Songwriter furious that Pandora played his song more than 1.1MILLION times and only paid him $16.89 in royalties

A songwriter is speaking out against the online music streaming site Pandora after the company played his hit single more than 1.1million times and paid him only $16.89 in royalties. 

David Lowery, who is best known as the lead singer for the 1990s alternative rock ban Cracker, said he is outraged that Pandora is now campaigning to lower royalty payments for songwriters even farther. 

He posted his bank statements to show the payouts from Pandora and other outlets - including YouTube, commercial radio and satellite radio - for his 1993 hit single 'Low' and other songs he has written.

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The statement covered all royalties for the fourth quarter of 2012. 

He remarked that he made less money on 1.1million plays of his song that he does by selling a single t-shirt at one of his concerts.

'I urge all songwriters to post their royalty statements and show the world  just how terrible webcasting rates are for songwriters,' he wrote on a post the songwriters' blog the Trichordist.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2347821/Songwriter-furious-Pandora-played-song-1-1MILLION-times-paid-16-89-royalties.html#ixzz2XNyjjlPu
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2347821/Songwriter-furious-Pandora-played-song-1-1MILLION-times-paid-16-89-royalties.html#ixzz2XNyRqZVb

BigBrain: an ultra-high-resolution 3D roadmap of the human brain June 21, 2013

A landmark three-dimensional (3-D) digital reconstruction of a complete human brain, called the BigBrain, shows for the first time the brain anatomy in microscopic detail — at a spatial resolution of 20 microns, smaller than the size of one fine strand of hair — exceeding that of existing reference brains presently in the public domain.

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A Fantastic Demonstration of Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson’s

Here’s an incredible video of Andrew Johnson, a Parkinson’s sufferer living in New Zealand, who demonstrates his Medtronic neurostimulator:

Link to video here

Hey, Fellas, Olive Oil And Nuts Tied To Prostate Cancer Survival

It turns out that men who replaced 10 percent of their total daily calories from carbohydrates (such as rice, bread and sweets) with vegetable fats (such as olive oil and canola) after their cancer diagnosis had a 29 percent lower risk of developing lethal prostate cancer and a 26 percent reduced risk of death during a median of eight years of follow-up.

In addition, adding a daily ounce of nuts to their diets was linked to an 18 percent lower risk of developing metastatic prostate cancer.

So what's at play in the body?

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Za'atar: A Spice Mix With Biblical Roots And Brain Food Reputation

Za'atar is one of my favorite foods..
Uvealblues

Anyway, the roadside serving of za'atar on bread was an astonishingly simple food, simple enough to love it. The za'atar was just spread over the hot bread like butter on toast. That was it. I'd eat it again. While I wait to encounter it again, Salt, here's what I want to know: Where does za'atar come from? How long has it been around? What, besides oregano, is in it?

And is it brain food?

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Think Inside the Box

Forget brainstorming: People are at their most innovative when they work within the constraints of what they already know.

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Scientists Use New Engineered Virus to Restore Sight

Researchers have engineered a new adeno-associated virus that could greatly expand gene therapy to help restore sight to patients with blinding diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration.
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Prof Schaffer generated around 100 million variants of adeno-associated virus – each carrying slightly different proteins on its coat – from which he and his colleagues selected five that were effective in penetrating the retina.

They then used the best of these, labeled 7m8, to transport genes to cure two types of hereditary blindness for which there are mouse models: X-linked retinoschisis, which strikes only boys and makes their retinas look like Swiss cheese; and Leber’s congenital amaurosis. In each case, when injected into the vitreous humor, the engineered virus delivered the corrective gene to all areas of the retina and restored retinal cells nearly to normal.

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Eyeball Discovery May Mean Safer Surgery

U. NOTTINGHAM (UK) — Scientists have found a previously undetected layer in the cornea, the clear window at the front of the human eye.
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Ticks That Spread Red-Meat Allergy

If Lyme disease isn't reason enough to avoid ticks, here's another: the inability to enjoy a burger.

Odd as it seems, researchers say that bites from the voracious lone star tick are making some people allergic to red meat—even if they've never had a problem eating it before.
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Is Barefoot-Style Running Best? New Studies Cast Doubt

Barefoot-running enthusiasts long have believed that running without shoes or in minimalist footwear makes running easier, speedier and less injurious. But a surprisingly large number of new studies examining just how the body actually responds when we run in our birthday shoes or skimpy footwear suggest that for many people, those expectations are not being met.
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In the end, this data showed that heel-striking was the more physiologically economical running form, by a considerable margin. Heel strikers used less oxygen to run at the same pace as forefoot strikers, and many of the forefoot strikers used less oxygen — meaning they were more economical — when they switched form to land first with their heels.

Most of the runners also burned fewer carbohydrates as a percentage of their energy expenditure when they struck first with their heels. Their bodies turned to fats and other fuel sources, “sparing” the more limited stores of carbohydrates, says Allison Gruber, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the study. Because depleting carbohydrates results in “hitting the wall,” or abruptly sagging with fatigue, “these results tell us that people will hit the wall faster if they are running with a forefoot pattern versus a rear-foot pattern,” Dr. Gruber says.

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Slathering on Sunscreen Shows Results, Researchers Find

People who diligently use sunscreen every day can slow or even prevent for a time the development of wrinkles and sagging skin, a new study found. Although dermatologists have long told people to use sunscreen to prevent aging, this is the first research to show an actual effect on the appearance of skin, researchers said.

The study involved 900 white people ages 25 to 55 in Australia, where intense sun exposure is a fact of life. Most had fair skin, and nearly all burned in the sun. Most were using sunscreen at least some of the time, and two-thirds wore hats in the sun.

But researchers wanted to find out what would happen to skin if people tried to use a broad-spectrum sunscreen all the time over four and a half years. Half of the study participants were told to continue their usual practices, and the other half to slather on sunscreen daily.

The result, the researchers reported on Monday in The Annals of Internal Medicine, is that those assigned to use sunscreen every day had noticeably more resilient and smoother skin than those assigned to continue their usual practices.

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Pinterest Accidentally Built A Better Search Engine Than Google

Nine out of ten times, Pinterest search actually beats Google image search. Pinspiring.
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Nodding Syndrome: A Devastating Medical Mystery In Uganda

It starts with the nodding — otherwise normal children begin to nod their heads, pathologically. Then come the seizures. The children stop growing and stop talking. Ultimately, the disease wrecks the children, physically and mentally.

The strange and deadly illness known as nodding syndrome affects only children, and only in a small pocket of East Africa. It has affected more than 3,000 children since the late 1990s, when it first appeared in what was then southern Sudan. And for more than three years, the cause of nodding syndrome has eluded epidemiologists around the globe.

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The Advantages Of Intermittent Fasting & Your First Fast

It’s known as intermittent fasting, or IF for short and it’s become pretty popular in the couple of years, but what is it? Just another dieting fad, or a genuinely healthy way of eating? Well the good news is that intermittent fasting may actually be much healthier than the more normal pattern of eating exercised throughout the developed world.
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Vinegar cancer test saves lives, India study finds

MUMBAI, India (AP) — A simple vinegar test slashed cervical cancerdeath rates by one-third in a remarkable study of 150,000 women in the slums of India, where the disease is the top cancer killer of women.
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Pap smears and tests for HPV, a virus that causes most cervical cancers, have slashed cases and deaths in the United States. But poor countries can't afford those screening tools.

This study tried a test that costs very little and can be done by local people with just two weeks of training and no fancy lab equipment. They swab the cervix with diluted vinegar, which can make abnormal cells briefly change color.

This low-tech visual exam cut the cervical cancer death rate by 31 percent, the study found. It could prevent 22,000 deaths in India and 72,600 worldwide each year, researchers estimate.

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New Tools to Hunt New Viruses

Peter Daszak, a parasitologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, has even put a number on it: 5.3 new ones each year, based on a study using data from 1940 to 2004. He and his co-authors blamed population growth, deforestation, antibiotic overuse,factory farming, live animal markets, bush meat hunting, jet travel and other factors.

Some aspects of the new viruses are scary. The Arabian coronavirus — now officially named MERS, for Middle East respiratory syndrome — has killed about half of those it infects, while SARS killed less than a quarter; in the lab, it replicates faster than SARS, penetrates lung cells more readily and inhibits the formation of proteins that warn the body that it is under attack.

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Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914974,00.html#ixzz2Ub3LKdof

Stress Can Boost Good Habits Too

Under stress, we all tend to seek comfort — sometimes in not-so-healthy ways — but a new study suggests that challenging experiences are as likely to promote good habits as they are to support bad ones.

In several different experiments, researchers led by Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, found that under various types of stress, all types of habits got stronger — not just the ones that cause trouble.

“When your willpower is low and you have little motivational energy, you are likely to fall back into old, bad habits of eating too much and not exercising — but only if those are, in fact, your habits,” says Wood. “Our novel finding is that people fall back into good habits in just the same way.” The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/27/stress-can-lead-to-good-habits-too/#ixzz2Ub1Jm25U

Google blimps will carry wireless signal across Africa

Search giant Google is intending to build huge wireless networks across Africa and Asia, using high-altitude balloons and blimps.

The company is intending to finance, build and help operate networks from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, with the aim of connecting around a billion people to the web.

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How I Cured My Anxiety

A great post by Charlie Hoehn..
Uvealblues

My anxiety lasted for more than a year. It affected how I breathed, how I thought, how I ate, how I slept, and how I talked. I was serious and tired and afraid, all the time. I wanted so badly to return to my normal, lively, care-free, confident self. But I didn’t know how to shake it.

I tried everything to fix myself: meditation, yoga, high-intensity workouts, long runs, therapy, therapy books, keeping a journal, super clean diets, extended fasting, drugs, deep breathing exercises, prayer, etc. I even took a six-week course, made specifically for men who wanted to overcome anxiety. A few of these things helped, a lot of them didn’t. Some of them made things worse.

Then one day, I discovered the cure. When my mind processed it and recognized it was the solution, I started laughing. The answer had been so obvious all along.

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What Is It About Bees And Hexagons?

Solved! A bee-buzzing, honey-licking 2,000-year-old mystery that begins here, with this beehive. Look at the honeycomb in the photo and ask yourself: (I know you've been wondering this all your life, but have been too shy to ask out loud ... ) Why is every cell in this honeycomb a hexagon?
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Some of My Best Friends Are Germs

A long but good read by the author Michael Pollen...
Uvealblues
I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Instituteat the University of Colorado, Boulder. As part of a new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab sequenced my microbiome — that is, the genes not of “me,” exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species with whom I share this body. These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map.
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o the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this “second genome,” as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome.
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The Scientific 7-Minute Workout

Exercise science is a fine and intellectually fascinating thing. But sometimes you just want someone to lay out guidelines for how to put the newest fitness research into practice.

An article in the May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal does just that. In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.

“There’s very good evidence” that high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla., and co-author of the new article.

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Editor’s blog: Significance of no statistical difference - See more at: http://ophthalmologytimes.modernmedicine.com/ophthalmologytimes/news/editor-s-blog-significance-no-statistical-difference#sthash.Kja7CIBI.dpuf

Seattle—As of Tuesday afternoon at this year's Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) meeting, all of the head-to-head comparison studies involving the efficacy and the safety of ranibizumab (Lucentis) and bevacizumab (Avastin) are officially IN.

The final verdict (NO drumroll, please): bevacizumab and ranibizumab are statistically NO different in the treatment of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

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On Tuesday, the results of the Inhibition of VEGF in Age-related Choroidal Neovascularisation 2 (IVAN2) Study and the Groupe d’Evaluation Français Avastin versus Lucentis (GEFAL) Study, the French comparison study, were presented. The conclusion for both studies pretty much coincided with the results presented in the Comparison of AMD Treatment Trials (CATT), CATT2, and the original IVAN studies that were presented at previous ARVO meetings: That both drugs are basically equal (with some minor differences) in the treatment of AMD.

Hopefully, the debate between the use of both drugs is finally put to rest and ophthalmology can move forward (unless the French ophthalmic community decides to drag this on for another year with a GEFAL2). The foregone conclusion of these trials pretty much came to the same conclusion on most points that "there was no statistical difference between ranibizumab and bevacizumab."

Most of the ophthalmic community should be good with those conclusions. Even Genentech, the manufacturer of both drugs, has pretty much accepted these conclusions. The bevacizumab supporters have proven their point that their drug is just as good as the FDA-approved drug—at a fraction of the cost.

This is where a "statistical difference" can be found—the price. Ranibizumab costs about $2,000 an injection, while bevacizumab costs less than $100. That is a really big statistical difference, especially to a patient who has limited income or whose insurance may not be so generous to pay. To help patients get their treatments, physicians have that right to utilize that off-label option.

One hospital charges $8,000 — another, $38,000

In the actual article from the Washington Post, there is an interactive module in which you can insert the name of your state and see how your state compares to national averages for common surgical procedures...
Uvealblues

Consumers on Wednesday will finally get some answers about one of modern life’s most persistent mysteries: how much medical care actually costs.
For the first time, the federal government will release the prices that hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures. Until now, these charges have been closely held by facilities that see a competitive advantage in shielding their fees from competitors. What the numbers reveal is a health-care system with tremendous, seemingly random variation in the costs of services.

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A Sense of Where You Are

The workings of the grid cells show that in the brain “you are constantly creating a map of the outside world,” said Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, who is one of the two leaders of a committee set up to plan the National Institutes of Health’s contribution to President Obama’s recently announced neuroscience initiative.

Often, the workings of billions of neurons that produce our thoughts are opaque. But electrical recordings of signals emitted by grid cells show a map “with a framework and coordinates that are completely intuitive,” Dr. Bargmann said. And to find such a straightforward system is, in its own way, “just mind-boggling.” What is the brain doing being so mysteriously unmysterious?

The implications of the discovery are both practical and profound. The cells have been proved to exist in primates, and scientists think they will be found in all mammals, including humans. The area in the brain that contains the grid cell navigation system is often damaged early in Alzheimer’s disease, and one of the frequent early symptoms of Alzheimer’s patients is that they get lost. The Mosers do not work on humans, but any clues to understanding how memory and cognitive ability are lost are important.

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Hammurabi’s Code and U.S. Health Care

Interesting that the economist, Uwe Reinhardt, opted for citation of eye surgery in this article!
There are also some good letters to the editor at the end of the article... (hit the link button below)
UvealBlues

Sometime around 1780-70 B.C., the Babylonian King Hammurabi promulgated the now famous Code of Hammurabi, covering both civil and criminal law.

TODAY’S ECONOMIST

Perspectives from expert contributors.

The code is said to have informed both Jewish and Islamic law. Remarkably, it has echoes also in modern health policy in the United States.

Among the 282 laws in Hammurabi’s Code, nine (215 to 223) pertain to medical practice:

215. If a physician make a large incision with an operating knife and cure it, or if he open a tumor (over the eye) with an operating knife, and saves the eye, he shall receive 10 shekels in money.

                216. If the patient be a freed man, he receives five shekels.

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Not all of these laws have survived the millennia. Relative to Hammurabi’s draconian medical malpractice code, for example, modern medical malpractice penalties represent mere slaps on the wrist.

On the other hand, our modern, differentiated payment system for health care does resemble the Code of Hammurabi in some respects.

To illustrate, for a primary care office visit with a new patient of 30-minute duration (using Current Procedural Terminology, or C.T.P. codes, in this case Code 99203), New Jersey’s Medicaid in 2012 paid a nonspecialist $25 and a board-certified specialist $32.30. The comparable fees paid physicians for commercially insured patients are jealously guarded trade secrets, but it is reasonable to assume them to be $100 to $200. Other fees in the C.P.T. code are similarly low for Medicaid.

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Physicians clearly understand this relative valuation being signaled to them. According to a recent estimate, almost a third of American physicians are unwilling to accept any new patients covered by Medicaid. In New Jersey in 2011, only 40 percent of physicians accepted new Medicaid patients (seeExhibit 4). Given the insulting valuations many state Medicaid programs put upon the physicians’ work, that’s understandable.

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Doctors Denounce Cancer Drug Prices of $100,000 a Year

These same cost issues described in the article below apply to drugs used in treating retinal disease, in which companies charge 2000-3000$ per injection. Some patients need these monthly...and in each eye...for the rest of their life...

Uvealblues

With the cost of some lifesaving cancer drugs exceeding $100,000 a year, more than 100 influential cancer specialists from around the world have taken the unusual step of banding together in hopes of persuading some leading pharmaceutical companies to bring prices down.

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Prices for cancer drugs have been part of the debate over health care costs for several years — and recently led to a public protest from doctors at a major cancer center in New York. But the decision by so many specialists, from more than 15 countries on five continents, to join the effort is a sign that doctors, who are on the front lines of caring for patients, are now taking a more active role in resisting high prices. In this case, some of the specialists even include researchers with close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. 

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Eggs, Too, May Provoke Bacteria to Raise Heart Risk

For the second time in a matter of weeks, a group of researchers reported a link between the food people eat and bacteria in the intestines that can increase the risk of heart attacks.

The lecithin study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is part of a growing appreciation of the role the body’s bacteria play in health and disease. With heart disease, investigators have long focused on the role of diet and heart disease, but expanding the scrutiny to bacteria adds a new dimension.

“Heart disease perhaps involves microbes in our gut,” said the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Stanley Hazen, chairman of the department of cellular and molecular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute. 

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To show the effect of eggs on TMAO, Dr. Hazen asked volunteers to eat two hard-boiled eggs. They ended up with more TMAO in their blood. But if they first took an antibiotic to wipe out intestinal bacteria, eggs did not have that effect.

To see the effects of TMAO on cardiovascular risk, the investigators studied 4,000 people who had been seen at the Cleveland Clinic. The more TMAO in their blood, the more likely they were to have a heart attack or stroke in the ensuing three years. 

Why listening to music is as good as sex: Scientists say listening to tunes stimulates the senses giving pleasure

Why listening to music is as good as sex: Scientists say listening to tunes stimulates the senses giving pleasure

The more the listener enjoyed what they were hearing, the stronger the connections were

Researchers even say they can predict whether we will buy a song based on the reaction of our brain

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2308020/How-listening-new-music-really-CAN-make-happy-Scientists-say-hearing-new-tunes-rewarding.html#ixzz2R7XONLYr

'ReadingMate’ reduces treadmill eye bobble

PURDUE (US) — New technology makes it easier for aspiring multi-taskers to read while they run on thetreadmill.
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The Wikipedia of Biomarkers: Interview with Jean-Emmanuel Bibault and Charles Ferté, Co-Founders of CancerDriver

Every year nearly 13 million people in the world are diagnosed with cancer. 7.6 million die from it, making it the leading cause of death in developed countries and the second leading cause of death in the developing world.

While cures for cancer are hard to come by, there are promising avenues for diagnosis. Cancer biomarkers are one of them; they are molecular aberrations found in the tumors that predict the aggressiveness of a disease or the response to a treatment. Unfortunately, too few patients are tested for biomarkers and too many with identified biomarkers are not referred to the right drug or the right trial.

Enter CancerDriver, a free repository of cancer biomarkers intended to improve access to biomarker information for patients, physicians, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies. CancerDriver contains a database of all known biomarkers in oncology. It can be found on the web and soon on iOS and Android mobile platforms.

We had a chance to speak with Jean-Emmanuel Bibault and Charles Ferté, Co-Founders of CancerDriver, to discuss this revolutionary site.

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Doctors driven to bankruptcy

As many doctors struggle to keep their practices financially sound,some are buckling under money woes and being pushed into bankruptcy.

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The Surprising Truth About 8 Common Diet Strategies

Who has the time to keep up with weight-loss research? It's so technical...and confusing...and often contradictory! And yet if you don't know what's going on in the world of calorie counting, you may not be seeing the pounds drop off as fast as you think they should. In one European diet-and-exercise study, for example, participants who were given detailed explanations of the research itself were more likely to improve (exercise more or eat better or both) than a less clued-in group. Fortunately, we have dug into the latest research. And as we did, we noted that a surprising number of dieting tactics accepted as gospel have recently been shown to be dead wrong. Knowing which still hold up and which are big (fat) lies can mean the difference between winning and losing at weight loss.

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Culprit in Heart Disease Goes Beyond Meat’s Fat

The researchers had come to believe that what damaged hearts was not just the thick edge of fat on steaks, or the delectable marbling of their tender interiors. In fact, these scientists suspected that saturated fat andcholesterol made only a minor contribution to the increased amount of heart disease seen in red-meat eaters. The real culprit, they proposed, was a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the intestines after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.

That, at least, was the theory. So the question that morning was: Would a burst of TMAO show up in people’s blood after they ate steak? And would the same thing happen to a vegan who had not eaten meat for at least a year and who consumed the same meal?

The answers were: yes, there was a TMAO burst in the five meat eaters; and no, the vegan did not have it. And TMAO levels turned out to predict heart attack risk in humans, the researchers found

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Patient people mull over future rewards

Brain imaging suggests impulsive people don’t think about the reward they’ll get for waiting, whereas patient people seem to enjoy it.
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A Beautiful Multimedia Newspaper Exposes Life In The World’s Largest Refugee Camp

The Dadaab Stories site gives you a window into daily life in the African camp, home to 500,000 Somali refugees. But it’s not Western filmmakers making sob stories: The site is reported by the refugees themselves.
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The 4 Ideas That Melinda Gates Thinks Are Changing The World

For the past three years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has hosted TEDxChange, a TEDx event with the goal of spurring action around the ideas supported by the foundation. This year, host Melinda Gates introduced seven speakers-- a theologian talking about faith and family planning, and children featured in the film The Revolutionary Optimists--who all discussed topics related to the event’s theme of "positive disruption." We talked to her after the event to learn more about some of the things happening around the world that Gates considers to be most disruptive--in a good way.
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In Sign of Warming, 1,600 Years of Ice in Andes Melted in 25 Years

Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists reported Thursday, the latest indication that the recent spike in global temperatures has thrown the natural world out of balance.
The evidence comes from a remarkable find at the margins of theQuelccaya ice cap in Peru, the world’s largest tropical ice sheet. Rapid melting there in the modern era is uncovering plants that were locked in a deep freeze when the glacier advanced many thousands of years ago.
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Our Inconsistent Ethical Instincts

MORAL quandaries often pit concerns about principles against concerns about practical consequences. Should we ban assault rifles and large sodas, restricting people’s liberties for the sake of physical health and safety? Should we allow drone killings or torture, if violating one person’s rights could save a thousand lives?

We like to believe that the principled side of the equation is rooted in deep, reasoned conviction. But a growing wealth of research shows that those values often prove to be finicky, inconsistent intuitions, swayed by ethically irrelevant factors. What you say now you might disagree with in five minutes. And such wavering has implications for both public policy and our personal lives.

Philosophers and psychologists often distinguish between two ethical frameworks. A utilitarian perspective evaluates an action purely by its consequences. If it does good, it’s good.

A deontological approach, meanwhile, also takes into account aspects of the action itself, like whether it adheres to certain rules. Do not kill, even if killing does good.

No one adheres strictly to either philosophy, and it turns out we can be nudged one way or the other for illogical reasons.

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Optimal Music for the Gym

Researchers Say The Right Tempo Boosts Stamina, Energy Efficiency

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Research has found that at the right tempo, music can reduce the sense of exertion as well as boost motivation. Costas Karageorghis, deputy head of research at the School of Sport and Education at London's Brunel University, says the "sweet spot" for workout music is between 125 and 140 beats per minute when people aren't trying to time their movements to the music. Previously, experts believed that the faster a person exercises, the faster the music tempo should be.

Other new studies have shown that when athletes synchronize their movements to a musical beat, their bodies can handle more exertion: Treadmill walkers had greater stamina and cyclists required less oxygen uptake. And swimmers who listened to music during races finished faster than others who didn't.

You're Eye-to-Eye With a Whale in the Ocean. What Does It See?

A deep dive into how the most intelligent creatures in the ocean perceive their world.
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Could Some of Our Favorite Flavorings Be Damaging Our DNA?

Plants are all-natural sources of all things good for us, right? It turns out some of our favorite plant-based flavorings may do more harm than good.

Scientists from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center report in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology that teas, coffees and “smoky flavoring” could be damaging our DNA at levels comparable to that caused by chemotherapy drugs.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/29/could-some-of-our-favorite-flavorings-be-damaging-our-dna/#ixzz2Ow8NfgIV

Huge cancer study uncovers 74 genetic risk factors

One of the largest cancer genetics studies ever conducted adds a wealth of information about the disease, but also highlights continuing difficulties with predicting cancer risk.
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The studies found 74 new SNPs linked to the cancers, doubling the known common risk variants linked to them. It also found that many were linked to more than one cancer.

“This indicates common underlying functional mechanisms at some of these susceptibility loci, and could lead to the identification of common biomarkers and therapeutic targets for intervention across several disease sites,” says geneticist Simon Gayther of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Long way to go

But most of the common genetic risk factors for these cancers remain unknown. The COGS researchers estimate that they can now account for just 28% of the risk of familial breast cancer, 4% of the risk of ovarian cancer and 30% of the risk of prostate cancer^1, 2, 3. Just asking whether a woman has any relatives with breast cancer still reveals as much about her risk of developing the disease as would surveying her SNPs.

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Hat tip to Ryan Dhindsa