In 1989, Timothy Sullivan had an ear infection, and he was urged to take antibiotics. After popping a giant tablet of amoxicillin one summer afternoon, he jumped up to celebrate “after confirming that [he] had not asphyxiated and died.” Unfortunately, his celebration ended rather quickly when he realized that he still had 41 tablets of amoxicillin left to take. His doctor told him to take all of these tablets, even if his ear infection was already resolved — he must finish the course.

While some doctors still urge patients to finish lengthy antibiotic treatments for simple infections, the evidence for this recommendation has largely been debunked.

Actually, the evidence never really existed. Traditional antibiotic prescriptions, often written for seven, 10 or 14 days weren’t based on science—they might well have come instead from associations with familiar numbers, such as the number of days in a week or toes on our feet. But for many infections, recent research has shown that shorter antibiotic durations are just as effective, often with fewer harmful side effects.

More details about this over at Scientific American.

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

With each turn, several hundred million years pass. That’s how slow this slow dance of these two galaxies, the NGC 5394 and the NGC 5395, is. As they whirl about each other, a flourish of sparks appear because of gravitational interaction, and new stars are formed. If that’s not romantic, I don’t know what is.

The featured image, taken with the Gemini North 8-meter telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii, USA, combines four different colors. Emission from hydrogen gas, colored red, marks stellar nurseries where new stars drive the evolution of the galaxies. Also visible are dark dust lanes that mark gas that will eventually become stellar nurseries. If you look carefully you will see many more galaxies in the background, some involved in their own slow cosmic dances.

We could make a love story out of this.

(Image Credit: Gemini, NSF, OIR Lab, AURA)

Plastic waste has been one of the most pressing concerns in the past years. Despite all the efforts to save the environment, sometimes it feels like we're fighting a loosing battle, right? Well, these caterpillars are giving us renewed hopes! 

"We found that waxworm caterpillars are endowed with gut microbes that are essential in the plastic biodegradation process, " said Christophe LeMoine, an associate professor and chair of biology at Brandon University in Canada.

"This process seems reliant on a synergy between the caterpillars and their gut bacteria to accelerate polyethylene degradation."

…

Its plastic-eating skills were discovered accidentally when an amateur beekeeper in Spain plucked some of the pests from her beehives and put them in a plastic bag. The worms eventually ate little holes in the bag, chewing through the plastic at an alarming rate. 

Federica Bertocchini, the beekeeper, who also happened to be a scientist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria, then put together a study to see just how good the little grubs were at breaking down plastic. The team found the wax worms broke down polyethylene plastic bags faster than other methods.

LeMoine said the waxworms were not an immediate solution to plastic pollution, with still more work to be done to understand how the caterpillars and the microbes in their digestive tract work together before it can be adapted and replicated on a large scale. 

While there's still a lot of research that needs to be done, this discovery is a good step for us!

Photo by Harald Grove

The game Foldit was developed years ago and launched to the public in 2008. The Game Science department and the Biochemistry department at the University of Washington combined forces to develop a video game that would crowdsource the structures of proteins, which can be folded in unlimited ways. Now the game has been recruited in the fight against the coronavirus that causes the dreaded Covid-19 illness.

In the game, players are shown the binding site of the coronavirus spike protein. To come up with folding solutions, you'll have to understand some basics of both proteins and how the coronavirus invades human cells. Luckily, all of this is explained in extensive detail on the game website.

The objective is to design a protein that binds to the available sidechains at the spike protein's binding site, where it typically interacts with human cells. This protein will effectively block all interactions between the viral protein and human cells.

Sounds like a win-win situation. You can play the game and enjoy it, learn something about science, and maybe contribute to saving lives! Read more about Foldit's new mission at the game site. -Thanks, Brother Bill!

It's more common now for actors to use their real names than in the past, while singers are more apt to take a stage name than in the past. But whether the name is real, made up for show business, or some combination of both, there's always a story behind them. Mindy Kaling's name is pretty honest, but reveals both her age and her mother's taste in television. The story behind the name Deadmau5 is both random and bizarre.

Read the stories behind 22 stage names at Cracked.

Boris Milosic broke a world record when he was able to walk 328 feet horizontally while completely underwater. Milosic successfully attempted to break the previous record of 262 feet in a Croation pool. He went underwater at the Marina Kastela pool in Kastel Gomilica. Now that’s an amazing feat! 

(via UPI)

Fake accounts have plagued, and is continuously plaguing the Internet up to this day. They spread spam and phishing links, as well as malwares that can damage computers. Thankfully, social media platforms who combat these fake accounts, like Facebook, who took down an average of 2 billion fake accounts last year. The question is, how do they know which are fake accounts? Facebook reveals how they do it.

The tech giant distinguishes between two types of fake accounts. First there are “user-misclassified accounts,” personal profiles for businesses or pets that are meant to be Pages. These are relatively straightforward to deal with—they just get converted to Pages. “Violating accounts,” on the other hand, are more serious. These are personal profiles that engage in scamming and spamming or otherwise violate the platform’s terms of service. Violating accounts need to be removed as quickly as possible without casting too wide a net and snagging real accounts as well.

To do this, Facebook uses hand-coded rules and machine learning to block a fake account either before it is created or before it becomes active. In other words, before it can harm real users. The final stage is after a fake account has gone live. This is when detection gets a lot trickier and where the new machine-learning system, known as Deep Entity Classification (DEC), comes in.

More details about this over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: ElisaRiva/ Pixabay)

Did you know that in the United States, one in ten adults suffer from type 2 diabetes? Out of these 30 million people, a fourth of these are not even aware that they contracted the disease. Furthermore, for every person who has type 2 diabetes, there are two more who are considered prediabetic.

Often referred to as Adult Onset Diabetes in old medical texts because it usually develops in midlife, type 2 diabetes is now prevalent even among children, too, as childhood obesity rates increase.

The earlier someone develops diabetes, the more likely it is that they will eventually experience serious complications.

Like other diseases, type 2 diabetes has its own share of myths. Monica Reinagel of Quick and Dirty Tips debunks six of them. Check them out over at the site.

(Image Credit: designfoto/ Pixabay)

The mantis shrimp may perhaps be the deadliest predator in all of the Earth. It is armed with highly-developed eyes that can detect more colors than any creature on Earth, and can see polarized light. But what it’s known for are not its eyes, but rather its punch, which is the fastest out of any predator on Earth. Despite being only six inches long, this creature may perhaps have the deadliest punch of all. Its strike is fifty times faster than we can blink, not to mention that its punch is capable of raising the surrounding water’s temperature to that of the surface of the sun.

Now, one might say that if the mantis shrimp’s punch is already that fast in the water, then its punch can be much faster in air, as air has a lower density. However, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

… scientists found that the animal punches at half the speed in air, suggesting that the mantis shrimp can precisely control its striking behavior, depending on the surrounding medium.

But why is this the case? Find out the answers over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: Roy L. Caldwell, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley/ Wikimedia Commons)

The umbilical cord is the conduit between a fetus and the placenta. It serves as the source of nutrients for the embryo — a lifeline for a mother’s young. For sloths, however, the umbilical cord also has another role: as a bungee cord that prevents the newborn from falling right out of the tree.

A rare glimpse of just such an incredible moment was recently caught on camera in Costa Rica, by local guide Steven Vela.

Pulling over to merely observe a brown-throated sloth (Bradypus variegatus), he and his vehicle of tourists instead bore witness to the late stages of sloth labour.

Seconds after birth, a newborn sloth can be seen suddenly slipping out of its mother's arms and falling, saved only by its umbilical cord.

Breathtaking.

(Video Credit: Nature on PBS/ YouTube)

We always buy and receive stuff from time to time. Books. Clothes. You name it. However, we often are unaware of how much stuff we leave behind when we receive new things, and then we realize we have lots of things in our house that we either use rarely, or not use at all, and then we come upon a realization that it’s high time we de-cluttered.

Oftentimes, decluttering can feel like it’s an overwhelming task, which I think is normal since we have accumulated stuff over a long time. So how do we begin decluttering?

Elaine Birchall has this to say: daily, dedicate 15 minutes of your time to decluttering.

This is a very manageable method of developing the skill of self-regulation which makes life easier and more effective. Remember, if you make the task a drudge you will not return to it regularly and consistently enough to reach the success you want.

More details about this over at Psychology Today.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Kasman/ Pixabay)

Who could have thought that scanning endless patterns of barcodes would produce music? Electronicos Fantasticos has utilized a barcode system on store shelves to recycle electronics as musical instruments. When the barcode patterns are scanned, a corresponding sound wave is produced by a linked audio component, as Colossal details: 

The black and white stripes produce a variety of rhythmic and tonal noises in two instrumental projects: the Barcoder, shown above, and Barcodress, a pattern-covered gown that’s played when the wearer moves in front of the scanner. Artist and musician Ei Wada (previously) leads the design group, which said in a statement that its goal is to create an entire orchestra of similar instruments. To watch more of the barcode projects in use, head to Instagram and YouTube.

Mendl Weinstock promised his sister that he’d crash her wedding with a llama in a tuxedo. Five years later, Weinstock fulfilled that promise, costing him $450, and making his sister’s wedding even more memorable. Boredpanda has the details: 

The bride’s first reaction to the llama waiting outside was to say “I hate you so much” to her brother, although she later revealed that she wasn’t really mad and wouldn’t let it change the good time she had. Mendl even wrote in response to some people thinking this would ruin the newlywed’s day: “Actually despite many Redditors telling me I “ruined” her big day, she still had an amazing time and has told me 100x that I did not ruin it but instead made it 10x more memorable.”

image via Boredpanda

This movie ticket can now help you locate your seat as the movie plays. Li Peitong has created the ‘shiny movie ticket’ design. The seat and row number is punctured on the ticket, allowing users to use the light emitted by the screen to see their seating location. Users would only have to hold the ‘shiny movie ticket’ by the cinema screen, and then be able to identify their seat. The ticket has been awarded the A’ design award winner for idea design category in 2018.

(via Designboom)

image via Designboom

An image posted to the NASA science blog and Astronomy Photo of the Day shows a mountain that seems hollowed out. It actually isn’t a hollowed mountain on Mars, but a lava tube ‘skylight’. The lava tube ‘skylight’ is a product of ancient volcanic activity below the surface of Mars. The feature is on the slopes of a volcano called Pavonis Mons, home to grabens, or long snaking lava tubes, as ScienceAlert details:

Lava tube caves like this are exciting because they offer some protection from the harsh radiation that bombards Mars. This means that they could be good sites to establish underground bases (if they are accessible; this particular one doesn't look like it's easy to get in and out of).

But there's another implication, too. If we're going to look for signs of life on Mars, caves might be the best option.

"Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life," the APOD post explained.

"These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers."

image via ScienceAlert