Checking the level of opioid drugs in a person’s bloodstream would require a blood sample to be taken, in the current time at least. Scientists have now developed a breath test for opioid drugs, however, and this could mean that things would be much less invasive.

The system was developed by a team at the University of California-Davis, led by postdoctoral researcher Eva Borras and Prof. Cristina Davis.

People who are being tested start by breathing normally, into a collection device. Droplets of their breath condense within it, and are then frozen until they can be placed in a mass spectrometer within a lab. That machine is capable of detecting both the original drug and metabolites (compounds produced by the body as it breaks down the drug) within the droplets.

In a test of the technology, six chronic pain patients were initially given infusions of medications such as morphine and hydromorphone, along with oral doses of oxycodone. When their opioid metabolite levels were subsequently checked via both blood samples and the breath test, figures for the two techniques were very similar.

This process is less painful and less stressful for the patients.

(Image Credit: Cristina Davis/ UC Davis)

Born in 1884, in rural Illinois, was the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux was the son of former slaves, and when he was born, movies barely existed. When he left his home at the age of 17, however, movies had progressed far beyond the galloping horses of Eadweard Muybridge. Micheaux wanted to be a part of this emerging industry, and so he decided that he would make films as well.

He would start making his own films in 1919, though they were fairly different from the mainstream fare coming out of the new Hollywood studios. Micheaux’s movies featured predominantly black casts, playing characters who pushed back against the cruel caricatures of black Americans seen in popular films like The Birth of a Nation. Working out of his own independent company on a shoestring budget, Micheaux gave his characters a dignity and humanity that was rarely seen on screens at the time. He presented an unflinching look at the legacy of white supremacy in America with his famous—and, at the time, controversial—film Within Our Gates.

More details about his life and works over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Last January greeted California’s beekeepers with worry that they wouldn’t have enough bees to pollinate their biggest money-making event of the year — the almond bloom. Gene Brandi, who is the former president of the American Beekeeping Federation, who happened to be a California beekeeper, stated that the winter losses were were “as bad or worse” than he believes it has been, and he was right about it.

It was another grim year for America’s beekeepers, already reeling from more than a decade of colony losses that threaten the commercial honeybee industry. An annual survey released in June by the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), a nonprofit collaboration of leading research labs and universities, found that beekeepers lost 38 percent of their colonies last winter, the highest winter figure since the survey began 13 years ago.

Managed honeybees play a crucial role in the nation’s food production, contributing an estimated $15 billion to the U.S. economy each year by helping to pollinate at least 90 crops.

So what keeps the bees from flourishing? It’s the Varroa destructor, a parasitic Asian mite that snuck into the US over 30 years ago. How are they a danger to bees? Find out over at Undark.

(Image Credit: 12019/ Pixabay)

Two weeks before the debut of the Pixel 4 flagship smartphone, giant tech company Google was reportedly pulling the plug to their controversial “field research” program. The company’s “field research” program is said to involve offering subjects in US cities a $5 gift certificate in exchange for their facial scan, according to the New York Daily News which reported that a Google contracting agency was “actively targeting homeless people in Atlanta,'' while also “tricking unwilling college students into participating.”

Originally, the company told us, the idea was to make sure the Pixel 4’s new Face Unlock feature would recognize a diverse array of faces, which could keep it from being biased against people of color — a legitimate concern for facial recognition tech.

According to The New York Times, Google claims it immediately suspended the program and opened an investigation after reading the Daily News’ story. It wouldn’t discuss details with the Times, but did say it’s true it hired contractors from Randstad for the research, the same contractor named in the Daily News’ expose, and Google reportedly called the alleged details “very disturbing.”

What are your thoughts on this one?

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This is a pretty difficult 10-item quiz. I only got 6, and I guess that means that I only know a few of these Victorian slang terms. (This really meant that I was able to correctly guess 6 out of 10 Victorian slang terms).

What about you? Try and test yourself to see how much you know about these slang terms of the Victorian era.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When the meaty meatless burgers were still new a few years ago, they were filled with mystery. As they slowly crept onto the food scene, chef Paul Canales became curious about these mysterious burgers. Back then, products like the Impossible Burger were harder to acquire. Canales, however, managed to secure 20 pounds of the goods which he can play with at Duende, the Spanish restaurant he runs in Oakland, California.

“I wasn’t happy with it as a burger, so I came up with this idea of making a meatball,” Canales recalls. He added cumin, garlic, and parsley and fried the “meat” into something resembling Spanish-style meatballs, calling his creation albondigas improbables (improbable meatballs).

The people loved Canales’s creation, and according to him, “they’d get two or three orders at a time.” But despite his sucess in his creation, something still bothered Canales: he didn’t know what exactly he was serving.

“You can’t really identify vegetables in it at all,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m selling a ton, but am I really providing nutrition to people?’”

Canales isn’t the only one wondering about the nutritional value of products like the Impossible and Beyond burgers, which have officially gone mainstream now that McDonald’s and Burger King have added them to their menus. While advocates for a plant-based diet welcome such products as a way to reduce meat consumption, dietitians are asking: Are they actually good for you?

“‘Good for you’ is a subjective question,” says Jill Edwards, director of education for the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies. “What are we comparing it to? Is it healthier than the comparative beef burger? Absolutely.”

Know more about this meaty meatless topic over at Medium.

(Image Credit: Impossible Foods/ Twitter)

Artificial intelligence has been shown to be just as good and even slightly better than human doctors in making medical diagnoses using images.

A thorough analysis of various studies that were published since 2012 was carried out by the researchers. The AI used in the studies used deep learning in classifying the images based on certain features, which were compared to visuals of diseases.

To come to such conclusions, the scientists made an effort to whittle down the list of often-poor studies they looked at from 20,000 to just 14 which had the best quality data. In these studies, the deep learning systems used images from datasets that were separate from the ones used to train them. These same images were then shown to human experts.

The researchers found that AI was able to correctly pinpoint illnesses 87% of the time. That's compared to 86% for healthcare pros. The AI was also right in clearing people of diseases 93% of the time, in contrast to 91% of human experts. One caveat to this statistic was that the healthcare workers tested were not given extra info about patients that they would have had in real-world situations.

What are your thoughts on this one?

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Over one in three adults aged 18 to 25 reported to have problematic levels of loneliness, according to a new report from Swinburne University and VicHealth.

1,520 Victorians aged 12 to 25 were surveyed. They examined their levels of loneliness, and they were asked about their symptoms of depression and social anxiety.

Over all, the report showed that one in four people aged 12 to 25 felt lonely for three or more days during the last week.

Among 18 to 25 year olds, one in three (35%) reported feeling lonely three or more times a week. We also found that higher levels of loneliness increases a young adult’s risk of developing depression by 12% and social anxiety by 10%.

Adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported better outcomes, with one in seven (13%) feeling lonely three or more times a week. Participants in this age group were also less likely to report symptoms of depression and social anxiety than the 18 to 25 year olds.

Thankfully, there is hope, and we can do something to help these young adults.

Find out more about this over at The Conversation.

(Image Credit: Free-Photos/ Pixabay)

This is Dr. Alec Couros, a professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina in Canada. Since 2007, Couros took photos of himself and his daughter sitting on the couch while they hold their respective laptops. While his daughter grew up on the photos, Couros did not, and he seems to be getting younger as time passed by.

Not only does it look like he doesn’t age, in fact, at 48 years old, he looks much younger, more energetic, more full of life, and more handsome than before.

In an exclusive and in-depth interview, Dr. Couros talked to Bored Panda about the photos with his daughter, how he changed his life, as well as about the foundation of a healthy relationship between parents and children.

Check out the full interview over at the site.

(Image Credit: courosa/ Reddit)

A new study from the University of Cambridge has revealed that people can now type on their smartphones as fast as they can on the keyboard. I don’t know about this one, but what are your thoughts?

While a good typist can type around 100 words per minute (WPM) on a desktop keyboard, an average person (like most of us) can only type around 35-65 WPM. The research showed that people typing using only two thumbs can reach speeds that average up to 38 WPM.

“[That’s] only about 25% slower than the typing speeds we observed in a similar large-scale study of physical keyboards," Anna Feit, a researcher at ETH Zürich and co-author of the study said in a statement. Feit said the number of people who can achieve speeds of 100 WPM on a keyboard is decreasing.

You can take the same test that the researchers used here.

More details of the study over at Vice.

(Image Credit: JESHOOTS-com/ Pixabay)

I was really surprised that the popular belief that Vitamin C cures cold is not as true as it seems (I take 1-2 500mg tablets daily). It merely shortens the length of the common cold. But taking Vitamin C is not that bad in itself, provided that we don’t take too much of it as it can increase the risk of developing kidney stones.

Via Vox

(Video Credit: Vox/ YouTube)

In light of the deadlier and worsening wildfire seasons because of climate change, California steps up to help its first responders and firefighters. Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a few bills last Tuesday that seek to increase access to mental health services for the state’s first responders.

This comes almost a year after the state saw the deadliest wildfire in its history, and it’s much needed as climate change continues to intensify the blazes firefighters are expected to put out and save people from.

The bills Newsom signed will create a peer support network across the state, add post-traumatic stress disorder as an eligible injury for worker’s compensation, and prevent public agencies from contracting out their 911 services to private for-profit companies. The peer support programs and financial assistance for employees suffering from PTSD are the focus here, though. They’re creating new opportunities for individuals who are dealing with the severe mental stress that comes with fighting fires.

Nice!

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The fires that have raged over the Amazon rainforest may have caught the world’s attention, but, unknown to many, the Gran Chaco, the second largest forest in South America, is also burning, and it’s vanishing in plain sight.

This extremely biodiverse forest, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is home to over 3,400 plant and 900 animal species.

It is also home to at least 30 indigenous peoples, including the Ayoreo, some of whom live in voluntary isolation in their historic homelands, as well Mennonite colonies.

Now, due to the some of the fastest deforestation in the world, this once enormous ecosystem may soon be gone outside of protected areas. Since 2001, more than 31,000 square miles of forest were felled to make way for agriculture and cattle ranching in the Gran Chaco.

[...]

To clear forest land for grazing, both legally and illegally, Paraguayan cattle ranchers use what’s called “chaining.” That means leveling the forest with tractors that drag heavy chains. Then they burn the fallen trees.

It’s saddening to hear that our world’s forests are being burned, and it’s more saddening that our forests are burned intentionally.

(Image Credit: Joel E. Correia/ Fast Company)

Welcome to Queensland Police Museum, home to many police archival materials such as vehicles, uniforms, equipment, and badges. One item here, however, stands out. It’s a taxidermy body of a dog named Peter. What’s so special about this dog? He just helped convict a murderer.

On May 22, 1952, 23-year-old taxi driver Athol Henry McCowan was murdered. The investigation progressed quickly, as police had witness reports and details about the suspect’s vehicle—and even the dog he had with him.

After an intensive Australia-wide investigation, Arthur Ernest Halliday was arrested that November and charged with murder. His dog, named Peter, had died in the meantime, but the prosecution insisted that he was mounted for his court appearance. 

On the big day, witnesses identified Peter as the kind of dog seen at the crime scene. Halliday himself was so surprised to see his faithful friend in the courtroom that he blurted out it was his dog. This outburst, along with other evidence, linked Halliday to the crime scene. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

(Image Credit: JBartlett2000/ Atlas Obscura)

Let’s be honest here. October really has not that much significance, except that it’s the 10th month of the year, and it’s the countdown to Halloween (an additional exception is if it’s your birth month, or it’s a loved one’s birth month). And now that we are adults and we have our own bank accounts, that means that we can buy all the Halloween-related stuff that we want.

On that note, did you know that you can buy an inflatable Beetlejuice sandworm that is TEN … FEET TALL

[...]

This magnificent 10-foot tall beast is $179.00 which seems like a lot, because it is, but also — money is temporary, GIGANTIC SANDWORMS ARE FOREVER.

Will you buy this?

(Image Credit: Home Depot)