News Articles

Given the news recently about yet another E. coli outbreak, you may be concerned E. coli is not just a plague in 'organically' processed and prepared vegetables but perhaps in regular steak  - and you would be correct.

Jackson Pollock (d.1956) is famous to mainstream people more for the movie about his troubled life than his art, but his drip paintings have intrigued more than art historians.A quantitative analysis of Pollock's streams, drips, and coils reveals some deep knowledge of applied physics and an ability to exploit fluid dynamics.  Crossovers between art and science are nothing new, of course, Leonardo da Vinci's is the archetype of the "Renaissance man" because of his botanical sketches, proportional studies, flying machines, war engines and a painting or two.

Endocarditis is a dangerous and sometimes lethal infection of the heart sometimes caused after a dental procedure.    

A pair of studies presented Saturday and today at the American Diabetes Association's Scientific Sessions in San Diego suggest diet sodas may be a dietary head fake for the body. Epidemiologists from the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio reported data showing that diet soft drink consumption is associated with increased waist circumference in humans.  Whatever, associated is not caused - people drink diet sodas more after they put on weight, not when they are still thin - but a second study that found aspartame raised fasting glucose (blood sugar) in diabetes-prone mice is more of a concern.

Songbirds have been used in the past to examine the precursor functions to human language in our neural circuitry, but they may be capable of much more than being animal models. A new study shows the Bengalese finch (Lonchura striata var. domestica) can learn the rules of an artificial grammar system - hierarchical language structure has been previously thought to be specific only to humans.

The common refrain when climate science detractors point out the flaws in numerical models is that, if no one is sure of the accuracy, the risks are being exaggerated.It could be the opposite.   Numerical models could be giving us a false sense of security, a belief that we have plenty of time to fix pollution issues.   Writing in Nature Geoscience, Paul Valdes from the University of Bristol School of Geographical Sciences, discusses four examples of abrupt climate change 'tipping points' over the last 55.8 million years that have been reconstructed from palaeoclimate data and states that the level of inaccuracy could be too comforting. 

Maybe your need to feel like a Hollywood celebrity outweighs the long-published perils of cocaine use and you just need a little something to push you back over the edge to sanity - if so, crusty, purplish areas of dead skin that are extremely painful and can open the door to nasty infections might do the trick. The condition is called purpura, usually a range of rare disorders, but increasingly associated with the use of cocaine, specifically cocaine that has been increasingly contaminated with a de-worming drug used by veterinarians. The drug, called levamisole, was found in 30 percent of confiscated cocaine in 2008 and 70 percent in 2009, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Other than wasting away due to illness, there is no shortcut to weight loss.   You can, of course, simply not eat at all and that will work but if you resume your old habits you would gain the weight back and the drastic changes to your body might do harm.Some people are motivated to lose weight - as long as it can happen right now.  And any number of gimmicks and diet programs will help, if you just buy the book or the meals.    But the failure rate is far greater than the success rate because, ordinarily, if people had the discipline to stick to a weight loss plan, they wouldn't be obese.    

Whether you agree or not, the funding machine for solar and wind energy is in motion and it is hard to stop - look at the debate over ending ethanol subsidies.One way to make an informed policy decision is to truly know just how much solar energy will be provided in a 'smart' grid scenario, beyond optimistic projections by lobbyists.   U.C. San Diego Professor Jan Kleissl and Matthew Lave, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Jacobs School, say they can do it. They developed a software program that allows power grid managers to predict fluctuations in the solar grid caused by changes in the cloud cover - and even discovered a solar variability 'law'.

Researchers say that a protein expressed in the human retina, human cryptochrome 2 protein (hCRY2), can sense magnetic fields when implanted into Drosophila, leading to an interesting topic in sensory biology; perhaps humans have an innate magnetic sense.Migratory birds and sea turtles do, and that ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field is how they navigate long-distance voyages during migration.

A study in Canada says Canadian pre-schoolers prefer to play with kids more like them.Are Canadian parents ingraining bias in their kids?  Or French-Canadians?  Hard to know. Participants were recruited from six daycares located in Montreal and its suburbs: 30 mostly second-generation Asian-Canadians and 30 French-Canadians. Children were paired with peers they had known for at least three months. According to the research team, social mores likely prompted a lack of interaction between cultures.   

A new study shows that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years - and a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.