68022651
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sciencehabit writes:
After the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter began beaming back close-up images of the Red Planet, researchers spotted peculiar features along the slopes of dunes: long, sharply defined grooves that seem to appear and disappear seasonally. They look like trails left behind by tumbling boulders, but rocks never appear in the sunken pits at the trail ends. Researchers initially took these gullies as signs of flowing liquid water, but a new model suggests they’re the result of sand-surfing dry ice that breaks off from the crests of dunes and skids down slopes. This is no ordinary tumble—according to the model, the bases of the chunks are continually sublimating, resulting in a hovercraftlike motion that gouges the dune while propelling the ice down slopes.
68022597
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sciencehabit writes:
A stream of hot protons from the sun is penetrating deep into the thin atmosphere of Mars, researchers have found. The stream, known as the solar wind, is typically deflected by the ionosphere, a layer of ions and electrons forming a shield around Mars. But the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission—a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars—has found that some protons re-emerge within the ionosphere below altitudes of 200 kilometers. The effect could be used to monitor the strength of the solar wind even at altitudes where mission scientists had not expected to have any handle on it. MAVEN, which arrived in Mars’s orbit in September, needs to catalog the ways energy is deposited in the upper atmosphere in order to achieve one of its main mission goals: explaining how Mars lost much of its atmosphere. Billions of years ago, when Mars was warmer and wetter, the planet is presumed to have had a much thicker atmosphere—one that has been eroded steadily by the solar wind, and also during more catastrophic solar storm events, into the dry, cold landscape seen today.
68018985
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sciencehabit writes:
Speak or write in English, and the world will hear you. Speak or write in Tamil or Portuguese, and you may have a harder time getting your message out. Now, a new method for mapping how information flows around the globe identifies the best languages to spread your ideas far and wide. One hint: If you’re considering a second language, try Spanish instead of Chinese.
67855135
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sciencehabit writes:
Few sights at a bar are more deflating than a bottle of beer overflowing with foam. This overfoaming, called gushing, arises when fungi infect the barley grains in beer’s malt base. The microorganisms latch onto barley with surface proteins called hydrophobins. During the brewing process, these hydrophobins can attract carbon dioxide molecules produced by the mashed barley as it ferments, making the beer far too bubbly. Brewers try to tamp down the gushing by adding hops extract, an antifoaming agent that binds to the proteins first. Now, food scientists in Belgium have hit upon a technological solution: magnets. When the team applied a magnetic field to a malt infused with hops extract, the magnets dispersed the antifoaming agent into tinier particles. Those smaller particles were much more effective at binding to more hydrophobins, blocking carbon dioxide and decreasing gushing. During tests in a real brewery, the magnets decreased excess foaming so effectively that brewers needed much lower amounts of hops extract—a potential cost-saving measure. Future studies could explore whether magnetic fields alone could reduce foaming on an industrial scale, the team says.
67855029
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sciencehabit writes:
Air pollution has turned the Taj Mahal's snowy marble dome brown. Scientists didn't know what exact process caused the discoloration: Perhaps it was fog droplets oxidizing the surface or maybe sulfurous gas in the air. Now, computer modeling has shown that these particles absorb ultraviolet light, thus giving the dome a yellow-brown shade. Researchers blame vehicle emissions and burning of biomasses such as dung and trash for causing the pollution.
67854865
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sciencehabit writes:
Federal officials are pulling the plug on an ambitious plan hatched 14 years ago to follow the health of 100,000 U.S. children from before birth to age 21. The National Children’s Study (NCS), which has struggled to get off the ground and has already cost more than $1.2 billion, has too many flaws to be carried out in a tight budget environment, advisers today told National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins. He announced he is dismantling the study immediately.
67825115
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sciencehabit writes:
Mastering fire was one of the most important developments in human prehistory. But it’s also one of the hardest to pin down, with different lines of evidence pointing to different timelines. A new study of artifacts from a cave in Israel suggests that our ancestors began regularly using fire about 350,000 years ago—far enough back to have shaped our culture and behavior but too recent to explain our big brains or our expansion into cold climates.
67825085
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sciencehabit writes:
Every genome is a miracle of packaging. Somehow a human cell crams two meters of DNA into its tiny nucleus, and yet this tangled mess can carry out the complex task of building and maintaining our bodies. Now, the most detailed look yet at this genomic jumble reveals loops of DNA that bring distant parts of chromosomes together, allowing them to act in concert. The work could help researchers pin down the genetic causes of diseases and help clarify how the genome functions.
67780337
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sciencehabit writes:
In times of trouble, multiple studies have shown, more girls are born than boys. No one knows why, but men need not worry about being overrun by women. An analysis of old church records in Finland has revealed that the boys that are born in stressful times survive better than those born during less challenging periods. The work helps explain why women may have evolved a tendency to abort certain males and could lead to a better understanding of miscarriages.
67778577
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sciencehabit writes:
Today’s most popular religions all have one thing in common: a focus on morality. But the gods didn’t always care whether you are a bad person. Researchers have long puzzled over when and why religions moved away from a singular focus on ritual and began to encourage traits such as self-discipline, restraint, and asceticism. Now, a new study proposes that the key to the rise of so-called moralizing religions was, of all things, more wealth.
67769107
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sciencehabit writes:
New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences—and geography—of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited much.
67734171
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sciencehabit writes:
Researchers today unveiled a new solid phase of ice that’s the lowest density version known. Known as ice XVI, the 17th solid phase of ice discovered to date, it has a cagelike structure that can trap other molecules. Such ice cages, known as clathrates, are known to store enormous quantities of methane on the deep ocean floor. The new clathrate, by contrast, is empty, though it didn’t start that way. The cagelike structure originally formed surrounding neon atoms. The neon was then leached out of the clathrate through rings of water molecules. The new form of ice may help researchers better understand clathrates in general, and perhaps ease the flow of oil and gas through pipelines at low temperatures.
67733683
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sciencehabit writes:
More than 5 trillion plastic particles weighing 268,940 tons are estimated to be floating in Earth’s oceans. The new estimate, published today in PLOS ONE, is based on models of floating plastics data gathered from a series of 680 surface net tows and 891 visual surveys from oceans around the world. Currents and winds push the plastics around the world’s oceans, concentrating many of the pieces in five massive midocean gyres in the northern and southern Atlantic, the northern and southern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. Despite having fewer inputs—due to smaller coastal populations—the amount of plastic in the gyres in the Southern Hemisphere was of similar magnitude to that in the north. That hints that ocean currents may redistribute material between the gyres more easily than thought—or that the most abundant particles, called microplastics (less than 4.75 millimeters), disappear from the sea surface more quickly in the Northern Hemisphere, the researchers found.
67733619
submission
sciencehabit writes:
he wandering spider boasts one of the world’s most sensitive vibration detectors: It can pick up the slightest rustling of a leaf from several meters away. Now, scientists have developed similar sensors that can detect simple human speech. The technology could lead to wearable electronics for speech recognition, health monitoring, and more.
67733587
submission
sciencehabit writes:
For an agency regularly called "adrift" without a mission, NASA will at least float through next year with a boatload of money for its science programs. Yesterday Congress reached agreement on a spending deal for fiscal year 2015 that boosts the budget of the agency’s science mission by nearly 2% to $5.24 billion. The big winner within the division is planetary sciences, which received $160 million more than the president’s 2015 request in March. Legislators also maintained support for an infrared telescope mounted on a Boeing 747, a project that the White House had proposed grounding. NASA’s overall budget also rose by 2%, to $18 billion. That’s an increase of $364 million over 2014 levels, and half a billion dollars beyond the agency’s request.
