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In a recent TED talk, Hannah Fry outlines a mathematical formula that predicts long-lasting relationships. In her recent book, The Mathematics of Love, she discusses the findings of psychologist John Gottman who studied hundreds of couples over many years to find out what sets apart the happy couples from the miserable. Gottman than enlisted the help of a mathematician who correlated all the data the psychologists gathered and came up with an empirical formula that seems to predict if a couple will be happy together.
A simple smartphone app combines the most reliable data and maps on global renewable energy potential, so you can get a better idea what's the right kind of equipment you need or if the investment is warranted in the first place. And it's all for free, too.
Children with autism spectrum disorder do not react as well to pleasant or foul smells compared to non-ASD children. Previously, autistic toddlers were found to have a dampened response to sight, sound and touch. For their study, the researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel used a novel technique to gauge the smell response in both ASD and control groups, with 81% accuracy. The test is unobtrusive and doesn't require a personal account from behalf of the children - something that can be difficult to do with autistic children, who more often than not are highly uncommunicative. If the test can survive the test of time and other trials, it could very well be used to diagnose autism.
Dylan O’Donnell, an amateur photographer, took one of the luckiest shots ever: the International Space Station past the moon. Any astro buff would be envious.
Paleontologists have discovered what looks like the earliest member of the Corytophanidae (also known as casquehead or helmeted lizards) judging from fossils collected in Wyoming. The ancient species is also the earliest ancestor of the modern basilisk, or better known as the Jesus Lizard because of its ability to skim the surface of water over short distances.
The Danish-based Lego is one of the big companies in the world that's actually making large scale efforts to lower its carbon footprint and run more sustainable business. They don't seem to be doing it out of a fake corporate responsibility ethos either. Lego is actually innovating. I mean, when a company says it wants to ditch the raw material its business is based on for something that's more expensive and which might not even exist yet, you know they actually mean it.
For the past couple of years, John Rogers, a materials science professor at the University of Illinois, has been working on his pet-project: the Biostamp. True to its name, the device is basically a tiny electronic stamp, no larger than a quarter, that sticks to the skin and can be worn seamlessly. The whole time, the Biostamp collects on a variety of vital signs, depending on the embedded sensor, and is powered wirelessly via your mobile phone. It can analyze chemicals in your sweat; blood pressure; UV radiation and much more. Basically, it's transforming the way patients are monitored. In fact, it's changing the way people, sick or not, monitor their health. Imagine wearing a Biostamp all the time and receiving a notification on your mobile phone to visit your doctor ASAP because your blood pressure has been too high in the last couple of days.
MIT engineers demonstrated a working spectrometer that took a huge leap in scale from a huge, bulky lab gear to a portable piece of equipment that's small enough to fit in a smartphone. Spectrometer are essential to research nowadays, employed in everything from physics, to biology, to chemistry. To design the spectrometer, the MIT team made use of tiny semiconductor nanoparticles called quantum dots. Having a portable spectrometer could prove to be extremely practical .You can use it to remotely diagnose diseases, detect pollution or food poisoning.
In 2000, the CDC declared measles as eradicated in the US, meaning there was no more endemic transmission. That doesn't mean though, that it can't creep out from time to time, especially in communities where heard immunity is poor because of low rates of vaccination. This is attested by a woman who unfortunately died of the virus, making it a first in twelve years. The woman was taking medications that suppressed her immune system due to other conditions, and this made it very difficult for her body to fight another infection.
A team led by scientists at University of British Columbia highlights the impacts of climate change on the world's oceans and marine life. Two scenarios were analyzed. One followed the changes that would arise if the world banded together to significantly curb greenhouse gas emissions; the other summarized impacts 100 years from now if we'd go on with business as usual. The report outlines the consequences under each scenario and found immediate action is required if we're to avert at a catastrophic outcome, particularly regarding the planet's oceans.
A team at University of Chicago made the most comprehensive woolly mammoth genome sequencing ever. By comparing its genome with that of its distant cousins, the Asian and African elephants, the researchers were able to determine which are the mammoth's specific genes. These were ran with libraries and repositories to identify what these do. We now know which of mammoth's gene shaped its uncanny skull and small ears, how it got hair to cover all its body or how the mammoth adapted a special fat metabolism and cold coping mechanism. To test their findings, the researchers transplanted a mammoth gene into a human cell. The kidney cell produced new proteins which were tolerant to heat or cold, as suspected showing their other genetic determinations are also likely correct.
Rising temperatures are fundamentally changing the way Australia's bearded lizards get their gender. Basically, the lizard's sex is not dependent on their genes as before, but on temperature. In time, the male chromosome could disappear, as more and more females are bred - the preferred sex. What this means is that if temperatures reach a critical level, then the lizards could become extinct due to lack of males. This has never happened before and it's as scary, as it is interesting.
In the lab, a team UC Santa Barbara demonstrated that an artificial pancreas that can automatically deliver insulin shots at a regular basis to diabetes patients. The biocompatible pancreas constantly monitors glucose levels and administers the insulin when its needed. This way there would be no need for cumbersome daily insulin injections. The researchers will soon start trials on animal models and if all goes well, clinical trials will follow shortly.
This little iron fish may look like a two bit souvenir, but what it can do is far more spectacular, not to mention useful. When added in boiling water, the fish-shaped object leaches just enough iron to offer up to 75 percent of daily iron needs of a person. Tests so far have proven that this simple, yet innovative the solution helped halve the cases of iron-deficiency anemia in Cambodian communities.
Women's faces are more attractive to men when they hit peak ovulation, past research showed. It's not clear what the amplifying signals are. One suggestion was that women's cheeks turn slightly red during ovulation, providing a subtle cue that enhance attractiveness. Using cameras specially designed to distinguish between subtle colour variations, researchers at University of Cambridge found that women's faces show an increased redness. Peculiarly, this difference is so small that it's not visually perceptible. Is the cue that subtle or can the enhanced attractiveness be attributed to some other factor or signal?
A breakthrough research found that male and female mice use different cells to signal pain. This could explain why both more women suffer from chronic pain than men, and pain relief medication seems to respond differently in women.
A report issued by the World Health Organization and UNICEF states 2.4 billion people lack access to proper toilets. Defecating outdoors bears a significant risk to the fresh water supply and is associated with the death of 700,000 children each year which contact diseases like diarrhoeal.
Low and middle-income countries bear the most deaths associated with sugary drink consumption. About 3 out of 4 deaths related to drinking sugary drinks happen in developing countries. These drinks greatly contribute to obesity, which in turn is associated with Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, gall bladder, kidney, pancreas and ovaries.
Despite a huge gap in public acceptance, the theory of evolution and natural selection is not a controversial theory. It is widely accepted by the scientific community and is, in fact, one of the most successful scientific idea in history. Yet, billions of people around the world discard evolution and uphold a creationist view of how humans, other creatures or the whole cosmos came to being. Ironically, it may be the way that our own brains evolved and supported the adaption of our species that supports a natural predisposition towards creationism. This idea is supported by a paper published in Cognition which found persons who rely more on intuition than analytical thinking are more likely to discard evolution and vice-versa.
Today, ray-finned fish make up 99% of all fish species, but it wasn't always like this. In an attempt to find out what triggered this spectacular multi-niche dominance, paleontologists traveled back in time sort of speak and analyzed ancient fossils to see what the fish diversity makeup looked like millions of years ago. Intriguing enough, the ray fish practically exploded in their diversity right after the last great mass extinction which occurred 65 million years ago. An asteroid impact wiped out thousands of species, including all dinosaurs. But there was now enough room for other creatures to take their place. On land, mammals started filling in the large-scale niches eventually reaching a dominant position. In the water, it was the ray-finned fish that seized the opportunity.
Some 10% of the energy generated by a car's engine is lost due to friction between tires and the pavement. What if you could harness this lost energy somehow? A group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in collaboration with researchers in China have found a ingenious way to collect and use this friction energy by effectively inserting nanogenerators into tires.
Just before sport camps and marathon training begins in the US, doctors report a new set of guidelines that should be reviewed to ensure athletes don't consume more water than they should. Drinking excessive amounts of water can result in potentially serious reductions in blood sodium a condition called hyponatremia. Last year, two high school football players died of exercise-associated hyponatremia (EAH). So, what do you need to do to be on the safe side? Just drink water when you're thirsty. If you have to drink in advance for various reasons - say, if you're a marathon runner - keep the excess water at sensible levels.
Mathematics is considered a problematic vocation, because, let's face it, mathematicians can be weird. But that's mostly because people don't understand mathematics, let alone mathematicians which can be even more problematic. Why do (pure) mathematicians do what they do? Michael Harris, professor of mathematics at the Université Paris Diderot and Columbia University, offers a personal account of "Mathematics without apologies".
A few days ago, the US supreme court ruled that same-sex marriage was hence forth legal in all states. To mark the occasion, Facebook released the "Celebrate Pride" tool which overlays a low-opacity rainbow over your profile pic. More than a million people changed their profile photos just a couple of hours after the feature was integrated into the Facebook. While its intentions might seem noble, Cesar Hidalgo - an MIT network scientists - doesn't buy it. He says it's all in fact a huge social experiment whose end game is to see how long it takes for you to change your profile pic to something else.
Paired with recent advances in graphene deposition and manufacturing, this sort of tech of could very well end up powering your notebook or phone a couple years from now.
Despite what you might have seen or not seen, there are actually some fireflies living west of the Rocky Mountains, though they mostly keep to themselves and are rarely spotted by humans. Every once in a while, people spot some. This time, one undergrad who was busy insect hunting in the Los Angeles County hit the jackpot after he discovered a new firefly species.
This question was prompted to Ray Kurzweil - well known futurologist, pioneer of the Singularity Movement and Director of Engineering at Google - by a member of the audience during a Q&A session at an Executive Program hosted at Singularity University last October. You might not give it much thought now, but the truth is half of all American jobs could be replaced by robots in just a couple of decades. If you're a teller, supermarket cashier, call center operator or even a famer, you'll likely lose your job in the coming decades. So, what's to do then? Should we all rally and ban robots? It's no easy topic, but at the same time it's important, I think, not to panic. We need to remember that this isn't the first time something like this happened. It's the old human vs automation problem. How many millions of jobs were lost to mass production in the late XIXth century? How many more once computers started permeating society? At the same time, new jobs were made. Just look at where the information industry is today. The major challenge is not if new jobs can be made. This isn't really problem. The real challenge is to make these available at the right pace and make sure people have the necessary resources to repurpose their skill set. I'll leave you to Ray.
In the last couple of months, Japanese women flocked in unusual numbers to the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Japan to see the main attraction in the flesh: a western lowland gorilla named Shabani. Apparently, the young Japanese women are going crazy after the gorilla's alleged good looks.
We seem to be losing the war on elephant poachers, but a new toolset that involves tracing slaughter hotspots in Africa based on DNA taken from ivory might be exactly what law enforcement needed all these years. This way, researchers at University of Washington, in collaboration with INTERPOL, found that most of the ivory seized since 2006 originates in just two areas.
In his book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", one of my favorite writers Philip K. Dick explores what sets apart humans from androids. The theme is more valid today than it ever was, considering the great leaps in artificial intelligence we're seeing coming off major tech labs around the world, like Google's. Take for instance how the company employs advanced artificial neural networks to zap through a gazillion images, interpret them and return the right one you're looking for when you make a query using the search engine. Though nothing like a human brain, the networks uses 10-30 stacked layers of artificial neurons with each layer doing its job in incremental order to come to an "answer" by the final output layer is finished. While not dead-on, the network seems to return results better than anything we've seen before and as a by-product, it can also "dream." These artificial dreams output some fascinating images to say the least, going from virtually nothing (white noise) to something's that out of a surrealist painting. Who says computers can't be creative?
Rwanda's Akagera national park will soon be home to seven lions flown in from South Africa. This is the first time in 15 years that lions will set foot in the country after the entire population was wiped out by cattle herders in the chaos that followed the 1994 genocide. The predators will hopefully mate and steadily replenish lion numbers back to a historical level.
Studying the fossil remains of an ancient reptile-like creature, paleontologists gained valuable clues and insights that help explain how turtles got their most uncanny feature: the shell. The newly named species, Pappochelys, Greek for “grandfather turtle", lived some 240 million years ago and fills an evolutionary sweet spot sitting between earlier turtle ancestors and more recently established species.
A new mobile Ebola test can detect the virus using a single drop of blood and reports a positive or negative result in under 15 minutes. When the ReEBOV test was applied in the field, it identified 100 percent of all infected patients who also got positive results with the lab test. Coupled with other recent advances in the fight against Ebola, like antiviral vaccines, the new test will help prevent another outbreak and hopefully contain the virus for good.
Neuroscientists have long posited that memories last as long as the connections in the brain, but putting this theory to test has always proved challenging. Using the latest imaging techniques and sheer innovation, a group at Stanford confirmed this as being true after the researchers literally peered into the brains of mice and studied brain connections as they formed or were replaced. Once the connection was lost, so was the memory.
Most people don't know what SPF is and many companies exploit this ignorance.
Racing at a pace of about 1 millions per day, the New Horizon craft is getting closer to Pluto and so are the pictures itțs beaming back. Previously, we've shown you the first colored pics of Pluto taken by New Horizon, and its moons. Some of you were disappointed when you got to see only a couple of pale pixels, so this latest shot taken just this morning might be more exciting to watch.
The weekends should be devoted to disconnecting from your job and focusing more on leisure, family and personal development. A global study made by Munster paints a different picture (who's surprised?). Seems like no less than 76% of American workers get the "Sunday blues". In other words, they stress and fret during the depressing night that separates them from a new workweek. Of course, it may be natural to feel a bit stressed knowing you're about to start a new busy work week, but It's also worth noting that these 76% have "really bad" Sunday blues. That doesn't sound normal. In fact, over the pond just 47% Europeans felt that way at the time.
This weekend, SpaceX is scheduled to deliver cargo and other much needed supplies to the International Space Station via its Dragon capsule. Among the supplies is a surprise for the astronauts on board: the latest high tech gadget from Microsoft, the HoloLens. If you missed ZME Science's feature of the HoloLens, well you're in for a treat if this is the first time you hear about it. Basically, the tech involves using holographic computing which enables you to mix virtual reality with ..actual reality. Holograms following in your kitchen, weather reports on your coffee cup. Really, anything is possible with the HoloLens, let alone in the final frontier: space.
Anecdotal observations and even some studies claim that listening to extreme music like heavy metal, punk or hardcore causes anger and expressions of anger, like delinquency or violent behavior. Researchers in Australia, however, found that this isn't the case. After closely following 39 extreme music listeners aged 18–34 years, the psychologists found that extreme music didn't make the participants angrier - even after they were purposely made angry. Instead, when they tuned to their favorite extreme music, the participants exhibited a lower heart rate, which is associated with less angry response, showed an increase in positive emotions.
When the freakish Hallucigenia was first discovered in the 1970s, paleontologists found it nearly impossible to distinguish heads from tail. Now, the bizarre creature - an ancestor to molding animals like crabs, worms or krill - had its features identified with unprecedented precision, but that doesn't mean it's less freakish looking: worm-like with a mouth adorned with a ring of teeth, bearing seven pairs of legs ending in claws, and three pairs of tentacles along its neck. To finish it off, its back was covered with enormous spikes. Yes, it looks weird, but so were most animals that lived 500 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian explosion - a period of massive bloom in terms of diversity of life and evolution. Most creatures of those times were somewhat primitive, but remarkably Hallucigenia was quite advanced for its age.
Fasting has been practiced since ancient times as a cleansing process, often accompanied by prayer and periods of seclusion. Famous enlightened historical figures like Jesus or Buddha are prime examples of such ascetic practice. The latter raised fasting to an artform. But fasting needs not be merely associated with spiritualism or religion - it could very well be a great tool to improve your health. Several studies have documented the benefits of fasting, but on the other hand how many of us could go through such excruciating torments, living on water alone for days at a time (some Buddhist monks do it for weeks). After all, low calorie diets are hard enough, let alone not eating altogether. A new study, however, suggests that there might be a way to trick your body it's in fasting mode, and thus reap the benefits, without actually going overboard.
Lexus, better known for its luxury cars, just released a teasing video unveiling what looks like a genuine hoverboard. But is it the real deal or some lame marketing stunt? I feel like the latter, while a possibility, would severely backfire for Lexus, a highly respectable brand. On the other hand, I guess the kid in me is just rooting for this whole thing to be real.
An extensive meta-analysis of 79 trials which studied the medical benefits of marijuana found that the various cannabinoid compounds did not improve nausea, vomiting, or appetite, but slightly improved chronic pain and plasticity. Moreover, most of the studies were poorly made, lacking control or placebo groups and also showing increased risk of bias. In short, this rigorous analysis found no conclusive evidence that supports the much heralded added benefits of medical marijuana. Side effects were common and included dizziness, dry mouth and sleepiness. The authors note that this doesn't mean that marijuana compounds aren't working as advertised, it's just that the science so far is inconclusive - mainly because of bad reporting and investigative techniques. They suggest more research is necessary, along with more support from the authorities and other able bodies given that we're talking about an extremely widespread drug ingested by millions of Americans each day, legally or not.
Viagra does things to you... but not skin cancer.
Researchers at University of Hawaii, Manoa in collaboration with a team from the University of Tokyo were surprised to find not one, but two species of deep-water sharks that have positive buoyancy. Most sharks have a negative buoyancy, meaning if they stop swimming they'll sink to the bottom, and some researchers have posited that there may be some species with neutral buoyancy. Finding sharks that defy this conventional wisdom is definitely an important discovery. Now the researchers are trying to find out how the positive buoyancy is attained and whether other shark species have this ability.
Don't you just hate it when you're looking for support for a service or app you bought, only to be greeted by some monosyllabic robot ? Ok, that can happen just as well when dealing with outsourced tech support, but at least you know you're talking to a real person. Well, that might change sooner than you might think. The singularity is getting closer by the moment. Just take a look at Google's new chatbot which according to the developers has moderate "natural language understanding". In other words, it can roll with the punches and continue the conversation by itself without following predefined question - answer. Of course, after a while you can still tell it's not human (fails Turing test), but that doesn't mean it isn't entertaining. Have a look at how it answers to "what's the purpose of life?".
NASA's spacecraft Dawn is currently orbiting Ceres - a dwarf planet and the largest object in the asteroid belt - in order to study this highly fascinating, yet enigmatic object. For instance, strange and peculiar brights spots on its surface are still puzzling scientists. NASA has kindly shared some of the photos documenting these brights spots, taken by Dawn from only 2,700 miles above the surface.
More job opportunities could be created by investing clean energy sources than fossil fuels.
DNA analysis of the jawbone of a human who lived in modern day Romania some 40,000 years ago has the most Neanderthal ancestry ever seen. Up to 9% of the ancient man's DNA was Neanderthal, suggesting interbreeding occurred much earlier than previously thought. In fact, this European human had a Neanderthal ancestor four to six generations back in his family tree. How would it be to have a Neanderthal for a great-great-great-grandfather?
This Friday, the International Whaling Commission issued a report in which it states Japan has failed to provide any reasonable explanation for its mass killing of over 4,000 whales in the Antarctic for the past 12 years. The country says it's hunting whales for research purposes, but clearly it's all a front. A lame excuse. Unimpressed by the report, Japan officials claim there's a debate and lack of consensus (not really), and even though it "acknowledges" the IWC position it will likely continue as before. In other words, they don't care.
