Technology

A recent study has revealed that as many as two-fifths of never-smoking teens are exposed to secondhand smoke worldwide.

The study at the University of Texas Medical Branch estimated the prevalence of secondhand smoke exposure worldwide among teens who had never smoked, and found that one third of those teens are exposed to secondhand smoke inside the home.

Lead author Phani Veeranki said that they need to protect never-smokers from being exposed to secondhand smoke as the negative health effects of secondhand smoke exposure are well known.

Scientists have found a “sixth sense” in fish that allows them to detect flows of water to spot prey and avoid obstacles.

“We identified a unique layout of flow sensors on the surface of fish that is nearly universal across species, and our research asks why this is so,” said Leif Ristroph, an assistant professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and one of the study’s authors.

Scientists have identified the substance that protects against premature births caused by infection.

Pre-term birth from infection is the leading cause of infant mortality in many countries according to the World Health Organization. The findings by the researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center are the first to identify the specific role that the substance hyaluronon (HA), plays in the reproductive tract.

Scientists have recorded mass die off’s in nearly 2,500 animal species from the past 70 years, and found a rise in the events among birds, fish and marine invertebrates.

An analysis of 727 studies, which also showed that the number of individuals killed appeared to be decreasing for reptiles and amphibians, and unchanged for mammals, points towards disease, biotoxicity and other stressors.

a new research, which suggests that drugs for high cholesterol or statins don’t really impair memory and cognitive function, has cast doubts on the cautionary stance taken by the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA).

Researchers question whether there is substance to FDA’s recent warning that statins could affect the memory, attention span and other cognitive abilities of people who take this drug to control high cholesterol.

A team of scientists has designed a promising nicotine vaccine to help smoke rs overcome their addiction and proven that the structures of molecules used in vaccines are critical.

Researcher Kim Janda from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) said that this study provides new hope that one could make a nicotine vaccine that succeeds in clinical trials.

Nicotine vaccines train the body to see nicotine as a foreign invader. To prompt this immune response, scientists have tried attaching nicotine derivatives called haptens to a larger carrier protein used in other approved vaccines.

A new study has demonstrated that computers that use digital footprints can personality better as compared to friends and family.

The study conducted at University of Cambridge compares the ability of computers and people to make accurate judgments about our personalities. People’s judgments were based on their familiarity with the judged individual, while computer models used a specific digital signal: Facebook Likes.

The results show that by mining Facebook Likes, the computer model was able to predict a person’s personality more accurately than most of their friends and family.

A new research has revealed about a new personalized therapy, dalcetrapib, for cardiovascular disease.

Researchers at the Montreal Heart Institute showed that cardiovascular disease patients and the appropriate genetic background benefit greatly from the new medication, with a reduction of 39 percent in combined clinical outcomes including heart attacks, strokes, unstable angina, coronary revascularizations and cardiovascular deaths.

A new study has revealed that lizard’s penis evolves six times faster than any of its other parts.

Study researcher Julia Klaczko, a biologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil, said that the study is the first to directly measure the evolution rate of the penis of any species, though researchers have long suspected that the male genitalia evolve faster than other body parts.

The unmanned Dragon capsule owned by private US firm SpaceX arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) Monday morning for its fifth commercial resupply mission to the orbiting laboratory, US space agency NASA said.

The spacecraft was successfully captured by a robotic arm operated by US astronaut Barry Wilmore inside the ISS at 10.54 a.m. GMT, 18 minutes ahead of schedule, as the two flew over the Mediterranean Sea, Xinhua news agency reported citing NASA.

NASA’s venerable Kepler space telescope’s count of exoplanets has passed the magic 1,000 mark, including eight new planets and 544 candidate planets.

Of more than 1,000 verified planets found, eight are less than twice Earth-size and in their stars’ habitable zone, the US space agency said.

Kepler continuously monitored more than 150,000 stars beyond our solar system, and to date has offered scientists an assortment of more than 4,000 candidate planets for further study – the 1,000th of which was recently verified.

Artificial intelligence experts all around the world are signing an open letter, pledging to protect mankind from machines.

Though still decades away from developing a machine that might enslave humankind, the Future of Life Institute put forth the open letter to ensure the progress in the field does not grow out of control, CNet reported.

A new study has recently revealed that Gibbons might be communicating through a similar form of language used by human ancestors in the past.

A study into the sounds white-handed gibbons make by Angela Dassow and Michael Coen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has led to the discovery, the Independent reported.

According to the New Scientist, researchers have discovered that the gibbons have a range of sounds, or “words”, with different meanings that can warn of predators or be used to discipline children or other member of the gibbon group.