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.
Online gambling has exploded in the last decades and several states, hungry for more revenue without direct taxes, have approved measures to legalize various types of gambling.
Critics contend that will lead to more crime and more broken homes due to gambling problems.
A new University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) survey says that isn't the case. They interviewed 2,613 people in 1999-2000, and the second survey interviewed 2,963 people in 2011-13. Individuals were asked about their participation in a broad range of gambling activities, including raffles, office pools, pulltabs, bingo, cards, pool, gambling machines, casinos, lottery, Internet gambling, and sports, horse or dog track betting.
When it comes to our senses, there is a lot of diversity in people. One person might have 10X the taste buds on their tongue as another person, for example, so they are more sensitive to bitters and sweets. But is there a quantifiable gender difference in the ability to hear or taste?
A new paper says women smell better than men - not as in their odor, but in their ability to detect and evaluate odors. If so, they postulate that sex differences in olfactory detection may play a role in differentiated social behaviors and may be connected to one's perception of smell, which is naturally linked to associated experiences and emotions.
The big question is whether or not any olfactory superiority is cognitive or emotional rather than perceptual.
Each year nearly 2,000,000 Americans suffer osteoporosis-related fractures but after it happens, 53 percent of women received Dual X-ray Absorptiometry, the preferred technique for measuring bone mineral density and therefore osteoporosis, compared with only 18 percent of men.
As the population ages, fractures are expected to increase dramatically, placing a major burden on the health care system and a new study from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) suggests that bias against men in favor of post-menopausal women will lead to lower quality of care and higher costs.
Nature enjoys variety, that is why it seems like evolution must have been drinking during the creation of some of the crazier things in biology.
There is no intelligent reason why snakes and lizards have two genitalia while birds and people have one - or why the former group's paired structures are located somewhat at the level of the limbs while with humans and birds it appears a bit further down. In fact, snake and lizard genitalia are derived from tissue that gives rise to hind legs, while mammalian genitalia are derived from the tail bud. But despite such noteworthy contrasts, these structures are functionally analogous and express similar genes.
How do these equivalent structures arise from different starting tissues?
Fashion and beauty magazines are tremendously successful, as are television ad campaigns where women who are 5'10" and weigh 120 lbs. model jeans. Clearly, most women do not look like that and never will, so why do they buy magazines and clothes that remind them of it?
While critics insist that Americans, the fattest people on the planet, are under too much pressure to be thin, the truth is instead that they like role models, no differently than how some parents will buy a particular magazine if it has a female scientist on the cover.
Researchers have witnessed how football-shaped carbon molecules known as
buckyballs
arrange themselves into ultra-smooth layers, all in real time, and by piecing that together with theoretical simulations, the investigators believe they can advance the field of plastic electronics.
Buckyballs are spherical molecules which consist of 60 carbon atoms (C60), named such because they are reminiscent of American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. With their structure of alternating pentagons and hexagons, they also resemble tiny molecular footballs.
The structure of an asymmetrical ABC transporter complex has been determined with the aid of a high-resolution cryo-electron microscope.
ABC transporters cause bacteria and other pathogens to become resistant to antibiotics. They can also help cancer cells to defend themselves against cytostatic agents and thus determine whether chemotherapy will succeed.
"ABC transporters causes diseases such as cystic fibrosis, while on the other hand they are responsible for the immune system recognising infected cells or cancer cells," explains Professor Robert Tampé from the Institute for Biochemistry at the Goethe University.
A serious epidemic of poliomyelitis that struck the Republic of the Congo in 2010 has been identified as a vaccine-resistant strain of polio. The epidemic affected 445 people in the city of Pointe-Noire, the economic capital of the country, killing almost half of them. The researchers fear the emergence of other strains against which vaccines would have little effect.
Like coffee but your liberal guilt won't let you enjoy it if the energy to heat the water might have come from natural gas or nuclear energy?There may be hope for the future. Researchers at Lancaster University have used a Raspberry Pi to determine the optimum time for a cup of tea in terms of impact on the environment - it only allows a kettle to boil when the University’s wind turbine is producing electricity. Windy Brew is the brainchild of Dr. Will Simm, Dr. Peter Newman, Dr. Maria Angela Ferrario and Dr. Stephen Forshaw. It envisions a future where man does not reshape nature, but where we are hostage to it.
A team of scholars say genetic markers that may help in identifying individuals who could benefit from the alcoholism treatment drug acamprosate - patients carrying these genetic variants have longer periods of abstinence during the first three months of acamprosate treatment.
It's common sense that if you have ne mess and add another mess, you have created an even bigger mess.
But in arcane statistics, economics and social science, a bigger mess can lead to more order - a concept known as antifragility.
In a paper published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, researchers found a counterintuitive interplay between two different types of disorder. One is thermodynamic disorder, or entropy. The other is the structural disorder—defects in an idealized system that can change its properties.
Tectonic plates, which make up the outer layer of the earth, are rigid. It is giant layers of rock, after all. But that is a bit of a simplification. They are not rigid and don't fit together as nicely as we imagine, according to a new paper in Geology by Corné Kreemer, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and his colleague Richard Gordon of Rice University, which quantifies deformation of the Pacific plate and challenges the central approximation of the plate tectonic paradigm that plates are rigid.
