In the 1980s, scientists captured the precise mechanics of a protein machine. It looked strange, to researchers its tall thin structure with stubby legs invoked the enchanted broomstick that stole the show in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Disney's 1940 Fantasia film.
When two
giant LIGO detectors
are switched on in the US next year, they will help scientists pick up the faint ripples of black hole collisions millions of years ago, known as gravitational waves.
Black holes cannot be seen, but scientists hope the revamped detectors, which act like giant microphones, will find remnants of black hole collisions - and theoretical physicists hope experimentalists will give validation for their numerical model.
Home dialysis therapies may help prolong the lives of patients with kidney failure compared with hemodialysis treatments administered in medical centers, according to an upcoming study at ASN Kidney Week 2014 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA.
Home dialysis therapies are more convenient and less expensive than in-center treatment, but it's unclear whether all home therapies - which include peritoneal dialysis and home hemodialysis - can prolong patients' survival. Researchers led by Austin Stack, MD, MBBCh, FASN (Graduate Entry Medical School, University of Limerick, in Ireland) analyzed national data to compare dialysis survival among 585,911 patients who started dialysis in the United States between 2005 and 2010.
Air pollution may play a role in the development of kidney disease, according to a study upcoming at ASN Kidney Week 2014 November 11-16 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
There are wide variances in the prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) across the United States, only part of which is explained by differences in individuals' risk factors. To see if air quality may also play a role, Jennifer Bragg-Gresham, PhD (University of Michigan) and her colleagues looked at 2010 Medicare information on 1.1 million persons as well as air-quality data for all US counties provide by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Major leaks from oil and gas pipelines can lead to home evacuations and even explosions. The line of lawyers waiting to sue for millions of dollars even if nothing happens can be seen from space. And though most pipeline leaks are small, America leads the world in safe pipeline construction and oversight, it's better for everyone if leaks are stopped as quickly as possible. A report in Industrial&Engineering Chemistry Research outlines development of a new software-based method that finds leaks even when they're small, which could help prevent serious incidents and save money for customers and industry.
Campylobacter's persistence in the kitchen is boosted by organic matter from chicken carcasses - "chicken juice" - and that means better cleaning of surfaces used for food preparation is an easy way to keep illness from happening.
Campylobacter aren't particularly hardy bacteria, so one area of research has been to understand exactly how they manage to survive outside of their usual habitat, the intestinal tract of poultry. They are sensitive to oxygen, but during biofilm formation the bacteria protect themselves with a layer of slime. This also makes them more resistant to antimicrobials and disinfection treatments.
Is there such a thing as a Facebook murder? Is it different than any other murder? Legally, it can be. From a common sense point of view, there is no 'hate crime' status that should make a murder worse if a white person kills a latino person or a Catholic instead of a white person or a Protestant, but legally such crimes can be considered more heinous and get a special label of hate crime.But social media is ubiquitous and criminal justice academics are always on the prowl for new categories to create and write about so a 'Facebook Murder', representing crimes that may somehow involve social networking sites and thus be a distinct category for sentencing, has been postulated.
In the 1980s, a press release writer for an environmental group pulled a metric for meat and fossil fuel usage out of the air. It made its way into a book written by an activist and ever since then the concept of 'embedded' emissions has been used by anti-meat proponents.
"It takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" is easy to remember. It is elegant. It is also completely wrong. Regardless, the virtual environmental cost of meat became a craze and it was soon followed by virtual water. The virtual water in the grain in just one part of Egypt is more than all of the water in the Nile so the concept falls apart rather quickly when it comes to the real world but scholars are still broadening the concept out to new areas.
Some people have great memories - almost like they are looking at a photograph. What is the secret? Will it be possible to change the amount of information the brain can store?
Maybe. Researchers have identified a molecule that puts the brakes on brain processing. When the brake is removed, brain function and memory recall is improved.
Credit:McGill
FXR1P: a controller of certain forms of memory
There may be disagreement about whether or not telling teenagers to not have sex works but that could be due to puberty. In younger kids, cookie abstinence works just fine. Even the Cookie Monster can get kids to eat fewer cookies, and cookies are kind of his thing.
Deborah Linebarger, an associate professor in Teacher and Learning at the University of Iowa, studied a group of preschoolers who repeatedly watched videos of Cookie Monster practicing ways to control his desire to eat a bowl of chocolate chip cookies.
"Me want it," Cookie Monster sings in a video, "but me wait."
The Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan was released in June of 2014 and is seeking public comments until December 1st so if you want to yell about liberals or Big Oil, you are running out of time.
The plan is like most government policies, they picked a number out of thin air and will tell businesses to meet the standards or close up shop. The government lost a gigantic amount of money subsidizing legacy solar power technology and have realized that the only way solar can be viable without funding actual basic research is to make everything else expensive, so existing power plants have to reduce emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Here's a diet tip that is certain to work: Eat nothing and drink nothing except water from 6 PM until you wake up the next day. With no dieting at all, you are certain to lose weight unless you go out of your way to eat three Big Macs at dinner.The reason is because your other organs and your brain start communicating - and many of them get a break from constantly processing food. Studies have found that mice who accumulated the most glycogen in the liver did not gain weight in spite of having access to an appetizing diet. In addition to observing that those animals ate less, researchers have found that the brains of the animals showed scarce appetite-stimulating molecules but rather many appetite-suppressing ones.
In America, it is no surprise to see obese people. They know they are obese, they just don't care. In Britain, you see just as many obese people, but they don't care because they don't think they are obese. They don't even think they are 'very overweight'.
Fewer than 10 percent of clinical obese Brits think they have a weight problem.
In results from a 2012 survey of around 2000 adults published in
BMJ Open, only 11 percent of obese women acknowledged they were "obese", with most describing themselves as "very overweight" or "just right". At least they know those positive body image campaigns are working.
