Culture
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2018 -- Nobody really likes bargain hot cocoa powder. It's lumpy, it's too thin and it leaves scummy residue behind. But premium hot cocoa mix is too expensive for some imbibers. Fortunately, Reactions is here with some easy kitchen chemistry hacks to turn cheap cocoa mix into a satisfying cold weather pick-me-up: https://youtu.be/7M105LuTJvo.
PHILADELPHIA--African Americans with atrial fibrillation (AF) - a quivering or irregular heartbeat that can lead to a host of dangerous complications - have a significantly higher risk of stroke than Caucasians with the condition, according to new research published today in Heart Rhythm by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The new findings build on previous studies examining the impact of race on the risk of developing atrial fibrillation (AF), which is linked to blood clots, stroke, heart failure and other complications.
Although socio-economic status is known to influence health, strong evidence of the association between economic vulnerability in childhood and the health of older adults was still missing. As part of the "National centre of Competence in Research - NCCR LIVES" funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) examined data from more than 24,000 people aged 50 to 96 living in 14 European countries.
Thousands of appointments cancelled; effects greatest when emergency care withdrawn
The 2016 junior doctors strikes in England had a 'significant' impact on the provision of healthcare, with thousands of appointments cancelled, and significantly fewer admissions and A&E attendances than expected, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open.
The effects were greatest during the last of the periods of industrial action, when junior doctors withdrew emergency care. But there was no obvious change in the death rate during any of the strikes.
A new online game puts players in the shoes of an aspiring propagandist to give the public a taste of the techniques and motivations behind the spread of disinformation - potentially "inoculating" them against the influence of so-called fake news in the process.
Punishing a wrongdoer may be more rewarding to the brain than supporting a victim. That is one suggestion of new research published in JNeurosci, which measured the brain activity of young men while they played a "justice game."
DALLAS, Feb. 19, 2018 -- Mental stress was more likely to cause chest pain in young women who have had a heart attack compared to a comparable group of men, according to a study published in a special issue of Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association that also includes an additional 10 original studies and research letters about the unique role gender plays in heart health.
A thousand-year-old tooth has provided genetic evidence that the so-called "Taíno", the first indigenous Americans to feel the full impact of European colonisation after Columbus arrived in the New World, still have living descendants in the Caribbean today.
Researchers were able to use the tooth of a woman found in a cave on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas to sequence the first complete ancient human genome from the Caribbean. The woman lived at some point between the 8th and 10th centuries, at least 500 years before Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas.
BOSTON -- (Feb. 19, 2018) -- Every cell in your body responds to the hormone insulin, and if that process starts to fail, you get diabetes. In an unexpected finding, scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center have identified four viruses that can produce insulin-like hormones that are active on human cells. The discovery brings new possibilities for revealing biological mechanisms that may cause diabetes or cancer.
For the first four billion years of Earth's history, our planet's continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes.
All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals would later invade.
The timing of this episode has previously relied on the oldest fossil plants which are about 420 million years old.
New research shows that the loss of biodiversity can increase the risk of "extinction cascades", where an initial species loss leads to a domino effect of further extinctions.
The researchers, from the University of Exeter, showed there is a higher risk of extinction cascades when other species are not present to fill the "gap" created by the loss of a species.
Researchers have unlocked the genetic code behind some of the brightest and most vibrant colours in nature. The paper, published in the journal PNAS, is the first study of the genetics of structural colour - as seen in butterfly wings and peacock feathers - and paves the way for genetic research in a variety of structurally coloured organisms.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Without a doctor or dentist's guidance, some parents don't follow national recommendations for early dental care for their children, a new national poll finds.
One in 6 parents who did not receive advice from a health care provider believed children should delay dentist visits until age 4 or older - years later than what experts recommend - according to this month's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.
AUSTIN, Texas -- Building on the success of 10 years of investigation into the production of renewable fuels from plants, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently embarked on a new mission: to develop sustainable alternatives to transportation fuels and products currently derived from petroleum.
Bees? Great. Ants? Hit or miss. Slime mold amoebas? Fail. Though nature offers excellent design inspirations in some information technology systems, in other systems, it can bomb.
Known for his work on The Honey Bee Algorithm, which tamed web traffic instabilities on servers by mimicking the behavior of bee colonies, systems researcher Craig Tovey has seen plenty of nature-inspired technological feats, but also foibles. He's sharing them in a talk on Sunday, February 18, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas.