Buttermilk is a funny thing. Many of our favorite food items—pancakes, biscuits—begin with “buttermilk.” And even if you’re the kind of foodie who has tons of food knowledge and can readily explain the difference between all the types of butter or you're willing to expound on what separates cider from apple juice, you may have trouble verbalizing what makes buttermilk different than regular milk. Sure, you know enough to buy it at the grocery when Smashed Buttermilk Potato Salad is on the menu, but if you were to be put on the spot, what do you really think buttermilk is?

There is a wealth of psychological and biological information stored in our scent, but for some reason we choose to ignore it.

King Louis XIV of France was obsessed with fragrance. Cut flowers adorned every room in Versailles, furniture and fountains were sprayed with perfume and visitors were even doused before entering the palace. Whether it was because his personal hygiene was not up to the standards we might expect today, or he just enjoyed playing with scent, Louis understood that smell is important.

Cognitive changes such as mild forgetfulness are often a normal part of aging. Older adults may find that it takes longer to remember a fact or learn a new skill. At the extreme end, the risk of dementia rises with aging. For example, the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease doubles about every 5 years beyond age 65.

Equipped with a color 3D camera, an inertial measurement sensor, and its own on-board computer, a newly improved robotic cane could offer blind and visually impaired users a new way to navigate indoors. When paired with a building’s architectural drawing, the device can accurately guide a user to a desired location with sensory and auditory cues, while simultaneously helping the user avoid obstacles like boxes, furniture, and overhangs.

People with an inherited condition known as neurofibromatosis type 1, or NF1, often develop non-cancerous, or benign, tumors that grow along nerves. These tumors can sometimes turn into aggressive cancers, but there hasn’t been a good way to determine whether this transformation to cancer has happened.

Three highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are available in the U.S. These vaccines have been shown to slow the spread of the virus and reduce COVID-19 deaths. About half of the population has been fully vaccinated as of August 2021. But vaccination rates have varied across the country, with some states proceeding much faster than others.

Here is a potentially familiar scene. You are exhausted after working a full day, the sort of day when you felt like your attention was drawn in 20 different directions, where you were ricocheting between obligations and meetings and running six minutes late to pick-up and realizing that if you didn’t put that load of laundry in the wash now, at 9 pm, the rest of the week could very well collapse in on itself. You answered emails while stirring something on the stove. You answered different emails while half-listening to a story from a family member or roommate.

In 2019, the top 10 causes of death accounted for 55% of the 55.4 million deaths worldwide.

The top global causes of death, in order of total number of lives lost, are associated with three broad topics: cardiovascular (ischaemic heart disease, stroke), respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infections) and neonatal conditions – which include birth asphyxia and birth trauma, neonatal sepsis and infections, and preterm birth complications.

Checking your blood sugar, also called blood glucose, is an important part of diabetes care. This tip sheet tells you:

• why it helps you to know your blood sugar numbers
• how to check your blood sugar levels
• what are target blood sugar levels
• what to do if your levels are too low or too high
• how to pay for these tests

Why do I need to know my blood sugar numbers?

Your blood sugar numbers show how well your diabetes is managed.

Lip-on-lip kissing is not nearly as universal as we might think it is, so can the diverse number of ways that humans kiss reveal what it is about this intimate act that we find important?

Less than half of all societies kiss with their lips, according to a study of 168 cultures from around the world. William Jankowiak, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, found that only 46% use lip-to-lip kissing in a romantic sense, excluding things like parent-child kissing or greetings.

The recently released findings from the 2020 Asia Pacific Healthy Aging Survey by Herbalife Nutrition revealed that Malaysian consumers have a clear vision of what healthy aging means to them, more than four in 10 consumers (44 precent) had the confidence to age healthily, with the fear of falling ill due to lower immunity as their top worry.

Credit: Fizkes/Shutterstock

Over the course of this pandemic, significant progress has been made in treating COVID-19 and helping to save lives. That progress includes the development of life-preserving monoclonal antibody infusions and repurposing existing drugs, to which NIH’s Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) public-private partnership has made a major contribution.

About 70,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with COVID-19 each and every day. It’s clear that these new cases are being driven by the more-infectious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. But why does the Delta variant spread more easily than other viral variants from one person to the next?