HON CHEMISTRY: So ordinarily it looks like just any old hunk of rock, but this is a picture of uranium ore under UV light. Pretty cool, huh?!? Here’s our beginning discussion of the unique properties of radioactive nuclides. And as a bonus, this vodcast has a head start at looking at nuclear equations. Woohoo!!
My article was about rice grains loaded with cow cells could possibly be a new alternative to regular meat. In the article, Meghan Rosen claims that regular cattle farming dispenses up to 100 million metric tons of methane into the atmosphere every year. She claims this and other alternative farming like cricket farming and fermented fungal spores are the future of meat in this world.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/could-rice-meat-hybrid-be-dinner
a type of snail known as the rough periwinkle snail that, unlike its relatives, delivers live birth rather than laying eggs. Before hatching, embryos in the rough periwinkle develop and mature inside the mother’s brood pouch. When the embryos are ready, they might not be forced out of the mother’s body; instead, they might have to crawl out on their own. This may give the eggs an advantage of protection.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/periwinkle-snail-live-birth-evolution-reproduction
Researchers found out that when you shoot light onto a semiconductor, small particles form called excitons, which have a net positive energy (gain energy). Researchers have found that these excitons possess very high binding energy. Then, the light shoots back into the semiconductors and breaks the bond between an electron and an exciton hole, causing it to “lose energy”. Researchers hope to use this property of excitons to study novel fazes of quantum materials. These quantum materials would help develop future technology.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-exciton-holes-insights-atomically-thin.html
When people come home from work or school, most are welcomed by a fuzzy friend. Researcher Kerri Rodriguez has been studying the benefits animals can have on your
mood and body. She has found that pets can reduce stress, help with immune system health, and so much more. Patricia Pendry is a psychologist who has done many tests to prove that animals lower stress levels. She focuses on the hormone that is produced when people are stressed. She did an experiment where she had college students spit saliva into a tube right when they walked onto campus. Then she had the students go play with animals for 10 minutes. She then had them provide another saliva sample. The sample showed that their stress hormone levels decreased immensely after playing with animals. Animals can benefit us in more ways than we know.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/pets-animals-boost-health-wellbeing-psychology
Just like people, leaves can get too hot and then stop working. A study showed that at an average temperature of 116°F, leaves can die and stop working. If the temperature rose 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit from now then leaves would start dying in big groups. Scientists predict this could happen by the year 2100. Right now 1 in 10,000 leaves get too hot for work. If the leaves can’t work then no oxygen is produced for the world to continue.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/climate-leaves-too-hot-for-photosynthesis
Honeybees rely on plants for food. Researchers in Italy have seen an increased amount of pollen stealing in bees. A video was released by naturalists Tiziano Londei and Giuliana Marzi, showing honeybees taking pollen off the backs of bumblebees. Honeybees tend to target female bumblebees. They steal in areas where there is less pollen.
Honeybees rely on plants for food. Researchers in Italy have seen an increased amount of pollen stealing in bees. A video was released by naturalists Tiziano Londei and Giuliana Marzi, showing honeybees taking pollen off the backs of bumblebees. Honeybees tend to target female bumblebees. They steal in areas where there is less pollen.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybees-italy-steal-pollen-bumblebees
A study that involved strapping a camera to a babies head for one and a half years has given us insight into how babies learn new words and develop over time. Given only the inputs that the camera recorded the A.I. program was able to pick out certain objects in the real world. This data showed that babies are able to learn everything just by listening to the people around them and by picking up small things in conversation that you wouldn’t think that they would pick up.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/babies-ai-learn-words-model
The MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa spotted something strange orbiting a pulsar. A pulsar are a type of neutron star that quickly spin, rotating in fractions of a second, while sending out powerful beams of radiation like a cosmic lighthouse. It’s huge, possibly a super heavy neutron star or one of the lightest black holes, or even something totally new. By watching pulsar, PSR J0514−4002E, scientists noticed it’s got a companion object with a weight somewhere between 2.1 and 2.7 times the sun’s mass, which is around the amount a neutron star can be before it collapses into a black hole.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/enigma-pulsar-companion-mass-ticks