image credit: veeterzy on Unsplash Air pollution threatens the health of more than 90% of the world’s population — and it all starts with changes triggered at the molecular level. In a newly published study which followed pollution levels before, during, and after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, researchers at the University of Buffalo found that 69 metabolites were affected when air pollution changed. Metabolites are the end products of the body’s metabolism as well as the results of environmental exposures. Beijing, a city numbering over 21 million people, is one of the most polluted cities in the world. But during the 2008 Olympic Games, local authorities enacted temporary measures that cleared the air — at least for the duration of the games. While most of the world’s population focuses their attention on global terrorism and economics, scientists are becoming increasingly alarmed at how air pollution affects human health. Research indicates that 5.5 million people around the...

image credit: success-resources.com.au Very often, people who had a rich upbringing and come from a good family — let’s  call them high-class  — seem to be able to convince other people that they’re more competent than they actually are. Whether it’s some politicians or the head of marketing at your company, examples of this effect are abundant. And according to a new study performed by psychologists at the University of Virginia, this effect can be explained by overconfidence, which stranger misinterpret as competence. Yet another advantage of higher social class     “Drawing on a collection of findings suggesting that different social class contexts have powerful effects on people’s sense of self, we propose that social class shapes the beliefs that people hold about their abilities, and that this, in turn, has important implications for how status hierarchies perpetuate,” the authors wrote in their study published in the Journal of Personality and Socia...

"As hosting gigs go, it's a tough crowd. More than 1 billion people are host to parasitic worms that take up residence in their intestines. For most, it's a short stay, with the immune system evicting the worms in days or weeks and leaving no trace that the parasites were ever there. In a small percentage of people and other animals, though, the worms gain a permanent mouth-hold and can stick around the intestines for years. That persistence often leads to malnutrition, which in turn tightens the grip of infection, initiating a spiral that becomes difficult to escape. The question of why that small percentage struggles to expel parasites has stymied researchers for a while. But a new mathematical model developed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research offers an answer while reinforcing an adage: safety in numbers. Clay Cressler, Anieke van Leeuwen and their colleagues have concluded that when large numbers of worms stake...