Coffee provides more than just a morning jolt; that steaming cup of java is also the number one source of antioxidants in the U.S. diet, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Scranton (Pa.). Their study was described today at the 230th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.
The world’s only searchable database for all four groups of land vertebrates launches today on WWF’s web site, worldwildlife.org. Wildfinder is the only online, map-driven tool to cover the entire globe. “For the first time the geographic ranges of 26,000 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians can be found at a single site,” said Eric Dinerstein, WWF’s Vice-President for Science. “This kind of information is critical for studies in ecology, biogeography, conservation biology and natural history. Before Wildfinder, finding these data might require a time-consuming search of several different references. Now, they are available with just a few mouse clicks.”
What is the mysterious dark energy that’s causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate? Is it some form of Einstein’s famous cosmological constant, or is it an exotic repulsive force, dubbed “quintessence,” that could make up as much as three-quarters of the cosmos? Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Dartmouth College believe there is a way to find out.
Severely restricting calories over decades may add a few years to a human life span, but will not enable humans to live to 125 and beyond, as many have speculated, evolutionary biologists report. “Our message is that suffering years of misery to remain super-skinny is not going to have a big payoff in terms of a longer life,” said UCLA evolutionary biologist John Phelan. “I once heard someone say caloric restriction may not make you live forever, but it sure would seem like it. Try to maintain a healthy body weight, but don’t deprive yourself of all pleasure. Moderation appears to be a more sensible solution.”
Part 1 was posted under media and entertainment as a heads-up to an upcoming book called The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. The book deals more closely with energy and environment than any other Science Blog category, so I’m posting the full review as it appears on my Science Shelf website here.
If you want to buy the book from Amazon.com through the Science Shelf, click here.
The mere mention of a stressful word like “wheeze” can activate two brain regions in asthmatics during an attack, and this brain activity may be associated with more severe asthma symptoms, according to a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and collaborators.
In a surprising development, a research team led by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has found that a class of experimental anti-cancer drugs also shows promise in laboratory studies for treating a fatal genetic disorder that causes premature aging.
Even if you don’t join up at http://www.chemistry.org/ you get access to current and past issues of the newsletter, chemistry headlines, and a Shockwave interactive Periodic Table. All by itself, the animated Periodic Table is good for hours (and hours) of fun.
This really fits in several Science Blog categories besides brain and behavior, since it is a review of an upcoming book (media and entertainment) about members of the animal kingdom, and it ultimately connects to understanding human culture (anthropology). Readers of all those sections will be interested in discovering Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are by Frans de Waal.
In a turbulent era of 1960s Cold War confrontations, Moon race headlines, and war in southeast Asia, eight test pilots quietly flew the radical X-15 rocket plane out of the atmosphere and into the record books, earning astronaut status. Until Aug. 23, 2005, three of those early astronaut test pilots never received official recognition of their lofty membership as astronauts because only the military had astronaut wings to confer on their pilots at that time. Civilian NASA pilots had no such badge.
One of the most devastating diseases in sub-Saharan Africa almost disappeared in the late 1950s. That disease, African sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis, largely succumbed to heroic public health efforts — including relocating entire villages. But in the past several decades, because of post-colonial turmoil, the catastrophic illness has come back to ravage parts of Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sudan and other countries. In some regions, the tsetse fly-borne infection rivals or exceeds the toll AIDS takes.
MIT scientists have developed a new dye that could offer noninvasive early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, a discovery that could aid in monitoring the progression of the disease and in studying the efficacy of new treatments to stop it. Today, doctors can only make a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s-currently the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States-through a postmortem autopsy of the brain. “Before you can cure Alzheimer’s, you have to be able to diagnose it and monitor its progress very precisely,” said Timothy Swager, leader of the work and a professor in MIT’s Department of Chemistry. “Otherwise it’s hard to know whether a new treatment is working or not.”
Dust from asteroids entering the atmosphere may influence Earth’s weather more than previously believed, researchers have found. In a study to be published this week in the journal Nature, scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, the University of Western Ontario, the Aerospace Corporation, and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories found evidence that dust from an asteroid burning up as it descended through Earth’s atmosphere formed a cloud of micron-sized particles significant enough to influence local weather in Antarctica.
Everyone knows that a good weight-loss program combines diet and exercise, but a new University of Illinois study reports that exercise is much more effective when it’s coupled with a protein-rich diet. “There’s an additive, interactive effect when a protein-rich diet is combined with exercise. The two work together to correct body composition; dieters lose more weight, and they lose fat, not muscle,” said Donald Layman, a U of I professor of food science and human nutrition.
Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems by Marion and Thorton
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After reading this article, you might never look at trash bags the same way again. We all use plastic trash bags; they’re so common that we hardly give them a second thought. So who would have guessed that a lowly trash bag might hold the key to sending humans to Mars? Most household trash bags are made of a polymer called polyethylene. Variants of that molecule turn out to be excellent at shielding the most dangerous forms of space radiation. Scientists have long known this. The trouble has been trying to build a spaceship out of the flimsy stuff.
After a dry, dusty day exploring Mars, it’s easy to imagine how delicious a fresh baked potato or steamed carrots might taste to a hardworking astronaut. Homegrown vegetables would not only be a nice alternative to freeze dried meals, but they’d help provide a constant supply of food for exploration crews while on the planet. At NASA’s Space Life Sciences Lab at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a team of engineers are devising ways to keep an astronaut’s pantry stocked by designing greenhouses to grow vegetables on barren Mars.
