Category: Science

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NASA Wants to Send a Probe to Venus’ Infernal Surface

Even though we’ve had our eyes on the Mars prize for some time, a different team of researchers is actually working on getting to Venus.

Venus gets closer to Earth in its orbit than any other planet, yet we have precious little information about the surface – except that it’s close to a living hell.

In 1966, a Soviet space probe crash-landed on the surface, where it lasted a few hours before being destroyed. Now NASA’s Long-Lived In-situ Solar System Explorer, or LLISSE, is looking to last a full 60 days in the reactive atmosphere, crushing pressure and blasting heat found on Venus’ surface. In fact, each probe has to be specially designed to withstand the high temperatures and pressure.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Called Earth’s evil twin, Venus is roughly the same size and mass of our home planet. Scientists say it was once water-rich, potentially with the elements necessary for life. But it has since turned into a hell planet with scorching, lead-melting temperatures, pressure comparable to what’s found at the bottom of our deepest oceans and winds whipping like tornados. During the day, sulphuric acid blocks the sun’s rays. The nights each last one hundred Earth-days.

One theory about what happened to make Venus so inhospitable is that, over time, the once huge, shallow ocean evaporated, releasing the super-light hydrogen atoms into space. As hydrogen disappeared, all the carbon-dioxide left in the atmosphere created an out-of-control greenhouse effect. Basically, turbo-charged climate change run utterly amok.

But we really don’t know.

And we can’t know, until we put some equipment on the surface.

Small as a ten-inch cube, LLISSE will piggyback on other space-going craft and then get dropped onto Venus. The unit is made of super hard silicon carbide – also used in sandpaper and lab-made diamonds – to protect it against sulphuric crystals. Like a missile, it will be powered by a heat-activated thermal battery for its 60-day life.

Photo Credit: NASA

NASA engineers need the unit powered for that long to see the change from day to night on Venus. Each Venus day lasts almost four Earth-months. If the unit can get placed late in the day, and if it can stay powered long enough, we’ll be get critical data on the transition for the first time.

Eventually, LLISSE will be used as part of a joint Venus project with the Russian space agency, but, as of right now, it looks as if nothing is getting to the next planet over before 2026. Frankly, it’s not even sure if LLISSE will ever get a trip into space at that point.

But the technology is already here, and Venus isn’t going anywhere.

A visit next door is just a matter of a few more Venus days.

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Playgrounds for Elderly People Increase Activity and Decrease Loneliness

As people get older, they become more isolated. After all, it’s just harder to get out an about, and the people you know have the same trouble.

It’s also a face that often times aging people exercise less, if at all.

So how do we solve the problem? Playgrounds!

I have yet to see one of these in person, but I have to say, I think this is an amazing idea.

The phenomenon of playgrounds for adults is still kind of new in the United States, but the original concept dates back to 1995 in China.

They proved to be very popular in China, and soon spread across the globe to Europe, Canada, Japan, and the U.S. The trend has become especially popular in Spain, where the city of Barcelona alone has more than 300 adult playgrounds.

Playgrounds for older adults feature low-impact exercise equipment that’s designed to improve flexibility, balance, and core strength among users, all key attributes that undoubtedly lead to better overall well-being for elderly people who take advantage of these spaces. Some of the parks even feature group exercise classes so older folks don’t have to work up a sweat all by themselves – plus, they get the opportunity to meet people.

Cedric X. Bryant, president and chief science officer of the American Council on Exercise, says, “[Playgrounds for elders] focus on promoting balance, flexibility, and range of motion, all of which can help with the functional capabilities of older people and allow them to do more of the things they want to do.”

Some park are strictly for adults, while some allow seniors to play along with their grandchildren. Right now, there are 53 “multigenerational” parks in the United States.

Here’s a video of some older folks taking advantage of such a park in Colorado.

I’d like to see these all over the country!

No, all over the world!

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People Who Wish for More Self-Control Actually Wind up with Less. Here’s Why.

I have some bad news for people who desperately need more self-control in their lives. Research shows that wishing for more self-control actually has the opposite effect.

In a 2017 study, psychologists measured participants’ desire to increase their self-control. Then the volunteers rated their current level of self-control. Lastly, they had to complete either an easy or a difficult assignment.

The volunteers who performed best on the challenging assignment were the least likely to say that they wanted to have more self-control. Those who did the worst were the most likely to wish for more self-control.

The desire for self-control had no effect on the volunteers’ performance on the easy assignment.

Photo Credit: iStock

These results could simply demonstrate that people with a lot of self-control perform better on hard tasks — they don’t wish for more self-control because they already have it.

But in a follow-up experiment, the psychologists managed to manipulate people’s desire for more self-control by asking them to write an essay about why self-control was a good thing OR how it could cause problems. This time, those who were prompted to see self-control as desirable performed worse on the difficult task. Those who were prompted to see self-control as problematic performed much better.

Consciously wishing for more self-control may seem like a positive thing — how are you supposed to become more disciplined unless you try? But in reality, this desire makes you focus on what you don’t already have, psyching you out in the process.

Photo Credit: iStock

So instead of just passively wishing for more self-control, try taking concrete steps to accomplish the specific things that you want to accomplish. For example, don’t just think to yourself, “I wish I had the self-control not to check Instagram every day” – actually install an app on your phone to limit your social media use.

The researchers also recommend reframing your thinking. Self-control isn’t something that people simply have or don’t have. It’s an unlimited resource, and you can tap into it at any time, regardless of what you’ve done before.

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A Public Service Announcement Compares the Dangers of Kids Playing Football to Smoking

When I was growing up, parents didn’t think twice about letting their kids play organized football. I played myself for several years, and I never thought about any of the possible repercussions that came along with getting hit over and over again on the field.

But parents with young kids today, including several of my friends who now have children of their own, are adamant that they will never, ever let their children play football. And maybe there’s a good reason for that…

Letting kids play football has come under fire in recent years due to the knowledge about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease that many former football players and others have suffered from after receiving multiple head injuries. To make the point, the Concussion Legacy Foundation released a public service announcement comparing the long-term effects of kids playing football to children smoking cigarettes.

In the PSA, a young boy says, “Tackle football is like smoking. The younger I start, the longer I am exposed to danger. You wouldn’t let me smoke. When should I start tackling?”

A study reports that it’s the number of years spent playing football, not the number of head injuries a person suffers, that impacts the severity of CTE.

The PSA calls for parents to wait until their children are 14 years old to let them play tackle football. Take a look at the PSA below.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you let your kids play football or do you refuse?

Sound off in the comments.

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Take a Look at the Case for Putting Your Kids to Bed Super Early

Some of us are night owls, others thrive in the early hours of the morning, but one thing is true across the board – we need solid, consecutive hours of sleep in order to perform our best.

And since many people find themselves on a forced 9-5 schedule because of, you know, jobs, our kids don’t have a whole lot of choice what time they get up in the morning.

So if you want them to get enough sleep, they probably need to be in bed around 7pm.

Image Credit: Pixabay

I know that probably cuts into your evening schedule, or practices, or even things like church, but listen: getting enough sleep lowers kids’ risk for future obesity, makes kids less vulnerable to illness, and primes them for better growth, academic achievement, and emotional wellbeing.

In fact, experts like Andrew J. Bernstein, a doctor and professor at Northwestern University, warn that kids with later bedtimes aren’t lucky at all, but set up to fail in many important ways.

“Children’s natural rhythm is to need to go to sleep well before adults do, and if children are kept up as late as their parents, they’re being deprived the opportunity to grow and learn as well as possible.

Image Credit: Pixabay

If your baby is under a year old, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends they get between 12-16 hours of sleep, while kids between 1 and 2 should be snoozing between 11 and 14 hours a day. Kids who are between the ages of 3 and 5 should sleep 10-13 hours out of every 24.

These recommendations include naps.

You might be thinking, well, as long as my kid sleeps 12 hours a night, why does it matter what time they go to sleep, but, well…multiple studies have shown that it does.

Kids who go to bed earlier get more quality sleep, and evidence suggests enough good quality sleep can help prevent emotional meltdowns, childhood obesity, and other childhood issues that could have lifelong impact.

Image Credit: Pixabay

A study published in The Journal of Pediatrics followed 1,000 kids from preschool into adolescence, tracking their bedtimes and other baseline factors the entire time. They found that 39% of the kids who went to bed after 8 p.m. were overweight as teenagers, compared to only 10% of the kids with earlier bedtimes.

Additional studies have linked high BMI to kids going to bed late, and have also supported the claim that “catching up” during the day doesn’t do anything to curb the increased risk of obesity.

“Napping during the day to make up for poor nighttime sleep is just catch-up sleep and is the sign of an exhausted child. That child still suffers from the lack of good consecutive sleep at night.”

Good sleep, and plenty of it, is still important to teenagers. With it, they’re more likely to perform better in school and to display more control over their emotions, too.

And no one wants a teen in the house with bad emotional regulation…

 

 

Anyone who has ever had kids can attest to the fact that bedtime can be one of the most challenging times of the day. Babies like to be held and rocked, toddlers have a million reasons they can’t just lay down and pass out, and older kids need one more drink or one more book.

But if you can come up with a routine and stick with it – even on the nights they’re fighting you – your kids will likely be the better for hitting the sack early.

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When the Pollen Count Goes Up, Violent Crime Goes Down

Much in the same way you feel like crap when allergies attack, it turns out criminals are less likely to go about their regular day when they’re not feeling up to snuff.

Image Credit: Pixabay

We know this because of a study recently published in the Journal of Health Economics, which found that when large cities experience a drop in violent crime, it typically happens while the pollen count is unusually high.

“Leveraging daily variation in local pollen counts in 16 US cities, we present novel evidence that violent crime declines by approximately 4% on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high. …While this might sound like a small behavioral response, it is on par with the change in crime that would be expected to accrue from a 10% increase in the size of a city’s police force.”

The researchers looked at crime levels in Chicago, Georgia, and New York, and while the results matched up when it came to violent crime – even domestic violence – property crimes did not seem to be affected.

Image Credit: Pixabay

It seems that if a plan to rob a house or a bank is already in progress, no one is going to cancel because they’re under the weather. Gotta pay the bills and all that.

“Given that the effects we observe are driven by a decline in a residential, mostly family violence, despite the fact that, if anything, there is more residential interaction on high pollen days, this is not merely a story about a change in opportunity or routine activities.”

It’s pretty remarkable when you think about it – even though people are more likely to be at home, where domestic violence typically occurs – these violent crimes are still less frequent.

“Violence responds to other situational factors which shift the costs and benefits of offending and precaution: malaise driven by pollen allergies.”

Image Credit: Pixabay

Basically, people may be too drowsy or unwell to commit crimes of passion.

The authors of the study believe that their findings show not just how crime is sensitive to allergens, but how it can be affected by changes to public health altogether.

“Our results do not show evidence of temporal displacement or state dependence, and hence the data are most consistent with the proportion that high pollen days prevent crime rather than delay it.”

So, people don’t “make up” for their drowsy, crime-free days by doing more crime afterward – the high allergy days actually seem to prevent crime.

I’m not sure how local law enforcement could take all of this into consideration, but I feel like they should be able to, don’t you?

Let’s figure it out together in the comments…

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Take a Look at This Bizarre Crayfish Species of All Females Who Clone Themselves by the Hundreds

Whoa…

The marbled crayfish looks like a regular crayfish. They live in fresh waterways, rivers and streams like regular crayfish. But they are so much more creepy.

The Procambarus virginalis is a crayfish with an ominous ability. First, they are all female.

Also, they clone themselves.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia

German biologist Frank Lyco was the first to notice something amiss about the extra large crayfish. An aquarium enthusiast told him he picked up the creature he called a Texas crayfish (aka a marmokreb) at a pet shop in 1995.

The man told Lyco the crayfish just kept laying eggs. He had so many live crayfish, he started giving them away to friends. It wasn’t too long before they could be found in aquarium and pet stores across Europe.

But the strangest part was that all the crayfish were female. They laid hundreds and hundreds of eggs with no males for fertilization, but the eggs still hatched hundreds and hundreds of crayfish—all females and all exact clones of the mother.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia

The females, once matured, would in turn lay her hundreds of eggs…

Yikes (that’s a scientific term).

Aquarium owners reported having hundreds of offspring from one crayfish. In 2003, biologists sequenced the crayfish DNA and confirmed the animals were exact clones.

Twenty-five years ago, these crayfish didn’t exist. Now, they number in the millions, thriving in the wild, throughout Europe, Japan and Madagascar.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

As aquarium hobbyists are finding out, even the largest tanks will fill with marbled crayfish fast. Extra animals often get dumped into rivers, but the dump-ees are hardy and can walk for hundreds of yards to fresh water… where they clone themselves to the contentment of their hearts.

So, where did the first weirdo come from?

Lyco and his team sequenced the marbled crayfish genome and discovered this new crustacean was a result of a major mutation in the form of a copied chromosome in a slough crayfish from the Saltilla River in Florida and Georgia. This mutation meant that there were two of each chromosome in its sex cells instead of the usual one. About 30 years ago, the mutated slough crayfish mated. The offspring was super hardy and had three copies of chromosomes in their sex cells.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia

And they could reproduce themselves.

Now what?

Well, Lyco told The New York Times the crayfish could thrive for a hundred thousand years, which is not all that long evolution-wise. Or, because there’s no genetic variation in the clones, one pathogen could bring the whole species down.

So there’s that.

But for the blip in time in which we now live, we’re sharing our space with mutant, self-cloning crayfish.

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Thousands of Tarantulas Are Roaming the San Francisco Area Searching for Mates

Attention: people of San Francisco, don’t freak out—but there are thousands of tarantulas casually roaming your city right now.

The tarantulas are out and about throughout the entire San Francisco Bay Area. They’re making a show not for Halloween, but because the weather has been drier and warmer than usual, causing male Bay Area blond tarantulas, the only tarantulas that are native to the region, to come out and look for a mate.

Residents have been spotting the creatures on trails, roads, and parks.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

After the males successfully mate, they die. “They’re not returning home,” Cameron Morrison, supervising state park peace officer for Mount Diablo State Park, explained to ABC News. “That’s their final voyage, basically.”

The male tarantulas are up to 4 inches in length, while females are the size of a nickel. But experts say not to fear them—they are “gentle giants,” Cameron says. “They’re very reluctant to bite you. I’ve never had someone say that they were bitten by a tarantula.” Also, if one did bite you for some reason, it would be less severe than a bee sting (even though their fangs are quite large). Their hairs can cause skin irritation, though, so it’s not a good idea to handle them.

Photo Credit: iStock

Usually, by this time of year, the male tarantulas have already done their mating and died. But thanks to seasonal weather changes, they’re still on the prowl. Lucky California!

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A Man’s Strange Reaction to Antibiotics Has His Guts Brewing Alcohol

Well, this is odd.

A week into his course of cephalexin, a common antibiotic prescribed to ward off infection in an injured thumb, a man checked into the emergency room with some strange symptoms.

They included memory loss, brain fog, and episodes of depression, along with personality changes and uncharacteristic aggression.

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Among my sleep studies research there are numerous notes about how alcohol disrupts sleep. Because it causes the brain to be simultaneously in alpha and delta activity patterns (one’s for being wide awake, the other for being in deep sleep), and blocks REM sleep, and messes with adenosine production interrupting your circadian rhythm, and aggravating breathing problems such as snoring and sleep apnea. . This has me thinking about a recently-discovered, seemingly-rare condition known as auto brewery/gut fermentation syndrome. It’s a condition in which the naturally-occurring yeast in your gut causes the sugars you consume to ferment into alcohol. Known cases lead to folks becoming drunk as a result of drinking fruit juice (for example), but — as with any condition — there should be cases that run the gambit between in-your-face (drunkenness) and subtle-enough-to-be-misdiagnosed-as-a-dozen-other-things-if-at-all. . With this in mind: What if an individual’s daily sugar intake, daily energy use, and overall gut yeast levels are balanced in such a way that their gut doesn’t automatically create alcohol during the day, but then at night (with some sugars still in the system and physical activity coming to a halt) the gut then creates alcohol? That person would have no trouble falling asleep, but would regularly have trouble staying asleep. . It’s just a theory. But it’s a theory that can be checked (at least on the individual level) via stool test and or glucose challenge test. And for those struggling to get a proper diagnosis for sleep issues, those are tests worth taking. . If it turns out a person has secondary insomnia resulting from auto brewery syndrome, that means there’s only a handful of underlying conditions that could be causing the whole kit-n-kaboodle. Because no one’s born with auto brewery syndrome, it arises as a result of some other condition creating too much yeast in your gut. And that really helps to narrow down the possibilities. . And as someone whose OCD was misdiagnosed and punished in equal measure for about 25 years before we finally knew what was what, if even one random-ass theory can help someone get to the right diagnosis a little fast

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Doctors were unable to get to the root of the cause, and he suffered those same symptoms for some time. Three years later, a psychiatrist treated him with antidepressants, but his issues persisted.

Things came to a head when he was pulled over on suspicion of drink driving, and was found to have a blood-alcohol level of 200mg/dL (about the equivalent of 7-10 drinks, depending on your weight). He was nauseous, vomiting, impaired, had no memory of the event, and passed out in the hospital.

The patient, however, insisted he had not had one single drink.

It was his aunt who brought him a breathalyzer, and as he tracked his measurements over time, he received similar readings.

A doctor in Ohio administered a carbohydrate test, where the patient consumes carbohydrates and then has their blood-alcohol levels monitored over the course of several hours, and found elevated alcohol levels in his blood. They also found brewer’s yeast in his stool, and eventually diagnosed him with auto-brewery syndrome (ABS).

The syndrome, also known as gut fermentation syndrome, is extremely rare. It causes the digestive system to produce ethanol that makes you intoxicated. Several cases have been reported over the years, usually discovered under similar circumstances (people arrested for drunk driving without having a drink).

This man, however, is the first documented case of ABS stemming from a course of antibiotics.

“We postulate that the antibiotic altered his gut microbiome, allowing fungal growth. This diagnosis should be considered in any patient with positive manifestations of alcohol toxicity who denies alcohol ingestion.”

He was given antifungal medications and, despite a relapse after a night of pizza and soda, is doing well.

I’m not saying this will work if you ever find yourself on the wrong end of a traffic stop, but I mean. It could be your guts making beer, and you just don’t know it.

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This Is Kind of Scary. Antibiotic Resistance in Germs Has Doubled in the past 20 Years.

There are a lot of things to worry about these days, but if you’re a germophobe (like my husband) or someone obsessed with the idea that we’re all going to die in a pandemic (like me), then you’ve probably spent at least some time wondering what’s going to happen when antibiotics stop being widely effective.

I mean…the world before antibiotics was a pretty harrowing place.

And now, research is finding that the number of cases in which people experience infections that are resistant to antibiotics is sharply on the rise.

Preliminary findings, which were presented at United European Gastroenterology Week Barcelona 2019, focused on conditions related to the Helicobacter pylori bacteria – gastric ulcer, lymphoma, and gastric cancer – and found that resistance to the typical antibiotic treatment has risen to nearly 21.6% (from 9.9% in 1998).

 

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Similar rises have been seen with other common antibiotic treatments.

Antibiotic resistance happens when bacteria evolve a tolerance to the drugs we use to eliminate them from our bodies body. Recently, the issue has gotten attention from the WHO, as well as national and regional health organizations in the U.S. and the EU.

 

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Right now, around 56,000 people die worldwide every year when antibiotics fail to treat their infections. Of course, according to this research, we can expect that number to rise, says lead author Francis Megraud.

“With resistance rates to commonly used antibiotics such as clarithromycin increasing at an alarming rate of nearly 1% per year, treatment options for H. pylori will become progressively limited and ineffective if novel treatment strategies remain undeveloped. The reduced efficacy of current therapies could maintain the high incidence rates of gastric cancer and other conditions such as peptic ulcer disease if drug resistance continues to increase at this pace.”

 

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Not being able to counter the effects of H. pylori is especially telling – and bad, as children are often the ones infected.

“The findings of this study are certainly concerning, as H. pylori is the main cause of peptic disease and gastric cancer. The increasing risk of H. pylori to a number of commonly-used antibiotics may jeopardize prevention strategies.”

If you’re worried about yourself or your family, the best thing you can do is not take antibiotics for infections that are likely viral, not all that bothersome, or will run their course on their own without excessive discomfort.

Easier said than done, I know, but you’ll be toughing out a lot worse if these bacteria evolve faster than we do.

Real talk.

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