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Restaurants frequently serve oversized meals, not only in the United States but also in many other countries, according to a study conducted by an international team of researchers and supported by FAPESP — São Paulo Research Foundation. Published in the British Medical Journal, the study weighed and measured the energy content of meals served by restaurants in Brazil, China, Finland, Ghana and India. The results showed that 94% of the most popular main dishes served in sit-down [...]

Health experts have warned for years that men and women with excess abdominal fat run a greater risk of developing cardiovascular problems. However, individuals with abdominal or central obesity are not the only ones in danger, according to a new study. The study found that physically active men who were not overweight but whose waist-stature ratio (WSR) was close to the risk threshold were also more likely to develop heart disorders than individuals with lower WSRs. The study was conducted [...]

The production of entropy, which means increasing the degree of disorder in a system, is an inexorable tendency in the macroscopic world owing to the second law of thermodynamics. This makes the processes described by classical physics irreversible and, by extension, imposes a direction on the flow of time. However, the tendency does not necessarily apply in the microscopic world, which is governed by quantum mechanics. The laws of quantum physics are reversible in time, so in the microscopic [...]

While most developed countries have reduced the construction of large dams for the production of electricity in recent decades, developing countries, including Brazil, have embarked on even more massive hydropower developments. These countries have not accounted for the environmental impacts of large dams, which include deforestation and the loss of biodiversity, or the social consequences, such as the displacement of thousands of people and the economic damages they suffer. These effects [...]

Up to 15 million hectares of tropical rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon could lose protection and be clear-cut because of an article in the country’s new Forest Code. The warning comes from Brazilian researchers at the University of São Paulo’s Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP) and Swedish researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. They recently published a paper on the subject inNature [...]

Shell middens are archeological features consisting mainly of the remains of marine animals thrown away near settlements over hundreds or thousands of years. They are the debris of human activity. In Brazil, they are known by the Tupi word sambaqui. The sambaquis were left by people who lived between 8,000 and 1,000 years ago in coastal Atlantic Forest areas, traditionally considered peripheral to South America’s first food production centers in the Andes and the Amazon. A new study, [...]

A simple sheet of graphene has noteworthy properties due to a quantum phenomenon in its electron structure named Dirac cones in honor of British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933. The system becomes even more interesting if it comprises two superimposed graphene sheets, and one is very slightly turned in its own plane so that the holes in the two carbon lattices no longer completely coincide. For specific angles of twist, the [...]

The bite from a brown recluse spider (Loxosceles) can cause skin necrosis, renal failure, and even death. A new ointment is being tested in Brazil, however. Its effects have already been proven in tests conducted in cell cultures and animal models. Now the ointment will have its immunomodulatory action tested on humans in Phase III clinical trials, and it may be included in the treatment protocol for patients who develop lesions caused by the spider bite. The trial has started in [...]

The history of the peoples of America has just been reinterpreted. The largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on the basis of fossil DNA extracted from ancient human remains found on the continent has confirmed the existence of a single ancestral population for all Amerindian ethnic groups, past and present. More than 17,000 years ago, this original contingent crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska and began to populate the New World. Fossil DNA shows an affinity between [...]