70491581
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sciencehabit writes:
It may sound radical, but it works: Eating peanuts slashes the chance of a peanut allergy, at least in children at high risk of developing one, a much-anticipated study finds. The results are likely to catapult a long-standing theory—that ingesting potential food allergens is a way to prevent allergies—into mainstream medicine. “This is the study,” says Rebecca Gruchalla, a specialist in allergy immunology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who wasn’t involved in it. The data, she says, are “just mind-blowing.”
70449807
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sciencehabit writes:
Every so often, the fossil record shows, ecological disasters wipe large numbers of species off the face of Earth. These mass extinctions occur roughly every 26 million to 30 million years—about the same interval at which our solar system passes through the plane of the Milky Way. Putting two and two together, some researchers have proposed that clouds of dust and gas in the galactic plane might disrupt the orbits of far-flung comets and trigger planet-smacking collisions. A new study suggests an additional culprit may lie behind those times of woe: dark matter.
70431723
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sciencehabit writes:
For those tired of winter, you’re not alone. Electric cars hate the cold, too. Researchers have conducted the first investigation into how electric vehicles fare in different U.S. climates. The verdict: Electric car buyers in the chilly Midwest and sizzling Southwest get less bang for their buck, where poor energy efficiency and coal power plants unite to turn electric vehicles into bigger polluters.
70429805
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sciencehabit writes:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has approved the first rapid diagnostic test for Ebola. The test needs no electricity, requires just a few drops of blood from a finger prick, and can return results in 15 minutes. That will be a huge help to health workers in remote areas. Current PCR-based tests require a blood sample taken by needle, secure transport of the blood to a properly equipped laboratory with trained staff, and at least several hours to return results. Depending on how far away a suspected case is from a testing laboratory, it can take more than a day to receive test results.
70405097
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sciencehabit writes:
Researchers have increased the size of mouse brains by giving the rodents a piece of human DNA that controls gene activity. The work provides some of the strongest genetic evidence yet for how the human intellect surpassed those of all other apes. The human gene causes cells that are destined to become nerve cells to divide more frequently, thereby providing a larger of pool of cells that become part of the cortex. As a result, the embryos carrying human HARE5 have brains that are 12% larger than the brains of mice carrying the chimp version of the enhancer. The team is currently testing these mice to see if the bigger brains made them any smarter.
70342375
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sciencehabit writes:
Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic. Deep blue regions, such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, have background noise levels lower than 20 decibels — a silence likely as deep as before European colonization, researchers say. That's orders of magnitude quieter than most cities, where noise levels average 50-60 decibels. The National Park Service is using the map to identify places where human-made noise is affecting wildlife.
70316873
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sciencehabit writes:
What do the Sahara desert and the Amazon rainforest have in common? Until recently, archaeologists would have told you they were both inhospitable environments devoid of large-scale human settlements. But they were wrong. Here today at the annual meeting of the AAAS, two researchers explained how remote sensing technology, including satellite imaging and drone flights, is revealing the traces of past civilizations that have been hiding in plain sight.
70316843
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sciencehabit writes:
If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive? All known life on Earth fits a particular mold, but life from other planets break might free from that mold, making it difficult for us to identify. We could even be oblivious to unfamiliar forms of life right under our noses. Scientists are now proposing some new things we should look for when it comes to identifying life in a “shadow biosphere”—an undiscovered group of living things with biochemistry different from what we’re used to.
70316809
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sciencehabit writes:
How can you visualize a 4D object in our 3D world? The answer involves some tricky projections and a 3D printer. One method you could use is to shine a light above the cube, projecting a shadow onto a 2D surface. Now imagine doing this with a hypercube instead of a cube, projecting it into three dimensions, and 3D printing the result.
70316773
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sciencehabit writes:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back, and it’s better than ever. The particle accelerator, located at CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, shut down in February 2013, and since then scientists have been upgrading and repairing it and its particle detectors. The LHC will be back up to full speed this May. What might we find with the new-and-improved machine? Here are five questions scientists hope to answer.
70195951
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sciencehabit writes:
The green-eyed wasp Dinocampus coccinellae turns ladybugs into zombie babysitters. Three weeks after a wasp lays its egg inside the hapless beetle, a wasp larva bursts from her belly and weaves itself a cocoon between her legs. The ladybug doesn’t die, but becomes paralyzed, involuntarily twitching her spotted red carapace to ward off predators until the adult wasp emerges a week later. How D. coccinellae enslaves its host at just the right time had been a mystery, but now researchers believe the insect has an accomplice: a newly identified virus that attacks the beetle’s brain. The findings raise questions about whether other parasites also use viruses as neurological weapons.
70195931
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sciencehabit writes:
Researchers know why popcorn kernels burst open, but they’ve long puzzled over the source of the "pop" sound. When popcorn heats up, the moisture inside turns into steam, building up pressure until the hull splits and fluffy white corn bursts out, often as the kernel sails into the air. The pop, slow-motion videos reveal, happens out of sync with the hull's rupture and the corn's launch into the air, eliminating two possible explanations for the noise. That left one remaining cause: The sound comes from the release of water vapor as the kernel opens.
70170209
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sciencehabit writes:
Sure, solar panels are good for the environment, but they’re so boring. Now scientists have found a way to spice things up. In a study published online this month in Nano Letters, researchers describe making solar cells in several colors that still perform efficiently. The team hopes that the colorful cells could win over people averse to solar panels and boost solar adoption on buildings and other structures.
70159061
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sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have measured positivity bias--a tendency to describe things in positive terms--in the 100,000 most frequently used words from 10 different languages, including English, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. Every word was scored for its emotional resonance by 50 different native speakers. Graphs of the data show that Spanish has the most positive words, while Chinese has the least. What remains to be seen is whether using a different language can actually make you happier.
70152675
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In a 2012 episode of the TV series Homeland, Vice President William Walden is assassinated by a terrorist who hacks into his Internet-enabled heart pacemaker and accelerates his heartbeat until he has a heart attack. A flight of fancy? Not everyone thinks so. Internet security experts have been warning for years that such devices are open to both data theft and remote control by a hacker. Now manufacturers are starting to wake up to the issue and are employing security experts to tighten up their systems.