News Articles

Just a few short years ago, sugar growers and packagers had to have felt pretty good. Thanks to a rash of suspect epidemiological claims about high-fructose corn syrup, and then marketing claims and labels touting a lack of HFCS (even pancake syrup, made of corn syrup, got labels saying it was not HFCS), they had to feel good about the future.
No more. The low-fat, low-calorie, gluten-free diet craze has also clearly turned on sugar, if New York Times stories are the barometer for that demographic. And it is.

A new study using snow during a Minnesota blizzard gave researchers new insight into the airflow around large wind turbines.
Thanks to subsidies, wind turbines are not going away until at least February of 2017, so improving wind energy efficiency is essential, especially in wind farms where airflows from many large wind turbines interact with each other, a problem that no one included in estimates of cost versus value.

Erythritol is the sweetener most people in the western world have never heard about. It can only be produced with the help of special kinds of yeast in highly concentrated molasses but it has a number of advantages: it does not make you fat, it does not cause tooth decay, it has no effect on the blood sugar and, unlike other 'artificial' sweeteners, it does not have a laxative effect.
Erythritol is more common in Asia and researchers at TU Vienna have developed a method that could make it popular in the US and Europe - they can produce it from ordinary straw with the help of a mold fungus. The experiments have been a big success, and now the procedure will be optimized for industry.

Can emotional states be measured quantitatively?
A team of researchers at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea has developed a flexible, wearable 20mm x 20mm polymer sensor that can directly measure the degree and occurrence of  piloerection
- commonly known as goose bumps, which is caused by sudden changes in body temperature or emotional states. 
Interesting science and technology, but also a dream for politicians and advertisers. Imagine a world in which real-time physical and emotional response helped to determine the experience of political campaigns, online ads or the temperature in the room. 

Around 165 million years ago, a bizarre parasite lived in the freshwater lakes of present-day Inner Mongolia - fly larva with a thorax formed entirely like a sucking plate.
With this odd thorax, the animal could adhere to salamanders and suck their blood with its mouthparts formed like a sting. To date no insect is known that is equipped with a similar specialised design. 

Mental fitness tools are all the rage. Companies are pushing out various brain games that claim they can boost cognitive powers. Do they work? Most studies say no but a new paper finds that playing a puzzle game like Cut the Rope for as little as an hour a day led to improved executive functions.
Executive functions in the brain are important for making decisions in everyday life when you have to deal with sudden changes in your environment – better known as thinking on your feet. An example would be when the traffic light turns amber and a driver has to decide in an instant if he will be able to brake in time or if it is safer to travel across the intersection.

We can't even define dark matter, other than it being some blanket term for something that must exist due to unexplainable gravitational influence on the movements and appearance of stars or galaxies. Based on indirect evidence, astronomers believe that dark matter is the dominant type of matter in the Universe – everything else has been conjecture. But astronomers using high-energy observatories believe they may have discovered a clue that hints at this elusive invisible ingredient. 

Some studies have suggested a link between cannabis use and schizophrenia, but it has remained unclear whether this association is due to cannabis directly increasing the risk of the disorder. 

Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use is higher amongst people with schizophrenia than in the general population. Schizophrenia affects approximately 1 in 100 people and people who use cannabis are about twice as likely to develop the disorder. The most common symptoms of schizophrenia are delusions (false beliefs) and auditory hallucinations (hearing voices). The exact cause is unknown. A combination of physical, genetic, psychological and environmental factors can make people more likely to develop the disorder.

Smartphones are everywhere, and they may tell something about you that you didn't realize could be told.
When we touch things we give it our 'germs' and that knowledge could tell researchers something about our personal microbial world. Our phones can be biological and environmental sensors.

It was once the case that computer security for users was a non-issue. Most break-ins of networks involved someone local, not a brute force password discovery. Now, remote hackers in China are constantly hammering US sites using automated tools.
Password security involves a trade-off; complex is good but too complex and people will write it down, which is bad. A new alternative called  'Facelock' is based on the psychology of face recognition.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is huge, a 1.7 million-square-kilometer, 2-mile thick layer of ice that covers Greenland.
In the last 40 years, ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet has increased four-fold, contributing to global sea level rise. Some of the melting at the surface of the ice sheet is due to a warmer atmosphere but the ocean's role in driving ice loss largely has been a mystery.
A new paper in Nature Geoscience sheds new light on the connection between the ocean and Greenland's outlet glaciers, and provides important data for future estimates of how fast the ice sheet might melt and how much mass could be lost. 

 Lavado cocoa is primarily composed of polyphenols, antioxidants also found in fruits and vegetables. Some studies have suggested that they prevent degenerative diseases of the brain and a new study
in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found that a specific preparation of Lavado may reduce damage to nerve pathways seen in Alzheimer's disease patients' brains long before they develop symptoms.
The researchers used mice genetically engineered to mimic Alzheimer's disease and it was found that the Lavado cocoa extract prevents the protein β-amyloid- (Aβ) from gradually forming sticky clumps in the brain, which are known to damage nerve cells as Alzheimer's disease progresses.