Various web links I found to be of interest recently:
New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.
Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall
of violent crime over the past half century.
...
In states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly,
crime declined slowly. Where it declined quickly, crime declined quickly.
...
When differences of atmospheric lead density between big and small cities
largely went away, so did the difference in murder rates.
The average scientist is not statistically more likely than a member of the general public to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society -- elite societies of scientists, membership in which is based on professional accomplishments and discoveries -- are 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to have an artistic or crafty hobby than the average scientist is. And Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to have an artistic or crafty hobby.
A chess computer has taught itself the game and advanced to
'international master'-level in only three days by adopting a more
'human' approach. Mathew Lai, an MsC student at Imperial College London,
devised a neural-network-based chess computer dubbed Giraffe --
the first of its kind to abandon the 'brute force' approach to competing
with human opponents in favour of a branch-based approach whereby the
AI stops to evaluate which of the calculated move branches that it has
already made are most likely to lead to victory.
...
The lag between depth-based 'move-crunching' and neural-based branch
evaluation has not completely closed, and Giraffe cannot perform yet
at either the same level or with the same latency as traditional
depth-based chess engines.
Enter CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
CRISPRs are part of an immune system for bacteria -- a way for populations
of bugs to share immunity to bacteria-specific viruses, called phages.
...
CRISPR is a really powerful tool for gene editing, and one that has
applications for overcoming antibiotic resistance. In an ironic twist,
researchers are packing CRISPR/Cas systems into phages and using them to
attack bacteria. The CRISPR system is programmed to search for and destroy
the sequences that code for antibiotic resistance, like the beta-lactamase
protein that confers penicillin resistance. The bacteria are then
vulnerable to antibiotics they had previously been able to stand up to.
Niall Ferguson, Kissinger's authorized biographer, begins the arduous task of rolling his subject's fallen reputation back up the hill.
Negative review of authorized biography of Henry Kissinger.
Millions of households could join the ranks of those spending more than half their income on rent, Harvard study warns
What's the real value of higher education?
These types of studies, and there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents and students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their "investment." But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. "The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges," Cappelli writes. "Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs--as much as one in four--is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students."
With careful monitoring by a urologist, a man with relatively unaggressive prostate cancer is unlikely to develop metastatic prostate cancer or die from the disease. This is according to a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Some microbes passed on during sex could actually be good for us, are most of us missing out?
Microbes that cause sexual diseases need to ensure they can
hop from human to human
...
A six-study review found that it (GB virus C) was associated with a 59%
reduction in the mortality rate of HIV patients. Scientists think GBV-C
does this by reducing HIV's ability to compromise our immune system
cells. It may also stimulate other parts of the immune system to
actively fight the infection.
As consumer concern grows over genetically modified products, more produce purveyors are paying to use such labels
While the U.S. government and most major science groups say evidence shows that GMOs are safe, consumer concern has grown so strong that some vendors of products such as blueberries and lettuce are paying for non-GMO labeling even though their products aren't among the small number of crops that are genetically modified in the U.S.
Scientists have discovered a protein which binds the components of ice cream together and stops it melting so fast.
The new ingredient should create firmer, longer lasting ice cream that will keep it frozen for much longer in hot weather
By reducing your "sleep window", you're raising the stakes, giving your powers of sleep a real challenge, which brings out the best in them'
Also see, Sleep Restriction Therapy (SRT).