The cheapest and easiest way to disinfect water? Sunlight. Just leave a clear glass or plastic bottle out in the sun for six hours. SODIS, or solar water disinfection, is an age-old method touted by the World Health Organization for areas where access to clean water is limited. UV rays in the sunlight tear apart the microbes to make water safe. Drink up!
SODIS is quite effective, but scientists have found two hacks that make the technique even better. One problem is that the water may be cloudy from sediment, which can be fixed with a dash of salt. NPR’s Salt blog explains:
No, this isn’t Photoshop or a gemstone-studded trinket—just an ear of corn. Seedsman Greg Schoen of the Seeds Trust got this “Glass Gems” corn from his “corn-teacher,” a part-Cherokee man in his 80s. He planted the seeds, had a gorgeous harvest last fall, and posted the posts on Seeds Trust’s Facebook page in October. Then last week, the photos of the gem-like corn got picked up on the internet and went viral. Good luck trying to get your hands on any seeds now…
But kernel color is a fascinating—dare we say, colorful—topic in the annals of genetics research. For one, why are there so many vibrant colors in a single ear of corn? You don’t usually see flowers of different colors on a single tree. Each kernel is actually a different corn plant (or the seed of one) with a unique mix of genes inherited from its parents. That’s why counting up kernels of different colors in the more familiar purple and yellow corn cobs is a common way of teaching how pigment genes are inherited in Mendelian genetics. Read the rest of this entry »
One sleepy person can start a bout of contagious yawning that quickly spreads through a room. But a new study suggests the effect may not be limited to the room’s human inhabitants: Dogs can “catch” yawns from people, the study found—especially their owners, hinting that pooches may empathize with familiar people.
When listening to recordings of people yawning, 12 of the 29 dogs in the study yawned themselves. It made a big difference, however, whom they heard: The dogs yawned more than four times as much when they heard their owner yawn as when they heard as a stranger.
You’d be surprised what’s in your lunch. When you look closer at what makes your American cheese melt well and your hotdog so delicious, you might cringe for a few minutes, but hopefully you also get curious about what other characteristics we like in our food and how food manufacturers have, for better or for worse, given our taste buds what they want.
Over at Wired, they’ve dissected Spam with Bacon, and what they find runs the gammut from “Hey, it’s cool that science can do that!” to “Maybe canned meat was a really bad idea.”
Just so it’s on your radar, New Yorkers: You won’t want to miss tomorrow night’s exciting discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences of how cutting-edge science and innovation are stimulated and sustained:
Moderated by Corey Powell, Editor-in-Chief of Discover Magazine, the panel will feature Jon Gertner, author of the recent bestselling book The Idea Factory; renowned theoretical physicist Brian Greene, PhD; technology investment expert Shelley Harrison, PhD; and MacArthur Genius Award-winning nanoscientist Michal Lipson, PhD.
Despite popular depictions on televisions and in film, scientific discoveries don’t always come as “Eureka!” moments after years of careful study and pursuit. A fair portion of scientific discoveries are the result of “that’s so crazy it just might work” thinking, or even, “this might fail, but we have to try it” ideas.
High-risk, high-reward science is defined by unique ideas and unconventional approaches that have the potential to create new models or fields within science and engineering or to radically change our understanding of a current concept. Such high-risk ideas may seem obvious in hindsight, but at the time they are unorthodox, impossible, or simply crazy. Yet there are organizations and individuals who make it their mission to identify and invest in these crazy and possibly brilliant ideas.
Join Research Corporation for Science Advancement, New York Academy of Sciences, and Discover Magazine in a thoughtful, honest, and wide-ranging conversation about what it takes to pursue unorthodox ideas and more importantly, what can we do to cultivate more creative leaps in science and technology.
Registration information is available here. See you there!
Image courtesy of _gee_ / flickr
The Xultun scribe’s chamber, with A, B, and C showing the locations of the calculations.
In a small closet-like chamber off a central plaza of the ancient Mayan city of Xultun, a scribe once sat with a paintbrush in hand.
On the north walls of the room, he painted an apparent self-portrait, facing a figure with an elaborate headdress, perhaps a ruler. But on adjacent walls, he and his successors, starting in about 800 C.E., painted and inscribed various astrological calculations. They are very similar to those found in the Dresden Codex, one of the most famous extant Mayan books, which contains numerous astrological and ritualistic cycles and is thought to have been copied from older books sometime between the 11th and 15th centuries. The markings on the scribe’s walls in Xultun, unveiled last week in a paper in Science, represent the earliest known depictions of some of these calculations.
When you’re trudging through the pouring rain to the office, it seems like the Earth possesses an infinite amount of water, a not-insignificant amount of which is dripping down your collar. But when you see an image like this one, produced by the USGS, it hammers home the reality of the situation: the water’s all spread out in a very thin layer, like a millimeter of frosting on a cake. If you gathered all the world’s water—from oceans, lakes, groundwater, water vapor, everything—into a sphere, it would have a diameter of 860 miles. That’s the distance between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas.
At Popular Science is a profile of food scientists given an impossible task: make year-old mashed potatoes taste good. Food that lasts a year on the shelf needs to be sterilized, and that is a battle against extremophiles. Our most effective weapon is a very blunt one—heat. 252 degrees Fahrenheit to be exact.
Writer Paul Adams tours a food science lab and gets a taste of “retort flavor” in his sterilized mashed potatoes. The unappetizing term refers to the retort, a machine that obliterates microbes and flavor in one fell (and very hot) swoop:
The potatoes look right, once we’ve fluffed them up a bit, but the wholesome earthy taste and smell of fresh potatoes is almost gone from the dish. In its place there’s a tired, wet-paper flavor with notes of old steam pipe. This side effect of confined high-heat cooking is known in the trade as “retort flavor.” Stuckey’s theory is that it’s just underlying parts of the flavor coming through. Before food is retorted, she says, the dank base notes present in it are masked in part “by the beautiful aromatic volatile notes that we take for granted. When the retort destroys these low-molecular-weight flavors, what’s left is the ugly insides.” Read the rest of this entry »
With glasses, contacts, and LASIK surgery, most of us nearsightedness folks don’t have to worry about squinting at the blackboard anymore. But the sheer prevalence of nearsightedness, or myopia, among Asian schoolchildren (in Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea) is stunning: 80 to 90% according to a recent review in the journal Lancet. In comparison, that number is just 20 to 30% in the UK. Myopia has also been on the rise in both Asia and Europe over the past few years.
While there are genes linked to myopia, its rising prevalence in both continents points to environmental causes. Namely, kids are spending more time hunched over screens and books instead of playing outdoors. In myopia, light coming into the eye can no longer focus at the retina because the eyeball has become too long. A body of research in humans and animals suggest that reading at close distances and lack of bright sunlight could cause elongated eyeballs.
But why care about radio waves if we have light and ultrasound? Radio waves have a couple distinct advantages over existing techniques.
In the current study, the radio waves didn’t heat up a whole patch of tissue or even a whole cell—it only affected specific pores in the cell, called TRPV1, that open in response to heat. To get this specificity, the scientists made special iron oxide nanoparticles attached to an antibody that only sticks to TRPV1. When they turned on the radio waves, the iron oxide particles warmed up and opened the TRPV1 channel, minimally affecting the rest of the cell or surrounding cells. Ultrasound, on the other hand, heats up a whole patch of tissue to 42° Celsius, which could have damaging or confounding effects on the cells.
Nearly a million coyotes have been killed by Wildlife Services since 2000.
In the western US, conflict between ranchers and wild animals who might harm their stock is an old, old story. But in 1915, the federal government started helping ranchers and farmers out by killing animals suspected of attacking livestock, eventually forming an agency known as Animal Damage Control. Today, though, the agency has morphed into something that appalled many of the readers who learned of its activities last week in the Sacramento Bee.
When Wildlife Services, as the group is now called, finds a bald eagle, a family’s beloved husky, or a young badger in a trap laid for coyotes or prairie dogs, its back broken or leg snapped, it is shot and its body buried. Its death at the hands of federal employees is rarely, if ever, reported as required. This happens thousands of times a year, on top of all the killings of wildlife that are the agency’s intended targets.
Bacteria are practically everywhere around us, including on and inside you, but that is in many ways a good thing. For instance, having a diverse set of microbes living on your skin might help prevent allergies. A new study published in PNAS links two factors related to how microbes might affect our health: the observation that diversity of microbes on a person is related to the diversity of microbes in their environment, and the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that the modern uptick in allergies and autoimmune diseases is caused by childhood under-exposure to bacteria.
For a while now, scientists have known that kids living on farms are less likely to have allergies or asthma. Being around livestock means the farm kids are also around a more diverse set of bacteria than city kids living in an apartment. In this new study, scientists swabbed the skin bacteria of 118 Finnish kids, some who lived in rural areas and some who lived in urban areas. They also tested the kids for levels of an antibody called IgE, high levels of which indicate hypersensitivity to allergens, or what is known as atopy. Lastly, they surveyed the parents about plant diversity around their homes.
“The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world.” So begins the Chicago Tribune’s damning four-part series about spin and science, or lack thereof, in the flame retardants industry. Flame retardant chemicals have become so ubiquitous–there’s two pounds of the stuff in just the cushions of a large couch—because we’ve accepted the health dangers are worth the protection they provide against fire. Except, there is no scientific basis for the claim that flame retardants save lives.
Part three in the series, published today, is a systematic debunking of the few studies the industry has continuously cited as evidence for the efficacy of flame retardants. One obscure Swedish study, available only in Swedish, relied on flimsy evidence from just eight electrical fires caused by TVs. The peer-reviewed paper also lists a PR specialist among its authors. The lead scientist of another study has disavowed what he calls the industry’s “grossly distorted” flogging of his work, which looked at levels of flame retardants far above industry standard in household furniture. These examples and many more show how scientific authority has been manipulated for profit: Read the rest of this entry »
Strictly speaking, cancer is not contagious. But a fair number of cancers are clearly caused by viral or bacterial infections: lymphomas can be triggered by the Epstein-Barr virus, which also causes mononucleosis. Liver cancers can be caused by Hepatitis B and C. Cervical cancers can be caused by human papillomavirus, the major reason behind the development of a vaccine against it. For some of these cancers, nearly 100% of the cases have an infectious link—when researchers check to see if a virus or bacterium is working in the tumor or has left signs of its presence in a patient’s blood, the answer is nearly always yes.
A new paper in The Lancet takes a look at the very best data on the prevalence of infection-caused cancers and comes up with some striking numbers. Overall, they estimate that 16% of cancer cases worldwide in 2008 had an infectious cause—2 million out of 12.7 million.
An 1865 painting by Frederic Edwin Church, possibly inspired by the aurora of 1859.
On September 1, 1859, the sky erupted in color: “alternating great pillars, rolling cumuli shooting streamers, curdled and wisped and fleecy waves—rapidly changing its hue from red to orange, orange to yellow, and yellow to white, and back in the same order to brilliant red,” read a New York Times account. This was the aurora seen around the world.
Meanwhile, the telegraph operators were perplexed to find that the system suddenly failed. None of the lines worked, and telegraph paper spontaneously caught on fire. The aurora and disconnected telegraphs were both the working of the largest solar storm recorded in history.
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
