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Researchers have found that resveratrol–a molecule found in the skin of red grapes and therefore in red wine–can prolong the life span of obese mice. They report their findings in today’s advanced online edition of Nature. Resveratrol has been touted as an antiaging therapy since 2003, when David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School pathologist and co-author of the current study, found that the life span of yeast could be extended by up to 60 percent when treated with the molecule....

To celebrate the end of the year at Mind Matters, we’re going to highlight a few of the posts that we featured over the past 12 months. Although our articles have covered a wide variety of subjects, from visual illusions to borderline personality disorder to the limitations of free will, many of our most popular posts dealt with the intersection of neuroscience and everyday life. This fact is, perhaps, a testament to the increasing relevance of neuroscience and psychology to society....

Black holes, as their name suggests, are dark. Perfectly dark. A black hole’s gravity is so intense that beyond a certain boundary in its vicinity, known as the event horizon, nothing can escape. Not a rocket with its boosters on full blast nor a photon of light. Nothing. Despite the fact that astronomers cannot peer at what goes on inside the event horizon, a black hole’s gravitational effects on its neighborhood allow for a number of indirect observations....

On Sunday night, as a burst of Arctic air swept southward across the Great Plains, power plants in Texas started flicking offline. Wind generation fell 32% between 9 p.m. Sunday and 3 a.m. Monday local time, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration figures. Coal dropped 13%. And natural gas generation, the cornerstone of the Texas grid, plummeted 25% over that six-hour period. By the time the sun rose over Texas around 7 a....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Bergen is a lively, historic city located on the west coast of Norway. Known for its history as a Hanseatic trading town of fish from the north, Bergen has much to offer those who visit. The most famous site is the colorful “Bryggen” or German Dock, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The system of names used today for Greek vases has quite rightly been described by one leading scholar as ‘chaotic’. Many of the names were first applied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by scholars who tried to fit the names of pots that they knew from Greek and Latin literature or inscriptions to the pieces then surfacing from excavations....

By Maggie McKee of Nature magazineSome middle-aged stars burn and rave like newborns, producing flares thousands of times as energetic as those we see on the Sun, according to the first large survey of these events.Solar flares occur when magnetic-field loops threading through sunspots get twisted and break, releasing massive amounts of radiation and accelerating charged particles into space. The largest ever measured on the Sun took place on 1 September 1859, and was observed as a mysterious brightening by British astronomer Richard Carrington, who was drawing a group of sunspots at the time....

Five million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, but scientists still have more questions about it than answers. Arguments abound over whether the hallmark protein clusters that accumulate in the brain are a cause or an effect of the illness, and current treatments do not address the main problem that causes impaired thinking: broken synapses, the junctions that allow neurons to communicate with one another. Researchers are now zeroing in on a promising missing link: mitochondria, the cell components responsible for energy regulation....

Owners of federally insured flood zone properties have plenty to be nervous about this summer. As hurricane season heats up, threatening thousands of coastal properties with storm surges, homeowners should also mark July 31 as a day of reckoning. That’s when the National Flood Insurance Program is set to expire unless lawmakers extend it for a seventh consecutive time since the end of fiscal 2017. In this polarized Congress, there are no guarantees that the cash-strapped program will get another reprieve....

The annual Perseid meteor shower peaked this weekend, and one astronaut living aboard the International Space Station captured a stunning view of the light show from space. NASA astronaut Ron Garan photographed a “shooting star” streaking through Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday (Aug. 13), as the space station orbited roughly 220 miles (354 kilometers) above the planet. “What a ‘Shooting Star’ looks like #FromSpace,” Garan wrote in a message on Twitter, where he posts photos and updates on his space mission....

The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club by Eileen Pollack Beacon, 2015 (($26.95)) Author Pollack long wanted to become a theoretical physicist, but discrimination, she says, drove her to abandon that dream after college. One of the first two women to earn a bachelor’s of science in physics from Yale University, Pollack graduated summa cum laude. But years of ostracism from her male peers and professors, she asserts, hammered in the message: you are not welcome here....

Buddy system: A dwarf galaxy containing hundreds of thousands of stars seems to be merging with the Milky Way. The new companion galaxy lies 30,000 light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Virgo. Sloan Digital Sky Survey announcement, January 9 Patterns of frog extinctions and lethal fungus outbreaks appear to be synchronized. To some scientists, the connection implicates global warming, which stimulates the fungal growth. Nature, January 12 Just hand me the leash and go away: nursing home residents felt much less lonely when they spent time with a dog, rather than with a dog and other people....

Sanfra Anastine had surgery at age 42 and couldn’t speak for about 12 hours afterward. The next time she was operated on she was 56 and it took three months for her speech to return. Now 61, Anastine says that she doesn’t have difficulty forming words anymore but is still more forgetful than before her second surgery. She’s afraid of what will happen if she has to go under anesthesia again....

The EPA took another step toward tightening oversight of hydraulic fracturing today, announcing it would initiate a process to set national rules for treating wastewater discharged from gas drilling operations. Until now, the agency has largely left it to states to police wastewater discharges. Some have allowed drillers to pump waste through sewage treatment plants that aren’t equipped to remove many of the contaminants, leading to pollution in some rivers and to problems at drinking water facilities....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the new book Demand Better! Revive Our Broken Health Care System (Second River Healthcare Press, March 2011) by Sanjaya Kumar, chief medical officer at Quantros, and David B. Nash, dean of the Jefferson School of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University. In the following chapter they explore the striking dearth of data and persistent uncertainty that clinicians often face when having to make decisions....

Just as identical twins raised in the same home often grow up to be different, identical cells grown in the same environment frequently exhibit distinct characteristics. These differences are the result of random fluctuations in biochemical reactions. Biologists had always thought of such biochemical blips as liabilities, but recent studies suggest that cells and bacteria sometimes utilize this randomness to their benefit. Small systems such as cells are inherently sensitive to the random effects scientists call stochasticity—or noise—because they contain only a few active copies of individual proteins or nucleic acids....

When DisplayMate Technologies tested the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, the iPad Air, and Google’s Nexus 10, the Fire 8.9 “leapfrogged into the best-performing tablet display that we have ever tested,” according to the results posted Monday. The Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 significantly outperformed “the iPad Air in brightness, screen reflectance, and high ambient light contrast, plus a first-place finish in the very challenging category of absolute color accuracy,” DisplayMate continued....

A compound available in some dietary supplements extends lifespan in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans by interfering with cellular energy production and mimicking the effects of severe calorie restriction. The results, published online in Nature today, suggest that the compound, called α-ketoglutarate, could provide a way to increase longevity. Though intriguing, data linking the compound to longevity are limited to short-term studies in a worm and should not lead people to start taking α-ketoglutarate supplements, cautions Matt Kaeberlein, who studies ageing at the University of Washington in Seattle....

Editor’s Note: We are posting this feature from our March 2002 issue because of news from the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society about the phenomenon discussed here. With each day’s newspaper seems to arrive a new astronomical discovery: a new celestial body, a new physical process, a new form of matter. Will the revelations ever end? Will there ever come a day when astronomers feel confident that they have made a complete inventory of the universe?...

The story behind the brain-destroying mad cow disease vividly illustrates why it’s not a good idea to eat your own species. For cattle, cannibalism had nothing to do with survival or grisly rituals and everything to do with economics. The first so-called mad cows (the sickness is formally called bovine spongiform encephalopathy) were identified in 1984 in the U.K. They were probably infected a few years earlier by eating feed derived from the parts of sheep, cows and pigs that people avoided—diaphragms, udders, hooves, spinal cords, brains, and the like....