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Natural Zinc Sulfides Are Ruining The Mary Rose, But Science Can Fix It

Natural Zinc Sulfides Are Ruining The Mary Rose, But Science Can Fix It

As the crown jewel of Henry VIII’s, its flagship, the Mary Rose, patrolled the Atlantic with her heavy cannons for 34 years. It then spend 437 more buried beneath the turbulent English Channel before being recovered and placed on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England. The Mary Rose sank during a naval battle with France in 1543 and was excavated in 1982, along with 19,000 objects from the Tudor period. There remains one thing the 510-year-old English warship can't defeat; nature.

Dyslexia Affects Visual Processing Beyond Just Reading

Dyslexia Affects Visual Processing Beyond Just Reading

Dyslexia is well-known to impact reading ability but it has been unclear which brain processes are affected by the condition. Whether dyslexia is, at its core, a visual processing disorder is hotly debated among researchers. With reading and writing a key challenge among children with dyslexia, increasing understanding of its effects on the brain might improve existing interventions. 

Health Disinformation Didn't Start With COVID-19, Lessons From The Past Can Help Combat It

Health Disinformation Didn't Start With COVID-19, Lessons From The Past Can Help Combat It

Anti-vaccine sentiment is not new but from the 1950s until the late 1990s it was isolated small pockets of deniers. With claims that MMR vaccines, and then preservatives in vaccines, caused autism, the west coast of America became overrun with vaccine denial. In 2021, anti-vaccine sentiment switched to middle America with COVID-19. The names change but health disinformation remains the same, as are ways to combat it. A recent study looked at combating typhoid misinformation in Sierra Leone and found that explicitly addressing falsehoods seems more effective in busting misbeliefs than simply stating scientific facts.

Homeschooled Kids Become Adults With Greater Character Strengths And Fewer Risky Health Behaviors

Homeschooled Kids Become Adults With Greater Character Strengths And Fewer Risky Health Behaviors

What do Taylor Swift, the Jonas brothers, and Miley Cyrus share in common? They're all great musicians and nice people. They were also home schooled. A new study examining how homeschooling affected adolescents’ character, health and well-being found that adolescents who are homeschooled are more likely to report greater character strengths and fewer risky health behaviors later in life, but are less likely to attain a college degree. 

Sharpless 2-302: The Snowman In The Southern Sky

Sharpless 2-302: The Snowman In The Southern Sky

Over 6,000 light-years away from earth, in the constellation Puppis in the southern sky, is an emission nebula. Emission nebulae are diffuse clouds of gas that have become so charged by the energy of nearby massive stars that they glow with their own light. The radiation from these massive stars strips electrons from the nebula’s hydrogen atoms - ionization. As the energized electrons revert from their higher-energy state to a lower-energy state, they emit energy in the form of light, causing the nebula’s gas to glow.

Your Pet Cat Is Spreading The Toxoplasma Parasite To Wildlife

Your Pet Cat Is Spreading The Toxoplasma Parasite To Wildlife

A recent paper examined 45,079 cases of toxoplasmosis in wild mammals—a disease that has been linked to nervous system disorders, cancers and other debilitating chronic conditions—using data from 202 global studies and found wildlife living near dense urban areas, where there are lots of cats carrying the pararsite, were more likely to be infected.One infected cat can excrete as many as 500 million Toxoplasma oocysts (or eggs) in just two weeks. The oocysts can then live for years in soil and water with the potential to infect any bird or mammal, including humans. Toxoplasmosis is particularly dangerous for pregnant women.

The Liao River Valley Is The Birthplace Of 100 Trans-Eurasian Dialects And Languages

The Liao River Valley Is The Birthplace Of 100 Trans-Eurasian Dialects And Languages

A new paper reaffirms how humankind's embrace of agriculture, and resulting lower 'cost' of food, led to a cultural boom that resulted in mass migration and many of the world's major language families. If you speak modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian, you have a connection to neolithic millet farmers from the Liao River valley - Inner Mongolia and the provinces of Liaoning and Jilin in China. People speaking nearly 100 dialects and languages across 5,000 miles have a shared genetic ancestry stretching back 9,000 years, the research found.

For Alzheimer's Patients, Familiar Music Helps

For Alzheimer's Patients, Familiar Music Helps

You may not want to hear the same song over and over, but for patients with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s disease, repeated listening to personally meaningful music induces beneficial brain plasticity, according to a new study.It found that changes in the brain’s neural pathways correlated with increased memory performance on neuropsychological tests, supporting the clinical potential of personalized, music-based interventions for people with dementia.

COVID-19: Does Natural Infection Or Vaccination Lead To More Protective Antibodies?

COVID-19: Does Natural Infection Or Vaccination Lead To More Protective Antibodies?

Coronavirus has been with us for thousands of years and has mutated accordingly. Since it is in the same family as the common cold it was only recognized as distinct a few decades ago, and in the past severe cases were likely just treated as a flu.But after SARS in 2003 and MERS a decade later, coronavirus has taken the world stage and it is never leaving the lexicon again. Every detected mutation is splashed across media outlets with no end in sight. Nearly everyone has to have been exposed at this point but well over 99 percent are unaffected and that leads to questions about how much more vaccines can help. Are antibodies from infection as good as a vaccination?They can be, in a counter-intuitive way.

Eggs Earlier In Life Will Mean Fewer Egg Allergies

Eggs Earlier In Life Will Mean Fewer Egg Allergies

In response to increases in allergies, and then paralyzing schools and businesses because many parents conflate any allergic reaction with anaphylaxis, in 2017 allergists and pediatricians began recommending that parents start to introduce peanut product around the time their child begins solid foods to prevent peanut allergy. A new study presented at the year’s American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting reveals that it makes sense to do the same with eggs.

People Are Sick Of People - It's Time To Make Robots More Social

People Are Sick Of People - It's Time To Make Robots More Social

It's nice that a robot can fold a towel really, really slowly, but they're going to remain an academic gimmick until they can engage in social interactions. Then they could replace people. If you have spent any time on Twitter, you know people are done talking to anyone who does not look, talk, or identify just like them, so robot socialization couldn't come at a better time.