Science
Being Dirty Makes You Clever. Maybe.
According to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, exposure to Mycobacterium vaccae in the environment could increase learning behaviour. Previous research studies on M. vaccae showed that heat-killed bacteria injected into mice stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain that resulted in increased levels of serotonin and [...]
Ocean Photography
National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry takes photographs of ocean life, in his own words: “both the horror and the magic of the ocean”. In this TED talk he explains why humans must be good custodians of the oceans. Watch the video:
Will You Live to be 100?
Newsweek explores whether science can tell us whether living to a grand old age is in our genes by looking at a study that examines the genes of 1,000 people over 100 years of age.
Google Tackles Parkinson’s Disease
Sergey Brin, Google’s 36-yr-old president of Technology, carries a genetic mutation that puts him at increased risk of Parkinson’s disease, but he’s not sitting back to see what happens – he wants to reduce his risk of ever getting the disease and he hopes to harness the power of computing to do it. According to [...]
Scientific Anatomy of a Twinkie
Photographer Dwight Eschliman has photographed the 37 ingredients – including whole egg, animal shortening and diglyceride – that make up America’s favourite ‘snack cake’ the Twinkie. Brought up by a health food obsessive mom, Eschliman fell off the wholefood wagon as a student but has returned to the ethos that, in the case of good [...]
Another Reason to Stay Out All Night
Depressed? Try sleep deprivation. The scientific literature – 75+ papers over the last 40 years – suggests that people with depression (particularly post partum related) can lift their mood simply by staying awake for half the night. Even if you are not depressed, sleep deprivation – as anyone who has been to Glastonbury Festival will [...]
Pigeon Blog
PigeonBlog is a charmingly method of charting air pollution. Researchers tagged city-dwelling homing pigeons with GPS enabled air pollution sensors to send pollution information to an online map where they tracked a bird’s flight and showed pollution data on a graph.
Criminology Books
Sage is publishing a new series of books on criminology, including Crime and Terrorism, which explores “the often murky interface between organised crime and terrorism” and Crime and Risk that looks at the influence of the excitement of risk-taking on criminal behaviour and how the harm can be reduced rather than risk-taking behaviours controlled. Visit [...]
Secret Scientific Live of Trees…and Prisons
Nalini Nadkarni is the founder of the Big Canopy Database that documents her research in the canopies of jungles in Costa Rica, the Amazon and Papua New Guinea. She also works with violent men in high security prisons, giving them science lessons and giving them images of nature to help inmates become calmer and less [...]
Bacterial Wardrobe
Suzanne Lee is a senior research fellow at Central Saint Martins School of Fashion & Textiles. She’s invented a way growing clothes from a brew of sweet green tea, yeast and bacteria, an experiment she blogs about on BioCouture (subtitled: How to Grow a Frock). Read more on Ecouterre, where you can also see some [...]
