Ryan Herbison is a graduate student in parasitology at the University of Otago. A few years ago, Ryan collected about 1,300 earwigs and over 2,500 sandhoppers from gardens and a beach in New Zealand. He then dissected and examined the insides of their heads in search of worms that coiled themselves within some of the insects.
The worms are parasites that force earwigs and sandhoppers to march into bodies of water, drowning themselves so the worms’ aquatic offspring can thrive.
“Like a back-seat driver, but a bit more sinister,” said Mr. Herbison, describing these mind-controlling parasites. “And sometimes they may just grab the steering wheel.”
Just how they do that, though, has remained a bit of a mystery…
It is recommended for adults to consume no more than 6g salt (roughly 1 teaspoon) per day, according to the NHS. However, the average salt intake for adults is 8g per day, which is 33 percent higher than the recommended intake, according to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey.
The dangers of eating too much salt are thought to be considerable. It raises blood pressure (a major cause of strokes) and increases the risk of stomach cancer and osteoporosis. The World Health Organisation says managing your salt intake is as important as stopping smoking when it comes to reducing heart disease.
If you’re eating too much salt, what can you do to reduce your intake?
Imagine touching your sweetheart’s face on the screen of your laptop and you see her react in real time. You also feel a touch, suddenly, on your face. This scene might be coming from a science fiction story, but it seems that this just might be a reality in the near future.
"Physical touch, human touch, is probably the deepest, most significant emotional connection that you can establish with a loved one or friends," said nanoengineer John Rogers, a professor of bioengineering at Northwestern University.
For years, science has been scrambling to add tactile sensation to our virtual experiences. Various types of electronic skins have been developed, typically reliant on clunky wired electrodes that provide less than instantaneous response and a lack of two-way feedback.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Rogers and his team at Northwestern report a new wireless and battery-free smart skin that could shift the course of this technology. Through a fast, programmable array of miniature vibrating disks embedded in a soft, flexible material, this smart skin can contour to the body and deliver sensory input -- what you'd feel when using it -- that Rogers says is quite natural.
This technology could be applied in social media, virtual reality, and even telemedicine.
Mokopane, South Africa — Weak and dehydrated. That was how Jazz the giraffe looked when a farmer found him in the wild. The farmer immediately called The Rhino Orphanage for help. The abandoned giraffe was only a few days old when he was taken to the orphanage.
At the orphanage, however, is a resident watchdog named Hunter, who quickly began to care and befriended the newcomer.
After spending several months working as a sous chef in the Antarctic, Rose McArdoo got back to New York. There, she was welcomed with many questions by her friends. Are there penguins in the Antarctic? How does she get her supplies? Is she on an iceberg?
McAdoo set about answering their questions the best way she knows how: with cake.
"Cake is my canvas," she says. "It's my way of making big ideas literally digestible."
The result was a series of descriptive desserts McAdoo developed to tell the story of life and work at McMurdo Station, a U.S.-run research station in Antarctica. She says she chose projects that showcase the diversity of the research that's happening on the continent. She is now releasing photographs of the cakes, and the stories and science behind them, on her Instagram page.
On November 21, Tesla’s Cybertruck was unveiled. The Cybertruck is said to have an “armored” glass. However, the unveiling went horribly wrong when an assistant managed to break the truck’s window with a rock. So much for Elon Musk’s big claims. Still, it might be that the Cybertruck truly is a revolutionary truck in more ways than one.
That angular body—already massively controversial in truck nerd circles—is actually the exposed stainless steel monocoque frame of the Cybertruck. That promises to be enormously strong, incredibly safe, and resistant to dents and corrosion. It should also prove to be very lightweight, which is good because those angular lines are disguising the dimensions of what’s actually a very large vehicle.
Production on the first versions of the Cybertruck won’t begin until 2021, and last’s night’s reveal was thin on details like exact size or weight. But Motor Trend suggests that the truck’s wheelbase is at least 150 inches long, and we know the bed—err “vault” in Teslaspeak—is 6.5 feet in length. So this thing is at least as large as a full-size truck like a Ford F-150.
More details about the truck’s features over at Outside.
Scientists in the US were able to overcome a major obstacle in creating mini-organs. They were able to program cells to take on the desired shape instead of relying on 3D printing or external “scaffolds.”
Described in a paper in the journal Cell Systems as an “inside-out” approach, this method could “signal a paradigm shift” in how mini-organs like mini-kidneys and brains are grown on the lab bench. This could one day lead to personalized organ transplants.
The team, led by bioengineer Todd McDevitt at Gladstone Institutes in the US, was driven by an enduring issue with state-of-the-art ways of producing mini-organs such as 3D printing. The cells just won’t stay put.
[...]
McDevitt’s team wanted to own those cellular minds and so took control of two genes that together make up something of a joystick that directs how the cells organise.
For the past three decades, Vietnam has been a country dependent on factory work and now it is moving up the value chain into electronics. Smartphone developer giant Samsung Electronics, for example, has invested $17.3 billion in Vietnam-based factories. Science is emphasized in public schools. University graduates who work for foreign tech firms will know more about how to make phones.
Vietnamese companies have come out with a list of their own phones, mostly cheaper Android models. The QPhone and BPhone were among the first. Now a subsidiary of the Ho Chi Minh City-based conglomerate Vingroup is selling a brand of handset called the Vsmart for about $100.
The problem is, even in their own homeland, Made-in-Vietnam phones don’t sell. But why? It is because the Vietnamese can get more recognized phone brands for around the same prices.
Foreign brands hold higher status than local equivalents, says Maxfield Brown, senior associate with the business consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates in Ho Chi Minh City. “The trajectory for consumer demand in Vietnam for electronics is currently trending toward an interest in international products and I would expect it to continue as consumer spending rises,” he says. Wages are rising in Vietnam though still as low as $171 a month.
2009. It was the year when Facebook launched a piece of code that changed the world. It was the “like” button, the brainchild of Leah Pearlman, Justin Rosenstein, and several other programmers and designers. They thought that the users of the social media website would be too busy to leave comments on their friends’ posts. If there was a simple button to express affirmations, however, then that would make everything better.
“Friends could validate each other with that much more frequency and ease,” as Pearlman later said.
It worked—maybe a little too well. By making “like” a frictionless gesture, by 2012 we’d mashed it more than 1 trillion times, and it really did unlock a flood of validation. But it had unsettling side effects, too. We’d post a photo, then sit there refreshing the page anxiously, waiting for the “likes” to increase. We’d wonder why someone else was getting more likes. So we began amping up the voltage in our daily online behavior: trying to be funnier, more caustic, more glamorous, more extreme.
Code shapes our lives. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has written, “software is eating the world,” though at this point it’s probably more accurate to say software is digesting it.
The Facebook like isn’t the only piece of code that had a lasting impact around the world. Check out the other pieces of code over at Slate.
You may have seen chubby-cheeked babies and wide-eyed puppies. How did you react to them? I could assume that you probably went, “Awwww! How cute!” But have you ever wondered why you felt that way?
Once thought to trigger a hardwired, primarily maternal, caregiving response, researchers are now learning that cuteness actually sets off unique brain activity — in women and men — that goes beyond making sure Junior wants for nothing. Marketers and product designers have known for decades that cuteness sells, but a series of recent studies suggests it’s less about caregiving and more about empathy, community and sharing.
In fact, understanding what cuteness is and how it affects us may help us harness its powers for good.
Know more about cuteness, and how the study about it started, over at Discover.
University of Pennsylvania immunologist De’Broski Herbert could not believe what his eyes were seeing when he looked deep inside the lungs of mice infected with influenza. What he found there was a strange-looking cell filled with taste receptors.
He recalled that it looked just like a tuft cell — a cell type most often associated with the lining of the intestines.
Why was a cell with taste receptors in the lungs? And why was it there in response to influenza?
Herbert wasn’t alone in his puzzlement over this mysterious and little-studied group of cells that keep turning up in unexpected places, from the thymus (a small gland in the chest where pathogen-fighting T cells mature) to the pancreas. Scientists are only just beginning to understand them, but it is gradually becoming clear that tuft cells are an important hub for the body’s defenses precisely because they can communicate with the immune system and other sets of tissues, and because their taste receptors allow them to identify threats that are still invisible to other immune cells.
In other words, they are not merely taste receptors.
Diana Toubassi is a family physician at Toronto Western Hospital, and she has been in practice for dozens of years. Every day seems to be a hectic and chaotic day in the hospital.
“I was thirteen or fourteen patients into the clinic,” she says, recounting a typical day in practice. “I had a green trainee with me who hadn’t done any clinical rotations yet. We were running behind, and I felt like we were drowning in patients. I had her go and see a newborn baby who was there for their first visit. Mom was clearly overwhelmed and tearful already. Baby was jaundiced and not gaining weight.” At the same time, Toubassi says, she was seeing a woman in her eighties armed with a written list of eight issues that had to be resolved in ten minutes.
With precision she tells the story quickly, and she narrates the chaos “as if it were a regularly scheduled program”.
She seems amused as she tells it, as if the sequence of events was both hilarious and ridiculous. Slight discomfort belies her laughter, a momentary slip of the mask from sprightly to exhausted, then back.
[...]
Lately, Toubassi has been drawn to a discipline known as “narrative medicine,” a movement that aims to use the special qualities of storytelling as a tonic for what ails contemporary medicine.
Learn more about narrative medicine over at The Walrus.
Back in 2015, we were introduced to a new protagonist for the Star Wars saga. The protagonist was Rey (played by Daisy Ridley in the film) who we came to know and love.
Now, Rey has been an object of cosplay for many people, men and women alike. Everyone loved her, and everyone wanted to be her. The question is, why?
The answer is found in her costume: it was a no-nonsense, economical costume.
I loved the 15-puzzle — the game with 15 tiles and a single empty space in a 4x4 grid — when I was a kid.
The goal is to slide the tiles around and put them in numerical order or, in some versions, arrange them to form an image.
The first 15 puzzle I was able to complete was a picture of a cat with a mouse sitting on its head. It seemed difficult at first, but after trying the game countless times throughout the days and weeks, I was able to get the hang of it.
The game has become a staple of party-favor bags since it was introduced in the 1870s. It has also caught the attention of mathematicians, who’ve spent more than a century studying solutions to puzzles of different sizes and startling configurations.
Now, a new proof solves the 15 puzzle, but in reverse. The mathematicians Yang Chu and Robert Hough of Stony Brook University have identified the number of moves required to turn an ordered board into a random one.
It was Valentine’s Day, year 2013, and it was one Valentine’s Day that Patricia Acensi-Ferré would probably never forget. That day, she learned that she had breast cancer. She was 35 years old at that time, and she was a new mom taking care of a baby at the end of her maternity leave. It was a tough situation.
But she decided to fight it with humor: She named her tumor “Roberto” and, when her hair started falling out, she named one of her wigs “Ginger.” She survived a 15-month-long treatment that grew to involve surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Today, she is cancer-free.
But her battle did not stop on the day she was declared cancer-free.
With the date of her return set for March 2014, though, Acensi-Ferré received another blow: While she was away, her job had been eliminated. Before her cancer, she had worked for about 15 years in the French government. In accordance with French law, Acensi-Ferré was offered another project—but it was unrelated to her interests and experience.
Even before her maternity leave, Acensi-Ferré had felt like her employer wanted her to quit. The French have a name for it: placardisé, meaning “relegated to a closet.” Now, she had had enough; she negotiated an exit package with her employer, and then quit.
“Even without the cancer, the moral limit had been surpassed from my point of view,” she says. “I think it could not have happened any other way.” But still, she wondered how her situation could have played out differently.
While Acensi-Ferré’s double-whammy experience can be considered a rare experience, her experience taking time away from work isn’t. She is only one of many people who “off-ramp” or voluntarily take leave. Off-ramping has become more common in many rich countries throughout the recent years. The question is, how do companies keep their employees with this kind of thing going on?
