Tag • #science

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Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 29 March - 01:33

Researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across several genres from 1980 to 2020

You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.

Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.

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Obese children twice as likely to develop multiple sclerosis, study suggests

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 28 March - 23:01

Swedish researchers say inflammation caused by obesity is likely to increase risk of developing conditions such as MS

Children who are obese may face more than double the risk of developing multiple sclerosis as adults, a study suggests.

MS can affect the brain and spinal cord, causing a range of potential symptoms including problems with vision, arm or leg movement, sensation or balance. It is a lifelong condition that can sometimes cause serious disability.

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‘People assume you’re crazy for doing it’: the Melbourne clinic infecting healthy patients

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 28 March - 23:00

Australia’s first unit dedicated to human challenge trials for novel vaccines and treatments has opened. But what are the ethics of infecting healthy people – and who would do it?

Green plants, cool tones, casually placed scatter cushions: this living room in East Melbourne could belong to – or at least, be rented by – any millennial. The squeaky corridor floors are a giveaway, though; along with the beds on wheels.

This isn’t a real estate opportunity, but Doherty Clinical Trials (DCT) – Australia’s first unit dedicated to human challenge studies, where trial participants are given a dose of an infectious disease in a controlled setting. An offshoot of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne, it opens on Monday – a breeding ground, its proprietors hope, for discoveries that may redefine the future of disease.

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Astronomers have solved the mystery of why this black hole has the hiccups

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 28 March - 19:56 · 1 minute

Enlarge / Scientists have found a large black hole that “hiccups,” giving off plumes of gas. (credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT)

In December 2020, astronomers spotted an unusual burst of light in a galaxy roughly 848 million light-years away—a region with a supermassive black hole at the center that had been largely quiet until then. The energy of the burst mysteriously dipped about every 8.5 days before the black hole settled back down, akin to having a case of celestial hiccups.

Now scientists think they've figured out the reason for this unusual behavior. The supermassive black hole is orbited by a smaller black hole that periodically punches through the larger object's accretion disk during its travels, releasing a plume of gas. This suggests that black hole accretion disks might not be as uniform as astronomers thought, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

Co-author Dheeraj "DJ" Pasham of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space research noticed the community alert that went out after the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) detected the flare, dubbed ASASSN-20qc. He was intrigued and still had some allotted time on the X-ray telescope, called NICER (the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) on board the International Space Station. He directed the telescope to the galaxy of interest and gathered about four months of data, after which the flare faded.

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Super gonorrhea rate quickly triples in China, now 40x higher than US

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 28 March - 18:12 · 1 minute

A billboard from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is seen on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California, on May 29, 2018, warning of a drug-resistant gonorrhea.

Enlarge / A billboard from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is seen on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California, on May 29, 2018, warning of a drug-resistant gonorrhea. (credit: Getty | )

Health officials have long warned that gonorrhea is becoming more and more resistant to all the antibiotic drugs we have to fight it. Last year, the US reached a grim landmark : For the first time, two unrelated people in Massachusetts were found to have gonorrhea infections with complete or reduced susceptibility to every drug in our arsenal, including the frontline drug ceftriaxone. Luckily, they were still able to be cured with high-dose injections of ceftriaxone. But, as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bluntly notes: "Little now stands between us and untreatable gonorrhea."

If public health alarm bells could somehow hit a higher pitch, a study published Thursday from researchers in China would certainly accomplish it. The study surveyed gonorrhea bacterial isolates— Neisseria gonorrhoeae —from around the country and found that the prevalence of ceftriaxone-resistant isolates nearly tripled between 2017 and 2021. Ceftriaxone-resistant strains made up roughly 8 percent of the nearly 3,000 bacterial isolates collected from gonorrhea infections in 2022. That's up from just under 3 percent in 2017. The study appears in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

While those single-digit percentages may seem low, compared to other countries they're extremely high. In the US, for instance, the prevalence of ceftriaxone-resistant strains never went above 0.2 percent between 2017 and 2021 , according to the CDC. In Canada, ceftriaxone-resistance was stable at 0.6 percent between 2017 and 2021. The United Kingdom had a prevalence of 0.21 percent in 2022.

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Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed?

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 28 March - 15:13

A process called biofortification puts nutrients directly into seeds and could reduce global hunger, but it’s not a magic bullet

In 2004, Donald Davis and fellow scientists at the University of Texas made an alarming discovery: 43 foods, mostly vegetables, showed a marked decrease in nutrients between the mid and late 20th century.

According to that research , the calcium in green beans dropped from 65 to 37mg. Vitamin A levels plummeted by almost half in asparagus. Broccoli stalks had less iron.

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Daily Telescope: Peering into the remnants of an 800-year-old supernova

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 28 March - 12:00

Enlarge / A composite image of SNR 1181. (credit: NASA, ESA, JPL et. al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope . There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's March 28, and today's photo comes from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as a host of other observatories.

It is a composite image of supernova remnant SNR 1181. The name of the object gives us a clue to when this object went supernova: the year 1181. For about half a year, the 'new' star appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It took a long time before astronomers using modern telescopes were able to find the remnant of this supernova, but they finally did so in the last decade.

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The virus that infects almost everyone, and its link to cancer and MS – podcast

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 28 March - 05:00

On 28 March it is the 60th anniversary of the discovery of Epstein-Barr virus, the most common viral infection in humans. The virus was first discovered in association with a rare type of cancer located in Africa, but is now understood to be implicated in 1% of cancers, as well as the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis, among others. Ian Sample meets Lawrence Young, professor of molecular oncology at Warwick Medical School, to hear the story of this virus, and how understanding it might help us prevent and treat cancer and other illnesses.

Read an obituary of Sir Anthony Epstein, who died in February 2024

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The Delta IV Heavy, a rocket whose time has come and gone, will fly once more

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 27 March - 23:15

United Launch Alliance's final Delta IV Heavy rocket, seen here in December when ground crews rolled it to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's final Delta IV Heavy rocket, seen here in December when ground crews rolled it to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: United Launch Alliance )

This is the rocket that literally lights itself on fire before it heads to space. It's the world's largest rocket entirely fueled by liquid hydrogen, a propellant that is vexing to handle but rewarding in its efficiency.

The Delta IV Heavy was America's most powerful launch vehicle for nearly a decade and has been a cornerstone for the US military's space program for more than 20 years. It is also the world's most expensive commercially produced rocket, a fact driven not just by its outsized capability but also its complexity.

Now, United Launch Alliance's last Delta IV Heavy rocket is set to lift off Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency.

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