SCIENCELIVE

You may have heard about the potentially-damaging impact alcohol can have on the digestive system and gut biome. You may have heard you're supposed to add add probiotics to your daily diet. You may have heard that your gut health will be better off if you don't drink alcohol at all (or keep it limited to sugar-free spirits such as vodka or gin, or dry wine).

We've all been there: you wake up feeling a little green around the gills, and before you know it, you're holed up in the bathroom for days. As you sip Gatorade and munch on saltine crackers in the brief respites from your body's need to evacuate its contents, you wonder, "What the heck did I eat?" While it's natural to assume that last night's fancy dinner is to blame (why did I have to order the mussels?!), chances are, you have to look back further than that. Food poisoning takes time, and it rarely sets in fast enough to come from the last thing you ate.

You may have two nostrils, but you surely only have one nose. Dogs are a slightly different story. Behind the big, wet pooch nose we all know and love is another organ that boosts sniff power. It's called Jacobson's organ, and you don't have one. If you did, you may be able to use it to detect cancer. It's no mystery that dogs have the gift of sniff. (We might not actually be too far behind a dog's sense of smell, but that's a different story.) Dogs have something of a second "nose" called the vomeronasal organ (VNO), or the Jacobson's organ. This second smelling device sits at the back of a dog's nasal passage, on the ready to detect pheromones and other compounds. This is a kind of accessory olfactory bulb with completely different neurons than the ones associated with the sense of smell, anthrozoologist John Bradshaw tells Slate.

Since the dawn of paleontology, scientists have struggled to confirm what dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures may have looked like when they were alive. Now, a team at Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada has brought us closer than ever to understanding our massive planetary ancestors. They discovered a dinosaur fossil that has guts, armor, and even some skin intact. In fact, it is so well-preserved, some have dubbed it a "dinosaur mummy."

As soon as a child is born, parents begin to worry. Will the baby grow up to be happy, healthy and successful? Parents of premature babies may worry that their early arrival could have some additional hurdles. But a reassuring 2017 study shows that while preemie babies may enter the world in a challenging way, their outlook for academic success is much more optimistic.

In May of 2017, a massive malware attack that came to be known as "WannaCry" struck over 200,000 computers in more than 100 different countries. An infected machine had much of its crucial data encrypted, which the attackers would then decrypt (for a price). In the UK, WannaCry targeted the National Health Service — an especially terrifying prospect for anyone who has ever handed their personal data over to a physician or clinic. Ultimately, WannaCry was killed by a stroke of good luck, but not before the people who unleashed it made a quick $50,000. This isn't a time to rest easy. The danger is still out there, but fortunately, there's a lot that you can do to prevent it.

The General Sherman Tree is the largest surviving sequoia in the forest. Actually, it's the largest surviving tree in the world. At its base, the trunk has a diameter of 36 feet (10 meters) and a circumference of more than 100 feet (30 meters). That means it would take more than 17 average adults holding hands to surround the entire thing.

Need an incentive to  eat healthier ? A new study suggests that people who make even small tweaks in their diet to make it healthier over time may live longer. Researchers found that a 20-percentile increase in people's diet-quality scores was linked with an 8 to 17 percent reduction in  a person's risk of death  from any cause over a 12-year period, according to the findings published online today (July 12) in The New England Journal of Medicine. A "20-percentile increase" in diet quality means, for example, that a person had an increase of 22 out of a possible 110 points in one of the objective diet scores used in the study.

Tesla Motors The internal combustion engine had a good run. It has helped propel cars — and thus humanity — forward for more than 100 years. But a sea change is afoot that is forecast to kick gas-powered vehicles to the curb, replacing them with cars that run on batteries. A flurry of news this week underscoresjust how rapidly that change could happen.

This article was originally published at  The Conversation.  The publication contributed the article to Live Science's  Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights . Roughly  90 percent of humans are right-handed  and this is one of the traits that separates us from most other primates who don't really show any overall preference for left or right handedness. It's believed that handedness played an important role in human evolution, with a  recent study  on the earliest evidence of right-handedness in the fossil record shedding light on when and why this trait arose. Interestingly, the clues were found not in our ancient hands, but in our ancient teeth. We have long known that the human brain is composed of two roughly similar halves. The left hemisphere controls language and motor abilities, whereas the right hemisphere is responsible for visual-spatial attention. It is less well known that brain lateralization, or the dominance of some cognitive processes in one side of the b