As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Research

Climate Change to Kill a Quarter Million a Year

by
climate change - pixabay

In the coming decades, more than a quarter-million people may die each year as a result of climate change, according to a new review study. In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that climate change would lead to about 250,000 additional deaths each year between 2030 and 2050, from factors such as malnutrition, heat stress and malaria. But the new review, published Jan. 17 in The New England Journal of Medicine, said this is a “conservative estimate.” That’s because it fails to take into account other climate-related factors that could affect death rates — such as population displacement and … Read more

SCIENCE: We Can Now Rewrite Rat Memories

by
rat - pixabay

When Ivan Pavlov’s dog heard the ding of a bell, the pup started salivating in anticipation of his dinner. When professor Mary Torregrossa’s rats heard a similar tone, they craved cocaine. At least, some of them did — before Torregrossa and her colleagues rewrote their memories. Torregrossa studies the psychology of drug addiction and relapses at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (where she is also an associate professor of psychiatry). In a new study published Jan. 22 in the journal Cell Reports, Torregrossa and two of her colleagues set up a Pavlovian experiment in which a group of … Read more

Greenland May Soon Be Green Again – Live Science

by
Greenland - Sarah Das/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Greenland is melting faster today than it has at any time in the last 350 years, and probably much longer, new research finds. Surface melt from the icy island has increased 50 percent in the last 20 years compared with the early 1800s, before the industrial era, researchers report today (Dec. 5) in the journal Nature. The runoff alone is now contributing about a millimeter to the global average sea level per year, said study co-author Sarah Das, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Climate change has hit Greenland very hard recently, and the ice sheet is responding quickly,” … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Awesome

by

I have a personal opinion about Hell, if Hell exists, and it’s a floor stretching out for eternity. Covered in Lego. Yeah. That’s my definite version of Hell. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Lego. Those little blocks make for hours of a frustrating good time and these days come in some wild builds. The Space Shuttle build is my kidlet’s favorite. And that brings me to the point of this whole little ramble: kidlets and Lego. Every parent’s worst child-related fears come with some version of them swallowing a foreign object. How long until it passes? Will it … Read more

SPACE: Is Killer Ice Knocking Off Alien Life Forms?

by
ice - pixabay

There’s a new kind of ice. It forms at speeds of more than 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h), it lies deep beneath our feet, it could destroy hopes for alien life, and — finally — scientists understand how it works. Back in March, researchers writing in the journal Science revealed that they have found the first evidence for this ice, called “Ice VII.” Scientists had predicted its existence beforehand. Under the right conditions, it was believed, ice could form in a pool of water without a layer of heat at the leading edge of its growing surface. That — along with … Read more

SCIENCE: Space Shrinks Your Brain

by
astronaut brains - pixabay

Going to space does more than change the way you look at the world — it also changes your brain. In a new small study, published today (Oct. 24) as a Letter to the Editor in The New England Journal of Medicine, a team of researchers from Germany, Belgium and Russia detailed changes in the brains of 10 cosmonauts before and after long-term missions to space, finding “extensive” changes to the brain’s white and gray matter. What these changes mean for the cosmonauts is still an open question. “However, whether or not the extensive alterations shown in the gray and … Read more

TECH: How Close Are We to 2001’s AI Future?

by
Hal - 2001

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Movie audiences first heard these calmly intoned and ominous words in 1968, spoken by a spaceship’s intelligent computer in the science-fiction masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey.” With that one phrase, the computer named HAL 9000 confirmed that it could think for itself, and that it was prepared to terminate the astronauts who were planning to deactivate it. Fifty years after director Stanley Kubrick released his visionary masterpiece of space colonization, how close are humans to the future that he imagined, in which we partner with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that we ultimately … Read more

Will Superhumans Replace Us? Stephen Hawking Thought So

by
superhero - pixabay

Are we all going to be replaced? Stephen Hawking apparently thought so. In the grand tradition of famous physicists making claims about subjects beyond their scope of expertise, the great British theorist left behind a collection of essays in which he speculated about and predicted the human future. In one essay, published Oct. 14 in the Sunday Times, Hawking argued that humanity risks being replaced by genetically modified “superhumans.” Well-intentioned research designed to improve human health and human life, he wrote, will eventually be corrupted. People will start to modify humans to live longer, be smarter, or be more aggressive … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Hoax

by

The science side of humanities was rocked this month by the exposure of three hoaxers. I won’t publish their conclusions or anything, because that’s not really the point of this post, but you can find their nonsense here. The whole impetuous for their shenanigans was bullshit, from start to finish, in my opinion. What basically happened was these three found out about a study they didn’t like. In an effort to undermine the field that study came out of, as well as undermine the humanities in general, these hoaxers put out 20 fake papers to academic journals to see if … Read more

SCIENCE: The Human Eye Can See ‘Ghost Images’

by
eye - pixabay

Scientists have discovered that the human eye has a spooky ability. It can detect “ghost images.” These are images that are encoded in random patterns, previously thought only detectable by computer. But in a new paper posted online on the preprint server arXiv, scientists in Scotland at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow have found that the human eye itself can do the required computations. “Although the brain can’t individually see them, the eye is somehow detecting all of the patterns, and then keeping the information there and summing everything together,” said study co-author Daniele Faccio, a … Read more