Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

“First, we have known for a long time that SES is a powerful determinant of health, but the underlying mechanisms through which our bodies ‘remember’ the experiences of poverty are not known,” said McDade, professor of anthropology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and director of the Laboratory for Human Biology Research. McDade said he was surprised to find so many associations between socioeconomic status and DNA methylation, across such a large number of genes. “These are the areas we’ll be focusing on to determine if DNA methylation is indeed an important mechanism through which socioeconomic status can leave a lasting molecular imprint on the body, with implications for health later in life,” McDade said.

Source: www.eurekalert.org

A new business in small satellites orbiting the Earth

Military radar satellites, which bounce radio waves off the surface of the Earth in order to build up a detailed picture of it, were said to be capable of detecting enemy submarines by measuring the tiny disturbances that their wakes left in the curvature of the surface of the ocean. A competitor, Finnish company , already has satellites in orbit gathering data. The concern is that, with so many new satellites in orbit operated by so many different companies, the chance of losing control of one goes up.

Source: www.economist.com

Relearn CSS layout

Through a series of simple, composable layouts, Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS. Employing algorithmic layout design means doing away with breakpoints, “magic numbers”, and other hacks, to create context-independent layout components. Every Layout is here to help you learn (or relearn) CSS layout, using simple components (primitives) and a compositional approach.

Source: every-layout.dev

Why Don’t We Hear About More Species Going Extinct?

All of which raises the question: If so many species are going extinct, why don’t we hear about new extinctions every day? For example, a 2005 paper by Stuart Butchart and other conservation experts identified several types of evidence to be used before a species could be considered “possibly extinct.” One of the most well-known cases of the Romeo Error took place in the Philippines, where the island of Cebu experienced so much deforestation that several of its native species were declared extinct early in the 20th century.

Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com

“Too Cheap to Meter”: A History of the Phrase (2016)

He noted that Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, in a 1954 address to science writers, had coined the phrase to describe fusion power, not fission. *

Nuclear critics believe Strauss was speaking of nuclear power and claim that, as AEC Chairman, he spoke for a budding industry too. In the years after the speech, the lay public and the power industry never questioned that Strauss’s predictions were for fission power.

Source: public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov

Relearn CSS Layout: Every Layout

Through a series of simple, composable layouts, Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS. Employing algorithmic layout design means doing away with breakpoints, “magic numbers”, and other hacks, to create context-independent layout components. Every Layout is here to help you learn (or relearn) CSS layout, using simple components (primitives) and a compositional approach.

Source: every-layout.dev

Life’s a blur – but we don’t see it that way

Since we do not notice our constant saccades, this suggests that the brain specifically suppresses the signals that reach our retina while a saccadic eye movement is in process. In experiments with macaques that were trained to make predictable saccades, brain cells that receive signals from one particular spot in the retina switched from responding to things currently in view there to things that would show up only after the saccade. Wurtz and others believe that this kind of signal nudges brain cells to start responding to things that their part of the retina will see only after the saccade.

Source: www.knowablemagazine.org

How modern life is transforming the human skeleton

And from the discovery of a curious spiky growth on the back of many people’s skulls to the realisation that our jaws are getting smaller, to the enigmatic finding that German youths currently have narrower elbows than ever before, it’s clear that modern life is having an impact on our bones. The man’s skull, arm bones, collarbones, and the bones of his lower legs suggested that he had been immensely strong and unusually tall. Shahar thinks the spikes form because the hunched posture creates extra pressure on the place where the neck muscles attach to the skull – and the body responds by laying down fresh layers of bone.

Source: www.bbc.com

Cl-cpp-generator: a Common Lisp library to generate c/C++ code

The following function write-source hashes the output of each call in `*file-hashes*` and will not emit code of unmodified s-expressions into C source code. So if you run this code in a fresh Common Lisp instance all C files will be touched and require a rebuild. The function (test ) will emit C code as defined by the s-expression in using the emit-cpp function into /dev/shm/1.