John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged science · everything

www.news-medical.net

Natural compound found in olives can lower blood sugar levels and promote weight loss

A Virginia Tech study found that elenolic acid, a compound derived from olives, significantly reduced weight and improved blood sugar control in obese diabetic mice—with effects comparable to the injectable drug liraglutide and superior to metformin. The researchers identified that elenolic acid works by stimulating the release of metabolic hormones (GLP-1 and PYY) in the gut, which promote satiety and regulate blood sugar, rather than targeting metabolic tissues directly. While the natural concentration in olive products is too low to produce these benefits, the findings suggest elenolic acid could be developed into a safer and cheaper alternative to existing obesity and diabetes medications.

Permalink nutritionhealthweight lossscience

www.scientificamerican.com

Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50

Astronomer David Kipping applied Bayesian reasoning to philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2003 simulation argument, which posits that at least one of three propositions must be true: humans go extinct before developing simulation technology, advanced civilizations don't simulate their past, or we're already living in a simulation. Kipping's analysis assigns equal initial probabilities to the "physical hypothesis" (no simulations exist) and the "simulation hypothesis" (simulations do exist), concluding that the odds we live in base reality are roughly even—contradicting Elon Musk's claim that the odds are one in billions. However, Kipping cautions that if humans ever create conscious simulations, the mathematics would flip dramatically to suggest we ourselves are almost certainly simulated, while acknowledging that the simulation hypothesis may be fundamentally untestable and thus fail the standard of science.

Permalink philosophyscience

Alistair Roberts

Blackbody: scientific OLED wallpapers · Alistair Roberts

A collection of 106 free, high-resolution (4K) OLED-optimized wallpapers rendered entirely from real scientific datasets and physics simulations—including ocean drifter tracks, hurricane paths, seismic data, animal migration routes, and fluid dynamics—each meticulously sourced and licensed for personal use. Every image is generated from code based on actual data or mathematical equations with no AI image generation, though AI assisted in writing the code. The project prioritizes accuracy and reproducibility by documenting all sources and licenses alongside each wallpaper.

Permalink designscience

gcdatlas.com

gcdatlas

The real universe, drawn entirely in ASCII. Zoom from Earth to the edge of the observable universe.

Permalink science

apple.news

Climate solutions most likely to reach ‘positive tipping points’ revealed by scientists — Guardian US

A report on "positive tipping points" identifies clean electricity as the highest-leverage environmental intervention because its falling costs create cascading benefits across transport, heating, and industry while simultaneously making other transitions more economically viable. Beyond energy, the analysis highlights other high-impact interventions including coordinating commodity supply chains to eliminate deforestation-linked products, rapidly cutting methane emissions (which show results within a decade), and scaling clean cooking technologies to the 2.1 billion people still relying on harmful solid fuels. The research reveals that progress in these sectors is being held back less by lack of finance than by political choices: roughly $7.3 trillion annually flows toward nature-degrading activities compared to just $220 billion for solutions, and systemic coordination among policymakers, producers, and financial institutions could accelerate tipping points by up to eight years.

Permalink sustainabilitysciencenewsclimate

Scientific American

Can humans live forever? | Scientific American

Aging is not inevitable wear-and-tear but results from the declining effectiveness of our cells' repair and maintenance systems, which become damaged through interconnected biological processes including DNA deterioration, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. Scientists are pursuing multiple strategies to slow or reverse aging—from caloric restriction and drugs like rapamycin to more radical cellular reprogramming using Yamanaka factors, which can revert adult cells to an embryonic state and have shown promise in regenerating tissue in mice. While no biological law prevents life extension, the extraordinary complexity of aging and practical obstacles like side effects and regulatory hurdles mean dramatic lifespan increases remain unlikely, though evidence suggests diet, exercise, sleep and social connection can meaningfully improve healthspan.

Permalink healthsciencelongevity

discoverwildscience

12 Sites Buried by One Event and Preserved by It - discoverwildscience

Catastrophic disasters like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and mudslides have preserved entire ancient communities in remarkable detail—sometimes better than sites buried gradually over centuries—by sealing them off from looters, weather, and decay. The article surveys ten sites from Skara Brae in Scotland to Pompeii in Italy, arguing that lesser-known locations like Herculaneum, Ozette, and Joya de Cerén often reveal more about daily life than Pompeii's famous ruins, which now face degradation from mass tourism. While Pompeii may be history's most celebrated archaeological site, the piece contends that quieter, less-visited catastrophe sites frequently offer clearer windows into how ordinary people actually lived before disaster struck.

Permalink historysciencearchaeology

Scientific American

How our sense of beauty takes shape in the brain | Scientific American

A neuroscience study using MRI scans and machine-learning algorithms found that the brain processes aesthetic experience through two separate neural systems: one identifies what an image depicts (landscape versus figure), while another evaluates its emotional reward value through the same pleasure circuits activated by food or money. The research suggests that art expertise resharpens how these systems interact, particularly in brain regions associated with meaning-making and self-reflection, implying that arts education and art therapy operate by physically rewiring how perception and emotion connect rather than merely providing exposure to beauty.

Permalink artsciencebrain

Moss and Fog

This Living Garden Has Been Sealed for Decades | Moss and Fog

David Latimer sealed a glass carboy containing spiderwort cuttings and minimal water in 1960, watered it once more in 1972, and has left it untouched for over 66 years while it continues to thrive as a completely self-sustaining ecosystem. The closed terrarium demonstrates how plants can create their own water cycle through transpiration and condensation, and maintain a carbon cycle through photosynthesis and respiration, requiring only light as external input. Latimer plans to eventually pass the botanical heirloom to his children or donate it to the Royal Horticultural Society for continued study and preservation.

Permalink sustainabilitydiyscience

Food & Wine

kottke.org

Supersonic Trebuchet

Kottke flags a Tom Stanton video documenting his attempt to build a fully mechanical trebuchet capable of firing a plastic pellet past the speed of sound, complete with an audible sonic boom. What hooks him isn't the final feat but the iterative engineering process—the weight and strength problems Stanton has to solve along the way—which he compares favorably to old PBS process shows and suggests could inspire kids toward engineering the way it might have inspired him.

Permalink engineeringsciencevideo

www.quantamagazine.org

The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today

This Quanta piece traces how the ancient bacteria-phage arms race turns out to have supplied the molecular toolkit for human innate immunity: it follows the discovery that human cGAS-STING, viperin, and gasdermins all have functionally and structurally identical bacterial antiviral counterparts, despite near-zero sequence similarity, and explains how the 2018 explosion of newly catalogued bacterial "defense islands" collided with James Chen's cGAS-STING work to reveal this deep conservation. It's worth keeping for the bigger evolutionary argument it builds toward — that bacteria act as a rapid-fire "maker space" generating immune innovations (and even developmental genes like Wnt) that eukaryotes repeatedly borrow, lose, and repurpose, reframing immunity and biotech tool discovery (à la CRISPR) as byproducts of a billions-year-old microbial arms race.

Permalink science

www.scientificamerican.com

Can You Change Your Metabolism?

Most claims about boosting metabolism are either dangerous or false, according to experts, because metabolism is largely determined by body composition—particularly muscle mass—and remains relatively stable despite diet trends and exercise routines. While building muscle through exercise and consuming protein can produce modest increases in metabolic rate, the body compensates for increased activity by reducing energy expenditure elsewhere, and metabolism doesn't actually decline significantly until around age 60, contrary to popular belief about a "middle-aged slowdown." Ultimately, weight loss depends on eating fewer calories overall rather than on metabolism hacks, though protein and fiber can help with satiety.

Permalink nutritionhealthfitnessweight loss

www.nytimes.com

How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?

Beyond gradual climate change, scientists have identified seven vast natural systems—from coral reefs to Atlantic currents—that could undergo sudden, irreversible collapse if planetary warming crosses critical thresholds. These "tipping points" operate like switches rather than dials: once flipped, they would trigger cascading effects difficult or impossible to reverse, such as permafrost releasing massive carbon stores, Greenland's ice sheet melting irreversibly, or the Amazon rainforest degrading into savanna. The timing of these potential collapses ranges from already underway to sometime this century, but the uncertainty around predictions shouldn't obscure the genuine risks—each additional increment of warming makes these catastrophic shifts more likely.

Permalink amazonscienceresearchclimate

www.theguardian.com

Why do people love spicy food – even when it hurts to eat it?

Spicy food isn't a taste at all but a pain response: capsaicin hijacks TRPV1 receptors designed to detect tissue-damaging heat, triggering sweating, tearing and a full alarm reaction in the nervous system. The piece explains why humans nonetheless crave this via genetic variation in receptor sensitivity, desensitisation with repeated exposure, and "benign masochism" — the brain learning the sensation is safe and rewarding, releasing endorphins much like cold showers or rollercoasters. It ends with practical relief tips, noting milk, yoghurt and even mint ice-cream neutralise capsaicin far better than water or beer.

Permalink foodscience

nymag.com

Was COVID-19 a Wuhan Lab Leak? A Coronavirus Investigation

Nicholson Baker's exhaustive January 2021 piece makes the case, point by point, that COVID-19 likely originated from a laboratory accident rather than a natural spillover, tracing the decades-long history of gain-of-function research, Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli's collaborative work engineering chimeric bat-human coronaviruses, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology's proximity to a 2012 mineshaft where workers fell ill with a SARS-like pneumonia. It's notable less for offering definitive proof than for laying out, months before the theory gained mainstream legitimacy, nearly every strand of evidence and argument that major outlets and intelligence agencies would later revisit — making it worth keeping as the founding document of the lab-leak debate's serious treatment.

Permalink healthsciencecoronaviruscovid-19

medium.com

52 things I learned in 2020 - Magnetic Notes - Medium

This is Tom Whitwell's annual "52 things I learned" roundup, a grab-bag list of curious facts and findings gathered over the year rather than a single argument—covering everything from why municipal trees are planted male, to the hidden Fetal Bovine Serum in lab-grown meat, to attractive criminals getting lighter sentences, to Warsaw's clam-powered water safety system. It's worth keeping as a dense trivia stockpile with sourced links for each claim, useful for dinner-party facts, writing hooks, or spotting patterns across unrelated fields like tech, biology, economics, and history.

Permalink technologyculturehistoryenergy

Moss and Fog

Prague's Cutting Edge New Planetarium Sets Records

The Prague Planetarium has reopened after a two-year renovation with Europe's first full LED dome featuring 45 million pixels and 8K-plus resolution, allowing for vivid, immersive 360-degree displays of astronomical content and other visual experiences. Engineers integrated the cutting-edge technology into the 1950s historic building while expanding seating capacity by 20 percent and maintaining architectural constraints. Unlike Las Vegas's larger Sphere designed for concerts and spectacle, Prague's dome prioritizes scientific clarity and detail, positioning the venue as both an educational institution and a cultural landmark for immersive storytelling.

Permalink technologyarchitecturetravelscience