You love your dog. Does your dog love you back? A group of Swedish and Danish researchers went looking for an answer. More specifically, knowing that dogs are highly attuned to cues from humans, the researchers suspected that dogs belonging to owners who felt they had a great relationship with their pets would also perceive that the relationship was close, perhaps because the owners’ attitude would lead to a high frequency of positive interactions between the duo....
The list of celebrities who have largely disappeared from public view because of Parkinson’s disease has become familiar to many: boxer Muhammad Ali, former attorney general Janet Reno, actor Michael J. Fox. Pope John Paul II and others have died from the brain disorder. But they are only the most visible of its many victims: today four million people worldwide have the disease, with 500,000 to one million in North America....
(Reuters) - A meandering stream of volcanic lava on Hawaii’s Big Island has resumed its slow march through forest lands toward residential communities in its path, sending up heavy smoke as it burns trees, officials said on Monday. The lava flow, which first bubbled out of the continuously erupting Kilauea Volcano on June 27, had come to a standstill in late September, but resumed its slow crawl forward last week and has since covered about 450 yards, a Hawaii County spokesman said....
Physicists recently confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had indeed found a Higgs boson last July, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science. The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart. “If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news,” says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois....
After 14 years of construction and $8 billion, the world’s mightiest particle accelerator is about to get a taste of what it was built for. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), nearing readiness outside Geneva, Switzerland, was designed to smash protons together at the highest energies ever achieved in hopes of unlocking new secrets of the universe. But to date, all that’s traveled through its circular beam pipe are ping-pong balls to test for obstructions....
By Janelle WeaverFreeloading crows start to contribute to group efforts when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows.Carrion crows (Corvus corone) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding and caring for the young. Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don’t seem to help at all. Puzzled about the reasons for this leniency, scientists have suggested that dominants may indirectly benefit from the survival and future reproduction of lazy relatives, and that larger groups–even those filled with dallying birds–may have a lower risk of predation or be more efficient at foraging....
TRICKS OF THE TRADE Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind by Alex Stone. HarperCollins, 2012 ($26.99) A magician’s psychological subterfuge requires years to master, as Stone writes in Fooling Houdini, a foray into the underbelly of the magic culture. As an aspiring magician, Stone quickly realizes he needs to do more than practice tricks. He has to penetrate this unique subculture, in which apprentices seek out masters to hone their performance and learn codes of conduct....
The current test for botulin–the potent neurotoxin responsible for paralyzing botulism–involves injecting a mouse with a suspicious sample and waiting to see if it dies. The test is crude, imprecise and can take up to three days to deliver results. But after 72 hours death may have already come for victims of the deadly toxin. Now researchers have discovered an exquisitely sensitive test that kills no animals and takes just three hours to complete....
Let’s say a driver approaches a red light at 80 kilometers per hour (50 miles per hour) and coasts to slow down, then the light turns green and he or she floors the accelerator. As the car slows down, the transmission automatically downshifts into lower gears, but a sudden command to increase speed reverses that process and the transmission has to find the proper gear for quick acceleration. With new technology introduced in the past couple of years to meet upcoming fuel economy standards, drivers of a small handful of the latest Ford, Chevy, GMC, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi models may feel engine hesitation when they goose the accelerator, which is a source of frustration, at minimum, to many drivers....
The news this morning from Digital Foundry that Sony’s PlayStation 4 will allegedly require a hefty chunk of its memory to run the console’s OS – 3.5GB of its celebrated 8GB total – has a few scratching their heads and many a fanboy rushing to the front lines. But we shouldn’t be wasting our breath on hardware comparisons that miss the point. The argument goes that so much memory-hogging kills the soaring ambitions Sony had set out for developers....
By Chloe McIvor of Nature magazine Preschool children spontaneously invent experiments in their play, according to research published this month in Cognition. The findings suggest that basic scientific principles help very young brains to learn about the world. Psychologists have been drawing a comparison between cognitive development and science for years – an idea referred to as ’the child as scientist’. But recently scientists have been trying to discover whether this is more than just a neat analogy....
Japan was rocked by a series of earthquakes today about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Tokyo that injured two, cut off power to some 2,100 homes, and left the country on high alert for possible aftershocks. The largest quake hit at 1:45 a.m. local time in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Ibaraki Prefecture and measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, but Japan’s meteorological agency told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that it does not expect the tremors to result in a tsunami....
In 2011, Emmanuel Nnaemeka Nnadi needed help to sequence some drug-resistant fungal pathogens. A PhD student studying microbiology in Nigeria, he did not have the expertise and equipment he needed. So he turned to ResearchGate, a free social-networking site for academics, and fired off a few e-mails. When he got a reply from Italian geneticist Orazio Romeo, an international collaboration was born. Over the past three years, the two scientists have worked together on fungal infections in Africa, with Nnadi, now at Plateau State University in Bokkos, shipping his samples to Romeo at the University of Messina for analysis....
The first thing you might notice about the breathtaking new volume from German publisher TASCHEN, The NASA Archives, is the weight of the book itself. The care required to extract the 12-pound tome from its glossy case hints you might be in for a daunting experience. The subject matter is just as heavy: the triumphs, tragedies and as-yet-unrealized dreams bound up in the 60-year history of America’s voyages into space, all told via stunning photos, illustrations and firsthand accounts....
The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) that would have graced the rolling prairies of Texas would have boasted energy 20 times larger than any accelerator ever constructed and might have been revealing whatever surprises that lay beyond the Higgs, allowing the U.S. to retain dominance in high-energy physics. Except the story didn’t play out according to script. Twenty years ago, on October 21, 1993, Congress officially killed the project, leaving behind more than vacant tunnel in the Texas earth....
Monkeypox cases continue to rise throughout the world, with more than 13,000 cases reported so far. The virus, which is rarely lethal but causes painful sores on the skin, normally lives in rodents and other animals but is now spreading rapidly among humans around the world. Monkeypox outbreaks have occurred several times since the 1970s. An outbreak in Nigeria in 2017 infected an estimated 122 people. And a more deadly version of the virus from Central Africa may have infected nearly 19,000 people in that region over the past decade....
JANUARY 1959 A VOICE FROM THE SCOPES TRIAL— “‘This is Clarence Darrow,’ said the voice at the other end of the wire, ‘I suppose you have been reading the papers, so you know Bryan and his outfit are prosecuting that young fellow Scopes. Well, Malone, Colby and I have put ourselves in a mess by offering to defend. We don’t know much about evolution. We don’t know whom to call as witnesses....
As U.S. law enforcement escalates its battle to keep criminals from concealing their communication on digital devices or “going dark,” Apple CEO Tim Cook is digging in his heels in resisting government directives to support their investigations. A federal judge in California on Tuesday ordered Apple to step up efforts to help the FBI search the locked iPhone 5c used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who, along with wife Tashfeen Malik, is suspected of a mass shooting at a December 2 holiday party last year in San Bernardino, Calif....
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an electrical disorder, or rather one of impaired myelin, a fatty, insulating substance that better allows electric current to bolt down our neurons and release the neurotransmitters that help run our bodies and brains. Researchers have speculated for some time that the myelin degradation seen in MS is due, at least in part, to autoimmune activity against the nervous system. Recent work presented at the MS Boston 2014 Meeting suggests that this aberrant immune response begins in the gut....
Fracking for oil and natural gas can contaminate drinking water under “some circumstances,” the Environmental Protection Agency said in a report released Tuesday, which changes a previous finding that the drilling process does not cause “widespread, systemic” effects. The final report from the agency concludes more than five years of research and backs down from its previous determination that fracking is not a systemic threat to drinking water nationwide. EPA science adviser Thomas Burke said there were significant gaps in data that limited the agency’s ability to examine effects on drinking water both locally and nationally....
