| ||||
 Bat wings inspire new breed of drone By Matthew Stock The unique mechanical properties of bat wings could lead to a new breed of nature-inspired drone. A prototype built by researchers at the University of Southampton shows that membrane wings can have improved aerodynamic properties and fly over longer distances on less power. Using a paper-thin rubber membrane, the team designed wings that mimic the physiology of the muscles in a bat's wing, changing shape in response to the forces it experiences. Read More »Stinging Jellyfish Come to Jersey, But Beaches Still Safe Read More » Ancient Greek 'Computer' Came with a User Guide Read More » Where's the Exit? Python Caught in Circle of Own Molted Skin The serpent slithered around and around for about 3 hours until it eventually broke free, according to a reptile center in Australia. Stimson's pythons molt all the time, about once a month on average, but it's rare for one to get stuck in its sloughed-off skin, said David Penning, a doctoral fellow of biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who is not affiliated with the reptile center. "A young snake that's growing will shed more often than an older snake, because they're literally running out of space inside their skin," he said. Read More »Rare Bronze Wing from Roman Sculpture Uncovered in England Read More » Rainbow-Colored Shooting Stars May Fly Overhead Someday The Japanese company ALE plans to create and release artificial meteors into space that emit colorful trails when they burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Normally, shooting stars form when particles in space — usually much smaller than an inch (just a few millimeters long) enter the atmosphere and burn brightly, in a process known as plasma emission. The company plans to launch a satellite carrying about 500 to 1,000 "source particles," which will become the artificial meteors. Read More »The Kilogram May Be Redefined Read More » Pretty as a Princess: Disney Movies May Be Making Girls 'Girlier' New research finds that preschoolers who watch Disney's princess movies are not only more likely to don the sparkling ultrafeminine fashion but also to internalize stereotypical gender roles. Researchers surveyed almost 200 4-year-old girls and boys, as well as the children's mothers and teachers, to learn about each kid's Disney movie- and TV-watching habits, favorite princesses and playtime routines. "Girls who were into the princess culture at the first wave were more gender-stereotyped one year later," said study lead researcher Sarah Coyne, an associate professor of family life at Brigham Young University in Utah. Read More »Pretty Risky: Men Would Skip Condoms with Attractive Women Previous research has suggested that there is a link between perceived attractiveness and a person's willingness to have unprotected sex, the researchers, led by Anastasia Eleftheriou, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Southampton in England, wrote in the new study. One earlier study of women, for example, found that the more attractive they considered a man to be, the more willing they would be to have unprotected sex with that man. Fifty-one heterosexual men completed a survey in which they were asked to rate the attractiveness of 20 women in photographs on a scale from 0 to 100. Read More »5 Surprising Facts About Egg Freezing A city in Japan has announced that it will pay a large part of the cost of egg freezing for women who live there, as part of a program aimed at raising the country's low birth rate. Egg freezing is the process of extracting egg cells from a woman's ovaries and storing them for later use. Urayasu, a city near Tokyo, will provide the currency equivalent of $850,000 over a three-year period to fund a research project on egg freezing, according to the Associated Press. Read More »New 'Artificial Synapses' Could Let Supercomputers Mimic the Human Brain Large-scale brain-like machines with human-like abilities to solve problems could become a reality, now that researchers have invented microscopic gadgets that mimic the connections between neurons in the human brain better than any previous devices. The new research could lead to better robots, self-driving cars, data mining, medical diagnosis, stock-trading analysis and "other smart human-interactive systems and machines in the future," said Tae-Woo Lee, a materials scientistat the Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea and senior author of the study. Previous research suggested that the brain has approximately 100 billion neurons and roughly 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) connections wiring these cells together. Read More »Music Festival Season Is Here: How to Avoid Dangerous Health Problems Your favorite bands aren't the only things that make headlines when summer music festival season is in full swing — each year, there are also news stories of people becoming dangerously ill and even dying at these events. Indeed, summer music festivals can be a perfect storm of heat, dehydration and drug use that can lead to deadly consequences. When it comes to drugs at these events, the biggest problem is ultimately the bad decision-making that goes hand-in-hand with drug use, said Dr. Lewis Nelson, a toxicologist and emergency medicine physician at New York University Langone Medical Center. Read More »Caffeine's 'Boost' Disappears When You're Extremely Sleep-Deprived "These results are important, because caffeine is a stimulant widely used to counteract performance decline following periods of restricted sleep," the lead author of the study, Tracy Jill Doty, a behavioral biology scientist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, said in a statement. Read More »Docs Diagnose Smartphone 'Blindness' in 2 Women For two women in the United Kingdom, mysterious vision problems that happened only at night or early in the morning turned out to have a rather innocuous cause: looking at a smartphone in the dark. An eye exam showed her vision was normal, and she had no signs of a blood clot or other conditions that could cause short-term vision loss, the doctors said. This vision problem lasted about 15 minutes, and happened on and off for six months, the report said. Read More »Stomach Sucker: How Does New Weight-Loss Device Work? The Food and Drug Administration recently approved a weight-loss device that may sound like something out of a science-fiction movie: a small tube inserted into the stomach allows patients to drain a portion of their gut's contents before the body absorbs those calories. The device, called AspireAssist, was approved by the FDA after a year-long clinical trial on 171 people, 111 of whom underwent a procedure to place the device. But not all weight-loss experts think the device is a game-changer. Read More »These Plant Compounds May Reduce Menopause Symptoms Some plant-based therapies, including supplements with compounds found in soybeans, may help reduce symptoms of menopause, according to a new review of relevant research. In these studies, the women took either a planted-based therapy, such as a supplement or herbal remedy, or a placebo to treat symptoms of menopause. The plant-based therapies included a class of compounds called phytoestrogens, which are found in certain foods, like soybeans. Read More » | ||||
| | ||||
| ||||
Monday, June 27, 2016
FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
Friday, June 24, 2016
FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
| ||||
| Male Fiddler Crabs Entrap Females In Their Bachelor Pads Read More » Memory-Boosting Trick: Exercise After Learning Researchers found that people who did a high-intensity workout on a spinning bike 4 hours after completing a memory task had better recall when they were retested two days later than men and women who pedaled the bike immediately after the task, and those who didn't exercise after the task at all, according to the findings published today (June 16) in the journal Current Biology. The study showed that delaying exercise by 4 hours after learning has a "moderate" effect on memory, said Dr. Guillen Fernandez, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior at the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. The findings showed that exercise improves memory performance and changes the way memories are stored in the brain, said Fernandez, who conducted the research with Eelco van Dongen, a postdoctoral student at the institute, and other colleagues. Read More »Americans Are Eating a Bit Healthier, Study Says From 1999 to 2012, the percentage of Americans who reported eating a poor-quality diet decreased from 56 percent to 46 percent, the researchers found. The percentage of Americans who ate what is considered to be an ideal diet remained low, however, increasing slightly from 0.7 percent in 1999 to 1.5 percent in 2012, according to the study, published today (June 21) in the journal JAMA. The researchers determined diet quality using a scoring system based on dietary recommendations from the American Heart Association (AHA). Read More »'3Doodler' Pen Lets You Draw 3D-Printed Creations in Midair Read More » Moral Dilemma of Self-Driving Cars: Which Lives to Save in a Crash New research has found that people generally approve of autonomous vehicles (AV) governed by so-called utilitarian ethics, which would seek to minimize the total number of deaths in a crash, even if it means harming people in the vehicle. The study, based on surveys of U.S. residents, found that most respondents would not want to ride in these vehicles themselves, and were not in favor of regulations enforcing utilitarian algorithms on driverless cars. Read More »Caribbean Sea's Curious 'Whistle' Detected from Space Bounded by South America, Central America and the Caribbean islands, the semi-enclosed basin of the Caribbean Sea acts like the body of a giant whistle, the scientists wrote in the study. "When you blow a whistle, you hear something because the air oscillates — pulses in and out of the whistle — and radiates a wave," the study's lead author Chris Hughes, a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool, in the United Kingdom, told Live Science. "In this case, the water is pulsing in and out of the Caribbean Sea. Read More » | ||||
| | ||||
| ||||
Thursday, June 23, 2016
FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
| ||||
| How mushrooms fueled a scientist's flight out of North Korea HWASEONG, South Korea (AP) — Lee T.B. fled North Korea not because he suffered from dire poverty or persecution at home, as many other defectors have. He did it for mushrooms, and to fulfill his wife's dying wish. Read More »Solar plane lands in Spain after three-day Atlantic crossing Read More » Screwworm Sex Wins 'Golden Goose' Award for Unusual Research Read More » Sharks Near You? Global Survey Reveals Predators' Top Spots Read More » In Shellfish, Cancer Can Be Contagious Read More » Virtual Reality Could Be Film's Next 'New Wave' Read More » Hair on Demand: Researchers Create 3D-Printed Fur Read More » 17th-Century French Ship Gets New Berth: A Texas Museum Read More » Previous exposure to dengue may make Zika worse, scientists find * Findings may explain why current Zika outbreak is severe * Dengue virus is also carried by mosquitoes * Dengue antibodies attach to Zika, but only partially By Kate Kelland LONDON, June 23 (Reuters) - Scientists studying the Zika outbreak in Brazil say previous exposure to another mosquito-borne virus, dengue, may exacerbate the potency of Zika infection. The scientists said their results, published in the journal Nature Immunology, suggested that some dengue antibodies can recognise and bind to Zika due to the similarities between the two viruses, but that these antibodies may also amplify Zika infection in a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement. Read More »Previous exposure to dengue may make Zika worse, scientists find Read More » Human skin cells used in animal-free cosmetic tests By Matthew Stock A UK-based laboratory is working to eradicate animal testing in the cosmetics industry by developing alternative methods which are not only cruelty-free but more scientifically advanced than other current tests. XCellR8 uses scaffolds of cells from human skin donated by plastic surgery patients, which they say are ideally suited to testing cosmetic products. "For skin irritation testing the cells are isolated from human skin that has been donated by people who have had plastic surgery and they've said that they're quite happy for the tissue to be used for research purposes. Read More »Previous exposure to dengue may make Zika worse, scientists find By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists studying the Zika outbreak in Brazil say previous exposure to another mosquito-borne virus, dengue, may exacerbate the potency of Zika infection. The scientists said their results, published in the journal Nature Immunology, suggested that some dengue antibodies can recognize and bind to Zika due to the similarities between the two viruses, but that these antibodies may also amplify Zika infection in a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement. This effect is already known with dengue, they said, and is thought to explain why, when a person gets dengue fever a second time, the infection is often more serious than the first. Read More » | ||||
| | ||||
| ||||
