Researchers found that compared with people who did not drink coffee, men who consumed six or more cups a day where 10 per cent less likely to die during the 14 years of the study.

For women there were 15 per cent fewer deaths for those drinking six cups or more.

The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that there was a marginal difference for men drinking one cup per day, but two drinking two to three cups a day were 10 per cent less likely to die, those drinking four or five cups per day were 12 per cent less likely to die than non coffee drinkers.

For women there was no effect seen for one cup or less per day. Those drinking two or three cups were five per cent less likely to die compared with those who drank none at all and those drinking four or five cups were 16 per cent less likely to die.

The researchers said the effect was seen across almost all causes of death including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections.

Read more here.

Women who cycle on a regular basis are at an increased risk of losing sensation their pelvic regions, and may experience less pleasure during sex, according to a new Yale study.

While previous studies have linked cycling to numbness of genitalia and erectile dysfunction in males, especially if they ride on a bike that has handlebars that are either parallel or higher than the saddle.

However, the latest findings show the opposite in females.

Researchers, reporting in the May edition of the Journal Of Sexual Medicine, found that female cyclists who position their handlebars lower than the bike’s seat are at risk of decreased anterior vaginal and left labial genital sensation because of increased pressures put on the nerves and blood vessels surrounding the female cyclists’ genitalia.

The study consisted of 48 women who all bicycled at least ten miles a week, four weeks a month. Participants were instructed to ride their own bikes that were mounted on stationary stands and researcher asked them if they experienced “soreness, tingling and other sensations” in their lower body.

Read more here.

ScienceDaily (May 15, 2012) — Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid.

A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning -- and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract the disruption. The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiology publishes the findings in its May 15 edition.

"Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage."

While earlier research has revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, this study is the first to uncover how the sweetener influences the brain.

Read more here.

We all know the Siri says some funny things, but it looks like Apple wasn't a fan of the automated assistant's response to the question "What is the best smartphone ever?"

The Next Web spotted that the assistant offered up the Lumia 900 as an answer to the question last week, but Apple has acted quickly and changed the response. You'll now be told that the answer is indeed the iPhone 4S, with responses like "the one you're holding" and "you're kidding, right?"

The issue was due to Siri's heavy reliance on Wolfram Alpha (its searches represent 25 percent of all Wolfram queries), which chose the Lumia 900 as the best smartphone due to a catalog of four different five-star reviews. If you search Wolfram Alpha independent of Siri you'll still be told that Nokia's offering is the best, so Apple appears to have simply told its beta assistant to ignore the "knowledge engine" for this particular query.

Source.

Conspiracy?

Researchers in Japan have smashed the record for wireless data transmission in the terahertz band, an uncharted part of the electro-magnetic spectrum.

The data rate is 20 times higher than the best commonly used wi-fi standard.

As consumers become ever more hungry for high data rates, standard lower-frequency bands have become crowded.

The research, published in Electronics Letters, adds to the idea that this "T-ray" band could offer huge swathes of bandwidth for data transmission.

The band lies between the microwave and far-infrared regions of the spectrum, and is currently completely unregulated by telecommunications agencies.

Despite the name, the band informally makes use of frequencies from about 300 gigahertz (300GHz or about 60 times higher than the current highest wi-fi standard) to about 3THz, 10 times higher again.

Read more here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=Qw10eKxaSDY

Read the news here.

I sat down one evening at Unit 15 in the old Rainier Brewery Building with Rob Flickenger. His projects have always been amazing – the can-tenna, shrunken quarters, building wireless networks for the UN in Africa, and writing the books (literally) on wireless networks. His most recent project pushes him even further into the mad scientist realm. He’s built a Tesla Gun.

NOTE TO READERS: This is a dangerous idea. An operator holds this device as it operates. Tesla coils and other high voltage devices can stop your heart. The operator must be ABSOLUTELY SURE that the case has a solid ground to shunt the electricity to earth, and not through you. And while I’m all about taking informed and calculated risks, this is me informing you. Ok. Read on.

When I asked him why he had started on this project, he cited Steven Sanders and Matt Fraction’s Five Fists of Science, a graphic novel in which Tesla and Twain battle the evil forces of Edison and Marconi. “How much more epically awesome can you get than a young Tesla fighting evil with a TESLA GUN?”

While Rob is undoubtedly brilliant, he had to learn a lot to make this project happen. If you made something like this out of duct tape and plastic, it would kill you. But if he wanted that Tesla Gun, he’d have to make a lot of the parts himself. Luckily for Rob, he lives in Seattle, where we have an outstanding group of hacker/makerspaces and incredible people doing crazy things in them. He went and talked to a lot of people. He learned about aluminum casting, 3D printing, working with ceramic slip, and machining — all things he had never had first-hand experience with. He learned even more about high voltage electronics. The end result is a hand-held (if you are very, very certain it is grounded) spark-gap Tesla Gun that puts out around 100k volts with sparks leaping a meter to DAGGAR*.

Read more about it here.

See a video here.

Contrary to popular belief that people who chat online tend to behave badly, recent research has shown that the pressure to act civil holds good even in online chat-rooms.

For the study, the researchers looked at 2.5 million posts from 20,000 participants on topics that ranged from music, sports to forums on specific computer programs. In all, around 20 topics were chosen for this study.

The researchers found that despite the fact that people remain anonymous, they tend to be neutral or positive while expressing their views. The researchers say that the reason for this behavior is that people in these chat rooms are frequent visitors and so feel the pressure to be polite. The researchers found that the instantaneous nature of chat-room conversation was another reason that people behaved nicely. Other online media like blogs or forums were found to have more negative messages and emotional out-bursts.

“As the daily “bump” the activity patterns also suggest, most users return to the online chats regularly, to meet other users they may already know. This puts a kind of social pressure on their behavior (even in an unconscious manner) to behave similar to offline conversations,” write Antonios Garas and colleagues.

Read more here.

As suspected, Vesta is no mere asteroid.

It is a protoplanet, a remnant of the early days of our solar system that never grew up because Jupiter kept stealing all its potential mass.

A 10-month study by NASA's Dawn spacecraft mapped the features and probed the composition of the second largest asteroid in the inner solar system. It provided evidence for its protoplanetary status and for the widely accepted notion that it is the source for about 6 percent of the meteorites found on Earth.

Vesta, has, as expected, an iron core covered by layers of rock that have been laid bare in huge craters up to eight miles deep, scientists said at a NASA press conference Thursday.

The huge space rock, 330 miles in diameter, is believed to have formed the same way the moon, Earth and other rocky planets of our solar system did - growing from the dust and gas left over from formation of the sun and eventually attaining enough mass to heat up and melt into an iron core surrounded by layers of rock.


Read more here.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – A scientific ghost town in the heart of southeastern New Mexico oil and gas country will hum with the latest next-generation technology -- but no people.

A $1 billion city without residents will be developed in Lea County near Hobbs, officials said Tuesday, to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets.

Hobbs Mayor Sam Cobb said the unique research facility that looks like an empty city will be a key for diversifying the economy of the nearby community, which after the oil bust of the 1980s saw bumper stickers asking the last person to leave to turn out the lights.

"It brings so many great opportunities and puts us on a world stage," Cobb told The Associated Press before the announcement.


Read more here.

In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years.

"We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise — so let's do it," writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan.

This "Gen1" Enterprise could get to Mars in 90 days, to the moon in three, and "could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse — rovers, special-built planes and satellites,” BTE Dan says.

Complete with conceptual designs, ship specs, a funding schedule and almost every other imaginable detail, the BTE website was launched just this week and covers almost every aspect of how the project could be done. This Enterprise would be built entirely in space, have a rotating gravity section inside of the saucer, and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from classic "Star Trek."

“It ends up that this ship configuration is quite functional,” writes BTE Dan, even though his design moves a few parts around for better performance with today’s technology. This version of the Enterprise would be three things in one: a spaceship, a space station and a spaceport. A thousand people can be on board at once — either as crew members or as adventurous visitors.

Read more here.

WARSAW — In the year 2000, as the president of Poland, I signed one of Europe’s most conservative laws on drug possession. Any amount of illicit substances a person possessed meant they were eligible for up to three years in prison. Our hope was that this would help to liberate Poland, and especially its youths, from drugs that not only have a potential to ruin the lives of the people who abuse them but also have been propelling the spread of H.I.V. among people who inject them.

We assumed that giving the criminal justice system the power to arrest, prosecute and jail people caught with even minuscule amounts of drugs, including marijuana, would improve police effectiveness in bringing to justice persons responsible for supplying illicit drugs. We also expected that the prospect of being put behind bars would deter people from abusing illegal drugs, and thus dampen demand.

We were mistaken on both of our assumptions. Jail sentences for the possession of illicit drugs — in any amount and for any purpose — did not lead to the jailing of drug traffickers. Nor did it prove to be a deterrent to drug abuse.

What the law did do, however, was enable the police to increase their arrest numbers by hauling in droves of young people caught with small amounts of marijuana. More than a half of all arrests under the law were of people aged 24 and younger. Criminalization of drug users resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of identified cases of drug possession: from 2,815 in 2000 to 30,548 in 2008.

Read the whole piece here.

Archaeologists working at the Xultun ruins of the Mayan civilisation have reported striking finds, including the oldest-known Mayan astronomical tables.

The site, in Guatemala, includes the first known instance of Mayan art painted on the walls of a dwelling.

A report in Science says it dates from the early 9th Century, pre-dating other Mayan calendars by centuries.

Such calendars rose to prominence recently amid claims they predicted the end of the world in 2012.

Read the whole article here.

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Very interesting article. Basically, they found a well preserved structure in some unexplored ruins which had a bunch of equations and other stuff that related to the Mayan calendar.

A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf — a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy — appears in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research. The article notes that unlike earlier devices, which used costly ingredients, the new device is made from inexpensive materials and employs low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes.

Daniel G. Nocera points out that the artificial leaf responds to the vision of a famous Italian chemist who, in 1912, predicted that scientists one day would uncover the "guarded secret of plants." The most important of those, Nocera says, is the process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The artificial leaf has a sunlight collector sandwiched between two films that generate oxygen and hydrogen gas. When dropped into a jar of water in the sunlight, it bubbles away, releasing hydrogen that can be used in fuel cells to make electricity. These self-contained units are attractive for making fuel for electricity in remote places and the developing world, but designs demonstrated thus far rely on metals like platinum and manufacturing processes that make them cost-prohibitive.

To make these devices more widely available, Nocera replaced the platinum catalyst that produces hydrogen gas with a less-expensive nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound. On the other side of the leaf, a cobalt film generates oxygen gas. Nocera notes that all of these materials are abundant on Earth, unlike the rare and expensive platinum, noble metal oxides and semiconducting materials others have used. "Considering that it is the 6 billion nonlegacy users that are driving the enormous increase in energy demand by midcentury, a research target of delivering solar energy to the poor with discoveries such as the artificial leaf provides global society its most direct path to a sustainable energy future," he says.

Read the whole article here.

MIAMI (AP) — The 8-year-old twins love their iPad. They draw, play games and expand their vocabulary. Their family’s teenagers also like the hand-held computer tablets, too, but the clan’s elders show no interest.

The orangutans at Miami’s Jungle Island apparently are just like people when it comes to technology. The park is one of several zoos experimenting with computers and apes, letting its six orangutans use an iPad to communicate and as part of a mental stimulus program. Linda Jacobs, who oversees the program, hopes the devices will eventually help bridge the gap between humans and the endangered apes.

“Our young ones pick up on it. They understand it. It’s like, ‘Oh I get this,’” Jacobs said. “Our two older ones, they just are not interested. I think they just figure, ‘I’ve gotten along just fine in this world without this communication-skill here and the iPad, and I don’t need a computer.’”

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