Tuesday 18 June 2019

Popcorn as a snack—healthy hit or dietary horror show?

Popcorn, with its ample dietary fiber and typically low calorie count, makes it easy to understand why many people think a giant bucket at the movie theater qualifies as a healthy snack.

* This article was originally published here

Bosnian city of Mostar awash in trash amid landfill protest

Uncollected thrash is piling up on the streets of the southern Bosnian city of Mostar—one of the Balkan nation's main tourist destinations—since residents begun blocking access to the city's only landfill, insisting that it poses serious health and environmental risks.

* This article was originally published here

Facebook plans its own currency for 2 billion-plus users

Facebook already rules daily communication for more than 2 billion people around the world. Now it wants its own currency, too.

* This article was originally published here

The fellowship of the wing: Pigeons flap faster to fly together

New research publishing June 18 in the open-access journal, PLOS Biology, led by Dr. Lucy Taylor from the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology now reveals that homing pigeons fit in one extra wingbeat per second when flying in pairs compared to flying solo.

* This article was originally published here

Scientists studying how large-scale environmental disruptions affected ancient societies

John Day, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in LSU's College of the Coast & Environment, has collaborated on a new analysis of societal development with Joel Gunn of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, William Folan of the Universidad Autonoma de Campeche in Mexico, and Matthew Moerschbaecher of the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinators Office. Gunn and Folan are Mayan archaeologists and Moerschbaecher is a graduate of LSU's oceanography program. They report that over the past 10,000 years humanity has experienced a number of foundational transitions, or "bottlenecks." During these periods of transition, the advance or decline of societies was related to energy availability in the form of a benign climate and other factors.

* This article was originally published here

Inhaling air pollution-like irritant alters defensive heart-lung reflex for hypertension

Air pollution significantly increases the risk for premature deaths, particularly in people with underlying cardiovascular disease, clinical and epidemiological studies have determined.

* This article was originally published here

Now your phone can become a robot that does the boring work

If any factory worker could program low-cost robots, then more factories could actually use robotics to increase worker productivity.

* This article was originally published here

Dark centers of chromosomes reveal ancient DNA

Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.

* This article was originally published here