/ Reddit)

Artificial intelligence has been shown to be just as good and even slightly better than human doctors in making medical diagnoses using images.

A thorough analysis of various studies that were published since 2012 was carried out by the researchers. The AI used in the studies used deep learning in classifying the images based on certain features, which were compared to visuals of diseases.

To come to such conclusions, the scientists made an effort to whittle down the list of often-poor studies they looked at from 20,000 to just 14 which had the best quality data. In these studies, the deep learning systems used images from datasets that were separate from the ones used to train them. These same images were then shown to human experts.

The researchers found that AI was able to correctly pinpoint illnesses 87% of the time. That's compared to 86% for healthcare pros. The AI was also right in clearing people of diseases 93% of the time, in contrast to 91% of human experts. One caveat to this statistic was that the healthcare workers tested were not given extra info about patients that they would have had in real-world situations.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

When the meaty meatless burgers were still new a few years ago, they were filled with mystery. As they slowly crept onto the food scene, chef Paul Canales became curious about these mysterious burgers. Back then, products like the Impossible Burger were harder to acquire. Canales, however, managed to secure 20 pounds of the goods which he can play with at Duende, the Spanish restaurant he runs in Oakland, California.

“I wasn’t happy with it as a burger, so I came up with this idea of making a meatball,” Canales recalls. He added cumin, garlic, and parsley and fried the “meat” into something resembling Spanish-style meatballs, calling his creation albondigas improbables (improbable meatballs).

The people loved Canales’s creation, and according to him, “they’d get two or three orders at a time.” But despite his sucess in his creation, something still bothered Canales: he didn’t know what exactly he was serving.

“You can’t really identify vegetables in it at all,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m selling a ton, but am I really providing nutrition to people?’”

Canales isn’t the only one wondering about the nutritional value of products like the Impossible and Beyond burgers, which have officially gone mainstream now that McDonald’s and Burger King have added them to their menus. While advocates for a plant-based diet welcome such products as a way to reduce meat consumption, dietitians are asking: Are they actually good for you?

“‘Good for you’ is a subjective question,” says Jill Edwards, director of education for the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies. “What are we comparing it to? Is it healthier than the comparative beef burger? Absolutely.”

Know more about this meaty meatless topic over at Medium.

(Image Credit: Impossible Foods/ Twitter)