In my country, there have been many cases of people dying suddenly as they were sleeping. It is locally called "bangungot" which is something like a mix of a night terror and sleep paralysis leading to death.

The thing about this occurrence is that the people who experience it usually have a healthy heart. So how are these people having sudden attacks causing death?

Over 30 years ago, Pedro Brugada had started investigating what they termed "cardiac dysrhythmia" which would later be named "Brugada syndrome". He looked into a 3-year-old boy, Lech, whose father Andrea Wockeczek brought to Brugada because he was experiencing the same symptoms that his 2-year-old sister had died from.

Brugada’s first impression was that Lech was perfectly healthy.His heartbeat sounded normal, too, but when Brugada examined his EKG, he saw a pattern that he had never seen before, highly unusual, shaped almost like a shark’s fin.

Over the next few years, Brugada searched for this electrical pattern in other victims of cardiac arrest. Then the EKGs of two patients, a man from the Netherlands and a man from Belgium who had both collapsed, came to his attention.

He collected a few more of these unusual EKGs and, with his brother, Josep, published his results in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. They said it “might constitute a distinct clinical and electrocardiographic syndrome.”

It turns out that it had something to do with genetics:

A few years later, scientists discovered that patients with the disease carry a mutation in a gene (called SCN5A) that controls the flow of sodium into heart cells, thus electrically activating them.

Now, there are more mysterious diseases out there that would take more time, effort, and money to study and find treatment. Even Brugada syndrome does not have a specific "cure". The best solution is an implanted defibrillator. But this may get us one step closer.

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Shocking, I know. But researchers have looked into various data from multiple studies that tried to compare whether eating or skipping breakfast could help lose weight and increase metabolic rates throughout the day.

They conclude that eating breakfast does not promote weight loss or increase one's metabolism. Rather, it may actually have the opposite effect and cause one to gain a little weight as opposed to skipping breakfast.

Though this is not to say that we should skip breakfast altogether. There are still benefits associated with it:

"Although eating breakfast regularly could have other important effects, such as improved concentration and attentiveness levels in childhood, caution is needed when recommending breakfast for weight loss in adults, as it could have the opposite effect," the researchers conclude in the published article.

So why is it that we have often heard that breakfast is the "most important meal of the day"? Read more on New Atlas.

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I don't think it needs to be said but social media, though it allows us to connect with other people, can cause distress and even depression.

So it would be logical to think that once you go offline and stop using social media, it can improve your mental health tremendously. Many have already attest to the big impact that unplugging from social media has done for them. Now a 'gold standard' study confirms it.

Researchers at Stanford University and New York University who led the study — which was posted on an open access site called the Social Science Research Network — recruited 2,844 Facebook users via Facebook ads. Those users were initially asked to fill out extensive questionnaires about their overall well-being, political views, and daily routine.

Half of the users were then randomly assigned to deactivate their Facebook account for four weeks in exchange for payment. Researchers regularly checked the Facebook accounts during the month to make sure they weren’t reactivated, and regularly received text messages to assess these users' moods, creating a real-time evaluation.

Overall, researchers concluded that not using Facebook reduced online activity, including other social media use, and increased offline activity such as watching television and socializing with friends and family more. Those who deactivated also observed a decrease in political polarization and news knowledge, and an increase in subjective well-being. The one-month cleanse also led to a reduction in time spent on Facebook for several weeks after the experiment.

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Molds, also called mildew, cause great damage not only to physical structures but if left unattended, they can release toxic spores that could extremely compromise the respiratory and sometimes, nervous system with deadly implications.

One such mold has been found at the Se Velha de Coimbra in Portugal and it's one that scientists have not seen before.

The mold is part of a newly identified family of microcolonial black fungi (MCBF) called Aeminiaceae. Scientists at the University of Coimbra in Portugal scraped samples of the mold off the limestone sculptures in the Santa Maria chapel of the cathedral.

After genetic analysis, researchers at the determined that the mold was something they had never seen before. While this strain of black mold is a completely new species, the damage mold can do to old stone architecture is well understood.

(Image credit: João Trovão, et al., CC-BY-4.0)

Out of all the emotions we experience, anger gets the worst rep because of the destructive capabilities it has that could push someone to do big damage. But it seems that all animals exhibit the same brain patterns or activity that humans do when we get angry and become aggressive.

Animals presumably have other triggers. And, of course, there's no way to know for sure how an animal is feeling. So Anderson and other scientists focus on animals' behavior and on biological changes like heart rate, hormone levels and brain activity.

By those measures, Anderson says, there is strong evidence that animals experience some sort of internal state that drives their aggressive behavior. "I'm comfortable calling that state anger as long as we are clear that we're not [referring] to the subjective feeling," he says.

Research also shows that aggressive behavior is remarkably consistent across species, Anderson says.

The only difference between animals and humans is that we have brain circuits that help us cope with the emotions we feel. One of the questions raised by this is, is there a connection between aggressive behavior and brain evolution?

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The Earth's magnetic field is one of the important factors that maintains the delicate balance we have. In Earth's history, its magnetic field went through a weakened state before solidifying.

In a recent study, researchers are trying to plot out these phases of Earth's magnetic field. Hopefully, this may also help us predict any possible shifts that might happen in the future which could cause catastrophic damage to our world.

(Image credit: Peter Reid/University of Edinburgh/NASA)

Being able to distinguish between objects is a very important visual function. It is previously thought that it relies on eye optics and brain processing. A new study suggests that it actually has to do with tiny eye movements.

“Historically these eye movements have been pretty much ignored,” says Michele Rucci, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester in the US. “But what seems to be happening is that they are contributing to vision in a number of different ways, including contrast sensitivity function.”

If we fix our eyes on a single point, the world may appear still. But microscopically, our eyes are always moving – known as “fixational eye movements”. Without these movements continually refreshing visual input to the retina, an image can fade from view.

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Bacteria has proven itself to be near indestructible much like cockroaches. But how indestructible are they? Well, Charles Lipman conducted experiments to see if bacteria could survive long periods of time so he looked for them in coal and began reanimating them.

Lipman did not believe that the bacteria he coaxed from coal were alive in the sense that the bacteria in your gut are alive. Rather, he believed that during the process of forming coal, the bacteria had dried up and entered suspended animation.

The year was 1931. His colleagues probably thought he was nuts. But from where we sit in 2019, it’s looking increasingly likely that Lipman was not nuts. The world’s oldest living individuals may not be gnarled bristlecone pines or shimmering aspen clones, but tiny microbes locked in rock miles beneath the surface whose goal is to not to grow or reproduce, but simply to cheat death.

(Image credit: Charles Lipman)

In the 1950s, uranium became a hot commodity much like gold was during the Gold Rush era. It didn't last long though as the costs began to outweigh the benefits of mining uranium. With the decline of uranium production, prospectors also disappeared. Except for Gregory Yount.

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It seems that astronomers think that we should become more focused on searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Whether there are aliens out there in the universe who have super advanced technology, we will probably have no idea unless scientists could find conclusive evidence.

Long an underfunded, fringe field of science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may be ready to go mainstream.

Astronomer Jason Wright is determined to see that happen. At a meeting in Seattle of the American Astronomical Society in January, Wright convened “a little ragtag group in a tiny room” to plot a course for putting the scientific field, known as SETI, on NASA’s agenda.

The group is writing a series of papers arguing that scientists should be searching the universe for “technosignatures” — any sign of alien technology, from radio signals to waste heat.

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How the planets formed in our solar system is still being examined by scientists today. We are looking for evidences and remnants from the big bang to figure out how the whole process actually happened. Recently, a Japanese team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have spotted a possible clue that could explain how planets were formed.

(Image credit: Ko Arimatsu/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

Schrodinger's Cat is a concept stating that a particle can have two contradictory traits at the same time. Erwin Schrodinger used the illustration of a steel box with a cat, an atom, and a glass vial of poison gas. Depending on whether the atom decays or not, we can never know the state of the cat unless we open the box. So the cat is said to be in a "superposition" where it could either be both dead and alive.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics said they have created several laser pulses that acted like the eponymous Schrodinger's cat.

"In our experiment, the [laser cat] was sent to the detector immediately, so it was destroyed right after its creation," said Bastian Hacker, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, who worked on the experiment.

But it didn't have to be that way, Hacker told Live Science. "An optical state can live forever. So if we had sent the pulse out into the night sky, it could live for billions of years in its [cat-like] state."

That longevity is part of what makes these pulses so useful, he added. A long-lived laser cat can survive long-term travel through an optical fiber, making it a good unit of information for a network of quantum computers.

(Image credit: Christoph Hohmann, Nanosystems Initiative Munich)

It's ironic to say the least that this guy would turn out to be the antithesis of his own name. Tom Justice had become enamored with cycling at the age of 13 when his crush invited him to watch a race. Ever since then, cycling became his life, eventually being chosen to be trained for the Olympics. So what led him to become a bank robber later in his life? Read his story on Chicago Mag.

(Image credit: Tom Justice via Chicago Mag)

After the past century filled with wars and strife like the world has not seen in history, we might be at another unprecedented moment when modern technology has evolved so much that our means and methods of warfare have become deadlier and more catastrophic than before.

So what does this mean with regard to the laws of war? Deadspin tries to tackle this issue in their article which is a part of a series on the laws of war.

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It's a crazy theory but Henry Cotton was intrigued with his mentor, Adolf Meyer's theory that mental illnesses could be caused by bacterial infection. So in Cotton's mind, the best way then to "cure" these illnesses is by removing the infected areas.

Cotton attacked the teeth first and slowly began to work his way towards other organs. The mouth, he reasoned, was the most obvious place were germs lurked. So he started by removing infected teeth, unerupted teeth, teeth with cavities and abscesses. He even had his own teeth pulled out, as well as that of his wife and two sons, as a prophylactic measure to avoid the risk of infection.

When pulling teeth didn’t cure his patients, he doubled his efforts and in the process removed their tonsils and sinuses. If a cure was still not achieved, other organs were suspected of harboring infection. Soon patients got relieved of their spleens, colons, testicles, ovaries, gall bladders, and other organs.

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