Gene writes: “I’ve read that toxic chemicals get stored in our fat cells and that when you lose weight, these are released into your body. But all the sources I can find are companies selling detox products. Is there any truth to this claim or is this just another scam to separate us from our hard-earned money?” What is a Toxin? Before we Gene’s excellent questions, let’s talk about this word “toxin....
The key to understanding how languages evolved may lie in their structure, not their vocabularies, a new report suggests. Findings published today in the journal Science indicate that a linguistic technique that borrows some features from evolutionary biology tools can unlock secrets of languages more than 10,000 years old. Because vocabularies change so quickly, using them to trace how languages evolve over time can only reach back about 8,000 to 10,000 years....
The U.S. government has begun auctioning off blocks of wireless radio frequencies to be used for the next-generation communications network known as 5G. But some of these frequencies lie close to those that satellites use for crucial Earth observations—and meteorologists are worried that 5G transmissions could interfere with their data collection. Unless regulators or telecommunications companies take steps to reduce the risk of interference, Earth-observing satellites flying over areas of the United States with 5G wireless coverage won’t be able to detect concentrations of water vapour in the atmosphere accurately....
If the sign of a successful scientific theory is that you get more out of it than you put in, then the most successful of all must be Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Starting from a few simple principles and earthy thought experiments, such as what would happen if you got stuck in a falling elevator, general relativity predicts everything we know about gravity and much we never suspected. In the latest example, John Swain of Northeastern University suggests that it might be possible to build a gravitational transformer that transfers kinetic energy just as an electrical transformer transfers electrical energy....
In the hostile environment of a bubbling volcanic hot spring, a team of researchers at Portland State University in Oregon has discovered a new viral genome that seems to be the product of recombination between a DNA virus and an RNA virus — a natural chimaera not seen before. Their findings appeared on 19 April in the journal Biology Direct. “It’s a mythological beast of a virus, but it actually exists,” says virologist Ken Stedman, who presented his lab’s findings at NASA’s Astrobiology Conference on 17 April in Atlanta, Georgia....
Every once in a while biologists come to realize that what was at one time regarded as a minor and relatively obscure cellular process is, in fact, of central importance. Not only is the process ubiquitous, but by virtue of that ubiquity it also plays a role in a broad range of normal and disease states. So it was with the discovery of the role of nitric oxide in the circulatory system, a discovery that led to a Nobel Prize, as well as to many beneficial drugs....
In the cutthroat business of generic drug manufacturing it’s the little things that can bolster a company’s bottom line—like fabricating data about quality instead of fully testing products. Some major drug plants in India that exported medications to the U.S., it seems, did just that. Such shoddy practices can lead to medicine that does not perform as it should or, worse, causes harmful side effects. In recent years these kinds of incidents have prompted the U....
A puzzling alien planet is the closest thing to an Earth twin in size and composition known beyond our solar system, though it’s far too hot to support life, scientists say. The exoplanet Kepler-78b, whose supertight orbit baffles astronomers, is just 20 percent wider and about 80 percent more massive than Earth, with a density nearly identical to that of our planet, two research teams report in separate papers published online today (Oct....
Imagine being deep in conversation at a cocktail party, while all around you other guests are trading war stories and gossip. To make sense of all the noise (that is, properly process the scene and know where to focus one’s attention), the brain has to take in and integrate all the sensory clues. Classical neuroscience dictates that information gathered by each sense is synthesized after being processed in proprietary areas. But, recent research suggests that the integration of signals must come earlier, so that, for instance, a face can be matched with a voice, a sound with a touch, a smell with a taste....
Cloud-borne bacteria may be to blame for rain, snow and hail because they affect the way water molecules bind. Does that mean snowballs are germ warfare? Trials of two different drugs show promise in treating advanced melanoma, which is usually fatal. NASA finds “a significant amount” of water on the moon, heightening the practicality of a future lunar base just as the space shuttle program draws to a close. The Milky Way may contain many billions of stray, Jupiter-size planets that were kicked out of their solar systems and left to wander space on their own....
This is the second of a four-part series. Read the first part here. GOOSE LAKE, Northwest Territories—In a fragile landscape where footsteps leave an imprint for years, Jennifer Baltzer stood and surveyed the surrounding bog of green sphagnum moss. Black spruce trees tilted here and there like drunkards. Using a metal rod, Baltzer, an ecologist with Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, pierced the ground near a spruce. “You are jamming into ice there,” she said....
The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may contain something never before seen from the depths of the Mesozoic era: degraded remnants of dinosaur DNA....
The triumphant landing of the Perseverance rover has inspired all Americans, and indeed much of the world. President Biden should follow it up by launching a program to send humans to Mars. While robotic rovers are wonderful, they cannot resolve the fundamental scientific question that Mars poses to humanity, which relate to the potential prevalence and diversity of life in the universe. The early Mars was very much like the early Earth; a rocky, warm and wet planet with a carbon dioxide–dominated atmosphere....
Up until the 1980s, Xerox used volatile organic compounds as solvents for cleaning. Needless to say, some of them spilled and ended up contaminating the ground—and groundwater—beneath manufacturing facilities. By the company’s own count, there were 68 such sites. When faced with the task of cleaning up, Xerox opted to tinker with the existing technology to do the job—and in the process hit on a way to radically speed the cleanup....
What’s in a face? A chimpanzee’s face, that is. Humans, it seems, apparently remain genetically and culturally close enough to their primate relatives, and are able to accurately guess an individual chimp’s personality just by observing it s face. This discovery sheds light on the evolution of our faces, and could yield insights into the nature of autism. There’s an old saying that you can’t judge a book by its cover, meaning that one shouldn’t judge someone or something based solely on appearances....
By Anne Harding NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Reduced sexual activity could cause a dip in testosterone levels in older men, new findings suggest. Among men 70 and older, those who reported a decline in sexual activity and desire over a two-year period also showed small declines in serum testosterone, Dr. David Handelsman of the ANZAC Research Institute at the University of Sydney and Concord Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues found....
The human brain weighs only about three pounds, or roughly 2 percent of the average adult body mass. Yet its cells consume 20 to 25 percent of the body’s total energy. In the process, inordinate amounts of potentially toxic protein wastes and biological debris are generated. Each day, the adult brain eliminates seven grams of worn-out proteins that must be replaced with newly made ones, a figure that translates into the replacement of about half a pound of detritus a month and nearly six pounds, twice the brain’s own weight, over the course of a year....
On October 31 world leaders will descend on Glasgow, Scotland, for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in a last-ditch effort to defuse the climate emergency by limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Reaching that level would still bring violent storms, deep flooding, gripping droughts and problematic sea-level rise, but it would avert even more severe consequences. Global temperature has risen by nearly 1.1 degrees C since the industrial revolution....
The broad-shouldered summit of Mauna Kea holds many meanings for many people: For astronomers, it’s a high-altitude playground of stars, among the best places on Earth to explore the firmament with minimal atmospheric distortion. For environmentalists, it’s a “sky island ecosystem” that hosts rare and altitude-sensitive species, including the wekiu bug found nowhere else in the world. For Hawaiian spiritual practitioners, it is the home of gods, the most holy place on Hawaii’s big island....
There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. This saying received empirical support in social psychology in the 1920s, when a series of studies showed that groups were more accurate than their individual members. In an early demonstration of the phenomenon, for example, Columbia University’s Hazel Knight asked students to estimate the temperature in a classroom. When the estimates were averaged together, the resulting group answer was more accurate than the estimate of a typical member....
