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.
The camera and lens that Wally Schirra and Gordo Cooper carried into space during their Mercury Program flights is going up for auction in a few weeks. Wally Schirra, a known camera enthusiast, said the Hasselblad camera they used was held in highest regard by photographers for its superior engineering, craftsmanship, and top-of-the-line quality. He reportedly purchased the Hasselblad 500c camera at a Houston photo supply shop in 1962, and brought it back to NASA for mission use preparation.
An organic compound called limonene provides the pleasant smell of cleaning products and air fresheners but some byproducts of these sweet-smelling compounds could be adding to the air while they remove germs and odors.
By cleaning your house, you could be adding smog and ozone to it.
Aircraft propelled by beams of light rather than fuel? Laser-propulsion just got a step closer thanks to a new method for improving the thrust systems developed by physicists Yuri Rezunkov of the Institute of Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering and Alexander Schmidt of the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute in Saint Petersburg.
Currently, the maximum speed of a spacecraft is limited by the amount of solid or liquid fuel that it can carry. Achieving higher speeds means that more fuel must be burned—fuel that, inconveniently, has to be carried by the craft and hefted into space. These burdensome loads can be reduced, however, if a laser—one located at a remote location, and not actually on the spacecraft—were used to provide additional propulsive force.
How can the international community know it is election time in the United States? A whole raft of claims about science and why you should vote one way or the other will be produced. Some people have even claimed politics is hard-wired, which would mean that American Republicans and Democrats are distinct species, having branched off from the rest of the world in 1860.While biologists laugh at the idea that voting preferences are biological, sociologists, psychologists and political scientists continue to match surveys to science and claim it might be true. What if only tall people voted Democrat and they only married other Democrats? Would that not shape evolution? Democrats would be tall and imposing and psychologists would say they will get their way more often.
The United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) is very popular with people who have no serious issues, because it is free - if they have to wait a few weeks, it is no big deal. For doctors, it isn't so great. The cost to attend medical school is not high, around $15,000 per year, but in their first year they will only earn about $30,000 annually. A specialist is almost 50% higher and that is part of the reason why the UK is losing General Practioners, at the bottom of the wage scale, faster than they can replace them.
Ebola is causing a lot of concern, a few instances in the United States were enough to lead to calls to overthrow the FDA vaccine approval process and the White House declared that the United States Department of Health and Human Services was unqualified to manage a handful of cases in America so they put a lawyer in charge as an Ebola czar. The National Institutes of Health said they could not fix the problem with the $330 billion they have gotten since 2001 but they are just exploiting an outbreak for personal gain also. In reality, the impact of disease outbreaks has been declining on a per capita basis for decades.
The far left in America loves government. Advocacy groups are always calling for new laws, new regulations, new bans and more layers of bureaucracy to put a stop to whatever they dislike. The right is increasingly suspicious of it, regarding every policy as a road to George Orwell's "1984".
That was not always the case. In the 1950s and '60s, it was the left who was on the right and the right was on the left. Government meant law and order and the right was opposed to anarchy and protests promoted by the left.
A diet rich in milk products is promoted as strengthening bones and reducing the likelihood of osteoporotic fractures, but dairy lobby marketing aside, actual research related to the benefits of milk for the prevention of fractures or influence on mortality rates has found evidence for and against.
A new study finds that high milk intake in women and men is not accompanied by a lower risk of fracture and instead may be associated with a higher rate of death.
It's great to insist that people should just accept science and medicine but it isn't really practical. The nature of coastal California is that they don't trust vaccines the way religious people in the American south do, Asians are going to believe in acupucture, and the French will think they can be allergic to Bt genetically modified plants but not Bt organic pesticide spray.
Historically, culture has been considered an impediment to health rather than a central determining feature of it. However, a new paper in
It's not easy to blame childhood obesity on sunsets but scholars at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Bristol say that later daylight couldn't hurt - and they even defend daylight savings time, which most people can't find much good to say about.
The scholars analyzed the lifestyles of over 23,000 children aged 5-16 years in nine countries; England, Australia, USA, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, Brazil and Madeira and Portugal. They looked for associations between the time of sunset and physical activity levels, measured via waist-worn accelerometers; electronic devices that measure body movement.
In the United States, professional basketball, the NBA, opens its regular season tonight. That means at this time tomorrow there will be talk that some player 'flopped' - fell on the ground to draw a foul and get a chance at a free basket.
A new analysis has found that two-thirds of the falls examined by the group at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev were found to be intentional. And it happens a lot.
It happens so much because there is insufficient punishment for deception and teams are not doing the math. A cost/benefit analysis of "flopping" finds that 90 percent of the time no penalty is awarded, so as a strategy it is pointless.
Men who have had sex with more than 20 women have a 28% lower risk of getting prostate cancer than those who have had only one partner - but males having more than 20 male partners face a 100% higher risk of getting prostate cancer than those who have never slept with a man.
The results were obtained as part of the Montreal study PROtEuS (Prostate Cancer&Environment Study), in which 3,208 men responded to a questionnaire on, amongst other things, their sex lives. Of these men, 1,590 were diagnosed with prostate cancer between September 2005 and August 2009, while 1,618 men were part of the control group.
Risk Associated with Number of Partners
