CDC’s advice on how to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome prompts backlash; Agency defends advice

Following a strong backlash prompted by recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for sexually active women to avoid drinking alcohol if they aren’t using birth control, the CDC has defended its words. Many women considered its suggestion insulting, severe and impractical.

In an interview on Friday, Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director of the CDC, said that they weren’t as clear as they had hoped to be.

Released on Tuesday, the focus of the CDC report was on the likelihood that children could develop fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, estimating that 3.3 million women of the age group 15 to 44 drink alcohol while not using birth control and put their infants at the risk of the disorders.

Single strand of hair almost cost Wichita baby one of her toes

A single hair strand nearly cost a Wichita baby one of her toes. Post this incident the parents of the baby have been cautioning others regarding what is known as a ‘hair tourniquet’.

In January 2016, Wichita’s Scott Walker shared a picture of Molly, his daughter, and her swollen toe on social website Facebook, and just seven days after that, it went viral. Several others commented about experiencing a scare with hair tourniquets.

What happens is that a strand a hair or loose fiber wraps the finger, toes or even penis of a baby. In case not noticed timely, the strand can get tight eventually, causing the child to miss blood flow to that part of the body.

Smithsonian Research finds Americas’ First-ever Native Malaria in White-tailed Deer

The white-tailed deer, most popular game species and best-studied wild animal in North America, has been carrying a malaria parasite that researchers have failed to notice for many years. Though it’s a sheer coincidence, the new find could help science in understanding how malaria originated, thanks to a DNA technology used.

Malaria parasites have hundreds of species spreading all over the globe, except southernmost continent Antarctica. Many of them are found in birds and lizards, even on remote ocean islands. Most of the science community has accepted an old belief that mammal-infecting malaria parasites were originated in the Old World. According to them, continents like Africa and Asia are the distributor of the microorganisms that infect animals.

Study finds European honeybees as main source of Deformed Wing Virus spread

The question ‘What is killing the bees’ has been baffling scientists in recent years. Several reports have talked about the mysterious drop in honeybee populations worldwide, with study focusing on likely causes, including parasites, a kind of pesticide known as neonicotinoids, and other factors.

Now, a research by the University of Exeter in the UK and the University of California, Berkeley, has come up with another explanation that the spread of a viral disease, accidentally helped along by human beings.

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.

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