A cyberattack that knocked out the main oil pipeline supplying the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and the potential shutdown of a major Canadian conduit could send fuel prices soaring, the Financial Post reports The outage on the Colonial Pipeline could be exacerbated by a Michigan state order forcing Enbridge Inc.’s Line 5 pipeline — supplying oil to Michigan, Ohio, Ontario and Pennsylvania refineries — to shut down on Wednesday, which could further strain U.S. oil...
Abigail Tucker’s article in Smithsonian Magazine is a fascinating look at how offspring affect their mothers’ hearts and brains in deep and enduring ways. New research sheds light on why hearts of recently delivered human mothers have shown a remarkable ability to recover from cardiac events. In tests on mice at Mount Sinai Hospital lab, cardiologist Hina Chaudhry and her research team discovered something astonishing: heart cells with DNA that doesn’t match the mother’s own. The...
When given a choice, animals rarely avoid mating with their cousins or siblings, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The study was a meta-analysis that collected and analysed information from 139 studies on mate choice, conducted over 40 years looking at 88 different species, from fruit flies to chimpanzees, CBC reports. Canadian researcher John Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of zoology at Stockholm University, told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald that he was motivated to understand...
A cyberattack has taken down the main pipeline that carries gasoline to the U.S. East Coast, elevating concern about how vulnerable critical systems are to hacking assaults, reports CNET. Colonial Pipeline, which operates pipes that carry refined petroleum products said in a statement that it has taken "certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems." It is unclear whether criminal hackers...
Researchers at the University of Central Florida have developed a sarcasm detector, Tech Xplore reports. The team taught the computer model patterns that often indicate sarcasm and combined that with teaching the program to correctly pick out cue words in sequences that were more likely to indicate sarcasm. They taught the model to do this by feeding it large data sets and then checked its accuracy. "The presence of sarcasm in text is the main...
A review of what is known about COVID-19 and the way it functions suggests the virus has a unique infectious profile, which explains why it can be so hard to treat and why some people experience so-called "long COVID," struggling with significant health issues months after infection, Medical Xpress reports. Growing evidence indicates that the virus infects the upper and lower respiratory tracts — unlike "low pathogenic" human coronavirus sub-species, which typically settle in the upper respiratory tract...
A new review in the journal Science looks at the major discoveries in hominin origins in the 150 years since Charles Darwin speculated that humans got their start in Africa and argues that fossil apes can inform us about essential aspects of ape and human evolution, including the nature of our last common ancestor. To understand hominin origins, paleoanthropologists aim to reconstruct the physical characteristics, behaviour, and environment of the last common ancestor of humans and chimps. "When...
Entomologist Michael Raupp has a colourful description of a remarkable feat occurring in nature this week, as CBC reports: "You've got a creature that spends 17 years in a COVID-like existence, isolated underground sucking on plant sap, right? In the 17th year, these teenagers are going to come out of the earth by the billions if not trillions. They're going to try to best everything on the planet that wants to eat them during this critical...
MIT researchers and colleagues have turned a "magic" material composed of atomically thin layers of carbon into three useful electronic devices. The work could usher in a new generation of quantum electronic devices for applications including quantum computing, according to an MIT article by Elizabeth A. Thomson. The devices can be superconducting, or conduct electricity without resistance. They do so through an unconventional mechanism that could give new insights into the physics of superconductivity. The researchers report...
People who were touched by a humanoid robot while conversing with it reported an improved emotional state and were more likely to comply with the robot, a small study indicates. In response to the robot's touch, most participants smiled and laughed. None pulled away. Those who were touched were more likely than those not touched to go along with the robot urging that they show interest in a particular academic course discussed, reports Tech...
