Category: Tech
-
Worms Live in Methane Ice on Bottom of Gulf of Mexico
Keep your fart jokes to yourself: The discovery of dense colonies of these one-to-two-inch-long, flat, pinkish worms burrowing into a mushroom-shaped mound of methane seeping up from the sea floor raises speculation that the worms may be a new species with a pervasive and as yet unknown influence on these energy-rich gas deposits. The worms […]
-
Scientists Find Marburg Virus Hot Zone
The vector is always the hardest to find: The natural reservoir for Marburg virus has been the subject of much speculation and scientific investigation. In demonstrating evidence of infection in this common species of fruit bat, the paper provides new insight into a deadly disease that has long baffled epidemiologists, ecologists and virologists, and in […]
-
Scientists Identify Taste Receptors in Your Intestine
Ice cream! The taste receptor T1R3 and the taste G protein gustducin are critical to sweet taste in the tongue. Research now shows these two sweet-sensing proteins are also expressed in specialized taste cells of the gut where they sense glucose within the intestine. “Cells of the gut taste glucose through the same mechanisms used […]
-
English-speakers Unable to See Another's Perspective
Using a Connect Four-like game: People raised in individualist cultures such as North America are less able to imagine the world from someone else’s perspective than people raised in collectivist cultures such as China, according to new research. By devising a simple board game, which players viewed from opposite angles, psychologist Boaz Keysar of the […]
-
Human Evolution Family Tree Really a Bush
Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early humans evolved. The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the […]
-
Parent-Child Play Relatively New, Distinctly American
From Boston Globe: Actually, parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy. And three-fourths of the world’s current population would still find that mother’s behavior kind of dotty. American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries — a recent byproduct of […]
-
Scientists Find Drug to Remove Emotional Stress of a Memory
Headline is a bit alarmist – they aren’t erasing the memory – they are softening the emotional impact: When you remember old memories they can become ‘unstored’ and then have to be ‘restored’. As the memory is getting restored, we gave patients a drug that turns down the emotional part of the memory. It left […]
-
DARPA Plans Aircraft That Flies 5 Years Non-Stop
That’s where we’ll put the prisons! They announced the VULTURE program last week which is an initiative to develop an airborne platform that is heavier-than-air and can remain aloft for 5 continuous years, this announcement is to potential offerors (or companies interested in contracting for some of the R&D). This would be an exploratory development […]
-
Richard Dawkins Aims at the Left
After giving fundies a good thrashing: He told a packed Hay Festival audience that although the threat from creationists and the religious right is well-documented, science is also under threat from the other end of the political spectrum: “I think we face an equal but much more sinister challenge from the left, in the shape […]
-
High-Testosterone Assholes Feel Rewarded by Being Assholes
This could explain a lot: Participants who were high in testosterone relative to other members of their sex learned the sequence that was followed by an angry face better than the other sequences, while participants low in testosterone did not show this learning advantage for sequences that were reinforced by an angry face. While high-testosterone […]