Mold in houses is unsightly and may cause unpleasant odors. More important though, mold has been linked to a range of health effects—especially triggering asthma.

However, is mold exposure linked to a serious lung disease in children, unrelated to asthma? As we’ll see, this link may not be real, or if it is, it’s so rare to not be a meaningful risk. Yet we still hear mold in damp homes described as “toxic.”

Indeed, moldy homes can harm people’s health, but not necessarily how you might think.

What is mold?
Mold is the general term for a variety of fungi. The mold that people have focused on in damp homes is “black mold.” This forms unsightly black patches on walls and other parts of damp-affected buildings.

Black mold is not a single fung...

The reliable manipulation of the speed at which light travels through objects could have valuable implications for the development of various advanced technologies, including high-speed communication systems and quantum information processing devices...

For years, astronomers have predicted a dramatic fate for our galaxy: a head-on collision with Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor. This merger—expected in about 5 billion years—has become a staple of astronomy documentaries, textbooks and popular science writing.

But in our new study published in Nature Astronomy, led by Till Sawala from the University of Helsinki, we find the Milky Way’s future might not be as certain previously assumed.

By carefully accounting for uncertainties in existing measurements, and including the gravitational influence of other nearby galaxies, we found there is only about a 50% chance the Milky Way and Andromeda will ...

Eating a high-fat diet containing a large amount of oleic acid—a type of fatty acid commonly found in olive oil—could drive obesity more than other types of dietary fats, according to a study published in the journal Cell Reports.

The study found that oleic acid, a monounsaturated fat associated with obesity, causes the body to make more fat cells. By boosting a signaling protein called AKT2 and reducing the activity of a regulating protein called LXR, high levels of oleic acid resulted in faster growth of the precursor cells that form new fat cells.

“We know that the types of fat that people eat have changed during the obesity epidemic...