science
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Vous reprendrez bien un peu de quinoa ?
Ça a beaucoup jasé sur le quinoa de Méluch’, dernièrement. Pour celles et ceux qui n’ont pas suivi, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, dans une interview à Gala, a déclaré tout le bien qu’il pensait de la chénopodiacée en question: La salade au quinoa a joué un grand rôle pour moi cet été. Elle m’a aidé à faire une sorte
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Air Cancer
A new study from MIT suggests that in the US, 53,000 people a year die prematurely because of automobile pollution, compared to 34,000 people a year who die in traffic accidents. » More Americans die from car pollution than car accidents, Quartz. The air we breathe is laced with cancer-causing substances and is being officially classified
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L’intelligence sous-estimée des animaux
Take the question of whether we are the only species to care about the well-being of others. It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces. But for decades, these observations were ignored, and more attention was paid
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Neanderthal : Picture for the inside
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We three groups were all enough alike that some of our ancestors could interbreed and produce fertile offspring. But the differences in the genomes of Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans are also revealing the genetic traits that set us apart from them—the traits that made us human. I’ve been comparing it to the pictures of
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Dans les pensées de nos mères. Littéralement.
Recent findings showed that during pregnancy, mothers and fetuses often exchange cells that can apparently survive in bodies for years, a phenomenon known as microchimerism. Scientists had found that in mice, fetal cells could even migrate into the brains of mothers. Now researchers have the first evidence fetal cells do so in humans as well.
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ASMR : Massages for your brain
ASMR : Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a physical sensation characterized by a pleasurable tingling that typically begins in the head and scalp, and often moves down the spine and through the limbs. Also known as : AIHO (Attention induced head orgasm), AIE (Attention induced euphoria), or simply « head orgasms »/ »head tingles ». » ASMR : Massages
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Bath Salts, la dangereuse insaisissable
The last four decades have seen plenty of whipped-up hysteria about various fad intoxicants of the moment. But the fear generated by bath salts seems well earned. Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts « the worst drug » he has seen in his 20 years there. « With LSD, you might see
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La science du Gaydar
Should you trust your gaydar in everyday life? Probably not. In our experiments, average gaydar judgment accuracy was only in the 60 percent range. This demonstrates gaydar ability — which is far from judgment proficiency. But is gaydar real? Absolutely. » The Science of Gaydar’, SundayReview, The New York Times.
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Apocalypse Zombie, phase 1
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— Un cannibale abattu à Miami. » New Jersey Man Throws Intestines at Cops. » A Montauban, un homme ivre mange l’oreille d’un autre. Ça commence. Je ne regrette pas d’avoir pris le temps, avec mes amis du club Apocalypse, d’établir un plan d’urgence, et d’acheter un Leatherman. L’opération NPSM (Ne partez pas sans moi) est en
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The Boundary Effect
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I know I came in here for something, but I can’t remember what it is If you’ve ever said something like this, you’ve probably experienced an event boundary. Many, if not all, of us have had the experience of walking into a room and forgetting exactly what it is we came in there to do.
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Qu’est-ce qui nous différencie des grands singes?
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Essentially what that says, is, take a chimp brain foetally, and let it go two or three more rounds of divisions and you get a humain brain instead. And outcomes symphonies, and ideologies, and hopscotch there. What that tells you is, with enough quantity, you invent quality. » Robert Sapolsky, février 2011. Réponse à la
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Venus, Jupiter et Paris
Photo: Serge Brunier (TWAN), depuis la Tour Montparnasse. » Astronomy Picture of the Day. On les voyait clairement depuis ma terrasse avec Max, en attendant le début de Top Chef, je me demandais ce que c’était (Max penchait pour une planète Melancolia-style), jusqu’à ce que sa proprio nous éclaire quelques jours après. » Best Venus-Jupiter conjunction in
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Pourquoi il faut laisser les enfants manger de la terre
In a study published online today in Science, the researchers show that in mice, exposure to microbes in early life can reduce the body’s inventory of invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells, which help to fight infection but can also turn on the body, causing a range of disorders such as asthma or inflammatory bowel
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Prof et nouvelles technologies
Sur 65 élèves, 51 élèves – soit plus des trois-quart – ont recopié à des degrés divers ce qu’ils trouvaient sur internet, sans recouper ou vérifier les informations ou réfléchir un tant soit peu aux éléments d’analyses trouvés, croyaient-ils, au hasard du net. (…) Je crois qu’avec cette expérience pédagogique j’ai d’abord démontré aux élèves
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«This American Life» retire un de ses épisodes pour bidonnage
I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show « The Agony and
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Les acides gras trans sont mauvais pour vous (air connu)
Non seulement ils font grossir, augmentent les risques cardio-vasculaires et sont liés à une augmentation des risques de cancer (du sein, par exemple), mais ils dégradent aussi notre humeur et la qualité de notre sperme (bon, ce dernier point, j’avoue que je m’en carre, mais quand même). This study provides the first evidence linking dTFA
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La fin de l’Encyclopaedia Britannica papier
Gary Marchionini, the dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the fading of print encyclopedias was an inexorable trend that will continue. There’s more comprehensive material available on the Web, Mr. Marchionini said. The thing that you get from an encyclopedia is one
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Les leçons à tirer des films catastrophes
Their special effects can be realistic enough to make us feel like we are right there in the heart of the storm. But frequently, the heroes and heroines of these movies respond to disasters in ways that bear no resemblance to what people in the real world should do. We can nevertheless use disaster films
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Les limites de TED
But: We live in a world of increasingly networked knowledge. And it’s a world that allows us to appreciate what has always been true: that new ideas are never sprung, fully formed, from the heads of the inventors who articulate them, but are always — always — the result of discourse and interaction and, in
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Avortement après naissance
Alberto Giubilini, from Monash University, and Francesca Minerva, from the University of Melbourne, say a foetus and a newborn are equivalent in their lack of a sense of their own life and aspiration. They contend this justifies what they call »after-birth abortion » as long as it is painless, because the baby is not harmed by