It’s no secret that smoking is bad for you. Cigarettes are responsible for one in every five deaths in the U.S. — that’s more than 480,000 people a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But beyond the toll smoking takes on the human body, the tobacco industry is damaging the environment and putting Earth on track for an even unhealthier future.
A recent report from the World Health Organization suggests that Big Tobacco causes “severe environmental consequences,” including deforestation, waste dumping and pumping fossil fuels into the air.
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An man smokes a cigarette on World No Tobacco Day in Hyderabad, India, on Wednesday, May 31, 2017.
Harvard has revoked at least 10 prospective students’ acceptance letters after it was discovered that the students shared racist and sexually explicit memes via a private Facebook group chat.
The group chat, which was at one point named “Harvard Memes for Horny Bourgeois Teens,” was formed in December of last year as an offshoot of the main Harvard Class of 2021 Facebook Group, the Harvard Crimson reported.
Students used the group chat to share offensive content that would have gotten them banned from the main class of 2021 Facebook group. Memes traded in the group reportedly mocked sexual assault, pedophilia, the Holocaust and children’s deaths.
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The Baker Library at the Harvard Business School on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Tuesday, March 7, 2017.
Food waste is a global problem: One-third of food produced for human consumption (that’s 1.3 billion tons) gets lost or wasted every year. Not only is it an expensive waste of resources, but it is an insulting reality to live with considering 795 million people — one in nine people — suffer from chronic undernourishment.
Now, researchers at Cornell University have found a way to turn food waste into something useful. In the journal Bioresource Technology, the engineers outline a two-step process that converts tossed away ingredients into fuel.
“Food waste should have a high value. We’re treating it as a resource, and we’re making marketable products out of it,” Roy Posmanik, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Food waste is still carbon – a lot of carbon.”
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A truck dumps Cornell dining hall food waste at the university’s composting facility in March 2017.
At Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled its latest hardware: HomePod. It’s a speaker — the gadget costs $350 and will be available in December — that will bring Apple Music and voice assistant Siri to your home. The smart assistant speaker has immediately been compared to others in the market like Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Google Home.
“What we tried to do is build something that is a breakthrough speaker first,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg. “Music is deep in our DNA, dating back from iTunes and iPod. And so we wanted something that, No. 1, sounded unbelievable. I think when people listen to it, they are going to be shocked over the quality of the sound. And of course it does a lot of other things too … but we wanted a really high-quality audio experience as well.”
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The HomePod speaker is seen in a showroom during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday in San Jose , Calif.
Mars and the Earth may have more in common than we thought. NASA just revealed photos of Mars taken by its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images look strikingly similar to planet Earth.
The MRO, which has sent thousands of vibrant images back to scientists, has documented everything from dust storms to mineral hills since its launch nearly 12 years ago. The landscapes are somewhat like red deserts or canyons. “Earth has more in common with Mars than you might think,” NASA wrote in a recent video uploaded to YouTube.
MRO is used to better understand materials, subsurface water, dust and weather on Mars, according to NASA’s website. It’s also great at supplying us with gorgeous photos of the red planet.
The robots may soon take one of the best jobs of them all: whiskey taste-testing.
Scientists recently designed a set of sensors, playfully called a “tongue,” that can analyze the chemical composition of whiskey and tell us about its age, country of origin and malt status.
The sensors are made of glowing solutions that change brightness when drops of whiskey are added to them. The result ultimately indicates different properties of the liquor — which may be noticeable to a whiskey master, but without the chemical certainty.
Some studies suggest that not sleeping enough is just as damaging to our health as smoking, and that getting less than six hours could lead to medical issues and — even worse — shave years off your life span.
“People often say you can sleep when you’re dead, and I say that’s true, but you’ll be dead a lot sooner if you don’t sleep right now,” said Lisa Meltzer, a doctor and associate professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health. “The science is quite clear that insufficient sleep leads to a significant impact on all aspects of functioning.” After all, research suggests that 24 hours without sleep is similar to being legally drunk.
The bad news: Fifty to seventy million Americans already suffer from sleep disorders. But the good news: We’re not necessarily damned if we don’t get a full eight hours.
A biotech company is trying to transform future treatments of Parkinson’s by transplanting brain cells from pigs into the brains of people with the disease.
There’s currently no cure for Parkinson’s disease, a condition that progressively limits a person’s ability to move. The age of onset and the speed of progression vary, but it affects nearly 1 million U.S. residents. Parkinson’s essentially causes the loss of dopamine-producing brain cells, which assist our brains with regulating and controlling movement. As it stands, there’s medicine to treat this, but its effectiveness starts to dwindle after a few years of use.
Now, Living Cell Technologies in Auckland, New Zealand, hopes that its new methods can also slow down the disease’s progression. Researchers took cells from pigs’ choroid plexus — a part of the brain that has a “cocktail of growth factors and signaling molecules known to keep nerve cells healthy,” according to New Scientist — and planted them into the brains of 18 patients. They put the cells in capsules with a coating made from seaweed, which helps stop patients’ immune system from attacking the foreign pig cells and also helps “growth factors” move into nearby human brain tissue.
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Pig brain cells were transferred to the brains of humans with Parkinson’s disease.
Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute are closer than ever to developing a vaccine to fight heroin addiction, the institute announced in a statement on June 6.
Researchers at TSRI have been working for more than eight years to develop a vaccine that would block the “high” that heroin users feel, making it easier for people to recover from heroin addiction by helping to eliminate the “motivation” to use the drug. Their latest findings were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in June.
What would the vaccine do?
The vaccine — which has been tested on rhesus monkeys — works by training the body’s immune system to fight heroin molecules, creating antibodies that “neutralize” the heroin and block the molecules from getting to the brain, according the statement from TSRI.
Interracial marriage was legalized 50 years ago Monday in the Loving v. Virginia case — and people on Twitter are celebrating the landmark decision in perhaps the most adorable way.
With the hashtag #LovingDay, people are sharing family pictures and Pinterest-worthy wedding shots. Let’s take a look of some of the heartwarming stories.
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Mildred Loving and her husband, Richard Loving, are pictured in a file photo from Jan. 26, 1965.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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