Science X Newsletter Week 40

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Here is your customized Science X Newsletter for week 40:

	New nanomaterial can extract hydrogen fuel from seawater It's possible to produce hydrogen to power fuel cells by extracting the gas from seawater, but the electricity required to do it makes the process costly. UCF researcher Yang Yang has come up with a new hybrid nanomaterial that harnesses solar energy and uses it to generate hydrogen from seawater more cheaply and efficiently than current materials.
	Tobacco smokers could gain 86 million years of life if they switch to vaping, study finds Up to 6.6 million cigarette smokers will live substantially longer if cigarette smoking is replaced by vaping over a ten-year period, calculates a research team led by investigators from Georgetown Lombardi Cancer Center. In all, cigarette smokers who switch to e-cigarettes could live 86.7 million more years with policies that encourage cigarette smokers to switch completely to e-cigarettes.
	Nobel physics prize awards discovery in gravitational waves (Update) Three U.S.-based scientists won the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for detecting faint ripples flying through the universe—the gravitational waves predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein that provide a new understanding of the universe.
	Evidence suggests life on Earth started after meteorites splashed into warm little ponds Life on Earth began somewhere between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, after meteorites splashed down and leached essential elements into warm little ponds, say scientists at McMaster University and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Their calculations suggest that wet and dry cycles bonded basic molecular building blocks in the ponds' nutrient-rich broth into self-replicating RNA molecules that constituted the first genetic code for life on the planet.
	Scientists can now produce electricity from tears A team of Irish scientists has discovered that applying pressure to a protein found in egg whites and tears can generate electricity. The researchers from the Bernal Institute, University of Limerick (UL), Ireland, observed that crystals of lysozyme, a model protein that is abundant in egg whites of birds as well as in the tears, saliva and milk of mammals can generate electricity when pressed. Their report is published today (October 2) in the journal, Applied Physics Letters.
	Scientists pinpoint the singularity for quantum computers Researchers from the University of Bristol have discovered that super-powerful quantum computers, which scientists and engineers across the world are racing to build, need to be even more powerful than previously thought before they can beat today's ordinary PCs.
	Neanderthals didn't give us red hair but they certainly changed the way we sleep Geneticists have now firmly established that roughly two percent of the DNA of all living non-African people comes from our Neanderthal cousins.
	One hour of exercise a week can prevent depression A landmark study led by the Black Dog Institute has revealed that regular exercise of any intensity can prevent future depression - and just one hour can help.
	Cats kill one million birds a day in Australia Feral and pet cats kill more than one million birds in Australia every day, new research showed Wednesday, with the staggering slaughter driving the decline of many species.
	Meet the hominin species that gave us genital herpes Two herpes simplex viruses infect primates from unknown evolutionary depths. In modern humans these viruses manifest as cold sores (HSV1) and genital herpes (HSV2).
	New insights on dark energy The universe is not only expanding - it is accelerating outward, driven by what is commonly referred to as "dark energy." The term is a poetic analogy to label for dark matter, the mysterious material that dominates the matter in the universe and that really is dark because it does not radiate light (it reveals itself via its gravitational influence on galaxies). Two explanations are commonly advanced to explain dark energy. The first, as Einstein once speculated, is that gravity itself causes objects to repel one another when they are far enough apart (he added this "cosmological constant" term to his equations). The second explanation hypothesizes (based on our current understanding of elementary particle physics) that the vacuum has properties that provide energy to the cosmos for expansion.
	Mental training changes brain structure and reduces social stress Meditation is beneficial for our well-being. This ancient wisdom has been supported by scientific studies focusing on the practice of mindfulness. However, the words "mindfulness" and "meditation" denote a variety of mental training techniques that aim at the cultivation of various different competencies. In other words, despite growing interest in meditation research, it remains unclear which type of mental practice is particularly useful for improving either attention and mindfulness or social competencies, such as compassion and perspective-taking.
	Breaking the rules: Heavy chemical elements alter theory of quantum mechanics A series of complicated experiments involving one of the least understood elements of the Periodic Table has turned some long-held tenets of the scientific world upside down.
	Recently discovered phenomenon could provide a way to bypass the limits to Moore's Law New research has shown that an exotic kind of magnetic behavior discovered just a few years ago holds great promise as a way of storing data—one that could overcome fundamental limits that might otherwise be signaling the end of "Moore's Law," which describes the ongoing improvements in computation and data storage over recent decades.
	Deep sleep critical for visual learning Remember those "Magic Eye" posters from the 1990s? You let your eyes relax, and out of the tessellating structures, a 3-D image of a dolphin or a yin yang or a shark would emerge.
	Time out: Dangers of disrupting your body clock Messing with your body's clock is dangerous business, in fact it could make you sick—or worse.
	New NASA study shows moon once had an atmosphere A new study shows that an atmosphere was produced around the ancient Moon, 3 to 4 billion years ago, when intense volcanic eruptions spewed gases above the surface faster than they could escape to space. The study, supported by NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
	Scientists find there is something universal about what occurs in the brain when it processes stories New brain research by USC scientists shows that reading stories is a universal experience that may result in people feeling greater empathy for each other, regardless of cultural origins and differences.
	The 'myth' of language history: Languages do not share a single history The 'myth' of language history: languages do not share a single history but different components evolve along different trajectories and at different rates.A large-scale study of Pacific languages reveals that forces driving grammatical change are different to those driving lexical change. Grammar changes more rapidly and is especially influenced by contact with unrelated languages, while words are more resistant to change.
	Bee-harming pesticides in 75 percent of honey worldwide: study Traces of pesticides that act as nerve agents on bees have been found in 75 percent of honey worldwide, raising concern about the survival of these crucial crop pollinators, researchers said Thursday.

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