How The House And Senate Bills Affect Higher Ed

WATCH: Bacteria Invade Antibiotics And Transform Into Superbugs

The Evolution of Bacteria on a "Mega-Plate" Petri Dish from Harvard Medical School on Vimeo.

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If you've ever wanted to watch a superbug evolve before your very eyes, you're in luck. Researchers filmed an experiment that created bacteria a thousand times more drug-resistant than their ancestors. In the time-lapse video, a white bacterial colony creeps across an enormous black petri dish plated with vertical bands of successively higher doses of antibiotic.

The colony pauses when it hits the first band of antibiotic, creating a stark border between the white colony and the black petri dish. Then the bacteria start to edge their way into the toxic soup. More dots appear and they start growing, racing to the next, stronger band of antibiotic. The bacteria are evolving. After almost two weeks of real time have passed, they've become resistant to the strongest antibiotic and completely taken over the kitchen-table-sized petri dish.

We know dangerous bacteria are getting stronger all the time and that it's our fault because of our excessive and indiscriminate use of antibiotics. Each year, 23,000 people in the U.S. die as a result of superbug infections. But we typically don't get to see superbugs created.

For most people, evolution is just conceptual, says Tami Lieberman, an evolutionary microbiologist at MIT. She and her Ph.D. adviser, Roy Kishony at Harvard Medical School, wanted something that would make the evolution of superbugs seem more concrete. "The goal was to see evolution, not to abstract it," she says.

Their video and report were published Thursday in the journal Science.

America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts

A new study confirms what many Americans already knew deep in their hearts: We're not good at math.

Not only that, but when it comes to technology skills, we're dead last compared with other developed countries.

The PIAAC study — the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies — looks at the skills adults need to do everyday tasks, whether it's at work or in their social lives.

"Clearly, we have some work to do in this country," says Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner of the government's National Center for Education Statistics. The study compared countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Japan and Finland led the group in literacy, math and technology skills, while the United States' performance was average or well below average in each category.

Literacy

Overall, Americans' everyday literacy skills were average. But if you zoom in and focus on just the young adults, a more complex picture emerges.

Americans who went to college and graduate school did well. They scored above their peers with similar degrees in other developed countries.

For young adults with a high school diploma or less, things did not look so good. These Americans performed significantly worse than those in other countries with the same education level.

"Postsecondary institutions should be happy," says Carr. "But on the other end of the continuum, we have young people coming out of high school — or not graduating from high school — that are struggling with everyday competencies."

Math

Carr says this pattern is even more obvious if you look at the math skills of young adults. This study found that Americans with a high school diploma performed about the same as high school dropouts in other countries.

"We need to think seriously about how to get them functioning better," says Carr.

She offers a sample math problem from the test: You go to the store and there's a sale. Buy one, get the second half off. So if you buy two, how much do you pay?

"High school-credentialed adults, they can't do this task — on average," says Carr.

Technology

When it comes to technology skills, the story gets worse. The U.S. came in last place — right below Poland.

The study looked at basic technology tasks: things like using email, buying and returning items online, using a drop-down menu, naming a file on a computer or sending a text message.

Across the board, Americans performed poorly on these tasks. However, there was a significant racial difference, with nonwhites scoring below whites.

"I don't think we were particularly shocked by that finding," says Carr. She points out that these racial differences are similar to what other national and international studies have found.

She says these findings should be concerning to everyone, especially leaders in the business community and in the K-12 school systems. npr

Professor's baby-friendly policy earns him admiration

Professor Sydney Engelberg, was unfazed when the child of a mother at his lecture on organizational behavior began to cry. The embarrassed mom tried to leave the class, but instead, the father-of-four and grandfather-of-five scooped the kid up and soothed him in his arms – without missing a beat in the lesson. He allows the mothers that attend his masters’ lectures to bring their children and even breastfeed. No mother should have to choose between a child and an education! cnn

Lack Of Deep Sleep May Set The Stage For Alzheimer's

There's growing evidence that a lack of sleep can leave the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease.

"Changes in sleep habits may actually be setting the stage" for dementia, says Jeffrey Iliff, a brain scientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

The brain appears to clear out toxins linked to Alzheimer's during sleep, Iliff explains. And, at least among research animals that don't get enough solid shut-eye, those toxins can build up and damage the brain.

Iliff and other scientists at OHSU are about to launch a study of people that should clarify the link between sleep problems and Alzheimer's disease in humans.

It has been clear for decades that there is some sort of link. Sleep disorders are very common among people with Alzheimer's disease.

For a long time, researchers thought this was simply because the disease was "taking out the centers of the brain that are responsible for regulating sleep," Iliff says. But two recent discoveries have suggested the relationship may be more complicated.

The first finding emerged in 2009, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis showed that the sticky amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's develop more quickly in the brains of sleep-deprived mice.

Then, in 2013, Iliff was a member of a team that discovered how a lack of sleep could be speeding the development of those Alzheimer's plaques: A remarkable cleansing process takes place in the brain during deep sleep, at least in animals.

What happens, Iliff says, is "the fluid that's normally on the outside of the brain, cerebrospinal fluid — it's a clean, clear fluid — it actually begins to recirculate back into and through the brain along the outsides of blood vessels."

This process, via what's known as the glymphatic system, allows the brain to clear out toxins, including the toxins that form Alzheimer's plaques, Iliff says.

"That suggests at least one possible way that disruption in sleep may predispose toward Alzheimer's disease," he says.

To know for sure, though, researchers will have to study this cleansing process in people, which won't be easy.

Iliff studied the glymphatic system in living mice by looking through a window created in the skull. The system also involved a powerful laser and state-of-the-art microscope.

With people, "we have to find a way to see the same sort of function, but in a way that is going to be reasonably noninvasive and safe," he says.

The solution may involve one of the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging machines, which sits in a basement at OHSU. The MRI unit is so sensitive, it should be able to detect changes that indicate preciselywhen the glymphatic system gets switched on in a person's brain, says Bill Rooney, who directs the university's Advanced Imaging Research Center.

When humans enter deep sleep, and toxin removal begins, there should be a particular change in the signal coming from certain salt molecules. That would indicate that fluid has begun moving freely through the brain.

In young, healthy brains, the signal should be "robust," Rooney says, indicating that the toxin removal system is working well. In the brains of older people, and those who are likely to develop Alzheimer's, the signal should be weaker.

Rooney and Iliff have received funding from the Paul G. Allen Foundation to test their approach. They hope to begin scanning the brains of participants within a year.

One challenge, though, will be finding people able to fall asleep in the cramped and noisy tunnel of the magnetic resonance machine.

"It's a tricky thing because it's a small space," Rooney says. "But we'll make people as comfortable as possible, and we'll just follow them as they go through these natural stages of sleep."

If Rooney and Iliff are right, the experiment will greatly strengthen the argument that a lack of sleep can lead to Alzheimer's disease. It might also provide a way to identify people whose health is at risk because they aren't getting enough deep sleep, and it could pave the way to new treatments.

"It could be anything from having people exercise more regularly, or new drugs," Rooney says. "A lot of the sleep aids don't particularly focus on driving people to deep sleep stages." npr

Sexual Harassment Case Shines Light On Science's Dark Secret

A sexual harassment case is sending shock waves through the scientific community this week, and raising questions nationwide about how common sexual harassment is in science and why so little is typically done to stop it.

A six-month investigation by the University of California, Berkeley concluded in June that a faculty member, renowned astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, violated multiple sexual harassment policies over the course of a decade.

Marcy has been a leader in the hunt for Earth-like planets beyond our solar system, was head of a $100 million project aimed at finding life on other planets, and has often been touted as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize.

But he resigned Wednesday after a number of faculty members and students in his department publicly released letters condemning his inappropriate behavior with students, and the university's inadequate response in dealing with it.

The school had kept its investigation private — even from its own faculty — until the online news outlet BuzzFeed broke the story last week.

Aside from confirming that "Marcy violated campus sexual harassment policy," the university released no details about what the investigation found. But according to BuzzFeed, the report concluded that Marcy's offensive behavior included unwanted massages, kissing and groping of at least four students, from 2001 to 2010.

One of these students was Sarah Ballard, now a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She first met Marcy a decade ago when she was an undergraduate at Berkeley. He taught her astronomy class and showed special interest in her career, she tells NPR.

"To have a really renowned scientist praise you — and praise your ability — you can imagine, was really encouraging to me," she says.

At first, she and Marcy met a few times at cafes around campus, where they talked about astronomy and her career. But sometimes, she says, the conversation became too personal. He talked about when he was young and about having sex with a former girlfriend.

Then one day, Marcy gave Ballard a ride home. He parked the car by her house. "The fact that we were in the car together suddenly made me feel really uncomfortable," she says. "I think I really realized that the tenor of the mood was really wrong."

As Ballard started to get out of the car, the professor "reached over and was rubbing the back of my neck," she says. She left the car — and stopped getting together with Marcy outside of class.

Ballard says she was afraid to report Marcy. She didn't want to hurt her chances of going to graduate school. It's a common and very real conundrum for many women hoping to pursue university research careers, says Katie Hinde, a biologist at Arizona State University.

"Academia has a particular climate that allows sexual harassment, sexual assault and sexual abuses to persist," Hinde tells NPR. Last year, she co-authored one of the few studies aimed at figuring out how common sexual harassment is in science.

Hinde and her colleagues surveyed roughly 500 women doing fieldwork in a range of scientific disciplines. Seventy percent of those women told the researchers they had experienced sexual harassment, often from their mentors or supervisors — "people who had power over their career, who had power over their research," Hinde says.

In science, letters of recommendation from mentors are particularly crucial to obtaining a coveted faculty position, Hinde says. When a mentor sexually harasses or assaults a woman, it backs her into a corner: She can either report the offense, and possibly hurt her career. Or she can try to ignore it.

In fact, most harassment is never reported, says Heather Metcalf, research director of the Association for Women in Science.

Women are often told to keep quiet about lewd comments, touching and leering, she says. "There is a bit of a norm for those behaviors to sort of be brushed off, rather than be taken seriously."

An incident last summer involving the prestigious journal Science shows how common this attitude is, Metcalf says. A young female scientist wrote to the journal's advice column, asking what she should do about a situation in the lab where she worked.

"She was really enjoying the scientific work she was doing, but she was feeling really uncomfortable because she kept catching her supervisor trying to take a peek down her blouse," Metcalf says.

The magazine columnist essentially advised the woman to say nothing — to turn a blind eye, Metcalf says. Science eventually retracted the column.

But the culture of keeping silent about sexual harassment continues.

In Marcy's case, it took years of complaints before the university took up its investigation. Then it disciplined him privately.

The university, which declined an interview with NPR, confirmed in a written statement that Marcy was told to follow strict behavior guidelines or "be immediately subject to sanctions that could include suspension or dismissal." This agreement was the "most certain and effective option for preventing any inappropriate future conduct," according to the statement.

Michael Eisen, a molecular biologist at Berkeley, disagrees.

"In essence the university convicted him," Eisen says, "and what was so stunning to me was that Marcy got, at best, something you would describe as a slap on the wrist."

By not punishing him, Eisen says, "they're all but ensuring this kind of behavior is going to continue from others. Basically they're saying there are no consequences for this type of behavior."

In the days since the news got out, many scientists have demanded consequences.

Thousands of scientists have signed an online petition supporting the women Marcy harassed. And 24 faculty members in the department of astronomy at Berkeley signed and released a letter Monday that said, in part, "we believe that Geoff Marcy cannot perform the functions of a faculty member."

Marcy hasn't responded to NPR's request for an interview. He denies some of the allegations, but prior to his resignation, and to the publication of the BuzzFeed story, he posted a public apology "for mistakes I've made" on his faculty website.

Harvard Law Professor Crowdfunds $1 Million, Launches Presidential Bid

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig met his self-imposed goal of crowd-funding $1 million by Labor Day, and Sunday on ABC announced he's running for the Democratic nomination for President.

Lessig, an activist with a grassroots following among some progressives, says he's running on a singular platform — the Citizen Equality Act of 2017. It would expand voting access, ban gerrymandering and institute campaign finance reform.

"I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room," Lessig said Sunday on ABC. "This stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work. And we have to find a way to elevate the debate to focus on the changes that would actually get us a government that could work again, that is not captured by the tiniest fraction of the one percent who fund campaigns."

As NPR's Peter Overby reported last month for our It's All Politics blog, Lessig's presidential bid —and campaign strategy — seems to be a long shot.

"The plan sidesteps the biggest growth area in political money: superPACs and so-called social welfare organizations that raise unlimited sums for "independent" efforts to promote candidates. This unregulated money, some disclosed and some anonymous, is constitutionally protected by recent court decisions, including the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in 2010."

This latest entrant brings the number of candidates on the Democratic side up to six.

Should Lessig beat the odds and win the White House, he would not be there very long, if things go according to his plan. Once the Citizen Equality Act is signed into law, he's vowed to vacate the Oval Office and hand over power to his vice president.

Visitors to Lessig's website can vote on a number of people they'd like to see as his running mate (and, in theory, eventual president), including astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, former Daily Show host Jon Stewart and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

While Lessig's campaign is unconventional, as Politico reports, it's not his first foray into politics.

Think Man-Sized Swimming Centipede — And Be Glad It's A Fossil

If living long and prospering is a measure of success, then the arthropods are life's winners. These are the most common form of life: insects, spiders, crustaceans and centipedes, to name but a few.

And now scientists have their hands on the remains of one of the first ever. It lived 480 million years ago, and it was big and strange.

The fossil was discovered by a Moroccan collector, Ou Said Ben Moula. He gave it several years ago to scientists who spent hundreds of hours scraping away its rocky casing. The "thing" that emerged is ... well ... a man-sized, swimming centipede? A 7-foot lobster without claws?

"It is one of the very biggest arthropods that ever existed," says Yale paleontologist Peter Van Roy. In fact, he says, it was the biggest animal of any kind on the planet, at the time.

Van Roy spent 500 hours preparing the fossilized creature. It's called an anomalocaridid, he says, and evolved at a special time during the Ordovician geological period. Scientists call this period, when the variety of life forms in the ocean exploded, the Great Ordovician Biological Diversification Event.

"(It was) the biggest diversification in marine animal life that we've ever known," says Van Roy, and it took place across 25 million years. The "diversification" turned out to be a bonanza for this creature, because a lot of this new life was plankton. Up until then, anomalocaridids were smaller. This version (Aegirocassis benmoulae) evolved a way to eat the plankton. It developed a comb-like appendage to scoop up the tiny creatures, the way whales do now. Van Roy also discovered that the creature had developed pairs of flaps on its body that later evolved into arthropod limbs. npr

Researchers Think There's A Warm Ocean On Enceladus

Saturn's moon Enceladus is a mystery. From Earth it looks tiny and cold, and yet it's not a dead hunk of rock. Passing spacecraft see trenches and ridges, similar to Earth, and in 2005 NASA's Cassini mission spotted ice geysers streaming from its south pole.

"The moon is actually alive in a sense," says Sean Hsu with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Beneath the surface, most researchers believe it even has a liquid ocean. Now Hsu and his colleagues have found new evidence that it's a downright balmy ocean.

The team used the Cassini spacecraft, which orbits Saturn, to detect tiny particles of silica floating in space. It's not sand exactly, but researchers think the particles did come from the bottom of Enceladus' ocean.

The silica particles could only be made if that ocean were hot. "We think that the temperature at least in some part of the ocean must be higher than 190 degrees Fahrenheit," Hsu says. "If you could swim a little bit further from the really hot part then it could be comfy."

In fact, 190°F is cooler than many hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Earth's oceans. Hsu says experiments on Earth also suggest the ocean is similar in salinity and pH to oceans here.

The evidence, published in the journal Nature, is somewhat circumstantial. The theory is that the silica formed and then dissolved in seawater beneath Enceladus' icy crust. It then left the moon through geysers, and filled Saturn's E-ring. From the E-ring, the silica eventually wound up in the giant planet's magnetosphere, which is where Cassini saw it. npr

How Marijuana Highjacks Your Brain To Give You The Munchies

Shortly after toking up, a lot of marijuana users find that there's one burning question on their minds: "Why am I so hungry?" Researchers have been probing different parts of the brain looking for the root cause of the marijuana munchies for years. Now, a team of neuroscientists report that they have stumbled onto a major clue buried in a cluster of neurons they thought was responsible for making you feel full.

This cluster, called the POMC neurons, is in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that scientists typically associate with base instincts like sexual arousal, alertness and feeding. Tamas Horvath, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine and the team's leader, says that the POMC neurons normally work by sending out a chemical signal telling the brain, you're sated, stop eating.

In the past, when neuroscientists shut down POMC neurons in mice, all the mice became morbidly obese. Horvath figured that in order for the drug in marijuana — compounds called cannabinoids — to spawn that undeniable impulse to feed, it would have to bind the activity of these neurons and make them fire less. Paradoxically, Horvath says, "We found the exact opposite."

The team discovered that when they injected cannabinoids into mice, the drug was turning off adjacent cells that normally command the POMC neurons to slow down. As a result, the POMC neurons' activity leapt up. At the same time, the cannabinoids activate a receptor inside the POMC neuron that causes the cell to switch from making a chemical signal telling the brain you're full to making endorphins, a neurotransmitter that's known to increase appetite. npr

the acoustics of glacial melting

If a glacier cracks and nobody hears it, does it still make a sound?

"Oh, they moan and they groan," says Grant Deane, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "They crackle and rumble and fizz, and they have all kinds of amazing sounds that they make."

Deane is one of the authors of a new study that interprets the acoustics of glacial melting.

"Yes, it's like they're speaking to us, but it's a language that we don't yet understand well," he says.

So Deane and his team set out to find what the glaciers are saying. They used underwater microphones to record the sound of massive sheets of ice breaking away from glaciers — a phenomenon called calving — and they used time-lapse photography to observe how the glaciers changed above water.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found three types of glacial calving, each with its own distinct sound.

"Imagine if you will, a wall of ice in the ocean, and it extends from pretty much all the way to the bottom of the fjord, through the water, and then on up into the air," Deane says.

The ice can fall off above the water in a clean break, or in a messy crumble. When it breaks off beneath the surface, it's almost impossible to see.

"But the sound propagates very well," he says. "So although we can't see the calving event, we can hear it."

That means Deane and the other researchers can tell how much ice is breaking off, and ultimately, how much it's contributing to global sea-level rise. By the sounds they make, Deane says, the glaciers may just reveal their secrets.

"We also want to be able to predict, 50 years from now, how much ice is going to be melting into the ocean, and that is a far more subtle thing," he says.

Police Fire Tear Gas On Kenyan Kids Protecting A Soccer Field

Hundreds of elementary schools were protesting the illegal seizure of their playground by a private developer in Nairobi, Kenya, when police fired tear gas into the crowd.

The incident sparked outrage across the city — and on social media, where Kenyans tweeted with the hashtag #OccupyPlayGround.

But the shocking images and videos of the ordeal provoked a surprisingly proactive response. In the end, these Kenyan kids did what ordinary Kenyans are rarely able to do: Defend disappearing public space.

The process is known as "land-grabbing." A fence suddenly appears overnight around a parcel of government property. Those who protest are warded off — sometimes violently — by police. In time, a new high-rise or hotel or parking lot appears, owned by a politically connected magnate.

But this time, the land in question was next to an elementary school, Langata Road Primary School. And the protesters were kids as young as 8, who used the land to play soccer.

When developers set up a fence separating the school from the playground over the winter break, several hundred kids showed up on Monday to protest. They ended up breaking down the new fence. In response, heavily armed police fired tear gas on the kids.

"The tear gas was so bad!" Kevin Sande, 10, said Tuesday.

The gas made their eyes red and caused them to cough, other kids said.

In full disclosure, I can't be sure that Sande and his classmates I interviewed at Langata Road Primary School were the ones that got tear-gassed. In the disturbing photos from that day, it's hard to make out the faces on the green uniforms engulfed in white smoke.

"I didn't understand whether we are in Kenya or the Gaza Strip," says Rahab Mwikali, an activist, who came to the school to express sympathy. "I thought what could this be?" npr

X-Rays Open Secrets Of Ancient Scrolls

Researchers in Europe have managed to read from an ancient scroll buried when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The feat is all the more remarkable because the scroll was never opened.

The Vesuvius eruption famously destroyed Pompeii. But it also devastated the nearby town of Herculaneum. A villa there contained a library stacked with papyrus scrolls, and the hot gas and ash preserved them.

Sort of.

"To be honest, being from Kentucky, they look like pieces of coal," says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who has held some of the scrolls. "You look at the end and you can see the circular markings of how it's been rolled, but it looks more like the growth marks of a tree."

Researchers want to unroll these scrolls, but opening them is more like peeling the flaky skin of an onion.

"When you try to pull one layer off it just breaks away from the rest, and so you have ten million fragments after you've peeled it away in that manner," Seales says.

Roughly 1800 scrolls were unearthed back in the 1750s. Seales says only about 300 have survived efforts to read them.

And that's why this latest finding is such a breakthrough. The researchers used a particle accelerator in France to bombard a rolled-up scroll with x-rays. These x-rays were so sensitive, they detected changes in thickness where ink had been used to write letters. The team could make out the entire Greek alphabet inside the tightly wound scroll.

"Capturing those letters you know that's pretty amazing in itself," says Seales, who has worked with the team but was not directly involved in this latest effort. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

From just the letters, the researchers believe the scroll is in the handwriting of the philosopher Philodemus. He was of the school of Epicureanism, which stressed enjoyment of the pleasures of life, according to Seales. Several other scrolls in the collection have been identified as works by Philodemus over the years.

The researchers can't read whole words yet. And that's where Seale's computer-scientist chops will come in handy. He thinks he can make a program that can distinguish which letters belong to which layers, so the scrolls can finally be deciphered. npr

E-Cigarettes Can Churn Out High Levels Of Formaldehyde

Vapor produced by electronic cigarettes can contain a surprisingly high concentration of formaldehyde — a known carcinogen — researchers reported Wednesday.

The findings, described in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, intensify concern about the safety of electronic cigarettes, which have become increasingly popular.

"I think this is just one more piece of evidence amid a number of pieces of evidence that e-cigarettes are not absolutely safe," says David Peyton, a chemistry professor at Portland State University who helped conduct the research.
...
Some public health experts think vaping could prevent some people from starting to smoke traditional tobacco cigarettes and help some longtime smokers kick the habit.

But many health experts are also worried that so little is known about e-cigarettes, they may pose unknown risks. So Peyton and his colleagues decided to take a closer look at what's in that vapor.

"We simulated vaping by drawing the vapor — the aerosol — into a syringe, sort of simulating the lungs," Peyton says. That enabled the researchers to conduct a detailed chemical analysis of the vapor. They found something unexpected when the devices were dialed up to their highest settings.

"To our surprise, we found masked formaldehyde in the liquid droplet particles in the aerosol," Peyton says.

He calls it "masked" formaldehyde because it's in a slightly different form than regular formaldehyde — a form that could increase the likelihood it would get deposited in the lung. And the researchers didn't just find a little of the toxicant.

"We found this form of formaldehyde at significantly higher concentrations than even regular cigarettes [contain] — between five[fold] and fifteenfold higher concentration of formaldehyde than in cigarettes," Peyton says.

And formaldehyde is a known carcinogen.

"Long-term exposure is recognized as contributing to lung cancer," says Peyton. "And so we would like to minimize contact (to the extent one can) especially to delicate tissues like the lungs."

Conley says the researchers found formaldehyde only when the e-cigarettes were cranked up to their highest voltage levels.

"If you hold the button on an e-cigarette for 100 seconds, you could potentially produce 100 times more formaldehyde than you would ever get from a cigarette," Conley says. "But no human vaper would ever vape at that condition, because within one second their lungs would be incredibly uncomfortable."

That's because the vapor would be so hot. Conley compares it to overcooking a steak.

"I can take a steak and I can cook it on the grill for the next 18 hours, and that steak will be absolutely chock-full of carcinogens," he says. "But the steak will also be charcoal, so no one will eat it."

Peyton acknowledges that he found no formaldehyde when the e-cigarettes were set at low levels. But he says he thinks plenty of people use the high settings.

"As I walk around town and look at people using these electronic cigarette devices it's not difficult to tell what sort of setting they're using," Peyton says. "You can see how much of the aerosol they're blowing out. It's not small amounts."

"It's pretty clear to me," he says, "that at least some of the users are using the high levels."

So Peyton hopes the government will tightly regulate the electronic devices. The Food and Drug Administration is in the process of deciding just how strict it should be. npr

Want To Perk Up Your Love Life? Put Away That Smartphone

70 percent of women in a recent survey said smartphones were interfering in their romantic relationship....

The study, published Monday in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, says technology and the screens that consume us are creating "technoference" in couples.

That ranges from picking up the phone while partners are casually hanging out to checking Facebook while in the middle of an argument.

You see it everywhere, says Sarah Coyne, psychologist at Brigham Young University and an author of the study. Like at a restaurant where couples have their phones, "both of them, on the table, right there. I think that is so easy for them to pick it up if it buzzes."

The study surveyed 143 married or cohabiting heterosexual women and asked them about their phone, TV, computer and tablet habits. It also asked about how their partner used technology, if there was any conflict about using technology, and about their satisfaction with their relationship and life overall.

They also reported that of five scenarios presented to them, the most common interference was seeing a partner pick up his phone during "couple leisure time," with 62 percent of women reporting this happened at least once a day.

Forty percent of women said their men would get distracted by the TV during a conversation at least once a day, while a third said he would take out his phone in the middle of a conversation or during a meal together. A quarter said their partner would actually send texts or emails to another person while they were having a face-to-face conversation.

But worse than the intrusions was the way they made the women feel; they found, as you might expect, that conflict over technology was associated with poorer relationships, which in turn were associated with lower life satisfaction.

npr

Sea Otters May Help Combat Harmful Runoff Pollution Off the California Coast

by Jaymi Heimbuch

As a keystone species, the importance of sea otters for the health of coastal ecosystems can’t be understated. A new study shows that they may even play an indirect but key role in helping coastlines cope with agricultural run-off.

The study by University of California, Santa Cruz, published in mid-August, shows that by eating crabs, sea otters are helping sea grasses thrive even in the face of pollution…

(read more: TreeHugger)

dogs poop along a north-south axis

According to researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, the pooch might be aiming to poop along a north-south axis that lines up with the Earth's magnetic field.

In the journal Frontiers in Zoology they report that after watching 70 dogs do their business over a two-year period (1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations), they reached the conclusion that they (the dogs) preferred to do their No. 2s "aligned along the North-south axis under calm [magnetic field] conditions."

And when the magnetic field is in flux, "this directional behavior was abolished" — which might sometimes explain why your dog just can't seem to settle on a place to go.  npr

uh... seriously???

dali and van gogh dissected insides

To advertise Brazil's Museu de Arte de São Paulo Art School, the advertising firm ofDDB Brazil pinned the famous painters down like classroom dissection frogs. Dalí's innards aren't all that different from his dinner parties.

foram friday friends

my lab and office buddy: UV Ray

best lab buddy ever.