Month: June 2016

(credit: Nottingham Trent University)

To make sure you’ll be able to jog your memory quickly, you might want to go for an actual jog a little after learning something.

Healthy volunteers that exercised four hours after learning patterns had better recall 48 hours later than those that didn’t exercise at all or exercised directly after learning. The delayed exercise may spur the release of molecules that boost the brain’s normal ability to consolidate and bank memories for long-term storage, researchers report in the journal Current Biology. If the finding holds up in further studies, it may suggest that working out a little after cramming could help bulk up your noggin.

For the study, researchers had 72 healthy volunteers spend 40 minutes learning the location of 90 objects on a screen—like a cartoon beach ball on the center right. The researchers immediately tested how well each participant did learning the objects' locations, then split up the participants into three groups. One group went directly into a 35-minute interval training on a stationary bike (with an intensity of up to 80 percent of their maximum heart rate). The second group went into a quiet room and watched nature documentaries until it was time for their four-hour delayed workout. And a third group acted as the control group, which just watched nature documentaries and hung out—but didn’t work out—in the gym.

Getty Images | Ker Robertson

Race leader Kazuki Nakajima of Toyota Gazoo Racing suffers engine problems with less than 3 minutes to run of the Le Mans 24 Hour race handing victory to the Porsche Team.

14 more images in gallery

The 24 Hours of Le Mans holds a special place in our hearts. More than any other race, it's a crucible in which new technology is forged, technology that's directly relevant to the cars you or I drive on the road. And for 23 hours and 57 minutes, this year's race belonged to Toyota Gazoo Racing, which put on a fine show with its pair of TS050 hybrid race cars. But racing can be a cruel, cruel sport—something I know all too well—and this year was crueler than most.

The race got underway on Saturday during torrential rain, with the first 50 minutes or so conducted under a safety car as the ACO (the race organizers) waited for the track to dry sufficiently for things to get going properly. At the front of the field the battle for the overall win was one fought between Porsche and Toyota with their hybrid LMP1 prototypes. Both of Audi Sport Team Joest's R18 hybrids faltered early on, as did the #1 Porsche 919 Hybrid, but the remaining three cars (the #5 and #6 Toyota TS050s and the #2 Porsche) stayed in close contention with multiple lead changes between them throughout the course of the race.

The #5 Toyota of Sebastien Buemi, Anthony Davidson, and Kazuki Nakajima looked set for victory after a strong performance in the final quarter of the race. The Toyotas were able to run for 14 laps between fuel stops—one more than either the Audis or Porsches, and the #5 stretched a lead over the #2 Porsche 919 Hybrid (Neel Jani, Romain Dumas, and Marc Lieb) and its sister TS050 (Mike Conway, Stéphane Sarrazin, and Kamui Kobayashi) until it all went tragically wrong halfway around the penultimate lap. A third of the way down the Mulsanne Straight, with Nakajima at the wheel, the #5 Toyota started losing power. In short order, its 50-second lead over the Porsche evaporated, and the car came to a halt just past the finish line—with three minutes still on the clock.

All your email. Threaded by conversation

E-mail clients are a personal thing. Something I love is not necessarily something you love, and I'm okay with that. Maybe I'm just picky, but I am an equal opportunity hater when it comes to email clients, and I've tried quite a few. A couple of years ago I stumbled upon Airmail and never looked back. Bloop just released Airmail version 3.0 last month.

Back in the day I used Eudora, but I've also used Thunderbird, Outlook, and Apple's own Mail client. In Mac OS 9 days, I even tried out a client called Nisus Email. There are many more that have briefly messed up my inbox and then gone. I don't mind paying for an e-mail client, but it has to do its job the way I want it to. So what do I want it to do?

The first thing is that it should not be integrated with its own calendar or to-do list. This sounds strange, but I often find myself reading an e-mail that has a list of dates and times for a possible event. In an integrated client, I have to flip back and forth between tabs to really check those dates. Sure, you can usually get a mini-calendar to one side, but then you have to click through day-by-day. If the applications are separate, I can put them side by side and get a much clearer view. This works especially well when I have more than a single screen available.

(credit: M. Noth)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is sounding the alarm over a recent uptick in outbreaks of turtle-related infections. Outbreaks in these infections largely involve kids.

Specifically, the wee, shelled reptiles sparked 15 multistate outbreaks of Salmonella infections between 2006 and 2014. According to the CDC's report in this week's edition of Emerging Infectious Diseases, turtles caused a total of 921 illnesses, 156 hospitalizations, and the death of an infant. The median age of a those sickened in the 15 outbreaks was 10.

The agency noted that the outbreaks seem to be increasing since 2006, with eight in 2012 alone. And according to another recent CDC report, there were four additional multistate outbreaks between January 2015 and April 2016, sickening 133 people in 26 states. Forty-one percent of cases in those four outbreaks were kids under the age of five.

(credit: Kevin Krejci)

Plastics are great. They can take any shape and serve an endless variety of roles. But... the beginning and end of a plastic’s life are problematic. While some plastics are made from renewable agricultural products, most are derived from petroleum. Plastics are not as easy to recycle as we'd like, and a huge percentage ends up in landfills (or the ocean), where they can be virtually immortal.

The easy way to recycle plastic is to just rip it up, melt it down, and pour a new mold. But that only works when the plastic is all the same chemical type, which is a level of purity you rarely find in a recycling bin. Without separating plastics precisely into different types, you get a mixture that is much less useful than pure plastics. We’re limited in what we can make out of it. Other methods for recycling plastics require serious energy input, like high pressure and temperatures over 400°C. That can produce a variety of hydrocarbon compounds, but they can be difficult to work with.

Recently, a team led by Xiangqing Jia of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry decided to try some chemical tricks to turn some of these plastics into something useful, even if it’s not more plastic. They worked with polyethylene, which makes up the majority of the plastic we use. Polyethylenes are essentially long chains made of repeating links of carbon, with hydrogen hanging off the side. The challenge is to break that resilient chain into shorter pieces so we can use the pieces to make other compounds.

NASA makes the case that humans offer decided advantages over robots. (credit: NASA/KSC)

The dazzling sunlight that flooded the lake-front restaurant where I sat down with Chris Kraft in 2014 was nothing compared to the brightness in his eyes. He'd just turned 90 and was frustrated that NASA hadn't flown any humans beyond low-Earth orbit since he was the agency's first flight director during Apollo. As much as anyone else, Kraft had built NASA and put men on the moon. You would think he'd want to see humans on Mars soon. Instead, he spent the next 90 minutes eating pasta and explaining that Mars, for now, is best left to robots.

NASA’s justification for sending humans to Mars has something to do with jump-starting the search for life while furthering research and exploration on the red planet. However, even under the space agency’s most wildly optimistic plans, humans will not reach the surface of Mars until the late 2030s. During his lifetime, Kraft has watched the increasing sophistication of robots and artificial intelligence. He imagines that this progress will continue apace or even accelerate. With these trends, the robots and rovers of the 2030s will certainly have some impressive capabilities. If so, why should NASA spend 20 to 40 times as much to send humans to Mars when robots could be almost as able, at a fraction of the cost?

The human rationale

It’s a question perhaps best answered by one of the space agency’s foremost modern explorers, John Grunsfeld. Not only was Grunsfeld a five-time flier on the space shuttle and chief repairman of the Hubble Space Telescope, he also served as the agency’s chief scientist. I had a chance to put the question to Grunsfeld before he left NASA this spring.