Science 2.0

Cannabis, known as marijuana in the U.S., Cannabis has been cultivated for millennia in East Asia and like many drugs exported from there to become one of the most widely used psychoactive drugs in the world today.

But now archaeologists have tracked down its earliest known use: 2,500-year-old funerary incense burners from the Jirzankal Cemetery in the eastern Pamirs. 

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Each year, 1 million men in the U.S. undergo biopsies to determine whether they have prostate cancer because ultrasound imaging cannot clearly display the location of tumors in the prostate gland.

Ultrasound has been used to visualize the prostate in order to take a representative sampling of tissue to biopsy but with MRI doctors can see specific lesions in the prostate and only take tissue samples from those spots.

Why aren't those two sampling methods used in combination?

A multidisciplinary team has found that biopsy guided by magnetic resonance imaging increases the rate of prostate cancer detection.

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Women will more often rush to the defense of mothers who give their kids formula, stick to the vaccine schedule, or who let their pre-schoolers play in the yard without a wall to protect them from predators they read about one time on the Internet. Women defend mothers against mommy shaming more often because a whole lot more women are also willing to shame mothers who don't buy food from the right store, clothe them in the right stuff, or act in a way social media zealots tell them not to do.

In my neighborhood, we call any guy who berates other fathers because they don't shop at Whole Foods or do give their kids vaccines 'that guy with no friends.'(1) But among moms the peer pressure is strong.

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If you read the Harry Potter series of novels or saw the films, you've known that fiction has people moving in and out of photographs - now that magic has been brought to real life.

The University of Washington algorithm Photo Wake-Up was posted in preprint form on arXiv in December and created a buzz because it can take a person from a 2D photo or a work of art and make them run, walk or jump out of the frame. The system also allows users to view the animation in three dimensions using augmented reality tools. Next week at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Long Beach, California, the researchers will be showing results.

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No one is for child labor but people are unfailingly for lower prices rather than higher. That is why the organic industry is a tiny fraction of the overall food market. With no benefit other than paeans to health halos or holistic beliefs about urban people about farming, most remain unconvinced.

What if it eliminated child labor? Nearly everyone would agree to that - unless they believe paying more would just lead to more profits by exploiters in developing nations.

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The Neolithic period, the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of civilizations, began about 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture in the Epipalaeolithic Near East. It spread to other parts of the world.

It provides not just the first evidence of farming, it also provides early evidence of gender inequality. according to a paper by researchers from the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Seville who study prehistoric societies in the Neolithic Period in the Iberian Peninsula.

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I have always been fascinated by optical instruments that provide magnified views of Nature: microscopes, binoculars, telescopes. As a child I badly wanted to watch the Moon, planets, and stars, and see as much detail as I could on all possible targets; at the same time, I avidly used a toy microscope to watch the microworld. So it is not a surprise to find out I have grown up into a particle physicist - I worked hard to put myself in a vantage position from where I can study the smallest building blocks of matter with the most powerful microscope ever constructed, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 

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This article is scaring people, with the usual “all going to be extinct soon ” hype that we have had so many stories about this year. It’s not true at all. It was a clickbait title and the article itself was also misleading by omission. It did not explain how many species of plants there are. There are around 391,000 species, according to one study in 2016, with 2,000 new species discovered every year. Yes it does matter that 571 have gone extinct. But at 0.15% of the plant species, it is not a mass extinction and we don’t risk a world without plants. Moreover most plants can be preserved as seeds for centuries when dried and kept in cold conditions.

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When we think of agriculture, we don't think of nomadic hunter-gatherers who simply followed nature rather than harnessing it. 

But they engaged in trade also. Millet, originally domesticated in China, was likely consumed at low levels by pastoralists inhabiting the far-flung regions of Siberia and southeastern Kazakhstan, possibly as early as the late third millennium but with the expansion of trans-regional networks across the steppe, when objects and ideas were first regularly exchanged over long-distances, millet consumption began to increase.  

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Researchers set out to find a wine grape so popular no one wanted to change it. 

And they did, thanks to a genetic database of modern grapevines and 28 archaeological seeds from French sites dating back to the Iron Age. They discovered that Savagnin Blanc (not Sauvignon Blanc) from the Jura region of France was genetically identical to a seed excavated from a medieval site in Orléans. 

That means the variety still grown now has grown for at least 900 years as cuttings from just one ancestral plant.

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It's quite common for the circle of life to have animals eating plants in order to become bigger food for other animals and then animals die and become food for organisms in the soil but nature has flipped the script again. 

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A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest crater in our solar system.

The crater, thought to have been created about 4 billion years ago, is oval-shaped and as wide as 2,000 kilometers (roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C.) and several miles deep. Despite its size, it cannot be seen from Earth because it is on the far side of the Moon. 

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Industrial processes in the United States produce 8 gigagrams of methane emissions per year, according to experts. But Environmental Defense Fund, using a sensor on a Google street view car, is claiming otherwise in a recent article they paid to publish in a small Berkeley-based journal (Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene) that promotes stories about how humans are killing the planet.

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This asteroid is expected to miss. It is classified as NO HAZARD.

NASA and ESA have not issued any warning for this asteroid because it is harmless.

The ESA table looks scary if you aren’t used to numbers. But replace numbers by words and you get:

This is a shorter version of my longer article, mainly in pictures, to help young children and panicked people who often find it hard to think clearly.

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In a new survey, 80 percent of gun owners support the concept of personalized guns, referred to as "smart" guns because they include safety features like fingerprint locks to help prevent use by unauthorized individuals. But only 18 percent are willing to buy them.

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People who smoke marijuana and are considering having children in the future need to be aware about four serious issues that may impact both men and women according to an article ("Five things to know about ... marijuana and fertility" - the title says five things, but there are only four, the fifth is a plea to send more money) in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

The following is useful information for people who may want to conceive. 

Four things to know about marijuana and fertility:

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Scientists continue to gain ground in the race against wheat stem rust, a pathogen that threatens global food security because of its ability to kill wheat. The new chink in nature's armor was discovered in the first rust virulence molecule that wheat plants detect to 'switch on' built-in resistance and stave off the disease.

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Dog owners insist that 'all dogs are puppies', which means our beliefs about their cuteness are not conditional on age, but a paper in Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals, suggests otherwise. The authors found that dogs' attractiveness to humans peaks at roughly eight weeks, the same point in time at which their mother weans them and leaves them to fend for themselves.

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This is an example of a “Sensationalist press choose a random asteroid” story. NASA didn’t warn us about it, and nor did ESA. It is expected to miss and is currrently classified as no hazard. It’s been in the table for many years, and there hasn’t been any announcement by anyone, just that for no reason, just “pick a random asteroid time” CNET, the Independent, Fox News and various others decided to run stories about it today.

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To many in the west, Siberia is synonymous with remote winter gulags where dissidents go to die. A new simulation estimates that if climate change occurs according to more aggressive models, the end of the century might see it as a pretty nice place to love. Russia east of the Urals towards the Pacific accounts for 77 percent of Russia's land area - 13 million square kilometers. Its population, however, is just 27 percent and is concentrated along the forest-steppe in the south, which has a comfortable climate and fertile soil. 

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