npr: skunkbear: This is very cool and a pretty big deal. Find...

Forget The Gizmos: Exercise Works Best For Lower-Back Pain

Forget The Gizmos: Exercise Works Best For Lower-Back Pain:

Who would have thought: get up and move, and you’ll be healthier. That’s some fancy science right there.

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Why the science of sliding matters to tennis

Polymer breakthrough could revolutionize water purification.

technology-org:

We’ve all seen the Febreze air fresheners, which employ a derivative of corn starch to trap invisible air pollutants in the home and remove unwanted odors. A team of Cornell researchers has used the same material found in Febreze, cyclodextrin, to develop a technique that could revolutionize the …

Read more

Febreeze put to use doing something besides covering up unpleasant smells. Nice.

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compoundchem: What happened in chemistry in 2015? Here’s a...

compoundchem:

What happened in chemistry in 2015? Here’s a round-up of some of the most interesting stories!

Science!

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itsfullofstars: NASA’s New Horizons sent back the best photos...

itsfullofstars:

NASA’s New Horizons sent back the best photos of Pluto ever.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby – and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades.

Each week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14. These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel – revealing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface.  In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains.

Now what are we going to do with this data?

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thebeakerblog: As the battle against malaria continues, a new...

thebeakerblog:

As the battle against malaria continues, a new idea has emerged: turning mosquitoes into our allies.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the University of California outline the idea, which uses a gene-editing tool (called CRISPR) to create mosquitoes filled with malaria-blocking genes.  

The mosquitoes are also engineered with a so-called “gene drive” that will push the malaria-blocking genes through wild mosquito populations much faster than would be anticipated by Mendel’s laws of genetics.

According to the New York Times:

The other modification is a set of genetic elements known as a gene drive that should propel the malaria-resistance genes throughout a natural mosquito population. When a malaria-resistant male mosquito mates with a wild female, the gene drive copies both itself and the resistance genes over from the male chromosome to its female counterpart.

These genetically-engineered mosquitoes haven’t been introduced into the wild yet, but that could soon change. About 3.4 billion people live in areas at risk of malaria transmission and, in 2013, the disease killed 500,000 people, according to the World Health Organization. 

The New York Times continues:

Rendering the wild mosquito population immune to the malaria parasite may seem a fairly minimal and benign intervention. But no gene drives have yet been released into the wild, and biologists are keen to avoid surprises that might arouse public hostility to the novel technology.

To that end, study co-author Anthony James said further testing will be needed to confirm the efficacy of malaria-blocking antibodies created by the genetic tweaking. “We know the gene works,” said James, in a news release. “The mosquitoes we created are not the final brand, but we know this technology allows us to efficiently create large populations.”

Read more: Engineering Mosquitoes’ Genes to Resist Malaria

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

This is potentially a hugely effective way to fight malaria.

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iheartapple2: http://apple.co/1Q03Y7K Did you...

iheartapple2:

http://apple.co/1Q03Y7K

Did you support Product Red today?

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npr: This is a story about two people sharing one body. Maybe...

npr:

This is a story about two people sharing one body. Maybe even three people. Or four.

Back in the late 19th century, a German scientist named Georg Schmorl made a remarkable discovery: Cells from a baby can hide out in a mother’s body, after birth.

More than a hundred years later, scientists are just beginning to figure out what these cells are doing. And their findings may have implications for how cancer and autoimmune diseases affect women.

But the discovery also means something else. Something that’s a bit mind-boggling: You likely have cells from your older siblings in your body. And cells from your grandmother, maybe even your great-grandmother.

Fetal Cells May Protect Mom From Disease Long After The Baby’s Born

Illustration: Joseph Daniel Fiedler for NPR

Um, duh? Do you remember the last time your mom got sick?

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sciencealert: Scientists figure out how to make flexible...

sciencealert:

Scientists figure out how to make flexible materials 3 times stronger than steel

Australian scientists have published an ‘instruction manual’ that makes it a whole lot easier and cheaper to create metallic glass - a type of flexible but ultra-tough alloy that’s been described as “the most significant materials science innovation since plastic”. The material is similar to the sci-fi liquid-type metal used to create the T-1000 in Terminator 2 - when it’s heated it’s as malleable as chewing gum, but when it cools it’s three times stronger than steel.

Read more

This is really cool.

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sciencesoup: Radioactive Power: The Nuclear Battery If you’re...

sciencesoup:

Radioactive Power: The Nuclear Battery

If you’re fed up with your phone battery not lasting through the day, there may be a solution in the future: nuclear batteries. These don’t derive their energy from chemical reactions like ordinary batteries; instead, nuclear batteries harness the energy created in radioactive decay.

Before you get freaked out about having a nuclear meltdown in your phone, nuclear batteries don’t actually contain tiny fission reactors. They don’t utilise chain reactions, and they’re actually much more akin to solar cells, but instead of generating electricity from photons, they generate electricity from high-energy electrons that are emitted when radioactive elements decay.

Betavoltaic batteries are one type of nuclear battery, harnessing energy from beta decay. They’re constructed almost exactly like a solar cell, with a piece of semiconductor like silicon sandwiched between two electrodes, so when radiation hits the silicon, a flow of electrons is produced. Since beta radiation can be stopped with just a thin film of aluminium (whereas gamma radiation needs a slab of lead or concrete), betavoltaic batteries are pretty safe.

They’re also not at all new: the first beta cell was demonstrated in 1913, and betavoltaic batteries have been used in the military, satellites, spacecraft and older models of pacemakers for years, because they have an extremely long life. The Curiosity Rover is powered by a nuclear battery containing plutonium-238, which will last it 14 years. Typically, though, they’re quite large because the semiconductor material is damaged by the high-energy particles, so batteries must be built large to last as long as the radioactive isotope. Their size has limited their use, but recently, researchers at the University of Missouri have been developing a nuclear battery the size of a penny that holds a million times more charge than regular batteries.

Led by Associate Professor Jae Wan Kwon, the researchers are using a liquid semiconductor—a water-based solution—instead of a solid one, which minimises the problem of semiconductor damage. Water absorbs the beta radiation from strontium-90 like a buffer, and the radiation also splits up the water molecules to produce free radicals and energy that increase the battery’s efficiency. A titanium dioxide electrode then collects the energy and converts it into electrons.

The team are working on improving the prototype by making it smaller and more efficient. For now, the price and the risk mean nuclear batteries are mainly confined to use in military and space applications, but we can all dream of a phone with a battery life of decades.

So, this is a thing, apparently… I suppose if it solves our battery life woes, all is well, right?

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Paleo People Were Making Flour 32,000 Years Ago

Paleo People Were Making Flour 32,000 Years Ago:

So, as it turns out, the paleo diet is based on misguided ideas. You know, like all diets.

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techcrunch: Synthetics startup Ras Labs is working with the...

techcrunch:

Synthetics startup Ras Labs is working with the International Space Station to test “smart materials” that contract like living tissue. These “electroactive” materials can expand, contract and conform to our limbs just like human muscles when a current moves through them – and they could be used to make robots move and feel more human to the touch.

Ras Labs CEO Eric Sandberg likens what the team is doing to re-creating Luke Skywalker’s arm in Star Wars episode 5. “That arm is somewhat the ultimate goal of prosthetics,” he said.

Read more about futuristic synthetic material here. 

Cool.

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randdmag: Authored by Greg Watry, www.rdmag.com Though capable...

randdmag:

Authored by Greg Watry, www.rdmag.com

Though capable in laboratory settings of achieving 25% efficiency, commercially produced silicon solar cells typically reach levels between 13% and 14%.

Challar V. Kumar, of the Univ. of Connecticut’s Dept. of Chemistry, unveiled an edible and digestible light antenna capable of increasing the efficiency of commercial solar panels. He presented his findings at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

Simply put, the process uses an edible protein (bovine serum albumin) and mixes it with a fatty acid from coconut oil. When warmed, the combination forms a gel, made up of around 95% water. The gel is mixed with four dye molecules, allowing the substance to absorb the blue, green and yellow regions of the solar spectrum and emit in the red region. Thus, low-energy photons can successfully be used for electrical currents.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1FgocGx

I mean, this is cool, but I feel like this is a solution to a problem that we don’t really have… People aren’t skipping solar because it’s “not efficient.”

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engineeringisawesome: engadget: MIT figured out how to 3D...

engineeringisawesome:

engadget:

MIT figured out how to 3D print using glass instead of plastic

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a new 3D printing method on Friday that employs transparent glass as precursor instead of plastic. The method, called 3DGP, works basically the same way that conventional 3D printing does though the team found that they could modulate the light transmission, reflection and refraction qualities by precisely varying the thickness of the print.

Video

Intense, yo.

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The Beats by Dre Social Experiment Analysis

So, remember my post about how Beats Studio headphones are actually pretty good, even if they aren't the right fit for a true studio setting, as their name might imply? If not, it's linked above for your perusing.

In any case, while doing my normal YouTube watching routine, I happened upon this video, embedded below, which is I think worth your watching. The hosts of the show take to the streets and do blind and non-blind listening tests with random people.

It would seem as though the hosts expected people to like the Beats when they saw what headphones they were wearing, but dislike them in the blind test.



What they actually found? It turns out that in blind tests, people generally preferred the Beats headphones, while in the non-blind test they preferred the other headphones.

Now, in interest of full disclosure, the alternative headphones used, made by Philips, are not the model of perfect sound accepted by the audiophile community, or anything. They simply offer a relatively flat, studio sound, and are designed for mobile use and fashion. Because of this, they are reasonably similar to the Beats headphones, with the main differences being brand and sound signature.

The hosts want to chalk this up to the noise cancelling of the Beats headphones. While noise cancelling is certainly a factor for the average person, I think there are other factors to account for.

For one thing, the people in the test used their own audio sources, so this creates two different cases in which the Beats headphones would offer the "better" sound.

The first case is the obvious one, which is that the subjects chose to listen to pop or rap music. This isn't a far stretch, being that hip-hop/rap and pop make up nearly all of the modern top 40 music, so there's a statistically high chance that the subjects would be listening to that.

The second case is less obvious, but no less important. The subjects were very unlikely to be in possession of well-recorded lossless files, and were not using a high quality audio interface. They were likely playing lossy .mp3 files or streaming music at low bit-rate. More importantly, they were likely listening to modern music, which is increasingly mixed in compressed resolution, so that even lossless files do not sound "good" on high quality audio interfaces. The sound signature of the Beats headphones actually improves the sound of these low quality files by not pointing out the harshness like a flat, studio headphone does.

A final factor I would consider is the changing sound signature taste in America. Beats joined the subwoofer movement which began in cars (yes, that's right, Beats did not start the bass-head revolution) and brought it into pop culture. Because of this, many people expect more bass out of headphones, and bass is the defining criteria of "good" audio products.

These factors explain why people chose the Beats headphones as sounding better when they were blindfolded, but it doesn't explain why they thought the better headphones were the non-Beats alternative.

The reason behind this is likely that as much as pop culture pushes the Beats brand, pop culture also pushes that Beats sound like garbage. While this may have been true for the first generation Beats Studio headphones, the most recent Beats products have radically different sound signatures, and no longer sound "bad." The problem is, pop culture hasn't caught up with that change, because it's not easy to change the minds of the masses after they've formed an opinion. Beats have been equated with bad sound, and that's not going to be changed easily.

So, with this video in mind, are you willing to give Beats another shot? Do you own a pair of the new Studio or Solo 2 Beats headphones and take a lot of flack and have a hard time convincing people that they actually sound okay? Let me know in the comments.