Land-Sea Ecological Chains of Life Threatened With Extinction Around the World

Manta RayAnd it’s not like we humans aren’t part of such chains. Via ScienceDaily:

Douglas McCauley and Paul DeSalles did not set out to discover one of the longest ecological interaction chains ever documented. But that’s exactly what they and a team of researchers — all current or former Stanford students and faculty — did in a new study published in Scientific Reports.

Their findings shed light on how human disturbance of the natural world may lead to widespread, yet largely invisible, disruptions of ecological interaction chains. This, in turn, highlights the need to build non-traditional alliances — among marine biologists and foresters, for example — to address whole ecosystems across political boundaries.

This past fall, McCauley, a graduate student, and DeSalles, an undergraduate, were in remote Palmyra Atoll in the Pacific tracking manta rays’ movements for a predator-prey interaction study. Swimming with the rays and charting their movements with acoustic tags, McCauley and DeSalles…

Read more »

Confirmed: Fox News makes people dumb!

After a study published last year labeled viewers of Fox News as grossly misinformed, the researchers who conducted the poll have expanded their work and now confirm, again, that the network’s audience might want to consider changing the channel. Res... Read more »

United States Justice: 2,000 Convicted Then Exonerated Over 23 Years

JailbaitReports the AP via CBS News:

More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled at two universities.

There is no official record-keeping system for exonerations of convicted criminals in the country, so academics set one up. The new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled.

The database compiled and analyzed by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they have less data.

They found that those 873 exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years…

Read more »

Now You Can Be Aquaman: “Dolphin Speaker” Produces Full Range of Dolphin Sounds

DolphinI wonder if the military will discover any conscientiousness objectors using this technology with the dolphins they have been training. While it is public knowledge they are used to rescue naval swimmers and locate underwater mines, the speculation remains on how many are used kamikaze-style to attack ships. As Rebecca Boyle reports in Popular Science:

Communication with dolphins is getting better all the time — they’ve been using iPads, for one thing, and humans have been working on a type of Rosetta Stone-like two-way translation device. A new gadget could improve matters even further, by allowing humans to produce the full range of dolphin sounds. The acoustics researchers who developed it call it the Dolphin Speaker.

Plenty of work is being done with dolphin sounds, but they have mostly focused on dolphin vocalizations and their hearing anatomy. Dolphins can not only hear and produce clicks, whistles and burst pulses well outside of…

Read more »

High Fructose Corn Syrup Can Make You Dumb

Corn_syrupYou have been warned (via AFP/Yahoo News):

Eating too much sugar can eat away at your brainpower, according to US scientists who published a study Tuesday showing how a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup sapped lab rats’ memories.

Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) fed two groups of rats a solution containing high-fructose corn syrup — a common ingredient in processed foods — as drinking water for six weeks. One group of rats was supplemented with brain-boosting omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), while the other group was not.

Before the sugar drinks began, the rats were enrolled in a five-day training session in a complicated maze. After six weeks on the sweet solution, the rats were then placed back in the maze to see how they fared. “The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity,”…

Read more »

Siri Says Nokia Lumia 900, Not Apple iPhone, Is The Best Smartphone Ever

You would think Apple's virtual assistant Siri knows who pays its bills. Apparently not--when asked, Siri says the best smartphone ever is Nokia's Lumia 900. What caused this apparent oversight? Siri uses Wolfram Alpha, which answers questions based on... Read more »

Fictional Characters Influence Real Life Decisions

AtlasShruggedHave you ever had the experience of stepping away from a novel and finding yourself thinking a little bit like the main character would? I’ve often described the feeling as being a little “book-drunk”, but I usually only experience it with really great novels. It seems to be worse when I read all or most of a book in one session.

According to a story over at GalleyCat, scientists have completed a study that verifies that this experience is a common one, and that the actions of fictional characters can actually influence the decisions we make – whether we consciously realize it or not. They call the phenomena “experience-taking”, and it’s very real.

Researchers exposed students to stories about students voting told in third-person and first-person tense, both written to encourage voting, and followed up later to see which group had the highest number of students who went to the poll.

Here’s what…

Read more »

UC Berkeley tests floating robot sensors to track environmental concerns

IDG News Service - It's been a couple of years and a couple of million dollars. Finally, researchers and graduate students who have spent years developing intelligent water sensors released them into the Sacramento River on Wednesday, about 80 miles ea... Read more »

Brain Scans Reveal Dogs’ Thoughts

Photo: Ildar Sagdejev (CC) Add one more expensive and unnecessary expenditure to the many made by obsessive dog owners: an MRI scan to reveal their innermost thoughts. Via LiveScience:

Fido's expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy's head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends. The researchers, who detailed their findings May 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, were interested in understanding the human-dog relationship from the four-legged perspective. "When we saw those first [brain] images, it was unlike anything else,"... Read more »

Energy And Sports Drinks Destroy Teeth

Gatorade

Photo: Jeff Taylor (CC)

Mikaela Conley reports for ABC News:

Sugar may rot your teeth, but the acid in energy and sports drinks will also do some irreversible damage to those (not so) pearly whites, say researchers.

A new study published in the journal General Dentistry found that energy and sports drinks contain so much acid that they start destroying teeth after only five days of consistent use. Thirty to 50 percent of American teens use energy drinks, the paper says, and up to 62 percent drink sports drinks at least once a day.

Damage to enamel can cause teeth to become sensitive to touch and temperature changes, and be more susceptible to cavities and decay.

“Young adults consume these drinks assuming that they will improve their sports performance and energy levels and that they are ‘better’ for them than soda,” said Poonam Jain, lead author of the study. “Most of these patients are shocked…

Read more »

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...13 14 15 Next