Walking 300 miles in over 20 days is not an easy thing to do. To walk the same number of miles while wearing 63 pounds of armor is much harder, but it is still achievable. Meet Lewis Kirkbride, a 38-year-old charity worker from Durham, northeast England, who did just that as he walked from York to Hastings.

Over 20 days, Kirkbride walked some 300 miles to raise awareness of the English population’s widespread, if largely undiscussed, struggles with mental health—struggles he likens to battles fought by the knights of yore. One particular knight, as it happens.

Kirkbride modeled his route after the one taken in 1066 by King Harold Godwinson (or Harold II), the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.

But why King Harold?

The answer is at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Lewis Kirkbride/ 1066 Battle Walk/ Atlas Obscura)

For people who had one of their arms or legs immobilized, it is to be expected that the immobilized limb would become tinier than its active counterpart, due to loss of muscle mass (also called muscle wastage) in the immobilized arm. But it seems that we can reduce muscle wastage in an immobilized limb. How? By exercising the active limb.

New research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has revealed that training one arm can improve strength and decrease muscle loss in the other arm -- without even moving it.

The findings could help to address the muscle wastage and loss of strength often experienced in an immobilised arm, such as after injury, by using eccentric exercise on the opposing arm.

Learn more about this study over at ScienceDaily.

(Image Credit: honka13/ Pixabay)

The answer? Nobody knows. But maybe this image from the American Museum of Natural History, which was created via computer simulation, might help us to at least visualize how this unknown substance is spread across the whole Universe.

The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and why visible matter is distributed as it is both in the local universe and on the cosmic microwave background.

[...]

In this frame from a detailed computer simulation, complex filaments of dark matter, shown in black, are strewn about the universe like spider webs, while the relatively rare clumps of familiar baryonic matter are colored orange. These simulations are good statistical matches to astronomical observations.

It’s kind of cool, and at the same time scary, to see how our universe is filled with, and is influenced, by an unknown substance.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Tom Abel & Ralf Kaehler (KIPAC, SLAC), AMNH)

Serotonin is one of the happy hormones that our body produces, with the others being oxytocin and endorphins. And it is with good reason that serotonin belongs to the group. This hormone promotes good sleep, and helps in regulating appetite in mood. But it seems that serotonin can do much more than these.

The researchers now report an additional, novel role of the happiness neurotransmitter serotonin which is known to function in the brain to mediate satisfaction, self-confidence and optimism—to act cell-extrinsically as a growth factor for basal progenitors in the developing human, but not mouse, neocortex. Due to this new function, placenta-derived serotonin likely contributed to the evolutionary expansion of the human neocortex.

Amazing.

More about serotonin over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: ColiN00B/ Pixabay)

Removing charred remains of food in your pans as you wash them is one of the most difficult things to do, and this reason alone makes non-stick pans a tempting alternative for those who love to be in the kitchen. The question is, are non-stick pans safe?

Usually when people inquire about the safety of their non-stick cookware, they're talking about the brand Teflon, said Suzanne Fenton, a reproductive endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina. Also known as polytertrafluoroethylene (PTFE), this clear plastic is used to coat metal pots and pans, giving them a waxy, easy-to-clean surface — and for decades, scientists have debated whether it's safe for cooking.

Experts tend to agree that Teflon itself isn’t a problem. The coating itself is considered non-toxic. Even if you ingest small flakes of it, it passes right through you. But some experts are concerned about what happens when Teflon gets too hot. "When pans are overheated, that PTFE coating begins to disintegrate," Fenton told Live Science. As Teflon breaks down, it releases a host of toxic gases. In rare instances, breathing in these chemical fumes can cause polymer fume fever, a condition characterized by a high fever, shortness of breath and weakness. These gases also deadly to birds — lightbulbs coated in Teflon have wiped out poultry houses. Of particular concern is perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), one of the chemicals released when Teflon pans heat up. Long-term exposure to PFOA is linked to a host of conditions from cancer to thyroid disease, Fenton said. 

More about this over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: Andrevan/ Wikimedia Commons)

Driving requires intense focus on the part of the driver. He has to be aware of his surroundings by regularly scanning the environment. He also has to keep a good eye on road signs. In short, driving is a difficult activity for us humans. And if it’s hard for us, that means it’s harder for a computer. With those things in mind, Tesla might have just made a breakthrough in autonomous driving.

“Elon, you mad man.”

That was one reaction to Tesla’s latest “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta, an upgrade to the electric car company’s self-driving suite that CEO Elon Musk called a “quantum leap,” by an owner who was selected to test it out this week.

[...]

The new update allows the vehicle to highlight everything on the road, including pedestrians, unmarked lane dividers, and even parked cars on the side.

If this does not amaze you, I don’t know what will.

Learn more details about this news over at Futurism.

(Image Credit: Tesla Raj/ YouTube)

Artificial intelligence has played a big role in many advancements in medicine, and it once again did just that in this scientific study. This time, AI helped in assessing a person’s risk of having Alzheimer’s by analyzing the said person’s word usage.

Other researchers have already trained various models to look for signs of cognitive impairments, including Alzheimer’s, by using different types of data, such as brain scans and clinical test results. But the latest work stands out because it used historical information from the multigenerational Framingham Heart Study, which has been tracking the health of more than 14,000 people from three generations since 1948. If the new models’ ability to pick up trends in such data holds up in forward-looking studies of bigger and more diverse populations, researchers say they could predict the development of Alzheimer’s a number of years before symptoms become severe enough for typical diagnostic methods to pick up. And such a screening tool would not require invasive tests or scans. The results of the Pfizer-funded and IBM-run study were published on Thursday in EClinicalMedicine.

Now that’s just amazing.

Learn more about this over at Scientific American.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Around 10,000-15,000 years ago, a person small in stature, possibly a young teenager or a short adult woman from the Pleistocene period, traveled across the ancient White Sands without a group. That person cut through a route where big mammals, such as mammoths and giant ground sloths, crossed during different times of day.

The person’s gait is uneven, as if they were carrying a load on their left hip. And three spots along the northbound trail reveal what that load must have been: a toddler, probably around three years old. The child’s small feet left their own tracks when their guardian set them down just long enough to rest or switch arms.

The question is, why?

Learn more about this interesting story over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: Ars Technica)

Colorado, USA — The bear knew that it had to take its chance when it saw this parked car. It really wanted to test its driving skills, even though the bear had no experience driving. So, the bear decided to test its luck, and it turns out that this was its lucky day: the driver’s seat was not locked, and inside the car the bear immediately went. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the keys to make the car run, and so it just left the vehicle a few moments after.

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

The Maya were not only good in astronomy and in architecture. They were also good at filtering water. The secret to their filtration system? Zeolite and quartz. These minerals are so effective in removing contaminants in water that they are still used water filtration systems to this day.

"What's interesting is this system would still be effective today, and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago," said anthropologist Kenneth Barnett Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati.

[...]

"The apparent zeolite filtration system at Tikal's Corriental reservoir is the oldest known example of water purification in the Western Hemisphere," the authors wrote, "and the oldest known use of zeolite for decontaminating drinking water in the world."

The ability to have clean water was of deep importance to the Maya, and of great concern, particularly to Tikal. The city's only water source was 10 reservoirs. Given the large population, and the highly variable climate that went through periods of seasonal drought, their drinking water was prone to contamination from both microbes and cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, a pigment the Maya used heavily.

Now that’s truly amazing.

Know more details about this story over at Science Alert.

(Image Credit: Daniel Schwen/ Wikimedia Commons)

One of the things that caused quite a stir this year was the sudden appearance of Asian giant hornets (or “murder hornets”) in the United States. We no longer have much news about these hornets, and now we suddenly hear that a website called BicBugs, is selling some of them (the website sells dead hornets, by the way).

Sold with their wings spread, they’re available either unmounted ($47), or pinned and framed ($59), and are sure to be one of this Christmas’s must-have gifts.

Would you buy one of these?

(Image Credit: BicBugs/ Technabob)

At first glance, mole rats look like puny creatures because of their appearance as well as their poor eyesight. But don’t let their appearance deceive you; these rodents can be a force to be reckoned with, at least to their enemies at their own size, which are other mole rats.

New research suggests there’s brute power in those numbers: Like ants or termites, the mole-rats go to battle with rival colonies to conquer their lands. 

Wild naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) will invade nearby colonies to expand their territory, sometimes abducting pups to incorporate them into their own ranks, researchers report September 28 in the Journal of Zoology. This behavior may put smaller, less cohesive colonies at a disadvantage, potentially supporting the evolution of bigger colonies.

Researchers stumbled across this phenomenon by accident while monitoring naked mole-rat colonies in Kenya’s Meru National Park.

The phrase “quantity has a quality of its own” is, indeed, true to some extent.

More details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Roman Klementschitz/ Wikimedia Commons)

A man named Ivan Smirnov has created a computer model that could predict a student’s educational outcome by analyzing his/her tweet. Through the use of mathematical textual analysis that takes into account the student’s vocabulary, the model is able to identify if a student is a high or a low academic achiever, and it bases its prediction from that.

Every word has its own rating (a kind of IQ). Scientific and cultural topics, English words, and words and posts that are longer in length rank highly and serve as indicators of good academic performance. An abundance of emojis, words or whole phrases written in capital letters, and vocabulary related to horoscopes, driving, and military service indicate lower grades in school. At the same time, posts can be quite short--even tweets are quite informative. The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), and an article detailing the study's results was published in EPJ Data Science.

[...]

By 'predict', the researcher does not refer to future forecasting, but rather the correlation between the calculated results and the real scores students earned on the PISA exam, as well as their USE scores (which are publicly available online in aggregated form--i.e., average scores per school). In the preliminary phase, the model learned how to predict the PISA data. In the final model, the calculations were checked against the USE results of high school graduates and university entrants.

Head over at EurekAlert to know more details about the study.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: I.Smirnov/ EurekAlert)

One of the most common skin conditions in the world is acne, and it is the most common skin condition in the United States, affecting over 50 million people in the country annually. The skin disease, which is linked to excess oil production and bacterial inflammation, usually starts in puberty, and affects adolescents and young adults across the world.

A new paper published in the journal Nature Communications tells of a discovery that could be used in the future in developing new acne therapies. The findings involve a protein called GATA6.

Learn more about this study over at MedicalXpress.

Sweet.

(Image Credit: Kjerstin_Michaela/ Pixabay)

Prepare yourself this coming Monday (Oct. 26), as NASA will be announcing “an exciting new discovery about the Moon” on that day at 12 noon, EDT. According to the post on their website, the audio of the teleconference will be livestreamed here.

According to NASA, the discovery was from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 modified to be an airborne observatory. The SOFIA flies high in the atmosphere and is equipped with a 9-foot telescope that enables a clear view of the cosmos.

I wonder what the announcement will be. What do you think?

Via Space.com

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)