News Articles

Conformity is a bad thing, in media portrayals like Apple advertisements - yet then they have a lot of people who look a lot alike all standing in line to buy the latest iPhone.In reality, despite the claims of creative people who insist that only one brand is for creative people, they are conforming. It is human nature to conform. Former Vice-President Dan Quayle was once criticized for not knowing how to spell 'potato' while guest judging a spelling event. It was spelled wrong on the answer card and he knew it was wrong but he conformed and politicians and the public do the same thing every day.
It makes us follow the lead of computers, even if the machines give us the wrong advice.

People love that earthy smell after it rains. It turns out there is a good science reason for it, and it's been captured using high-speed imaging.Petrichor is the  phenomenon first characterized by Australian scientists as the smell released after a light rain. Now scientists at MIT believe they may have identified the mechanism that releases this aroma, as well as other aerosols, into the environment.

A 21st century gold rush has led to a significant increase of deforestation in the tropical forests of South America. Researchers from the University of Puerto Rico have shown that between 2001 and 2013, around 1680 km2 of tropical forest was lost in South America as a result of gold mining, which increased from around 377 km2 to 1303km2 since 2007, which increased in the global economic crisis of 2008 and on. Around 90 percent of this forest loss occurred in just four areas and a large proportion occurred within the vicinity of conservation areas.

Bisexual women are more likely to experience poor mental health and mental distress than lesbians, according to new data gleaned from the 2007 Stonewall UK Women's Health Survey. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene&Tropical Medicine analyzed responses from 5,706 bisexual and lesbian women living in the UK aged 14 or over.The study found bisexual women were less likely to be 'out' to friends, family and work colleagues and also less likely to be in a relationship. According to the results, bisexual women were less likely to experience sexuality-related discrimination from work, health care services, education and family than lesbians, but more likely to experience discrimination from friends.  

It's not new that dwellers and cities are a little less hearty than rural cousins. There is even a hygiene hypothesis that says kids in the country get dirtier to their benefit and that wealthy, educated helicopter parenting and all those hand sanitizers and antibacterial soaps are doing more harm than good.Allergies and numerous autoimmune diseases, such as asthma and type 1 diabetes, have become more common in the past 50 years, especially in urban environments. The belief is this is caused by urban issues like pollutants from human activities, a higher level of hygiene and the reduced biological diversity of the city living environment.

In a laboratory first, researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals. The lab-grown tissue should soon allow researchers to test new drugs and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body.The researchers started with a small sample of human cells that had already progressed beyond stem cells but hadn't yet become muscle tissue. They expanded these "myogenic precursors" by more than a 1000-fold, and then put them into a supportive, 3-D scaffolding filled with a nourishing gel that allowed them to form aligned and functioning muscle fibers.

It is well-known that “huffing” - inhaling organic solvents or propellants to achieve a “high” - is extremely dangerous, but less well known is that newer replacement products primarily used by homosexual men, called “poppers”, actually contain harmful solvents and propellants and pose the same health risks as huffing. The original poppers, based on alkyl nitrites and related to the medication amyl nitrite, got the name from their glass vials that “popped”, and they have been popular among gay men due to mild psychoactive effects and relaxing of smooth muscle, used to enhance sexual experience. 

Some kids and school districts have objected to the Obama administration's efforts to change lunches to be fare they prefer. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act changes have led to worries by advocates for the poor that kids whose best meal of the day was a school lunch are now being penalized, while food waste activists see increasing piles of food in garbage cans as a worrying trend. People who prefer freedom don't like that centralized government is now controlling what local school districts feed kids.

Most young children are essentialists, they believe that human and animal characteristics are innate, so traits like native language and clothing preference are intrinsic rather than acquired. It is a natural law that other kids should speak the same language - until other kids don't.A new study postulates that bilingual kids learn earlier that it's what one learns, rather than what one is born with, that makes up a person's psychological attributes. The study suggests that bilingualism in the preschool years can alter children's beliefs about the world around them. Contrary to their unilingual peers, many kids who have been exposed to a second language after age three believe that an individual's traits arise from experience. 

US states as different as California, West Virginia and Hawaii share one thing in common - half of automobile fatalities involving young drivers, ages 16 to 25 years, involved pot or alcohol. And those results were from years before the cultural push to make marijuana legal.

Bisphenol A, known as BPA, is in the middle of an environmental culture war and a hurriedly-rushed replacement, Bisphenol S (BPS), is just as big a concern.
We need plastic, food items are covered in plastic to make them last longer and protect them from microbes, but we know that plastic bottles and films take between 100 and 400 years to degrade, so the quest for alternative materials to plastics has been ongoing. That means we should not rush to embrace things just because they are 'not BPA', which still has no evidence of harm (unless hyperactive zebrafish count).

A new research project has identified a specific gene in soybean that has great potential for soybean crop improvement because it can be bred to better tolerate soil salinity - that means less changes to soil and the ecosystem while still getting more food.
The researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia and the Institute of Crop Sciences in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing pinpointed a candidate salt tolerance gene after examining the genetic sequence of several hundred soybean varieties.