Heartbeats can now be measured without placing sensors on the body, thanks to a new way to measure heartbeats remotely, in real time, and under controlled conditions with as much accuracy as electrocardiographs.

The researchers say this will allow for the development of "casual sensing" -- taking measurements as people go about their daily activities, for instance, when they are going to bed or getting ready to start the day. Kind of like a Fitbit, except accurate

"Taking measurements with sensors on the body can be stressful and troublesome, because you have to stop what you're doing," says Hiroyuki Sakai, a researcher at Panasonic. "What we tried to make was something that would offer people a way to monitor their body in a casual and relaxed environment."

New research from the University of Southampton indicates that the public are being exposed, without their knowledge, to airborne ultrasound.

The study found increasing exposure to ultrasound in locations such as railway stations, museums, libraries, schools and sports stadiums, in which there have been complaints of nausea, dizziness, migraine, fatigue and tinnitus.

Ultrasound in public places can be generated from a number of sources including loudspeakers, door sensors and public address systems.

NAIROBI, KENYA (20 January 2016)--Small, family farmers in Africa purchase more than half of their seeds every year through local markets and other informal sources--neglected outlets that present a major opportunity for improving access to better crop varieties crucial to dealing with climate, nutrition, and other production challenges in a region where food security remains a major concern. That's a key finding from comprehensive new research released today in the Journal Food Security that examined some 10,000 seed transactions across five African countries and Haiti.

Social media may seem to be a way to make and maintain hundreds of friendships. But University of Oxford research, supported by Dorset bakers Thomas J. Fudge's, suggests that the constraints that limit the number of friends we have offline also apply online. The study is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Offline, research has given rise to what's called the Social Brain Hypothesis. This says that our brain's ability to process multiple relationships creates a natural group size for humans of 100 - 200 people. This size is also constrained by the time required to maintain relationships - we only have so much time to devote to meeting or talking to people.

Though hyper-exaggerated pictures of garbage patches and models extrapolated from a fishing line study in the 1980s get all of the media attention when it comes to pollution, it causes activist groups to raise money by focusing on the wrong thing. The most efficient way to clean up ocean plastics and avoid harming ecosystems is to stop litter on the coasts.

For the first time, researchers have been able to directly estimate the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the British population from ancient skeletons, showing how Anglo-Saxon immigrants mixed with the native population.

Human remains excavated from burial sites near Cambridge provided the material for the first whole-genome sequences of ancient British DNA. Using a new analysis method to compare these ancient genomes with modern-day sequences, researchers have estimated that approximately a third of British ancestors were Anglo-Saxon immigrants.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration sharply reduced the number of foreign work visas - the reason was protectionism, the belief that foreign workers were taking American jobs.

Things didn't work out as planned. Jobs instead went overseas and since we did not reduce student visas, Asian students learned at the best schools in the world and were forced to return home to compete with Americans, rather than becoming Americans.

One of the most triumphant moments in the book and recent movie "The Martian" comes when lead character Mark Watney successfully grows a potato crop on Mars.

It's more than food for survival, it's a mental and engineering breakthrough. In space, there is no scent of baking bread, no wind on your face, no sound of raindrops hitting the roof, no favorite kitten to curl up in your lap. Over time, being deprived of these common earthbound sense stimulations may take a toll, according to NASA's Behavioral Health and Performance team. They say gardening provides recreation and relaxation and can provide a welcome break.

The reason to force young people to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was because they are an easy profit center. They won't use much in the early years but they will when they are old, when a new generation of young people will be forced to pay.

It hasn't really worked out that way. While emergency room visits did go down slightly, visits were instead done more in an office for the difference, the cost of mental illness ER visits in this age group increased "significantly," as did diseases of the circulatory system, according to a paper in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

A new study shows how dangerous autoimmune responses, seen in diseases such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, might be "dialed down" without compromising the immune system's ability to fight viruses and bacteria. 

The new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences defines a mechanism at work in an anti-autoimmune drug candidate called ozanimod, currently in advanced phase 3 clinical trials for multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis.