In the News

I easily remember laughing at Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner while watching Saturday morning cartoons as a child. I can still see the Coyote walking slowly through the sweltering desert, sun high in the sky, sweating, tongue-hanging-out, about to collapse from heat, hunger and thirst. Then, BEEP! BEEP! the Road Runner would fly past, and the chase was on with a perfectly revived Coyote.

If only fixing heat stroke were that quick and easy.

Chronic kidney disease—which affects about 14 percent of Americans—kills more people each year than breast or prostate cancer. Patients often develop metabolic acidosis, where there is too much acid in bodily fluids because diseased kidneys are less able to remove it.

Clinicians currently treat the condition in two ways. Most commonly, they prescribe drugs like sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) that are absorbed from the gut into the blood to neutralize accumulated acid. Alternatively, clinicians prescribe a diet that limits acid accumulation in body fluids.

The new drug candidate, called veverimer, offers a way to remove accumulated acid from the gut without entering the bloodstream to treat metabolic acidosis safely and effectively, according to a phase III clinical trial detailed in The Lancet.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of introverts and extroverts. Some people, according to this theory of personality, recharge socially in environments with a lot of people, while others expend a lot of energy in social situations and need to recharge their batteries on their own. The former are extroverts, the latter introverts— but the boundaries between these two categories are pretty fluid, and experts tell Bustle that there’s some evidence that even the most dyed-in-the-wool introverts can adopt some extrovert tendencies. However, they say, a complete category shift — changing from an introvert who loves staying at home with the cat to an extrovert who finds time at parties invigorating — is virtually impossible, particularly as we get older.

The concept of introversion and extroversion isn’t actually that old. “It was popularized around the 1920s and 1930s by the writings of Carl Jung and later utilized in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” Dr. Trey Armstrong, PhD, of the Texas A&M Department of Psychiatry, tells Bustle. You’ve likely taken Myers-Briggs personality tests online. These days, we know a bit more about introvert and extrovert tendencies — including the fact that introversion isn’t necessarily shyness, and that extroverts aren’t necessarily socially invincible.

Dental hygiene has come a long way since the days of wine-soaked toothpicks and the urine mouthwash once thought to disinfect mouths and whiten teeth.

Some of the earliest tooth-cleaning artifacts archaeologists have found are ancient toothpicks, dental tools and written tooth care descriptions dating back more than 2,500 years. Famous Greek doctor Hippocrates was one of the first to recommend cleaning teeth with what was basically a dry toothpaste, called a dentifrice powder.

Ancient Chinese and Egyptian texts advised cleaning teeth and removing decay to help maintain health. Some of the early techniques in these cultures included chewing on bark or sticks with frayed ends, feathers, fish bones and porcupine quills. They used materials like silver, jade and gold to repair or decorate their teeth.

Nowadays, there are dozens of kinds of tools and potions to help keep your mouth healthy. As a professor of dental hygiene, I believe it’s most important to clean your mouth daily, no matter how you choose to do so.

Human skeletons unearthed at the Houtaomuga archaeological site in northeast China represent some of the earliest evidence of intentional skull reshaping, a new study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology reports.

As Bruce Bower writes for Science News, 11 modified skulls, excavated alongside 14 skeletons with unmodified craniums between 2011 and 2015, have artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at both the front and back of the head. Per the study, five of the skulls belonged to adults (four men and one woman), and six belonged to children. Ages ranged from as young as 3 years old to as old as 40. Of the skulls, one was found in a layer of sediment dating to around 12,000 years ago, while the remaining 10 were found in sediment dating to between 6,300 and 5,000 years ago.

As Science Alert’s Michelle Starr explains, intentional cranial modification (ICM), also known as artificial cranial deformation, has been practiced around the world for millennia, albeit for a number of different reasons. Some cultures likely participated in skull reshaping as an indicator of social status, wealth and power, while others may have inadvertently modified infants’ heads by binding them to protect during growth.

Although Houtaomuga is not home to the earliest evidence of ICM, researchers led by bioarchaeologist Quanchao Zhang of China’s Jilin University and paleoanthropologist Qian Wang of Texas A&M University say it does hold the distinction of recording skull modifications that occurred over a longer stretch of time than seen at any other excavation site.