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It's increasingly hard to eat less sugar, as market shelves are filled with sugary products. In the past ten years alone, global sugar intake has risen by ten percent. In what's not the first and surely not the last appeal of the sort, the Wold Health Organization reports adults and children from the Americas to Western Europe and the Middle East must halve their daily sugar intake to reach acceptable levels. Otherwise the risk of obesity and tooth decay, to name a few, will skyrocket. In terms of daily energy intake, the new guidelines means that people should keep sugar at a maximum of 10% of equivalent energy.
Science journal today seem to be dominated by positive results - that is those that are statistically significant and lead to a dramatic finding. The devil's in the details they say, and the same hold true for the advances of science. While it's true that groundbreaking research is what leads to leaps, these jumps are often ambiguous. Hundreds of other papers - some which control tidbits, other that replicate past findings - are paramount to filling in the blanks.
A crowd gathered for the New America Foundation’s first annual Future of War conference was told by DARPA's director that a woman was able to control F-35 flight simulator without touching the joystick. The woman controlled the simulation only with her thoughts, which were relayed and processed to the simulator by a neural implant embedded in her left cortex.
Airports, some of the busiest places, are now becoming unlikely hosts for bees. Not content with mechanical winged contraptions, airports all over the world, from Germany to the US, are stepping up their sustainability game and installing apiaries. Next time you're down the airport concourse to your gate, stop for a second and look outside. You might be in for a surprise!
India is among the most polluted country in the world, a direct consequence of its growth-orientated policy. Despite economic growth, the health of Indians is suffering significantly. According to researchers at University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale, pollution is directly responsible for shortening the lives of 660 million Indians who live in sensitive areas by three years on […]
Big cities are crammed with millions of pigeons, but despite their large numbers the birds seem to have no problem navigating through bustling urban environments. I've often wondered how pigeons manage not to hit each other, first of all, when they sudden burst in a flock or why you never seem to see pigeons hit by taxis or poles. A new study suggests that this remarkable dodging is made by the pigeon through a trade-off between efficiency and safety, depending on the situation.
It's not just women who are concerned with their bodies and eating disorders, it's men too. This might seem obvious, but a study found that despite eating disorders are very common among men, these receive little attention or are treated less seriously than women.
US researchers have imaged for the first time ultra-small bacteria, whose existence has been debatable for the past couple of decades. Now, these tiny bacteria have been confirmed after samples coming from groundwater were analyzed with state of the art techniques. Very little is know about these enigmatic creatures, but it's believed they play an important role in microbial ecosystems, despite their tiny cells harbor limited resources. The cells have an average volume of 0.009 cubic microns (one micron is one millionth of a meter). About 150 of these bacteria could fit inside an Escherichia coli cell and more than 150,000 cells could fit onto the tip of a human hair.
This gentle and secluded creature is called a pangolin. Bet you've never heard of him. It looks sort of like a walking pinecone, a dragon or a dinosaur. It's tongue is as long as its body and can curl, then roll in a scaly ball. It's a pretty amazing animal and it's a shame so few people know of its existence. But more worrisome is that the pangolin might cease to existence entirely, with or without we knowing about it. Many believe it's the most trafficked animal in the world.
Memories aren't infallible - even for those with photographic memory - so, more often than not, they'll seem fuzzy. And the older these get, the fuzzier they're recalled. Mixing names, faces and events in your head can sometimes be embarrassing, but at least we're not alone. Seems like bees have false memories too, according to a study made by British researchers at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, false memories had been induced in other animals, like mice, but this is the first time natural false memories have been shown to happen. Research like this might help us, in time, understand how false memories are formed and, in a more general sense, how we recall events.
One of the prime arguments climate change skeptics throw about is how surface temperatures have remained more or less constant for the past 15 years, hence there is no man-made global warming – it’s all a sham, a conspiracy to keep scientists busy with gratuitous grants and fill Al Gore’s pockets. I’ve written previously about […]
Like most things in our modern day life style, we tend to take vaccines for granted. Some, in ever growing numbers, are on the contrary pushing and inciting against vaccination for all the wrong reasons. It’s easy to forget, however, that since their introduction hundreds of millions of lives have been spared. Vaccines given to […]
In America and other developed countries, the leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer. Elsewhere, the picture can be a bit more complicated. A report called the Global Burden of Disease study plotted a map where it outlined the leading causes of lost years of life by country. “Cause of lost years of life” and “cause […]
A complex artificial intelligence program developed by DeepMind, a London-based company which was acquired by Google last year for $400 million, mastered classic ATARI video games, like Breakout, Video Pinball, and Space Invaders. It was so effective that it outperformed professional game testers in 29 of the 49 games it tried out. As is the case with such demonstrations, there's more to it than just humiliating humans. The same algorithms could be used to develop and improve autonomous robots or self-driving cars.
Paleontologists have excavated and analyzed the remains of an ancient hypo ancestor in Kenya. The 28 million-year-old fossils paint a broader picture revealing the missing link between modern day hippos and the earliest ancestor who lived some 53 million years ago. As an interesting tidbit, the closest living relatives of the hippo are whales and […]
Astronomers have discovered a humongous supermassive black hole that’s 12 billion times as massive as the Sun. What’s peculiar about it isn’t necessarily its mass – some even bigger black holes have been found – but rather its age. Observations suggest that the black hole 12.8 billion light-years away, which means what scientists are reading […]
Norwegian rats know how to keep their friends close. A new study found they reward other rats for their help even though there's no immediate gain at hand as a result of this behavior. Called direct reciprocation, this is the first time something like this has been recorded by science outside human interactions.
Two new studies - both covering gay men, one in Britain and the other in France - were recently shared with the public boasting terrific results. In the trials, gay men were asked to take a drug called Truvada either daily or right before and after having sex. In an unlikely event of chance, both studies found a 86 percent reduction in new HIV infections among volunteers using Truvada. This suggests that the orally administered drug might be a lifeline in many HIV-ridden communities, considering 90% of all HIV cases could be prevented if those infected seek treatment.
The highlight of the award winning film, "The Imitation Game", is when Alan Turing and colleagues devise an ingenious statistical method that eventually helped decipher the Nazis' Enigma code. This breakthrough allowed Allied intelligence to read previously unavailable German military positions and actions, vastly shortening World War II. Interestingly, a team of neuroscientists at Columbia University found that more or less the same statistical method applied by Turing and co. is used by the brain to make any kind of decision, be it going left instead of right in an intersection or placing a higher bet during a high raise power game instead of folding.
The love hormone, oxytocin, was found to neutralize the motor deficiency effects of alcohol in rats, sobering them up. The researchers involved believe that given enough oxytocin, similar sobering effects might be seen in humans as well.
Contrary to popular belief, much of the damage inflicted to the skin by harmful ultraviolet (UV) light occurs hours after exposure to the sun, even when you're sitting comfortably asleep in your dark bedroom. The Yale University research also made a startling find: melanin - the pigment that gives human skin and hair its colour - has both carcinogenic and protective effects. This double standard should be taken into consideration from now on when discussing UV exposure, but also when looking for new treatments to skin cancers like melanoma.
Using CT-scans, researchers at the Netherlands-based Drents Museum imaged a mummified monk who lived 1,000 years ago inside a Buddha statue. Encased inside the golden cast, lie the the remains of Buddhist master Liuquan of the Chinese Meditation School. His organs were removed prior to becoming encased, which isn't a surprise being a standard mummification practice. What was surprising however were the rolls of paper scraps covered in Chinese writing which were placed where the organs used to sit.
Stanford scientists proved that it's possible use DNA minirings that code the production of a specific protein that can't be found in healthy cells to diagnose any form of cancer. The mini-rings were injected in the bloodstream of mice and allowed for accurate diagnosis up to two days from the injection. In authors envision using the same solution to diagnose any cancer in humans, while also relaying how large is the extent of the tumour. Moreover, they hope they can achieve this with an orally administered pill, instead of an intravenous injection, thus making it the least invasive form of cancer diagnosis. The only pain you'll experience is when doctors will prick a needle in your finger to get a drop of blood. Take that, biopsy!
In the quest to understand what are the crucial differences between human and chimpanzee brains, scientists have isolated a stretch of DNA, once thought to be “junk”, near a gene that regulates brain development in mice. The engineered mouse embryos grew significantly larger brains. Those which received human brain DNA strands had 12% larger brains than those bred with chimp brain DNA. Research like this, though ethically controversial, might help identify which DNA sequences give a brain human characteristics, but also aid in findings treatment or cures for brain diseases like Alzheimer's.
Here’s another reason for children to do their chores: washing dishes by hand boosts children’s immune system. The findings were reported by Swedish doctors who found that in households where dishes are washed by hand children have much fewer allergic incidents than in those where the dishes are washed by a machine. Yet again, the findings […]
The mighty Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan wasn’t all that different from New York City today, or any major city for that matter, despite the former has been deserted for 500 years. You see, both cities grew under the same rules, independent of political or economic systems, according to a new model. Scott Ortman, an anthropologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, heard […]
Marine animals today are 150 times larger than they were 540 million years ago, according to a new study which seems to suggest evolution favors animals bigger in size.
A new report highlights the reprehensible state of women working in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics— where they’re not only under represented, but also under constant pressure to over perform. The report also stresses how sexism and racism is “still a thing” in labs, universities and technology companies. In fact, there’s seems to be […]
Here's a question: what's the difference between actor Sean Penn and the charitable Mother Theresa? Bear with me for a second. Here's a bit of context: following the onslaught left by Hurricane Katrina, Penn hurried to New Orleans to aid victims. Allegedly has has personally saved 40 people. Today, however, he's scorned and mocked of because he also brought a camera crew and publicist along for the ride to document his humanitarian effort. Both Mother Theresa and Sean Penn have engaged in what can be described as humanitarian aid, yet one's seen as a saint, while the other is made fun of. The key difference is motivation and now game theory may finally be able to account for it.
Can you judge a person by his fingers? If that person's a men, yes you can, some scientists would agree. Researchers at McGill University found that men with short index fingers and long ring fingers are on average nicer to women. Not entirely a correlative study, the findings seem to have weight as previously a link was found between high levels of testosterone in the womb and shorter index finger relative to the ring finger. You can stop watching your fingers now.
The most populated city in the United States is already experiencing its fair share of floods, hurricanes and heat waves, but these will only intensify in years to come. According to the New York City Panel on Climate Change by the 2080s there could be an 8.8-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature from 1980s levels and as many as six heat waves a year or three times as many as in the 1980s. Sea levels could also rise by as much as six feet, pressing the municipality for swift adaptive measures.
Languages like English, Greek or Hindu, all Indo-European tongues, stem from a common ancestral language family which originated 5,500 - 6,500 years ago, on the Pontic-Caspian steppe stretching from Moldova and Ukraine to Russia and western Kazakhstan. The findings were reported by a group of linguists at University of California, Berkeley after data from more than 150 languages were analyzed. Today, some 3 billion people speak the more than 400 languages and dialects that belong to the Indo-European family.
Many scholars who still seek to explain why more women leave the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pipeline than men are stuck in old times. If in the 1970s, men were 1.6 to 1.7 times as likely as women to later earn a STEM Ph.D., by the 1990s the gender gap had closed and both sexes are as likely to complete their education. Efforts to bridge the gap and promote gender diversity have thus been fruitful. There's still gender gap in STEM among those who first enroll in college, with roughly three times as many men than women.
Alec Falkenham, a 27-year-old PhD student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, has invented a special cream that will wipe out tattoos for good, without the pain and scaring expected today following laser surgery. Time to erase your ex-lover's name off that shoulder... or keep it! Good or bad memories are what make you the person you are today, you shouldn't be ashamed of that. Either way, soon enough you might have the means to make your own choice - one that doesn't involve burning you skin.
After scientists discovered a huge hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, an emergency UN panel banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in 1987. These build up in the atmosphere, react with the triple oxygen molecule and break it down. Since then, ozone has thankfully replenished, thought it might take decades before it reverts to pre-1980 levels. Progress is slow because there are still some plants through out the world who illegally use CFCs (the stuff that used to go into refrigerants or deodorants), but also because there are other ozone-depleting chemicals out there - some recognized, others new and extremely dangerous. One class of chemicals that has been allowed in the industry since the Montreal Protocol, despite the danger it posses to ozone, is made up of so-called 'very short-lived substances' (VSLS) which breakup in under six months. A new study, however, found that these have dramatically increased over the past couple of years and despite their short reaction times, these could prove to be extremely dangerous.
British researchers have demonstrated three ways gold nanotubes can be used against cancer: 1) high resolution in-vivo imaging; 2) drug delivery vehicles; 3) agents that destroy cancer itself. Their work shouldn't be viewed as yet "another" hack that seeks to eradicate cancer. We need to be more realistic than this. Instead, the findings have the potential to be a great measure that both diagnoses and treats cancer at the same time, complementing conventional surgery and, hopefully, avoiding the need for chemotherapy.
The team behind Interstellar's awesome special effects meant business when they set out to emulate space, celestial objects and black holes as scientifically accurate as possible. In a paper published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, the special effects crew describe at length the innovative computer code they used to generate stunning imagery, but also make new scientific discoveries. Whenever a SciFi movie spews new scientific advancement, well, you know it's a good one!
We know that things like eye or skin colour are encoded in our DNA and passed down by our parents, but many other traits are significantly influenced by another hereditary mechanism: bacterial offspring. A paper in Nature suggests microbes are passed down from mother mice to pups, passing down traits similarly to how genes influence illness and health.
South Londoners who smoke skunk weed - a much more potent strain of cannabis - were found to be three times more likely to register at hospitals with first-episode psychoses, according to a study made by British researchers. The research has many shortcomings though, as is to be expected from a case-control design where it's always difficult to account for external variables. As the old saying goes, correlation does not equal causation, so take these findings with a grain of salt. The study is valuable however considering it's among the few which actually considered the relationship between cannabis use and psychosis, often ignored by mainstream cannabis research. Cannabis is used by millions of people worldwide, yet its long-term effects are seriously under reported.
Speaking at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting, US researchers showed a coloured map of the quietest regions in the United States, based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City. Apparently, the eastern half of the country is much more loud […]
This is a picture of a cat, obviously, but do you notice something strange about it? Sure looks like a cat, but let's have a closer look - zoom in!
The best storage medium might actually be DNA, considering the vast amount of information it store relative to its weight - one gram can theoretically hold some 455 exabytes or more than the data collectively stored by all of Google, Facebook and every other tech company. It's also very durable. Remember how some scientists thought about cloning mammoths? Well, the DNA they would use is at least 4,000 years old, but DNA has been extracted and sequenced from much older samples, like a 700,000 years-old horse. With this in mind, some scientists got the idea of storing the most critical pieces of modern human knowledge into specially treated DNA - maybe the most effective time capsule ever.
At this years' Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Symposium, NASA's Glenn COMPASS Team discussed at large the possibility of exploring Titan, Saturn's largest moon, with a robotic submarine that would dive deep inside the oceans of liquefied natural gas. Such a mission, if ever funded, could help answer some important questions like what are the defining chemical building blocks required to birth and sustain life. Titan is very similar to Earth in terms of cycling systems, elemental composition and terrestrial geography, so there's much insight to be gained.
Dr. Robert W. Levenson is a psychologist at UC Berkeley who has been studying 156 married middle-aged and older couples that were together for more than 20 years. Every five years, the couples were asked to come in and report on their current marital satisfaction. They were observed interacting with each other in a lab setting, where researches judged their interactions though their facial expressions, body language, tone of voice and topic of discussion. Of those involved, 125 also agreed to provide DNA samples.
A lesser known side effect of a famous blue pill.
Using ultra-fast laser techniques employed by the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists have peered through the transitional state that reactants go through before joining in a molecule. The implications for chemistry are massive and the findings might spur a new field of science. Already, we’re hearing about some very interesting conclusions, although much […]
A rare Neolithic-era burial site was discovered by the northern entrance of the Alepotrypa (“Foxhole”) Cave in southern Greece. The skeleton remains show how a couple was laid to rest in embrace, close to a burial of another male and female who were found in fetal position - the most common burial position during the Neolithic. The embracing couple’s skeletons were dated with the C14 method to 3800 BC while their DNA analysis confirmed the remains were those of a male and female.
Although mammals surfaced only 20 million years after the first dinosaurs evolved, there's a general consensus that mammals were shadowed and reclusive in the face of dinosaurs, seeing how they were the dominant animals on the planet back then. As such, early mammals are thought to have been mostly nocturnal with minimal interaction with dinosaur environments, occupying very limited ecological niches. This conventional thinking might be toppled by recent findings made by Chinese paleontologists who discovered two highly sophisticated early mammals each at least 160 million years old: the first tree-clinging mammal and the first burrowing mammal. These creatures munched on the same plants dinosaurs did, proving they seemingly coexisted in the same ecological framework.
A great explanation of Einstein's theory of relativity for laymen.
With Valentine's Day just around the corner, some of you might be tempted to employ some of those spray-on pheromone products. I won't give names, but you must have seen the ads - they're all over TV and the internet. Odorless pheromones are secreted by many animals to attract mates, and while synthesized versions have been shown to work for bees and other insects, the human nose and brain for that matter is a whole different thing.
