TopNews

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.

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.

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.

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”.

The mosquito-borne Zika virus threat has left Brazilians rushing to purchase repellant, which has resulted into a lack of some brands on pharmacy shelves. It has boosted the sales for the industry, a trend many producers have been preparing for at other places as the outbreak spreads.

As per a consumer research firm, Nielsen, after Zika detection in April, repellant sales in Brazil went up by one-third in previous year, which doubled revenue for the sector, making it $55.7 million. The purchase was also spurred by a rise in dengue case, which is another virus spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Over 200 million girls and women in this world have faced genital mutilation. On Friday, the United Nations said that the number is quite higher than earlier estimated, highlighting the need to accelerate efforts to wipe out the practice.

Though the drive to bring female genital mutilation (FGM) to an end has grown with time, experts have cautioned that booming populations in some high prevalence nations have been undermining efforts to deal with the practice broadly condemned as a serious human rights abuse.

On the eve of International Day for Zero Tolerance of FGM, the UN children's agency UNICEF said that in case prevailing trends persist than the number of girls and women facing FGM will rise notably in the coming 15 years.