Troy Farah, Salon

One of the fastest growing diet trends has less to do with what you eat or how much, but when you eat. Restricting meal times, a practice sometimes called intermittent fasting or time restricted eating, comes in many forms, but it generally involves limiting when you eat to certain windows.

Intriguingly, fasting isn't merely about weight loss. A great deal of research suggests that this behavior can spur a whole host of health benefits, from improved mental state to more restful sleep. Weight loss, of course, is the benefit often most hyped. The Reddit forum for intermittent fasting, for example, has over 860,000 members, many of which share before and after photos of massive weight loss.

Simply restricting eating to an 8 to 10 hour window can change the way our genes express themselves, which has broad implications for human health....

Salon spoke to experts about the short-term health benefits of moderating one's alcohol consumption for a month. As it turns out, time actually does play a big role in determining health benefits.

The most noticeable effect ethanol has is on GABA receptors, which play a role in calming the nervous system. More GABA means a more sedating, relaxed effect.

"The long-term effects of Dry January depends on if the habit of not drinking or reduced alcohol consumption is maintained," Dr. Rami Hashish, an injury expert and founder of the National Biomechanics Institute, told Salon. "If somebody drinks relatively a lot, and then stops for a month, and then goes right back to that same habit, then you may not necessarily see so many great benefits. It sounds nice, but science doesn't really bear that out, that they're going to see these huge benefits long-term, if they just stop some sort of action for a given month."...

When you think of flowers being pollinated, you likely picture a bee or butterfly doing the work. But many different insects also visit flowers and help plants reproduce, including flies, wasps, beetles, and even certain mosquitoes. Some birds and bats also benefit flowering vegetation, acting as the liaison for sexual reproduction, a strange but widespread evolutionary practice.

This article first appeared on Salon.

But sadly, climate change is rapidly shifting the relationships between plants and certain bugs. And in Scandinavia, that has meant that flies are taking the place of moths and other more charismatic insects. The takeover of the flies speaks to the biodiverse history of the region that is being lost as the climate warms....

In 2019, a mere three years ago, public health researchers described the "face" of vaccine hesitancy as middle- and upper-class women of a very specific cultural milieu.

"The rebel forces in America's latest culture war — the so-called anti-vaxxers — are often described as middle- and upper-class women who breast-feed their children, shop at Whole Foods, endlessly scour the web for vaccine-related conversation, and believe that their thinking supersedes that of their doctors," wrote Alfred Lubrano in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting on then-recent studies from government public health agencies.

How things have changed. Nowadays, the face of vaccine hesitancy is most apt to be a Christian, according to more recent research and polling. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have shifted cultural opinions on vaccines....