Key Concepts Human biology Senses Taste Smell Food Science Introduction Have you ever tasted a piece of warm apple pie or a cup of hot chocolate milk—and then had them after they cooled? Maybe you even prefer to have these treats at room temperature. Why is this? Can flavor change even when you are not adding ingredients? Try this activity and discover how temperature influences flavor! Background Our experience with flavor starts in our mouth....
How did youthful galaxies in the early universe fatten up to become the behemoths we see today? One explanation, put forth more than a decade ago, is that galaxies in the early universe supped on cold gas to fuel their prodigious star formation. Theoretical astrophysicist Avishai Dekel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that narrow streams of intergalactic gas could act as supply lines, penetrating a budding galaxy’s hot halo of gas and feeding that galaxy’s growth....
Broken spirits, not bones, may be the worst result of falling down. Many older people fall, but for some, the experience makes them so afraid of toppling again that their mind impairs their ability to walk without trembling or losing balance. They quickly make themselves dependent on canes or wheelchairs. Roger Kurlan, a neurologist at the University of Rochester, has seen about 30 cases of what he calls “fear of falling” gait....
Video games, movies and television, Facebook and Twitter—for a couch-potato child, digital culture is rarely more than a fingertip away. Young Americans spend on average about seven and a half hours a day with digital media. In fact, they often multitask, using many devices simultaneously to pack in some 10 hours and 45 minutes’ worth of content every day, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report. With kids devoting more free time to media than many adults spend at their full-time jobs, you would not be alone in wondering what they are taking away from the experience....
By Janelle WeaverWhen it comes to racehorses, males get all of the attention. The founding stallions of the famed Thoroughbred breed are known to come from the Middle East, but historical records have neglected female pedigrees. Research now suggests that mares had more cosmopolitan origins than their male counterparts.Information on the origins of mares is spotty because the importance of females to race performance was underplayed in the past, says Mim Bower, an archeogeneticist at the University of Cambridge in the UK....
By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Scientists in California are reporting raised levels of radioactive chemicals in the atmosphere in the weeks following the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The measurements are the latest evidence that the reactors melted down catastrophically. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), say that radioactive sulfur from the stricken power plant reached California in late March, two weeks after the crisis at Fukushima began....
The first vaccine against polio, developed by Jonas Salk in 1954 while he was at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, registered a success rate of only 60 to 90 percent. Yet the annual incidence of polio in the U.S. quickly and dramatically fell from tens of thousands of cases to a few dozen in only a few years. The initial Salk vaccine, a “killed-virus” version, was replaced within a few years by a “live-virus” formulation developed by Albert Sabin of the University of Cincinnati....
Perfectly sanitized dimpled spinach leaves or tender greens like baby lettuce has been high on the wish list of the $3.1-billion bagged salad industry since its inception. The race to develop better wash systems for cleaning took off in earnest in 2006, after the high profile E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to bagged spinach killed five people and sickened more than 200, leaving the leafy green industry with a black eye and an ego-bruising $350-million price tag in recalls and lost sales....
South Africa’s science system is set for its biggest shake-up in 20 years, amid proposed legislation changes that aim to make research efforts better serve citizens and address problems such as poverty and unemployment. Policymakers in the government’s department of science and technology are updating the 1996 legislation document that governs the country’s science, technology and innovation activities and agencies. A final draft, seen by Nature, shifts the focus of South Africa’s science sector towards business-led innovation that tackles societal problems and expands the economy....
The human cells in our laboratory looked mild-mannered. They were normal cells, not cancer cells, which are able to proliferate rampantly, invade nearby tissues, and ultimately can kill. But something disturbingly malignant occurred when we forced these cells to change their shape, stretching them by pulling on their edges. This maneuver, flattening out their rounded mounds, increased the activity of two proteins within the cells, YAP and TAZ. As the proteins peaked, our benign cells began acting cancerous, replicating uncontrollably....
Acting Surgeon General Steven Galson issued a “call to action” this week to make more Americans aware of deep-vein thrombosis, life-threatening blood clots that occur in the legs or pelvis. The condition affects 350,000 to 600,000 Americans every year. DVT and pulmonary embolism (lung blood clots; some originate in the legs) kill an estimated 100,000 people annually, according to Galson. We asked Steven Elias, director of the Center for Vein Disease at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, for a primer....
A powerful tornado as much as three-kilometers wide devastated the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on May 20. The twister reportedly boasted winds above 300 kilometers-per-hour as it tore through homes and schools, leaving a path of large-scale destruction and killing dozens of people, including many children. Oklahoma is ground zero for tornadoes for geographic reasons. The state is located precisely where warm air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with colder weather from the west and north....
Apart from the terrible weather hanging around from an unusually cold winter, the second week of March started like any other week. But then rumors started floating around in the cosmology community about an imminent announcement out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The rumors spread to Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere by the weekend. Details began to emerge. This was not any ordinary announcement but rather the kind that, if correct, would happen once per lifetime....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Clove, nutmeg, and mace are native to only a handful of tiny islands in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago – cloves on five Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) about 1250 km (778 mi) west of New Guinea, and nutmeg on the ten Banda Islands approximately 2,000 km (1,243 mi) east of Java....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Admiral Zheng He (aka Cheng Ho, c. 1371-1433 CE) was a Chinese Muslim eunuch explorer who was sent by the Ming dynasty emperor Yongle (r. 1403-1424 CE) on seven diplomatic missions to increase trade and secure tribute from foreign powers. Between 1405 and 1433 CE Zheng He commanded huge fleets loaded with trade goods and high-value gifts to such far-flung places as Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Mogadishu in East Africa....
When a bad deed makes headlines, the first thing we want to know is whether the perpetrator did it “on purpose.” Intention matters in our moral judgments, as we intuitively realize and many studies confirm. Now studies suggest that this focus on the cause of an event can distort our understanding of the damage done—and knowing harm has been inflicted can even change the way we view the victims, ascribing them pain and consciousness when none might exist....
Women who drink water contaminated with low levels of the weed-killer atrazine may be more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles and low estrogen levels, scientists concluded in a new study. The most widely used herbicide in the United States, atrazine is frequently detected in surface and ground water, particularly in agricultural areas of the Midwest. Approximately 75 percent of all U.S. cornfields are treated with atrazine each year. The newest research, which compared women in Illinois to women in Vermont, adds to the growing scientific evidence linking atrazine to altered hormones....
President Biden has ordered his administration to produce a report on the environmental costs and potential benefits of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technologies they rely on. Biden’s request came yesterday as part of a sweeping executive order on the “responsible development of digital assets.” Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum are a growing part of the global financial system—and a major new source of planet-warming emissions. “Fundamentally, an American approach to digital assets is one that encourages innovation but mitigates the risks to consumers, investors, and businesses, broader financial stability, and the environment,” National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement about the directive....
SAN JOSE, California—Michael Bledsoe’s story begins like that of many other Iraqi war veterans. In 2007, he was chasing insurgents through Anbar province when a roadside bomb exploded, breaking Bledsoe’s back and both his feet. A former Army Ranger working as a security contractor, Bledsoe soon knew his high-paying military career was over. Back home, Bledsoe (not his real name) felt angry almost constantly. Nightmares haunted him. He withdrew and became isolated....
Methane trapped in Arctic ice (and elsewhere) could be rapidly released into the atmosphere as a result of global warming in a possible doomsday scenario for climate change, some scientists worry. After all, methane is 72 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timescale. But research announced at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union this December suggests that marine microbes could at least partially defeat the methane “time bomb” sitting at the bottom of the world’s oceans....
