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sciencehabit writes:
In 1996, a baby infected with HIV at birth was started on anti-AIDS drugs. But at age 6, against the advice of doctors, her family stopped treatment. Twelve years later, the young French woman is still healthy, with no detectable virus in her blood. Her unusual case, reported today at an international AIDS conference in Vancouver, Canada, may hold clues that might help other HIV-infected people control their infections without antiretroviral drugs and offer insights to AIDS vaccine developers.
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sciencehabit writes:
The Southern Ocean is the cloudiest region on Earth, almost completely blanketed yearround. But the cause might be surprising: tiny marine organisms called phytoplankton, which live in the ocean’s stormy waters. A new study has measured how particles and gases emitted by these creatures enter the atmosphere and become the seeds of clouds. The study represents the first large-scale correlation between biological activity in the Southern Ocean and cloud formation. Establishing that link is an important first step toward understanding a longstanding question in climate modeling: the role of clouds and tiny air particles called aerosols in global climate change.
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sciencehabit writes:
Hollywood has been tackling Artificial Intelligence for decades, from Blade Runner to Ex Machina. But how realistic are these depictions? Science asked a panel of AI experts to weigh in on 10 major AI movies--what they get right, and what they get horribly wrong. It also ranks the movies from least to most realistic.
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sciencehabit writes:
When we see birds winging their way across the sky, we are really looking at living dinosaurs—the only lineage of these mighty beasts that survived mass extinction. Yet before they went extinct, many dinosaurs sprouted wings themselves. Researchers now report finding the largest ever winged dino in China, a sleek, birdlike creature adorned with multiple layers of feathers all over its arms and torso that lived 125 million years ago. It almost certainly could not fly, however—an important confirmation that wings and feathers originally evolved to serve other functions like attracting mates and keeping eggs warm.
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sciencehabit writes:
Zapped with cosmic rays and ultraviolet light, the space between the stars is so hostile that most astronomers once thought it couldn't possibly harbor something as fragile as molecules. Nevertheless, observers have found lots of interstellar molecules, some simple and others complex. Now, as chemists report online today in Nature, buckyballs—complex molecules with 60 carbon atoms arranged into what look like the geodesic domes of R. Buckminster Fuller—do indeed exist in the space between the stars. Because our solar system arose from interstellar material, suggests that some of the carbon now in our bodies was once in the form of buckyballs.
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sciencehabit writes:
Glance at a runner's wrist or smartphone, and you'll likely find a GPS-enabled app or gadget ticking off miles and minutes as she tries to break her personal record. Long before FitBit or MapMyRun, however, the brain evolved its own system for tracking where we go. Now, scientists have discovered a key component of this ancient navigational system in rats: a group of neurons called "speed cells" that alter their firing rates with the pace at which the rodents run. The findings may help explain how the brain maintains a constantly updated map of our surroundings.
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sciencehabit writes:
Using the HARPS spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-meter telescope in Chile, a Brazilian-led team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar system that bears a striking resemblance to our own. The HIP11915 system is centered on a star about 200 light years away from us that has a similar mass, age, temperature, and chemical composition to the sun. Orbiting the star is a gas giant that could be a dead ringer for Jupiter. The findings—published in Astronomy & Astrophysics —suggest that astronomers have hit an important milestone in their search for a planetary system that might harbor life.
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sciencehabit writes:
From the frigid soil of Antarctica, researchers have excavated a prehistoric gem: 50-million-year-old sperm. The fossilized cells, reported today as the oldest animal sperm ever collected, belong to a class of cocoon-producing worms called clitellate annelids, more commonly known as earthworms, leeches, and their relatives. Using scanning electron microscopy, researchers found a “network of interwoven cables,” nestled within the wall of a cocoon, which they later determined was the rare preservation of clitellate annelid spermatozoa.
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sciencehabit writes:
Like fishermen, whale hunters sometimes alter the details of their catch. In the 1960s, Soviet Union (USSR) whalers illegally killed almost 180,000 cetaceans, but reported taking far lower numbers. Now, it seems that Japanese whalers in the North Pacific also manipulated their numbers around this time, according to a new study. The finding, which comes as Japan is readying to hunt whales for what it says are research purposes, raises new concerns about the country’s current endeavors; it also may invalidate several past studies on whale demographics and conservation, the authors say.
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sciencehabit writes:
Today, the New Horizons team released a false color image of Pluto and its moon, Charon, which shows the different materials that blanket each body. The team also offered an intriguing theory for Charon’s reddish polar cap. Although it lacks an atmosphere of its own, Charon orbits through and picks up gas molecules of ices that sublimate from Pluto’s surface and then escape from its atmosphere. Some of these stray molecules may bounce around Charon until they end up at a place cold enough to freeze out and stay put: the pole. The reddish regions on both Charon and Pluto thus offer an intriguing hint of a material connection between the two bodies.
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sciencehabit writes:
The human hand is a marvel of dexterity. It can thread a needle, coax intricate melodies from the keys of a piano, and create lasting works of art with a pen or a paintbrush. Many scientists have assumed that our hands evolved their distinctive proportions over millions of years of recent evolution. But a new study suggests a radically different conclusion: Some aspects of the human hand are actually anatomically primitive—more so even that that of many other apes, including our evolutionary cousin the chimpanzee. The findings have important implications for the origins of human toolmaking, as well as for what the ancestor of both humans and chimps might have looked like.
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sciencehabit writes:
NASA’s New Horizons team says the debate is over: Pluto is the largest of the worlds that patrol the fringe of the solar system. Just a day away from the mission’s closest approach past the dwarf planet, the team on Monday reported refined estimates for its size: 2370 kilometers in diameter, plus or minus 20 kilometers. That makes Pluto larger than Eris, another distant world with a diameter of 2326 kilometers across, plus or minus 12 kilometers. Estimates for Pluto’s size have generally grown over the past decade, whereas Eris’s have remained similar. So Pluto can now claim to be king of the Kuiper belt, the region of thousands of icy worlds that orbit the sun beyond Neptune.
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sciencehabit writes:
It’s no surprise that a sudden summer heat wave can kill the elderly; it’s a serious public health hazard that will only grow as the world warms. But will more old folks survive milder winters, balancing out the loss of life in the summers? A new study suggests not. A rise of 1C in mean summer temperatures killed 1% more people, whereas that same rise in mean winter temperatures saved a mere 0.6%, according to an analysis of death records for nearly 3 million people 65 years and older living in New England from 2000 to 2008. Not only that, but sudden swings in temperature—another phenomenon that could increase along with climate change in some regions—were found to be even worse killers, in either winter or summer, surpassing the toll taken by AIDS.
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sciencehabit writes:
The number of federally regulated animals used in U.S. biomedical research dropped last year to its lowest level since data collection began in 1972, according to new statistics posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Approximately 834,000 rabbits, nonhuman primates, and other regulated animals were used in research last year, compared with more than 1.5 million in the early 1970s. The use of these animals has been on a downward trend since 1993, with a 6% decrease from 2013 to 2014. Since USDA first started posting its numbers on its website in 2008, total use has dropped 17%. The figures do not include most mice, rats, birds, and fish, which make up 98% of lab animals but are not covered under the 1966 Animal Welfare Act (AWA).
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sciencehabit writes:
Beginning in 1982, the ground beneath the Italian port city of Pozzuoli began rising at an alarming rate. Deep beneath the surface, geothermal activity belched carbon dioxide and other gases that pressed up on the overlying rock. At one point the ground swelled 2 meters in 2 years, prompting Italian authorities to evacuate more than 40,000 people from the city over concerns of an eruption. But no eruption occurred. Now, researchers report in Science that they have a good idea why: a layer of strong, yet pliable “caprock” that has kept a lid on eruptions in the area. The material may have served as the inspiration for the creation of Roman concrete, which led to the building of Rome’s architectural wonders such as the Pantheon and the aqueducts that still stand today, the researchers say.
