66697393
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sciencehabit writes:
Football has always been a violent sport. In the 1950s, when hard, polycarbonate shells replaced leather football helmets, the number of game-related fatalities plummeted. But hundreds of thousands of football-related concussions still occur every year. Now, one researcher is trying to harness the repulsive forces of magnets to reduce the impact of head-to-head collisions before they occur. The idea is far from ready for the football field. It’s being tested in the lab, using machines for now. But one helmet expert says the strategy is worth pursuing given the seriousness of the problem.
66697359
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sciencehabit writes:
Dean Hamer finally feels vindicated. More than 20 years ago, in a study that triggered both scientific and cultural controversy, the molecular biologist offered the first direct evidence of a “gay gene,” by identifying a stretch on the X chromosome likely associated with homosexuality. But several subsequent studies called his finding into question. Now the largest independent replication effort so far, looking at 409 pairs of gay brothers, fingers the same region on the X. “When you first find something out of the entire genome, you’re always wondering if it was just by chance,” says Hamer, who asserts that new research “clarifies the matter absolutely.”
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sciencehabit writes:
Every time you share a long kiss with your partner, you transfer 80 million bacteria to his or her mouth. That’s the somewhat icky conclusion of a new study of 21 intimate couples at a zoo in Amsterdam. To estimate just how many bacteria are transferred during make-out sessions, the team asked one of the partners to drink a probiotic yogurt, which is filled with bacteria not commonly found in the mouth. The test revealed that people transfer about 80 million bacteria to each other during a kiss, as the team reports today in Microbiome. That may sound like a lot, but the mouth is home to about a billion bacteria. So perhaps it’s not so icky after all.
66591585
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sciencehabit writes:
Researchers have figured out how to anesthetize octopuses so the animals do not feel pain while being transported and handled during scientific experiments. In a study published online this month in the Journal of Aquatic Animal Health, researchers report immersing 10 specimens of the common octopus in seawater with isoflurane, an anesthetic used in humans. They gradually increased the concentration of the substance from 0.5% to 2%. The investigators found that the animals lost the ability to respond to touch and their color paled, which means that their normal motor coordination of color regulation by the brain was lost, concluding that the animals were indeed anesthetized. The octopuses then recovered from the anesthesia within 40 to 60 minutes of being immersed in fresh seawater without the anesthetic, as they were able to respond to touch again and their color was back to normal. (Video)
66591541
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sciencehabit writes:
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today two major efforts to push supercomputing power well beyond where it is today. DOE will spend $325 million on two extreme-scale computers to be built at national labs in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Livermore, California. The agency will spend another $100 million on FastForward 2, a program designed to improve software and applications that will run on the new machines. Though the specifications for the new machines are still in flux, they’re expected to run at top speeds of between 100 and 300 petaflops. (Each petaflop is equal to 1015 floating-point operations per second.) That’s considered a key milestone toward the goal of creating the first exascale (1018 flops) supercomputer, the next major landmark in high-performance computing.
66584993
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sciencehabit writes:
A cometlike object that originated in the farthest reaches of our solar system is not what it should be. Unlike other objects from this vast field of icy bodies at our solar system’s outer edge, known as the Oort cloud, the body resembles those that formed much closer to the sun. The finding supports the idea that large planets like Jupiter moved around a lot during the chaotic early days of the solar system, flinging asteroids outward as they went. That hypothesis also suggests icy bodies were thrown inward, which could explain how water got to our planet.
66540753
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sciencehabit writes:
If cells could talk, they’d have quite a story to tell: Their life history would include what molecules they’d seen passing by, which signals they’d sent to neighbors, and how they’d grown and changed. Researchers haven’t quite given cells a voice, but they have now furnished them with a memory of sorts—one that’s designed to record bits of their life history over the span of several weeks. The new method uses strands of DNA to store the data in a way that scientists can then read. Eventually, it could turn cells into environmental sensors, enabling them to report on their exposure to particular chemicals, among other applications.
66540747
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sciencehabit writes:
Earth and its planetary neighbors arose in a magnetic field strong enough to sculpt the disk of gas and dust that spawned our solar system and set the stage for a planet capable of developing life. That's the implication of new work that uses a meteorite to deduce the strength of the magnetic field around the young sun. "Only a few meteorites in our entire collection can work for a study like this," says. on scientist. Meteorites come from asteroids, where in most cases the magnetic information is erased by heat and moisture; sometimes meteorite hunters hold magnets up to rocks to test whether they are indeed meteorites, but that also destroys information. "Most meteorites are kind of like eight-track tapes," the researcher says. "This one is like a DVD."
66501429
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sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have made progress towards a band-aid like device that can literally suck bacteria out of wounds. When they placed nanofibers in a petri dish of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium involved in chronic infection, the bugs quickly attached themselves to 500-nanometer-wide fibers, but hardly onto fibers with larger diameters. When the researchers coated the nanofibers with different compounds and tested them on the bacteria Escherichia coli, also responsible for chronic wounds, the bugs formed bridges on fibers coated with allylamine, a colorless organic compound, but stayed away from fibers coated with acrylic acid. The researchers, who plan to test the meshes on composites that resemble human skin, hope that they will eventually lead to smart wound dressings that could prevent infections. Doctors could stick the nano–Band-Aid on a wound and simply peel it off to get rid of the germs.
66492229
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sciencehabit writes:
If you've ever been a victim of "beer tapping," then you'll know how simultaneously annoying and entertaining the party trick can be. Your buddy uses his beer bottle to strike down on the top of yours. A moment later, your beer foams up and flows out of the bottle, leaving you soggy and thirsty. Now, a team of fluid mechanicists has explained how that volcano of suds emerges. The analysis could help explain the odd release of CO2 from lakes and even sound a warning note on plans to pump CO2 from power plants into the ground.
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sciencehabit writes:
Blind from infancy, Daniel Kish learned as a young boy to judge his height while climbing trees by making rapid clicking noises and listening for their echoes off the ground. No one taught him the technique, which is now recognized as a human form of echolocation. Like Kish, a handful of blind echolocators worldwide have taught themselves to use clicks and echoes to navigate their surroundings with impressive ease—Kish can even ride his bike down the street. A study of sighted people newly trained to echolocate now suggests that the secret to Kish’s skill isn’t just supersensitive ears. Instead, the entire body, neck, and head are key to “seeing” with sound—an insight that could assist blind people learning the skill.
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sciencehabit writes:
After a two-and-a-half year ocean journey, radioactive contamination from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan has drifted to within 160 kilometers of the California coast, according to a new study. But the radiation levels are minuscule and do not pose a threat, researchers say. The team found a high of just 8 becquerels of radiation per cubic meter in ocean samples off the coast. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for drinking water allow up to 7400 becquerels per cubic meter.
66438881
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sciencehabit writes:
The magma fueling the volcanoes of Hawaii and Yellowstone National Park pipes up from deep inside the planet. Scientists have struggled to understand why there are hot spots there, so far from the grinding tectonic plate boundaries at which volcanoes normally appear. New research chalks the mystery up to “dark magma”: deep underground pockets of red-hot molten rock that siphon energy from Earth’s core. If the team is right, its work could illuminate a key part of Earth’s geology. These plumes are one of the most important things to understand because the movement of heat powers many processes on the planet. For one, Earth’s magnetic field depends on how the core spins and flows inside the planet. As a result, the way heat flows from the core to the mantle could potentially affect the way Earth’s magnetic field evolves over time.
66401185
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sciencehabit writes:
Place a housecat next to its direct ancestor, the Near Eastern wildcat, and it may take you a minute to spot the difference. They’re about the same size and shape, and, well, they both look like cats. But the wildcat is fierce and feral, whereas the housecat, thanks to nearly 10,000 years of domestication, is tame and adaptable enough to have become the world’s most popular pet. Now scientists have begun to pinpoint the genetic changes that drove this remarkable transformation. The findings, based on the first high-quality sequence of the cat genome, could shed light on how other creatures, even humans, become tame.
66401123
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sciencehabit writes:
Five years ago, Ben Potter made a dramatic discovery: the partially burned remains of a cremated 3-year-old child, left to rest in a hearth at Upward Sun River, one of the oldest settlements in Alaska. But the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, archaeologist never expected what waited underneath the hearth. More recent excavations have yielded two well-preserved burials, of an infant who likely lived for about 12 weeks and a fetus who died shortly before birth. The discovery provides a window into daily life and burial practices at the 11,500-year-old site, and an unprecedented opportunity to analyze the DNA of some of the Americas’ earliest inhabitants.
