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Approximately 3.8tn cubic metres of water is used by humans annually with 70% being consumed by the global agriculture sector, according to a report issued by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME). Strikingly, up to 50% of all food is thrown away before it gets the chance to reach consumers, often out of frivolous reasons. In terms of water that's 550bn cubic metres that go to waste each year. At the same time, approximately 795 million people in the world are chronically malnourished and 1 in 10 lack access to clean water. While policy makers should take more notice and take measures to curb waste, there's much you can do yourself to cut on waste. Eglė Plytnikaitė, an illustrator from Vilnius, Lithuania made some insightful drawings showing how much water goes into some of the most popular foodstuff.
"Please enter a strong password", is now an ubiquitous greeting whenever we try to register online. Security experts advise we use long passwords at least 12 characters in length, which should include numbers, symbols, capital letters, and lower-case letters. Most websites nowadays force you to enter a password under some or all of these conditions. Moreover, the password shouldn't contain dictionary words and combinations of dictionary words. Common substitution like "h0use" instead of "house" are also not recommended - these naive attempts will fool no automated hacking algorithm. So, what we end up at the end is a very strong password, like the website kindly asked (or forced) us to do. At the same time, it's damn difficult if not impossible to remember. People end up endlessly hitting "recover password" or, far worse, write down their passwords in email or other notes on their computer which can easily be recovered by any novice hacker.
Couple of weeks ago, Volkswagen admitted it had cheated US tests to make its diesel cars seem more green than they actually were. Later, ZME Science reported companies like Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat or Volvo were also cheating. Then, independent lab tests showed some Samsung TVs were rigged to use less energy during official testing conditions than they do during real-world use. Now, famous British inventor James Dyson is accusing German companies Bosch and Siemens of doing the same thing, gaming energy ratings for their vacuum cleaners.
The Concorde was created by Britain's British Aircraft Corporation and France's Aérospatiale in the early 1960s. But it wasn't until 1976 and billions of dollars later that the supersonic plane took its maiden voyage. Because it was very expensive to maintain, only long distance flights made sense and boy did the Concorde deliver - New York to London in just three hours! Today, 12 years after the aircraft was retired, it takes 7 hours. Rightfully so, the Concorde episode is one of the few in human history where society has had to downgrade. Yes, today's sub-sonic aircraft are more advanced than the Concorde, but still arduously sluggish. Now, a group of Concorde enthusiasts - its fan club if you will - plans to buy up two old units of this vintage wonder. One will be turned into a museum in London, and the other will be refurbished, upgraded and put to good use flying the wealthy faster than the speed of sound.
After five years of painstakingly stitching together pictures of the Milky Way, astronomers from Ruhr University Bochum have finally completed their masterpiece: the largest ever space photo. It has a whooping 46 billion megapixel and 194 GB in file size. It's so large, in fact, that the astronomers had to cut it in 268 sections for it be manageable.
We humans arguably came to dominate the world thanks to our dexterous hands, which allow gripping tools and manipulating objects. An eccentric professor at University of Utah agrees, but with a twist. According to David Carrier there's a secondary evolutionary driver that led our hands to reach their current shape and dexterity: fist punching. To illustrate his hypothesis, Carrier turned to a macabre experiment in which cadaver hands clenched in various positions, from open hand to a good old sucker punch fist, were bashed against a dumbbell. Carrier showed that a fist could handle the strike with double the force supported by an open hand before bones started to break.
Marijuana use has doubled among American adults from 2001 to 2013. About 10% of the population or 22 million are believed to be recreational users, a steep rise driven by both cultural shifts and more permissive laws. About 1 in 3 users abuse the drug (continued use despite knowing it may be damaging health or causing depression or anxiety), though it's worth mentioning that this ratio was the same before the exponential rise in marijuana users.
Bitcoin's blockchain database is shared by all nodes participating in a system - that's more computing power than Google has. This makes the Bitcoin ledger impossible to forge or destroy, since there are millions of other copies distributed across the whole web. Now, this remarkable financial innovation could be used to thwart corruption.
"No amount of alcohol should be considered safe to drink during any trimester of pregnancy," wrote the the American Academy of Pediatrics in a report which identified ingesting alcohol during pregnancy as the leading cause of preventable birth defects.
Carbon nanotubes are a class of advanced materials that researchers think will transform electronics someday, but while great effort is expended trying to figure out the best way to make them, it appears that our lungs are already littered with them. American and French researchers collected both biological samples from randomly selected asthma patients and swabs from nearby buildings and busy intersections. Eventually they found carbon nanotubes, leading them to believe that the material is expelled throughout the city. The source? Vehicles, it seems, which act like carbon nanotube factories on wheels. Similar findings were detected in samples from Houston, in spider webs in India and in ice cores, suggesting carbon nanotubes are everywhere where automobiles are on the loose.
The current procedure for Ebola survivors is wait 42 consecutive days for the tests to come back negative, then the patients can be discharged from quarantine. More and more evidence is surfacing, however, showing that the virus can still linger on through various nooks and crannies in the human body, undetected from standard testing. For instance, one man was treated for Ebola, but the virus was still present in his eyes. It wasn't dormant either, since the inflammation caused his normally blue eyes to turn into green. Other evidence suggests Ebola can linger in the testes and be transmitted through sexual contact, but also in the uterus and joints. Only the case where Ebola was present in semen led to a transmission of the disease, so survivors aren't necessary contagious. These serious findings do suggest more quarantine measures are required, though.
In 2006, the US court found the tobacco industry guilty of a decades-long racketeering enterprise in which it conspired to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking. The tobacco companies were ordered to buy newspaper ads detailing smoking's health effects and to stop using such descriptions as "low tar," "light," ultra light," "mild" or "natural" that might imply that they are less dangerous than other cigarettes. They were also ordered to pay $10 billion in fines. Speaking for ThinkProgress, Sharon Y. Eubanks - the leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted the landmark lawsuit against big tobacco - says the Department of Justice should investigate Exxon and possibly other fossil fuel industry players (Koch *cough) for a similar claim, only much worse. The conspiracy isn't only against smokers' health, it's against all life on Earth.
Defecating outside comes at a great toll to the numerous, and often crowded Indian people. Lack of basic hygiene means hundreds of millions are exposed to bacterial pathogens and children are at the mercy of diarrhea. Economically speaking, this translated to $53.8 billion or 6.4 percent from India’s gross domestic product in 2006, says the World Bank.
It probably took a bit of convincing for man to turn wolves into dogs through domestication. At least this is not settled for debate: dogs branched from Eurasian grey wolves some 15,000 years ago. What's less clear is where did this first happen. After embarking on a huge study which led them to analyze the genetic markup of hundreds of dog breeds, Adam Boyko at Cornell University thinks he's finally got an answer: dogs were first domesticated in Central Asia, or in modern day Nepal and Mongolia.
Used to make almost everything from skyscraper girders, automobiles, and appliances to thumb tacks and paper clips, steel is one of the world's most vital materials. While there's been a great amount of research invested into steel, most of it has concentrated on making various grades of steel, with little focus on the surface itself. Understanding that there's a great interest and need for steel surfaces that can stay clean and don't corrode under harsh biological conditions, a group of material scientists at Harvard have come up with a squeaky clean coating that does just that.
You've probably heard some of the headlines: eBay hacked; Apple hacked etc. It's infuriating when your private records, which you shared with a company you trust, get breached. But it's often easy to lose sight of the fact that nowadays it's not only companies that get hacked - it's normal, nine to five, credit card holding individuals that get hacked too. Cybercriminals use all sorts of methods to spoof millions of twitter or facebook accounts and extract private information they can later use to steal your identity, extort you or hack other accounts. As such, we should all be a lot more responsible. Here's a brief infographic made by the Digital Guardian which shows how oversharing on social media can be harmful and some practical tips on how to protect your data.
The last time humans set foot on the moon was 1972. Feeling confident it had clearly showed its superiority over Russia, the US felt no more reason to prove itself and immediately shut down subsequent missions. Once with funding gone - and its budget has been thinning since - NASA had to settle for less ambitious goals, and it's not like we can blame them. Building on outpost on the moon, versus say the International Space Station, is not only a lot more expensive, but also impractical. Recent findings, however, suggest there's a lot to gain from having an outpost on the moon, of some sorts at least. That's because the interest has shifted from prestige, or at least not only, to the potentially bountiful economic activities. Minerals, helium-3 (fuel) or precious metals can all be mined from the moon, trillions worth. But before you can shuttle minerals back from the moon, you at least need a footing of some sort. Understanding this, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos banded together to send a robotic probe to an unexplored region of the moon. The ultimate goal, they say, is to prepare the ground for humans.
With today's propulsion tech, it takes at least 1.5 years for a manned crew to reach Mars, and at least as much to get back - provided there's a return mission. There's only so much that can fit in a spacecraft, and besides the supplies astronauts need for the long trip, there's precious cargo that's required to sustain the mission on site like construction materials, lab equipment, food and so on. Remember the last time you went camping? Well, this time we're headed to another planet and forgetting about toiler paper is the least of your worries. But when NASA handles logistics, you know things are tight to the last bolt. Sometimes, outside help and fresh minds are more than welcome, which is why the space agency held a very interesting competition called the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition which awards the most innovative, but practical designs of habitats on Mars.
Every year Nikon holds the Small World Photomicrography Competition awarding the very finest photographers that capture the essence of the micro world. For 2015, the winner was Ralph Grimm from Australia with a close-up of a bee eye covered in dandelion pollen grains. This was no lucky shot. Grimm says it took four hours to prepare, including setting focus increments, proper illumination and stacking.
This Friday, the CEOs of the some of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world, including BP, Shell and Total, held a press conference asking for immediate action against climate change and urging world readers to reach an agreement in Paris, this December. The companies account for a fifth of the world's oil and gas production, the leading fossil fuels that are flooding the atmosphere with excess carbon and warming the planet, causing irreversible climate change. As such, if you find the statement dubious - not to mention hilarious - you're not alone.
Previously stored away in government archives, some 170,000 photographs from the time of the Great Depression have been now released to the public by Yale University.
Solar energy could be turned up a notch not by some exotic material or chip, but surprisingly by viruses. A team at MIT published a paper demonstrating how a genetically modified virus was used in a quantum system to transfer energy at double the speed and over a greater distance than even the best solar cells.
By 1918, the Indian born, self-thought mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was already making headlines all over the world, recognized as one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his time. He was born into a poor Brahman family and with no formal education. Luckily he came across a couple of textbook maths, and since he didn’t […]
Besides chirps and squeaks, you'll also find bear roars, primate calls, and blue whale songs. In total: 150,000 recordings of 9,000 species.
Bill Gates, the wealthiest man in the world in 2014, has for the past decade concentrated his efforts and resources into philanthropic projects aimed to transform the world. He's invested billions in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which concentrates on improving health and helping the world's poor access technology and basic services. Some of Gates' funded projects were covered by ZME Science, like the Omniprocessor that turns sludge into electricity and pure, clean water or the solar power toilets. As you can see, energy is key to meeting any humanitarian goal. It also matters how you get this energy. If we continue to burn fossil fuel at this rate, the planet might irreversibly warm by a couple degrees Celsius, with cataclysmic shifts. That's why Gates has pledged $2 billion strictly into energy R&D.
A while ago, aerospace giant applied a patent for a most peculiar propulsion system that uses high power lasers to kick off a fusion reaction, akin to a small thermonuclear explosion. The energy released would be enough power spacecraft, rockets and even jetliners with tremendous thrust.
"Spring is coming," said no Stark ever. You've already noticed that the traditional starting dates for each season have become misaligned, and in some instances patterns have changed with shorter winters and longer springs. This trend is set only to exacerbate in the future. By 2100, spring could come three weeks early on average across continental United States. In some parts, like the Pacific Northwest and the mountainous regions of the Western U.S., spring will be a month early. This might sound like good news if you live in Wisconsin, but in the long-run this spells disaster as ecosystems get disrupted by abrupt seasonal changes.
One of the most important open questions in paleobiology today is whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded. Their appearance suggests dinosaurs had a low metabolic rate, lazying around, charging at the sun much like modern reptiles like crocodiles. At the same time, their direct descendants are warm-blooded birds. Unfortunately, you can’t stick a thermometer up […]
Chronic inflammation of the colon has been recognized as a leading factor contributing to senescence and age-related diseases. Previously, scientists identified polyamines (PAs) levels, which are aliphatic low- molecular compounds, as being linked with systemic inflammation. The more PAs you have, the healthier your gut. But as we age, PAs levels fall and intestinal barrier dysfunction may occur. To test how significant is this contribution, researchers from Japan fed mice with probiotic supplements than compared them to a control. They found the mice lived longer, suggesting "ingestion of specific probiotics may be an easy approach for improving intestinal health and increasing lifespan."
A study assessed how sea level rise at the hand of global warming will affect coastal populations in the United States. The analysis made by Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science, found 20 million Americans’ homes might be flooded, and more than 1,500 U.S. cities and municipalities could have at least half of their residential area under water if the world emits under a 'business-as-usual' scenario. Unfortunately, there's a lot of damage that's already been done. Carbon emitted today will continue to warm the planet for hundreds of years and its effects on the climate are already locked in. Cities like Miami and New Orleans are 'already lost in the long run,' said Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central.
Earlier this week Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to twitter announcing a new software update for the Model S will come bundled with an autopilot feature for highway cruising. Previously, Tesla worked with a couple hundred early adopters, but come October 15th, everyone will be able to enjoy the spoils. The v7.0 autopilot features include auto-steering, lane change activated by the turn signal and auto-parking in parallel spaces.
The battlefield is shifting from trench soldiers to cyberspace and unmanned machines. As always, when a new technology of war is developed, a counter that levels the game isn't far behind. Business Insider reports three companies in the UK are working on a device that freezes drones in mid-air by flooding them with radio signals across all frequencies, similarly to how cell phone blockers work, or how Cooper in Interstellar captured a drone in his corn fields.
In 1847, at the tender age of 27, Ada Lovelace became the world's first programmer, more than a hundred years before the first computer was actually introduced.
That's the year man first set foot on the moon. Our computer tech has shot even farther away, though.
For the past two weeks the scientific community was stirred by news that a biologist captured a male moustached kingfisher, took the first ever picture of a male from the species, then killed the bird shortly after.
Tourism is affecting wildlife in more than one way.
The remarkably well preserved fossil of a wing that belonged to an early Cretaceous bird suggests some of the first avian creatures could fly. The remains were unearthed from a limestone site in Spain, and exhibit features reminiscent of modern birds like intricate arrangement of muscles, tendons and ligaments. This soft tissue system is excellent for controlling position and allows rapid adjustment of the wing to navigate through the air.
Less than two months away, 200 governments will join the U.N. Paris talks where an international agreement might be reached seeking to limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions for each country. The goal is to eventually level emissions significantly relative to 1990 levels for developed countries and cap emissions as soon as possible for developing countries like India and China. Each country, however, wants to get the best deal and many critics are weary that we're simply heading for another Copenhagen bust like six years ago, or worst even - another Kyoto which failed miserably.
Capitalizing a more than a decade's worth of neuroscience and computer science research, an international team of 82 researchers from institutions around the world report one the most detailed digital reconstruction of a mammalian brain. The researchers simulated 30,000 neurons and almost 40 million synapses, part of a rat's brain measuring less than a third of a cubic millimeter. It's a small step that might one day help simulate the whole brain, not just of rats, but also of humans - the ultimate goal of the Human Brain Project (HBP), an ambitious project which the European Commission prioritized and awarded $1 billion in funding.
The complete genetic code book of a person who lived 4,500 years ago in Ethiopia was completed by US researchers. Although much older genomes have been sequenced, like those of 38,000 year-old Neanderthals, samples from African forefathers have proven difficult to sequence as the DNA is often destroyed by accelerated decay, driven by tropical conditions. As such, this is the first time a complete genome retrieval was performed from an ancient human in Africa. In this light, the findings are very important: they suggest even older DNA could be retrieved - maybe even millions of years back to the age of other species of the homo genus.
Possibly the greatest demographic challenge China is facing has due to do with a hugely discrepant gender imbalance.
Are homosexuals hard wired this way or merely the product of their environment? Some argue that its both, but whether or not there's a 'gay gene' or more is up to debate. The fact that it's such a delicate subject, i.e. hard to get funding, means that progress is slow. One could argue that it wouldn't be worth researching anyway. If someone found a scientific causal-link, say some genes, that's responsible for homosexuality than it's possible to maybe reverse it. A 'cure' for homosexuality, if you will. Even this very prospect is enough to kill research out of politically correctness. At the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in Baltimore, however, the audience might have been surprised to hear about the findings of a group from University of California (UC), Los Angeles that found there's reasons to believe homosexuality is rooted in epigenetics. The authors are quick to caution that their findings are far from being the final word, and hence should be taken with a grain of salt.
Our planet's magnetic field is the first and ultimate shield that guards life from the elements of space, particularly radiation. It's enough to look at Mars, which also had a magnetic field but only for 500 million years, to see what could happen were it absent: what was once a "blue planet", filled with vasts oceans of liquid water, maybe even vegetation and other life forms, is now a barred red rock. This invisible, protective shield likely existed shortly after the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago, when it was still a big blob of molten rock. It was only after the super hot iron liquid core lost enough heat to freeze (more properly said, it solidified) did the field become strong enough to allow life to foster. Previous studies estimated this happened sometime between 500 million and 2 billion years ago. A more refined analysis by University of Liverpool places the timeline between 1 billion and 1.5 billion years ago.
A newly founded artificial intelligence lab, called Vicarious, wants to build the world's first, unified artificial intelligence that can match human intelligence. This is not the first time we've heard companies or universities trumpet such ambitious goals, but considering who's backing the project I can only entertain the possibility Vicarious might just do it. Entrepreneurs with great vision and a track record of backing successful companies have all hopped aboard, like Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Peter Thiel (Paypal, founder of venture capital and hedge funds worth billions), Jerry Yang (Yahoo! founder), Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) and more.
The feel-good, floating sensation people get after a good run is analogous to smoking pot. Researchers came to the conclusion after they found mice released chemicals in the brain that bind to the same brain receptors which are triggered when one smokes the herb. The practical implications of the research are limited, but they do seem to suggest that evolution fostered running otherwise it wouldn't have been this pleasurable.
If you've ever brushed past the tailpipe of a running car, then you know just how smoking hot it can be. And since tailpipes aren't exactly heating radiators, that's just wasted energy. Not much you can do, you might say. That's just the 2nd law of thermodynamics mocking us humans. But there are ways to turn otherwise wasted heat into something useful, like residential heating or electricity. Typically, engineers design systems that transfer the heat to water which then turns to steam and so on until you can get something useful out of it - eventually. There are other ways also which are more convenient in most situation - after all, you can't fit a steam turbine in your car. For instance, you could use thermoelectric materials that directly convert the heat into electricity.
Quantum computing is one of the future's transitional technologies destined to transform human society, along with advanced materials like graphene and metallic glass or advances in space propulsion. Imagine what the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors did for computing, scale that a couple of folds and you might somewhat be close to what quantum computers are capable of. Operations that today's supercomputers require days even weeks to crunch, would be completed immediately by leveraging the quantum weirdness that happens below the nano scale. All of this is theoretically possible - but in practice building a working quantum computer that doesn't disintegrate information has proven to be an immense challenge. We're still far from there, but advances reported by Australian researchers hint that quantum computers aren't a pipe dream.
While surveying the island of Sulawesi right in the center of Indonesia, a group of researchers came across a previously undocumented species of rodent. It was pretty easy too, considering the animal's uncanny appearance: what would otherwise look like a normal looking rat, but with the nostrils of a hog.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature assessed the state of cactus populations around the world and found almost a third of all species are endangered. The report summarizes that human activity is threatening hundreds of species with extinction. This includes illegal trading, agriculture and aquaculture, but also land-use change.
Watches might keep time in an absolute manner, but people don't. Each person perceives time differently depending on mood, and moreover this perception changes with age. "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity," Einstein famously said. Apparently, time slows down even when white folks are concerned not to appear racially biased, according to a study published in Psychological Science.
