This Is Why Giving Up on Weed After Years of Smoking Can Feel So Terrible

"After I got sober, it took me a little over a year to go a single day without wishing for a drink, but it was more than nine years before my craving to get high abated."

Continue reading...

Sad music and depression: does it help?

Depression and suicide are major concerns in the 21st century. The World Health Organisation estimates that over 800,000 people die by suicide each year, with the 15-29 age group particularly affected. Interestingly, it is also when we are in our teens and twenties that music seems to play its most important role in our lives. Studies show that adolescents listen to music for approximately two to three hours per day, especially when feeling distressed.

Continue reading...

Does drinking 1 bottle of wine a week raise cancer risk as much as 10 cigarettes?

How many cigarettes are in a bottle of wine? Drinking one 750-milliliter bottle of wine a week is associated with the same lifetime cancer risk as smoking five cigarettes a week for men, and 10 cigarettes for women, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal BMC Public Health.

Continue reading...

Crispr Gene Editing Could One Day Cut Away Human Pain

FOR JO CAMERON, it takes the sight of blood or the smell of her own flesh burning for her to know that something is very wrong. As the 71-year-old Scottish woman recounted to The New York Times earlier this week, she has lived a life virtually free of pain, fear, and anxiety, thanks to a missing stretch of DNA. Doctors discovered there was something different about Cameron when she came in for surgery and turned down painkillers after the nerve blocker from her operation wore off.

Continue reading...

Discovery of Underground Water on Mars Points to Humanity's Ideal Landing Site

When NASA launched the Mars projects of the early 2000s, its missions were guided by a central theme known as “Follow the Water.” The basic idea is that if humans are to colonize Mars, they’ll need to have water to drink. Ideally, that water would come from Mars itself, which overflowed with rivers three billion years ago. But now, researchers report in Nature Geoscience that water remains on the Red Planet, hidden in unexpected locations deep underground.

Continue reading...

'Bias deep inside the code': the problem with AI 'ethics' in Silicon Valley

When Stanford announced a new artificial intelligence institute, the university said the “designers of AI must be broadly representative of humanity” and unveiled 120 faculty and tech leaders partnering on the initiative.

Continue reading...

NASA Wants To Pay Someone $19,000 to Lie Down For Two Months

Germany's space research program, the German Aerospace Center (known as the DLR), is looking for a woman with the right stuff to stay in bed for 60 days to study weightlessness. Commissioned by NASA and the European Space Agency, the study will simulate weightlessness with sleep. Using what's been deemed a "short-arm human centrifuge," scientists hope to test two-thirds of study participants in the best ways to counteract the negative effects of zero-gravity.

Continue reading...

The Other Reasons People Don't Get Vaccines

When it comes to the flu, refusal often has nothing to do with the fear of autism

Continue reading...

The Adult Brain Does Grow New Neurons After All, Study Says

Study points toward lifelong neuron formation in the human brain’s hippocampus, with implications for memory and disease

Continue reading...

Life on Mars? NASA's Curiosity rover snaps photos of mushrooms

Images from the surface of Mars reveal the presence of mushrooms, a group of scientists claim in a controversial new study. It states some images captured by NASA's Curiosity show fungi is growing on the surface of the supposedly barren planet. The claims have yet to be confirmed or refuted by NASA.

Continue reading...

I had my poo tested to see if the science on gut bacteria stacks up

There are more than 1,000 species of bacteria fighting deep inside your body. But what does the makeup of that bacteria tell us about our health? Your digestive system is about seven metres long — dank folded passageways filled with rotting food and faeces and slick with bile.

Continue reading...

For Some People, Attractive Wives and High Status Husbands Enhance Marital Quality

Your decision-making style—whether you make a "good enough" choice or seek to make the “best" possible choice among all possible options—influences your satisfaction with your partner, according to a 3-year study of newlyweds. Researchers from Florida State University found that maximizing men—those who seek to make the “best” choice—who had attractive wives were more satisfied at the start of their marriages than maximizing men who had less attractive wives, and maximizing women who had high status husbands experienced less steep declines in satisfaction over time than maximizing women who had low status husbands.

Continue reading...

66 million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor

The beginning of the end started with violent shaking that raised giant waves in the waters of an inland sea in what is now North Dakota. Then, tiny glass beads began to fall like birdshot from the heavens. The rain of glass was so heavy it may have set fire to much of the vegetation on land. In the water, fish struggled to breathe as the beads clogged their gills.

Continue reading...

Skin-eating fungus is mighty species slayer

A frog-killing fungus is responsible for the decline of more species than any other pathogen on record, a global analysis has found. The study, published on 28 March in Science1, reveals that chytrid fungi have caused the decline of at least 501 amphibian species worldwide from 1965 to 2015, including 90 that have become extinct. Other well-known pathogens such as the bat disease white-nose syndrome or West Nile virus, which kills birds, have affected just a fraction of the number of species. Chytrid fungi’s impact on biodiversity is comparable to those of the most destructive invasive species, such as cats and rodents, says the study.

Continue reading...

The US will need a lot more neodymium if it wants an offshore wind boom

Magnets made of rare-earth metals like neodymium are commonly used in the generators found in offshore wind turbines. Turbines with neodymium magnets generally need less maintenance than those without them—an advantage when your turbine is a few miles out from land. But neodymium is costly, it almost all comes from China (which has restricted export in the past to drive prices up), and the environmental impact of extracting it from the Earth is not super.

Continue reading...

New drugs that unleash the immune system on cancers may backfire, fueling tumor growth

Although the 65-year-old woman had a rare type of endometrial cancer that had spread to her liver and was expected to be fatal, she still felt well enough to work and swim. As a last hope, her doctors gave her a type of immune-stimulating drug that had had near-miraculous results in some patients with advanced cancer. But 3 weeks after she began the drug, the woman's liver tumors had grown, and her abdomen was swollen with tumors as big as oranges.

Continue reading...

Dogs Can Smell Epileptic Seizures, Study Finds

A new study has found that the human body emits a specific odor during seizures and that dogs can smell them. 

Continue reading...

NASA proves its space helicopter can fly on Mars

NASA has successfully tested the helicopter that's making its way to the red planet with the Mars 2020 rover.

Continue reading...

Here's why Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and other investors are pouring billions into clean-tech ventures

As funding for coal- and gas-fired power generation continues to decline, investors long leery of so-called “clean tech” plays are taking a shine to renewable-energy start-ups and other carbon-reducing technologies.

Continue reading...

NASA Offering People $19,000 To Stay In Bed For Two Months

Do you want to make money, but never leave your bed? NASA just may have your dream job. According to CBS-affiliate WKMG, researchers and NASA and the European Space Agency are willing to pay 24 participants nearly $19,000 to spend 60 days in bed and monitored around the clock. The 24 participants will be separated into two groups, but housed in a single room. Each person will be propped up at an incline with their feet above their head, reducing blood flow to the extremities, mimicking the effects of being in space. This could, however, lead to numbness and muscle deterioration.

Continue reading...

Bill Gates casts an enthusiastic vote for bill to accelerate nuclear energy research

If dollars were votes, newly reintroduced legislation aimed at boosting nuclear energy innovation and advanced reactors would be a winner, thanks to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ strong endorsement today. The world’s second-richest person is the founder and chairman of Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower, a startup that’s working on next-generation nuclear fission reactors.

Continue reading...

Mathematicians have found a new way to multiply two numbers together

The multiplication you learn at school is too slow for computers, so mathematicians are always searching for better methods.

Continue reading...

The woman who doesn't feel pain

Jo Cameron is one of two people on Earth known to have a mutation that means she feels almost no pain.

Continue reading...

How climate change will put billions more at risk of mosquito-borne diseases

Climate change doesn’t just shift weather patterns. It can force the migration of plants, people, animals, bugs — and disease. By the end of this century almost all of the world’s population could be exposed to mosquito-borne diseases once limited to the tropics, according to a new study from PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Continue reading...

WOW Air collapses, stranding passengers around the world

All flights are cancelled.

Continue reading...

Humans can make new brain cells into their 90s, scientists discover

Humans can make fresh brain cells until they are well into their 90s, but the production of new neurons falls in those with Alzheimer’s, even when the disease has recently taken hold, scientists have found. The findings may help doctors to diagnose Alzheimer’s at an earlier stage, and identify those most at risk who may benefit from exercise and other interventions that could boost the production of new brain cells.

Continue reading...

These x-rays of seeds turn biology into art

In her project Archiving Eden, photographer Dornith Doherty explores the beauty and necessity of the world's botanical stockpiles.

Continue reading...

Vegans found to have highest amount of disease-fighting biomarkers

A vegan diet was found to produce the healthiest levels of diet-related biomarkers compared to other diet patterns, according to a Loma Linda University study. The study was reported last month in The Journal of Nutrition. Like clues at a crime scene, biomarkers in blood, urine, fat tissue and other biospecimens can serve as indicators or predictors of health and disease. Biomarkers may have favorable or unfavorable health effects, promoting or preventing cancer, cardiovascular and age-related diseases, and other chronic conditions.

Continue reading...

Fukushima contaminants found as far north as Alaska's Bering Strait

Radioactive contamination from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami in 2011 has drifted as far north as waters off a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait, scientists said on Wednesday

Continue reading...

People consume more calories when eating with a smartphone, study finds

New research provides some initial evidence that distractions like smartphones could contribute to obesity, according to new research published in Physiology & Behavior. “I have studied mastication and oral physiology for 15 years. I was interested in studying the influence of oral physiology on obesity and its comorbidities,” said study author Luciano Pereira, an associate professor at Federal University of Lavras in Brazil.

Continue reading...

Budget airline Wow Air collapses and cancels all flights, stranding passengers

Icelandic airline Wow Air has ceased operations and says stranded passengers should seek "rescue fares."

Continue reading...

NASA Wants to Place Calls to Deep Space With X-Rays

The U.S. space program is developing gigabit-per-second deep-space comms. China is on the hunt too

Continue reading...

How your office job is affecting your metabolism

A new study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology adds to evidence that the two are linked: Those who sit the most benefit the least from a given amount of exercise

Continue reading...

Drunk shopping is a $45B industry. Here's what people are buying.

What percentage of alcohol-consuming Americans shop drunk? How much do they spend? What do they buy? We ran a survey to find out.

Continue reading...

Study of 6 Million People With Mental Disorders Reveals a New Health Risk

New studies reveal that most psychiatric illnesses are related to one another. Tracing these connections, like the mapping of a river system, promises to help define the main cause of these disorders and the drugs that could alleviate their symptoms. The Danish Psychiatric Central Research Register is an enormous treasure trove of clinical data documenting every hospitalization for mental illness in Denmark over the course of 16 years.

Continue reading...

Lack of redundancies on Boeing 737 MAX system baffles some involved in developing the jet

Boeing has long embraced the power of redundancy to protect its jets and their passengers from a range of potential disruptions, from electrical faults to lightning strikes. The company typically uses two or even three separate components as fail-safes for crucial tasks to reduce the possibility of a disastrous failure. Its most advanced planes, for instance, have three flight computers that function independently, with each computer containing three different processors manufactured by different companies.

Continue reading...

The Universe's Dark Secret: Where Did All the Antimatter Go?

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe. Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. So there's this stuff called "antimatter." You may have heard of it. It's just like normal matter, with all the same properties and all the same abilities to make up atoms and molecules, except for one crucial difference: It has an opposite charge. Take the humble electron, for example. Mass of 9.11 x 10^-31 kg. Quantum spin of 1/2. Charge of -1.6 x 10^-9 coulombs.

Continue reading...

IBM purged ‘gray hairs’ and ‘old heads’ as it launched ‘Millennial Corps’: lawsuit

IBM has let go more than 20,000 U.S. workers over age 40 in the past six years, lawsuit claims.

Continue reading...

Teeny-Tiny Bluetooth Transmitter Runs on Less Than 1 Milliwatt

Bluetooth Low Energy data packets can now be sent by millimeter-size IoT motes

Continue reading...

Study finds that low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination

...especially among people who naturally struggle with self-regulation.

Continue reading...

AI disaster won’t look like the Terminator. It’ll be creepier.

When I heard five or so years back that people in Silicon Valley were getting worried about artificial intelligence causing human extinction, my initial reaction was extreme skepticism. A large reason for that was that the scenario just felt silly. What did these folks think would happen — was some company going to build Skynet and manufacture Terminator robots to slaughter anyone who stood in their way? It felt like a sci-fi fantasy, not a real problem.

Continue reading...

NASA Scraps First All-Female Spacewalk For Want Of A Medium-Size Spacesuit

Two female astronauts were set to become the first women to spacewalk together around the International Space Station this week. But they both wear medium spacesuits, and only one was space-ready.

Continue reading...

Rugged 'mountains' taller than Everest lurk deep inside Earth

Revealed by powerful earthquakes, the subterranean structures offer exciting new clues to why our planet is a chemical oddball.

Continue reading...

What Causes Hallucinations? The Brain May Be OverInterpreting a Lack of Info

Mental illness affects millions of Americans. Many people with bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia suffer hallucinations, the perception of something that is not present. From phantom smells to hearing voices and seeing things that are not there, hallucinations can take many forms and stem from many causes. It’s not just mental illness, either. Strokes, migraines and inner ear diseases can also lead to hallucinations. And obviously, psychedelic drugs do as well.

Continue reading...

Unbelievable Assassin Bug Wears Its Victims' Corpses as Armor

Like a real-life version of the Predator—that's barely a half-inch in size—the aptly named assassin bug wears the bodies of its victims like trophy armor after liquefying and consuming their innards. Disgusting. After it's made a kill, the assassin bug—which calls Malaysia home—injects its victim with a special enzyme that dissolves and softens its guts so they can be easily sucked out.

Continue reading...

Trigger Warnings Do Not Work, New Study Finds

Participants who saw trigger warnings before reading or watching upsetting content felt as negative afterwards as those who did not. By Tom Jacobs.

Continue reading...

Elon Musk: ‘Mark my words — A.I. is far more dangerous than nukes’

Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk has doubled down on his dire warnings about the danger of artificial intelligence. The billionaire tech entrepreneur called AI more dangerous than nuclear warheads and said there needs to be a regulatory body overseeing the development of super intelligence, speaking at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas on Sunday.

Continue reading...

Atheists are more Intelligent than Theists

Science and Religion are considered as antonyms of each other, generally. In your brain also, science and religion are ‘fighting‘ with each other. Not only in metaphorical sense, but in a real, physical altercation. These results are found by researchers from Case Western Reserve University (Ohio) and Babson College (Massachusetts). The researchers found that theists are more likely to be involved in religious practices and their faith often suppress their brain to think analytical thinking. The religious people, instead, engage the empathetic network.

Continue reading...

Naturopaths are snake-oil salespeople masquerading as health professionals

When I began researching and conducting interviews for a feature about naturopaths, I was doggedly determined to keep an open mind. Journalism 101 dictates balance: a fair hearing to both sides. My commitment was to present the unbiased truth; I was about to embark on a learning journey, as journalists often do. I interviewed academics from Sydney, Melbourne and the UK, senior medical professionals, sceptics, authors on the subject, naturopaths themselves, those who use them, the professional body for naturopaths...

Continue reading...

Could ‘alcosynth’ provide all the joy of booze – without the dangers?

Scientist David Nutt memorably said alcohol is more dangerous than crack. Now, he is trying to invent a healthy synthetic alternative, and the race is on to get it to market.

Continue reading...