Science Simplified!

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:57am

Ghee, butter and cheese not tied to heart disease? Experts: No Proof That Saturated Fat Is Unhealthy ( Take this with a pinch of salt! - K) Yes, your genes will definitely determine whether you are susceptible or not. You cannot put all the people in one bracket to come to a conclusion! Flawed study! The results are unclear!

A dollop of ghee or butter in your diet does not cause as much harm to your heart as it was believed till now. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the British Heart Foundation have found there is actually no evidence that confirms changing the type of fat you eat from “bad” saturated to “healthier” polyunsaturated cuts heart risk.
The researchers analysed data from 72 unique studies with over 600,000 participants from 18 nations and found total saturated fatty acid, whether measured in the diet or in the bloodstream as a biomarker, was not associated with coronary disease risk in the observational studies. Similarly, when analysing the studies that involved assessments of the consumption of total monounsaturated fatty acids, long-chain omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, there were no significant associations between consumption and cardiovascular risk.
Saturated fat is the kind of fat found in butter, biscuits, red meat, sausages and bacon and cheese and cream. There has been a big drive to get more people eating unsaturated fats, such as olive and sunflower oils, and other non-animal fats instead. But the latest study raises questions about the current guidelines that generally restrict the consumption of saturated fats and encourage consumption of polyunsaturated fats to prevent heart disease.
“These are interesting results that potentially stimulate new lines of scientific inquiry and encourage careful reappraisal of our current nutritional guidelines,” said Dr Rajiv Chowdhury, lead author of the research at the University of Cambridge. “Cardiovascular disease, in which the principal manifestation is coronary heart disease, remains the single leading cause of death and disability worldwide. In 2008, more than 17 million people died from a cardiovascular cause globally. With so many affected by this illness, it is critical to have appropriate prevention guidelines which are informed by the best available scientific evidence.”
The research collaboration led by the University of Cambridge analysed existing cohort studies and randomised trials on coronary risk and fatty acid intake. They showed that current evidence does not support guidelines which restrict the consumption of saturated fats in order to prevent heart disease. The researchers also found insufficient support for guidelines which advocate the high consumption of polyunsaturated fats (such as omega 3 and omega 6) to reduce the risk of coronary disease.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:55am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:52am

The use of wastewater to irrigate crops is exposing children in Asia to a high risk of rotavirus infection and other deadly disease, scientists say.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.12178/abstract;jses...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:50am

A meta-analysis of papers published on diabetes shows that diabetic women are more susceptible to stroke than diabetic men, possibly because of obesity.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2814...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:48am

Scientists: Don't pee in pools
Not only is peeing in the swimming pool antisocial, it could also harm your health, according to a study.
Scientists from China Agricultural University and Purdue University have found that uric acid in urine interacts with the disinfectants in swimming pools to produce harmful chemicals.

The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, showed that uric acid becomes chlorinated and acts as a precursor to the formation of the toxic gases cyanogen chloride (CNCl) and trichloramine (NCl3).

At high concentrations, CNCl is known to cause immediate injury to the eyes and respiratory system upon contact, and longer term problems in the central nervous system and heart. NCl3 has been linked to chronic health problems in adults and asthma in children.

In the article, the authors noted that since urination is under the voluntary control of swimmers, improved hygiene habits are essential to keep swimming pool water safe.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es405402r

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:38am

Natural forests in the Amazon remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they emit - Nasa-led study
This means that the 5.5 million square kilometer forest is a crucial factor in reducing global warming. The new study, published in Nature Communications on March 18, is the first to measure tree deaths caused by natural processes throughout the Amazon forest.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:34am

Evolution Of Conch Size Driven By Humans
The first humans to pluck a Caribbean fighting conch from the shallow lagoons of Panama’s Bocas del Toro were in for a good meal. Smithsonian scientists found that 7,000 years ago, this common marine shellfish contained 66 percent more meat than its descendants do today. Because of persistent harvesting of the largest conchs, it became advantageous for the animal to mature at a smaller size, resulting in evolutionary change.

Human-driven evolution of wild animals, sometimes referred to as “unnatural selection,” has only previously been documented under scenarios of high-intensity harvesting, like industrialized fishing. “These are the first evidence that low-intensity harvesting has been sufficient to drive evolution,” said lead author Aaron O’Dea of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “The reason may be because the conch has been subjected to harvesting for a long period of time.” Published March 19 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the findings are based on a comparison of mature shell sizes prior to human settlement, from shells excavated from human trash heaps representing various points in the last few thousand years and from modern sites.

Source: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1782/20140159.ab...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:31am

New hypothesis explains earth's continued habitability
Researchers from USC and Nanjing University in China have documented evidence suggesting that part of the reason that Earth has become neither sweltering like Venus nor frigid like Mars lies with a built-in atmospheric carbon dioxide regulator -- the geologic cycles that churn up the planet's rocky surface. Scientists have long known that "fresh" rock pushed to the surface via mountain formation effectively acts as a kind of sponge, soaking up the greenhouse gas CO2. Left unchecked, however, that process would simply deplete atmospheric CO2 levels to a point that would plunge Earth into an eternal winter within a few million years during the formation of large mountain ranges like the Himalayas -- which has clearly not happened.

And while volcanoes have long been pointed to as a source of carbon dioxide, alone they cannot balance out the excess uptake of carbon dioxide by large mountain ranges. Instead, it turns out that "fresh" rock exposed by uplift also emits carbon through a chemical weathering process, which replenishes the atmospheric carbon dioxide at a comparable rate.

"Our presence on Earth is dependent upon this carbon cycle. This is why life is able to survive," said Mark Torres, lead author of a study disclosing the findings that appears in Nature on March 20. Torres, a doctoral fellow at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), collaborated with Joshua West, professor of Earth Sciences at USC Dornsife, and Gaojun Li of Nanjing University in China.
Source: University of Southern California

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:20am

The most difficult part of writing a program is not actually writing the program but rather determining what the client wants the program to do.
It is relatively easy to write the rules for what a program should do in cases where everything is working correctly; it is much more difficult to write the rules for what a program should do when things go wrong (see below).
A lot more can (and does) go wrong than you think: databases can become corrupt or lose their connection to your program; the connection between various computers may become unavailable due to networking issues; and the list goes on. This is largely due to the distributed nature of computer systems these days, in which multiple interconnected computers process what seems to you to be a single request.
A large part of what a program does is hide from you the gory details of when things go wrong (see above).
Good programming requires the ability to foresee what might go wrong and to account for it. Most non-programmers either don't believe what could go wrong or don't want to worry about it, and thus can get uncomfortable even thinking about the idea of things going wrong.
What may appear to be a very simple program (e.g. Google's site) may involve a huge, invisible supporting infrastructure that cost lots of time and money to build and maintain.
When you meet us at parties and learn what we do, we really don't want to hear the story about how you couldn't get a certain program to install/uninstall/run or how you might have a virus on your Windows PC. It would be like saying to a dentist you just met, "Oh, you're a dentist? I have this pain in my leg, what do you think is causing it?"
Just as you're usually not impressed when we brag about how much we know about computers, we're not impressed when you brag about how little you know about them.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 20, 2014 at 8:20am

Did you know? What are some things that programmers know, but most people don't?

• Digital content can never be moved, only copied.
• You can never watch or listen to anything on the internet without having it copied to your computer first.
• You cannot password protect a computer from someone who has physical access to it, only encryption works.
• When you empty the trashcan, the files are not deleted.
• When you format your hard drive, the files are not deleted.
• Murphy was right.
• Your desktop computer can run advanced programs for free that used to be available only to big companies for $100,000. Like Unix, virtual machines and SQL servers.
• The Cloud simply means someone else's computer.
• That Office documents are actually ZIP files.
• 1. Programming is more about the art of problem solving with limited options than a science of understanding exact conditions to produce reliable results. 
  2. Programming is hard because users (including programmers) expect programs to work as essentially smarter, more knowledgeable humans. 
  3. Programs are workhorses with a set of prescribed instructions that can interact in surprising ways.  The universe works this way as well.  Think about the simplicity of gravity.  Gravity's force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects centers of mass as well as their respective mass.  That's incredibly simple when you think about it.  Now, go watch a wobbling comet's orbit going through multiple overlapping gravitational fields and tell me you wouldn't think that's a bug in the system if you didn't already know that the universe is made of up simple rules interacting surprisingly.
  4. Bugs do not necessarily mean that the software is wrong; it may mean the programmer misunderstood what the user wanted, that the user misunderstood what they needed or the program illuminated an unknown problem with the process the software is trying to solve.
  
  Software is a possible solution to a stated problem.  Anything more is just dreaming of unicorns and fairy dust.

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