John Oliver, host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight", needs to do something splashy soon if he is going to enter the late night big leagues. He's five years into this latest phase of his career, incredulous angry comedy commentator, and 18 months away from negotiating a new contract, so it is a bad time for him to run out of gas.
Culture
Somewhere in the American Southwest or northern Mexico, there are probably the ruins of a scarlet macaw breeding operation dating to between 900 and 1200 C.E., according to a team of archaeologists who sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of bird remains found in the Chaco Canyon and Mimbres areas of New Mexico.
If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you break the noodle in two? If not, you're in very good company.
The spaghetti challenge has flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman '39, who once spent a good portion of an evening breaking pasta and looking for a theoretical explanation for why the sticks refused to snap in two.
Aug. 13, 2018 - Medicare patients nationwide have low rates of preventive care visits - https://journals.lww.com/lww-medicalcare/Fulltext/2018/09000/Ethnoracial_Disparities_in_Medicare_Annual.5.aspx?PRID=MC_PR_081318" with the lowest rates found in older adults of minority race/ethnicity, reports a study in the September issue of Medical Care.
WORCESTER, MA - Reports from cannabis users that the drug reduces the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) may finally be explained by new research from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Bath showing that endocannabinoids help control and prevent intestinal inflammation in mice.
New research illuminates how some men and boys who are contemplating suicide are finding emotional support in an unexpected place: Reddit.
Sometimes referred to as the "front page of the Internet," Reddit is a social news aggregation and discussion website that's especially popular among young adult males.
More than 100 years ago, German Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich popularized the "magic bullet" concept -- a method that clinicians might one day use to target invading microbes without harming other parts of the body. Although chemotherapies have been highly useful as targeted treatments for cancer, unwanted side effects still plague patients. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have demonstrated that specialized nucleic acid-based nanostructures could be used to target cancer cells while bypassing normal cells.
To encourage innovation in health care, governments need to move away from current siloed funding to funding that encourages collaboration among providers in managing patients who need care in a variety of settings, argue the authors of an analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal)
You probably know Easter Island as "the place with the giant stone heads." This remote island 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile has long been seen as mysterious--a place where Polynesian seafarers set up camp, built giant statues, and then destroyed their own society through in-fighting and over-exploitation of natural resources.
LAWRENCE -- In ethnic enclaves, Mexican immigrants tend to spend less on food per week while East Asian immigrants spend more, which could explain the difference in assimilation rates and contrast in ethnic population density among the two groups, according to a University of Kansas study.
LAWRENCE -- A group of Americans and Europeans has relocated to a Costa Rican community in recent decades, and despite the government cheering the economic jolt, their isolation from locals there more highlights the privilege of these migrants who drastically transform coastal villages, according to a study by a University of Kansas researcher.
"Americans and Europeans are not thought of as migrants, more like expatriates or tourists," said Erin Adamson, a doctoral candidate in sociology. "But they have a really large economic impact on the places they go."
LAWRENCE -- When female athletes have strong mentors, the relationship helps them combat issues of sexism and helps them navigate problematic behaviors, according to a study by two University of Kansas researchers.
"Mentorship and the feeling of mattering is really important to female athletes in dealing with issues of discrimination or bullying that can impede women's full participation in sports, such as playing on a mostly male team or confronting sexual harassment," said Kathryn Vaggalis, the study's co-author and a KU doctoral candidate in American Studies.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The bond between parent and child extends far beyond sharing similar looks or behaviors, as symptoms of depression in teens and parents appear to be linked, according to research presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association.
When a teen's depression improved through treatment, so did depression experienced by his or her parent, according to Kelsey R. Howard, MS, of Northwestern University, who presented the findings.
Nature has provided us not only the fantastic materials, but also the inspiration for the design and fabrication of high-performance biomimetic engineering materials. Woods, which have been used for thousands of years, have received considerable attention due to the low density and high strength. The unique anisotropic cellular structure endow the woods with outstanding mechanical performances. In recent decades, various materials have been produced into monolithic materials with anisotropically cellular structures, trying to duplicate the lightweight and high-strength woods.
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's unique expertise in sun-viewing telescopes will be an integral part of the historic NASA Parker Solar Probe mission scheduled to launch Aug. 11 to better understand how the Sun affects our solar system.
The mission to "touch the Sun" is 60 years in the making and will bring a spacecraft carrying a suite of instruments the closest ever before to the Sun with NRL's Space Science Division's coronagraph telescopes called the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR, being the only imager.