A new study from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences lends new evidence to a suspected link between regular exposure to lavender oil or tea tree oil and prepubertal gynecomastia (abnormal breast growth in young boys). Ramsey et al identified eight components of lavender and tea tree oils as …

Betanin, a natural pigment found in the sugar beet (Beta vulgaris), could eventually help slow the accumulation of misfolded proteins in the brain, a process that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Betanin could eventually help slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Image credit: Gyöngyi Nagy. “Betanin shows some promise as …

A team of geophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, proposes that Martian oceans originated several hundred million years earlier than thought, as the Solar System’s largest volcanic system — called Tharsis — formed, and that greenhouse gases enabled the oceans. The team’s theory predicts smaller oceans, more in line …

The Hope College men’s soccer program will begin a new chapter with another well-known coach from the NCAA ranks. Dave Brandt brings his championship pedigree to Hope College after successful stops at Division III Messiah College (Pa.), and the Division I United States Naval Academy (Md.). He won six NCAA …

Recently, a number of major websites like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc. and Huffington Post started using nofollow attributes on their outbound links. This trend puzzles me. If you can’t trust the people adding links to their articles, they shouldn’t be writing for you in the first place. Even more disturbing is …

Computers are shrinking rapidly. You can build a pretty capable little machine powered by a device like the Raspberry Pi, but that’s still huge compared with IBM’s latest machine. The company that started out selling massive mainframe computers has developed the world’s smallest computer. Each one is smaller than a grain …

Uber doesn’t have the greatest reputation when it comes to self-driving car safety, having been unceremoniously kicked out of San Francisco in 2016, and scaling back its tests in 2017 after a crash in Arizona. In the most recent incident, an Uber test vehicle, in autonomous mode with a safety …

At SMX West last week, Michelle Robbins conducted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Nathan Johns, a search quality analyst at Google. Johns touched on topics ranging from the core search algorithm update a week ago to the mobile-first index, the Google Search Console, Google’s zero results experiment and …

Google has been working on retail challenges for some time. The problems: (1) how to make mobile shopping from its properties like Search faster; (2) how to maintain market share for product search in a splintering mobile landscape of apps and digital assistants; and (3) how to compete against Amazon, …

The “AMP: Do or Die?” session at SMX West covered the hot topic of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is the Google-backed project designed to speed up webpages on mobile devices. Google has actively been pushing adoption of AMP, but due to the many challenges inherent in migrating to AMP, …