Researchers have found a DNA “clock” that predicts how long you’ll live Nicknamed ‘graphene’s cousin’, silicene - a form of silicon made from a two-dimensional lattice structure of silicon atoms - has been touted as a super-material in its own right, and now, computer engineers in the US have managed to make a transistor out of this notoriously tricky material. This feat, achieved by computer engineer Deji Akinwande from the University of Texas and his team, has proven for the first time that silicene can be stabilised and sandwiched into a functioning transistor device - something no one thought would even be possible. Scientists have theorised about the existence of silicene for over two decades, but it wasn’t until 2010 that anyone was actually able to make it. “For logic applications, graphene is hopeless,” Guy Le Lay, a materials scientist at Aix-Marseille University in France, told Peplow. “If we can get good properties out of it, it can be translated immediately by the semiconductor industry,” Akinwande told her. We’re excited to see what comes next.
Scientists have found the region of the brain that controls addictive overeating I don’t want to alarm you, but your metadata is showing, and can lead people straight to your credit card details. Scientists have found that 90 percent of the time, they need just four pieces of outside information on you - for example, what store you shopped at on a given day, what you bought, how much an item cost - to match an anonymised credit card record to your identity. The team, led by computer scientist Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, analysed three months of credit card records belonging to 1.1 million people. The team then gathered information from 10,000 shops, and information readily available about individuals online, such as their tweets, Instagram photos, and Facebook updates. Using this kind of information, the team wanted to figure out how many individual pieces of information about what a person has done on a particular day were needed to match them and their credit card details. So, what's the solution?
Celestial Nomad Takes Centre Stage | ESO In this new ESO image, nightfall raises the curtain on a theatrical display taking place in the cloudless skies over La Silla. A meteor adds its own streak of light to the scene, seeming to plunge into the hazy pool of green light collecting along the horizon. The telescopes of La Silla provide an audience for this celestial performance, and a thin shroud of low altitude cloud clings to the plain below the observatory streaked by the Panamericana Highway. Comet Lovejoy’s long tail is being pushed away from the comet by the solar wind. Carbon compounds that have been excited by ultraviolet radiation from the Sun give it its striking green hue. This is the first time the comet has passed through the inner Solar System and ignited so spectacularly in over 11 000 years. This image was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek during a visit to La Silla in January 2015. Credit:
Wake No More — Matter For most teenagers, getting out of bed in the morning is a drag. But when Lloyd Johnson was 13 years old, he suddenly found waking up not just irritating, but agonizing and confusing. Sometimes he would open his eyes and already be in the car on the way to school — with no memory of showering or getting dressed. Things started not long after a failed surgery. Still, Lloyd and his parents didn’t pay as much attention to his sleeping patterns as they did to the constant pains in his leg. Over the next two years, though, Lloyd’s pain inexplicably got better, and his sleeping went back to normal. It was a complete turnaround. But in the spring of 2012, when he was 25, Lloyd’s spark went out again. Lloyd had just finished a particularly grueling circuit for work, whizzing through seven cities and 11 time zones in just a few months. Lloyd’s doctor thought the culprit was mono: Working too hard and traveling too much must’ve knocked down his immune system. That was enough. Okay, he told her.
Internet comment credibility study: Vaccine decisions influenced by online discussion. Photo by Monkey Business Images/Thinkstock. The best account on Twitter, without question, has just over 40,000 followers and doesn’t tweet anymore. It’s called Don’t Read Comments (@avoidcomments), and in its heyday it periodically tweeted things like “Nobody on their deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time reading internet comments’ ” and “If you spent more time applying yourself and less time reading comments, you could afford HBO and wouldn’t have to pirate Game of Thrones.” Betsy Woodruff is a Slate staff writer. But despite the yeoman’s work of hero tweeters like Don’t Read Comments, people do read comments and often take them seriously. The study, called “Reexamining Health Messages in the Digital Age: A Fresh Look at Source Credibility Effects,” is much more interesting than its title might suggest. To come to this determination, they performed two experiments. So what’s a public service announcer to do when competing with cyberspace’s hordes?
Scans reveal autistic brains contain unique, and highly idiosyncratic connections When it comes to immunity, the environment you grow up in, or how you were 'nurtured', is more important than nature, a new study suggests. Particularly as you get older. Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine in the US analysed pairs of twins who were either 100 percent genetically identical, or fraternal twins, who only share on average 50 percent of their genes. As all the twins grew up in the same environment, this allowed them to determine the role genes played in shaping their immune system. “What we found was that in most cases, including the reaction to a standard influenza vaccine and other types of immune responsiveness, there is little or no genetic influence at work, and most likely the environment and your exposure to innumerable microbes is the major driver,” said the study's leader and microbiologist, Mark Davis, in a press release.
Chemists have figured out how to ‘unboil’ an egg When it comes to immunity, the environment you grow up in, or how you were 'nurtured', is more important than nature, a new study suggests. Particularly as you get older. Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine in the US analysed pairs of twins who were either 100 percent genetically identical, or fraternal twins, who only share on average 50 percent of their genes. As all the twins grew up in the same environment, this allowed them to determine the role genes played in shaping their immune system. “What we found was that in most cases, including the reaction to a standard influenza vaccine and other types of immune responsiveness, there is little or no genetic influence at work, and most likely the environment and your exposure to innumerable microbes is the major driver,” said the study's leader and microbiologist, Mark Davis, in a press release.
Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow & Jon Lebkowsky: State Of The World 2015 It's a new year and it's time for the 2015 edition of the State Of The World discussion featuring Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky. This year, they are joined by special guest, Cory Doctorow. All WELL members are welcome to post, and non-members can participate as well. Just tweet your comments or questions to @TheWELL or email them to inkwell at well dot com. First, a little about our participants. *Ping ping, click click *tap* Is this thing on? I'm here! *So then, Hello World yet again, and the WELL SOTW 2015 finds me writing a brief historical fantasy about the Roman Empire. Then there's the existent, or the emergent, zeitgeist of the year 2015. As I get older, and boy am I ever in 2015, I can see the divisions of the past fading into the ambiguities of the present. Another big dichotomy that seems to me to be dissolving through an epic effort is "Things" and "Internet."
This is how much a cloud weighs This piece was written by Hannah Earnshaw, a PhD student at Durham University in the UK, and was originally published by The Conversation. I have always been in awe of the night sky, trying to comprehend the vastness of space and the countless wonders it contains. But I have always felt a certain dissatisfaction with only being able to see it at a distance. One day I imagine that humanity will be able to visit other planets in the Solar System, and venture even further to other stars, but this has always seemed very far away. Mars is, in a way, the perfect stepping stone into the rest of the universe. Science, but more than science As a PhD student carrying out astronomical scientific research, I’m naturally drawn to the research possibilities on the surface of Mars. Being able to study the geology of Mars up close would be the ultimate research opportunity, answering questions about the history of the planet and the Solar System. Life on the Martian range. The journey of a lifetime
No one could see the colour blue until modern times | Business Insider This isn’t another story about that dress, or at least, not really. It’s about the way that humans see the world, and how until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a colour, we may not even notice that it’s there. Until relatively recently in human history, “blue” didn’t exist. As the delightful Radiolab episode “Colours” describes, ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the colour, there’s evidence that they may not have seen it at all. How we realised blue was missing In the Odyssey, Homer famously describes the “wine-dark sea.” In 1858, a scholar named William Gladstone, who later became the Prime Minister of Great Britain, noticed that this wasn’t the only strange colour description. So Gladstone decided to count the colour references in the book. He studied Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. There was no blue.
NASA missions may re-elevate Pluto and Ceres as full-on planets This article was written by David A Weintraub, Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, and was originally published by The Conversation. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will arrive at this dwarf planet on March 6, 2015. Pluto is the largest object in the Kuiper belt, and NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will arrive at this dwarf planet on July 15, 2015. These two events will make 2015 an exciting year for Solar System exploration and discovery. But there is much more to this story than mere science. I expect 2015 will be the year when general consensus, built upon our new knowledge of these two objects, will return Pluto and add Ceres to our family of Solar System planets. The efforts of a very small clique of Pluto-haters within the International Astronomical Union (IAU) plutoed Pluto in 2006. Ceres and Pluto are both spheroidal objects, like Mercury, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. Ceres, temporarily a planet But Ceres does still stand out.
Death Is Optional KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities? HARARI: I think about it in visual terms, whether you try to narrow your field of vision, or to broaden it. For example, when you try to predict the weather for tomorrow, there are a lot of possibilities to begin with. It might rain, it might snow, there might be sunshine. And a good meteorologist, according to one view of science, is a meteorologist that takes this horizon of possibilities and narrows it down to a single possibility or just two possibilities. And after you finish reading the book or taking the course or whatever, your view of the world in this sense is narrower, because you have fewer possibilities to consider. There is room of course for that. KAHNEMAN: But do you get to a broader view by becoming more differentiated, that is, by having more detailed views? HARARI: Mainly, the second way. We don't think like that today.