Does playing music lead to less age-related hearing problems or do people without hearing problems continue to play music?
Hearing studies have shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians but a new study concludes hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians differs, across the age spectrum from 18 to 91 years of age, and that musicians retain a keener ability to
detect and discriminate acoustic information from the environment.
Sex determination is obviously an important developmental event with great ecological and evolutionary consequences. A large variety of sex determination mechanisms exists, and the evolution of many of these is still relatively poorly understood. Previous work suggests that compensatory adaptations to mutations in involved genes might be relevant in the evolution of these pathways.
The highest paid player in baseball has the last name "Rodriguez" and 3 of the top 10 highest paid players in major league baseball are black - but major league umpires are racist, argues Johan Sulaeman, a financial economist at Southern Methodist University.
They looked at 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008 and found that minority pitchers are so convinced white MLB umpires call strikes more often for white pitchers than for minority pitchers that they throw 'safe' pitches and therefore hurt their own performance.
The Maxwell equations govern light, electricity and magnetism as a trinity. The Big Goal for the next five weeks is to understand my variations on those equations. I want readers to see both the forest and the trees, the planet and the subatomic particles, the math behind the curtain.
Many may fear they don't have the math chops to follow this five week march. The names of the players and their jobs will be explained. There is repetition in this process which may make the steps start to sound familiar. After three weeks, the diligent reader will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of the mathematical intricacies of light, unknowable to poets or priests. My variations are nothing more than that, variations.
Deep Web Interferometry compares curves in trendlines from synchronized multiple data sources. Interferometric analysis of Web metrics data increases the clarity of meaningful data points by isolating events. For example, given two Websites that track a popular sport, one Website may experience a weekly peak in traffic on Monday and the other site may have two smaller peaks on Wednesday and Saturday. However, during a major tournament both sites experience sharp peaks during the games. These game-driven data spikes appear in both sites' trendlines.
One long-standing myth is that any law claiming to be good for the environment is actually good for the environment. Anyone living along levees in the South who watched environmental lawsuits block improvements in the 1990s and then heard the Army Corps of Engineers criticized after Hurricane Katrina for not previously making improvements had to wonder why the media didn't cover one obvious source of blame for the entire region not being more resistant to floods.
No, instead we got treated to Sean Penn carrying a shotgun, apparently to mow down the zombies the media claimed were floating in New Orleans and everyone blamed Pres. George Bush because the tropical storm turned into a hurricane.
A Brief History of Arctic Warming
We all know a high-fat diet is going to be bad for most people, but why?
A study in mice showed that those lacking the gene-expression-controlling enzyme HDAC3 that were fed a high-fat diet experienced rapid thickening of the heart muscle and heart failure. A molecular link between fat intake and an enzyme tasked with regulating gene expression, at least in mice, may be a target for combating heart disease.
The team found that the engineered mice without the enzyme HDAC3 tended to under-express genes important in fat metabolism and energy production. Essentially, when fed a high-fat diet, these animals' hearts cannot generate enough energy and thus cannot pump blood efficiently.
What would you say if an oil company said it wanted to invest in alternative energy research but the cost was too much so it needed public financing - but wanted no accountability or timeframes or an expectation of results?
You'd be skeptical of the papers they produce because they have every incentive to perpetuate the model and only produce positive results. Leaders in the scientific research have put scientists in that very position; more research needs to be taxpayer-funded, proponents claim, because the private sector won't do basic research, and in order to maintain that we have to keep it positive.
Extreme brightness changes on a nearby brown dwarf dubbed 2MASS J21392676+0220226, or 2MASS 2139 for short, may indicate a storm grander than any seen yet on a planet. Because old brown dwarfs and giant planets have similar atmospheres, this finding could shed new light on weather phenomena of extra-solar planets.
As part of a large survey of nearby brown dwarfs, which occupy the mass gap between dwarf stars and giant planets, scientists used an infrared camera on the 2.5m telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to capture repeated images of 2MASS 2139 over several hours. In that short time span, they recorded the largest variations in brightness ever seen on a cool brown dwarf.
