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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

This week in science: March 6, 2014

Gesture into the future
New gesture recognition technology is now cheaper than ever before and uses significantly less power than touch screens. AllSee, created by Bryce Kellogg, Vamsi Talla and Shyam Gollakota from the University of Washington, has a small sensor that can be installed on the phone. Through this sensor it uses television signals that already exist to recognize gestures and sources of power itself. Unlike current gesture recognition technology, the device can be in your pocket and still pick up your gestures.

Diet vs. regular
According to a paper published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, cognitive psychologist Cecile Marczinski found that mixing vodka with diet soda would get men drunk faster than if they had mixed it with regular soda. Apparently, diet soda mixers increase the rate of alcohol absorption. It may come down to the the types of sugars used because because diet drinks contain artificial sugars.

Breast milk cheese
It turns out you cannot make cheese from human breast milk. According to Michael H. Tunick, a research chemist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), there is a lack of protein in it that doesn’t allow it to curdle to make cheese. Breast milk only contains one percent protein. In early lactation, 90 percent of the proteins are whey proteins, decreasing to 50 percent in late lactation.

Bogus research papers published
Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist from the Joseph Fournier University in France, discovered that over 120 fake research papers were published in 30 journals between 2008 and 2013. The fake papers were created through the use of SCIgen, where anyone can create a bogus paper. Students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created SCIgen in 2005 to test the peer review system for both subscription-based journals and open-source journals. As of now, most publications have agreed to remove the SCIgen created papers.

 

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