Construction teams around the world rely on bitumen—an incredibly sticky by-product of crude oil production—as the main binding agent for asphalt. But a team of scientists reckon that a compound found within plants could help replace it, making road-building a greener, more sustainable practice. Read more…
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A Compound From Plants Could Replace Bitumen to Make Roads Greener
We debunked a lot of fake viral photos this year. Eighty-six, to be exact. And that doesn’t even include all those fake toilet photos from the Sochi Olympics , those fake Ebola cures , and all the lies that UberFacts helped spread . It was a busy year for fakes. Read more…
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86 Viral Images From 2014 That Were Totally Fake
Nature abhors a vacuum. Aristotle said that. Of course, he was talking about how nature has a tendency to fill empty spaces with stuff. In a way, the internet also abhors a vacuum, and the “downfall” of The Pirate Bay is just the latest example. Read more…
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The Pirate Bay Shutdown Hasn’t Slowed Piracy At All
TaleSlinger sends this news from Space.com: Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe. While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster. “The signal’s distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges, ” [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. “With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations, ” added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted
LuxuryYacht writes A new study shows that the way your brain responds to photos of of maggots, mutilated carcasses, and gunk in the kitchen sink gives a pretty good indication of whether you’re liberal or conservative. “Remarkably, we found that the brain’s response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual’s political ideology, ” Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute psychology professor who led the study, said in a written statement. 83 men and women viewed a series of images while having their brains scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. The images included the disgusting photos described above, along with photos of babies and pleasant landscapes. Afterward, the participants were asked to rate how grossed out they were by each photo. They also completed a survey about their political beliefs, which included questions about their attitudes toward school prayer, gun control, immigration, and gay marriage. There was no significant difference in how liberals and conservatives rated the photos. But the researchers noted differences between the two groups in the activity of brain regions associated with disgust recognition, emotion regulation, attention and even memory. The differences were so pronounced that the researchers could analyze a scan and predict the person’s political leaning with 95 percent accuracy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Reactions To Disgusting Images Predict a Persons Political Ideology
schwit1 writes with news about a flying defibrillator designed by a Dutch student. A Dutch-based student on Tuesday unveiled a prototype of an “ambulance drone”, a flying defibrillator able to reach heart attack victims within precious life-saving minutes. Developed by Belgian engineering graduate Alec Momont, it can fly at speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour (60 miles per hour). “Around 800, 000 people suffer a cardiac arrest in the European Union every year and only 8.0 percent survive, the main reason for this is the relatively long response time of emergency services of around 10 minutes, while brain death and fatalities occur with four to six minutes, ” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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"Ambulance Drone" Prototype Unveiled In Holland
HughPickens.com writes After rising rapidly for decades, the number of people behind bars peaked at 1.62 Million in 2009, has been mostly falling ever since down, and many justice experts believe the incarceration rate will continue on a downward trajectory for many years. New York, for example, saw an 8.8% decline in federal and state inmates, and California, saw a 20.6% drop. Now the WSJ reports on an awkward byproduct of the declining U.S. inmate population: empty or under-utilized prisons and jails that must be cared for but can’t be easily sold or repurposed. New York state has closed 17 prisons and juvenile-justice facilities since 2011, following the rollback of the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws, which mandated lengthy sentences for low-level offenders. So far, the state has found buyers for 10 of them, at prices that range from less than $250, 000 to about $8 million for a facility in Staten Island, often a fraction of what they cost to build. “There’s a prisoner shortage, ” says Mike Arismendez, city manager for Littlefield, Texas, home of an empty five-building complex that sleeps 383 inmates and comes with a gym, maintenence shed, armory, and parking lot . “Everybody finds it hard to believe.” The incarceration rate is declining largely because crime has fallen significantly in the past generation. In addition, many states have relaxed harsh sentencing laws passed during the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, and have backed rehabilitation programs, resulting in fewer low-level offenders being locked up. States from Michigan to New Jersey have changed parole processes, leading more prisoners to leave earlier. On a federal level, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Before 2010, the U.S. prison population increased every year for 30 years, from 307, 276 in 1978 to a high of 1, 615, 487 in 2009. “This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration, ” says Natasha Frost. “People don’t care so much about crime, and it’s less of a political focus.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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As Prison Population Sinks, Jails Are a Steal
An anonymous reader writes 28 years after the Chernobyl accident, tests have found that more than one in three Saxony boars give off such high levels of radiation that they are unfit for consumption. In 2009 almost €425, 000 ($555, 000) was paid out to hunters in compensation for wild boar meat that was too contaminated to be sold. “It doesn’t cover the loss from game sales, but at least it covers the cost of disposal, ” says Steffen Richter, the head of the Saxon State Hunters Association. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Radioactive Wild Boars Still Roaming the Forests of Germany
Scientists already know how to make a tasty tomato , but in the quest for mass production, there’s another barrier to overcome: how to make a tomato that grows 24 hours a day. Read more…
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Scientists Are Building a Tomato That Grows 24 Hours a Day
redletterdave (2493036) writes “Apple is one of the biggest headphone makers in the world thanks to those signature white earbuds that have shipped with every iPod, iPhone, and iPad since 2001. But even two years after earbuds became ‘EarPods, ‘ the design could still be improved — and competitors are taking notice. Amazon recently unveiled a new pair of in-ear headphones that are magnetic, tangle-free and $5 cheaper than Apple’s $30 EarPods, while smaller startups are promoting their own wireless and customizable 3D-printed earbuds. But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with ‘one or more integrated physiological sensors’ designed to help users keep track of their body stats.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How Apple Can Take Its Headphones To the Next Level