Science And Brexit

Science And Brexit

The scientific community is one of the main beneficiaries of the UK's membership of the EU, and stands to lose out in a post-Brexit world.

Britain receives £850m in research funds from the EU each year. Full membership of one of the main EU funding programmes requires free movement of labour. British universities employ 30,000 scientists with EU citizenship.

Lord Willetts suggested that if researchers try their best to seize the new opportunities Brexit presents, two things might happen. First, they might be pleasantly surprised and get to be involved in some really good, well-funded science. Second, according to the wily Lord Willetts, they would receive a more sympathetic hearing from government for the concessions they are seeking over Brexit.

Such a boost in funding would be transformative, according to Naomi Weir of Case.

"It would boost confidence for inward investment, drive growth in the economy, see the creation of high-quality jobs and increase our capacity to tackle national and global challenges in health, energy and the environment," she said.

Full Article From BBC

Why Pluto Is Not A Planet

Why Pluto Is Not A Planet

Nasa’s New Horizons mission was launched at the start of 2006, Pluto was a planet, but it's not any more.

Pluto is only 1,430 miles (2,302km) in diameter and that makes it smaller than our Moon. Pluto is 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion km) from the Sun – that’s 40 times the distance the Earth is from it. Consequently, it was the last 'planet' discovered. It took until 1930, because it was so small and too far away to be seen without the aid of a powerful telescope.

Because Pluto does not have enough ‘gravitational influence’ to clear its neighbouring orbit it was decided it did not make the cut.

Instead it was rebranded as a ‘dwarf planet’.

Full Article From BBC

SUPER FOOD

SUPER FOOD

Google ‘diet’ and you’ll get nearly half-a-billion results in less time than it takes to swallow. There are diets that tell you to count calories and diets that tell you to focus on food groups. There are diets that tell you to avoid carbs and diets that tell you to carbo-load. There are diets that tell you to eat a handful of blueberries, or a handful of walnuts, or that you should load all your foods with lemon juice, cinnamon or turmeric. Eggs, potatoes and full-fat dairy are out, then they’re back in.

“The super foods fad is yet another sign of the never-ending search for a magic bullet to solve problems,” she says. “Such thinking, which ignores the multi-factorial nature of diet-related health problems, is probably the greatest myth.”

“Then it achieves a health halo and it sells, and you see this with heavily sweetened breakfast cereals,” Stanton says. “I get concerned when people find that something’s good then they stick it in their Coco Pops.” Stanton points out that she is yet to find an Australian deficient in the sort of nutrients that go into fortified cereals.

Despite Stanton's objection to painting those so-called 'superfoods' as a nutritional panacea, she supports efforts to find new, environmentally sustainable sources of food as part of a balanced diet. Marine ecologist Pia Winberg from Venus Shell Systems offered one option at the BBC Future World-Changing Ideas Summit, when she presented a convincing argument that seaweed could become a major component of food in the future.

Full Article From BBC

Will farming be fully automated in the future

Will farming be fully automated in the future

The World Bank says we'll need to produce 50% more food by 2050 if the global population continues to rise at its current pace.

But the effects of climate change could see crop yields falling by more than a quarter.

So autonomous tractors, ground-based sensors, flying drones and enclosed hydroponic farms could all help farmers produce more food, more sustainably at lower cost.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs is far more bullish, predicting a $240bn market over the next five years. Manufacturers including John Deere, CNH Industrial and AGCO are all fighting to corner the market in driverless tractors.

The Hands Free Hectare project will use flying drones and automated tractors in the coming year to grow and harvest a cereal crop.

The latest generation of this trundling four-wheeled robot can make a cut every five seconds. It has six cameras - some with infrared sensors - and two arms, and is controlled by a tablet computer inside.

The machine learns as it goes and can trim the grass around each vine. An onboard solar-powered battery gives 10-12 hours of charge, so with a change of battery, it can work day and night.

Back outside, drones are monitoring crop growth rates, spotting disease, and even spraying crops with pesticides and herbicides

From 1950 to 2010, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), agricultural labourers as a percentage of the workforce declined from 81% to 48.2% in developing countries, and from 35% to 4.2% in developed ones.

Full Article From BBC

What If We Live In Matrix Movie World

What If We Live In Matrix Movie World

Several physicists, cosmologists and technologists are now happy to entertain the idea that we are all living inside a gigantic computer simulation, experiencing a Matrix-style virtual world that we mistakenly think is real.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford in the UK has broken down this scenario into three possibilities. As he puts it, either:

1. Intelligent civilisations never get to the stage where they can make such simulations, perhaps because they wipe themselves out first; or
2. They get to that point, but then choose for some reason not to conduct such simulations; or
3. We are overwhelmingly likely to be in such a simulation.

One possible answer invokes the "multiverse". Maybe there is a plethora of universes, all created in Big Bang-type events and all with different laws of physics. By chance, some of them would be fine-tuned for life – and if we were not in such a hospitable universe, we would not ask the fine-tuning question because we would not exist.

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

In the early 1700s, the philosopher George Berkeley argued that the world is merely an illusion. Dismissing the idea, the ebullient English writer Samuel Johnson exclaimed "I refute it thus" – and kicked a stone.

Full Article From BBC

Sceientist Warn Us About Danger From Space

Sceientist Warn Us About  Danger From Space

Tokuhiro Nimura is a researcher at the Japan Spaceguard Association, which was formed to monitor near-Earth objects that might strike the planet. In March 2016, Nimura and his coworkers suggested that the extinctions, global cooling and iridium layer might have been caused by the Solar System passing through a molecular cloud: one of the great clouds of gas and dust in space from which stars form. As dust accumulated in the atmosphere, it would have formed a haze that reflected sunlight and cooled the planet.

The basic idea goes back to a 1975 suggestion by British astronomer William McCrea. He thought that if Earth passed through an interstellar "dust lane" it could cause an ice age. At the time, astronomers Mitchell Begelman and Martin Rees pointed out that such dust might instead affect the way particles streaming from the Sun impinge on the Earth’s atmosphere and expose the planet to high doses of radiation, causing extinctions as well as climate changes.

The event 66 million years ago is just one of several known "mass extinctions", in which many species worldwide seem to have died out suddenly.

The biggest was at the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago, when no less than 96% of all life on Earth seems to have died out. All life today is descended from the surviving 4%, so it is easy to see that evolutionary history would have been very different if this extinction had not happened. When species die off, those that survive get opportunities to expand and diversify that they would not otherwise have had.

Our galaxy is shaped a bit like a plate. As it rotates, the Sun rises and falls in the galactic plane, rather like a merry-go-round horse. These shifts in position could change the amount of cosmic rays that stream through the Solar System and hit Earth.

Cosmic-ray collisions could also change the chemistry of the atmosphere. They might produce electrically-charged particles that affect cloud formation and thus climate, or they could destroy the ozone layer that protects the Earth from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

Stars explode as supernovae all the time; when they do, they can temporarily outshine their entire host galaxies. Many are seen every year in other galaxies, but the most recent one known to have happened in our own galaxy became visible about 140 years ago. Another in our galaxy that appeared in 1572 was so bright, it was visible to the naked eye and was seen by the astronomer Tycho Brahe.

But he adds that, while it is far from clear that our galaxy really has a disk of dark matter, "we know so little about the distribution and make-up of dark matter within the galactic disk and halo that the premise is certainly viable within our present uncertainty."

At this point that might be a rather too-familiar refrain: "interesting idea but it's all speculation". Should we believe any of these notions?


Full Article From BBC

What’s the Longest Humans Can Live?

What’s the Longest Humans Can Live?


“It all tells a very compelling story that there’s some sort of limit,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has made a similar argument for over 25 years.

James W. Vaupel, the director of the Max-Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging, has long rejected the suggestion that humans are approaching a life span limit. He called the new study a travesty.

“It is disheartening how many times the same mistake can be made in science and published in respectable journals,” he said.

A child born in the United States in 1900 had an average life expectancy just short of 50 years. An American child born today can expect to live on average to age 79. Japan’s average life expectancy at birth has risen the most of any country so far, to 83 years.

But when Dr. Vijg and his students looked closely at the data on survival and mortality, they saw something different.

The scientists charted how many people of varying ages were alive in a given year. Then they compared the figures from year to year, in order to calculate how fast the population grew at each age.

The fastest-growing portion of society has been old people, Dr. Vijg found. In France in the 1920s, for example, the fastest-growing group of women was the 85-year-olds.

As average life expectancy lengthened, this peak shifted as well. By the 1990s, the fastest-growing group of Frenchwomen was the 102-year-olds. If that trend had continued, the fastest-growing group today might well be the 110-year-olds.

Full article from NYTimes

 

Global Warming Alters Arctic Food Chain

Global Warming Alters Arctic Food Chain

The Arctic Ocean may seem remote and forbidding, but to birds, whales and other animals, it’s a top-notch dining destination.

“It’s a great place to get food in the summertime, so animals are flying or swimming thousands of miles to get there,” said Kevin R. Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University.

But the menu is changing. Confirming earlier research, scientists reported Wednesday that global warming is altering the ecology of the Arctic Ocean on a huge scale.

Since the mid-2000s, researchers like Dr. Arrigo have been trying to assess the effects of retreating ice on the Arctic ecosystem.

The sun returns to the Arctic each spring and melts some of the ice that formed in winter. Algae in the open water quickly spring to life and start growing.

These algae are the base of the food chain in the Arctic Ocean, grazed by krill and other invertebrates that in turn support bigger fish, mammals and birds.

Dr. Arrigo and his colleagues visited the Arctic in research ships to examine algae in the water and to determine how it affected the water’s color. They then reviewed satellite images of the Arctic Ocean, relying on the color of the water to estimate how much algae was growing — what scientists call the ocean’s productivity.

The sea’s productivity was rapidly increasing, Dr. Arrigo found. Last year he and his colleagues published their latest update, estimating that the productivity of the Arctic rose 30 percent between 1998 and 2012

Full Articles From NYTimes.

 

Real Whale in the Hudson River

Real Whale in the Hudson River

For two years in a row, Dr. Dubroff said on Tuesday, she has spotted a whale swimming outside her living room window. Last year, she didn’t quite believe the sighting was real. But she saw a whale again on Saturday — and in the same spot again on Sunday — and news reports confirmed her hunch: The Hudson River has a resident humpback.

“It was general excitement and shock,” Dr. Dubroff, 39, said, “and how thrilling that a whale can be in the Hudson, based on what we see float by sometimes.”

Chuck Bowman, the president of the Riverhead Foundation, was among those who had helped to monitor the stranded whale while awaiting guidance from NOAA.

“The good thing was 30 years ago you’d see maybe one whale off of Long Island a season,” Mr. Bowman said. “Now you see them all the time due to conservation efforts.”

But, he added, “You get a bigger population and you get a greater chance of things like this happening.”

Full article from NYTimes

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Dog Remembers More Than You Think

Dog Remembers More Than You Think

Once again, science has confirmed the suspicions of dog owners that their beloved pets know more than they are letting on. In this case, it has to do with memory, a favorite subject of researchers who study the mental abilities of other animals.

No one doubts that dogs can be trained to remember commands and names of objects. They also remember people and places. But Claudia Fugazza and her colleagues at the Family Dog Project at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest set out to see whether dogs share a more complex kind of memory.

Jonathon D. Crystal of Indiana University, who studies episodic-like memory in rats and wrote a commentary on the work that will appear in the print edition of Current Biology, said he thought the conclusions were strong, although it was very difficult to ensure that a memory was truly incidental in a training situation. He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.

What does this mean for the dog owner? Dogs probably remember what their owners do even when training isn’t going on. And, she said, “It tells us that the dog’s memory is more similar to ours than we expected.”

Full article from NYTimes

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Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate

Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate

Real estate agents looking to sell coastal properties usually focus on one thing: how close the home is to the water’s edge. But buyers are increasingly asking instead how far back it is from the waterline. How many feet above sea level? Is it fortified against storm surges? Does it have emergency power and sump pumps?

Rising sea levels are changing the way people think about waterfront real estate. Though demand remains strong and developers continue to build near the water in many coastal cities, homeowners across the nation are slowly growing wary of buying property in areas most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions, the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground.

Full article from NYTimes

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A.T.M. MACHINE Is Full of Microbes

Whenever you withdraw money from an automated teller machine, the A.T.M. deposits microbes onto you.

That shouldn’t be surprising because germs and bacteria are everywhere: on doorknobs, subway seats, staircases, your cat, your dog, your face. You can’t avoid them, especially when you’re punching in your pin.

Researchers in New York City swabbed the keypads of 66 A.T.M.s at banks, bodegas and other places across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. They found that A.T.M.s are mostly covered in microbes from human skin, similar to the ones found in bathrooms, on pillowcases and on televisions.

“New Yorkers love their food, it’s not that surprising,” said Jane Carlton, an urban microbiology ecologist from New York University and an author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal mSphere. She added that the microbes they found were pretty consistent across boroughs and stressed that the majority of the microbes they found were harmless. Gross, perhaps, but mostly harmless.

Full article from NYTimes

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Mystery Behind the Deadly ‘Tsunami of Molasses’

Mystery Behind the Deadly ‘Tsunami of Molasses’

It was January. The place was Boston. And when 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst from a gigantic holding tank in the city’s North End, 21 people were killed and about 150 more were left injured. The wave of syrup — some reports said it was up to 40 feet tall — rushed through the waterfront, destroying buildings, overturning vehicles and pushing a firehouse off its foundation.

For nearly 100 years, no one really knew why the spill was so deadly.

“The historical record says that the initial wave of molasses moved at 35 miles per hour,” Ms. Sharp said, “which sounds outrageously fast.”

“At the time people thought there must have been an explosion in the tank, initially, to cause the molasses to move that fast,” she added. But after the team ran the experiments, she said, it discovered that the molasses could, indeed, move at that speed.

“It’s an interesting result,” Ms. Sharp said, “and it’s something that wasn’t possible back then. Nobody had worked out those actual equations until decades after the accident.”

If the tank had burst in warmer weather, it would have “flowed farther, but also thinner,” Mr. Rubinstein said.

In the winter, however, after the initial burst — which lasted between 30 seconds and a few minutes, Ms. Sharp said — the cooler temperature of the outside air raised the viscosity of the molasses, essentially trapping people who had not been able to escape the wave.

About half the people who were killed “died basically because they were stuck,” Mr. Rubinstein said.

Mr. Rubinstein and Ms. Sharp said they would like to eventually build an entire course around the disaster. Students could apply what they learn in other classes to understanding not just why the molasses behaved the way it did, but also what other forces shaped the events of that day in 1919.

Full article from NYTimes

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Space’s Trash Collector

Space’s Trash Collector

Only inside do visitors see signs that its founder, Mitsunobu Okada, aspires to be more than an ordinary garbageman. Schoolroom pictures of the planets decorate the door to the meeting room. Satellite mock-ups occupy a corner. Mr. Okada greets guests in a dark blue T-shirt emblazoned with his company’s slogan: Space Sweepers.

Mr. Okada is an entrepreneur with a vision of creating the first trash collection company dedicated to cleaning up some of humanity’s hardest-to-reach rubbish: the spent rocket stages, inert satellites and other debris that have been collecting above Earth since Sputnik ushered in the space age. He launched Astroscale three years ago in the belief that national space agencies were dragging their feet in facing the problem, which could be tackled more quickly by a small private company motivated by profit.

“Let’s face it, waste management isn’t sexy enough for a space agency to convince taxpayers to allocate money,” said Mr. Okada, 43, who put Astroscale’s headquarters in start-up-friendly Singapore but is building its spacecraft in his native Japan, where he found more engineers. “My breakthrough is figuring out how to make this into a business.”

“In the U.S., aerospace engineers are more interested in working on missions to Mars, not waste management,” Mr. Okada said. “Japan doesn’t have so many interesting space missions, so engineers were excited by my idea.”

He also said that Astroscale would start by contracting with companies that will operate big satellite networks to remove their own malfunctioning satellites. He said that if a company has a thousand satellites, several are bound to fail. Astroscale will remove these, allowing the company to fill the gap in its network by replacing the failed unit with a functioning satellite.

“Our first targets won’t be random debris, but our clients’ own satellites,” he said. “We can build up to removing debris as we perfect our technology.”

He said this approach would also get around a hurdle in international law to the removal of space debris — the required permission of the owner. Under a 1967 treaty, man-made objects in space belong to the countries that launched them, and cannot be touched without approval.

Mr. Okada said finding ways around these various barriers was more than a business proposition; it would also be the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

“I see a business opportunity in solving a problem that nobody knows how to solve,” Mr. Okada said. “But my enthusiasm is because I am going back to my teenage passion: space.”

Full article from NYTimes

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Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change

Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change

Alaska — In the dream, a storm came and Betsy Bekoalok watched the river rise on one side of the village and the ocean on the other, the water swallowing up the brightly colored houses, the fishing boats and the four-wheelers, the school and the clinic.

She dived into the floodwaters, frantically searching for her son. Bodies drifted past her in the half-darkness. When she finally found the boy, he, too, was lifeless.

“I picked him up and brought him back from the ocean’s bottom,” Ms. Bekoalok remembered.

Laid out on a narrow spit of sand between the Tagoomenik River and the Bering Sea, the village of 250 or so people is facing an imminent threat from increased flooding and erosion, signs of a changing climate.

With its proximity to the Arctic, Alaska is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the United States and the state is heading for the warmest year on record. The government has identified at least 31 Alaskan towns and cities at imminent risk of destruction, with Shaktoolik ranking among the top four. Some villages, climate change experts predict, will be uninhabitable by 2050, their residents joining a flow of climate refugees around the globe, in Bolivia, China, Niger and other countries.

At least two villages farther up the western coast, Shishmaref and Kivalina, have voted to relocate when and if they can find a suitable site and the money to do so. A third, Newtok, in the soggy Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta farther south, has taken the first steps toward a move.

In Shaktoolik, as in other villages around the state, residents say winter is arriving later than before and rushing prematurely into spring, a shift scientists tie to climate change. With rising ocean temperatures, the offshore ice and slush that normally buffer the village from storm surges and powerful ocean waves are decreasing. Last winter, for the first time elders here can remember, there was no offshore ice at all.

The state of Alaska — which in the past provided some funds to Newtok, allowing the Y’upik community to begin its move across the river to safety — is in a fiscal crisis, its economic health tied to oil revenues. And a federal lawsuit filed by one village against oil and coal companies, seeking relocation money as compensation for their air pollution, went nowhere.

Full article from NYTimes

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typography t-shirt

 

there will be eartquake hit california and it was HUGE

there will be eartquake hit california and it was HUGE

For years, scientists believed the mighty San Andreas—the 800-mile-long fault running the length of California where the Pacific and North American plates meet—could only rupture in isolated sections.

But a recent study by federal, state and academic researchers showed that much of the fault could unzip all at once, unleashing a rare, singular catastrophe. Now, insurers have used that research to come up with a new analysis of the damage that could be caused by statewide break of the San Andreas.

Researchers say a statewide quake above 8.0 would likely hit the Golden State once at least every 2,500 years. “We are talking about very rare earthquakes here,” said Maiclaire Bolton, a seismologist and senior product manager for CoreLogic.


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102M dead trees big impact to california

102M dead trees big impact to california

In drought-stricken California, 36 million trees have died since May, the Los Angeles Times reports. They're part of 62 million trees that have died in the state since 2016 and 102 million trees that have died over the past six years.

At the same time, rising temperatures in California are increasing the amount of water trees need. "This staggering and growing number of tree deaths should be concerning for everyone," a California climate and conservation manager tells the Times.

One dangerous side effect: Having millions of dead, dry trees lying around increases the dangers posed by wildfires. Fires can start easier, spread more quickly, and burn hotter, damaging the soil.

full article from foxnews

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Tesla Solar Roof will cost less to install than regular roof

Tesla Solar Roof  will cost less to install than regular roof 

illustration not tesla solar roof

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his company's new solar roof will actually cost less for homeowners to install than a regular roof, Bloomberg reports. “So the basic proposition will be: Would you like a roof that looks better than a normal roof, lasts twice as long, costs less and—by the way—generates electricity?” Musk says. “Why would you get anything else?” According to Business Insider, Musk made the surprising pronouncement after 85% of Tesla shareholders approved a $2 billion merger with solar-energy specialist SolarCity on Thursday. Musk wants solar roofs to be "as appealing as electric cars," Fortune reports. 

When Musk says they'll cost less than a traditional roof, he's talking about the fancy terra cotta and slate roofs on which they were modeled, not asphalt roofs, which can be 20 times cheaper. Still, Bloomberg states the Tesla solar roof "could be a real turning point in the evolution of solar power."

Full article from Foxnews 

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mars signal of past life

mars signal of past life

To help make their case, the researchers have contrasted Spirit's study of "Home Plate" a plateau of layered rocks that the robot explored during the early part of its third year on Mars with features found within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio.

Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer of the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration — shows that the nodular and digitate silica structures at El Tatio that most closely resemble those on Mars include complex sedimentary structures produced by a combination of biotic and abiotic processes.

"Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures," the researchers wrote in the study.

Previously, a NASA science team defined a potential biosignature as "an object, substance and/or pattern that might have a biological origin and thus compels investigators to gather more data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or absence of life."

"Because we can neither prove nor disprove a biological origin for the microstromatolite-like digitate silica structures at Home Plate, they constitute a potential biosignature according to this definition," Ruff and Farmer wrote.

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mars underground ice is bigger than New Mexico

mars underground ice is bigger than New Mexico

A giant deposit of buried ice on Mars contains about as much water as Lake Superior does here on Earth, a new study reports.

The ice layer, which spans a greater area than the state of New Mexico, lies in Mars' mid-northern latitudes and is covered by just 3 feet to 33 feet of soil. It therefore represents a vast possible resource for future astronauts exploring the Red Planet, study team members said.

Data gathered by SHARAD during 600 MRO passes over Utopia Planitia revealed the deposit between 39 and 49 degrees north latitude. The layer ranges in thickness from 260 feet to 560 feet and is made up of 50 to 85 percent water ice, researchers said. (The remainder is dirt and rock.)

That puts the deposit's water volume roughly on a par with that of Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, which holds 2,900 cubic miles of the wet stuff.

"We don't understand fully why ice has built up in some areas of the Martian surface and not in others," Levy added. "Sampling and using this ice with a future mission could help keep astronauts alive, while also helping them unlock the secrets of Martian ice ages."


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bats are the fastest fliers

bats are the fastest fliers

The new record-holder for fastest flying animal isn’t a bat out of hell. It’s a bat from Brazil, a new study claims. Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) can reach ground speeds of 160 kilometers per hour.

Until now, common swifts held the record of fastest fliers, soaring at up to 112 km/hr, often with help from wind and gravity. The Brazilian bats, however, reached their higher speeds with no assist. Since bat flight is rarely studied, there may be even faster bats out there, the researchers speculate.

Full article from sciencenews

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your blood risks your brain

your blood risks your brain

Irina Conboy of the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues devised a new way to mingle blood in two mice that didn’t involve stitching their bodies together, as in previous experiments. Instead, researchers used a microfluidic device to shuttle blood, a process that precisely controlled the timing and amount of blood transferred between the mice. The method, reported online November 22 in Nature Communications, allows more precise tests of blood’s influence on aging, the researchers believe.

But young blood didn’t seem to help one measure of brain health. After transfusions of young blood, old mice still had lower numbers of newborn nerve cells in the hippocampus, a brain structure important for learning and memory. What’s more, old blood reduced the number of newborn nerve cells in young mice. This damage happened quickly, after just one blood exchange, the researchers found. The results suggest that old blood contains components that harm brain cells, an insight that makes scientists eager to identify those factors.

 

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first glassmaking may have begun in Egypt

first glassmaking may have begun in Egypt

 

Arguments that glass production originated in Mesopotamia largely rest on artifacts recovered nearly a century ago at Nuzi, a site in what’s now Iraq. Glass finds there included colored beads, vessels and pendants.

Comparably old Egyptian glass items display an array of colors, including red, green, yellow, opaque blue and translucent blue. Some Egyptian glass features patterns of wavy, colored lines. Nuzi items from Mesopotamian times show a poorer grasp of glassmaking, Eremin said. Those remains consist mainly of beads, a majority of which are colored translucent blue. Wavy, colored lines on some beads are crudely formed and arranged.

Further study of ancient glass objects from other sites is needed to resolve the question of whether glassmaking originated in Egypt or the Near East, she said.

Full article from sciencenews

 

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how bacteria help carnivorous plants

how bacteria help carnivorous plants

 

The carnivorous pitcher plant Darlingtonia californica releases water into the tall vases of its leaves, creating deathtraps where insect prey drown. Water in a pitcher leaf starts clear. But after about a week, thanks to bacteria, it turns “murky brown to a dark red and smells horrible,” says David Armitage of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Now, he’s found that those bacteria can help plants keep insects trapped. Microbial residents reduce the surface tension of water enough for ants and other small insects to slip immediately into the pool instead of perching lightly on the surface, he reports November 23 in Biology Letters.

Bacterial populations in a pitcher leaf are akin to those in a mammal gut or bovine rumen, Armitage’s preliminary analysis finds. The microbes can help digest the prey as well as catch it, he says.

 

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when your kid tells a lie

While reporting a story on adult lying, I had the pleasure of talking with developmental psychologist Victoria Talwar of McGill University, who studies lying in children. I told her about an episode last week, in which I watched my older daughter swat my younger one. Instead of simply accepting reality and scolding her, my reaction was to question it further. “Did you just hit your sister?” After a pause, the guilty one offered a slightly confused “no.”

Lying, it turns out, is actually a sign of something good happening in the developing brain. Dishonesty requires some mental heavy lifting, like figuring out what another person knows and how to use that information to your advantage. Many kids start experimenting with stretching the truth between ages 3 and 4. “In a way, it’s almost like they’re exercising a new ability,” Talwar says. “ And part of that is, ‘Mommy doesn’t know what I just did.’”

Another strategy to minimize lies, as simple as it sounds, is to ask your kid to tell you the truth. Sweet little children, bless their hearts, just might comply, as a study from Talwar and colleagues suggests.

And remember, if you want your kid to value honesty, you should check yourself. One study found that children were more likely to lie after having been lied to. And lest you think you can skirt under their underdeveloped lie radars, consider a recent study. Children ages 6 to 11 were actually not terrible at detecting white lies. When watching a video of an adult or child saying that they thought a hunk of used, dingy soap was a good gift, or that a bad drawing of a person was actually good, children were about as good as adults in spotting fibs.

Full article from sciencenews
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