Breakfast Isn't Always the Most Important Meal of the Day, Says Scientist

There was a time when skipping breakfast was nothing short of dietary blasphemy. But recently, breakfast’s status as the “most important meal of the day” has come under some scrutiny, especially its key role in common weight loss strategies. Proponents of the idea that eating breakfast is important for weight loss have just been dealt another blow.

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Columbia Engineers Translate Brain Signals Directly into Speech

In a scientific first, Columbia neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone’s brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.

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US government scientists debunk Trump’s ‘global waming’ tweets with cartoon

US government climate scientists take unprecedented step of tweeting a rebuttal to PDonald Trump’s recent tweets implying that winter storms and cold weather in US somehow disprove global warming.…

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What Spacecraft Will Enter Interstellar Space Next?

In December 2018, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft reached interstellar space, following the example of its sister, Voyager 1. Right now, only five spacecraft have been launched capable of making such a grand exit, including the Voyagers. The remaining three are Pioneers 10 and 11, and New Horizons. Which one will be the next to make a great escape?

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How Cold Is It In Canada And The Upper Midwest? Colder Than Mars, In Parts

We knew we were in for a very cold, potentially life-threatening, week, but we had no idea that it was going to be this cold, like Mars-is-looking-pretty-good-now-compared-to-Earth degree of coldness. According to Mars Weather, a Twitter account that posts updates on the weather on the red planet, in certain parts of North America, the high temperatures yesterday were even lower than Mars' last reported high...

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After ghoulish allegations, a brain-preservation company seeks redemption

Robert McIntyre and Nectome are determined to claw their way out of scientific purgatory and show they can preserve brains and perhaps memories.

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Fish Poop Could Help Us Sustainably Grow The Food Of Our Future

Today, surrounded by freezing temperatures, thousands of heads of lettuce grow, nestled in a cozy greenhouse fed by nutrient-rich nitrates. Or you could call it what it is: fish poop. The process, called aquaponics, allows farmers to grow local, organic produce anywhere at any time of year. Aquaponics is a sustainable method of farming that combines aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (cultivating plants in water).

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Why some Japanese pensioners want to go to jail

Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime wave. Poverty and loneliness are two of the possible causes.

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Tragic reason for whale suicides revealed in major study

Scientists have long known that some beaked whales beach themselves and die in agony after exposure to naval sonar, and now they know why: the giant sea mammals suffer decompression sickness, just like scuba divers. At first blush, the explanation laid out today by 21 experts in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B seems implausible. Millions of years of evolution have turned whales into perfectly calibrated diving machines that plunge kilometres below the surface for hours at a stretch, foraging for food in the inky depths.

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The Creator of the Roomba Just Launched a Lawn Mower

Product to go on sale in Germany in 2019, globally in 2020.

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It’s time to start taking the search for E.T. seriously, astronomers say

Long an underfunded, fringe field of science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may be ready to go mainstream. Astronomer Jason Wright is determined to see that happen. At a meeting in Seattle of the American Astronomical Society in January, Wright convened “a little ragtag group in a tiny room” to plot a course for putting the scientific field, known as SETI, on NASA’s agenda.

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'Metallic wood' has the strength of titanium and the density of water

Researchers have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that make it as strong as titanium but four to five times lighter.

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NASA is back to work, but the effects of the government shutdown linger

This week, thousands of civil servants and contractors are back at work at NASA’s various centers throughout the country following a record 35-day government shutdown — but it will be a while before it’s work as usual again at the agency. These first few days back on the job will be consumed with practical matters, such as figuring out employee backpay and how to dive back into projects.

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EU proposes ban on 90% of microplastic pollutants

European Chemicals Agency draft law aims to cut 400,000 tonnes of plastic pollution

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The Hubble Telescope's Deep View of the Universe Is Now Even More Astounding!

One of the Hubble Space Telescope's most famous images peered even deeper into the cosmos than scientists had thought. That photo is the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), which combines hundreds of images taken by the space telescope over multiple years into the deepest view of the universe ever created. The composite pic of a small patch of sky contains a whopping 10,000 galaxies, astronomers have estimated. (The HUDF also refers to that patch of sky, not just imagery of it.)

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Milkmen return to London as millennials bid to cut plastic waste

Milkmen and milkwomen are making a comeback in London as millennials have started using glass milk bottles in a bid to cut down plastic waste. Dairies in the capital told of a "phenomenal" upsurge in interest from younger customers at the start of the year amid growing public upset over plastic waste.

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Body Clock Study Shows Mental Health Effects of Being a "Morning Person"

Living organisms are governed by an internal biological clock known as the circadian rhythm, and as the Earth rotates every 24 hours, this clock aligns with the cycle of day and night. In a new study, scientists reveal that this process has a strong link to mental health. There’s a larger chunk of the genome dedicated to body clocks than previously realized, and those genes are linked to others that determine a person’s overall state of well-being.

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Newborn babies have inbuilt ability to pick out words, study finds

Newborn babies are born with the innate skills needed to pick out words from language, a new study published in Developmental Science reveals. Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition.

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Incredible New Brain-Computer Interface Can Translate Thoughts Into Speech

Neuroengineers have created a new system that can translate simple thoughts into recognizable speech, using artificial intelligence and a speech synthesizer, according to a study published Tuesday. A team of New York-based researchers was able to reconstruct words using only brain activity, an innovation that could pave the way for brain-controlled technologies like, say, a smartphone that can translate your thoughts into text messages.

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Artificial Skin Could Help Burn Victims "Feel" Again

University of Connecticut (UConn) scientists say a new type of sensor could lead to artificial skin that someday may help burn victims “feel” again. They described their research (“An Ultra-Shapeable, Smart Sensing Platform Based on a Multimodal Ferrofluid-Infused Surface”) in Advanced Materials. “The development of wearable, all‐in‐one sensors that can simultaneously monitor several hazard conditions in a real‐time fashion imposes the emergent requirement for a smart and stretchable hazard avoidance sensing platform that is stretchable and skin‐like.

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Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis on the Tip of Your Tongue…Microbiome

Scientists in China report that differences in the abundance of various types of bacteria living on the tongue can distinguish patients with early pancreatic cancer from healthy individuals. The researchers, headed by a team at Zhejiang University, say that their findings could feasibly help direct the development of diagnostic tests for pancreatic cancer or even hint at new approaches to preventing the disease.

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64 and unemployed: One man's struggle to be taken seriously as a job applicant

David Wimsett's resume is expansive, and potential employers are always keen to meet with him. When they finally do, however, the interviewer's disposition quickly switches from enthusiastic to disappointed.

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A cure for cancer? Israeli scientists say they think they found one

A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer. “We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.

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Funky mirror turns electric field into a magnetic field with missing pole

The mirror image of a frozen electric charge becomes a magnetic monopole.

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LSD Changes Something About The Way You Perceive Time

We measure time in set amounts— seconds, minutes, and hours. But the way time feels is more slippery. 

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Renewables Could Surpass Fossil Fuels in Britain by 2020

Britain will get more of its electricity from renewable energy sources than fossil fuels as early as next year, according to a new report from the energy analysts group EnAppSys. The transformation is being driven by a surge in offshore wind farms currently under construction or about to begin operating, CleanTechnica reported.

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Study: Loneliness Is Common in US, Wisdom May Curb It

Emerging research discovers loneliness is more prevalent than expected and may wax and wane throughout an adult’s life. Although feeling lonely is linked to a host of mental and physical issues, investigators did not discover an association with serious illness and found that wisdom appears to mitigate loneliness.

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The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite

In public, executives wring their hands over automation’s negative consequences for workers. In private, they talk about how they are racing to automate.

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Scientists bring new insight into how animals see

Scientists from The University of Manchester have found a way to trick the eye into thinking the world is brighter than it actually is.

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From secrecy to dignity: trust and policy implications of shifting attitudes to privacy

The public typically trusts governments to protect personal data more than they trust the private sector. Social media companies are among the least trusted.News & events

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Speaking Black Dialect in Courtrooms Can Have Striking Consequences

A soon-to-be published study found court reporters in Philadelphia regularly made errors when transcribing sentences spoken in a dialect linguists term African-American English.

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World’s First Mammal CRISPR/Cas-9 Genetic Inheritance Control Achieved

CRISPR/Cas9 is a form of genetic editing that holds a lot of promise, such as the killing of cancer cells, but also comes with some hefty warnings, such as that it may cause DNA damage. So far, scientists have been using CRISPR/Cas9 in a variety of plants and animals to edit genetic information, including attempts to practice what is called 'active genetics'.

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Cannabis dependence linked to changes in the processing of social rewards

New research provides evidence that cannabis dependence is linked to altered activity in the striatum when receiving a socially rewarding stimulus. The study has been published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology. “Current addiction theories propose that repeated drug use leads to lasting changes in motivational processes mediated by drug-induced adaptations in the brain reward systems, particularly the striatum,” said study co-author Benjamin Becker of neuSCAN Lab and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

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A Fifth Dimension Could Make Star Trek Discovery's Spore Drive Physically Possible

There are a few rules in the Universe that seem likely to never be broken. Particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum; the entropy of a closed system can never decrease; energy and momentum must be conserved. But if the rules that the Universe plays by are different than we understand them today, many things that appear to be forbidden today may be possible after all.

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Nanotechnology enables engineers to weld previously un-weldable aluminum alloy

An aluminum alloy developed in the 1940s has long held promise for use in automobile manufacturing, except for one key obstacle. Although it's nearly as strong as steel and just one-third the weight, it is almost impossible to weld together using the technique commonly used to assemble body panels or engine parts.

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Autism and theory of mind

Suppose you are helping your friend search for their missing phone and while they are looking around another room, you find it behind some cushions. When they return, you seize the opportunity to play a prank on them and pretend the phone is still missing. You are able to envision this prank because you know that their understanding of the world is separate from what you know to be true. This is an example of theory of mind: the ability to understand other people's beliefs, preferences, and intentions as distinct from one's own.

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Spectacular Hubble Image Shows a Galaxy That Lost Its Spiral Arms

A new study led by Yale University astronomers tells the story of a galaxy that ran out of gas. It’s a story as old as the universe itself: A galaxy is born, brimming with new stars, its spiral arms stretching and curving. But then it runs into trouble, veering too close to the center of a nearby galaxy cluster. The surrounding cluster begins to siphon off the galaxy’s star-making gas, until it loses its spiral arms and becomes a dead relic.

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Maybe You Really Can Use Black Holes to Travel the Universe

One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined. Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density.

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Researchers find that e-scooters are a fun, easy way to go to the ER

"This is a very important technological innovation that has a significant public health impact."

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Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for Alzheimer's disease

Researchers have the first PET scan-documented case of improvement in brain metabolism in Alzheimer's disease in a patient treated with hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT).

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Amazon begins testing deliveries with sidewalk drones

Robots are "the size of a small cooler and roll along at a walking pace."

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Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This

The devices have become our constant companions. This was not the plan.

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Apollo Astronauts May Have Found the Oldest Earth Rock We Know On the Moon

One of Earth's oldest rocks may have been dug up on the moon. A chunk of material brought back from the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts in 1971 harbors a tiny piece of Earth, a new study suggests. The Earth fragment was likely blasted off our planet by a powerful impact about 4 billion years ago, according to the new research.

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Complete Axolotl Genome Could Pave the Way Toward Human Tissue Regeneration

The adorable and enigmatic axolotl is capable of regenerating many different body parts, including limbs, organs, and even portions of its brain. Scientists hope that a deeper understanding of these extraordinary abilities could help make this kind of tissue regeneration possible for humans. With news today of the first complete axolotl genome, researchers can now finally get down to the business of unraveling these mysteries.

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Russian Combat Pilots Now Have Deadly AI Wingmen

Hunter seems to be a robotic wingman that flies autonomously side to side with Russian combat jets, with the pilot issuing combat orders to it on the fly. This is not a new concept. The U.S Air Force hinted at the same idea in this video about the future of air combat (starts at the 3:10 mark):

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How the Air Traffic Control system works and fails

After LaGuardia went down, we could have expected other airports to go dark, as the not-sufficiently automated Air Traffic Control system falls under the load. Without air traffic controllers, there can be no commercial air flight.

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Viewpoint: Why we still underestimate the Neanderthals

Prof Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, explains why some old assumptions about the intellectual capabilities of our evolutionary relatives, the Neanderthals persist today. But a body of evidence is increasingly forcing us to re-visit these old ideas. A paper out this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution reports the early arrival of modern humans to south-western Iberia around 44,000 years ago.

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Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit

Sort of like making artificial life out of silicon, controlled nuclear fusion power or Bussard ramjets is “just an engineering problem.” By Scott Locklin.

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Skinny genes the 'secret to staying slim'

Scientists say they have discovered the secret behind why some people are skinny while others pile on the pounds easily. Their work reveals newly discovered genetic regions linked to being very slim. The international team say this supports the idea that, for some people, being thin has more to do with inheriting a "lucky" set of genes than having a perfect diet or lifestyle. The study appears in PLOS Genetics.

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US flight delays amid federal shutdown

Departures from a number of US airports are said to be affected because of air control shortages.

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