A good guitar player tunes their guitar by putting a tuning fork in their mouth and matching the vibrations. They made need it when they are older.

A new paper in Occupational & Environmental Medicine finds that professional musicians are almost four times as likely to develop noise induced hearing loss as the general public, and they are 57% more likely to develop tinnitus - incessant ringing in the ears - as a result of their job.

In light of recent results from the "world's longest experiment", spanning more than 90 years, at the University of Queensland, a group of researchers from Trinity College Dublin explain the background behind their own pitch-drop experiment in this month's Physics World and offer an explanation as to why their research hit the headlines in 2013.

MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance

As soon as I read about the claims that Georesonance identified an aircraft wreck at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal my bogusness meter went off the scale.  A whois search shows the company is registered to a small private residence.   The company claims to have identified an underwater object using multispectral images.

Quoted words below are from the Georesonance Pty. Ltd. press release posted by Air Traffic Management.net.


Nonsense on stilts

In the United States, murders have plummeted in the last 20 years, as has crime. A culture that in the 1980s was commonly projected to be morphing into gangs of youth wilding across urban areas has become just the opposite. Even New York City is reasonably safe.

But one thing has risen dramatically while crime has dropped; incarceration. 

Now, a group of scholars is saying jail has little to do with crime rate or prevention and they further believe that the negative social consequences (harder to get a job, can't buy a gun, can't vote) and cost of incarceration means we should open some cell doors.

Stem cells taken from teeth can grow to resemble brain cells. Perhaps one dau they could be used in the brain as a therapy for stroke, say researchers at the University of Adelaide Centre for Stem Cell Research, who believe that although these cells haven't developed into fully fledged neurons, it may be just a matter of time and the right conditions for it to happen.

"Stem cells from teeth have great potential to grow into new brain or nerve cells, and this could potentially assist with treatments of brain disorders, such as stroke," says Dr Kylie Ellis, Commercial Development Manager with the University's commercial arm, Adelaide Research&Innovation (ARI).

Biomedical engineers at Columbia Engineering have successfully grown fully functional human cartilage in vitro from human stem cells derived from adult stem cells in bone marrow tissue. 

It's common to perceive Neanderthals as more big-headed primitives and Cro-Magnon as more like us, but we were all primitive cavemen. It takes a biologist to really know the difference.

So if you think Neanderthals were stupid and primitive, it's time to think again.  

The oldest sections of transform faults, such as the North Anatolian Fault Zone and the San Andreas Fault, produce the largest earthquakes, putting important limits on the potential seismic hazard for less mature parts of fault zones, according to a new presentation ("Fault-Zone Maturity Defines Maximum Earthquake Magnitude") at the Seismological Society of America 2014 Annual Meeting in Anchorage.

Babies begin to learn about the connection between pictures and real objects by the time they are nine-months-old, according to a new paper in Child Development.

Babies can learn about a toy from a photograph of it well before their first birthday, the scholars from Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of South Carolina found. 

Researchers familiarized 30 eight and nine-month-olds with a life-sized photo of a toy for about a minute. The babies were then placed before the toy in the picture and a different toy and researchers watched to see which one the babies reached for first.

New research has helped unpick a long-standing mystery about how dietary fibre supresses appetite.

In a study led by Imperial College London and the Medical Research Council (MRC), an international team of researchers identified an anti-appetite molecule called acetate that is naturally released when we digest fibre in the gut. Once released, the acetate is transported to the brain where it produces a signal to tell us to stop eating.

The research, published in Nature Communications, confirms the natural benefits of increasing the amount of fibre in our diets to control over-eating and could also help develop methods to reduce appetite. The study found that acetate reduces appetite when directly applied into the bloodstream, the colon or the brain.