Pets could be subjected to gene editing under a new UK government act, the RSPCA has warned. From a report: The animal charity has said that the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act applies to all vertebrate animals, not only farmed animals, and that it could lead to cats and dogs being gene-edited to include extreme features. The law allows the creation and marketing of "precision-bred" or genome-edited plants and vertebrate animals in England. The government said it would allow farmers to grow crops that are drought- and disease-resistant, reduce the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and help breed animals that are protected from catching harmful diseases. The UK environment secretary, Therese Coffey, described the act, which received royal assent on Thursday, as a "Brexit freedom," but the RSPCA said it could have dire consequences for animal welfare. David Bowles, the head of campaigns and public affairs at the RSPCA, criticised what he described as an "ill-judged policy." He said the charity had tried to get the government to include an exemption for pets, but was "sadly ignored." He added: "Gene editing could be a huge step backwards for animals. We do not believe this act should include animals, whether they are farm, pet or wildlife. Invasive procedures are needed to create each line of gene-edited mammals, there is no history of use for this powerful technology, and it can cause unintended changes to the genome, with unpredictable effects. The RSPCA has serious animal welfare and ethical concerns about this."

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Long-time Slashdot reader turp182 shares two stories about the new state-of-the-art in very-high-speed imaging. "The techniques don't image captured photons, but instead 'touch' the target to perform imaging/read structures using either lasers or neutrons." First, Science Daily reports that physicists from the University of Gothenburg (with colleagues from the U.S. and Germany) have developed an ultrafast laser camera that can create videos at 12.5 billion images per second, "which is at least a thousand times faster than today's best laser equipment." [R]esearchers use a laser camera that photographs the material in [an ultrathin, one-atom-thick] two-dimensional layer.... By observing the sample from the side, it is possible to see what reactions and emissions occur over time and space. Researchers have used single-shot laser sheet compressed ultrafast photography to study the combustion of various hydrocarbons.... This has enabled researchers to illustrate combustion with a time resolution that has never been achieved before. "The more pictures taken, the more precisely we can follow the course of events...." says Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, who was one of the researchers at the University of Gothenburg and who is now presenting the results in a scientific article in the journal Light: Science & Applications.... The new laser camera takes a unique picture with a single laser pulse. Meanwhile, ScienceAlert reports on a camera with a trillionth-of-a-second shutter speed — that is, 250 million times faster than digital cameras — that's actually able to photograph atomic activity, including "dynamic disorder." Simply put, dynamic disorder is when clusters of atoms move and dance around in a material in specific ways over a certain period — triggered by a vibration or a temperature change, for example. It's not a phenomenon that we fully understand yet, but it's crucial to the properties and reactions of materials. The new super-speedy shutter speed system gives us much more insight into what's happening.... The researchers are referring to their invention as variable shutter atomic pair distribution function, or vsPDF for short.... To achieve its astonishingly quick snap, vsPDF uses neutrons to measure the position of atoms, rather than conventional photography techniques. The way that neutrons hit and pass through a material can be tracked to measure the surrounding atoms, with changes in energy levels the equivalent of shutter speed adjustments.

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Having high levels of caffeine in your blood may lower the amount of body fat you carry and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, research suggests. From a report: The findings could lead to calorie-free caffeinated drinks being used to reduce obesity and type 2 diabetes, though further research is required, the researchers wrote in the BMJ Medicine journal. Dr Katarina Kos, a senior lecturer in diabetes and obesity at the University of Exeter, said the research showed potential health benefits for people with high levels of caffeine their blood, but added: "It does not study or recommend drinking more coffee, which was not the purpose of this research." She said any caffeinated drinks containing sugar and fat would offset the positive effects. The researchers said their work built on previously published research, which suggested that drinking three to five daily cups of coffee, containing an average 70-150mg of caffeine, was associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. As those were observational studies, they made it difficult to pinpoint whether the effects were because of caffeine or other compounds, the researchers said. This latest study used a technique known as Mendelian randomisation, which establishes cause and effect through genetic evidence. The team found two common gene variants associated with the speed of caffeine metabolism, and used these to work out genetically predicted blood caffeine levels and whether this was associated with lower BMI and body fat.

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All toilet paper from across the globe checked for toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" contained the compounds, and the waste flushed down toilets and sent to sewage treatment plants probably creates a significant source of water pollution, new research has found. From a report: Once in the wastewater plant, the chemicals can be packed in sewage sludge that is eventually spread on cropland as fertilizer, or spilt into waterways. "Toilet paper should be considered as a potentially major source of PFAS entering wastewater treatment systems," the study's authors wrote. PFAS are a class of about 14,000 chemicals typically used to make thousands of consumer products resist water, stains and heat. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down, and they are linked to cancer, fetal complications, liver disease, kidney disease, autoimmune disorders and other serious health issues. The study checked 21 major toilet paper brands in North America, western Europe, Africa, Central America and South America, but it did not name the brands. The peer-reviewed University of Florida report did not consider the health implications of people wiping with contaminated toilet paper. PFAS can be dermally absorbed, but no research on how it may enter the body during the wiping process exists. However, that exposure is "definitely worth investigating," said David Andrews, senior scientist with the Environmental Working group, a public health non-profit that tracks PFAS pollution.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: [S]cientists from the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University announced that they'd finally mapped every single neuron and all the connections between them housed inside the brain of a fruit fly larva. The team's research was published this week in the journal Science. "If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding the mechanism of thought," says Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer Joshua T. Vogelstein in a press release. "And the key to that is knowing how neurons connect with each other." And there are a lot of neurons and connections to sort through. To complete this neurological map, scientists had to identify 3,016 neurons. But that pales in comparison to the number of connections between these neurons, which comes to a grand total of 548,000. They also identified 93 distinct neurons that differed in shape, function, and neurological connection. If this all sounds difficult, that's because it is. For 12 years, scientists had to painstakingly slice a brain into thousands of tissue samples, image them with an high-resolution electron microscope, and then piece them back together -- neuron by neuron. Understanding the inner workings of a fruit fly's brain may seem unrelated to the human mind, but scientists didn't choose this particular species based on its size or perceived simplicity -- rather, fruit flies actually share fundamental biology and a comparable genetic foundation with humans. This makes the map a perfect cornerstone upon which to explore some of the many mysteries of the human mind. "All brains are similar -- they are all networks of interconnected neurons," Marta Zaltic, a co-author on the study, told the BBC. "All brains of all species have to perform many complex behaviors: they all need to process sensory information, learn, select actions, navigate their environments, choose food, etc."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published in the journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This finding opens the way to create devices that literally make energy from thin air. The research team, led by Dr. Rhys Grinter, Ph.D. student Ashleigh Kropp, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia, produced and analyzed a hydrogen-consuming enzyme from a common soil bacterium. In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current. Dr. Grinter notes, "Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels -- as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe." The researchers used several cutting-edge methods to reveal the molecular blueprint of atmospheric hydrogen oxidation. They used advanced microscopy (cryo-EM) to determine its atomic structure and electrical pathways, pushing boundaries to produce the most resolved enzyme structure reported by this method to date. They also used a technique called electrochemistry to demonstrate the purified enzyme creates electricity at minute hydrogen concentrations. Laboratory work performed by Kropp shows that it is possible to store purified Huc for long periods. "It is astonishingly stable. It is possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 degrees celsius, and it retains its power to generate energy," Kropp said. "This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments. " Huc is a "natural battery" that produces a sustained electrical current from air or added hydrogen. While this research is at an early stage, the discovery of Huc has considerable potential to develop small air-powered devices, for example as an alternative to solar-powered devices. "Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy."

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Covid-19 may not have taken as great a toll on the mental health of most people as earlier research has indicated, a new study suggests. From a report: The pandemic resulted in "minimal" changes in mental health symptoms among the general population, according to a review of 137 studies from around the world led by researchers at McGill University in Canada, and published in the British Medical Journal. Brett Thombs, a psychiatry professor at McGill University and senior author, said some of the public narrative around the mental health impacts of Covid-19 were based on "poor-quality studies and anecdotes," which became "self-fulfilling prophecies," adding that there was a need for more "rigorous science." However, some experts disputed this, warning such readings could obscure the impact on individual groups such as children, women and people with low incomes or pre-existing mental health problems. They also said other robust studies had reached different conclusions. Thombs said: "Mental health in Covid-19 is much more nuanced than people have made it out to be. Claims that the mental health of most people has deteriorated significantly during the pandemic have been based primarily on individual studies that are 'snapshots' of a particular situation, in a particular place, at a particular time. They typically don't involve any long-term comparison with what had existed before or came after."

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Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction. The Guardian reports: The advance could ultimately pave the way for treatments for severe forms of infertility, as well as raising the tantalizing prospect of same-sex couples being able to have a biological child together in the future. "This is the first case of making robust mammal oocytes from male cells," said Katsuhiko Hayashi, who led the work at Kyushu University in Japan and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of lab-grown eggs and sperm. Hayashi, who presented the development at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the Francis Crick Institute in London on Wednesday, predicts that it will be technically possible to create a viable human egg from a male skin cell within a decade. Others suggested this timeline was optimistic given that scientists are yet to create viable lab-grown human eggs from female cells. The study, which has been submitted for publication in a leading journal, relied on a sequence of intricate steps to transform a skin cell, carrying the male XY chromosome combination, into an egg, with the female XX version. Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome "borrowed" from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes. "The trick of this, the biggest trick, is the duplication of the X chromosome," said Hayashi. "We really tried to establish a system to duplicate the X chromosome." Finally, the cells were cultivated in an ovary organoid, a culture system designed to replicate the conditions inside a mouse ovary. When the eggs were fertilized with normal sperm, the scientists obtained about 600 embryos, which were implanted into surrogate mice, resulting in the birth of seven mouse pups. The efficiency of about 1% was lower than the efficiency achieved with normal female-derived eggs, where about 5% of embryos went on to produce a live birth. The baby mice appeared healthy, had a normal lifespan, and went on to have offspring as adults. "They look OK, they look to be growing normally, they become fathers," said Hayashi. He and colleagues are now attempting to replicate the creation of lab-grown eggs using human cells.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Has the quest for room temperature superconductivity finally succeeded? Researchers at the University of Rochester (U of R), who previously were forced to retract a controversial claim of room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, are back with an even more spectacular claim. This week in Nature they report a new material that superconducts at room temperature -- and not much more than ambient pressures. "If this is correct, it's completely revolutionary," says James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida who was not involved with the work. A room temperature superconductor would usher in a century-long dream. Existing superconductors require expensive and bulky chilling systems to conduct electricity frictionlessly, but room temperature materials could lead to hyperefficient electricity grids and computer chips, as well as the ultrapowerful magnets needed for levitating trains and fusion power. [...] On February 22, [physicist Ranga Dias] and his colleagues doubled down on their original claim. In a preprint posted on arXiv they reported synthesizing a new version of CSH that superconducts at a slightly lower 260 K, but at only about half the previous pressure. "This should clear up any questions regarding CSH," says co-author Russell Hemley, an x-ray crystallographer at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who helped determine the material's structure. Now comes the even more promising substance: nitrogen-doped lutetium-hydride (LNH). To make it, Dias's team loaded a thin lutetium foil in a diamond vise and injected a mix of hydrogen and nitrogen gas. By ramping the pressure up to 2 gigapascals (nearly 20,000 times atmospheric pressure) and baking the mix at 200C for up to 3 days, they forged a bright blue crystalline fleck, one that survived even after the pressure was eased. When they dialed the pressure back up to as little as 0.3 gigapascals, the blue fleck turned pink as the electrical resistance plunged to zero. The substance reached a peak superconducting temperature of 294 K-7-degrees warmer than the original CSH and truly room temperature -- at pressures of 1 gigapascal. Magnetic measurements also showed the sample repelled an externally applied magnetic field, a hallmark of superconductors. The paper, the authors say, went through five rounds of review. Given the U of R group's recent retraction, many physicists won't be easily convinced. "I think they will have to do some real work and be really open for people to believe it," Hamlin says. Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a vociferous critic of the earlier work, is even more blunt. "I doubt [the new result], because I don't trust these authors."

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Artificial sweeteners and other sugar substitutes sweeten foods without extra calories. But studies show the ingredients can affect gut and heart health. From a report: Table sugar, or sucrose, is still the dominant sweetener in the food supply, and eating a lot of ultra-processed foods with added sugar has been linked to chronic illness and obesity. The number of new food products containing sucrose has fallen by 16 percent in the last five years. Use of high-fructose corn syrup and agave syrup also have declined. "These low-calorie sweeteners are ubiquitous in the food supply, and so people often aren't even aware that they're consuming them," said Allison Sylvetsky, an associate professor in the department of exercise and nutrition sciences at George Washington University. Many sugar substitutes are known as high-intensity sweeteners because they're often hundreds of times sweeter than table sugar. Some are synthetic, like sucralose, aspartame, and saccharin, while others, like allulose, stevia and monk fruit extract, are referred to as "natural" because they're derived from plants. Sugar substitutes can be found in ingredient lists on food packages, often with names that many consumers don't recognize, like adventame, neotame and acesulfame potassium. Foods that claim "no artificial sweeteners" often are sweetened with stevia and other so-called "natural" sugar substitutes. A variety of these sweeteners are turning up in cereals, juices and other packaged foods marketed to kids -- even though public health groups have discouraged their use among children. Sucralose and acesulfame potassium are regularly used in Greek yogurts, tortilla wraps and other foods served in school meals. Schools in some states have experimented with serving chocolate milk sweetened with a blend of sugar and monk fruit extract. [...] Scientists used to think that non-nutritive sweeteners were largely inert, activating sweet receptors on our tongues and passing through our bodies without causing metabolic changes. But questions remain about the health effects of consuming large amounts of these ingredients. The World Health Organization cautioned people to limit their intake of sugar substitutes because of their potential for "undesirable" long-term effects, including detrimental effects on gut and metabolic health.

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The New York Times reports: After the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, local residents were forced to permanently evacuate, leaving behind their homes and, in some cases, their pets. Concerned that these abandoned animals might spread disease or contaminate humans, officials tried to exterminate them. And yet, a population of dogs somehow endured. They found fellowship with Chernobyl cleanup crews, and the power plant workers who remained in the area sometimes gave them food. (In recent years, adventurous tourists have dispensed handouts, too.) Today, hundreds of free-ranging dogs live in the area around the site of the disaster, known as the exclusion zone. They roam through the abandoned city of Pripyat and bed down in the highly contaminated Semikhody train station. Now, scientists have conducted the first deep dive into the animals' DNA. The dogs of Chernobyl are genetically distinct, different from purebred canines as well as other groups of free-breeding dogs, the scientists reported Friday in Science Advances. It remains too soon to say whether, or how, the radioactive environment has contributed to the unique genetic profiles of the dogs of Chernobyl, the scientists said. But the study is the first step in an effort to understand not only how long-term radiation exposure has affected the dogs but also what it takes to survive an environmental catastrophe. "Do they have mutations that they've acquired that allow them to live and breed successfully in this region?" said Elaine Ostrander, a dog genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute and a senior author of the study. "What challenges do they face and how have they coped genetically?"

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Scientists propose to develop a biological computer powered by millions of human brain cells that they say could outperform silicon-based machines while consuming far less energy. From a report: The international team, led by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, published in the journal Frontiers in Science on Tuesday a detailed road map to what they call "organoid intelligence." The hardware will include arrays of brain organoids -- tiny three-dimensional neural structures grown from human stem cells -- connected to sensors and output devices and trained by machine learning, big data and other techniques. The aim is to develop an ultra-efficient system that can solve problems beyond the reach of conventional digital computers, while aiding development in neuroscience and other areas of medical research. The project's ambition mirrors work on the more advanced quantum computing but raises ethical questions around the "consciousness" of brain organoid assemblies. "I expect an intelligent dynamic system based on synthetic biology, but not constrained by the many functions the brain has to serve in an organism," said Professor Thomas Hartung of Johns Hopkins, who has gathered a community of 40 scientists to develop the technology. They have signed a "Baltimore declaration" calling for more research "to explore the potential of organoid cell cultures to advance our understanding of the brain and unleash new forms of biocomputing while recognising and addressing the associated ethical implications."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Shadows can do some adventurous, sometimes malignant, poetic things: They move, rebel, hide, refuse to be identified, vanish. All these visual aspects provide fertile ground for complex metaphors and narrations. Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows -- shadows doing impossible things -- that nevertheless reap a payoff for scene layout and do not look particularly shocking. Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows -- after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics -- are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art. Here, we embark on a journey that takes us through a number of extraordinary pictorial experiments -- some successful, some less so, but all interesting. We have singled out some broad categories of solutions to pictorial problems: depicted shadows having trouble negotiating obstacles in their path; shadow shapes and colors that stretch credibility; inconsistent illumination in the scene; and shadow character getting lost. We also find some taboos, that is, self-inflicted limitations on where or what to depict of a shadow. [...]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Heat pumps, in contrast, (to gas or oil furnaces) don't generate heat. They transfer it. That allows them to achieve more than 300 percent efficiency in some cases. Because they are more efficient, using heat pumps to cool and heat homes can help homeowners save money on their utility bills, said Sam Calisch, head of special projects at Rewiring America, a nonprofit advocacy group. In Maine, where heat pump adoption is growing, but where a majority of homes still burn oil, homeowners can save thousands of dollars in annual energy costs by making the switch, according to an analysis from Efficiency Maine, an independent administrator that runs the state's energy-saving programs. Many heat pumps that are built for cold climates do have hefty upfront price tags. To soften the blow, a federal tax credit from last year's climate and tax law can cover 30 percent of the costs of purchase and installation, up to $2,000. As they've grown in popularity, heat pumps have increasingly been the subject of misconception and, at times, misinformation. Fossil-fuel industry groups have been the origin of many exaggerated and misleading claims, including the assertion that they don't work in regions with cold climates and are likely to fail in freezing weather. While heat pumps do become less efficient in subzero temperatures, many models still operate close to normally in temperatures down to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 24 Celsius. Some of the latest models are even more efficient, and many "cold" countries, like Norway, Sweden and Finland, are increasingly embracing heat pumps. "We're starting to see evidence that the myth has been kept alive by people with an entrenched interest in avoiding the adoption of heat pumps," Dr. Calisch said. There are additional steps homeowners can take to make the most of their heat pumps, like sealing air leaks and drafts and improving insulation, said Troy Moon, the sustainability director for the city of Portland, Maine. Homeowners can also keep their existing furnaces as backup for the coldest days of the year, he said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cheap, light, flexible, yet robust circuit boards are critical for wearable electronics, among other applications. In the future, those electronics might be printed on flexible circuits made out of bacterial cultures used to make the popular fermented black tea drink called kombucha, according to a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server. "Nowadays kombucha is emerging as a promising candidate to produce sustainable textiles to be used as eco-friendly bio wearables," co-author Andrew Adamatzky, of the University of the West of England in Bristol, old New Scientist. "We will see that dried -- and hopefully living -- kombucha mats will be incorporated in smart wearables that extend the functionality of clothes and gadgets. We propose to develop smart eco-wearables which are a convergence of dead and alive biological matter." Adamatzky previously co-authored a 2021 paper demonstrating that living kombucha mats showed dynamic electrical activity and stimulating responses, as well as a paper last year describing the development of a bacterial reactive glove to serve as a living electronic sensing device. Inspired by the potential of kombucha mats for wearable electronics, he and his latest co-authors have now demonstrated that it's possible to print electronic circuits onto dried SCOBY mats. The team used commercially sourced kombucha bacteria to grow their mats, then air-dried the cultures on plastic or paper at room temperature. The mats don't tear easily and are not easily destroyed, even when immersed in water for several days. One of the test mats even survived oven temperatures up to 200 C (392 F), although the mats will burn when exposed to an open flame. Adamatzky et al. were able to print conductive polymer circuits onto the dried kombucha mats with an aerosol jet printer and also successfully tested an alternative method of 3D printing a circuit out of a conductive polyester/copper mix. They could even attach small LEDs to the circuits with an epoxy adhesive spiked with silver, which were still functioning after repeatedly being bent and stretched. According to Adamatzky et al., unlike the living kombucha mats he worked with previously, the dried SCOBY mats are non-conductive, confining the electrical current to the printed circuit. The mats are also lighter, cheaper, and more flexible than the ceramic or plastic alternatives. Potential applications include wearable heart rate monitors, for instance, and other kombucha-based devices. "Future research will be concerned with printing advanced functional circuits, capable for detecting -- and maybe recognizing -- mechanical, optical, and chemical stimuli," the authors concluded.

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Cars aren't the only conveyances being transformed by electricity. Along with electric motorcycles and snowmobiles, personal watercraft are floating better ways to coexist with nature and neighbors. This new breed of machines brings requisite thrills to the Great Outdoors, but without fouling the atmosphere or disturbing the peace with an internal-combustion racket. From a report: The latest comes from Florida-based Pelagion, whose founder and chief executive, engineer Jamie Schlinkmann, was inspired by childhood adventures on a watersports icon: A 1973 Kawasaki Jet Ski. Schlinkmann's machine, just the 213th ever built, is still one of his prized possessions. His company's Pelagion HydroBlade is an ingenious mash-up of classic stand-up Jet Skis and modern surfboard-style "eFoils." Those electric-powered boards had a real breakthrough in 2020 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was spotted sailing over Hawaiian waters on one model. The metaverse may spring to mind the first time you see an eFoil, with its rider seeming to fly above the waves on a magic carpet. Naturally, there's no magic, only hydrodynamics. Hydrofoils work like an airplane wing, only underwater: An aerodynamic wing creates high and low pressure areas as it slices through water, generating lift with precious little drag. Add an electric motor and propeller to create thrust and you've got a hydrofoil that doesn't require surf waves, a kite, or tow boat to generate power. There's only one problem: Powered or not, a hydrofoil takes some practice and patience to learn to ride in a standing position, especially for people with no surfing or wakeboarding experience, or so-so balance skills. To solve that, Schlinkmann's invention adds a boom-mounted canard and rudder ahead of the rider to keep the craft airborne and steady without a rider having to constantly expend energy and adjust body position. Add a trusty set of handlebars, says Schlinkmann, and the HydroBlade handles more like a vehicle with which most of us are familiar: a bicycle. Making the experience somewhat like riding a bike, he says, helps ease the intimidation factor and boost appeal for people of all ages and abilities. [...] The design began to take shape around 2020. Schlinkmann pulled the engine and other ICE guts from his old Jet Ski and studied how he could make it electric. He realized a conventional electric Jet Ski might only have a 15- or 20-minute runtime on a single charge, which wasn't good enough. But after riding a few eFoils, the idea came together. For the HydroBlade, a pair of permanent-magnet radial-flux motors drive dual propellers at a peak 16 kilowatts (21 horsepower). They're fed by two battery packs, with a combined 600 cylindrical 2170 NCM cells and a total 11 kilowatt-hours of energy -- about eight to 10 times the capacity onboard a typical eFoil. A separate 1.6-kW charger can refill batteries in about 4 hours.

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It is no mystery that a good night's sleep and a lie-in can improve your day. But researchers are suggesting that, far from just being enjoyable, quality sleep may even add years to people's lives. From a report: Men who regularly sleep well could live almost five years longer than those who do not, while women could benefit by two years, research suggests. And they could also enjoy better health during their lives. Researchers found that young people who had better sleep habits were less likely to die early. But the researchers said their findings indicated quantity of sleep was not in itself enough to achieve the possible health benefits -- quality of sleep is also important. Good sleep was based on five different factors: ideal sleep duration of seven to eight hours a night; difficulty falling asleep no more than two times a week; trouble staying asleep no more than two times a week; not using any sleep medication; and feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week. The findings suggested that about 8% of deaths from any cause could be attributed to poor sleep patterns. The researchers included data from 172,321 people with an average age of 50, 54% of whom were women, who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 2013 and 2018. The survey looked at the health of the US population and included questions about sleep and sleep habits.

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According to research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, zebra fur is thinly striped and sharply outlined to thwart horsefly attacks. "These characteristics specifically eliminate the outline of large monochrome dark patches that are attractive to horseflies at close distances," adds Phys.Org. "The team theorizes that the thin back stripes serve to minimize the size of local features on a zebra that are appealing to the biting flies." From the report: The team found that tabanid horseflies are attracted to large dark objects in their environment but less to dark broken patterns. All-gray coats were associated with by far the most landings, followed by coats with large black triangles placed in different positions, then small checkerboard patterns in no particular order. In another experiment, they found contrasting stripes attracted few flies whereas more homogeneous stripes were more attractive. [...] The team found little evidence for other issues that they tested, namely polarization or optical illusions confusing accurate landings such as the so-called "wagon-wheel effect" or "the barber-pole effect." Now the team want to determine why natural selection has driven striping in equids -- the horse family -- but not other hoofed animals.

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A new study on added sugars (also known as "free sugars") concluded they're bad for your health, reports NBC News. "The research, published in the journal BMC Medicine, found that diets higher in free sugars — a category that includes sugar added to processed foods and sodas, as well as that found in fruit juice and syrups — raise one's risk of heart disease and stroke." The study relied on data about the eating habits of more than 110,000 people ages 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom, whose health outcomes were then tracked over about nine years. The results suggested that each 5% increase in the share of a person's total energy intake that comes from free sugars was associated with a 6% higher risk of heart disease and a 10% higher risk of stroke. An author of the study, Cody Watling, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, said the most common forms of sugar the study participants ate were "preserves and confectionary," with the latter category including cookies, sugary pastries and scones. Fruit juice, sugar-sweetened beverages and desserts were also common, he added.... The people found to have the highest risk of heart disease or stroke consumed about 95 grams of free sugar per day, or 18% of their daily energy intake, Watling said. By comparison, U.S. guidelines suggest that added sugars should make up no more than 10% of one's daily calories. "Avoiding sugar-sweetened beverages is probably the single most important thing we can be doing," said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. Willett added that although there are some health benefits to drinking a small glass of orange juice occasionally, its sugar content means "a glass of fruit juice is the same thing as Coke...." The Oxford researchers found a positive relationship when it comes to fiber, unlike sugar intake: Consuming 5 grams of fiber a day was associated with a 4% lower risk of heart disease, the study suggested, although that did not hold true when researchers controlled for participants' body-mass indexes.... Watling said, the study demonstrates that the types of carbs people choose to eat may matter more than the total amount. "What's really important for overall general health and well-being is that we're consuming carbohydrates that are rich in whole grains," he said, while "minimizing the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, as well any kind of confectionary products that have added sugars." It's a point underscored by CNN: After over nine years of follow-up, the researchers found total carbohydrate intake wasn't associated with cardiovascular disease. But when they analyzed how outcomes differed depending on the types and sources of carbohydrates eaten, they found higher free sugar intake was associated with a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and greater waist circumference. The more free sugars some participants consumed, the greater their risk of cardiovascular disease, heart disease and stroke was.... "This study provides much needed nuance to public health discussions about the health effects of dietary carbohydrates," said Dr. Maya Adam, director of Health Media Innovation and clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, via email. Adam wasn't involved in the study. "The main takeaways are that all carbs are not created equal...." CNN adds that the mechanism seems to be that sugar intake "can promote inflammation," according to an assistant cardiology professor at Columbia's medical center. "This can cause stress on the heart and blood vessels, which can lead to increased blood pressure..."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A team of engineers studying the 500-year-old, backward writings of Leonardo da Vinci have found evidence that the Italian polymath was working out gravity a century before its foundations were established by Galileo Galilei. The team's findings come from a revisit of the Codex Arundel, a compilation of documents written by da Vinci that detail various experiments and personal notes taken down in the latter 40 years of his life. The codex is freely accessible online courtesy of the British Museum. The team's research is published in the MIT Press journal Leonardo. Mory Gharib, an engineer at Caltech, said he stumbled across the writings in 2017 when looking for some of da Vinci's work on flow in hearts. Though the codex was written over a long span of da Vinci's later years, Gharib suspects the gravitational musings were written sometime in the last 15-or-so years of his life. Gharib recruited co-author Flavio Noca, a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, to translate the Italian's backward writing on the subject. Da Vinci understood some fundamentals of objects in motion. He wanted to make an experiment testing how the motion of a cloud would correspond to the hail it produced, if the cloud's velocity and any changes to it corresponded with the falling hail's velocity. In lieu of control of the weather, da Vinci substituted a pitcher for the cloud and sand or water for the hail. Reliable clocks weren't available until about 140 years after da Vinci's death in 1519, the researchers note, so the inventor was forced to substitute the constant of time with space: by assuming that the time it took each water/sand particle to fall from the pitcher was constant, he just kept the pitcher at the same height throughout the tests. Da Vinci's sketch shows the positions of the falling material over the course of its trajectory toward the ground. By drawing a line through the position of the material at each instance in time, da Vinci realized that a triangle could be formed, with the drawn line being the hypotenuse. By changing the acceleration of the pitcher over the course of the experiment, one would change the shape of the triangle. Leonardo knew that the falling material would accelerate and that the acceleration is downward. What he wasn't wholly certain on -- hence the experiment -- was the relationship between the falling material's acceleration and the pitcher's acceleration. In one particular case, when the pitcher's motion was accelerated to the same rate as the falling material being affected by gravity, an equilateral triangle was formed. Literally, as Da Vinci noted, an "Equatione di Moti" or an "equalization of motions." The researchers modeled da Vinci's experiment and found that the polymath was wrong in his understanding of the relationship between the falling object and time. "What we saw is that Leonardo wrestled with this, but he modeled it as the falling object's distance was proportional to 2 to the t power [with t representing time] instead proportional to t squared," said Chris Roh, a researcher at Cornell University and a co-author of the researcher, in a Caltech release. "It's wrong, but we later found out that he used this sort of wrong equation in the correct way." The team interpreted tick marks on da Vinci's sketches as data points the polymath made based on his eyeballing of the experiment in action. In lieu of a timepiece, da Vinci found the gravitational constant to nearly 98% accuracy.

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