Science

Engineers have made a breakthrough utilizing spray-on technology that could revolutionize the way optical lenses are made and used.

A University of British Columbia engineer and a team of U.S. researchers have made a breakthrough utilizing spray-on technology that could revolutionize the way optical lenses are made and used.

Hollywood will have the box office heating up this summer with dozens of blockbuster films. But whether a movie is a worldwide box office bomb or a box office bonanza has a lot to do with the culture and release strategy in other countries, says a Kansas State University researcher.

An injection-molding method that can reduce costs and increase the use of titanium and other durable, lightweight and corrosion-resistant metals has earned a 2013 TechConnect National Innovation Award.

(Phys.org) —Fergus Ewing, Scotland's energy minister, has announced plans for the deployment of 40 to 50 Oyster hydro-electric wave devices off the country's northwestern shore. The new facility will be capable of producing 40MW of electricity, which should be enough to power approximately 30,000 homes—making it the largest such facility in the world.

Despite current recommendations by UK welfare organisations that cats should be neutered at four months, a new study from the 'Bristol Cats' study cohort has shown that 85 per cent of pet cats are not neutered by the recommended age possibly due to cat owners needing better information about when to neuter their cat.

A pristine stretch of Amazon rainforest–teeming with malaria-transmitting mosquitoes? Photo by Phil P. Harris Most people consider saving the Amazon rainforest a noble goal, but nothing comes without a cost. Cut down a rainforest, and the planet looses untold biodiversity along with ecosystem services like carbon dioxide absorption. Conserve that tract of forest, however, and risk facilitating malaria outbreaks in local communities, a recent study finds. Nearly half of malaria deaths in the Americas occur in Brazil, and of those nearly all originate from the Amazon. Yet few conservationists consider the forest’s role in spreading that disease. Those researchers who do take malaria into account disagree on what role forest cover plays in its transmission. Some think that living near a cleared patch of forest–which may be pockmarked with ditches that mosquitoes love to breed in–increase malaria incidence. Others find the opposite–that living near an intact forest fringe brings the highest risk for malaria. Still more find that close proximity to forests decrease malaria risk because the mosquitoes that carry the disease are kept in check through competition with mosquitoes that don’t carry the disease. Most of the studies conducted in the past only focused on small patches of land, however. To get to the bottom of how rainforests contribute to malaria risk, two Duke University researchers collected 1.3 million positive malaria tests from a period of four-and-a-half years, and ranging over an area of 4.5 million square kilometers in Brazil. Using satellite imagery, they added information about the local environment where each of the cases occurred and also took rainfall into account, because precipitation affects mosquitoes’ breeding cycles. Using statistical models, they analyzed how malaria incidences, the environment and deforestation interacted. Their results starkly point towards the rainforest as the main culprit for malaria outbreaks. “We find overwhelming evidence that areas with higher forest cover tend to be associated with higher malaria incidence whereas no clear pattern could be found for deforestation rates,” the authors write in the journal PLoS One. People living near forest cover had a 25-fold greater chance of catching malaria than those living near recently cleared land. Men tended to catch malaria more often the women, implying that forest related jobs and activities–traditionally carried out by men–are to blame by putting people at greater risk for catching the disease. Finally, the authors found that people living next to protected areas suffered the highest malaria incidence of all. Extrapolating these results, the authors calculated that, if the Brazilian government avoids just 10 percent of projected deforestation in the coming years, citizens living near those spared forests will contend with a 2-fold increase in malaria by 2050. “We note that our finding directly contradicts the growing body of literature that suggests that forest conservation can decrease disease burden,” they write. The authors of the malaria study do not propose, however, that we should mow down the Amazon in order to obliterate malaria. “One possible interpretation of our findings is that we are promoting deforestation,” they write. “This is not the case.” Instead, they argue that conservation plans should include malaria mitigation strategies. This could include building more malaria detection and treatment facilities, handing out bed nets and spraying for mosquitoes. This interaction between deforestation and disease outbreakis just one example of the way efforts to protect the environment can cause nature and humans to come into conflict. Around the world, other researchers have discovered that conservation efforts sometimes produce negative effects for local communities. Lyme disease–once all but obliterated–reemerg

And which gum gives you the sweetest-smelling breath? You’re driving home from a first date, and it went great: You didn’t sweat too much, your jokes worked 50 percent of the time, and she didn’t get an "emergency phone call" in the middle of dinner. Only one thing stands in the way of your impending make-out session: the garlic bread you just ate. What’s your move? Gum. But can you be sure it will work? Science says yes, as long as the garlic is the worst of your problems. Bad breath originates from three different sources: the nose, the stomach and the mouth. While more serious problems like acid reflux and sinus infections may underlie the smell, the most common source of halitosis is the mouth. “Everyone has bacteria in their mouth,” says Dr. Christine Wu, Professor and Director of Caries Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Dentistry. “There are billions of bacteria in one little chunk of plaque.” There are billions of bacteria in one little chunk of plaque. Normally, the good bacteria balance the bad to form a healthy, odor-free ecosystem in your mouth. Your baby breath turns rancid when anaerobes overrun the system. These bacteria, which flourish in the absence of oxygen, usually live at the back of the tongue, where they are partially protected from oxygen and spit by a film of food, dead cells and mucus. Another source of stench is plaque, which your dentist has probably been lecturing you about since grade school. Eating too many sweets and failing to brush can cause plaque buildup on your teeth, which may spread into the pockets of your gums. Here the bacteria in plaque can cause not only gum disease, but terrible breath. If you don’t brush your teeth and the bumpy area on the back of your tongue every day, these bacteria will thrive and give you bad breath. Alternatively, if you are sick and your immune system can’t maintain the balance of good and bad, anaerobes will reproduce very quickly, spreading through your whole mouth. This is the white coating you sometimes see on your tongue when you’re sick: smelly bacteria. What makes bacteria particularly offensive (and not so different from humans in this way) is their excrement. Dentists call this waste "volatile sulfur compounds," or VSC, and it has a foul odor, explains Dr. Cassiano Kuchenbecker Rösing, associate Professor of the Department of Conservative Dentistry at the University of Rio Grande do Sol in Brazil. The smell is comparable to rotten eggs, and is the difference between bad breath and get-away-from-me breath. Extra spit works like a power washer, rinsing bacteria away.The good news is that there is a second line of defense against these harbingers of evil: enjoying a stick of gum. Gums with strong scents can cover unwanted odor, but they can also actively fight the odor-causing bacteria with a twofold attack. “The stimulation of saliva, which happens with chewing gum, is responsible for diminishing the bad breath,” says Rösing, whose research finds that gum can temporarily reduce VSC production by more than 70 percent. The extra spit works like a power washer, rinsing bacteria and VSC away. Ingredients can also make a difference. Wu’s lab studies essential oils, which have the surprising ability to freshen breath. “Chewing gum can be a delivery system for [these] agents to kill germs,” she says. To date they have found a number of effective ingredients, including cinnamon, peppermint and spearmint oils, as well as green and black teas. Wu says some plant oils act on the bacterial membrane, making it leaky and killing the bacteria. Teas, on the other hand, kill bacteria by attacking their metabolisms and affecting their growth. The trick is to find gums with real essential oils, a task harder than you may think. Labels commonly list the umbrella term ‘natural and artificial flavors,’ wherein the natural flavors may or may not be essential oils. Wu’s tested recommendation: the “kiss a little longer” gum itself, Big Red.

Today I came across this Open Street Map of aerial imagery showing the devastating damage caused by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. Unfortunately the map doesn't have any zoom controls or an option to view aerial imagery of the same location before the tornado struck. The map, however, does include a dynamic URL that gives the latitude and longitude of the current view. Therefore, if you want to compare before and after views of the tornado, you can grab the latitude and longitude of a view and paste it into Google Maps. The aerial view above shows Plaza Towers Elementary School. Below is the aerial view of the same school on Google Maps, taken before the tornado. Update: Google Crisis Map now also has the same post-tornado imagery. The Google Crisis Map also includes aerial imagery taken at the end of April, so users can compare the pre and post-tornado imagery on the same map. The New York Times has also created two evocative custom Street View images of the devastation caused by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma - Before and After: 360° Views From Moore.

Every once in awhile I get a question that I can directly answer from my published research. When that happens it makes me so happy. Here’s an example. Patrick Lam wrote, Suppose one develops a Bayesian model to estimate a parameter theta. Now suppose one wants to evaluate the model via simulation by generating fake data where you know the value of theta and see how well you recover theta with your model, assuming that you use the posterior mean as the estimate. The traditional frequentist way of evaluating it might be to generate many datasets and see how well your estimator performs each time in terms of unbiasedness or mean squared error or something. But given that unbiasedness means nothing to a Bayesian and there is no repeated sampling interpretation in a Bayesian model, how would you suggest one would evaluate a Bayesian model? My reply: I actually have a paper on this! It is by Cook, Gelman, and Rubin. The idea is to draw theta from the prior distribution. You can find the paper in the published papers section on my website. P.S. Although unbiasedness doesn’t mean much to a Bayesian, calibration does. We’re planning on implementing this in Stan at some point. The post Validation of Software for Bayesian Models Using Posterior Quantiles appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.