Our furry little friends!
Here is what we are reading today:
- If you like your google glass, you can keep it ( if you buy it first)
Another way to get your google glass on Amazon! ( I love mine!!)
“When bats began migrating to Austin, Texas in the early 1980s, locals were afraid that the bats would be a rabies spreading menace. But in the three decades that they’ve been coming to Austin they’ve become a part of the city’s identity and an unofficial mascot. “
“A team of scientists may have detected a twist in light from the early universe that could help explain how the universe began. Such a finding has been compared in significance to the detection of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012.
What they detected is known as primordial B-mode polarization and is important for at least two reasons. It would be the first detection of gravitational waves, which are predicted to exist under Einstein’s theory of relativity but have never before been seen. But the thing that has scientists really excited is that it could provide the first direct evidence for a theorized event called inflation that caused the universe to exponentially grow just a fraction of a fraction of a second after it was born. “
“Bo Hang, Ph.D., who presented the research, said that although the idea of third-hand smoke made its debut in research circles just a few years ago in 2009, evidence already strongly suggests it could threaten human health.
“The best argument for instituting a ban on smoking indoors is actually third-hand smoke,” said Hang, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).”
“”This is a tremendous advance in the field,” says Anna Dongari-Bagtzoglou, an oral microbiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. Besides being the first study of the fungal microbiome in people with HIV, it’s also the first study that compares bacterial and fungal populations in the same patients, she says. “These correlations are important because for many years we thought the two kingdoms were in competition,” she says, adding that research from her lab has shown that some bacteria can even combine with Candidato make infections more severe.”
“‘Elephants appear to be able to manipulate their vocal tract (mouth, tongue, trunk and so on) to shape the sounds of their rumbles to make different alarm calls,’ said Dr Lucy King of Save the Elephants and Oxford University who led the study with Dr Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert from Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and colleagues.”
“Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has had enough of shooting in the dark. He thinks that if a clinical trial of a psychiatric therapy fails, scientists should at least learn something about the brain along the way.”
“”The lack of association in our study between contagious yawning and empathy suggests that contagious yawning is not simply a product of one’s capacity for empathy,” said study author Elizabeth Cirulli, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Center for Human Genome Variation at Duke University School of Medicine.”
3 Comments
Rachael R. · April 7, 2014 at 9:48 am
The article on third-party smoke is interesting because the public is probably not well-informed on this issue; there are advertisements and protests against first- and second-hand smoke, but I personally never heard of or thought about second-hand smoke. I would be interested to see how damaging this third-hand smoke exposure is, and how long the symptoms would take to manifest. I am very glad that no one in my family smokes, as I would be terrified to think of how this could impact the children in my family, so I hope this will become more advertised in the future among the general public.
oliviaeinbund · May 12, 2014 at 8:12 am
Yawning: This article proved everything I thought about contagious yawning wrong, stating that yawning is “not strongly related to variables like empathy, tiredness and energy levels.” However it revealed new insights on yawning and disease. I was not aware contagious yawning only occurs in humans and chimps, not other animals like dogs. I thought the research was well sampled and well conducted.
oliviaeinbund · May 12, 2014 at 8:14 am
Elephants: This article was very cool! We obviously do not speak languages of animals, but by recording their language these researches were able to figure out they make a certain sound in response to human danger. The elephants heard this sound and reacted!! I believe all animals do understand their kind and this article does demonstrate something of that nature. So although humans may not understand the elephant rumbles, elephants clearly hear the differences and understand what the sounds mean.