Meat-based diets like driving SUVs

Think you can’t do anything to stop global warming? Think again! Scientists are reporting that changing from a meat based diet to a vegetable-based diet helps reduce global warming.

Why? Here is how the authors put it:

The energy consumption of animal- and plant-based diets and, more broadly, the range of energetic planetary footprints spanned by reasonable dietary choices are compared. It is demonstrated that the greenhouse gas emissions of various diets vary by as much as the difference between owning an average sedan versus a sport-utility vehicle under typical driving conditions.

So where do the emissions come from? The problem has biological and technological roots. Firstly, as energy moves up the food chain, from the sun, to plants, to animals, to humans, it gets wasted. Actually, only 10% makes it to the next step up in the food chain. Also, cows and animal waste are a source of methane. In addition, we need trucks and tractors and all the farming equipment to get the food at each step of the way. It all adds up.

End result? We can calculate how much a person’s diet produces greenhouse emissions each year and compare it to the amount produced by driving different types of cars. As the authors state, meat-based diets produce as much greenhouse gases as driving an SUV.

Technorati Tags: SUV, global warming, diet, greenhouse, methane, emissions, science, technology

Science stats beat astrology stars

Astrology claims that people’s personalities are directly affected by their date of birth. So is there any evidence to support the ideas of astrology? The answer, it seems again, is a resounding no.

A paper studying over 15000 people by Danish and German researchers looked for any statistical correlations between date of birth and personality traits. In every single aspect studied, no correlation was found. The paper is entitled The relationship between date of birth and individual differences in personality and general intelligence: A large-scale study, and is in the May issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Technorati Tags: astrology, zodiac, personality, science

Blinking lights using RFID

In the ‘Why didn’t I think of that!’ category, a new purse tells its owners if important objects (keys, wallet, etc) are not inside it.

It works like this: a set of lights outside the bag are turned on by default. To each important item, a small RFID (radio frequency ID) chip is attached. If the item is placed in the purse, the lights system detects the attached RFID chip and turns off the corresponding lights. The prototype can handle up to three items, each having its own set of lights.

Is that cool or what? More info at the Discovery Channel.

Technorati Tags: RFID, purse, technology

High drop-out rates

A worrying post from Donald Trump: Shocking Education Statistics. The title says it all, but here is an extract:

…nearly one in three public high school students in the United States won’t graduate. If you break down the statistics for Latinos and African-Americans, the numbers are even worse. The dropout rate is nearly 50 percent.

Bill Gates has also made similar remarks, in his National Education Summit on High Schools speech. If two big names (I’m sure there are more) are sounding an alarm, something is definitely wrong!

Although I’m not American, these stats and warnings make me shiver. As Donald rightly points out, a good educational system underpins the whole of society. For society to keep inventing new things and developing new ideas, we need educated people to feed into science and engineering higher education programs (and this is just a small part of the good effects of a good education).

So what is going wrong and what can we do to fix it?

Technorati Tags: Donald Trump, Bill Gates, education, science, society

Scientific literature search

A very cool new service part of the up-coming MSN Live website: Windows Live Academic Search. The same functional (if a bit slow) and information-dense interface is used as the main Live search site, but with focus on academic papers. Check it out.

MP3 medical advice

In what has got to be a first, the British Sussex Ambulance Service has released medical advice in MP3 format. That’s a good use of technology if you ask me!

Technorati Tags: Sussex Ambulance Service, podcast, ipod, medicine, medical advice, technology

Science of pouring ketchup

This is a bit old, but still interesting. Ketchup is a funny fluid - part solid, part liquid. As we all know, getting it out of a bottle can be frustrating. So is there a proper way to do it? Sure there is! Read all about the technicalities of pouring ketshup, and keep your eye out for the science in there!

Microphones + glasses = hearing aid

A very cool hearing aid has been created in the Netherlands. Called Varibel (in Dutch), it is basically a pair of glasses which has microphones embedded into the frame. This arrangement primarily picks out sounds from the direction people of looking, giving a directional sensitivity of +8.2dB as opposed to +4dB of the regular hearing aids.

Technorati Tags: Varibel, hearing aid, technology

Drug marketing and disease mongering

Timed to conincide with the Inaugural Conference on Disease Mongering, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine journal has published a series of articles about disease mongering and how pharmaceutical companies market drugs. The articles cover topics such as erectile dysfunction, female sexual dysfunction, the role of teachers in medicine, restless legs syndrome, and many others. It’s a very thorough attack on the industry, potentially inciting extra governmental control on how drugs are marketed.

The BBC has a commentary, which includes an important gem: the studies published in PLoS Medicine focus on the US market, and so we should not extrapolate the results to other countries. Still, it’s an important issue which affects everyone!

Technorati Tags: erectile dysfunction, female sexual dysfunction, restless legs, disease mongering, pharmaceuticals, industry, drugs, medicine, PLOS, science

Fear sweat makes people more accurate and cautious

It is well documented that animals experiencing stress and fear produce chemical warning signals that can lead to important changes in animals of the same species. Now, Rice University researchers studied the effects of sweat on the brain performance of women. The sweat used in the tests came either from scared volunteers (people who sweated while watching horror films) or normal volunteers. The theory was that fear-induced sweat contains chemical signals that affects brain function.

The experiment was straightforward: 75 female students between the ages of 18 and 22 respond to 320 pairs of words that flashed for three seconds each on a computer screen. For each pair, the participants had to press a key to indicate whether the words were associated with each other (for example, arms and legs) or not (arms and wind). Some of the words were associated with threatening or fear-related topics, like weapons. Each participant had a piece of gauze attached above their lips so that they were exposed to either chemicals from sweat or none at all during the tests. The experiment compared how the chemicals from sweat impacted the speed and accuracy of participants’ results on the word-association tests.

When processing meaningfully related word pairs, the participants exposed to the fear chemicals were 85 percent accurate, and those in either the neutral sweat or the control (no-sweat) condition were 80 percent accurate. When processing word pairs that were ambiguous in threat content, such as one neutral word paired with a threatening word or a pair of neutral words, subjects in the fear condition were 15 to 16 percent slower in responding than those in the neutral sweat condition. These differences are statistically significant and point to further research about the mechanism of these effects.

Technorati Tags: cautiousness, cognitive performance, fear, chemosignals, brain, psychology, biology, science