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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.
A novel, previously unseen self-repair mechanism was reported by a team of researchers at Caltech who studied the moon jellyfish. A lot of animals, mostly invertebrates, grow back their lost limbs after these are bitten off by predators or lost in an accident. The moon jellyfish, however, employs a different tactic altogether: instead of expending a lot of energy to regrow its lost limb, the animal re-arranges the limbs it has left to regain symmetry. Even when it's left with two limbs out of its initial eight, the jellyfish will still re-arrange itself. This sort of mechanism might prove extremely useful in designing self-repairing robots.
Some 30 million years after dinosaurs emerged, they managed to rise up and dominate much of the world - then all clumped together under a supercontinent known as Pangea - except the tropics. Why dinosaurs proved so successful in higher latitudes, but failed miserably in the tropics has perplexed scientists. A possible explanation might be that during those times the tropics had an unpredictable climate, rapidly shifting from wet to dry due to a high concentration of carbon dioxide. This hypothesis is supported by a detailed analysis performed on samples collected at the Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, a site rich with fossils from the Late Triassic Period.
A group of international researchers unveiled the world's thinnest light bulb. Remarkably it uses a carbon-based filament, just like Thomas Edison used in 1879 for the first truly commercially-viable incandescent bulb. Unlike Edison, however, the group used carbon in its pure form and ultimate size limit - one atom-thick graphene sheets. Remarkably, the tiny bulb emits light visible to the naked eye. Of course, these sort of designs aren't about setting milestones, though it's always interesting to see how low or high down the scale you can go with engineering. Mostly, graphene-based light sources might prove useful for optical communications where bits are transmitted via packets of photons, instead of electrons.
Whaaaat? It’s just a matter of math, really. Fold an A4 once and it will be twice as thick, fold it again and it will be four times as thick as it initially was. Turns out, according to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, if you do this 103 times the sheet’s thickness will be larger than the observable Universe: […]
Sampling impact glass from the ancient craters that litter the surface for Mars might prove key to settling a long debate: did Mars ever harbor life? Researchers at NASA believe this is a great lead after the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) currently hovering above the red planet found deposits of glass. These were formed by impacts with large asteroids, whose blast trapped and preserved any matter it came across: dust, soil or any plants or bacteria (if there ever were such things). Cracking open these glass time capsules and peering inside could, thus, be one of the best places to look for.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports it has classed all chimpanzees, whether captive or wild, under the Endangered Species Act. Previously, chimpanzees kept captive in labs for biomedical research, entertainment or as pets were classed as "threatened".The USFWS director Dan Ashe agrees that this has transmitted an erroneous mixed message to the public. Whether captive (and hopefully cared for) or living in the wild, all chimps belong the same species, and this species is definitely endangered and in dire need of help.
Since the time of the ancient Egyptians, people have using the grounded seeds of the Moringa oleifera tree to clean water. Scientists found that some of the proteins contained in the seeds interact with the bacteria in the water, killing and clustering them. Eventually, the bacteria lump falls down to the bottom of the watery solution, and makes the water safe to drink. Now, a team at Penn State reports it's uncovered the mechanism that allows the "miracle tree" seeds, as they've been called before, to purify water. In those places of the world where there isn't any access to clean water (850 million people), the moringa might hold true to its name and provide a cheap, sustainable solution to the problem. Just grow your own water filter and decontamination "device".
In a breakthrough moment, researchers at MIT successfully cooled sodium potassium gas molecules (NaK) near absolute zero. At this temperature, matter behaves significantly different and starts exhibiting quantum effects. This is the coldest any molecule has been recorded ever.
Daimler, the giant auto maker from Germany, is releasing its own version of a large-storage battery on the heel's of Tesla's heralded Powerwall. Branded under Mercedes-Benz, the battery pack is destined for both automobiles and home use. So far, a 2.5 kWh each version has been made public, with Deimler claiming it can be packaged in up to eight modules bringing the total capacity to 20kWh worth of energy - more than enough to power a typical home or even a small business.
It's nothing new to hear about chimps or monkeys drinking alcohol, most often stolen from unsuspecting tourists, but a new research which documented the chimpanzees of Bossou, south-eastern Guinea, for the past 17 years found some engage in habitual drinking. It's the first evidence of habitual drinking outside humans. Like humans, some enjoy the brew more often than others, while some totally abstain from the habit.
The SpaceX Dragon crew capsule's milestone safety state which took place the other day passed NASA's approval board. Back then, the capsule was launched atop a trunk powered by eight SuperDraco engines to a height of 1,187 meters (3,900 feet) at 345mph. The capsule then separated from the trunk and deployed three parachutes that touched it down for a splash in the Atlantic, very close to shore.
Computers and water don't mix well, but that didn't stop Manu Prakash, a bioengineering assistant professor at Stanford, to think outside the box. Using magnetic fields and droplets of water infused with magnetic nanoparticles, Prakash demonstrated a computing system that performs logic and control functions by manipulating H2O instead of electrons. Because of its general nature, the water clock can perform any operations a conventional CPU clock can. But don't expect this water-based computer to replace the CPU in your smartphone or notebook (electrons speed vs water droplet - not a chance). Instead, it might prove extremely useful in situations where logic operations and manipulation of matter need to be performed at the same time.
Traces of soft tissue and red blood cells were discovered by accident by a team of paleontologists and biologists while they were playing around in the lab with so-called "crap" fossils dug up more than 100 years ago in Canada. Usually, museum curators are very proud and picky about the works they display or hold in storage, and any analysis that involves breaking or sectioning a fossil is most often than not strictly forbidden. But these fossils - like a claw from a meat-eating therapod, the limb from a duck-billed dinosaur and even the toe of a triceratops-like animal - were fragments in poor conditions that nobody really cared about. One man's trash, another man's treasure.
A group at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology developed a sophisticated facial recognition software specially designed to identify birds for photos. Called the Merlin Bird Photo ID, the software works its magic by employing a combination of image recognition algorithms, deep learning techniques (so it learns from its mistakes and gets better in time) and human collaborators who upload photos and help the software by first identifying the key features that makes a species distinct. The team is now working at turning the software into an app, so that anyone with a smartphone can take photos of a lingering avian wonder then instantly come to know which species it is.
There are some important issues nowadays in which scientists and laymen seem to disagree on. For instance, there's climate change. While the world's leading climate scientists agree with 95% confidence (very very very likely) that the world's climate is changing in an accelerated manner due to greenhouse emissions as a result of human activities. But only 50% of Americans agree that global warming is happening and is caused by humans. Then there's the age old Darwinism vs creationism schism. A major survey found that 31% of the US public believed that humans had existed in their present form since the beginning, with a further 24% stating that humans had evolved under the guiding hand of a supreme being. In contrast, only 2% of AAAS scientists said humans had not evolved in their time on Earth. Of course, then there's the case of doctors vs so-called anti-vaxxers - people who refuse to vaccinate themselves or their children because they think these cause illness, not ail or prevent it. But maybe one of the most heated debate in which scientists and the public is mostly opposed concerns genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Canadian paleontologists discovered a new dinosaur which looks strikingly similar to the famous Triceratops. While the two are very similar in many respects, the new species stands out due to the size and shape of its facial horns and the shield-like frill at the back of the skull. It also had a longer nose horn than Triceratops, and two small horns above its eyes. The radiating frill and pentagon-shaped plates must have made the dinosaur look like a crowned Triceratops. Once you consider this, it's not surprising how the team named the new dinosaur Regaliceratops peterhewsi (regal is latin for royal, and Peter Hews is the paleontologist who first discovered the fossils).
The nature of bright swirl patterns, some extending for hundreds of kilometers, on the moon's surface has eluded researchers for years. Now, the mystery seems to have been solved after a computer simulation suggests these were made following comet impacts. The tails of the comet, through made up of light-weight ice particles, likely blew off the upper, dark layer of the moon's surface, leaving behind a bright trail.
