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To provide complete care for its residents, Chaseley Trust — a venerable British nursing facility housed in an ornate seaside mansion — offers amenities such as a movie theater, a gymnasium and a pool table. It also, from time to time, invites prostitutes and strippers to provide their services to residents. "People have needs," said manager Helena Barrow, as quoted in The Sun. "We are there to help. We respect our residents as individuals so that's why we help this to happen. [Read More]

Our brains need sleep to work properly. But it turns out you don't need a brain to sleep. In a new study, researchers identified a sleep-like state in a tiny, freshwater animal called a hydra, which has a simple anatomy and lacks a brain. "We now have strong evidence that animals must have acquired the need to sleep before acquiring a brain," study lead author Taichi Q. Itoh, an assistant professor at Kyushu University in Japan, said in a statement. [Read More]

Some manufacturers of sunglasses are as shady as the products they offer. Labeling can be ambiguous concerning the level of UV protection, and even seemingly straightforward proclamations, such as "100 percent protection," can be outright false, according a new study. No trivial concern, the sun's invisible ultraviolet radiation can sunburn your eyes just as it burns your skin, causing immediate damage and long-term vision problems, such as cataracts and retinal and macular degeneration. [Read More]

Raghu Murtugudde is a professor at the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. He is currently a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India. Murtugudde contributed this article to Live Science's  Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The tiny Galápagos Islands archipelago sits in the equatorial Pacific about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) west of Ecuador, and although the islands are renowned for inspiring Charles Darwin with their stunning, diverse fauna, they have influenced life for far longer: A new study now suggests that the Galápagos' equatorial location affects large-scale ocean-atmosphere dynamics in the equatorial Pacific. [Read More]

At a June 2, 2005, press conference, Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a rare and curious apology. She apologized for the mixed messages and contradictory studies regarding the dangers of obesity, acknowledging that flawed data in several CDC studies had overstated the risks. We have all heard the news reports, such as that 400,000 Americans die annually from obesity and that fat kills more people than smoking. [Read More]

More than 1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 have now been reported worldwide. As of today (April 2), the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has spread to 204 countries and regions, sickened 1,001,079 and killed 51,385, according to Worldometer, which relies on multiple data sources to track the virus spread. Roughly a month ago, on March 5, the worldwide case count came in at 96,888, Live Science reported.  The earliest known case of the novel coronavirus dates back to Nov. [Read More]

Diet tricksEat fruit. But not as a snack. Drink more water. With ice! Every day, it seems, there is new advice headlining papers and magazines on how to lose weight. It can get overwhelming trying to tease the legitimate from the fads, so we turned to the experts. Here are the top seven tricks that scientists say really work. Avoid corn syrupDespite the pervasive media campaign coming to corn syrup's defense, science is starting to show a clear difference between regular sugar and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). [Read More]

Fermi TelescopeGamma rays are the brightest, most powerful, explosions in the universe, often emitted from supernova or supermassive black holes. But these giant flashes can also have Earthly origins, stemming from intense storms — these are called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (shown here in a May 2008 image), which launched in June 2008, can detect both types of gamma rays. The telescope can see the terrestrial type up to a distance of about 500 miles (800 kilometers). [Read More]

The discovery of a Roman cemetery in England has archaeologists scratching their heads, mainly because about 40 percent of the bodies buried there are missing theirs.  Well, not missing, exactly. Of the 52 skeletons discovered in the fourth-century A.D. cemetery, 17 had been decapitated. And almost every head was resting between its owner's legs or feet. It's unclear why these decapitations happened, but "this appears to be a careful funeral rite that may be associated with a particular group within the local population," [Read More]

Scientists have discovered giant sinking mucus "houses" that double the amount of food on the sea floor. The mucus houses, or "sinkers," are produced by tadpole-like animals not much bigger than your index finger. As sinkers drop to the sea floor, small sea critters and other food particles get stuck to the mucus and end up on the bottom of the ocean. For years scientists have observed loads of life at the bottom of the ocean. [Read More]