Ethnic minorities produce less pollution but are exposed to more
newscientist.com – Black and Hispanic people in the US are, on average, exposed to more dirty air than white people, despite generally producing less pollution
Source: Christopher W. Tessum, et al. Inequity in consumption of goods and services adds to racial–ethnic disparities in air pollution exposure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019.
Hide the cheese: scientists just created supermice that can see in infrared
digitaltrends.com – A team of multidisciplinary scientists has achieved something impressive and frankly a little terrifying: they have used nanotechnology to give mice infrared vision. They injected mice with nanoparticles that gave the creatures infrared vision for up to 10 weeks from just one treatment.
Source: Yuqian Ma, et al. Mammalian Near-Infrared Image Vision through Injectable and Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae. Cell, 2019.
Infants can tell friends from strangers just by hearing them laugh
zmescience.com – True laughter between the friends is unmistakable even for a five-month-old.
Source: Athena Vouloumanos, Gregory A. Bryant. Five-month-old infants detect affiliation in colaughter. Scientific Reports, 2019.
Trilobites: Congratulations, It’s Twins. The Doctor Is Perplexed.
nytimes.com – It seems like it should not be possible, but a recent case showed that sometimes a boy and a girl are born as semi-identical twins.
Source: Michael T. Gabbett, et al. Molecular Support for Heterogonesis Resulting in Sesquizygotic Twinning. New England Journal of Medicine, 2019.
How singing mice belt out duets
sciencenews.org – A precise timing system in the brain helps musical rodents from the cloud forests of Costa Rica sing to one another.
Source: Daniel E. Okobi, Arkarup Banerjee, Andrew M. M. Matheson, Steven M. Phelps, Michael A. Long. Motor cortical control of vocal interaction in neotropical singing mice. Science, 2019.
Sleeping in on the weekend can’t make up for lost sleep
sciencenews.org – Using the weekend to catch up on sleep is ineffective at making-up for lost sleep and offsetting the consequences to a person’s health.
Source: Christopher M. Depner, et al. Ad libitum Weekend Recovery Sleep Fails to Prevent Metabolic Dysregulation during a Repeating Pattern of Insufficient Sleep and Weekend Recovery Sleep. Current Biology, 2019.
Some exoplanets tilt too much, and it's pushing everyone apart
popsci.com – The proclivity for pairs of exoplanets to seemingly push themselves into orbits that are more irregular from one-another than they ought to be has confounded astronomers for years.
Source: Sarah Millholland, Gregory Laughlin. Obliquity-driven sculpting of exoplanetary systems. Nature Astronomy, 2019.
The hipster effect (or why non-conformists tend to look the same)
zmescience.com – We're all humans, and that might mean that we're all conformists to a degree.
Source: Jonathan Touboul. The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same. arXiv, 2019.
Image of the Day: Squid Skin
the-scientist.com – The cephalopods use several strategies to manipulate light and produce their colorful patterns.
Source: Thomas L. Williams, et al. Dynamic pigmentary and structural coloration within cephalopod chromatophore organs. Nature Communications, 2019.
Yeast can produce THC, CBD, novel cannabinoids
upi.com – Scientists have bioengineered yeast to produce THC and CBD, the two main ingredients in cannabis.
Source: Xiaozhou Luo, et al. Complete biosynthesis of cannabinoids and their unnatural analogues in yeast. Nature, 2019.
