Plasma is like a lightning bolt, when it happens underwater.

A new study explored how electrochemical cells that help recycle CO2 but whose catalytic surfaces get worn down in the process might be regenerated at the push of a button - using extreme plasmas in water. To show proof ofconcept, they deployed optical spectroscopy and modeling to analyze such underwater plasmas in detail, which exist only for a few nanoseconds, and to theoretically describe the conditions during plasma ignition.

Particle physicists call "jet" the combined effect of many particles produced together when an energetic quark or gluon is kicked out of the hadron it called home, or when it is produced out of the blue by the decay of a massive particle. 
The clearest example of the first process are the collisions we routinely produce at the Large Hadron Collider, where pairs of protons traveling at close to the speed of light bang into each other head-on. Protons are like bags of garbage: they contain a complex mix of quarks and gluons. So what happens in the collision is that one individual quark or gluon inside one proton hits a corresponding constituent in the other proton; the two pointlike objects scatter off each other, and get ejected out of the proton containing them. 

More than 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, which means coffee beans used in all those lattes, espressos and mochas create a livelihood for millions of people worldwide.

Yet coffee plant production remains decidedly low-tech, and gimmick labels like "organic" and "fair trade" keep developing nations growing coffee stuck in the past. That has resulted in a "biennial effect" in yields, where years with high yields are often followed by years with low yields. The biennial effect makes it challenging for coffee breeders to compare yields from different varieties of coffee. Without accurate measures of yield, breeders cannot know which varieties of coffee would be most useful for farmers to grow.

Bystander apathy is a social psychological construct where it is believed that someone who sees a victim is less likely to offer help when other people are present. They say it is proportional to the number of bystanders, the more people around not helping the less likely anyone will help.

It became a popular idea in pop culture, and therefore made its way into social psychology, after the 1964 case of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old woman who was raped and murdered in Queens, New York.

Throughout human history, humans have artificially selected food. The sweeter, the better. When agriculture came into being, such genetic engineering became commonplace. A banana we eat today has nothing in common with one of a few hundred years ago. At one time we couldn't consume corn at all.

That evolutionary legacy, we once didn't have confidence when our next meal might be, is still evident. Sweet foods sell well and science has made them affordable; so affordable we have the opposite of the starvation problem poor people faced in the past.

It was said there was a 'rainbow wave' of LGBTQ voters after the Trump presidency and a new survey analysis set out to find what makes them tick.  To do so, authors distilled results a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults collected by Survey Sampling International after the November 2018 polls.

They hoped to gain a deeper understanding of the political motivations of LGBTQ people and identify sexual, gender and queer identity gaps in liberalism. 

Work presented today at European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology meeting showed said that a lack of difference in a range of sperm characteristics observed in frozen sperm samples exposed to microgravity and those maintained in ground conditions.

That means male gametes may safely travel in space.

If revenue numbers are true, gun manufacturers don't like when Democrats are in the White House. During the Clinton and Obama administrations gun sales did quite well, because Democrats are perceived by Republicans as more inclined to ban things and people who may not have been motivated to buy guns did, because they worried about bans.

Yet it may not be Democrats causing an uptick in purchases, it could be media making the public think mass shootings will cause Democrats to ban them. 

Vitamin D helps keep bones strong and some diseases at bay. During the summer months, people are able to get about 90 percent of their daily vitamin D requirements through exposure to sunlight, but that is not the case during a northeast winter. 

The remainder is often obtained through food. Milk, for example, if fortified with vitamin D because children drink it and that keeps them healthy. Chicken eggs also provide vitamin D and since the nutrition fad has swung away from linking eggs to heart attacks it may be possible to give those affordable protein sources a vitamin boost. 

Cities with a higher incidence of racist tweets showed more actual hate crimes related to race, ethnicity, and national origin, according to an analysis of the location and linguistic features of 532 million tweets published between 2011 and 2016.

A machine learning model identified and analyze two types of tweets: those that are targeted (directly espousing discriminatory views) and those that are self-narrative (describing or commenting upon discriminatory remarks or acts) and then the team compared the prevalence of each type of discriminatory tweet to the number of actual hate crimes reported during that same time period in those same cities.