• Scott and Mark Kelly are identical twins with two sets of the same DNA.
• While Scott spent a year in space, his brother Mark stayed on Earth, giving NASA a unique opportunity to see how space flight changes the human body and brain.
• They're uncovering some fascinating results: about 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA may have permanently changed in space.

When NASA astronaut Scott Kelly stood up last March after spending a year in space, he was two inches taller.

The engineer and veteran of four space flights is part of a long-term NASA study that aims to figure out how being in space changes our bodies and brains.

Scott Kelly is uniquely positioned to give NASA key insight into these changes because he is both an astronaut and a twin. For its research, NASA is comparing Scott Kelly's DNA with the identical DNA of his twin brother, Mark Kelly. Mark stayed on Earth for Scott's 340-day stint aboard the International Space Station, giving NASA the rare opportunity to compare how being space affected his genes.

Although each Kelly brother was born with the same set of DNA, life has exposed each set of genes to a range of divergent experiences — space being one of them. Those experiences affect the way the Kellys' genes are expressed (also known as being "turned on" or "turned off").

Scott's newfound height turned out to be only a temporary result of his spine being physically stretched in a gravity-free environment, and not a tweak to his genes. But it's just one of the many alterations the researchers have documented so far. Deep within Scott's DNA, they are finding a range of tweaks that are not present in his brother Mark. While some were temporary and seemed to occur only while he was in space, others were long-lasting.

"When he went up into space it was like fireworks of gene expression,"Christopher Mason, a principal investigator on the NASA twins study and an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, told Business Insider. "But the changes that seem to have stuck around include changes in immune system function and retinal function related to his eye health."

Roughly 7% of Scott Kelly's genes may have permanently changed as a result of his time in space

According to Mason, some 7% of Scott's genes have not returned to normal since he landed back on Earth more than two years ago. Kelly said he was surprised by that change in a Marketplace interview on Thursday.

"I did read in the newspaper the other day … that 7% of my DNA had changed permanently,"Kelly said. "And I'm reading that, I'm like, ‘Huh, well that's weird.'"

Those changes appear to have occurred in genes that control functions related to Kelly's immune system, bone formation, and DNA repair, as well as in those involved in responding to an oxygen-depleted or carbon-dioxide rich environment.

"With a lot of these changes, it's as if the body is trying to understand this, quite literally, alien environment and respond to that," Mason said.

In many respects, Kelly's genes display the hallmarks of a body reacting to what it perceives as a threat, he added.

"Oftentimes when the body encounters something foreign, an immune response is activated. The body thinks there’s a reason to defend itself. We know there are aspects of being in space that are not a pleasant experience and this is the molecular manifestation of the body responding to that stress."

The full results of NASA's twin study aren't public yet — but here are some interesting findings

The full results of NASA's twin study haven't been released yet, but the preliminary data is already giving scientists a lot to ponder.

Some of those findings build on what we already knew, like the fact that being in space stretches your spine, shrinks your muscles, and messes up your sleep cycle.

But the long-term effects of taking our bodies for a jaunt outside Earth's protective atmosphere are much less understood. Here's a quick look at what the researchers have uncovered so far:

• Scott's telomeres got longer, then shrunk back to normal. Scott's telomeres, or the caps at the end of chromosomes, became longer than his brother's while he was in space, but quickly returned to their normal length once he returned home. "That is exactly the opposite of what we thought,” Susan Bailey, a radiation biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, told Nature last year. That's because shorter telomeres are generally associated with getting older. Scientists are still studying what this means, but it could be linked to getting more exercise and eating fewer calories while in space, according to NASA.
• Scott's genetic expression changed in a variety of ways. Scott's genes showed both increased and decreased levels of methylation, a process that results in genes getting turned on and off. “Some of the most exciting things that we’ve seen from looking at gene expression in space is that we really see an explosion, like fireworks taking off, as soon as the human body gets into space,” Mason said in a statement last year. According to NASA, this could "indicate genes that are more sensitive to a changing environment whether on Earth or in space."
• The twins hosted different gut bacteria. Researchers noted differences between Scott's and Mark's gut bacteria (essentially the microbes that aid in digestion) throughout the year-long study. This was probably a result of their different diets and environments, NASA said.
• Scientists are looking for what they're calling a "space gene." By sequencing the RNA in the twins' white blood cells, researchers found more than 200,000 RNA molecules that were expressed differently between the brothers. It is normal for twins to have unique mutations in their genome, but scientists are "looking closer to see if a 'space gene' could have been activated while Scott was in space," NASA said.

NASA is still combing through the results of the study and expects to release the full set later this year. That research will inform space missions — including potential trips to Mars— for years to come.

Dina Spector contributed to an earlier version of this story.

SEE ALSO: I got my dog’s DNA tested and what I learned shocked me

DON'T MISS: 8 weird things that happen to your body if you live in space for a year

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NOW WATCH: NASA and Lockheed Martin reveal their plans to build the first-ever Mars space station

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• The biggest difference between human vision and cat vision is in the retina.
• Cats can't detect colors as well as humans. 
• Cats can't see far objects as well as humans.
• Cats have a superior ability to see in the dark compared to humans.

What do cats see?

Artist Nickolay Lamm consulted three experts to hypothesize how cats view the world compared to humans.

The biggest difference between human vision and cat vision is in the retina, a layer of tissue at the back of the eye that contains cells called photoreceptors. The photoreceptors convert light rays into electrical signals, which are processed by nerve cells, sent to the brain, and translated into the images we see.

The two types of photoreceptor cells are known as rods and cones. Rods are responsible for peripheral and night vision. They detect brightness and shades of gray. Cones are responsible for day vision and color perception.

Cats (and dogs) have a high concentration of rod receptors and a low concentration of cone receptors. Humans have the opposite, which why we can't see as well at night but can detect colors better.

In the following pictures, the human view is on top and the cat view is below.

Visual field — This refers to the area that can been when the eyes focus on a single point. It includes what can be seen straight ahead, as well as above, below, and to the side. Cats have a slighter wider visual field of 200 degrees compared to the average human visual field of 180 degrees.

Visual acuity — This refers to clearness of vision. The average human has a visual acuity of 20/20. A cat's visual acuity is anywhere from 20/100 to 20/200, which means a cat has to be at 20 feet to see what an average human can see at 100 or 200 feet. This is why the bottom picture is so blurry.

Color vision — It's a common misconception that cats can't see any colors, only shades of gray. Humans are known as trichromats, meaning they have three kinds of cones that allow them to see red, green, and blue. Cats are also thought to be trichromats, but not in the same way that humans are. A cat's vision is similar to a human who is color blind. They can see shades of blue and green, but reds and pinks can be confusing. These may appear more green, while purple can look like another shade of blue.

Cats also don't see the same richness of hues and saturation of colors that we can.

Distance— Cats seem to be nearsighted, which means they can't see far objects as well. The ability to see close objects would be well-suited for hunting and capturing prey.

Night vision — Cats can't see fine detail or rich color, but have a superior ability to see in the dark because of the high number of rods in their retina that are sensitive to dim light. As a result, cats can see using roughly one-sixth the amount light that people need.

Cats also have a structure behind the retina, called the tapetum, that is thought to improve night vision. Cells in the tapetum act like a mirror, reflecting light that passes between the rods and the cones back to the photoreceptors and giving them another chance to pick up the small amount of light available at night. This is what makes cats' eyes glow in the dark.

Nickolay Lamm consulted with Kerry L. Ketring, DVM, DACVO of All Animal Eye Clinic, Dr. DJ Haeussler of The Animal Eye Institute, and the Ophthalmology group at Penn Vet for this project.

This article was originally published on October 16, 2013. 

SEE ALSO: These hybrid animals will be created because of climate change

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• About 80% of people believe that "opposites attract."
• In fact, if science is anything to go by, this probably isn't the case.
• Research points to us being attracted to people who are similar to us — both physically and in personality.

If you're on the hunt for love, chances are you've heard the phrase "opposites attract."

Despite romantic comedies hinging on the idea we're likely to fall in love with someone with completely different qualities to ourselves — and the fact that about 80% of people believe this is the case — there is very little scientific evidence to suggest it's true.

In fact, we are more likely to be attracted to someone who is physically similar to ourselves. According to research from St Andrews, we are attracted to the features that our parents had when we were born, such as eye colour. This could be because we see them as our first caregiver, and associate positive feelings with their features.

Also, an article published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that if someone looks similar to ourselves, we are more likely to trust them.

We might even be able to sense someone is genetically similar to ourselves. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that spouses tend to be more genetically similar than two individuals chosen at random. A more recent study has found the same for close adult friends, too.

But it's not just about appearance. Back in 1962, psychologist Donn Byrne was one of the first people to study similarities between people in relationships. In his research, published in the Journal of Personality, he asked participants to complete a questionnaire about their attitudes to topics such as nuclear weapons. Then, they had to evaluate the answers of another person (who didn't actually exist).

The results showed that people felt more drawn to those who held similar attitudes, and the greater the similarity, the greater the attraction.

In later research, such as one study from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the University of Kansas, like-minded people have been found to spend more time together than those with opposing views.

Researchers recruited 1,523 couples — defined as people sitting together and interacting, not necessarily romantically — and asked them to fill out a survey about their personality traits. Results showed that the couples had a similarity rate of 86%.

A follow-up study used pairs who had just met. After the study, 23% of the pairs remained in contact, and these pairs had a lot in common too.

Last year, a study published in Psychological Science looked at how people behave online, and found more evidence that people who have similar personalities, based on likes and the words they used, were more likely to be friends. Those with the highest levels of similarities tended to be romantic partners.

However, research has shown that couples can start to align their beliefs to be more like each other's the longer they are together. This could be why couples have similar views and opinions on paper.

Overall, searching for your exact opposite probably isn't the most effective way of finding a partner. The scientific evidence points to opposites barely ever attracting. Besides, if the research is correct, you're probably already attracting all the right people anyway.

SEE ALSO: 9 facial traits that make someone more attractive, according to science

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• Many of us don't get enough sleep during the week, and then try to make up for it at the weekend with a lie-in.
• Sleep scientists generally don't advise people do this, as sleep is "not like the bank."
• However, a new study has shown that making up for lost sleep at the weekend might not be such a bad idea if you really need it.

It's no secret that unpleasant things happen when we don't get enough sleep. On the surface it can make us more irritable, but it can also have long term affects like an increased risk of dementia.

Unfortunately, many of us don't get the sleep we need due to work, social commitments, or behaviours like binge-watching our favourite shows. This means a lot of us are guilty of the weekend lie-in.

Previous research has revealed how trying to play catch-up with our sleep is a pretty bad idea. Sleep scientist Matthew Walker put it this way:

"Sleep is not like the bank. You can't accumulate a debt and pay it off at a later point in time. If I were to deprive you of sleep an entire night, and then in a subsequent night give you all the sleep you want, you never get back all that you've lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment. The brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep."

The odd lie-in might be okay

However, new research contradicts this belief of many sleep scientists, and has shown you might be able to make up for lousy sleep with the odd lie-in. The study from Stockholm University, published in the journal Sleep, looked at the sleeping habits and overall health of 43,000 people.

The results showed that people who slept less than five hours a night, or more than 8 hours a night, had much higher rates of mortality than those who slept more. Overall, it was the average amount of sleep somebody got that seemed to make a difference.

Torbjörn Åkerstedt, a biological psychology professor at the Center for Stress Research at Stockholm University, and lead author of the study, said this seems to show that if you suffer from bad sleep over the week, and make up for it at the weekend, you might be doing your body a favour.

"It seems like you actually can compensate by catching up on sleep during weekends,"Åkerstedt said. "This is in effect an argument for lazing around all weekend. There probably is an upper limit, but it's anyway better to increase [sleep hours] on the weekend rather than not doing it at all."

One reason we feel groggy and tired during the week is that we are out of sync with our circadian rhythms, otherwise known as the body clock. If we are on a regular schedule, our hormones make us tired when it's time to go to bed, and wake us up again in the morning.

Work schedules can lead to 'social jetlag'

"The body clock thrives off routine — the more regular you are, the better it is really," Elise Facer-Childs, a doctoral researcher specialising in sleep at the University of Birmingham, told Business Insider when she was interviewed about partners having different body clocks.

She explained something called "social jetlag," which is the misalignment between social and biological time, and how we keep chopping and changing out schedules depending on what day it is.

"A lot of our society suffers from social jetlag because we follow a certain schedule during the week for work, and then we follow a different schedule at the weekend because we're either having a lie in or going out for social activities," she said.

"If you get up at 6 o'clock for work during the week, and then at the weekend you sleep in until 10, that's a four-hour time difference. So for your body, it is like every Friday you jump on a plane and you fly to Dubai, which is a four-hour time zone change, and every Sunday you fly back. That's the sort of social jetlag that's happening to your body, but people just don't see it like that."

Our bodies like routine

It is very easy to stay up too late, or snooze our alarms. Even the slightest adjustment can make us fall out of whack, like when the clocks change in spring and autumn. Making up for lost sleep at the weekends is probably better than doing nothing at all, but the best thing is to keep to a schedule whenever you can.

"There does have to be a balance, because we do get up early during the week, and then that causes an accumulation of sleep debt, so were not sleeping enough during the week," Facer-Childs said. "So it's difficult to get the balance between keeping a regular schedule and catching up on some much needed sleep.

"I'd say the best thing to do is to try and keep a regular schedule, but that means getting up early during the week but not going to bed late."

The new study doesn't recommend always lying in at the weekend, as results also suggested too much sleep can increase the risk of death too. But if you've had a long week, and you really feel like your body could do with the extra rest, don't feel too guilty about it.

SEE ALSO: You might be better at sports at certain times of day thanks to your biological clock

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• Opentrons, a Brooklyn-based startup that's building robots to help out with routine lab work, just closed a $10 million seed-funding round led by Khosla Ventures.
• Its robots help scientists by automating the process of pipetting, a necessary task for things like getting DNA samples ready for sequencing.
• Opentrons has been using the funding to develop its new robot, OT-2, which has a starting price of $4,000 — a much lower cost than traditional lab equipment that performs the same task. 
• The hope is to open the technology up to more people who might be interested in biotech, including areas like fashion and food tech, that until now weren't able to pay high prices for the equipment. 

Opentrons, a Brooklyn-based startup that's trying to replace lab work that scientists often have to do by hand with a $4,000 robot, just raised $10 million. 

The seed funding round was led by Khosla Ventures, which was joined by the Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and former Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler. The company got its start back in 2014 with a Kickstarter campaign, and went on to be a part of Y Combinator in 2016.

Opentrons develops robots that help scientists by automating the process of pipetting, which transports a certain amount of liquid from one place to another. It's a necessary part of doing things like getting DNA samples ready for sequencing. 

The funding, which has come in over the last year, has been used in part to get Opentrons' new robot, the OT-2, developed, along with now launching the product.  The OT-2 starts at $4,000, a price point Opentrons says is 10 times less than traditional lab robots. 

Here's what it looks like in action in Opentrons' offices in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood.

The hope is that by making the robot cheaper, it'll open up the world of biotech to not only those developing medications but to folks that don't come from traditional biotech backgrounds who might be interested in applying biotech to their industry, like fashion and food. Will Canine, chief product officer at Opentrons, told Business Insider said about 75% of Opentrons customers hadn't had a lab robot before their Opentrons machine. 

Canine compared the easier accessibility of the robots to the advancements that were made with early computers. In the same way early computers were only available in certain institutions that could afford them, that's how lab equipment's been so far. Canine sees Opentrons robots transforming labs the ways PCs changed how people interacted with computers.

The robots are also open-source, with the hope that this will make it easier to share scientific protocols between labs so that those running the robots don't have to start from scratch. Going forward, Canine said, the plan is to build more products and applications to add on to the robot.

SEE ALSO: A startup that uses software to discover new drugs just raised $10 million

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As humans, how we perceive the world is how we define our own reality. And for the vast majority of humans, perception is handled through sight. 

Your hearing, and your senses of smell, taste, and touch also play roles — no doubt — but sight is the most immediate way we experience the world around us. 

This isn't the case for dogs.

The adorable snout on your pup isn't just for petting — dogs "see" the world with their nose first. "We assume that non-human animals' perception would be kind of like ours, but simpler," dog cognition researcher Dr. Alexandra Horowitz told me in an interview last year.

But that isn't the case. Instead, dogs "see" the world through smells. Here's how it works.

SEE ALSO: You probably shouldn't hug your dogs, regardless of how adorable they are

"It's really hard to get outside our perspective."

Because our perception of the world colors our perception of how others see the world, we assume that dogs primarily perceive the world through sight. But it's not so hard to understand — and even experience— the concept of smell as a primary input.

"You could think of it as just another perceptual modality," Horowitz told me. "You can close your eyes. You're still having an experience as a human, and it's transformed in some ways. But there's still a room. There's still a reality — a room that you can hear, you can smell, you can touch. And even though it's not one that we're that familiar with, we're still co-existing."

That's the first way to understand how dogs see the world — close your eyes, maybe cover your ears with sound-canceling headphones. Now take a sniff! As humans, our sense of smell is nowhere near as adept as that of dogs — but you can begin to understand how a dog perceives the world. Maybe you smell something delicious, or something rotting, or the sterile blow of an office air conditioner.

"We basically have a cloud of smell around us. That's interesting, because it means a dog can smell you before you're really there," Horowitz said. "If you're around the corner, your cloud of smell is coming around ahead of you."

"Ultimately, their bigger interest is smell than vision."

Which isn't to say that dogs don't literally see you — their eyes are another form of input, just not the primary one. "They might look at someone with their eyes; as you approach, they look at you," Horowitz said. "But then once they've noticed that there's something with their eyes, they use smell to tell that it's you. So they sort of reverse that very familiar use of ours."

And that's crucial to understanding how dogs see the world.

You, as a human, might smell something delicious and then use your eyes to look around to locate the source of that delicious smell. "Ah, it's pasta sauce slowly coming together on a stove!" 

For dogs, the opposite is true. Or, as Horowitz put it:

"We smell something and then when we see it we're like, 'Oh yeah, that's it. That's what it was. It was cinnamon buns.' And dogs when they see you, they're like, 'Okay, that's something to explore, I'm gonna smell it. Oh yeah that's Ben.'"

"Instead of all the things that are bouncing into my eyes when I sit in a room, I'm just perceiving that room through things— molecules of smell. That's really the transformation you have to make."

We perceive depth, as humans, through stereo vision — our two eyes triangulate on the world around us, and our brain converts that video feed into three dimensions. That same concept applies to dogs, except — once again — it's through scent rather than sight.

"Where something is in a room, or what something even is, kind of changes a bit if you imagine it as an olfactory precept instead of as only a visual precept," Horowitz said. To translate that a bit, your perception of the world fundamentally changes if it's viewed through the lens of scent.

It means not only do you perceive what's immediately around you, but also what was once around you and what's coming up. In this way, how dogs perceive the world is actually more developed than humans — their sense of smell doesn't just alert them to the present, but it also travels through time.

It all started with a simple question: "Do snakes fart?"

Dani Rabaiotti had no idea. But the zoologist and University College London PhD student knew she could probably tap her scientist friends on Twitter and find an answer to her brother's simple query. So she asked snake expert David Steen what he thought. 

But the smelly questions didn't end there. What about fish? Cheetahs? And dinosaurs?

Soon, the hashtag #doesitfart? was born.

Now Rabaiotti, along with another animal expert, Nick Caruso from Virginia Tech, have compiled their answers into a book that answers the question"does it fart?" for more than 80 different animals, including humans and dinosaurs.

"The farts basically brought us together," Caruso said. 

Here are a few of our favorite flatulence questions, as answered by the new book:

SEE ALSO: Bugs survive the winter through a trick straight out of science fiction

Seals and sea lions may be some of the smelliest gas emitters out there.

"Having been near seals and sea lions on field work before, I can confirm they are absolutely vile," Rabaiotti told Business Insider. 

Bolson Pupfish have to fart, because if they don't they'll explode. Or they might float to the surface of their ponds and get eaten by a predator. Not ideal.

The Bolson pupfish (Cyprinodon atrorus) is a species of fish that lives in the pools of this northern Mexican reserve. If they don't fart regularly, the gas that builds up in their system can make them burst. 

The authors said that around 300 of these little fish have been found dead from not farting. "It really is a case of fart or die," they wrote. 

That's not true for all fish, though.

Goldfish don't usually fart, even though they do have some gas-making bacteria in their guts. 

"It is far more common to see them burp out gas than pass it through their anal duct," the authors said, warning that if your goldfish is farting, it's probably having some serious digestive issues.

Similar areas of the brain are activated when you burn your hand on the stove and when you bite into a cookie. Here's why. Following is a transcript of the video.

Caroline Aghajanian:"Oh my god... I think I'm going to die."

Why do we do this?

Joe Avella:"It burns, but it's so good."

Chef Johnny Zone:“As a human being, pain is pleasure..”

Chef Johnny is right. Pain and pleasure are intricately connected. Similar areas of the brain are activated when you burn your hand on the stove and when you bite into a cookie. To be clear, eating a cookie and burning your hand won't make you react the same way... unless the cookie is on fire. But, while it may seem like a cookie would bring us infinitely more joy than a burn, sometimes... it doesn’t.

Capsaicin is the chemical that makes chili peppers spicy. It was developed specifically to keep mammals from eating them. But humans went ahead and started eating – and enjoying – spicy peppers anyway.

So what gives?

When we feel pain, all sorts of feel-good chemicals get pumped into our system as a way to cope. Endorphins, anandamide, and adrenaline are all responsible for that “heat buzz” after a hot wings challenge. The hippocampus orders endorphins to block the transmission of pain signals, and also stimulate the brain’s limbic and prefrontal regions. That’s where our penchant for grand romance and an appreciation of music lives.

Adrenaline raises your heart rate and excitement levels, while anandamide chills you out. Anandamide, aka the “bliss chemical,” is like the endorphins’ cool cousin. It binds to the same receptors in the brain as marijuana and produces the same warm, fuzzy feeling. And it’s not just chemicals that determine how we feel pain.

Our brains are pretty smart. They’re able to determine when a stimulus that’s causing us pain isn’t actually a threat, even when our bodies are screaming that it is. That initial scary moment coupled with the realization that we’d been duped by our senses actually brings us pleasure. The concept is called “benign masochism.” It’s what tells us it’s fun to eat ghost peppers, ride roller coasters, and take a whiff of old milk.

Geoffrey R. O. Durso:"So, if I put myself in a situation that is very likely to cause me pain, that means any positive experience out of that is magnified because it's unexpected, it's surprising."

Now, for the most part, we avoid harm at all costs. But getting rid of paid can come at a price. For example, painkillers dull our aches... but they also blunt our sensitivity to pleasure.

Geoffrey R. O. Durso: "People who took acetaminophen in my studies, compared to a group that took a placebo, were evaluating the unpleasant things less negatively and these pleasant things less positively."

And in another case, one group of cervical cancer survivors had nerves in their spinal cords cut to relieve abdominal pain. Unfortunately, they also lost the ability to orgasm. Pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin – it's hard to imagine one without the other.

Geoffrey R. O. Durso: "If you were to wake up tomorrow, and just no longer experience any pain that would be a bad day for you."

So, it looks like pain is here to stay. We might as well enjoy it.

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Goldfish may look small and cute in your home, but in the wild, it’s a different story. Releasing them into your local stream or lake is a bad idea. Following is a transcript of the video.

Right now, Washington state is fighting of an invasion! The culprit? Goldfish. Yup, you heard right.

Thousands of goldfish have infested the West Medical Lake and are crowding out the native fish population. How did this happen? The Department of Fish and Wildlife thinks a few irresponsible pet owners are to blame. And while the goldfish may have cost the owners a few dollars this mess is going to run cost the state an estimated $150,000 to try to remove these feral fish.

But this isn't the only place this is happening. Goldfish are invading lakes and streams worldwide, and it’s all our fault.

If you think you’re doing the goldfish a favor by releasing it, you’re not! Instead, you’re setting the stage for an ecological disaster, which could threaten hundreds of other species. Turns out, goldfish are one of the world’s worst invasive species.

Goldfish were first selectively bred in China 2,000 years ago for food. By the 14th century, goldfish had been promoted from our meals to our entertainment. It wasn’t long before pet owners helped them spread across the world, eventually reaching North America by the 19th century.

They may look small and cute in your home, but in the wild, it’s a different story. Given enough time and resources, these little orange monsters will grow into giants, reaching as much as 4 pounds (2 kg), about the size of an American football!

These big fish are also big eaters. Feeding on plants, insects, crustaceans, and other fish. But they’re not just consuming what other fish rely on to survive, they’re voracious feeding time actually kicks up mud and sediment which can lead to harmful algae blooms that choke the ecosystem.

If that’s not enough, they also introduce foreign parasites and diseases that wreak havoc on the delicately-balanced ecosystems wherever they go. And they aren’t content to stay in one place. Goldfish are a rapidly-reproducing fish and will migrate across multiple bodies of water. Case in point, when a few were dumped in a local Australian river in the early 2000s they eventually migrated to the Vasse River, where they’re still a major problem today.

There are similar accounts of goldfish invasions in Epping Forest, London, Alberta, Canada, and Lake Tahoe, Nevada. In fact, invasive fish species accounted for over half of the total fish population in Lake Tahoe Basin. Besides causing fiscal and environmental disasters there are other reasons you should keep that goldfish in its tank.

For starters, goldfish are smarter than you might think. They have a memory span of at least 3 months which means you can teach them tricks like this. They also can tell the difference between Stravinsky and Bach.

Can you do that?

So, consider the wildlife, and think twice before tossing that goldfish away.

Additional video courtesy Spartan's tricks.

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• Bill Gates says he parents according to a model developed in the 1970s by a former principal, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist.
• The "Love and Logic" method minimizes emotional reactivity, and encourages parents to give kids more of their own problems to solve and chances to fail.
• Gates says his wife Melinda did most of the parenting for the couples' three children.

Bill Gates doesn't pretend he lives in an egalitarian household. When it comes to parenting his three children, the billionaire Microsoft mogul readily admits his wife Melinda has done more than her share of the work raising the kids.

"My wife does 80%," Gates told a crowd of Harvard students on Thursday. Gates spent two years there taking math and computer science courses as a pre-law student, but never finished up his degree (though he was later gifted an honorary diploma from the Ivy League university).

"My eldest graduates from Stanford in June, so I’m optimistic she won’t fall into my footsteps," Gates joked.

Gates said he and his wife have been quite deliberate about the model they've used to raise their three children, who are now 15, 18, and 22 years old. 

He says the couple followed a 1970s "Love and Logic" parenting model. It's a formula that was created by a group of three men — a mix of psychologists, psychiatrists and former school administrators. The core idea of their philosophy is centered on the idea that exerting emotional control, essentially minimizing emotional reactions like shouting or reprimanding kids, is a good formula for parenting. 

"One of the greatest benefits of applying Love and Logic is that it helps us learn how to keep a tighter leash on our emotions and on our tongues," co-founder Charles Fay wrote in a blog post about his model. 

Gates admits he and his wife haven't been perfect at carrying out the approach.

"Can you get rid of the emotion? You can’t totally do it," he said.

Aside from reining in hot-blooded parent tempers, the love and logic model also stresses the importance of not leaning into rewards for kids, but instead demonstrating unconditional love and admiring kids for who they are, not what they do (or don't) achieve, like a poor test score or a bad grade.

"Many highly successful people struggled with grades as children," Fay wrote on his site. "What’s most important is that our children develop good character, curiosity, and problem-solving skills."

The model is a bit like the Socratic method, in that it pushes parents to focus on asking questions of their kids and getting them to think about how to solve their own problems, instead of feeding them answers. 

Gates says the "Love and Logic" method is a far cry from the way he grew up, but he knew he wanted to do things differently with his own kids.

It wasn't the only way he set boundaries for his children while they were growing up. None of his kids owned a cell phone until they were 14 years old. The children also attended Catholic church regularly with their parents. And they will each get about $10 million of their parents fortune as inheritance, a mere fraction of the mogul's roughly $90 billion net worth. 

"We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything, but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing,"Gates once told TED.

SEE ALSO: Bill Gates says he now lumps the world into 4 income groups — here’s how it breaks down

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NOW WATCH: 6 things in tech today that Bill Gates accurately predicted back in 1999

• Investigators in California reportedly used publicly available DNA information uploaded to an open-source website to match a "distant relative" of suspected Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo to decades-old crime-scene DNA.
• They used a site called GEDmatch, which lets users upload the DNA information they get from at-home testing kits like 23andMe or Ancestry to search for family members.
• The case's lead investigator told the San Jose Mercury News that the site was his most important detective tool in cracking the cold case, which has been a mystery since the 1970s and '80s. 

A growing preponderance of at-home DNA testing kits, coupled with online forums where people can post and share their results, is making it easier for people to track down long lost relatives online.

Now, it seems, that also made it easier for one California district attorney's office to pinpoint a suspected killer who'd been at large for more than 30 years. 

Investigators think that the so-called Golden State Killer — also known as the East Area Rapist or the Original Night Stalker — committed 12 murders, more than 45 rapes, and upwards of 120 burglaries in 10 California counties between 1974 and 1986. 

The case remained largely a mystery until this week, when investigators arrested 72-year-old former cop Joseph DeAngelo.

Investigators told the San Jose Mercury News that by consulting an open-source DNA-sharing website called GEDmatch, they were able to find the genetic information of a distant relative of DeAngelo's.

That relative seems to have uploaded their sample online on their own. The data was apparently similar enough to DNA information that officers had recovered at the crime scenes to enable investigators to pinpoint DeAngelo as the suspected killer and rapist.

He'd been at large for 32 years when officers arrested DeAngelo at his home outside Sacramento earlier this week. 

Cracking the case using DNA

Humans are all around 99.9% the same, genetically speaking, but that extra 0.1% of variation is what scientists, investigators, and family members zero in on when studying DNA data.

Genetic testing companies 23andMe and Ancestry both say they won't share genetic information with law enforcement unless they're served a court order. But they can't stop people from sharing their genetic information online, which many people do when trying to connect with long lost relatives or find a biological parent like a sperm or egg donor.

Scientists are also using the onslaught of DNA information that's becoming available online to better track and understand genetic diseases, as the Atlantic reported last year.

GEDmatch said in a statement to Business Insider that the site was not approached by law enforcement "or anyone else about this case or about the DNA." The site administrator said he's always made it clear in the site's policy that the information people upload "could be used for other uses" besides connecting with potential relatives.

"While the database was created for genealogical research, it is important that GEDmatch participants understand the possible uses of their DNA, including identification of relatives that have committed crimes or were victims of crimes," the statement said. 

But this kind of labor-intensive DNA matching isn't likely to happen often, since most criminal investigators don't have time to cruise online DNA forums and search for potential matches.

"The man-hours and resources needed to follow up on these leads is extremely limited in many jurisdictions," Sara Katsanis, a scholar at Duke University’s Initiative for Science and Society, told Buzzfeed News.  

The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s office, which made the arrest, did not immediately respond to questions about how they used the publicly available data to crack the case. 

SEE ALSO: These are the US states where people live the longest, healthiest lives — and the shortest

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NOW WATCH: The DNA in your body stretches 12 times farther than Pluto

• The human body is in a constant state of regeneration, from the cells in our skeleton to the nails on our toes.
• But some cells are replaced more quickly than others, and some body parts never get replaced.
• The graphic below illustrates how cellular regeneration and regrowth happens in your body.

Human bodies change and regenerate throughout our lives.

That process is easy to see if you watch babies' limbs grow and their bodies get bigger. It's also obvious when our toenails grow or healthy skin emerges after a burn peels away. 

But less obvious systems of regrowth and rebirth in the body continue through adulthood. Dead skin cells constantly rise to the surface of our body, get sloughed off, then are replaced by new stem cells.

Some areas of the body take a long time to refresh themselves — for example, our fat-storage cells shift roughly once per decade, while we get fresh liver cells about once every 300 days.

Of course, your body doesn't simply throw away an entire liver's worth of cells on day 300 and create a brand new set on 301. Instead, it's more of an organic cycle, since liver cells continue to divide and regenerate long after they're mature.

Not every body part regenerates or changes, though. While the body's hairs are in a near constant state of growth, parts of the human brain and head pretty much finish developing at birth (like the lens of the eye that's helping you read this).

Eventually, the tips of our DNA begin to fray as years of wear and tear take their toll on the body — part of the natural aging process.

Here are just a few of the myriad ways that your body regenerates, regrows, and starts anew all the time. 

Not all members of the animal kingdom have the same processes of regeneration, of course. Some get wild with their techniques: freaked out geckos can drop their tails and grow new ones, spiders will grow replacement legs after one falls off or breaks, and deer shed their antlers and grow a new rack each year. 

Meghan Bartels and Florence Fu contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

SEE ALSO: How often to clean everything you own, from your toilet to your phone, according to science

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NOW WATCH: Here's what losing weight does to your body and brain

• A professor at Harvard Medical School has co-founded a start-up that intends to reverse the effects of aging in dogs. 
• Taking cue from studies of worms and flies, the startup believes the lifespan of a dog could be doubled by amending their DNA.  
• However, the unintended consequences these tests could have are raising ethical concerns amongst some.

The world's most influential synthetic biologist is behind a new company that plans to rejuvenate dogs using gene therapy. If it works, he plans to try the same approach in people, and he might be one of the first volunteers.

The stealth startup Rejuvenate Bio, cofounded by George Church of Harvard Medical School, thinks dogs aren't just man's best friend but also the best way to bring age-defeating treatments to market.

The company, which has carried out preliminary tests on beagles, claims it will make animals "younger" by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.

Its age-reversal plans build on tantalizing clues seen in simple organisms like worms and flies. Tweaking their genes can increase their life spans by double or better. Other research has shown that giving old mice blood transfusions from young ones can restore some biomarkers to youthful levels.

"We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we'll move on to humans," Church told the podcaster Rob Reid earlier this year. The company's other founders, CEO Daniel Oliver and science lead Noah Davidsohn, a postdoc in Church's sprawling Boston lab, declined to be interviewed for this article.

The company's efforts to keep its activities out of the press make it unclear how many dogs it has treated so far. In a document provided by a West Coast veterinarian, dated last June, Rejuvenate said its gene therapy had been tested on four beagles with Tufts Veterinary School in Boston. It is unclear whether wider tests are under way.

However, from public documents, a patent application filed by Harvard, interviews with investors and dog breeders, and public comments made by the founders, 'MIT Technology Review' assembled a portrait of a life-extension startup pursuing a longevity long shot through the $72-billion-a-year US pet industry.

"Dogs are a market in and of themselves," Church said during an event in Boston last week. "It's not just a big organism close to humans. It's something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We'll do dog trials, and that'll be a product, and that'll pay for scaling up in human trials."

It's still unknown if the company's treatments do anything for dogs. If they do work, however, it might not take long for people to clamor for similar nostrums, creating riches for inventors.

The effort draws on ongoing advances in biotechnology, including the ability to edit genes. To some scientists, this progress means that mastery over aging is inevitable, although no one can say exactly how soon it will happen. The prolongation of human lifespan is "the biggest thing that is going to happen in the 21st century," says David Sinclair, a Harvard biologist who collaborates with the Church lab. "It's going to make what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian."

Dog years

Rejuvenate Bio has met with investors and won a grant from the US Special Operations Command to look into "enhancement" of military dogs while Harvard is seeking a broad patent on genetic means of aging control in species including the "cow, pig, horse, cat, dog, rat, etc."

The team hit on the idea of treating pets because proving that it's possible to increase longevity in humans would take too long. "You don't want to go to the FDA and say we extend life by 20 years. They'd say, ‘Great, come back in 20 years with the data,'" Church said during the event in Boston.

Instead, Rejuvenate will first try to stop fatal heart ailments common in spaniels and Doberman pinschers, amassing evidence that the concepts can work in humans too.

Lab research already provides hints that aging can be reversed. For instance, scientists can "reprogram" any cell to take on the type of youthful state seen in an embryo. But turning back the aging program in animals is not as easy because we're made up of trillions of specialized cells acting in concert, not just one floating in a dish. "I don't think we are even near to being able to reverse the aging process as a whole in mammals," says J. Pedro de Magalhães, whose team at the University of Liverpool maintains a database of longevity-connected genes.

Starting around 2015, Church's large Harvard lab, also known for attempting to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth, decided to make a run at rejuvenating mice using gene therapy and newer tools like CRISPR.

Gene therapies work by inserting DNA instructions into a virus, which conveys them into an animal's cells. In the Harvard lab, the technology has been used to modulate gene activity in old mice — either increasing or lowering it — in an effort to return certain molecules to levels seen in younger, healthy animals.

The lab started working through a pipeline of more than 60 different gene therapies, which it is testing on old mice, alone and in combinations. The Harvard group now plans to publish a scientific report on a technique that extends rodents' lives by modifying two genes to act on four major diseases of aging: heart and kidney failure, obesity, and diabetes. According to Church, the results are "pretty eye-popping."

Any age you want

In a January presentation about his project at Harvard, Davidsohn closed by displaying a picture of a white-bearded Church as he is now and another as he was decades ago, hair still auburn. Yet the second image was labelled 2117 AD — 100 years in the future.

The images reflect Church's aspirations for true age reversal. He says he'd sign up if a treatment proved safe, or even as a guinea pig in a study. Essentially, Church has said, the objective is to "have the body and mind of a 22-year-old but the experience of a 130-year-old."

Such ideas are finding an audience in Silicon Valley, where billionaires like Peter Thiel look upon the defeat of aging as both a personal imperative and, potentially, a huge business that would transform society. Earlier this year, for example, Davidsohn told Thiel's Founders Fund that because scientists can already modify life spans of simpler organisms, it should be possible to do so with humans as well. He told the investors that one day "we'll be able to control the biological clock and keep you whatever age you want."

Old dogs, new tricks

The new company has been contacting dog breeders, ethicists, and veterinarians with its ideas for restoring youth and extending "maximal life span," according to its documents. The strategy is to gain a foothold in the pet market — where Americans already lavish $20 billion a year on vet bills — "before moving on to humans."

Starting last year, Rejuvenate Bio began reaching out to owners of toy dogs called Cavalier King Charles spaniels after saying it planned a gene therapy to treat a heart ailment, mitral valve disease, that kills about half of these tiny dogs by age 10.

Rejuvenate hasn't publicly disclosed what its dog therapy involves, but it may mirror one treatment Davidsohn has given mice to stop heart damage. That involved using gene therapy to block a protein, TGF-beta, termed a "master switch" in the process by which heart valves scar, thicken, and become misshapen, the same process that afflicts the dogs.

This spring, Davidsohn and Oliver traveled to Chicago to the breed's national show, where they were feted at an auction dinner that raised several thousand dollars for the trial. Spaniel breeder Patty Kanan says the research is "seriously meaningful to the American Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club," of which she is president.

In a flyer circulated to spaniel owners last year, Rejuvenate stated, without qualification, that the still untested treatment would make pets "healthier, happier, and younger." But not all dog owners are impressed.

To Rod Russell, editor of the website CavalierHealth.org, the offer is "pure hype." He says there is "absolutely no evidence" for a way to make dogs younger and that even for pets, experimental drugs can't be said to work before a study is complete. "No one would be naïve enough to contribute money on a promise that this treatment will make their Cavaliers younger. Or would they?" he asks on his site.

A further question: even if the treatment stops progressive heart disease, is it "age reversal" or merely a form of disease prevention? To Church, the answer lies in whether an old dog's body can heal like that of a young one. In any case, he predicts, pet owners won't worry about semantics "if the dog is jumping around wagging its tail."

Dog ethics

One doesn't have to wait for aging reversal in humans to see how life extension could create some ethical quandaries. Last September, Rejuvenate Bio's founders traveled to New Haven for a roundtable discussion with philosophers and ethicists organized by Lisa Moses, a veterinarian affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

For instance, if dogs' lives can be extended, more pets would outlive their owners and end up in shelters or euthanized. "I do worry about unintended consequences," says Moses. "I would want to see that investigated before this goes much further."

The pet dogs Rejuvenate wants to test gene therapy on also have fewer special ethical protections than those in research facilities. "Pets fall into a legal gray zone when it comes to experimenting on them," she says. The power of life and death sits in their owner's hands; people can choose to put an ailing animal out of its misery or, just as often, take extraordinary medical steps to save it, which Moses says "don't always benefit the patient."

Life-extension treatments based on genetic modification could also bring unexpected side effects, according to Matt Kaeberlein, a University of Washington researcher involved in a study called the Dog Aging Project, who has been testing whether a drug called rapamycin causes dogs to live longer.

"The idea that we can genetically engineer lab animals to have longer life span has been validated. But there are concerns about bringing it out of the lab," Kaeberlein says. "There are trade-offs." Changing a gene that damages the heart could have other effects on dogs, perhaps making them less healthy in other ways. "And when you do these genetic modifications, there are many cases where it doesn't work as you intend," he adds. "What do you do with the dogs in which the treatment fails?"

Kaeberlein says he'd like to see stronger evidence of rejuvenation in mice before anyone tries it in a dog. Until then, he thinks, claims for youth-restoring medicine should be kept on a leash.

"They can talk about it all they want, but it hasn't been done yet," he says. "I think it's good for getting people's attention. But I am not sure it's the most rigorous language in the world."

SEE ALSO: It seems like chimpanzees have specific calls for 'snake' and other words — and it could teach us how human language evolved

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NOW WATCH: What will probably happen with the North and South Korean peace treaty

• Our internal body clocks — or circadian rhythms — keep our bodies in sync.
• If our cycle is disrupted, this can cause health problems.
• A new study suggests an interrupted body clock cycle is associated with an increased risk of mood disorders like depression.
• Further research is needed to determine whether interrupted sleep does cause mood disorders, or if it's the other way around.

Our internal body clocks, or circadian rhythms, determine nearly every biological process in our bodies, including sleeping, eating, and our blood pressure.

It also determines your chronotype, which is how long you tend to sleep in any 24 hour day. People are generally divided into night owls and early birds.

Your body clock is inherently biological, which means you cannot change it. If you're a night owl, you'll probably be that way forever — you just have to learn how to best manage it. This also means disrupting your natural rhythm can be really bad for you.

For example, you will probably feel groggy and unmotivated in the short term, and in the long term, some research suggests you could increase your risk of diseases like Alzheimer's.

According to a new study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, an interrupted body clock can also increase the risk of depression, bipolar disorder, and other mood disorders.

Researchers from the University of Glasgow recruited 91,105 people in the UK to wear activity monitors for a week to see how disrupted their body clocks were. If they were highly active at late hours, or inactive during the day, this was classed as a disruption.

Those with more disruption were between 6 and 10% more likely to have been diagnosed with a mood disorder than people who had a more typical day — active in the day, sleeping at night. Circadian disruption was also associated with lower well-being, higher neuroticism, increased loneliness, less happiness and health satisfaction, more mood swings, and a slower reaction time.

Laura Lyall, the lead author of the study, said this was the largest study of its type ever conducted to identify an association between disrupted body clocks and mood disorders.

However, the results do not reveal whether the disruption causes mental illness, or if it's a symptom of it, as shifts in energy levels and sleep disturbances are common with a diagnosis of depression or bipolar disorder. But it is an area of research the scientists can look into.

"The next step will be to identify the mechanisms by which genetic and environmental causes of circadian disruption interact to increase an individual’s risk of depression and bipolar disorder," said Daniel Smith, a professor of psychiatry and senior author of the study. "This is important globally because more and more people are living in urban environments that are known to increase risk of circadian disruption and, by extension, adverse mental health outcomes."

Circadian rhythms are a highly vital to life, because they have evolved over time to adapt to different phases of the day, regulating our hormones, behaviour, sleep, body temperature, and metabolism to keep us in sync. It's considered such an important area of research, three scientists who uncovered certain molecular mechanisms in body clocks — Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young — won The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2017.

SEE ALSO: What a sleep scientist says you should do if you and your partner have different body clocks

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NOW WATCH: The terrible things that would happen if all the coral reefs died off

• The internet is aflame about whether a robotic-sounding recording says "yanny" or "laurel."
• Speech scientists say there's a simple reason for the audio trickery that has to do with the way our brains learn to quickly decipher vowels and words.
• The recording seems to be a slightly altered version of vocabulary.com's pronunciation aide for the word laurel. (Sorry, team yanny.) 

Yanny or laurel?

The internet exploded in argument this week as people debated which of those words a robot was saying in this recording, posted by YouTube vlog-er Chloe Feldman: 

Hardik Kothare, who works in the speech neuroscience lab at UCSF was quick to weigh in with his assessment of the sound. To his ear, this was definitely a recording of the word laurel.

If you're still on team yanny, take a listen to the original recording from Vocabulary.com, where it's the pronunciation key for just one word: laurel. (Apologies, yanny fans.)

The sound was recorded by a professional opera singer who was one of the original cast members in the Broadway musical Cats, according to Wired. The dictionary site hasn't revealed the man's identity, but said he was one of several trained singers enlisted to record hundreds of thousands of pronunciations, based on the rules of the international phonetic alphabet. 

Kothare suggested that the recording was likely "cleverly synthesized" to trick our brain's powers of speech detection. He said there's a simple, logical reason why some folks who listen to the viral recording hear yanny while others pick up laurel. 

"The human brain is trained to perceive and interpret speech on the fly in a remarkable way," Kothare said Tuesday on Twitter.

Our ears learn at a young age to pick up clues about the vowels people are spitting out by focusing on frequencies at which certain sounds tend to resonate. The frequencies for each sound are a little different from person to person and language to language. And if you mess with the frequencies in a recording, you can change what people hear — it's similar to the way that our eyes can be tricked by an optical illusion. 

The New York Times tried this out today and created its own yanny-versus-laurel audio switching tool.

It turns out that our brains can shift pretty easily between hearing yanni and laurel, just based on how low or high the frequency of the recording gets. Couple this with all the cultural and linguistic ways we've been trained to hear certain vowels, and you've got a perfect recipe for a little audio illusion. 

"Speech perception and production depends heavily on an internal map of speech sounds," Kothare said. "You learn this map while learning to speak as a toddler, and also while hearing others speak on a day-to-day basis."

SEE ALSO: The 7 best exercises for toning your body right now

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NOW WATCH: What it's actually like to hear voices in your head

Octopuses have blue blood, can change colors, and regrow their tentacles. But what really makes them stand out is even weirder: they can edit their own RNA. Following is a transcript of the video.

Octopuses are the weirdest animal on earth. I know what you're thinking... Is it because they have three hearts? Blue blood? That they can regrow their limbs? Or how they're known to use tools? Or change colors whenever they want?

And of course, all that is cool, but it's just the beginning.

Turns out, octopuses — and their close coleoid relatives — have a unique ability to edit significant amounts of their RNA. They’ve been doing this since before modern humans showed up 200,000 years ago.

And while scientists aren’t sure how or why it started, studies suggest that octopuses today are editing their RNA to adapt to temperature changes in their environment.

RNA is sort of like DNA editing but, in some ways, even better.

Prof. Eli Eisenberg: “You can think of it as spell checking. If you have a word document. If you want to change the information, you take one letter and you replace it with another."  

But what makes RNA editing different from DNA editing is the long-term effects. Your DNA, for instance, is identical in each one of your trillions of adult cells. So, changing the code in one cell, changes it forever and fundamentally alters your genome, which is passed down to your children and every generation thereafter.

This is how the majority of the animal kingdom evolves. But octopuses do things differently, by also editing their RNA, which allows them to “try out” adaptations in the short-term without messing with entire generations to come.

Prof. Eli Eisenberg: “In this aspect, RNA mutations, or RNA editing events, are much less dangerous. You can play with the RNA. You can test many different possibilities without damaging the master copy of your genetic information.”

Unlike DNA, changes to RNA are NOT hereditary. It also means that you can target certain body parts and edit the RNA in them individually. In fact, research groups have discovered that octopuses tend to edit the RNA in their brain tissue more than anywhere else.

Which has led some experts to hypothesize this is why octopuses are the most intelligent of all invertebrates on the planet.

Now, most organisms — including humans — have the enzyme necessary for RNA editing but the general consensus is it’s by and large just not worth the effort. Humans, for example, have around 10 RNA editing sites, but octopuses have tens of thousands.

Prof. Eli Eisenberg: “It’s really a completely new story.”

So, octopuses and their coleoid cousins truly are bizarre but it may not be the case for too much longer.

Scientists have recently proven ways of using CRISPR to edit RNA, too. Perhaps they can learn a thing or two from the experts.

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• People with a night owl chronotype can struggle with a fixed 9-5 routine.
• Failing to get to sleep can mean you don't get a consistent eight hours a night.
• This is bad news because a lack of sleep has been associated with an increased risk of early death.
• But according to new research, you might be able to reduce your risk by catching up with sleep at the weekend.
• However, the consensus in the sleep science community remains that consistency is key, and there is no substitute for a regular bedtime when it comes to your health.

As a night owl, I know what it's like to struggle with the strict schedules society has set for us. Getting to bed to ensure eight hours of sleep is a daily battle, but it's nothing compared to getting up in the morning to make it to work on time.

Throughout the week it can feel like my body hasn't rested enough because I often fail to fall asleep until very late. This means I take the opportunity at weekends to "catch up" on my shut-eye, so I rarely set an alarm, and tend to wake up when my body wants to.

Sleep scientists have long been critical of my method. Sleep scientist Matthew Walker said last year: "Sleep is not like the bank. You can't accumulate a debt and pay it off at a later point in time."

But according to a new study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, the impact of insufficient sleep over the week could actually be countered by a later lie-in at the weekend.

Sleep researchers from the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University looked at data from more than 43,000 adults collected in Sweden in 1997. Then, they found out what happened to participants 13 years later by looking at the national death register.

Results showed that adults under age 65 who only got five hours of sleep or fewer a night, seven days a week, had a higher risk of death than those who consistently got six or seven. But those who made up for it at the weekend by sleeping in had no raised mortality risk compared to the steady sleepers.

"The results imply that short (weekday) sleep is not a risk factor for mortality if it is combined with a medium or long weekend sleep," wrote the authors, led by Torbjörn Åkerstedt. "This suggests that short weekday sleep may be compensated for during the weekend, and that this has implications for mortality."

This study follows on from previous research published in 2017, that showed how people who slept less than five hours a night, or more than 8 hours a night, had much higher rates of mortality than those who slept more.

Overall, Åkerstedt suggested it was the average amount of sleep somebody got that seemed to make a difference, and the new study adds to the growing body of research that highlights this.

However, in the sleep science community, the overarching advice is that consistency is key, and there is no substitute for having a regular sleep pattern.

In a previous interview for Business Insider about body clocks, research fellow at Birmingham University Elise Facer-Childs said the more regular your sleep the better. Otherwise you can experience something called "social jetlag," which is the misalignment between social and biological time. (Essentially, our bodies have clocks — or circadian rhythms— and if we mess with them, it can cause problems.)

"I would say that it is all about getting the right balance," Facer-Childs wrote recently in an email. "Yes, if you are extremely sleep deprived during the week then continuing that over the weekend isn't ideal and maybe you should think about getting a few more hours."

She added that the most important thing is the timing of sleep. For example, if you get up at 6 o'clock for work during the week, and then at the weekend you sleep in until 10, that's a four-hour time difference. So for your body, it's like you're flying to Dubai every weekend, then flying back on Sunday — so you're basically jetlagged.

"If you're sleep deprived it is probably better to try and fall asleep earlier than get up later... although our social commitments at the weekend tend to prevent us from doing this," she said.

Not getting enough sleep has been linked to an increased risk of obesity and heart disease, as well as brain diseases like Alzheimer's. There's also evidence sleep deprivation can mean a lower sex drive, reduced fertility, and generally less mental well-being.

So forget "sleep when you're dead." It might be more "don't sleep, and you will be dead."

SEE ALSO: You might be better at sports at certain times of day thanks to your biological clock

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NOW WATCH: I ate nothing but 'healthy' fast food for a week — here’s what happened

• The State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry just released its list of the "top 10 new species for 2018."
• These newly discovered and named species demonstrate how large, small, beautiful, and bizarre the unknown life out there really is.
• The list is released annually on May 23 in recognition of the birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who developed the modern system of taxonomy that we use to classify animals.

There's an astonishing amount of life out there that we still know almost nothing about.

But if we're not careful, most of those creatures could be lost before we get a chance to get to learn how they're uniquely adapted for life on Earth. Every year, approximately 18,000 new species are named and classified. But we believe about 20,000 species go extinct annually.

Highlighting the need to preserve biodiversity is the motivation behind the annual "Top 10 New Species for 2018" list, which is put together by the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF).

Since 2008, ESF has selected 10 newly discovered and named species that demonstrate how large, small, beautiful, and bizarre the unknown life out there really is. The list is released every May 23 in recognition of the birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who developed the modern system of taxonomy that we still use to classify animals down to their genus and species.

The newest list includes a tree that can stretch more than 130 feet into the sky and a single-celled creature that was discovered in an aquarium and doesn't fit neatly into any known group of similar organisms. A beetle that disguises itself as part of an ant and an extinct marsupial lion that used to roam Australia are also featured.

"So many of these species — if we don't find them, name them and describe them now — will be lost forever. And yet they can teach us so much about the intricacies of ecosystems and the details of evolutionary history," ESF president Quentin Wheeler said in a news release. "Each of them has found a way to survive against the odds of changing competition, climate and environmental conditions. So each can teach us something really worth knowing as we face an uncertain environmental future ourselves."

There are the ESF's top 10 new species for 2018.

SEE ALSO: One type of tick can make people allergic to red meat — and it seems to be spreading

The Ancoracysta twista is a single-celled eukaryote. It uses the flagella visible in this image to propel itself around as it hunts other tiny organisms.

Ancoracysta twista was discovered in an aquarium in San Diego, California, USA. It’s a new single-celled protist that has challenged scientists to determine its nearest relatives. 

These Dinizia jueirana-facao trees, also known as Atlantic forest trees, are found only in and near the Reserva Natural Vale in Espirito Santo, Brazil.

A Dinizia jueirana-facao tree weighs an estimated 62 tons (56,000 kg). The tree species is limited — there are only 25 known individuals, about half of which are in a protected area, making it critically endangered.

The Epimeria quasimodo amphipod is about two inches long and comes from a genus that's abundant in glacial waters.

Epimeria quasimodo is one of 26 new species of amphipods of the genus Epimeria from the Southern Ocean. It is named for Quasimodo the hunchback in reference to its shape.

Moist is one of the most disliked words in the world. People compare hearing the word moist to hearing nails on a chalkboard. What is it about this word that causes people to have such a strong reaction? Following is a transcript of the video.

Moist is one of few words in the English language…with the power to make your skin crawl.

And it makes sense — the word sounds…… Kind of disgusting.

But scientists have discovered that… the way it sounds isn’t the biggest problem.

Moist is part of a phenomenon known as word aversion. It refers to words with an inoffensive meaning.

Yet when you hear them — like crevice and phlegm — they have the unique power to disgust people...

But there’s one word we find most disgusting of all. MOIST.

In 2012, for example, Twitter users voted on the word that should be eliminated from the English language. Out of the more than a quarter million words in the English language, moist was the clear winner, or … loser in this case.

In another experiment that polled 400 people … 20% reported that moist gave them the same reaction as fingernails on a chalkboard.

However sound is just part of the problem. In fact, when those same people reported how they felt about similar sounding words like “hoist” and “foist” they didn't have the same negative reaction.

And even when the offending word was provided in context with food like a “moist cake” it still didn’t have the same gut-wrenching affect.

Turns out, the real reason we may hate moist SO much is because it conjures up thoughts of wet … bodily functions  ...wait what .. that’s just… ew, let’s just leave it at that.

Despite our disgust for the word … moist is somewhat of a celebrity.

We’ve been steadily Googling it more often over the years. And maybe moist’s bad rep is just a fad. Like fidget spinners or rainbow bagels.

So does moist make you cringe? Or are people overreacting? Let us know in the comments below.

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