Being a teetotaler, someone who chose to abstain from alcohol, does not guarantee that a person won’t have the kind of liver disease that heavy drinkers may suffer from. But why is that the case? One strange medical case may be able to get us closer to understanding what happens.

The patient, a 27-year-old man in China, was suffering from a form of liver inflammation called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, and had a rather strange history of becoming drunk without actually... drinking.

To get a high blood alcohol reading of somewhere around 400 milligrams per decilitre, most of us would need to down at least a dozen shots of hard liquor.

Not this guy. The subject of this case study only needed a good supply of fruit juice and a few plates of carbs.

Find out more about this guy over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: rawpixel/ Pixabay)

Some of the most powerful machine-learning systems that we have today come in the form of recommendation algorithms, due to their ability to shape the information that we consume. One of the most influential recommendation algorithms of today is YouTube’s, a video sharing website estimated to be second only to its owner, Google, when it comes to web traffic. Seventy percent of the videos that users watch is fed to them through recommendations.

In recent years, this influence has come under heavy scrutiny. Because the algorithm is optimized for getting people to engage with videos, it tends to offer choices that reinforce what someone already likes or believes, which can create an addictive experience that shuts out other views. This also often rewards the most extreme and controversial videos, which studies have shown can quickly push people into deep rabbit holes of content and lead to political radicalization.

YouTube has publicly stated that they are working to address these issues. However, a new paper seem to tell a different story, and this paper came from none other than Google itself.

It proposes an update to the platform’s algorithm that is meant to recommend even more targeted content to users in the interest of increasing engagement.

More of this over at Technology Review.

What are your thoughts on this one?

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What color makes you feel envy? What color makes you feel anger? The answers here depend on which country you are from, according to a new study. When the researchers were given data on how a person associated colors with emotions, 80% of the time, they were able to accurately predict where that person came from.

The scientists surveyed 711 people from China, Germany, Greece, and the United Kingdom. Volunteers read the word for 12 colors, such as “green” and “turquoise.” They then indicated which of 20 emotions the colors brought to mind, and how strongly the color was tied to the feeling.

Across the board, the colors that inspired the most emotion were red, black, and pink, whereas brown and purple had weaker associations. Black was associated with sadness across all countries, for example, and red with positive emotions like love and pleasure, along with negative feelings such as anger and hate, the researchers report today in Royal Society Open Science.

Check out more details of this literally colorful study over at Science.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

It’s a jumbo size model of the green Jedi, and it’s bigger and more LEGO-ish than ever! Your past LEGO minifigs of Yoda don’t stand a chance from this one.

This is the LEGO set number 752255, which lets you build a 16” (41 cm) tall sculpture of the green Jedi out of 1771 bricks.

… [It] includes lots of neat details, like a posable head and eyebrows, as well as fingers and toes that move. Naturally, he’s got his iconic green lightsaber in hand, and is ready to do battle with the Dark Side of the Force.

The set also includes a fact plaque about Yoda, a display stand, and a Yoda minifigure, dressed in the same garb as the jumbo model you just built. The set will retail for $99.99, and will be available on October 4, 2019 from LEGO.com and LEGO retail stores.

Are you looking forward to buy this one?

(Image Credit: Technabob)

Pens clicking, fingers tapping, heels bouncing, and hair being twiddled. These are just some of the movements you’ll see inside an office. But humans aren’t alone in being jittery — mice, too, fidget while they work.

What’s more, this seemingly useless motion has a profound and widespread effect on mice’s brain activity, neuroscientist Anne Churchland of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and colleagues report September 24 in Nature Neuroscience. Scientists don’t yet know what this brain activity means, but one possibility is that body motion may actually shape thinking.

Find out more about the study over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Robert-Owen-Wahl/ Pixabay)

Led by the University of Bristol, a team of scientists have found infant feeding vessels, which suggest that prehistoric babies were fed animal milk through the use of these, which are the equivalent of modern-day baby bottles.

Possible infant feeding vessels, made from clay, first appear in Europe in the Neolithic (at around 5,000 BC), becoming more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The vessels are usually small enough to fit within a baby's hands and have a spout through which liquid could be suckled. Sometimes they have feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. Despite this, in the lack of any direct evidence for their function, it has been suggested they may also be feeding vessels for the sick or infirm.

So how did the researchers conclude that these vessels were, in fact, used to feed babies? Find out on EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Helena Seidl da Fonseca)

It might look like a bunch of moon craters, but somewhere in this image lies a large piece of metal that carried India’s hopes of lunar science.

This image was captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA on September 17, as it went over the target landing site of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.

That project's lander, dubbed Vikram, fell silent in the final minutes of its touchdown procedure on Sept. 6. The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which oversees the mission, spent two weeks trying to establish communications with the lander.

ISRO has said it was able to spot the lander with the orbiter component of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, but the agency has not released those photographs. NASA wanted to help the effort, but LRO's angle on the scene was suboptimal during its first flyover of the targeted landing site after the attempt.

Head over to Space.com to find where the missing moon lander is.

(Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)

Ormia flies find their hosts for their young by listening for cricket calls. When they find their target, the flies deposit their eggs on or near the cricket. Larvae would hatch and burrow inside of the cricket, and it would eventually burst through and kill the host.

But what happens when you factor in noise in the environment? Researchers from California Polytechnic State University looked into how background sounds affect that fly’s eavesdropping capabilities.

The research was published in Royal Society Open Science, and used sticky fly traps near speakers broadcasting cricket calls across a gradient of noise. The results show that fewer parasitoid flies were caught near speakers in noisier locations. Because parasitoids end up killing their hosts, the results suggest that crickets may benefit from calling in noisy areas.

The study also found that both traffic noise and natural ocean noise inhibit fly orientation to sound, suggesting crickets could use sound as a parasite shield across different soundscapes. These results suggest that soundscapes may influence the evolution of tightly co-evolved host-parasitoid relationships.

(Image Credit: Jpaur/ Wikimedia Commons)

This is the Starship Mk1, the orbital-space prototype of the spacecraft that SpaceX plans to use as it aims toward fully reusable commercial spaceflight. It also aims to make Elon Musk’s daring plan come true. The plan? To get humans to Mars and sow the seeds which will help us become an interplanetary species.

See more photos over at TechCrunch.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Darrell Etherington/ TechCrunch)

There are a lot of games available in the App Store of your smartphone, and you probably don’t have all the time in the world to play them all to see which ones are the best. Thankfully, EnGadget gives some of what they think are the best games, so that we’ll know when to start.

See their recommendations over at their site.

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Michael Bennett has a YouTube channel named “NuggetNoggin” where he shows himself diving into rivers in search of lost treasure. Lots of his content involve finding laptops, nail polish containers, or GoPros.

Posted earlier this week, Michael went down to the bottom of Edisto River and managed to find a waterproof case. Inside the case was an iPhone. Amazingly, the iPhone still works despite it being submerged for 15 months!

Michael then returned the phone to its rightful owner.

(Video Credit: nuggetnoggin/ YouTube)

Watch as this star comes too close to a black hole and get ripped apart and then becomes gas. An amazing spectacle, if you ask me. A NASA satellite is reported to have witnessed the event.

It is one of the most detailed looks yet at the phenomenon, called a tidal disruption event (or TDE), and the first for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (more commonly called TESS.)

The milestone was reached with the help of a worldwide network of robotic telescopes headquartered at The Ohio State University called ASAS-SN (All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae). Astronomers from the Carnegie Observatories, Ohio State and others published their findings today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Amazing!

(Video Credit: Ohio State News/ YouTube)

When Indras Govender first set foot in the United States, he was astonished by the welcoming attitude he encountered whenever he went. “To come to a country and just walk into any restaurant or go anywhere you want, it was like, ‘Whoa,’” he stated as he recalled that moment.

Coming from apartheid-era South Africa, Indras and wife, Tilly, (now an assistant dean in the social sciences division of the College of Letters & Science) lived a life fraught with overt racism and discrimination due to their Indian heritage. It was the early 1990s. Nelson Mandela had just been freed after 27 years in state prison, and South African president F. W. de Klerk had just signed a peace accord to end the oppressive system. Still the effects of the 50-year-long regime lingered.

The life of the Govenders, however, was entirely different from where they came from.

“California’s quite the melting pot,” he said. “There are people from every country in the world here. And so you don’t feel out of place, and people are welcoming.”

It’s the feeling of that first welcome that Govender pays forward every day in his role as food and beverage manager at The Club & Guest House. Joining the campus in 2016 to head the newly revamped fine dining facility formerly known as the Faculty Club, Govender brings more than 10 years of experience as a restaurant owner, combined with his formal training as a certified public accountant and his genuine passion for the epicurean experience.

Learn more about Indras and The Club & Guest House over at The Current.

(Image Credit: Jeff Liang)

A second interstellar object had made its way into our solar system a few weeks ago, but Yale astronomers Gregory Laughlin and Malena Rice were not surprised to hear it.

Their research, which has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest that these strange, icy visitors from other planets will keep on coming.

We can expect a few large objects showing up every year, they say; smaller objects entering the solar system could reach into the hundreds each year.

“There should be a lot of this material floating around,” said Rice, a graduate student at Yale and first author of the study. “So much more data will be coming out soon, thanks to new telescopes coming online. We won’t have to speculate.”

More details on YaleNews.

(Image Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Newcastle cancer researcher Dr Matt Dun was supposed to highlight the importance of more funding for research on Childhood Brain Cancer Awareness Day (which happened on Thursday), through his speech alongside the Federal Health Minister in Melbourne. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to make it.

In the early hours of that same day, his 4-year-old daughter, Josie, was admitted to hospital.

"She is not doing OK. She is coming to the end of her journey," Dr Dun said.

Josie has been fighting DIPG - or diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma - a "ferocious", inoperable cancer that almost exclusively affects children.

Dr Dun, a University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute biologist, was already focused on paediatric high grade cancers. But since Josie's diagnosis, he has also turned his attention to understanding DIPG, and developing better treatments for it.

"We wanted to try to highlight the importance of research, and funding research, on Brain Cancer Awareness Day," he said.

Dun states that of the 100 children that die of cancer annually, 36 of them die from brain cancer, and 20 of them die from DIPG. Of the 36, over half of them die due to one particular brain cancer — one that is totally untreatable and have no recognized treatments whatsoever.

"Until we do the work to really understand the biology of the disease, kids are still going to face a bleak prognosis, which is 300 days from diagnosis to death."

I hope scientists would be able to do something about it, and I hope that more funds would be given for this research.

(Image Credit: Newcastle Herald)