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(credit: Joanna Servaes)

After several hints that gut microbes may be key players in the obesity epidemic, a new study provides a mechanistic explanation of how the intestinal inhabitants directly induce hunger, insulin resistance, and ultimately obesity in rodents.

After mice and rats were fed a high-fat diet, their gut microbes produced more acetate, a short-chain fatty acid made during bacterial fermentation. That acetate spread throughout the rodents’ bodies and into their brains where it activated the parasympathetic nervous system. This system, largely involving the vagus nerve, controls the body’s unconscious actions, such as digestion, excretion, and sexual arousal. By activating the parasympathetic nervous system, the microbe-made acetate spurred the rodents to produce more insulin, a hormone made by pancreatic β-cells that promotes calorie storage, as well as ghrelin, a hormone involved in hunger. The result was rodents that ate more developed insulin resistance—a precursor to diabetes—and became obese, the researchers report in Nature.

“This generates a positive feedback loop,” the authors conclude—which makes sense for foraging animals, they add. If a foraging animal stumbles upon a calorie-dense food in the wild, it would be advantageous if their gut signaled their brain to keep eating and store some energy, stocking up to survive leaner times. “However, in the setting of chronic exposure to calorically dense, abundant food, this gut microbiota–brain–β-cell axis promotes obesity and its related sequelae of hyperlipidaemia [high levels of lipids in the blood], fatty liver disease and insulin resistance,” the authors write.

The Moto Z. The Z Force looks just like this, but a bit thicker.

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Today, Motorola took the wraps off its 2016 flagship, the Moto Z. These phones (there are two of them) are markedly different from past Moto flagships, which is appropriate since the Moto Z represents Motorola's transition from "A Google Company" to Lenovo subsidiary. The actual deal closed over a year ago, but product pipelines mean only now are we seeing Lenovo's full influence.

The Moto Z is a metal phone the company is calling "the world's thinnest premium smartphone." It has a 5.5-inch, 1440p AMOLED display, a Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, and 32 or 64GB of storage with a MicroSD slot. For cameras, there's a 13MP rear sensor with OIS and laser autofocus and a 5MP front camera with a wide angle lens. Other extras include a fingerprint sensor, "water-repellant coating," and a front flash.

Lenovorola hasn't said how big the battery on the Moto Z is, only that it will get "30 hours" of battery life.

Instead of fighting through this wasteland, cheaters will now have to face the wasteland of their own lives.

In a move intended to help stem a wave of cheating in the online portions of The Division, Ubisoft says it is rescinding its policy of issuing 14-day suspensions when a player is first detected using a cheat engine. Now, those players will be permanently banned when found.

The new policy comes after The Division team said it became clear to them that the 14-day suspension policy currently in place "has not been dissuasive enough... judging from your feedback, and based on what we witnessed when cheaters came back to the game." That 14-day suspension policy was itself an increase from the previous three-day suspensions that were given out for first offenses until late April.

Those temporary suspensions certainly didn't seem to be discouraging cheaters very much, according to widespread reports of cheating and exploit use in the game. "The message is out," one player wrote on The Division forums in April. "Cheat all you want, it will take forever to catch you apparently, and you get to keep all the exp/money/items you gained and then after a three-day suspension you get to laugh, come back in, and reap your reward. Then just don't cheat anymore."

NASA

The interior of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module is seen during sensor installation and after successful expansion. This is the best view we've seen so far.

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In April, astronauts attached an expandable room to the International Space Station, which they successfully inflated at the end of May. This week, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams entered the Bigelow Aerospace expandable module and said everything was fine. He subsequently installed some sensors to monitor air pressure, temperature, and other variables, as well as other hardware.

Finally, on Wednesday, Williams removed his tools from the module and closed the hatch. Astronauts will not reenter the 13-foot-long module now until August, when they will perform more checks of the equipment.

Why wait so long? Because as important as it was to demonstrate the module could be expanded, it is more important still to prove its durability over the two-year experiment. Engineers with Bigelow have said the expandable’s kevlar-like weave should be at least as protective as the station’s aluminum hull when it comes to tiny orbital debris. The company also says that with this material, the interior of the module should prove a quieter location than the notoriously noisy station interior. NASA is also interested in how the non-metallic shell of the module limits radiation exposure.

Wikipedia is behind the times. All those elements that start with "Uu" in the lower right? They've got real symbols now. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Earlier this year, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) accepted the evidence that indicated we had produced four new elements, filling out the bottom row of the periodic table. At the time, they were given temporary names—and catchy ones, too. We'll all be sad to see ununseptium (element 117) go, but you'll be glad to know that the formal names are probably just as difficult to pronounce properly.

Three of the new names honor the places where the elements were produced; the fourth recognizes a key person who helped organize the work involved.

For element 113, Japan is recognized by one of its alternate names, Nihon. The element will be called nihonium, and bear the symbol Nh. The remaining elements were produced by collaboration between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and two of the US' national labs: Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore. Element 115 honors the Russian part of that collaboration with the name moscovium (symbol Mc). 117 handles Oak Ridge by getting the name tennessine, or Ts. Lawrence Livermore has the misfortune of being in California, which already has an element named after it, so it gets left out.

(credit: SDOT)

Two former Uber and Lyft drivers based in Austin, Texas have filed two new proposed class-action lawsuits against those ridesharing companies on Thursday. The drivers allege that they are owed up to 60 days of back pay and other benefits that would be afforded to them as ex-employees under a federal labor law. One case involved driver Todd Johnston taking on Uber; the other involves driver David Thornton taking on Lyft.

These cases, like so many others before it, boil down to whether the drivers are employees or simply independent contractors. If a court were to find that the drivers are employees, Uber’s and Lyft's bottom line would be significantly impacted as the companies would have to provide health care and many other benefits.

The Austin plaintiffs' cases, which were filed by the same law firm, center on a federal law known as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act of 1988, which requires companies with more than 100 employees to provide written 60 day notice of any mass layoffs.