Smokers are more likely to die or become seriously ill from a flu or other viral infection than non-smokers are. According to researchers at the Yale School of Medicine, that might be because smokers’ immune systems don’t understand the value of proportional response.
Most scientists believed that viral infections hit smokers harder because smoking suppresses the immune system, making it less able to respond to the threat. But while working with mice exposed to cigarette smoke, the Yale scientists found the opposite—the rodents’ immune systems overreacted.
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·Who wants an electric scooter? Two weeks ago the answer was Paris taxi drivers; this week it’s Providence, R.I., police officers.
·For a cool $10,000, you too could have a glorious piece of geek decor: the Periodic Coffee Table.
·“Einstein was wrong, and I can prove it!”—rating the minds of fringe scientists.
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The two barn swallows found in Arkansas last week that looked like conjoined twins might turn out to be much more ordinary.
An Arkansas man, Danny Langford, found the pair at his home last week after the birds fell out of their nest and into his life. Unfortunately, they stopped eating soon thereafter and both died. But the find shocked officials from the state Game and Fish Commission, who said conjoined twins were almost unheard of in birds.
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Yesterday we wrote about scientists who were trying to learn the secrets of efficient traffic flows by watching the masters—ants. Now, researchers are trying to figure out the traffic flows of a much less organized group—drunks.
Simon Moore from the University of Cardiff in the U.K. wanted to find the math behind the stumbling and weaving of a drunkard’s gait. So he and his team spent nights in the center of the Welsh capital, studying how people in varying states of inebriation stagger around. They then created a moving model from their data, which you can watch here.
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It turns out that the spleen is a more useful organ than we thought. For a good part of the last 100 years, experts have assumed that the spleen was merely a piece of tissue above our abdomen, there to filter and store blood. In recent years, scientists have recognized the spleen’s role in manufacturing immune cells to fight off infection. The latest news (providing further evidence that the spleen is far from useless) tells us that the spleen actually connects the nervous system to the immune system.
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Need to orchestrate a media stunt to gather attention for your cause? Here’s what others have tried:
1. Glue yourself to the prime minister. On the positive side, it’s sure to get plenty of press coverage, like 24-year-old Dan Glass garnered today after slathering his left hand in adhesive and trying to glue himself to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. (Glass was protesting a potential expansion of Heathrow Airport.) On the negative side, even Super Glue takes a moment to dry, and Brown was able to wrest himself free of Glass’s gooey grip. Glass later tried to glue himself to the gates of 10 Downing Street, and that didn’t work, either.
2. Try to bring sex dolls into the Philippines. Speaking of failure, this is a surefire recipe. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals tried it in December; their intention was to protest Kentucky Fried Chicken by putting the dolls under a banner reading “KFC Blows.” Only one thing stood in their way: Filipino customs officials confiscated their dolls.
3. Dress up. The Arctic Front sends out volunteers in polar bear costumes to protest oil drilling in Canada. They even have their own Facebook page and photo gallery.
4. Dress down. Upset at the number of trees felled to make Victoria’s Secret catalogs, ForestEthics protesters showed up at the company’s cross-country tour in 2004 wearing angel wings, lingerie, and wielding chainsaws.
5. Don’t bother dressing at all. Hundreds of nude cyclists rolled around the U.K. and mainland Europe last summer to promote biking as an eco-friendly form of transportation. Presumably they had no trouble staying cool, but what about the chafing?
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Earlier this month we wrote about a study of adaptable ants that changed their leaf-gathering strategies to bypass a roadblock thrown in their way. These clever insects solve traffic jams much more easily than big-brained humans do, and now scientists want to borrow their secrets to ease our highway woes.
Ants leave a trail of pheromones to show others the best way back to the nest; when others follow, they leave their own pheromones and the trail is reinforced. They all work together through what biologists call “distributed intelligence.” You can see this skill demonstrated in a Slate video here.
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The Chinese government has been scrambling to cut down on air pollution before the world’s best athletes compete in the Olympics next month; they’ve closed down factories near Beijing and allowed people to drive their cars only every other day.
But according to researchers from Northwestern University, athletes aren’t the only ones who need to be wary of dirty air. Even spectators, they say, could suffer serious health problems from traveling to China for the games.
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The Large Hadron Collider is almost ready. Scientists are cooling the components of this giant underground accelerator to extreme temperatures—already -350 degrees Fahrenheit in some places—in anticipation of activating it next month. But don’t expect immediate answers—first physicists are going to have to wade through the sea of numbers.
Nature reports today that the LHC will create 700 megabytes of data per second. If you stacked the number of CDs necessary to store a year’s worth of LHC’s data, the pile would reach 20 kilometers into the air, or about 12.5 miles.
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Perhaps Lonesome George should now be called Curious George.
The giant Galapagos tortoise earned his moniker by keeping to himself for most of his 36 years of captivity at the Charles Darwin Research Station. Now, all of the sudden, George appears to have broken out of his solitude and mated with one of the two females at the station that come from a similar species of Galapagos tortoise.
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