Key concepts Biology Senses Perception The brain Introduction Have you ever tried adding green food coloring to your milk? Or blue coloring to the butter you spread on your bread? You might not have tried this, but for years scientists have been studying the effect of color and food appearance on how we perceive food tastes. Believe it or not our eyes are an important part of tasting and perceiving food!...
The day could soon come when patients could be taking their heart medication as a sprinkling of seeds on cereal or treating cancer with a daily cup of herbal tea. This is not woo being peddled by an alternative medicine salesman—it is the aim of a pair of biochemists who want to provide the next generation of drugs, for everything from HIV to chronic pain, to the world’s poor by producing them in fields using genetically modified (GM) plants instead of in factories....
By Makini Brice and Anastasia Moloney LES CAYES, Haiti, Oct 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - H ealth officials in Haiti on Thursday said they were preparing for a likely surge in cholera cases in the wake of Hurricane Matthew which severely damaged water supplies and sanitation systems in the Caribbean nation. The fiercest Caribbean storm in nearly a decade has killed more than 300 people, most of them in hardest-hit Haiti where rescue workers were struggling to reach remote areas due to flooded roads, collapsed bridges and power outages....
Graphene has been a hot topic in physics and materials science since its discovery five years ago. The sheets of carbon, just an atom thick, have a host of intriguing properties, including transparency, strength and a structure that lets electrons zip through almost unimpeded. Graphene’s characteristics and near two-dimensionality recommend it for use in next-generation displays, electronics or structural composites, but like many materials du jour, it has yet to find applications on a significant scale....
All dog owners who have had to clean up after their beloved pooches know that people aren’t the only ones who experience gastrointestinal disorders. Many animals, including man’s best friend, also suffer from both short-lived and chronic digestive woes. As a result, some veterinarians have begun prescribing supplements containing friendly bacteria, or “probiotics,” to ease related symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, gas and bloating. But some animal experts say there is little solid evidence that the supplements are effective....
Visual perception begins with our retinas locating the edges of objects in the world. Downstream neural mechanisms analyze those borders and use that information to fill in the insides of objects, constructing our perception of surfaces. What happens when those borders—the fundamental fabric of our visual reality—are tweaked? Our internal representation of objects fails, and our brain’s ability to accurately represent reality no longer functions. Seemingly small mistakes lead to the very distorted perceptions of an illusory world....
A new study finds that a pair of chemical building blocks similar to those in genetic material was present in a meteorite before it fell to Earth in the 1960s. Researchers say the finding makes it slightly more plausible that meteorite bombardments may have seeded ancient Earth with life’s raw materials, potentially paving the way for life itself. Part of the scientific mystery of how life emerged is the origin of chemical building blocks: Were they created by chemical reactions on Earth or did they, perhaps, hitch rides on meteorites that may have germinated our and other planets in our solar system with the same molecules?...
The question of whether we can be reinfected with COVID-19 has been resolved. In August, genome sequencing confirmed that a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong had indeed been infected by the same virus a second time. So too was the case for a 25-year-old man in the United States, though the originating case study has yet to be peer reviewed. This strengthens earlier reports that have surfaced periodically throughout the pandemic....
Dear EarthTalk: I own a small business and would like to do what I can to minimize its impact on the environment. Can you help me?— Jacob Levinson, New York City There are many ways to green up any business, large or small—and an added benefit might just be saving money. Just like individuals, businesses can measure their carbon footprints to get a sense of where they are starting from and to get some initial ideas of areas to focus on to reduce greenhouse gas emissions....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The title of this article might trigger self-satisfied smiles among first-borns, and some concerns among the rest of us. Many studies show children born earlier in the family enjoy better wages and more education, but until now we didn’t really know why. Our recently published findings are the first to suggest advantages of first born siblings start very early in life—around zero to three years old!...
Global economic development, in combination with climate change, is expected to result in over a billion new consumers installing air-conditioning systems in their homes and businesses in the coming decades. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has predicted that by 2050 energy demand for indoor cooling will be 300 percent higher than present-day levels, making cooling by far the largest use of electricity in the global buildings sector. These estimates were made before the COVID-19 pandemic, however....
The bountiful fields of the U.S. are awash in atrazine. Some 36 million kilograms of the odorless, white powder are applied on farms to control grassy weeds. Some 225,000 kilograms of the herbicide fall with the rain each year, sometimes up to 1,000 kilometers from the source. All that atrazine may be having another effect: turning male frogs female. As described in the March 1 Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, biologist Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues exposed 40 African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) to 2....
The U.S. experienced 22 disasters last year that each caused at least $1 billion in damage, shattering a previous record and reflecting the increasing cost of climate change, according to NOAA. The billion-dollar disasters of 2020 were led by Hurricane Laura, a Category 4 storm that caused $19 billion in damage and 42 deaths when it slammed the Louisiana coast in August. The list of disasters is composed almost exclusively of hurricanes, storms and tornadoes....
Natural compounds have proven to be a treasure trove of medicinal properties. For example, the bark of the Pacific yew tree yielded a compound that has helped battle some forms of cancer. Such finds have led to a new industry–bioprospecting–and such prospectors have fanned out across the globe in search of nature’s remedies. Now a compound isolated from coral collected off the coast of Okinawa has shown the ability to slow down and possibly prevent virus replication and it may hold promise as a cancer treatment....
Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion....
The best way to get students interested in scientific studies is to give them hands-on experiences that get them excited about the subject matter. In chemistry courses, teachers accomplish that with test tubes and mysterious liquids. In a course I taught recently at the University of California, San Diego, on relationship science, I piqued my students’ interest with exercises on, well, love. To begin, I invited eight students who did not know each other to come to the front of the auditorium, where I paired them up randomly....
Now that the United Nations climate talks have wrapped up in Copenhagen, nations agreeing to the accord drafted there are now obliged to keep their promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Wind power is one of the key sources of renewable energy expected to play an important role in helping to cut emissions and wean society from its dependence on fossil fuels, which means wind-power companies must be prepared to quickly fix mechanical problems that threaten to slow down renewable energy production....
When salt-rich water leaks out of sea ice, it sinks into the sea and can occasionally create an eerie finger of ice called a brinicle. New research explains how these strange fingers of ice form and how the salty water within sea ice could have been a prime environment in which life may have evolved. The study, published in the American Chemical Society’s journal Langmuir, suggests that brinicles form in the same way as hydrothermal vents, except in reverse....
In 2008 Matthew Allender, a wildlife veterinarian affiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, noticed something wrong with some of the rattlesnakes he’d been studying as part of a population-monitoring program near Carlyle, Ill. His team had found three eastern massasauga rattlesnakes (Sistrurus catenatus catenatus) with severe facial swelling and disfiguration. Allender brought them back to his lab for observation. The lesions ulcerated and progressed beneath the skin. When the snakes died just three weeks later the disease had deformed their mouths, nasal passages and fangs beyond recognition....
Peering through a spotting scope in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, conservation ecologist Joel Berger and his doctoral student Forest Hayes saw something strange. On a barren ridge a mile away, a bunch of mountain goats and bighorn sheep were loitering around “these wet little muddy spots,” Berger recalls. “It’s very unusual to see them together like that.” The two researchers had no idea what the animals were doing, and their perplexity increased as they watched a male goat approach a group of sheep....
