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A new study suggests that two very common emulsifiers - chemicals that stabilize foods and stop products like mayo from separating - could increase the risk of obesity and irritable bowel syndrome.
Scientists undertook the gargantuan task of analyzing the compound chemicals found in the venom of 206 spiders, and they discovered what may lead to a new generation of painkillers, improving the lives of over 1 billion people.
If you'd happen to see these two British twins, you'd likely believe they're good friends - or cousins at most. But Lucy and Maria are actually twins - despite the obvious differences.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is expected to remain stationary for at least a couple of days after a shortcircuit has rendered its arm useless for the time being. The engineering problem occurred on February 27 as the rover was preparing to start drilling in the Martian soil.
Many people today are consuming more salt than they actually need - while this may make foods more tasty, it also increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. But a new study found that dietary salt could actually have a dietary advantage, defending the body against invading microbes.
OK, it’s been a while since we did this feature, but it’s back now – and it’s here to stay. This is where we take a look back at the past week, discussing the most interesting studies and the researchers behind them. Bees have false memories too Article Featured Researcher: Lars Chittka Affiliation: Chittka Lab, Queen Mary […]
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!
You may look more like your mom or more like your dad, but technically, you inherit equal amounts of genetic information from both; however, a new study has shown that you (and all mammals for that matter) are genetically more like their dads. If that sounds a bit confusing... well, it is. Specifically, although we inherit equal amounts of genetic mutations from both our parents, the mutations that make us who we are and not some other person actually 'use' more of the DNA that we inherit from our dads.
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 […]
NASA's Towed Glider Air-Launch System will launch small payloads, like mini-satellites, into space more efficiently and at a fraction it currently costs, according to officials. In a spree of ingenuity, researchers have devised a launch system comprised of a double piggyback of sorts. First, a drone will fly off the ground and into the upper atmosphere, carrying a glider. The glider in turn carries a rocket, which ultimately carries the payload meant for Earth's orbit. Once the drone reaches 40,000 feet, it decouples the glider which immediately turns on its on-board booster. Once, again, high enough, the glider will decouple the rocket which fires for the final climb into space.
Many people change a lot after their youth... and so to did our Universe. Nowadays, galaxies contain both dust and gas, but back in the early Big-Bang days, the earliest galaxies had no dust, only gas. Now, a team of astronomers has discovered a very young galaxy with lots of dust - the equivalent of a white-bearded young man.
The link between climate change and violent conflict has been thrown about often, but a recent study is the first to support this hypothesis with qualitative evidence. US researchers found that widespread droughts and increased temperatures amplified an already heightened state of unrest in Syria, which may have triggered the civil war still raging on today.
We see light every day, and yet, we don't truly understand it; it's either a particle or a wave, or both at the same time... and we don't really know why. Now, for the first time, researchers have captured an image of light behaving as a particle and a wave at the same time.
A week ago, we were telling you about Wei-Hock Soon, an aerospace engineer turned climate scientist; mister Soon, known as "Willie", is one of the most well known and quoted climate change deniers - he's also one of the only climate change deniers. This week...
There's something so eerily exciting about spacewalks... the idea of walking into outer space with only a cable connection you to a ship rotating at 7 km/s some 400 km above the Earth is just... out of this world - literally! Now, two astronauts have completed ISS upgrades is what can only be described as a picture perfect spacewalk. This entire spacewalk took one hour less than planned for.
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.
In any given month, the vast majority of physicians treating children in the US (93%) receive at least one request to delay child vaccination; many of them (37%) often or always honor the request, despite putting the kids at a needless risk for disease and favoring potential outbreaks of diseases such as measles.
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.
According to a new study, ancient hunter-gatherer Britons imported wheat from mainland Europe, showing a surprising level of sophistication for such an old population.
Who doesn't love dinosaurs? Well sure, there's these guys, but rational people love dinosaurs, right? Well, Nathan Myhrvold, an inventor and Microsoft's former CEO sure does, and he believes that dinosaurs might actually help us fight malnutrition. Here's how:
They like freezing conditions, but the Emperor penguins struggled during the last Ice Age, a new study concluded. In fact, if they hadn't been able to change their breeding habits and even their genetic make-up, they might have not survived.
We all know how therapeutic and soothing (or on the contrary, motivating) music can be; and we all know that different people like different types of music... so it seems safe to say that different animals also like different types of music. Now, a joint team of scientists and musicians believe they found how to compose the purr-fect music for animals, including monkeys and cats.
Mars - our neighbor, the Red Planet... is not actually red. The first look at what’s under Mars’s dusty red surface has revealed a clearly greyish blue rocky layer.
The world's first grid-connected wave power station has just been activated off the coast of Australia. Taking energy directly from the waves and sending them to the grid is a remarkable achievement which will hopefully be replicated in Australia, as well as in other parts of the world.
If you've ever wondered what happens inside an egg, then science has you covered - researchers have developed transparent artificial eggshells; but they didn't do this just out of curiosity - they want to create a controlled environment for bird embryo growth and development to aid stem cell studies.
Scientists at the University of Sydney in Australia have achieved 5G speeds of 1Tbps, far exceeding existing the speeds of existing technologies. At 1 Terrabyte per second, you could download 10 movies per second.
After an exhaustive analysis conducted over a year and a half, NASA's Curiosity Rover has finally confirmed the existence of methane on Mars, somewthing which indicates that life may have existed (or still exist) on Mars.
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 […]
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 […]
Building vertical farms is innovative and can have significant advantages, done properly; but building a vertical farm in the middle of a city... that's just awesome! In downtown Jackson, Wyoming, developers are working on a vertical veggie farm which just might revolutionize urban food growing.
A while ago I wrote that the applications for graphene are endless, and it seems like scientists just want to make prove me right - University of Manchester scientists have used graphene to target and neutralise cancer stem cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed.
A partial skull fragment found in Kenya seems to indicate that early humans were much more diverse than previously thought. The 22,000-year-old skull clearly belongs to a human species, but is unlike anything else previously discovered.
Rats remember acts of kindness done by other rats, and are more helpful to individuals who previously helped them. It's not clear if they do this because they are grateful or if they are trying to make sure that they will get helped in the future as well, but their behavior gives scientists a new understanding of animal social behavior.
It's pretty scary what modern medicine can do these days. Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy announced his intention to perform a full head transplant by 2015. He will put forth a proposal at a conference in the US so interested parties can get onboard and make suggestions for the procedure.
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 […]
A typical school cafeteria serving contains fried food stuff like nuggets, mashed potatoes or peas. Kids' nutritional uptake and diet could be a lot better, as proven elsewhere by schools all around the world. Sweetgreen, a restaurant the values local and organic produce, recently published on its Tumblr an amazing photo journal detailing what a typical cafeteria serving looks like in countries like South Korea, Brazil or Italy.
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.
Bionic hands - artificial limbs controlled through thought power - they're as awesome as they sound, and they're now a reality. Three Austrian men have become real-life cyborgs after having losing their hands to injury and then undergoing innovative surgery.
Humans have been fascinated by eyelashes for centuries, with long and luxuriant eyelashes being in fashion since the days of ancient Egypt. Now, researchers have found how eyelashes actually work, what their functions are, and revealed that longer is not necessarily better.
If you've ever walked with beverages in your hand, you probably know that coffee tens to spill easily, while beer doesn't. Emilie Dressaire, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, believes the secret lies in the foam.
The Curiosity Rover, currently on Mars, took another selfie in the "Mojave" area, where it is preparing to have a second taste of Mount Sharp, the central peak within Gale crater. The selfie scene is assembled from dozens of images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the rover's robotic arm.
The Sahara Desert and the Amazon area have few things in common - one is a dry, barren wasteland, while the other is the most fertile area on Earth. But according to a new NASA study, there may be more than meets the eye when it comes to the two - dust from the Saharan area makes the trans-Atlantic journey, fertilizing the Amazonian rainforest with phosphorus.
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.
