Jurassic period insect featured many traits associated with modern butterflies

An insect has been found that went extinct for over 120 million years and featured several traits related to today’s butterflies, including wing markings called eye spots.

Called Kalligrammatid lacewings, paleobotanists since last 100 years were aware that they lived in Eurasia at the time of the Mesozoic.

However, now it has come to their knowledge that how similar they were to present day butterflies, thanks to recent discoveries of well-preserved fossils from two places in northeastern China that showed so.

Due to extensive lakes that restricted oxygen exposure in such regions during mid-Jurassic through early Cretaceous time, paleontologists have got to recover exquisitely preserved fossils, retaining much of their actual structure.

NASA: 100-foot-wide asteroid could make close pass-by of Earth next month, but won’t hit planet

An asteroid that crossed our planet at a safe distance of 1.3 million miles away a couple of years back is ready to make a return appearance. According to NASA, it will probably fly by again on March 5, and this time it may reach quite nearer to Earth, reaching as close as 11,000 miles.

In an announcement, NASA's Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that the object isn’t going to impact Earth. The path of the asteroid is likely to range somewhere between 11,000 miles to 9 million miles away.

After knowing that they measured that there is very minimal chance that the asteroid-called ‘2013 TX68’ could have any impact on September 28, 2017, though in that case also the odds won’t exceed one in 250 million.

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell Dies at 85

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon and one among just 12 human beings who have walked on the moon, passed away on Thursday night at the age of 85, his former wife Anita Mitchell has confirmed. Mitchell died at a West Palm Beach hospice following a brief illness.

The death coincides with the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 14 mission, which ran from January 31 to February 9, 1971.

Mitchell along with Alan Shepard had helped NASA recover from Apollo 13’s “successful failure” and later he devoted his life to exploring the mind, physics and unexplained phenomena such as aliens.

In a condolence message, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden expressed his condolences to the bereaved family and friends of Mitchell.

UCLA Study suggests BMI Readings could be misleading

A study has been featured with good news for some of those Americans who were mislabeled as obese or overweight considering their body mass index (BMI). The study by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), suggested that BMI mislabeled about 54 million individuals.

The individuals were considered as obese or overweight after reviewing their BMI, but when a closer look was taken, it could found that some 54 million Americans were still healthy, stated the study published in the International Journal of Obesity.

The new findings should be seen as a final nail in the coffin for BMI, said A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychologist at the university and lead author of the study.

Human Beard Could Help Treat Antibiotic Resistant Infection

Adam Roberts, a microbiologist at University College London, and his team of researchers are trying to develop new antibiotics to prevent resistance to antibiotics in patients. The bacteria that could fight off resistance breeding bacteria are derived from none other than human beard.

The idea flashed into Roberts’ mind when he saw an article by a TV journalist in Albuquerque, in which she described how she swabbed men's beards for a microbiologist to examine. The expert found enteric bacteria that are often found in the intestine. It’s been a year since Roberts has been requesting people from all around the world to pack and send their beard for testing antimicrobial properties. So far, he has collected 20 isolated promising strains that are capable of killing bacteria and yeast.

75 percent of Women continue drinking after stopping Birth Control to become Pregnant: CDC

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended this week that sexually active women of reproductive age, who consume alcohol, should be on birth control.

The CDC has recommended it with overwhelming evidence that alcohol intake during pregnancy, even before the woman knows about her pregnancy, poses major risks to her newborn suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or the more serious fetal alcohol syndrome.

The CDC report said, “An estimated 3.3 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 are at risk of exposing their developing baby to alcohol because they are drinking, sexually active, and not using birth control to prevent pregnancy”.

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