How is a 3-year-old better than a computer?  A pre-school child can look at a cartoon of a chicken and know that's a chicken but a computer cannot.  But things are getting better. In the International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, a
computer recognition system has been shown to be 99% accurate when identifying different fruits and vegetables, even the particular strain of apples or plums.

Being an overweight, lazy person is bad in lots of ways: Epidemiologists estimate that about 80 percent of the most common diseases are linked to being severely overweight and leading a sedentary lifestyle. Obese people are at an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases, vascular diseases, hypertension, diabetes and cancer. Al this lowers their life expectancy. 

Weight loss and physical activity help to counteract this. Women who lose weight lower their breast cancer risk while regular physical activity lowers the risk of developing breast, colorectal and cervical cancers. 

A University of Granada researcher has a new hypothesis concerning why bacteria seem to becoming increasingly more resistant to antibiotics.

Bacteria are incredibly versatile - they have been found in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet, and it may be just evolution in action. In this instance,  Mohammed Bakkali, a scientist in the Genetics Department at the Faculty of Science of the UGR,
 believes that bacteria that are non-resistant to antibiotics acquire resistance 'accidentally' because they take up the DNA of others that are resistant, due to the stress to which they are subjected. 

Nel 1929 Bruno Rossi, ricercatore presso l’istituto di fisica sperimentale
dell’Università di Firenze [...] intuì quella che sarebbe stata la sua ragione di vita: indagare sulla natura di questi corpuscoli ionizzanti provenienti dall’alto. Doveva realizzare un circuito che permettesse di rivelare e contare le coincidenze che si verificavano in una certa unità di tempo e realizzò uno strumento molto semplice, il circuito a coincidenze.
L’involucro dei tubi Geiger è collegato al polo negativo di una batteria da 1200 volt (non
disegnata). La scarica nei tubi genera un impulso di tensione negativa sulle resistenze da

Sugar is irresistible to humans, and apparently to writers.

There was no better example than this week’s vaygeshray over Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times. Bittman, the paper’s former food columnist who rose to fame with his fast and easy recipes for modern life, got caught up in one of the biggest food battles on the planet: the sugar wars.

Is sucrose good? Bad? Toxic? Addictive? Causal of illness?

Can you buy leadership?

If you talk to people trying to convince the government to give them more money, the answer is 'yes', even among scientists who know better. Since the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider, Americans have been shy about Big Physics - politicians don't trust the projections science makes on if projects can be completed at all, much less on time and on budget.  And no one has minded not having Big Physics locally except American physicists, who would rather large colliders be closer to home.

Operator storefronts and portals now account for just 6% of content downloads worldwide, with Google Play and Apple's App Store now comprising nearly 70% between them. The increasing popularity of OTT (Over The Top) stores had led to many operators closing their own mobile storefronts.
 

Fluoride is good but too much of anything can be bad. However, a filter system developed in India using a medicinal herb is very, very good.

The technology uses parts of the plant Tridax procumbens as a biocarbon filter for the ion.

The  divergent lineage of the oldest known genetic branch of the human Y chromosome, the hereditary factor determining male sex, has been pushed back in time.

The new divergent lineage, found in an individual who submitted his DNA to Family Tree DNA, a company specializing in DNA analysis to trace family roots, branched from the Y chromosome tree before the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in the fossil record.

Deleting a specific gene in mice prevents them from becoming obese  - even on a high fat diet, according to a  two-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and published in the Journal of Lipid Research.