Science Trends

Psychologists have shown for the first time that horses are able to distinguish between positive and negative human facial expressions. Look angry and a horse is likely to give you a sideways glance: using its left or sinister side. Its heart rate will increase, too. And both are indications that a horse can recognise a human emotion. Psychologists at Sussex University, who last year compiled a dictionary of the facial expressions that might indicate emotions in a horse, report that they have just turned the experiment on its head: they have explored the equine capacity to read a human face. And man’s favourite neigh-sayer can not only tell whether a human might be in a bad mood, it can do so from a photograph. The scientists report in the journal Biology Letters that they made high quality, large size colour prints of the same male human smiling and baring his teeth, and frowning and baring his teeth: expressions of positive and negative emotions from ...

Scientists have developed a novel algorithm that may help detect and prevent cyber attacks on GPS-enabled devices in real time. The algorithm developed by researchers at University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in the US mitigates the effects of spoofed GPS attacks on electrical grids and other GPS-reliant technologies. “Malicious agents have the ability to disrupt a device’s understanding of time and location by emitting a signal that is pretending to be a GPS signal,” said Nikolaos Gatsis from UTSA. “This can be very harmful in several different realms of technology,” said Gatsis, researcher on the study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. The US electrical power grid, for example, depends on GPS to give time stamps for its measurements at stations across the country.Although reliable, researchers in laboratories across the world have shown that the system can be vulnerable to spoofing cyber-attacks that can disrupt the system’s time and locat...

The University of British Columbia created a computer program called DeepLoco that uses deep learning to teach itself to walk, run, and even dribble a soccer ball. It could help video games become much more realistic and even aid robots in the real world.

Daggers made from human femurs make better weapons and convey greater prestige than ones made from bird bones. That’s the finding arising from an analysis of historical bone daggers, once widespread among male warriors in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The analysis was conducted by a team led by anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy from Dartmouth College in the US, and published in the journal  Royal Society Open Science . To make their findings the researchers looked at the structural and decorative properties of 10 PNG bone daggers held in the Dartmouth College museum. The items dated from between the early and mid-twentieth century. A more recent bone dagger, dating from the 1970s, was purchased from an art dealer. The 1970s artefact was fashioned from the thigh bone of a large flightless bird known as a cassowary ( Casuarius unappendiculatus ), as were five of the weapons in the museum collection. The rest were made from human femurs. The researchers looked clo...

Plants  use their roots to “listen in” on their neighbours, according to research that adds to evidence that plants have their own unique forms of communication. The study found that plants in a crowded environment secrete chemicals into the soil that prompt their neighbours to grow more aggressively, presumably to avoid being left in the shade. “If we have a problem with our neighbours, we can move flat,” said Velemir Ninkovic, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala and lead author. “Plants can’t do that. They’ve accepted that and they use signals to avoid competing situations and to prepare for future competition.” Previously, scientists have shown that when plant leaves are touched as they brush up against the leaves and branches of neighbours they alter their growth strategies. Mature trees have been seen to experience “canopy shyness” and rein in their growth under crowded conditions. Others, take a more combative approach, divertin...

Smart women can't find men to impregnate them, the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Geneva has been told. Professor Marcia Inhorn​, a researcher from Yale, said female graduates were freezing their eggs due to a "dearth of educated men to marry", and that this "man deficit" was worse in countries where more women attended university.  These days I'm more concerned about avoiding pregnancy than freezing my eggs. I can, however, relate to the difficulties faced by smart women in the dating scene. Anecdotal evidence suggests men often "date down", choosing partners less intelligent than themselves. Bright, accomplished women often complain that men are "intimidated" by them, and that they need to play down their accomplishments to get a date. And, a couple of years ago, researchers confirmed this. While men claimed to be attracted to very smart women, in actuality they shied away from those...

A commonly used pesticide known as  atrazine can turn male frogs into  females  that are successfully able to  reproduce, a new study finds. While previous work has shown atrazine can cause sexual abnormalities in  frogs , such as hermaphroditism (having both male and female sex organs), this study is the first to find that atrazine’s effects are long-lasting and can influence reproduction in  amphibians . The results suggest that atrazine, which is a weed killer used primarily on corn crops, could have potentially harmful effects on populations of amphibians, animals that are already experiencing a  global decline  , said study author Tyrone B. Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley. Atrazine is banned in Europe. And since atrazine interferes with the production of the sex hormone estrogen, present in people and frogs, the findings could have implications for humans as well. "If you have problems in amphibians, you can an...

A change of body posture can help boost a student’s math scores, especially if they are known to fear the subject, a study has found. Researchers at  San Francisco State University  tested 125 college students to see how well they could perform simple math — subtracting 7 from 843 sequentially for 15 seconds — while either slumped over or sitting up straight with shoulders back and relaxed. 56% of the students reported finding it easier to perform the math in the upright position. “For people who are anxious about math, posture makes a giant difference,” said  Erik Peper , from San Francisco State University. “The slumped-over position shuts them down and their brains do not work as well. They cannot think as clearly,” said Peper. Before the study began, students filled out a questionnaire asking them to rate their anxiety levels while performing math; they also described any physical symptoms of stress they experienced during test taking. ...

Caffeine May Increase Pain Tolerance A plant-based diet may also help you withstand pain. Consuming caffeine regularly may increase the ability to withstand pain, a small study suggests. Researchers recruited 62 men and women, ages 19 to 77, and had them record their daily caffeine intake from coffee, tea, soda, energy drinks and chocolate. They averaged 170 milligrams of caffeine a day, about the amount in two cups of coffee, although 15 percent of the group consumed more than 400 milligrams a day. The  study is in Psychopharmacology. After seven days, they took the volunteers into a laboratory to test their pain tolerance using calibrated devices that gradually increased heat or pressure on a volunteer’s forearm or back. The people pressed a button on a hand-held device first when the sensation became painful, and then again when it became intolerable. The experiment controlled for sex and race, current tobacco use and alcohol consumption, among other variables that...

It’s often advised not to become romantically involved with a coworker, as it could lead to a whole array of awkward situations if the relationship goes sour. And while almost a quarter of workers in UK are in serious relationships with people at work, a recent study has shown that workplace romances are becoming more taboo in the wake of sexual harassment campaigns such as the #MeToo movement. Research conducted by Direct Line  life insurance  has discovered that almost 80% of human resources professionals believe that office relationships have become less acceptable in recent times. Furthermore, almost one in 20 UK companies now ban workplace romances outright. While the notion of dating a coworker may be frowned upon in many  industries , this hasn’t stopped many Brits. Around half of workers in the UK have admitted that they’ve been in a workplace relationship in the past. On top of that, almost three quarters of those who’ve been roma...

Cameras gave computers eyes. Microphones gave them ears. Touchscreens gave them tactile perception. Now the Massachusetts-based company  2 C 2 Sense  has invented a tiny chip that gives computers a sense of smell. The first goal of the company, says co-founder and CTO Jan Schnorr, is to use machines to sniff out spoiling food. And that could have a bigger impact than you might think. " The company's goal is to make wireless sensor chips so cheap that they could be built into a product's packaging. " Food spoilage can be contagious. You know the saying "one bad apple can spoil the whole batch"? It's true. As fruit ripens, it releases a musky gas called ethylene. When fruits are exposed to ethylene, they ripen more quickly and give off more ethylene themselves, creating a domino effect that speeds up the ripening process for every piece of fruit nearby. C 2 Sense's technology can detect ethylene even in trace amounts that a human wouldn...

Diagnosing symptomatic carriers of malaria is difficult enough, needing careful examination of blood samples to identify parasites, but picking up asymptomatic carriers is even more challenging. These infected carriers often bear no clinical symptoms yet act as reservoirs for the disease helping it spread to more and more people. An international team of researchers set out to find a way to diagnose asymptomatic malaria carriers and the key turned out to be in body odor. "Our previous work in a mouse model found that malaria infection altered the odors of infected mice in ways that made them more attractive to mosquitoes, particularly at a stage of infection where the transmissible stage of the parasite was present at high levels," explains Consuelo De Moraes, a researcher working on the study. The new study aimed to uncover what odor-based biomarkers could be detected in humans with either symptomatic or asymptomatic malaria infections. The researchers ga...

Just shy of six months ago, YouTube Kids, a branch of YouTube with services geared toward children, expanded its functions by allowing parents to edit controls so  only videos screened by humans  will be displayed instead of filtering through the algorithm. If content is human-reviewed, this means that a  YouTube moderator  has watched a few videos on a channel and decides whether it is generally appropriate for children. Once opted in, the filtered content includes not only the videos that a child is allowed to watch, but the related videos as well. Before this,  YouTube relied solely on its algorithm  to choose which content would be appropriate for the Kids app, but because technology isn’t perfect, sometimes a video would slip through and it was up to parents to flag it for review. In a message on  YouTube’s official blog , it was announced that YouTube Kids added another helpful feature –  the ability for parents to whitelist.  I...

There is a new advanced type of malware that can spy on almost any Android phone; even worse, it can spy on any app that has been  installed  on the phone (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) to steal passwords, photos, videos, images, and data. The malware is called  ZooPark.  For now, it only attacks people in the Middle East, and it is possible that someone from the United States is behind it. All information about ZooPark comes from Kaspersky. The cybersecurity company believes that ZooPark is the 4th generation of this malware. It started with “simple” functions, such as stealing details from accounts or contacts. Now, this viral monstrosity can monitor and filter key logs, data from the clipboard, browser data such as search history, photos and videos from the memory card, and call and audio records. But it does not end there: ZooPark can also make screenshots, and video and audio recordings without the owner of the phone finding out. It can also make cal...

One of the world’s most dreaded viruses has been turned into a treatment to fight deadly brain tumours. Survival was better than expected for patients in a small study who were given genetically modified  polio  virus, which helped their bodies attack the cancer, doctors report. It was the first human test of this and it didn’t help most patients or improve median survival. But many seemed to have long-lasting benefit: About 21% were alive at three years versus 4% in a comparison group of previous brain tumour patients. Brain tumours called glioblastomas often recur after initial treatment and survival is usually less than a year. Doctors at  Duke University  wanted to take advantage of the strong immune system response polio spurs to try to fight cancer. With the help of the  National Cancer Institute , they modified polio virus so it would not harm nerves but still infect tumour cells. The one-time treatment is dripped directly into the brain thro...

If your kid is slow in language skills then sending him or her for piano lessons can improve word discrimination as well as language proficiency says a study.  The findings suggested that piano lessons may have specific effect on the children s ability to distinguish different pitches which helped them to better distinguish different words. However it did not appear to confer any benefit for overall cognitive ability as measured by IQ attention span and working memory the researchers said. "The children didn t differ in the more broad cognitive measures but they did show some improvements in word discrimination particularly for consonants. The piano group showed the best improvement there " said Robert Desimone from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included data from nearly 100 children aged four or five years who were divided into three groups -- one that received 45-min...