Posts

Fluorescence detection of poison oak oil: Tens of millions of Americans suffer every year after close encounters with urushiol, the oily allergen in poison oak and poison ivy. The barest brush of urushiol-tainted foliage, clothing or fur against the skin is often all that is needed to set off a severe allergic reaction, and by the time itching sets in, it is too late to avoid a rash. After experiencing a particularly nasty run-in with poison oak, Rebecca Braslau of the University of California, Santa Cruz, decided to fight back—with science....

TOMSK, RUSSIA—Prisoners in western Siberia who contract tuberculosis (TB) get sent to a forbidding complex in the heart of this provincial city. Armed guards with dogs patrol the nearby streets. Barbed wire covers the top of the outer walls. Iron bars clang shut when anyone enters. TB can keep you out of a remote Siberian prison camp, but it doesn’t keep you out of jail. And a decade ago, passing through this prison hospital’s portals also posed a significant risk of premature death....

This presents a thorny question for the companies making them, particularly if they claim to take user privacy seriously. How does one create smart virtual assistants that understand individual user preferences, without snooping on users’ activities and putting their personal data at risk? “The first line of defense is anonymization and encryption of the data,” says Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “Anonymization so that it’s not directly linked to you in an obvious way, and encryption so that an outside party can’t get access to that [information]....

Japanese neurosurgeons have implanted ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells into the brain of a patient with Parkinson’s disease for the first time. The condition is only the second for which a therapy has been trialled using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which are developed by reprogramming the cells of body tissues such as skin so that they revert to an embryonic-like state, from which they can morph into other cell types. Scientists at Kyoto University use the technique to transform iPS cells into precursors to the neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine....

Compared with the hustle and bustle of waking life, sleep looks dull and unworkmanlike. Except for in its dreams, a sleeping brain doesn’t misbehave or find a job. It also doesn’t love, scheme, aspire or really do much we would be proud to take credit for. Yet during those quiet hours when our mind is on hold, our brain does the essential labor at the heart of all creative acts. It edits itself....

Microbes, they get a bad rap. But, as I’ve reported on before (for instance here), not all microbes are bad news. A couple new papers shed light on the latest good news on the microbial front. Marine Plastic, What’s It Good For? By now we all know about the huge patches of plasticthat are floating about the ocean (seehereandhere)— the nom de science for this stuff is marine plastic debris. Of all the different kinds of marine debris out there, plastic is the most abundant....

Dear EarthTalk: Oceans are in big trouble and I understand President Obama is creating a high-level ocean council to address them. What are the major issues? —Steve Sullivan, Bothell, Wash. Our oceans are indeed in a terrible state, thanks primarily to unrestrained commercial and industrial activity. Overfishing and pollution have decimated once abundant stocks of fish and other marine life, and the damaging practices continue to this day despite international agreements outlawing them....

Dear EarthTalk: I am considering solar panels for my roof to provide heat for my hot water and possibly to do more than that. Are there some kinds of solar panels that are better than others? How do I find a knowledgeable installer? – Elise, Watertown, MA What type of solar energy capture system you put on your home depends on your needs. If you want to go full tilt and generate usable electricity from your home’s rooftop—and even possibly contribute power back to the larger grid—tried and true photovoltaic arrays might be just the ticket....

Deterioration of a specific brain region impairs sleep quality as people age, leading to poorer memory retention, according to research published today in Nature Neuroscience. Aging is associated with the gradual loss of brain cells, sleep disturbances and declining memory function, but how these factors are related to each other has been unclear. Neuroscientist Bryce Mander at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues recruited 33 healthy adults — 18 around the age of 20, and 15 ranging from late sixties to late seventies — all with normal mental function, and asked them to memorize a list of word pairs....

A steady rain fell for 39 straight hours in southern Louisiana, beginning Thursday. When the deluge let up Saturday, six people had died. More than 20,000 were rescued from rooftops, homes and cars, according to the Office of the Governor. Some 11,344 people are in public shelters. Everybody in Baton Rouge knows somebody whose home got flooded, said resident Barry Keim, a professor at Louisiana State University and the state climatologist, who had himself helped rescue a stranded colleague....

Severe weather experts at AccuWeather.com are forecasting the intense weather outbreaks in the U.S. to continue beyond April into much of May. According to Severe Weather Expert Meteorologist Henry Margusity, “We see no let-up in the weather pattern that has led to the outbreaks this month.” A pronounced temperature contrast often produces strong storm systems. May is notorious for severe weather and tornadoes in its own right as warmth builds from the strengthening sun, while the upper atmosphere and the low-level air over the northern latitudes remain chilly....

Incarcerated thieves, drug dealers and murderers may not be the typical group you imagine doing yoga, but recent studies show that the ancient discipline might be able to play an important role in reducing prison violence. Several studies have shown that yoga helps to improve symptoms of anxiety and depression in prisoners, and now a study at the University of Oxford has found that it also increases focus and, crucially, decreases impulsivity—a known factor in much prison violence....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The magnificent stone monument variously referred to as the Monument of Sacred War, the Teocalli of Sacred War, the Temple Stone or, more simply, the throne of Motecuhzoma II (Montezuma), the Aztec king (tlatoani) who ruled at the time of the Spanish conquest, is covered with relief carvings of symbols, gods and Motecuhzoma himself....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the 17th century, many groups of British Christians rose and fought against religious intolerance and corruption. The Puritans sought a return to biblical religion and a purified form of Christianity in England. This resulted in the Puritan Revolution, as well as a migration to America to find a place to worship God in what they considered the ‘correct’ fashion....

Toward the end of the Stone Age, in a small fishing village in southern Denmark, a dark-skinned woman with brown hair and piercing blue eyes chewed on a sticky piece of hardened birch tar. The village, dubbed Syltholm by modern archaeologists, was near a coastal lagoon that was protected from the Baltic Sea by sandy barrier islands. Behind them, the woman and her kin built weirs to trap fish that they skewered with bone-tipped spears....

Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient staff carved with two realistic human faces in southern Syria. The roughly 9,000-year-old artifact was discovered near a graveyard where about 30 people were buried without their heads — which were found in a nearby living space. “The find is very unusual. It’s unique,” said study co-author Frank Braemer, an archaeologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. [See Images of the Ancient Wand and Skeletons] The wand, which was likely used in a long-lost funeral ritual, is one of the only naturalistic depictions of human faces from this time and place, Braemer said....

In September a driverless Audi TTS will speed to the top of Colorado’s Pikes Peak at just under 100 kilometers per hour—that’s right, no driver. It is an early step toward a robo-car that can drive itself, perhaps better than you can. The World Health Organization projects traffic fatalities to be the third leading cause of mortality worldwide by 2020. And drivers themselves are responsible for 73 percent of these deaths....

In the late 19th century Yellowstone, Sequoia and Yosemite became the first of the great U.S. National Parks, described by author and historian Wallace Stegner as America’s “best idea.” But the parks were devastating for the Native Americans who had lived or hunted within their borders and who were expelled—essentially an act of colonialism in the name of conservation. In the 20th century similar reserves began to be carved out in developing countries, creating millions of “conservation refugees” even as neighboring forests were given over to extractive industries....

Ingmar Bergman’s famous 1957 movie The Seventh Seal takes place during the 14th century, when Europe is in the midst of a major epidemic of the bubonic plague—the Black Death—which ultimately killed about half the population. A Swedish knight, Antonius Block, returns from the Crusades and finds Death waiting for him. He challenges Death, later seen disguised as a priest, to a chess match, hoping to stave off his own death by devising what he hopes is a winning next move....

A cave on the southern coast of South Africa contains a bowl’s worth of edible shellfish dating back to about 165,000 years ago. Besides pushing back the earliest known seafood meal by 40,000 years, the discovery also marks the earliest time when people might have engaged in symbolic thought. Anatomically modern humans probably emerged between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago in eastern Africa. When those humans first developed the potential for symbolic thought, including language, has remained a puzzle....