- Kidney stone mystery solved: Why some people are more prone to develop kidney stones – Most kidney stones form when the urine becomes too concentrated, allowing minerals like calcium to crystallize and stick together. Diet plays a role in the condition — not drinking enough water or eating too much salt (which binds to calcium) also increases the risk of stones.
It goes on to say they maybe able to develop a drug that takes care of this. How about having doctors recommend drinking more water, eating less salt, and cutting down on calcium (dairy products, etc.) in your diet?
But genes are partly to blame. A common genetic variation in a gene called claudin-14 recently has been linked to a substantial increase in risk — roughly 65 percent — of getting kidney stones. In the new study, the researchers have shown how alterations in the gene's activity influence the development of stones.
Tags: research health
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Bookmarks for April 16th
- What is contemporary global nomadism and how does it affect materialism? – "Globalization theorists argue that global nomadism will become more prevalent in the future, and thus the liquid relationship to possessions that we identify will become an important lens in which to understand the new role of objects in people's lives, as consumers will seek to temporarily access objects rather than own them over long periods of time," the authors conclude.
Tags: research SF travel - Why time warps: Mysteries of time perception explored – "The brain creates its own time, making it remarkably easy to trick the brain's clock. Mind time is different from clock time. It is the inner time we experience and it can pass fast or slowly depending on whether we are waiting for a train, working hard or free falling from a plane. Our relationship with time is not straightforward."
Tags: science research
Bookmarks for April 14th
- Enemy me on Facebook – Ideas – The Boston Globe – In a friend-obsessed world, research is uncovering real benefits to having a nemesis
having a nemesis is in many ways as intense and personal a relationship as having a friend, and studies in the animal world and the human one are revealing that those relationships matter, too. For animals, dear enemies may allow individuals to spend less time and energy fighting with foes; for humans, direct personal rivals appear to help people push their performance. A small number of researchers are exploring how these relationships affect our motivation and success — and although “enemy studies” isn’t likely to ever become its own discipline, their findings provide a different and perhaps more realistic way to think about how competition works.
Tags: research science comics - ‘Sounds of silence’ proving a hit: World’s fastest random number generator – The researchers — Professor Ping Koy Lam, Dr Thomas Symul and Dr Syed Assad from the ANU ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology — have tuned their very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum — a region of space that is empty.
Professor Lam said vacuum was once thought to be completely empty, dark, and silent until the discovery of the modern quantum theory. Since then scientists have discovered that vacuum is an extent of space that has virtual sub-atomic particles spontaneously appearing and disappearing.
Tags: science space research tech
One who makes no mistakes makes nothing.
–Giacomo Casanova
Bookmarks for April 7
- Is some homophobia self-phobia? – Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Tags: science research
Bookmarks for April 6th
- BBC Nature – Hibernating bears’ wounds heal without scars –
Tags: research science comics - Can Most Cancer Research Be Trusted? – Reason Magazine – "Most authors have concluded that industry-funded studies published in peer-reviewed journals are of equivalent or higher quality than non-industry funded clinical trials.”
Tags: research science
These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps – Forbes
If Americans aren’t disturbed by phone carriers’ practices of handing over cell phone users’ personal data to law enforcement en masse–in many cases without a warrant–we might at least be interested to learn just how much that service is costing us in tax dollars: often hundreds or thousands per individual snooped.
Earlier this week the American Civil Liberties Union revealed a trove of documents it had obtained through Freedom of Information Requests to more than 200 police departments around the country. They show a pattern of police tracking cell phone locations and gathering other data like call logs without warrants, using devices that impersonate cell towers to intercept cellular signals, and encouraging officers to refrain from speaking about cell-tracking technology to the public, all detailed in a New York Times story.
via These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps – Forbes.
Bookmarks for April 3rd
- Caffeine and exercise may be protective against skin cancer caused by sun exposure, study suggests – Yay! 'Cause I get plenty of both.
Tags: research science health
Bookmarks for April 1st
- Getting to the moon on drops of fuel – Imagine reaching the Moon using just a fraction of a liter of fuel. With their ionic motor, MicroThrust, EPFL scientists and their European partners are making this a reality and ushering in a new era of low-cost space exploration. The complete thruster weighs just a few hundred grams and is specifically designed to propel small (1-100 kg) satellites, which it enables to change orbit around Earth and even voyage to more distant destinations — functions typically possible only for large, expensive spacecraft. Instead of a combustible fuel, the new mini motor runs on an "ionic" liquid, in this case the chemical compound EMI-BF4, which is used as a solvent and an electrolyte. It is composed of electrically charged molecules (like ordinary table salt) called ions, except that this compound is liquid at room temperature. The ions are extracted from the liquid and then ejected by means of an electric field to generate thrust. This is the principle behind the ionic motor: fuel is not burned, it is expelled.
Tags: science tech travel
To the Moon!
