167 articles from TUESDAY 22.11.2022

Of mice and men: Treating acne with systemic antibiotics can have unintended consequences on the maturing skeleton during adolescence

Adolescence is a time of significant skeletal development. In a new report, researchers showed that long-term use of minocycline, an antibiotic used for the systemic treatment of adolescent acne, disrupts the normal gut microbiome, leading to poor bone maturation. Surprisingly, these effects were caused by a change in the gut microbiome, leading to an altered profile of bile acids -- molecules...

How to test whether we're living in a computer simulation

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be—allowing matter to clump together rather...

No need for six-month wait to try for baby after pregnancy loss, study finds

Analysis challenges WHO health guidance on amount of time women should delay after miscarriage or abortionWomen don’t need to wait for at least six months before trying for another baby after a miscarriage or abortion, an analysis of data suggests, challenging World Health Organization guidance.The research was also at odds with WHO advice that women should delay at least 24 months after a live...

Donald Perkins obituary

Physicist who played a key role from the birth of particle physics in the 1940s to the discovery of the Higgs bosonThe particle physicist Donald Perkins, who has died aged 97, made seminal discoveries about the structure of the proton, and nuclear interactions at extreme energies, and first proposed the use of beams of pion particles in cancer therapy. His career spanned the birth of particle...

Secrets of sunspots and solar magnetic fields investigated in NASA supercomputing simulations

The Sun is much more than just a source of light for Earth—it's a dynamic and complex star, with storms, flares, and movement causing it to change constantly. Magnetic fields govern most of the solar activity we can observe but how they do this is still poorly understood. New results based on simulations out of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in...

Sweet corn sweltering in summer heat spells uncertainty for corn lovers

Few things say summer in America more than buttery corn on the cob, but as summer temperatures climb to unprecedented levels, the future of sweet corn may not be so sweet. New University of Illinois research shows sweet corn yields drop significantly with extreme heat during flowering, especially in rainfed fields in the Midwest.