Scienceblog

Our body image is not always correct or realistic, as every athlete or fashion-conscious person is aware, but it's a crucial piece of knowledge that affects how we behave in the outside world. Your brain continually plans ahead while you dress or play ball so that you may move your body without bumping, stumbling, or falling. As babies, we develop our ideal body types, and robots are doing the same. Today, a team from Columbia Engineering said that they had developed a robot that, for the first time, could learn a model of its whole body from scratch without the aid of humans. The researchers explain how their robot built a kinematic model of itself and utilized that model to plan movements, accomplish goals, and avoid obstacles in a range of scenarios in a new report published in Science Robotics. Even damage to its body was automatically detected, repaired, and then detected again. Robot looks at itself as if it were a baby discovering itself in a room full with mirrors. A roboti

Southeast Greenland is home to a polar bear population that is isolated and genetically different. Researchers that saw and monitored the bears found that they rely on the freshwater ice provided by the Greenland ice sheet to live despite having little access to sea ice, which is essential for polar bears. The journal Science released a report on the bears on Thursday. "We never expected to find a new subpopulation living there," said lead study author Kristin Laidre, a polar research scientist at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory, in a statement. "We wanted to survey this region because we didn't know much about the polar bears in Southeast Greenland. "Because of historical documents and Indigenous knowledge, we were aware that there were some bears in the region. We just were unaware of their uniqueness." An icy requirement The 19 populations of polar bears that are known to exist rely on sea ice to pursue their prey, such as r

On June 24, a rare five-planet alignment will be at its zenith, providing an amazing opportunity to see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn align in planetary order. According to Diana Hannikainen, observing editor of Sky & Telescope, the event started at the start of June and has gotten brighter and simpler to spot as the month has gone on. On Friday, another celestial object will join the celebration between Venus and Mars: a declining crescent moon. The moon will stand in for the Earth's relative location in the alignment, which indicates the place of our planet in the planetary hierarchy. According to Sky & Telescope, this unusual event won't happen this year since Mercury and Saturn are closer together than they were in 2004. Viewing the alignment To see the amazing phenomena, observers will require a clean view of the eastern horizon, according to Hannikainen. The planetary spectacle may be seen by anyone without glasses, but for the best viewing, she sugges

How woodpeckers can continuously strike tree trunks with their beaks without harming their brains has long been a mystery to scientists. Because of this, it was assumed that their skulls must function as shock-absorbing helmets. Researchers have already debunked this idea, claiming that their heads behave more like stiff hammers and published their findings in the journal Current Biology on July 14. Their calculations really reveal that any stress absorption would interfere with the woodpeckers' ability to peck. Sam Van Wassenbergh from the Universiteit Antwerpen in Belgium states, "We discovered that woodpeckers do not absorb the shock of the hit with the tree by studying high-speed footage of three species of woodpeckers. First, Van Wassenbergh and associates calculated the effects of pecking decelerations in three different woodpecker species. They built biomechanical models using the data and came to the conclusion that any stress absorption in the skull would be harmful t

The University of Michigan evolutionary scientist Elizabeth Tibbetts and her colleagues have shown over the course of more than 20 years' worth of research that paper wasps, despite having tiny brains, have an outstanding ability for learning, memory, and social differences about others. The study demonstrated that paper wasps can distinguish between members of their species based on differences in face markings and that they are more hostile toward wasps with unusual markings. They demonstrated that paper wasps have unusually strong memory and that they guide their behavior based on what they recall from earlier contacts with other wasps. Additionally, they revealed the paper wasp as the first example of transitive inference, a nonvertebrate animal behavior that approaches logical reasoning. Paper wasps may now be used to create abstract notions, according to Tibbetts and her pupils. Surprisingly, the wasps demonstrated the ability to apply what they had learned through visual tra

It might be daunting for customers to choose from the vast selection of dietary fiber supplements in the pharmacy or grocery aisle. They also offer a variety of health claims without getting FDA permission or evaluation. How then can you determine which supplement is effective and ideal for you? People who had been eating the least amount of fiber prior to the study showed the greatest benefit from supplements, regardless of which ones they consumed, according to a rigorous analysis of the gut microbes of study participants who were fed three different kinds of supplements in different sequences. According to research author and assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University Lawrence David, "The persons who responded the best had been consuming the least fiber to start with." Dietary fiber has advantages beyond the advertised easier defecation. Fermentable fiber, which is composed of dietary carbohydrates that some bacteria can digest but which

According to a comprehensive analysis of previous studies undertaken by UCL experts, there is still no conclusive proof that serotonin levels or serotonin activity are the cause of depression after decades of research. The new umbrella review, which provides a summary of previous meta-analyses and systematic reviews, was just published in Molecular Psychiatry. It questions the effects of antidepressants and contends that depression is not likely the result of a chemical imbalance. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which make up the majority of antidepressants, were once believed to function by restoring unusually low serotonin levels. No other recognized chemical mechanism exists for how antidepressants influence the signs and symptoms of depression. "It is always difficult to prove a negative, but I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades, there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abno

One of the numerous risks that NASA had to foresee before sending humans to the moon in 1969 was space pebbles piercing astronauts' spacesuits or other equipment. The moon is susceptible to whatever rocks, or even particles, are flying around in space, unlike Earth, which has a protective atmosphere in which meteoroids often disintegrate. Thankfully, Bill Cooke, director of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said that the crew weren't in too much danger. According to Cooke, the likelihood of an astronaut being struck by a millimeter-sized item occurs around once in a million hours per person. The maximum size of a meteoroid that can enter a spacesuit for an astronaut is one millimeter. Understanding how often our natural satellite is struck by objects is crucial since NASA is gearing up to return people to the moon by 2025 and eventually build a base there or in orbit around it. How many things thus strike the moon dai

A mechanism that causes an advanced type of fatty liver disease has been discovered by researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore; it turns out that vitamin B12 and folic acid supplements can stop this mechanism. These results might benefit those who suffer from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is a catch-all phrase for a variety of liver disorders affecting people who consume little to no alcohol and which affects 4 in 10 adults in Singapore and 25% of all adults worldwide. The most common reason for liver transplants globally is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which causes fat to accumulate in the liver. Due to its link to diabetes and obesity, two serious public health issues in Singapore and other developed nations, it has a high prevalence. Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis is the term used when the disorder proceeds to inflammation and the production of scar tissue (NASH). The study's first author, Dr. Madhulika Tripathi, a senior research fellow with the Labo

It's a prevalent misconception that people with autism have low emotional awareness and little understanding of how successful their own emotional recognition is. However, new Australian research shows that adults with autism are just marginally less accurate than their non-autistic friends at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Recent studies contradict commonly held beliefs that individuals with autism have trouble recognizing social cues and have little understanding of how others read facial expressions, as shown in two publications recently published in the premier international journal Autism Research. In a Flinders University study, 63 persons with autism and 67 non-autistic adults (IQs ranging from 85 to 143) took part in three to five-hour sessions to compare their abilities to recognize 12 different facial expressions of emotion, such as rage and grief. Throughout the course of her PhD, Dr. Marie Georgopoulos gathered a variety of data, which the research team late

According to a recent research on the subject, persons who felt as though they had some influence over the music they listened to were more likely to experience pain alleviation than those who did not feel this way. On August 3, 2022, Dr. Claire Howlin of Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom and associates from University College Dublin in Ireland report these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. Listening to music can help relieve pain, especially chronic pain, which is discomfort that lasts longer than 12 weeks. The underlying processes of these advantages, particularly for acute pain, which is defined as discomfort lasting less than 12 weeks, remain unknown. Basic musical elements like speed or vigor appear to be less significant for pain treatment; instead, feeling in control of the music may be vital. However, prior research mostly concentrated on results from lab-based samples and ignored pre-existing acute discomfort in the actual world. Howlin and coll

The University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins University, and Vanderbilt University researchers found that some cells move surprisingly faster in thicker fluid than in thinner fluid, such as honey or mucus instead of blood. This is because the ruffled edges of these cells can sense the viscosity of their environment and change to move more quickly. Their combined findings in cancer and fibroblast cells—the type that frequently leaves tissue scars—indicate that the viscosity of a cell's environment plays a significant role in disease. This finding may explain the development of tumors, the formation of scars in cystic fibrosis-affected lungs that are mucus-filled, and the healing of wounds. Membrane ruffling is a mechanosensor of extracellular fluid viscosity, a study that was just published in Nature Physics, provides fresh insight into the little-studied topic of cell environments. According to Sergey Plotnikov, assistant professor in the Department of Cell and Systems Biology in the F