In Victorian Britain, the poor had the healthiest diets., a new study found.

While the rich enjoyed life’s vices to the fullest extent, the poor people of Victorian Britain had healthier diets and an overall healthy life. A new study revealed that poor, rural societies had a more traditional lifestyle than their rich counterparts which meant higher-quality foods. This included locally-produced vegetables, potatoes, whole grains, fish, and milk.

The study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Open, analyzed the impact of regional diets on the health of the poor during the mid-19th century Britain and compared it with mortality data over the same period.

According to the study’s author, Dr. Peter Greaves, of the Leicester Cancer Research Center, several elements present in the diets of the poor are incorporated in modern healthy diets.

“The fact that these better-fed regions of Britain also showed lower mortality rates is entirely consistent with recent studies that have shown a decreased risk of death following improvement towards a higher Mediterranean dietary standard,” Greaves said.

As for the rich people of Victorian Britain, their access to daily meat and dairy equaled their access to unhealthy foods. While the study didn’t focus entirely on this aspect, sugar was a predominant issue in Victorian times. Sugar consumption increased dramatically during this period which led to tooth decay and many associated problems. However, the poor did not experience such ailments.

Greaves explained that the rural diet was often healthier if it originated in more isolated areas, where crops were healthier and livestock had room to thrive.

Greaves focused on deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease typically associated with worse nutrition. The people living in rural regions during the Victorian Era had a lower mortality rate, including fewer deaths from pulmonary diseases, indicating that they were better fed.

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Stephen Hawking believes that the Big Bang also gave birth to time as we know it.

Every galaxy in this whole universe can be traced back to a single event that is believed to have sprung everything into existence. This event, called The Big Bang, was an explosion that scientists believe took place 13.8 billion years ago, a feat so powerful and so massive that is set the universe in motion. However, many still wonder what the actual ingredient was that allowed for such an event to transpire. Was it God, or was it merely chaos changing its name to existence?

Renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, believes he may know what existed before the Big Bang and the answer, like the mysterious event, is overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. The answer was revealed to another celebrated physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the Star Talk show.

Hawking thinks that it wasn’t the Big Bang that caused something to be created out of nothing. The physicist claimed that there has “always been something” behind the Big Bang, but from the point of view of humanity, that something would equal nothing.

Hawking said that anything that existed prior to our universe has no role to play in everything that came after, and thus it could be left out of any theories that could explain our observations.

He believes that at the moment of the Big Bang there was a singularity where all the laws of physics “were broken down”.

“The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before,” Hawking said.

He also suggested that the beginning of the universe had “imaginary time” and to understand this, Hawking, said to imagine time as a horizontal line. The past is on the left of the line and the future is on the right. While doing so, add a vertical line to the mix and that becomes imaginary time. Hawking said that this time is not the “kind of time we normally experience” and the four-dimensional “Euclidean space-time” it would create with the three dimensions of space would be almost impossible for anyone to imagine.

Time as we know it began at the Big Bang, and this event was determined by the state of the universe in imaginary time when the event took place.

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Skin cancer may be kept at bay by a bacteria that resides on the surface of our skin, a study found

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have found a strain of bacteria that lives on our skin which may protect us from skin cancer. The discovery could one day lead to treatments that manage or even prevent skin cancer.

According to the researchers, this strain of bacteria is able to keep skin cancer at bay by suppressing the spread of tumor cells triggered by over-exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays.

The bacteria contain a chemical compound that halts DNA formation. This process was observed in mice which were injected with a strain of Staphylococcus epidermidis, the strain of bacteria responsible for making the compound.

“Everyone has some strains of this bacterial species,” said Dr. Richard Gallo, the study’s co-author. “About 20 percent seem to have this particular strain.”

Staphylococcus epidermidis are the most numerous of the many bacteria that normally live on human skin.

While the findings were unusual and noteworthy, the team was not actively looking for a treatment for skin cancer but rather searching for evidence that S. epidermidis could kill off pathogenic bacteria.

Researchers originally focused on the inner working of “good” bacteria and how they can prevent bad bacteria from spreading. The compound which was the most efficient against bad bacteria was 6-N-hydroxyaminopurine (6-HAP).

Researchers knew that cancer cells have runaway growth so they wanted to see if the 6-HAP compound could inhibit those cells. The compound was able to stop DNA formation in different tumor cells grown in the lab. However, they noticed that the 6-HAP was not able to prevent the spread of cancer cells in normal skin cells, as certain enzyme found in human skin deactivated the compound.

Thus, Gallo and his team injected mice with skin cancer cells, after which the rodents received either a shot of 6-HAP or a placebo. Tumors grew in both groups, however, the mice that received the compound had tumors about half the size of those in mice without the compound.

The study was published in the journal, Science Advances.

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Two lunar missions find evidence that the moon has widespread water distribution.

Data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and from India’s first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, revealed that the moon’s water is widely distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to certain regions. The findings may help figure out the origin of the Moon’s water and may, in turn, provide future manned missions to the moon with a valuable resource.

The recent findings would contradict previous studies where it was suggested that more water could be found at the moon’s polar latitudes. These studies also theorized that the strength of the water is affected by the lunar day, which is 29.5 Earth days.

“We find that it doesn’t matter what time of day or which latitude we look at, the signal indicating water always seems to be present,” said Joshua Bandfield, a senior researcher at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and one of the authors of the study that details the findings.

According to the study, if the moon contains enough water, future lunar explorers could use it as drinking water or convert it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel or oxygen. However, the lunar water is not the same as the one we are familiar with here on Earth.

The finding of widespread and immovable water on the moon suggests that it exists mainly as hydroxyl, or HO, a reactive relative to H20, Earth’s water. Hydroxyl can’t exist on its own for long as it can attach itself to other molecules. This would mean, that future astronauts on the moon would have to extract the water from minerals before using it.

Researchers also noticed that the lunar water does not move between regions, nor is it loosely attached to the surface.

Further research needs to be conducted as to provide an accurate answer for the lunar water actually comes from. LRO project scientist, John Keller of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that such a conclusion can only be achieved by “drawing on multiple resources from different missions”.

The study was published in the journal, Nature Geoscience.

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