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How Earth’s Axis Affects Your Sleep Habits

November 5, 2011 by ·

At 2 a.m. on Sunday (Nov. 6), most of the United States will enjoy the upside to the annual daylight saving time shift — setting our clocks back by an hour.

But be careful how you enjoy it, cautions Dr. Anita Valanju Shelgikar, director of the sleep medicine fellowship program at the University of Michigan.

“It’s truly easier to go this way than in the other direction,” Shelgikar said, referring to the spring-time shift forward an hour. “It does give you an extra hour in the morning to sleep, but it can throw people off, primarily because people say I can stay up a lot later because I have an extra hour in the morning to sleep and ultimately, they sleep deprive themselves.” [Are You Getting Enough Sleep?] [Read more...]

Filed Under: Health Care, Lifestyle, Research & Study ·

Neither Climate Nor Humans Alone Caused Ice Age Mass Extinctions

November 3, 2011 by ·

An inter-disciplinary team from more than 40 universities around the world have put an end to the controversial single-cause theories of Ice Age mass extinctions.

Scientists have for years debated the reasons behind the Ice Age mass extinctions, which caused the loss of a third of the large mammals in Eurasia and two thirds of the large mammals in North America.

They have been arguing on whether climate change or humans are responsible for the extinctions of the large-bodied Ice Age mammals (commonly called megafauna) such as the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth.

Now the study, led by Professor Eske Willerslev and his group from the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, has revealed dramatically different responses of Ice Age species to climate change and human impact. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Research & Study ·

The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded

October 13, 2011 by ·

Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They’ve found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original “proto-human language” might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda, the tiny green Jedi from “Star Wars.”

There are various word orders used in the languages of the world. Some, like English, use subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering, as in the sentence “I like you.” Others, such as Latin, use subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering, as in “I you like.” In rare cases, OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO are used. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages, argue that the original language used SOV ordering (“I you like”). [Read more...]

Filed Under: Art, Humanities, People, Research & Study ·

Global Warming: Why Americans Are In Denial

September 27, 2011 by ·

Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.

“I don’t think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that,” the author recalls.

But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of “global warming” didn’t set off an instant outcry of angry denial. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Research & Study ·

Search On For Amateur Science Ideas

September 26, 2011 by ·

Snail “GPS”, Facebook psychology and crowd dynamics at music gigs: these were just some of the ideas submitted during last year’s search for “citizen science” projects.

Now, Radio 4 is launching its search for the next BBC Amateur Scientist of the year.

A panel of judges, chaired by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, will select four finalists. The shortlisted entrants will then have their ideas turned into real experiments, with the help of a professional scientist. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Humanities, Research & Study, Science ·

By Storing More Heat, Oceans Create ‘Hiatus Periods’ in Rise of Global Warming — Study

September 19, 2011 by ·

The “missing heat” needed to balance the Earth’s energy budget may be lurking in the deep oceans, a new study finds.

That deep ocean heat storage could help explain periods when global warming has slowed, even though satellite data show no change in the amount of energy trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere.

That “missing heat” is hiding out in ocean waters at depths of 1,000 feet or more, according to researchers from the United States and Australia. Their findings, based on computer climate simulations, were published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study also predicts that the continued warming of the climate will be punctuated by brief periods when the rate of warming slows, stops or even reverses, slightly. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Research & Study ·

Teaching Beekeeping to Children Improves Behavior

September 4, 2011 by ·

When I wrote about beekeeping with children for our sister site Parentables, I noted that bees can be a fantastic tool for encouraging emotional literacy. For the same reason that beekeeping is great for those with felony convictions, it can also help children to better understand and control their anger and improve their behavior. As any beekeeper will tell you, opening a hive when you are in a bad mood is a very silly idea. One UK school is finding this out in very practical terms, having gone from trying to remove an uninvited swarm, to adopting a school hive of its own. While revenue from honey sales is a welcome boost, it’s the improvement in unruly kids’ behavior that has been most striking. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Education, Humanities, Research & Study ·