63521141
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have developed a new way to identify a chemical sample more than four football fields away, simply by shining a laser on it. The advance could one day provide a powerful tool for the military to detect explosives from a distance and even for astronomers to probe alien worlds for life.
63519211
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Musicians playing a duet don’t just make beautiful music—they make beautiful math. A new study finds that as two players mesh, tiny hiccups in their rhythms follow repeating patterns. The study has implications for “humanizing” computer-generated music and helps reveal the complex mathematics underlying the common ways in which we interact.
63518973
submission
sciencehabit writes:
They may look like Play-Doh, but these colorful, spongy rings of goo are alive and may one day be able to learn. The rings are engineered to mimic the structure and function of the six layers of human cortical brain tissue. Scientists coaxed neurons to grow around stiff, porous matrices made of silk proteins immersed in collagen gel. Then, they colored the layers with food dye and pieced them together like a jigsaw puzzle. By tweaking the size and orientation of matrix pores, researchers attempted to emulate variations of cellular structure and function in a real cortex. The rings live longer than other models; researchers hope to keep the neuronal sponge alive for at least 6 months. Already, researchers are using them to study how neural networks respond to drugs and heal after various insults, such as disease or a traumatic injury.
63495853
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In 2010, a powerful magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of central Chile, rocking much of the country and producing tremor as far away as Argentina and Peru. But a new study suggests its effects were felt even farther away—in Antarctica. In the wake of the Maule temblor, the scientists found, several seismic stations on the frozen continent registered “icequakes,” probably due to fracturing of the ice as the planet’s crust shook.
63495841
submission
sciencehabit writes:
A best-seller by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade about recent human evolution and its potential effects on human cultures has drawn critical reviews since its spring publication. Now, nearly 140 senior human population geneticists around the world, many of whose work was cited in the book, have signed a letter to The New York Times Book Review stating that Wade has misinterpreted their work. The letter criticizes “Wade’s misappropriation of research from our field to support arguments about differences among human societies,” and is slated to appear in the 10 August issue of the Book Review.
63424595
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Researchers tracked the sleep patterns of 85 crew members aboard the International Space Station and space shuttle and found that despite an official flight schedule mandating 8.5 hours of sleep per night, they rarely got more than five. In fact, getting a full night’s rest was so difficult that three-quarters of shuttle mission crew members used sleep medication, and sometimes entire teams were sedated on the same night. Given that sleep deprivation contributes to up to 80% of aviation accidents, it’s important to better understand why sleep is so difficult in space, the authors say.
63417529
submission
sciencehabit writes:
The early signs of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)—a rare, incurable brain disorder caused by infectious, misshapen proteins called prions—are difficult to interpret. At first, people may simply feel depressed and can undergo personality changes or bouts of psychosis. By the time memory failure, blindness, and coma set in, typically within a year of infection, death is usually imminent. Now, researchers report that a simple nasal swab may help physicians detect the disease far more accurately and earlier than current methods.
63417511
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Even when the sea looks clean, its surface can be flecked with tiny fragments of paint and fiberglass. That’s the finding from a study that looked for plastic pollution in the uppermost millimeter of ocean. The microscopic fragments come from the decks and hulls of boats, and they could pose a threat to tiny creatures called zooplankton, which are an important part of the marine food web.
63417481
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Using origami-inspired computing, researchers have built a crawling robot that assembles itself in 4 minutes. The team made a five-layer composite out of paper, a flexible circuit board, and shape-memory polymers that contract when heated to 100C. Heat generated locally by the embedded circuits triggers hinges in the composite to fold, while mechanical features in the composite determine how far and in what direction each hinge bends. The precise folding pattern is generated by origami design software and programmed into the robot’s microcontroller. Once the machine is assembled, a motor interacts with linkage structures in its legs to drive it crawling and turning without human intervention. The researchers hope this early prototype will eventually lead to cheap, quick, and customized robot manufacture. One possibility: mass deploying the flat robots into collapsed buildings to navigate small spaces in search-and-rescue missions.
63391389
submission
sciencehabit writes:
seaside town of Minamata, Japan, and caused mental retardation in newborns. Only later did the villagers learn that the fish they ate had been contaminated with toxic mercury dumped by a local chemical plant. Now, new research suggests human activities since the Industrial Revolution have tripled the amount of mercury in shallow parts of the ocean, posing a threat to human health worldwide.
63370817
submission
sciencehabit writes:
You can credit your existence to tiny wormlike creatures that lived 500 million years ago, a new study suggests. By tunneling through the sea floor, scientists say, these creatures kept oxygen concentrations at just the right level to allow animals and other complex life to evolve. The finding may help answer an enduring mystery of Earth’s past.
The idea is that as they dug and wiggled, these early multicellular creatures—some were likely worms as long as 40 cm—exposed new layers of seafloor sediment to the ocean’s water. Each new batch of sediment that settles onto the sea floor contains bacteria; as those bacteria were exposed to the oxygen in the water, they began storing a chemical called phosphate in their cells. So as the creatures churned up more sediment layers, more phosphate built up in ocean sediments and less was found in seawater. Because algae and other photosynthetic ocean life require phosphate to grow, removing phosphate from seawater reduced their growth. Less photosynthesis, in turn, meant less oxygen released into the ocean. In this way, the system formed a negative feedback loop that automatically slowed the rise in oxygen levels as the levels increased.
63363231
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Yoshiki Sasai, a noted stem cell scientist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, who co-authored two controversial and later retracted papers that reported a simple way of reprogramming mature cells, was confirmed dead this morning, an apparent suicide. Local media reported he was found hanging from a stairway railing in the RIKEN complex in Kobe. Sasai was rushed to a nearby hospital but efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. He reportedly left a suicide note, but it has not been made public.
63363215
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Every fall, grizzly bears pack on the pounds in preparation for their winter hibernation. In humans, such extreme weight gain would likely lead to diabetes or other metabolic diseases, but the bears manage to stay healthy year after year. Their ability to remain diabetes-free, researchers have now discovered, can be chalked up to the shutting down of a protein found in fat cells. The discovery could lead to new diabetes drugs that turn off the same pathway in humans.
63077335
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Pregnant women who smoke don’t just harm the health of their baby—they may actually impair their child’s DNA, according to new research. A genetic analysis shows that the children of mothers who smoke harbor far more chemical modifications of their genome--known as epigenetic changes--than kids of non-smoking mothers. Many of these are on genes tied to addiction and fetal development. The finding may explain why the children of smokers continue to suffer health complications later in life.
63017469
submission
sciencehabit writes:
A flock of starlings flies as one, a spectacular display in which each bird flits about as if in a well-choreographed dance. Everyone seems to know exactly when and where to turn. Now, for the first time, researchers have measured how that knowledge moves through the flock—a behavior that mirrors certain quantum phenomena of liquid helium. Some of the more interesting findings: Tracking data showed that the message for a flock to turn started from a handful of birds and swept through the flock at a constant speed between 20 and 40 meters per second. That means that for a group of 400 birds, it takes just a little more than a half-second for the whole flock to turn.
