18 Burst results for "Christopher Dodd Yata"
60-Second Science
How some doctors ended up prescribing fewer pills
"This is scientific. Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd. Yata used to be when doctors prescribe a drug. They'd open up a a book summarizing drugs and dosages or go by memory for the common stuff but nowadays now you can type in whatever it is and then placing an order via computer. See you type in an order of the name of the drug. And it will pre populate everything one Carlos Monte as an emergency medicine physician at San Francisco General Hospital. He also studies decision making in healthcare. He says for an antibiotic default dose programmed into a doctor's computer might be pretty standard but for pain. The the number of opioids prescribed might vary a lot depending on the patient and their type of pain. Well we wanted to look at is whether and to what extent the precepts the default upsetting that we had in the electric medical record influence provider prescribing specifically would lower defaults resulting fewer opioids being prescribed. Soman toys team systematically changed the recommended opioid pill number defaults in the computer systems of two hospitals in the San Francisco Bay area during an eight month period rid. Each hospital's pre existing defaults were twelve and twenty pills respectively. The researchers dialed in new defaults of five ten fifteen or an unspecified number of pills compared to doctors prior prescribing habits. The new default settings resulted in fewer opioid pills prescribed overall and fewer prescriptions shins exceeding the maximum recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So this is suggestive that hospitals other departments clinics can change the setting England impact opioid prescribing. Pretty much immediately as the really low constantly prevention and can be done really quickly. The results are in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Russian internal medicine. Definitely not a silver bullet. The epidemic has a lot of different issues that need to be addressed in this one small tool so that we can use to address. There still could be a useful prescription for physicians.
60-Second Science
Marine Mammal Epidemic Linked to Climate Change
"This is scientific. Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd. Yata the Arctic because warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet meaning more and more sea ice is melting every year concerning the rapid loss of see I sat there for a lot of reasons. Tracy Z Goldstein. A researcher and conservationist at UC Davis she says one of those reasons is animals like ice seals. Need the ice to haul out on and give birth and other reason. As the Arctic warms the fish the seals eat maybe moving to deeper and colder waters so the seals have to travel further to hunt them for the combination of all of that over time is probably going to affect their health and their body condition and that will make them not just underweight but also more susceptible to diseases diseases may also be encroaching the upon Arctic marine mammals because spotting a trend here Arctic sea ice is melting coli unintended consequence of all of that but yes You know when they I used to be an ice bridge certain populations would remain separate from each other and so they couldn't come in contact and give each other they bacteria viruses etc but once those channels thought it to open animals were able to move further and came into contact with new species that they had not come in. Contact with in the Post Goldstein. In her colleagues documented the spread of a disease called called fo seen distemper virus from two thousand one through two thousand sixteen. It's related to the measles and causes skin lesions coughing pneumonia seizures and sometimes death in in marine mammals Goldstein's team scanned historical and Contemporary Marine Mammal blood samples for antibodies against the virus. They also hunted for evidence of live infections nasal swabs taken of mammals and they found that flare ups of the virus were linked to years with extreme losses. NCI's suggesting that open waters. Aided the spread of the pathogen perhaps along the melted coastline north of Siberia. Their analysis is in the journal scientific reports mammals that depend on ice to survive may already be slated for extinction and as the Arctic melts. Goldstein says in more frequent epidemics like this viral one could hastened the blow but humans may also be affected up in the Arctic. People subsist subsist on these species so they really rely on these animals for their livelihood and wellbeing and as those animals disappear as their habitat disappears. That's is also going to heavily affect humans in that area so overall I think overall health of the environment and the animals and the people up in the Arctic over time it's just going to continue to deteriorate
60-Second Science
Tiny Worms Are Equipped To Battle Extreme Environments
"At Toyota we believe that American veterans have the strongest credentials on earth especially when you consider that they spend years gaining valuable experience by putting their lives on the line to protect the country they love and the people that live here but that doesn't always mean finding a career path is easy. That's why Toyota has partnered with hiring our as Europe's to help over one hundred fifty thousand veterans and military spouses connect with employment opportunities. We are Toyota. USA. This is scientific Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata in the science. It's fiction story June. The Desert Planet Iraq is inhabited by enormous fearsome sandwich shops they blast out of the dunes to swallow vehicles the whole they also look familiar to Caltech geneticists Paul Sternberg. We look like nats anything in pop culture has relationship doors. We follow nematodes toads of course are much smaller than sand worms most never told you can just barely see and there are a lot slower these worms are probably take one hundred years to get across the US if they could could do it and they went continuously day and night even so they're pretty scary when you look at them up close. Sternberg and his colleagues had a hunch they might find nematodes lurking in one of California's most extreme extreme habitats Mono Lake on the east side of the Sierra Nevada it super salty alkaline and loaded with arsenic and previously known to harbor only two animal species easies brine shrimp and Alkali flies so the researchers took soil samples at beaches around the lake and indeed they found eight species of nematodes living there so we just I went from two animals to at least ten species so that's Kinda striking so are they going to be others the lake yeah people should go look photos and details are in the journal current Biology Sternberg. His colleagues were able to culture one of the worm species in the lab and they discovered it could survive five hundred times the dose of arsenic they would kill a human but they also found that even nemo toads that weren't from Mona Lake seemed to have the genetic ability to resist the lethal element meaning. The worms may be Natural Boron extrema files us from the worms perspective invading a host. That's a harsh environment so I think there's some general ability than Emma toads to adapt to harsh environments like Doc. Maybe Mars I have a fantasy that we should send Amadou's. We really interesting. He could get the codes to photosynthesis or carry photosynthetic organisms and then worth talking about of course that's scenarios in the realm of science fiction for now. Thanks for listening for scientific Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dunya.
60-Second Science
Corals Can Inherit Symbiotic Adaptations to Warming
"Komo Alicia Burke host of that made all the difference a new podcast from Bank of America join me as I talked to Ken Burns about the moments that inspired his work as a documentary dementri filmmaker. You can find that made all the difference anywhere you get your podcasts. This is scientific civic. Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata Marine Heatwave in two thousand sixteen killed off a full third of Australia's Great Barrier Reef the largest coral reef system in the world and it's terrible watching your favorite ecosystems slowly. Di Carli can't go is a marine biologist at the University of Southern California Nia who's studied that coral bleaching event bleaching occurs when the waters around corals become too cold or too salty or too hot but mostly too hot and then the symbiotic algae that live inside corals which are photosynthetic food factories abandoned the coral which causes them to die because they're losing their nutritional source so they're essentially starving to death but coral can house multiple species of algae some more heat tolerant than others so sometimes in the face of stress the heartier algae proliferate delivery and that change offsets the damage caused by the exodus of the more sensitive species have processes called shuffling chemical in her colleagues studied shuffling in corals roles affected by the two thousand sixteen bleaching bet on the Great Barrier Reef and they found that adult corals can actually pass those reshuffled. Al Go residents along to their offspring in in their eggs pointing to a possible way. Successive generations of coral could adapt to warmer waters. If your mom can kind of crime you for the environment that you might be experiencing presumably would improve your fitness. The details are in the journal scientific reports so can this help corals beat back bleaching the pace of climate change and the frequency and intensity of the stress events is such that I don't think this is enough in face of so many threats. Even this trick may fail to provide relief for the reef. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Indonesia.
60-Second Science
Nature Docs Avoid Habitat Destruction
"This is scientific Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata. Documentaries are known for their sweeping natural vistas. This does their amazing footage seriously. How did they get that shot in often soothing baritone of Sir David attenborough strain incontinent what those documentaries don't do though is show the realities of environmental destruction historically particularly BBC documentaries have shied away from that Nikki Rust is an environmental social scientist at Newcastle University in the UK Russ studied work by the BBC in the World Wildlife Fund which had teamed up with Netflix to make what they said would be a whole new kind of production. They wanted it to reach. I think a billion people and that it was going to revolutionize nature documentaries except for the fact it may be that attenborough would be the narrator the Netflix series our planet aim to be different because it promised to reveal the threats facing wildlife in the natural world so did it deliver liver rust and her colleagues analyzed scripts of our planet along with three recent. BBC Series Planet Earth to Pimple Dynasties Twenty into hyenas and Blue Planet to spider cramps and logged everything they saw on the screen turns out planet only talks about threats and successes successes a bit more than Blue Planet to fifteen percent of the script did focus on the woes of the natural world but very little devastation was actually shown on screen. The spite being filmed the analysis is in the Journal people in nature. The lead author of the Study Julia Jones was in Madagascar at the time where net that flicks were there filming and she knows that they were there filming the destruction of Habitat and burning and lots of mental devastation so they've got fatigue is just unfortunately it wasn't chosen to be included. It's not clear if that's really a bad thing. Though we still don't really know whether showing environmental tragedies on screen green motivates people to support conservation but what climate change communication has taught us. Ross says is that the ideal way to motivate audiences is with optimism tinged with trepidation. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Don Yata.
60-Second Science
Eavesdropping Puts Anxious Squirrels at Ease
"This is scientific. Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd. Yata seems like anytime you see a squirrel. It's busy doing something pink headed somewhere scrounging for food and being out in about all the time also means era tasty morsels for a lot of different predators. Keith target a behavioral ecologist at at Overland College. He says squirrels scan their surroundings for hawks and owls cats and foxes but they also have another surveillance system. They eavesdrop on nearby. Birds BIRT's eavesdropping on alarm calls or eavesdropping on chatter is a cheap and easy way to supplement the information that they have access to because it's free it's produced by other individuals in the environment. It's publicly available to any organism that has the cognitive ability to recognize interpret that information tarvisio colleague Marie Lillie tested that ability by riding around town on her bicycle stopping when she found a squirrel then she'd set up her equipment play the fearsome fearsome scream of a red tailed hawk and then either play the casual unworried chatter of songbirds chiefs or ambient noise as a control all the while she observed the squirrels behavior and she noticed that when squirrels heard the reassuring chatter of songbirds following the Hawks doc scream they relaxed more readily. Imagine this if you're walking in a crowd and everyone seems pretty happy and content and they're chit chatting with beach other. You might even subconsciously take that as information that all of those eyes and ears apparently seem to perceive the environment as being safe and we think the squirrels might be listening in on bird chatter in the same way the details are in the journal plus one and squirrels give back to the community to with their own alarm calls which might help other eavesdropping animals but in busy urban environments Tara and says that rich fabric brick of animal communication risks being drowned out by the loudest animals around us. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds sites. I'm Christopher.
60-Second Science
Artificial Intelligence Sniffs Out Unsafe Foods
"This is scientific. Americans sixty seconds science. I'm christopher dodd yata food and drug administration has to recall hundreds of foods is every year like cookie snack packs with chunks of blue plastic hiding inside or salmonella tainted taco seasoning or curry powder laced with lead he can take months before a recall is issued but now researchers have come up with a method that might fast track process leading to early detection and ultimately faster recalls the system relies on the fact that people increasingly by foods and spices online and people tend to write reviews of products they buy online which are like breadcrumbs to food safety officials sniffing out dangerous products. The researchers linked f._d._a. Food recalls from twenty twelve to twenty fourteen to amazon reviews of those same products they then train machine. Learning algorithms comes to differentiate between reviews for recalled items and reviews for items that had not been flagged and the trained algorithms rebel to predict f._d._a. Recalls three quarters of the time name the also identified another twenty thousand reviews for possibly unsafe foods most of which had never been recalled. The results are in the journal of the american medical informatics informatics association. The world health organization estimates that six hundred million people worldwide get sick annually from contaminated food and more than four hundred thousand people die from it so having tools that can enable us to detect. There's a lot of actor and hopefully investigated and <hes> do recalls faster would be useful not just in the u._s. Other countries around the wall show study author elaine and soya see of boston university. She did add one caveat. Even recalled hauled products can still get five star reviews so stars alone. Don't tell the whole sickening story. The proof and fortunately may still be in the pudding. Thanks for listening for scientific american sixty seconds science. I'm christopher indonesia.
60-Second Science
Stare Down Gulls to Avoid Lunch Loss
"This is scientific. Americans sixty seconds sites. I'm christopher dodd yata. No trip to the beach would be complete without a swarm of hungry goals but don't get distracted because one of those goals may soon go after your food. There's a very small proportion russian of extremely bold individuals that seem to ruin the reputation of the whole species notre bogert animal behavior researcher at the university of exeter. She studied the food snatching habits of goals in seaside towns in the southern u._k. And she found that very few only the boldest would actually take the bait or make that the the bite the experiment went like this a researcher crouch near goal and then sat out a plastic bag of french fries for those brave goals that then started to approach. The researcher either stared straight at the goal as in i._c._u. Thief or the researchers simply looked away and it turns out staring down the gulls made them hesitate twenty one seconds on average bridge before approaching the fries. The results are in the journal biology. Letters and goals aren't the only ones who behave better when being watched a two thousand six study found that people paid three times as much for their drinks at an unintended honor system coffee bar when just an image of staring eyes was displayed nearby as for the gulls gobert points out that we need to learn to live with them because the particular species she studied the herring gull is on the u._k.'s red list of birds of conservation concern. The thing is people. Don't want to have a seaside holiday without goals there so it's just finding ways to harmoniously live with one of the only wildlife species we still have around in these coastal areas so don't turn back on the goals she says both figuratively for conserving the species and of course literally for conserving. Thanks for listening for scientific american sixty seconds science. I'm christopher dodd yada.
60-Second Science
London Crawling with Drug-Resistant Microbes
"This is scientific Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata. If you're a Germaphobe navigating the city there are certain certain mandatory rules of engagement use a paper towel to shield your hand as you touch the bathroom door handle lift toilet seat covers with your shoe touch buttons at A._T._M.'s and crosswalks awesome walks in elevators with a knuckle. The back of your hand never a fingertip. I know this because I am that person and a new study in the journal scientific reports somewhat justifies is my behavior because when researchers in London sampled all those kinds of surfaces in public shopping centers and train stations and common areas in hospitals what they found was a whole a lot of antibiotic resistant bacteria lurking there scientists swab sites all over London and ended up with six hundred samples of staphylococcus bacteria of those nearly half were resistant to two or more commonly used antibiotics like penicillin and Erythromycin and the hospital samples had significantly more drug doug resistant microbes which makes sense because hospitals are a place where they use a lot of antibiotics but if there is a silver lining here it might be how few staph bacteria were multi-drug-resistant drug-resistant in public places a mere forty seven percent because a few years back one in the same scientists swabbed London hotel rooms in found that eighty six percent percent of the staph bacteria. There were multi-drug-resistant which may not help you sleep easy. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Don Yata.
60-Second Science
Male Black Widows Poach Rivals' Approaches
"This is scientific. Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata for male black widow spiders. Finding a mate is risky risky business. They have to go on an epic journey. Catherine Scott in Iraq knowledge EST at the University of Toronto. If the population she studies on Canada's Vancouver Hoover Island she says the spiders only twelve percent chance of surviving their scramble over sand dunes implants and they have very poor eyesight and their traveling at night so one way males find females is by sniffing from afar the fair Ramon perfume on their webs but Scott has now discovered an alternative way males find mates by subjecting the spiders to a race for each male before he started. We weighed him in on a tiny scale and we painted him with racing stripes and measured the length of his his legs. We had a finish line of fairmount omitting females and we released males at various distances from those females to see whether they arrived out of females. Weber not and how fast they got their what suppressor was at the males that started farthest nearly two hundred feet away actually traveled fastest towards females else and the reason they poached the pads of their rivals. WHO's been continuous. Soak drag lines as they move. These spiders are much more adept at walking and running on silk than they are on the ground so we realized that maybe the males that we released far away from the females were encountering. These silk highways left by rival males else and running along them. The details are in the proceedings of the Royal Society. B and follow up experiments in the lab confirmed that male black widows are indeed willing to risk a run in with a rival to win a chance to pass on their genes a chance that makes it worth traveling along the Silk Road. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Indonesia.
60-Second Science
Tourist Photos Help African Wildlife Census
"This is scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata. Tracking wildlife is a tough job. Take the case of a one eared leopard named Pavarotti for this guy. A very very big beautiful mail and you had a very very deep deep roar and so the end after Roy Kassim Rafique a wildlife biologist at Liverpool John Moores University so you see the crack of dawn and I would find his tracks. You know it's always tracks and try and find him. One day I went out and I was looking for and it tracks to offer ordered through this like woodland area and before you knew it the wheel of his Land Rover was stuck in a warthog burrow. He wasted several. Several hours getting it out and then on the way back to camp he bumped into some local tour guides in their safari guests who'd had way better luck spotting Pavarotti and basically they laughed and they told me that morning Rafique then realized that tourist wildlife sightings might be. UNTAPPED source of information about wild animals so he and his team worked with a Safari Lodge in Botswana to analyze twenty five thousand tourists photographs of wildlife. They use those as sightings of lions spotted Hyenas Leopards Cheetahs and wild dogs. Dogs they then compared those data to the estimates they made with traditional wildlife biology tactics stuff like camera traps and track surveys and Colin stations where they play sounds of distrust animals in the middle of the night and see who pops by it turned turned out that the estimates from tourist photos were just as good as those gleaned from traditional methods and the tourists were actually the only ones to see elusive cheetahs. The researchers would have missed the cats without the citizen science data. The results are in the journal current biology.
60-Second Science
One Small Scoop, One Giant Impact for Mankind
"Have you ever wanted to speak another language. Whether you want to speak Spanish French or German Babbel's ten to fifteen minute lessons can get you speaking confidently and your new language within weeks babble spaced repetition method gradually build your language skills so so you intuitively remember what you've learned. No wonder battle is the number one selling language learning APP in the world. Try BABBLE FOR FREE GO TO BABBLE DOT com or download the APP. That's Babbel B. A. B. L. DOT com or download the BABBLE APP to try for free. This is scientific Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata. The Apollo missions brought back eight hundred forty two pounds of Rock and soil from the Moon nearly early twenty two hundred different samples but there's one sample that planetary scientists monoxide Wadhwa says is the most interesting of all Apollo one zero zero eight five Neil Armstrong collected it on Apollo Eleven. He was about to step back into the lunar module and. He turned around and just he had this rocks and he saw little spaces and there and he knew that these geologists on earth would be just so excited to study these materials just scooped up. I think nine scoops of soil that he put into the box six and it became one of the most well-studied samples of the Apollo mission she says geologist named John would at the Smithsonian noticed white flex of rock in the soil which he identified as Iraq type called a north of site and include him into the Moon's ancient past and this casinos quite a leap of imagination but he proposed that the whole of the moon had at one time in the past somewhere close to four and a half billion years ago been almost covered with a global magma ocean ocean of lava and so this was a revolutionary idea at the time because people had thought that the moon had formed cold and so it completely changed their idea about how the moon farmed how the terrestrial planets form like the Earth is well. You know really changed a lot about our. Our understanding of planetary science but WADHWA has a second and more personal reason to appreciate this sample. I met my husband because of this rock. My husband is Scott Parazynski. He was with NASA as an astronaut for seventeen seventeen years from nine hundred ninety two two thousand nine and after his retirement from NASA he actually he's a mountaineer as well and he had always aspired to climb Mount Everest Scott's boyhood heroes were Neil Armstrong and the climber Edmund Hillary who made the first confirmed affirmed incentive Everest with his partner tenzing norgay in honor of them he wanted to take a moon rock from Apollo eleven to the top of Everest and to bring back and never some rock at the time Wadhwa was the chair of the NASA committee that grants access to the samples for scientific purposes but this request she says was definitely out of the ordinary and I just remember it because it was a really funny discussion the committee hey what happens if that moon rockfalls Donna Crevasse you know and and not that race Scott would be. Going Down with them with that moon rock of but Scott made it to the top Wadhwa never met him and moved on from the lunar sample committee but then a year or two later she saw a friend suggestion pop up on facebook. You might know Scott Parazynski and I respect took said hey how did your expedition go and did you return the moon rock to NASA and he sent me this note back saying well. Actually I didn't send the Moon Rock back to NASA. I actually sent it to the International Space Station along with an ever summit rock and if you ever happened to be in Houston I would love to meet you and thank you for making that possible and so I happened to meet him and that was that I was that that's how we met and so Neil Armstrong's last minute scoop of moon-dust brought to people together here on earth and upturned our understanding of how the moon and the earth itself got here. There's something in there about one small scoop for A.
60-Second Science
Attractive Young Females May Have Justice Edge
"This is scientific. Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata eight years ago. The jury in the trial of Casey Anthony announced their verdict as to the charge of first degree murder verdict as to count one. We the jury find the defendant not guilty so say we all anthony had been charged with murdering her two year old daughter but like the murder charge the jury's decision for additional charges of aggravated child abuse and aggravated manslaughter. We're again guilty and that created this huge outcry Christopher Ferguson clinical psychologist at Stetson University in Central Florida not far from where the trial occurred. It was kind of like this narrative that you know she got preferential treatment maybe not on. Purpose but yeah so the jury was more sympathetic to her because she was this pretty young female and that kind of conflicted with people's impression of who a murderer as mock trial studies have. Suggested that attractive people have an edge in the criminal justice system so ferguson and his colleagues looked into that stereotype using data from the National Longitudinal Study of adolescent to adult health. The largest long-term study of people who began participating in the study as is teens the interviewers asked the youths a multitude of questions and also raided the respondents degree of attractiveness a measure. That's been used to examine links to health and wealth in this case Ferguson and his team looked at a subset of nearly eight hundred respondents. And examined the correlation between attractiveness and arrest conviction and sentencing after controlling for things like gender race and socioeconomic status they found that attractiveness did have a protective effect but only for females girls or women who are. are more attractive or less likely to be arrested if they had committed a crime and less likely to be convicted if they were arrested for that crime however it did not have any impact on their sentencing so once they were convicted. Attractiveness conveyed no further benefits the results are in the journal Psychiatry Psychology and law. It's just a correlation of course and there are limitations. The attractiveness ratings were an average of four different interviewers assessments made over a dozen years but beauty as they say is in the eyes of the beholder.
60-Second Science
Scientists Fool Flies with 'Virtual Tastes'
"This is scientific Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata. There's a scene in the matrix, where the character cypher talks about the illusory experience of eating a fine meal. I'm Ben you on the steak and he said, I know this doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious taste so good. I prefer virtual reality to the cruelty of the world. Ignorance is bliss. Recounting that scene is Carlos Ribeiro, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud foundation in Portugal. He has a special interest in that scene, because he has essentially recreated that phenomenon in fruit flies who did exactly doing to the flash. Here's how it works. He and his team raised genetically engineered flies, with tastes neurons, that can be turned on and off with red and green light that kind of process is known as Octo genetics. His team fed the flies bland food, which they understandably disliked. But then the researchers made the flies in light to turn on sweetness perceiving neurons and the flies gobbled up the food, which to them now, tasted sweet. The team was also able to do the same with bitter, neurons flies got bitter food, which they avoided, but the scientists then turned off the bitter neurons, and all of a sudden, the flies changed their minds until we have used this to create completely virtual tastes reality for our flies. The experimental. Details are in the journal. We live. So why do this? We really want to understand how the brain uses sensory taste information to make feeding decisions. And also, what goes wrong in a beef for example, or when there are other diseases, which are related to nutrition. He also imagines we could someday use, gene therapy techniques to plug senses back into the noses or tongues of people who've lost the ability to smell or taste, but for now that is like the matrix firmly, the realm of science fiction. Show me. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Don. Yata.
60-Second Science
Wheat Plants "Sneeze" And Spread Disease
"This is scientific Americans sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata, humans can spread disease by sneezy, but less well known is the wheat plants ability to do something strangely, similar from its leaves basically analogous to humans me is in terms of you have very fast and sudden expulsion of droplets that contained the disease or pathogen inside of it. And they kind of thrown away from the surface Jonathan burrito. A mechanical engineer at Virginia Tech, he and his team were studying the ability of wheat plants to expel spores of a common pathogen the wheat rest fungus from their leaves via this unusual mechanism. So the inoculated we'd plants with the disease created do on the plants leaves, and then studied the ensuing action with high-speed microscopy. Here's what they saw the leaves are extremely hydrophobic meaning water beads up to minimize contact with the surface and win two or more jobs, touch energy gets released in the form. Of catapulting action, which sneezes the droplets into the air several millimeters above the leaf surface. The droplets can then be picked up by light breezes or simply fall and spread to other plants. The process is surprisingly effective, at launching spores. The researchers figure each leaf can launch a hundred spores per hour during a morning, do the results and photos of the jumping drops are in the journal of the Royal Society interface. Next break oh and his team want to see what happens if they spray stuff on the leaves the changes the way do forms for if we painted a wet ability of the lease, but they're no longer super hydrophobic now to do drop will be unable to jump when they grow. They sort of claim to the leaf surface and not be something anymore. Such treatment could perhaps put a stop to wheat sneezes and slow down the transmission of disease. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Don yada.
60-Second Science
Antiperspirant Boosts Armpit and Toe-Web Microbial Diversity
"This is scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata. A lot about how what you eat will affect your microbiome. Probiotics prebiotics stuff like that. But your skin is swarming with microbes to and the grooming products, you use might affect what's living there? That's according to a study in the journal EMC biology further tests. Researchers recruited six men and six women, the volunteers left their skin alone for the first three weeks except for a light body wash and then for the next three weeks, the participants apply to modern skin-care arsenal. Sunscreen and skin lotion into perspiration and foot powder. Finally, the volunteers returned to their usual routine. Whatever it was each person for another three weeks throughout that time. The scientists swabbed volunteers faces in forearms, armpits and feet. And they did chemical in genetic analyses of the samples, the lotion, and sunscreen, did not appear to alter the microbiome, but they found counter-intuitively that the anti per sprint and foot powder, actually boosted the diversity of microbes in the armpits, and in between the toes. Perhaps, because those products change nutrient and moisture levels and thus create conditions that foster a wider variety of tiny occupants. The researchers also found that different skin care routines, altered, the types of hormones and fairmont's present on the subject skin. And they hypothesis that someday personalized skin-care recipes could be tailored to individuals to alter our Ramones in a systematic way thus making us more attractive to others or less attractive should anyone need to lessen their Kevorkian. This alert Rian word which means they're lure update on amoun-. Amoun-. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Don. Yata.
60-Second Science
High School Cheaters Nabbed By Neural Network
"This is scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata, the English language version of Wikipedia has almost six million articles. And if you're cheating student that's six million essays already written for you footnotes and all except plagiarism isn't really ineffective tactic just plug the text into a search engine and game over. But what about having a ghostwriter at a paper mill composer final essay, STAN dot K two recent software cannot detect this kind of cheating. Stefan luanne is a data analyst at the university of Copenhagen in Denmark, where he's based ghost writing is a growing problem in high schools, so Lawrenson and his colleagues created a program called ghost rider that can detect the cheats at its core is in neural network trained and tested on a hundred and thirty thousand real essays, from ten thousand Danish students after reading through tens of thousands of essays label as being written by the same author or not the machine taught itself to tune in to the characteristics. That might tip off cheating, for example, did a student's essays share the same styles of punctuation. The same spelling mistakes were the abbreviations, the same by scrutinizing inconsistencies like those ghost rider was able to pinpoint cheated essay nearly ninety percent of the time, the team presented the results at the European symposium on artificial neural networks, computational intelligence and machine learning. And there is one more aspect here that could help students your high school, essays presumably, get better over time as you learn to write and the machine can detect that the final idea is, of course, to try to detect students who either at risk, the because that development and writing style is not as you would expect teachers could thus give extra help to kids who really need it while sniffing out the cheaters too. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Don yada.
60-Second Science
Preserved Poop is an Archaeological Treasure
"This is scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Dodd Yata for a longtime archaeologists have dug for the shiny stuff the sorts of artifacts that belong in museums. They like poach. They like jewelry and gold and stuff like that appears Mitchell, a biological anthropologist at the university of Cambridge Mitchell spends his time looking for something decidedly different from such handmade relics that thing he seeks preserved piece of human feces, copper lights as they're called are dried or mineralized pieces of poop and Mitchell and his team found some prime specimens in a trash heap at the ancient settlement of cattle Hoya. That's in modern day, Turkey and dates from six thousand to seven thousand b c Mitchell's team ground up the poop samples with a mortar and pestle then dissolve them and use Microsoft's to filter out particles of various sizes, the presence of certain molecules tip them off that it was indeed human. Poop in two of the samples, they found the intact eggs of whip worm and intestinal parasite that's far more likely to. Flourish in settlements than among people who poop and then move along down the road to a new location. The discovery thus gives us a glimpse of how human health may have changed as hunter gatherers started to adopt a stationary agricultural lifestyle. It's only by looking at these earliest villages. These earliest towns that was set up in the Middle East that we can really start to understand how when humans change their lifestyle to different way of getting food how it could increase or decrease their risk of different kinds of diseases. The results are in the journal antiquity and the findings prove that ancient poop is flushed with details about ancient civilizations. Thanks for listening for scientific American sixty seconds science. I'm Christopher Don. Yata.