Tech
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Chemistry
Deep-sea oil plume goes missing
Controversy arises over whether bacteria have completely gobbled oil up.
- Computing
Going viral takes a posse, not an army
Quality of followers, not quantity, determines which tweets will fly
- Humans
Protecting innocent — and not so innocent — bystanders
Technique removes pedestrians from Google Street View images.
- Tech
The people’s pulsar
Thousands of volunteers help discover a neutron star by donating the processing power in their idle home computers.
- Tech
Research trials pose challenge to medical privacy
How — or even whether — to share a medical data collected on research subjects poses a growing dilemma. Certainly, doctors would benefit from knowing if their patients had been receiving medicines, physical therapies or dietary supplements. Or if a patient had a history of drug abuse, mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases or engaging in risky behaviors. But in the wrong hands, such sensitive data could compromise an individual’s ability to keep a job — even retain shared custody rights to children during a contentious divorce.
- Health & Medicine
‘Miracle’ tomato turns sour foods sweet
Pucker no more: That seems to be one objective of research underway at a host of Japanese universities. For the past several years, they’ve been developing bio-production systems to inexpensively churn out loads of miraculin — a natural taste-altering protein that makes sour foods seem oh so sweet. Their newest biotech reactor: grape tomatoes.
- Humans
World of proteincraft
Players compete to solve scientific puzzles in an online computer game.
- Chemistry
Receipts a large — and largely ignored — source of BPA
A host of small studies raises a big alarm about exposure to a hormone-mimicking chemical.
- Tech
Cashiers may face special risks from BPA
“People working at places that use thermal paper can have continual contact with bisphenol A. And if they knew, I think they would be horrified,” notes Koni Grob, an analytical chemist with an official government food laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s describing the thermal paper commonly used throughout Europe and North America to print store receipts.
- Chemistry
More evidence that BPA laces store receipts
People interested in limiting exposure to bisphenol A — a hormone-mimicking environmental contaminant — might want to consider wearing gloves the next time a store clerk hands over a cash-register receipt. A July 27 report by a public-interest research group has now confirmed many of these receipts have a BPA-rich powdery residue on their surface.
- Health & Medicine
Good vibrations: A greener way to pasteurize milk
Many people like the taste of raw – as in unpasteurized – milk. The problem, of course, is that germs may infect raw milk, so food safety regulations require that commercial producers heat-treat their milk. But food scientists at Louisiana State University think they’ve stumbled onto a tastier way to sterilize milk. They bombard it with sound waves.
- Tech
Nano-scale additives fight food pathogens
Nano products are all the rage, even in food science. Here at the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual meeting, on July 18, scientists described dramatic success in fighting food-poisoning bacteria by doctoring foods or their packaging with microbe-killing nanoparticles – sometimes along with natural anti-bacterial agents.
