Month: August 2019

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The Ebola cure is a turning point in drug development, experts say

DRCONGO-EPIDEMIC-HEALTH-EBOLAPhoto credit should read JOHN WESSELS/AFP/Getty Images

Two new drugs have shown remarkable promise at treating Ebola in a clinical trial, increasing survival rates for people who recently contracted the disease to between 89 and 94 percent. That’s astonishing for a virus that typically kills about half of all the people it infects.

“From now on we will no longer say that Ebola is not curable. This advance will in the future help save thousands of lives that would have had a fatal outcome in the past,” Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale, announced in a press call.

In the aftermath of the discovery, the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic…

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This Is the Most Hated Sandwich in America, According To New Survey

Just imagine this without the turkey and the lettuce….

Americans love sandwiches, and we love cheese. So it should come as no surprise to learn that according to a new survey, our most favorite sandwich of all is the classic grilled cheese.

But apparently, all you need to do is basically add a delicious, juicy slice of tomato and you get our least favorite sandwich: the tomato and cheese, at least according to a new YouGov sandwich survey.

As seen above, the humble grilled cheese is the all-time fave, beloved by 79% of the 1,223 respondents surveyed (the number weighted to represent U.S. adults 18 and up). It’s followed closely by grilled chicken and turkey—75% of respondents cited both as favorites.

To break it down further, here are the top 10:

  1. Grilled Cheese
  2. Grilled Chicken
  3. Turkey
  4. Roast Beef
  5. Ham
  6. BLT
  7. Club
  8. Bacon
  9. Peanut Butter & Jelly
  10. Pulled Pork

The list goes on to tick off some classics: roast beef, ham, the BLT, club, and even bacon sandwich. Oddly, everyone’s elementary school favorite, the peanut butter & jelly, was only cited by 66% as being a sandwich they “really like.”

The full list of 15 terminates with the French Dip, liked by just 46% of those surveyed, which is pretty absurd because French Dips are amazing. But YouGov reports that the absolute bottom belongs to the tomato and cheese sandwich, liked by a mere 27% of respondents.

There were regional differences—Southerners, for instance, are the biggest fans of the grilled cheese, by 82%, and Midwesterners just don’t try a variety, steering away from Northeastern faves like the lobster roll—but generally speaking the numbers make sense.

The takeaway seems in part to be that Americans like to keep it simple when it comes to the sandwich. Cheese, bread, and butter. 

You can take a look at a completely different kind of list here. Otherwise, if you were thinking of opening a sandwich shop called Only Cheese and Tomato or something like that, maybe don’t.

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Composition of fossil insect eyes surprises researchers

Eumelanin — a natural pigment found for instance in human eyes — has, for the first time, been identified in the fossilized compound eyes of 54-million-year-old crane-flies. It was previously assumed that melanic screening pigments did not exist in arthropods.