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Thursday, January 21, 2016

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Baking-Soda Ingredient May Lower Risk of Premature Death

Older people may be at increased risk of premature death if they have low levels of bicarbonate, a main ingredient in baking soda, in their blood, a new study suggests. The reason for the link isn't exactly clear, but it may have to do with the ill effects of having slightly acidic blood, the researchers said. Bicarbonate, a base, is a natural byproduct of metabolism that the body uses to regulate the pH level of the blood.

Don't Blame Pot for Teens' IQ Drop, Study Says

Instead, the results suggest that if teens experience a cognitive decline, other factors, such as genetics or that young person's family environment, are more likely to be responsible for the drop, the researchers said. The implications of the new findings are that "it is unlikely that the exposure to marijuana itself is causing children to show intellectual change," Isen told Live Science. Previous research on marijuana use during adolescence has yielded mixed results.

10,000-Year-Old Battered Bones May Be Oldest Evidence of Human Warfare

The skeletons of 27 people who died about 10,000 years ago bear marks of blunt force trauma and projectile wounds, the researchers said in the study. The victims included men, women and children. "That scale of death — it can't be an individual murder or homicide amongst families," said study co-author Robert Foley, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in England.

Prehistoric massacre in Kenya called oldest evidence of warfare

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Man's inhumanity to man, as 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, is no recent development. Scientists said on Wednesday they had found the oldest evidence of human warfare, fossils of a band of people massacred by a troop of attackers with weapons including arrows, clubs and stone blades on the shores of a lagoon in Kenya about 10,000 years ago. The remains of 27 people from a Stone Age hunter-gatherer culture were unearthed at a site called Nataruk roughly 20 miles (30 km) west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.

'Dragon thief' dinosaur thrived after primordial calamity

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the early years of the Jurassic Period, when the world was recovering from one of the worst mass extinctions on record, a modest meat-eating dinosaur from Wales helped pave the way for some of the most fearsome predators ever to stalk the Earth. Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of fossil remains of a two-legged dinosaur called Dracoraptor that lived 200 million years ago and was a forerunner of much later colossal carnivores like Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus and Spinosaurus. The fossil is of a 7-foot-long (2.1-meter) juvenile, with adults reaching perhaps 10 feet (3 meters), said paleontologist Steven Vidovic of Britain's University of Portsmouth.

From sawdust to petrol

By Jim Drury As world governments mull over global emission targets agreed at last December's United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), attention is turning to which new technologies can help them achieve this. Researchers at the University of Leuven say they have part of the answer, having devised a way to convert sawdust into valuable chemicals and the building blocks for gasoline. By developing a unique chemical process in their laboratory at the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, outside Brussels, they can convert the lignin in sawdust into aromatic chemicals and the cellulose into hydrocarbon chains.

Even Centenarians Are Living Longer

In recent years, the death rate among American centenarians — people who have lived to age 100 or older — has decreased, dropping 14 percent for women and 20 percent for men from 2008 to 2014, according to the report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, "the risk of dying for centenarians decreased" over this period, study author Dr. Jiaquan Xu, of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, told Live Science. In 2000, the top five causes of death for centenarians were heart disease, stroke, influenza and pneumonia (the two conditions are grouped together), cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

Eating Healthy Fats May Reduce Deaths from Heart Disease

Encouraging people to eat healthy fats such as those found in olive oil or fish could help prevent more than a million deaths from heart disease worldwide each year, according to a new study. In fact, the number of deaths from heart disease due to insufficient intake of healthy fats is almost three times' greater than the number of deaths due to excessive intake of saturated fats, according to the researchers. "Policies for decades have focused on saturated fats as the priority for preventing heart disease, but we found that in most countries, a too-little intake of healthy fats was the big problem, bigger than saturated fat," said study author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston.

Low-Fiber Diet May Change Gut Microbes for Generations

Diets that are low in fiber may cause irreversible changes to populations of gut bacteria, and those changes may be passed on over generations, new research suggests. What's more, the depleted microbial community, called the microbiome, was passed on from parent to offspring, and worsened over time: After four generations of mice had eaten a low-fiber diet, most of the bacteria species normally found in the animals' gut microbiome were completely missing, the researchers found. The study, which was published Wednesday (Jan. 13) in the journal Nature, may have implications for humans, said study lead author Erica Sonnenburg, a microbiome researcher at Stanford University in California.

New Seafloor Map Reveals Secrets of Ancient Continents' Shoving Match

Tectonic plates may have inched across the Earth's surface to where they are now over the course of billions of years, but they left behind traces of this movement in bumps and gashes under the sea. Now, a new topographic map of the seafloor has helped researchers chronicle when the Indian-Eurasian continent formed as well as find a previously undiscovered microplate that broke off as a result of the event.

Racing Pigeons Fly Home Faster in Polluted Air, Scientists Find

China currently has an air pollution problem so severe that smog is occasionally dense enough to be visible from space. Using publicly available data gathered from environmental and pigeon racing agencies, scientists analyzed pigeon performance in 415 races that took place on the North China Plain, where concentrations of air pollution are higher than anywhere else in the country, the scientists reported. By comparing the pigeons' racing times to records of pollution levels on race days, the researchers hoped to learn whether air pollution might affect how well the pigeons performed during the races, the scientists said.

State of play of Virtual Reality

Valkyrie, a new action-packed space adventure developed by game company CCP, was designed to harness the latest in virtual reality technology. Tomorrow we want to change the dynamic around immersive, advanced, virtual reality," said JP Nauseef, the founder of Krush technologies, a company starting to develop virtual reality hardware. Major advances in virtual reality are starting to take shape.

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