A recent study examined the brains of 111 former NFL football players and found that only one of them did not have CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the brain damage that is associated with being subject to the repeated collisions that routinely occur during games. This adds to the evidence that football poses a real threat to players.
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There was a pre-dawn collision on June 17 involving a large container ship ACX Crystal and a US navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald. The cargo ship, being much larger, suffered little damage but seven US sailors were killed and the destroyer was heavily damaged. Preliminary reports suggest that the destroyer was at fault.
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The scientists at NASA have plotted average global temperatures since 1880, both the annual averages plus five-year averages to smooth out any short term fluctuations in any given year due to things like El Nino. They plot the temperatures as the deviation from the 30-year average taken over the period 1951-1980. As they point out, “Sixteen of the 17 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001, with the exception of 1998.”
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A photographer went up close to a pod of giant sperm whales and captured incredible photos of the animals asleep in a vertical pose, a rare sight.
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The shocking death from cancer of mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani has resulted in tributes poring in for her from all over. In 2014 she became the only female winner of the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics. She was born and raised in Iran and came to the US for graduate study, where she married a non-Muslim Czech scientist with whom she had one child. She had been initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 but it had later spread to her bone marrow.
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In 2014, this professor of mathematics at Stanford University became the first woman to win the Fields medal, considered the highest award in mathematics and the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the sciences.
Coral reefs are sensitive indicators of oceanic temperatures, dying when the water gets too warm. But some reefs in American Samoa seem to be able to tolerate higher temperatures than others and this video clip describes the efforts by scientists to understand the causes of the difference.
I was interested in this article and video clip of attempts to make meat in the laboratory. This technology has been talked about for some time and is advancing. They are already able to make chicken, beef, and pork. They do this by using stem cells to grow the protein in the labs. I have no idea how it compares with regular meat in terms of taste and texture. The video below explains the process by which it happens and the advantages.
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We’ve all experienced what the cartoon character has just gone through. You decide to do something the next time you go into a room where that task has to be done and then as soon as you get there, you forget what it was that you wanted to do. Sometimes you know that you have forgotten something but can’t recall what it is, at other times you don’t even realize that you have forgotten until much later, when you are doing something else.
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Here is a video that shows original unappetizing forms of vegetables and fruits before human beings cultivated and bred them to be the forms that we now eat. We’ve come a long way, baby.