Monthly Archives: September 2018

Open office designs have been hailed for their economic benefits and helping people work together. On the other hand, a survey by a research firm showed that workers in an open office can lose up to 86 minutes of productivity per day due to distractions, like the constant humming of machinery or computers. In this scenario, noise-cancelling headphones have emerged as an important tool for people working in open office environments. However, it is physically uncomfortable to wear such headphones for long hours. To enhance sound privacy while ensuring comfort, scientists at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics have designed an office chair that can control not only tonal noise like humming machines, but also broadband (random) disturbances coming from anywhere in a room. The scientists customized a popular gaming chair that has a built-in sound system to design the noise-cancelling chair. They attached flexible “error” microphones to the headrest…

Read more

Typhoid fever is an infection caused by a bacteria called Salmonella enterica typhi which, according to the CDC, affects about 22 million people every year. Many of those affected by the disease come from developing countries where there is poor sanitation and a lack of access to clean water. Symptoms of typhoid fever include headaches, stomach pain, and high fever. On rare occasions, these infections can affect the brain resulting in serious neurological symptoms such as slurred speech and lack of muscle control. Treatment success rates are still poor in these cases. Worryingly, even when the initial infection is cleared, doctors have seen cases of relapses with survivors suffering from various mental disorders including cerebral palsy and even mental retardation. Despite the severity of the disease, scientists are still unsure of how exactly Salmonella causes these neurological symptoms. Many previous studies involving the bacteria have focused on how it spreads…

Read more

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection, which if it not treated properly, can lead to complications and symptoms involving the eye, including inflammation, redness, and even vision loss. These complications are referred to as ocular syphilis. There have been a few studies showing that people living with HIV develop this complication of syphilis faster than others. However, the exact reason for this is not entirely clear. Therefore, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services decided to study this issue. They used data from all syphilis patients diagnosed in North Carolina over 2014 to 2016 to identify factors that were associated with the development of ocular syphilis in syphilis patients with and without HIV. Between 2014 and 2016, 7,123 people were diagnosed with syphilis, and among them, 109 had ocular syphilis. Furthermore, 2,846 of the 7,123 people were also…

Read more

By Eric Moyer and Gina RiggioBlue Marble Space Young Scientist Program Since humanity’s first journey off the ground, advances in space exploration and aviation have been a fierce competition among nations on the international stage. Sanjoy Som writes in his article “An international symbol for the sustained exploration of space” published in the journal Space Policy that the future of space research and exploration will be an increasingly cooperative effort between nations, public enterprises, and private companies. Their joint efforts together are greater than the sum of their parts, he argues, pointing to the accomplishment of the International Space Station as evidence that international collaboration in space is a worthy effort. Going into space is difficult and costly. All of our past space missions have taken many years to complete from laboratory to launch. As we set our eyes on missions that go further into space than we have before…

Read more

Here on Earth, scientists study layers of sediment like dirt and sand to better understand how rocks form. The same contextual clues geologists use to explain how sedimentary rocks form on Earth can also be applied to extraterrestrial planets. Recent studies of Mars, for example, have looked at photos of sedimentary rocks to determine how geologic forces like erosion, wind, and even water have changed through time. The goals of a recent paper were to use surface images to reconstruct the past history of a section of the Martian surface. This is what sedimentary rock looks like on Earth. Wikimedia Commons. In order to measure how the water level has changed along the surface, the authors studied images taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to see how the rocks change throughout a section of exposed rock. These images focused on rock formations along the Jezero crater on the Martian surface…

Read more

Genes are the blueprints of organisms. Your hair color, height, voice, and many other traits, all are determined by the genes. You inherited half of these genes from your mother and half from your father when you were conceived. However, every once in a while some genes that aren’t part of your family tree will sneak in. When biological invaders like viruses and bacteria enter your body, your immune system works to chop them up. Occasionally, some of the invader’s DNA will be chopped up in such a way that it gets incorporated into one of your own cell’s DNA. If this cell is an egg or a sperm, then this foreign DNA can be passed on indefinitely. And though this may seem like a rare phenomenon, our own species owes approximately 8 percent of its DNA to viruses that gave our ancestors their DNA. When this happens, the foreign…

Read more

King Phillip came over for good soup (or salsa, or spaghetti). No matter what your favorite comfort food is, many of us had to memorize this silly sentence in school to help ourselves remember the seven taxonomic levels of life — kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. In case you haven’t seen those words in a while, they belong to a method for categorizing all of life on Earth. There are several variations on this system in use today to capture even more complexity. For example, we have a level higher than Kingdom called “Domain” of which there are three – Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. The single-celled bacteria belong to Prokarya while multi-celled humans, plants, and animals belong to Eukarya. Archaea are single celled like bacteria, but also have some characteristics in common with Eukarya. They have also been around on Earth much longer than Eukaryotes and can…

Read more

7/7