Second-hand smoking happens when a person inhales smoke from someone else’s cigarette. This has many negative effects on a person’s health. Second-hand smoking is not the only thing rampant on the world; second-hand drinking is, too.

It's not quite as literal, as it doesn't mean the alcohol you drink will end up in the bloodstream of another. But over the years it's become increasingly clear that second-hand drinking is a significant public health issue. Now, a study in the United States has placed its effects on par with second-hand smoking.

Using US national survey data from 2015, research has found that each year, one in five American adults - which is an estimated 53 million people - experience harm because of someone else's drinking. These harms include things like threats or harassment, which was the most commonly cited, as well as physical aggression, drunk driving, and even financial or family problems.

Know more about this study over at Science Alert.

(Image Credit: Free-Photos/ Pixabay)

Physical attractiveness, personality similarities, and similar interests; these are some of the things we consider in dating a person. However, it might surprise you that these same things that are believed to draw people people are the same things that break them apart.

Take for example physical attractiveness:

Physical appearance is a very important factor in determining who we consider as a potential romantic partner... However, if we are looking for long-term, stable relationships, it may be better to choose a partner based on other characteristics (perhaps honesty or trustworthiness). Attractive individuals are more likely to end their relationships in order to pursue new relationships, perhaps because they are less able to resist the many potential new partners available to them due to their attractiveness…

What are your thoughts on this one?

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Sony might have a solution for us as we try to cope up with the scorching heat outdoors. With its First Flight program, Sony crowdfunds the Reon Pocket, a wearable air conditioner that slips into a pouch in a special t-shirt.

The stealthy device doesn't condition the air as such. Rather, it sits at the base of your neck and uses the Peltier effect (where heat is absorbed or emitted when you pass an electrical current across a junction) to either lower your temperature by 23F or raise it by 14F, all without bulk or noise. You could wear a stuffy business outfit on a hot day and avoid looking like you've just stepped out of a sauna.

Unfortunately, the product is expected to ship in March of the next year, which means that we just have to find ways to keep ourselves cool this summer.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Video Credit: First Flight JP/ YouTube)

Mint, similar to chili peppers, is a biochemical success story. Their wonders lie in the special molecules that they produce — capsaicin in chili peppers, and menthol in mint. Scientists hypothesize that the plants’ ancestors began to produce chemicals to repel predators.

"Plants probably evolved compounds to use as a defense mechanism, and through natural selection, they found some that happened to work," Paul Wise, an associate member at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, told Live Science.

"The plants that produced the compounds were less likely to be eaten," he said. Those that survived long enough to reproduce were able to spread their seeds and pass their genes to subsequent generations.

That's why mint makes menthol. But why does it make your mouth feel cool?

The answer, in short, is that menthol tricks our bodies into feeling cold, even though we're not. Both menthol and capsaicin affect the system of sensory receptors that monitor things such as touch, temperature and pain. Called the somatosensory system, this complex network of neurons is different from the systems responsible for taste and smell.

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It is thanks to pain-sensing nerves on our skin that we feel pain when we get pricked or when we pinch ourselves. But apparently, that is not the only thing that they do. According to a surprising discovery made by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, these nerves also help in fighting skin infections and in preventing their spread, which suggests a new type of immunity. The study can be read in the journal Cell.

“These pain-sensing nerves can detect pathogens, and for the first time, we’ve shown that they activate an immune response and also signal protective immunity in sites adjacent to the infection,” said Daniel Kaplan, M.D., Ph.D., professor of dermatology and immunology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and the senior author of the study. “This demonstrates that the immune and nervous systems work synergistically for host defense. These findings also could have important implications for developing more specific therapies for autoimmune skin diseases like psoriasis.”

More details on Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen/Adapted from Cohen et. Al., Cell 2019)

Magnets are usually solids. But for the first time, scientists have made a permanently magnetic liquid and they made it by accident. The serendipitous creation which was made at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California allowed scientists to alter the magnetic matter.

Thomas Russell, a distinguished professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was a senior author on the paper, told LiveScience that scientists could "make magnets that are liquid and they could conform to different shapes—and the shapes are really up to you."

More details of this accidental creation on Popular Mechanics.

(Video Credit: Berkeley Lab/ YouTube)

The human immune system must be able to identify which are the body’s own cells and which are invaders. In the same way, a standard facial recognition program should be able to identify its target face from thousands of faces. This analogy is demonstrated by a new mathematical model. This model shows that the strategy for outsmarting the immune system is similar to the way to fool a pattern recognition system.

Every time an immune cell encounters a new biomolecule (“ligand”), such as the protein coating of a virus, it must categorize the molecule and determine the appropriate response. But the system isn’t perfect; HIV, for example, can avoid setting off an immune response. “In immunology, you have unexpected ways of fooling immune cells,” says Paul François, of McGill University in Canada. He realized that there is a similarity between the way certain pathogens outsmart the immune system and the way a sophisticated hacker can fool image recognition software.

One way an immune cell distinguishes among molecules is by the length of time that they remain bound to a receptor on the cell’s surface. “Stickier” molecules are more likely to be foreign. One strategy for pathogens involves overwhelming immune cells with borderline molecules called antagonists that bind to receptors and have an intermediate stickiness. Surprisingly, this condition can reduce the likelihood that a cell will activate an immune response even against obvious foreign molecules.

Artificial neural networks—computer programs that in some ways mimic networks of brain cells—can be used for image recognition after they’ve been trained with a wide range of image data. But a carefully constructed and nearly imperceptible modification of an image could make a picture that appears to human eyes as a panda to be misclassified as a gibbon, for example.

In both of these cases, an attacker tries to cause a sorting system to misclassify an object. To formally demonstrate the analogy, François and his colleagues developed a mathematical model of decision making by a type of immune cell called a T cell. In the model, which is a variation on previous models, the cell’s many receptors are exposed to numerous ligands having a range of stickiness values. Next, the model assumes that a series of biochemical reactions results from the binding and unbinding events at the receptors, which leads to a score—a number that determines whether the cell will activate an immune response or not. (Biochemically, the score is the concentration of a certain biomolecule.) The biochemical reactions include both “gas pedals,” which raise the score and make an immune response more likely, and “brakes,” which reduce the score.

More details on APS.

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Photosynthesis is the ability to use the Sun’s energy to produce sugars via chemical reactions. There are two types of photosynthesis: oxygenic and anoxygenic. 

Oxygenic photosynthesis splits water into oxygen and hydrogen to power the process, and releases oxygen as a by-product. This is what plants, algae, and some bacteria, do.

Anoxygenic photosynthesis, on the other hand, uses molecules other than water to power the process. It does not release oxygen. This is what other bacteria do.

Scientists have always assumed that anoxygenic photosynthesis is more 'primitive', and that oxygenic photosynthesis evolved from it. Under this view, anoxygenic photosynthesis emerged about 3.5 billion years ago and oxygenic photosynthesis evolved a billion years later.

However, by analysing structures inside an ancient type of bacteria, Imperial College London researchers have suggested that a key step in oxygenic photosynthesis may have already been possible a billion years before commonly thought.

This finding could mean that the evolution of photosynthesis needs revising.

See more details on Science Daily.

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Remains of hunters’ weapons from about 14,000-15,000 were uncovered by archaeologists at a cave in Slovakia, stated by officials. According to the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education’s Science in Poland publication, these were discovered earlier this month at the Hučava Cave in Slovakia’s Belianske Tatras mountain range by a Slovak-Polish archaeological expedition.

“We have discovered dozens of stone blades that have survived completely or in fragments, originally embedded on poles,” said Paweł Valde-Nowak from the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. “We recovered some of the blades from the remnants of a hearth.”

The stone blades are the first prehistoric artifacts to be found in the Tatra caves.

“The traces we have discovered show that prehistoric hunters had lived in the cave for a long time,” Valde-Nowak said.

The blades are believed to date back to the end of the Ice Age, when the ice sheet began to disappear from the northern areas of modern Poland, approximate 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.

According to Valde-Nowak, researchers have have been looking for traces of prehistoric human presence in the Tatra caves since the 19th century, with no success — until now.

(Image Credit: Prof. Paweł Valde-Nowak)

The film Kimi no Na Wa (Your Name) has been a hit animated film that put its creator Makoto Shinkai in the global map. Now Shinkai has a new film that has just recently landed in theaters in Japan, entitled Tenki no Ko (Weathering With You), but we have to wait until 2020 to see the film outside Japan. 

If there was something notable in Japanese anime, that would be the mouth-watering drawings of food.

In the film, there is a scene where the heroine, Hina Amano, prepares a series of creative dishes for protagonist Hodaka Morishima. They include potato chip fried rice and instant ramen salad.

The odd yet alluring dishes were created in collaboration with recipe website Kurashiru, who has released the recipes for anyone to try.

(Image Credit: Spoon & Tamago)

This interactive phosphorescent landscape is created by Dutch artist and designer Daan Roosegaarde. The installation is entitled PRESENCE, and is the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum. The installation fills several rooms with interactive glow-in-the-dark presence.

Guests can capture their shadows as they are bathed in green and red light, dig their hands into thousands of glowing orbs, or trace neon light patterns across the museum floor. The installation was created as a metaphor for the impact of humans’ presence on Earth, which displays the multitude of ways we leave our impression behind.

The installation runs through January 12, 2020 at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands.

(Video Credit: studioroosegaarde/ YouTube)

Ryo Yamazaki, a Japanese crafter and photographer, comes back with an expanded portfolio of cats wearing hats made from their own fur. Called “nukege hats” (nukege being the japanese word for ‘shedded fur’), the hats are made from old sheds molded into wacky shapes.

The idea came about when yamazki saw a lump of shed had accumulated on the floor that looked like a hat. He decided to mold it into a pointy hat and place it on one of his cat’s heads. Fast-forward several years and he has developed a passion for the feline fascinators that he now shares with his wife.

See the pictures on DesignBoom.

(Image Credit: Ryo Yamazki / Hiromo Yamazki)

Human creativity indeed knows no bounds. In this video, people sprint while wearing huge inflatable T-Rex costumes. And some of the competitors have silly names like Dino Dasher, Ramblin’ Rex, Fossilizer, and Regular Unleaded.

Via Funny or Die

(Video Credit: CBS 42/ YouTube)

The Mid-Century Monster was the brainchild of William Penn Mott Jr., an Oakland parks administrator. It was said on the Landscape Architecture Magazine that Mott wanted children to have somewhere to play on the shores of Lake Merritt.

However, Mott was tired of seeing the same old swings and slides on many playground structures, and so he commissioned Robert Winston, a local artist known for his rippling, free-flowing jewelry, to make a huge piece of public art — something big enough that could make kids feel like they were climbing trees.

Winston was up to the challenge. He designed a 40-foot-long structure, with angles and bends perfect for children to climb on, and all elegance of an Isamu Noguchi sculpture. In 1952 he completed the monster, which he painted light green. Two years later it graced the shores of the tidal lagoon.

The sculpture quickly became an Oakland icon, gracing the cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 album Dance to the Music. The cover shows the band members peering down from the monster’s green haunches.

But through time the Mid-Century Monster deteriorated. As of 2015, the green monster became a large washed-up husk. Its color has already faded to white, and some of its concrete limbs had begun to crack. Rust has also crept inside its mesh metal frame.

It had become a menace, for all the wrong reasons, and the city had fenced it off for public-safety purposes.

But after a long restoration project, the Mid-Century Monster was finally let out of the cage this year and back to its green color.

See more details over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Mid-Century Monster Fan Club)

Imagine this for a moment: You have no job. Your savings are rapidly depleting. You have no friends or family to help you pay the rent. It’s only a matter of time before the owner kicks you out of the house. When that happens, what’s your next move? Where will you find help, or at least free food to get you through that day? Fortunately, an app was designed just for those kinds of questions.

Built by the Toronto-based startup Ample Labs, the chatbot, called Chalmers, helps quickly direct struggling local users to free meals, shelter, and other resources. The early version is simple, but the app will eventually be able to respond to detailed questions.

[...]

The team spent months working with people experiencing homelessness, along with frontline staff at agencies and shelters, to develop the new app. A chatbot made sense, Chen says, because it directs people to information quickly and because most people who need help do have smartphones. “When we went into shelters and did codesign and [testing], we also found that people are more likely to tell personal information to a bot,” she says.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Mark Bone/ Ample Labs)