Coffee Drinking Tied to Substantially Lower Risk of Suicide

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Photo Credit: Harvard Gazette Drinking several cups of coffee daily appears to reduce the risk of suicide in men and women by about 50 percent, according to a new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). The study was published online July 2 in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

“Unlike previous investigations, we were able to assess association of consumption of caffeinated and non-caffeinated beverages, and we identify caffeine as the most likely candidate of any putative protective effect of coffee,” said lead researcher Michel Lucas, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH.

The authors reviewed data from three large U.S. studies and found that the risk of suicide for adults who drank two to four cups of caffeinated coffee per day was about half that of those who drank decaffeinated coffee or very little or no coffee.

Caffeine not only stimulates the central nervous system but may act as a mild antidepressant by boosting production of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, including serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline. This could explain the lower risk of depression among coffee drinkers that had been found in past epidemiological studies, the researchers reported.

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Horror as Swarm of 30,000 Bees Attack Couple and Kill Two Horses and Five Hens in North Texas

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Photo Credit: CorbisA swarm of about 30,000 bees attacked a North Texas couple as they exercised their miniature horses, stinging the animals so many times they died.

Kristen Beauregard, 44, was stung about 200 times, and her boyfriend about 50 times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Saturday.

But the horses, Chip and Trump, were so covered in bees they shimmered. Neither could be saved.

‘They were chasing us down, they were following us,’ Beauregard said of the incident Wednesday evening. ‘We swept up piles and piles of them … it was like a bad movie.’

The bees are being tested to see whether they are Africanized or ‘killer’ bees. It is unclear what prompted them to leave the hive.

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World’s First Fully 3D Printed Rifle Shot for the First Time (+video)

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Less than two months after the debut of the first almost entirely 3D-printed handgun, a Canadian gunsmith has created the first 3D printed rifle.

The gun maker, who goes by the online handle CanadianGunNut, is an active user on DEFCAD, the primary online forum for 3D-printed firearms. He is also known online as “Maker Matthew,” or “Koa Soprano.” Previously, CanadianGunNut successfully printed a ukelele, and he currently appears to run a private message board for printing related musical instruments. Ars’ attempt to contact CanadianGunNut through his YouTube channel was not immediately successful.

In his video, CanadianGunNut—whose actual name is unknown to Ars—noted that the gun fired a single shot, but the barrel split.

Legality questionable

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the federal law enforcement agency in Canada, seems to suggest that making such a firearm would likely be illegal in Canada, under current law.

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Turkey Clears Bird of Spying for Israel

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Photo Credit: Alamy The kestrel was discovered by residents of Altinavya, a village in Elazig province, wearing a metallic ring stamped with the words “24311 Tel Avivunia Israel”. Suspicious that the bird may have been on a spying mission for the Jewish state, villagers turned the bird over to local authorities, according to Turkish media.

So great was the level of concern medical personnel at Elazig’s Firat University initially identified the kestrel as “Israeli Spy” in their registration documents. Intensive medical examinations – including X-rays – determined that the bird was, indeed, just a bird. There were no sign of microchips that might transmit information back to Israel, local media reported. The kestrel was allowed to fly off after authorities determined there was no need to press charges.

Yet the incident shows the degree of paranoia and xenophobia regarding Israel that exists among large segments of Turkish society. It comes as talks between Turkey and Israel over compensation for families of those killed in the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident have stalled.

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Apocalyptic, Fiery Clouds Gathering Over Midwest Captured in Video

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Eerie round, orange clouds were spotted over a Michigan town, making the sky appear “on fire” and leading residents to worry that wild weather was coming.

The bizarre sight formed in the skies over the Michigan town of Iron Mountain at around 8:30 p.m. local time, and led to worries that severe thunderstorms or tornadoes were approaching.

National Weather Service Warning Coordination meteorologist Jeff Last, who posted images of the curved, tinted clouds to Twitter, said they were a rare phenomenon called Mammatus, which means “breast cloud.”

Mammatus, or mammatocumulus, clouds are often associated with severe thunderstorms, said Iron Mountain Daily News reporter Chris Tomassucci.

“The pictures don’t really capture how eerie the whole experience was,” he wrote.

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Cassini Takes First-Ever Pictures of Earth from Spacecraft Orbiting Saturn

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Thousands of astronomy fans looked to the heavens and posed for a unique picture on Friday afternoon – a shot of planet Earth from Saturn.

The first photos are are just being transmitted back now – but anyone who participated in the ‘Day the Earth Smiled’ shouldn’t hope to see their face. This was, after all, a 898million-mile photo op.


The photos, some of which have been enhanced by astronomers, show Earth as a tiny dot – only a little bigger than the North Star appears in our sky – illuminating the skies beyond Saturn.

The images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting the ringed giant since its arrival in the Saturn system in 2004.


The Earth has only been pictured in images from outer space on two other occasions. The first was in 1990, when Voyager 1 captured an image from 3.7 billion miles away. The second occasion was when Cassini took a photo in 2006 from 926 million miles away.

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High-End Stores Use Facial Recognition Tools To Spot VIPs

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesWhen a young Indian-American woman walked into the funky L.A. jewelry boutique Tarina Tarantino, store manager Lauren Twisselman thought she was just like any other customer. She didn’t realize the woman was actress and writer Mindy Kaling.

“I hadn’t watched The Office,” Twisselman says. Kaling both wrote and appeared in the NBC hit.

This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by NEC IT Solutions is supposed to prevent.

The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a “face template,” and checking it against a database.

In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s Sunday Times. If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.

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Nuclear Doomsday is Coming Today. You’ll Want to See This.

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Photo Credit: APIt’s Thursday, July 18, and nuclear Armageddon is upon us. Or at least you might be excused for thinking so when you glimpse on your colleague’s computer monitor a compelling simulation of a mushroom cloud rising over your home town.

That’s the 2.0 version of NUKEMAP — now in three dimensions! — expected for launch by late Thursday, the brainchild of a guy named Alex Wellerstein.

A historian with the American Institute of Physics, Wellerstein has had 3 million visitors to the original two-dimensional edition of his website, who have virtually detonated a whopping 17.4 million nuclear warheads over their choice of locations virtually anywhere around the world.

Launched in February 2012, the initial or “classic” version of NUKEMAP featured your choice of 18 preselected cities — from Beijing or Berlin to Tehran or Tokyo — and 23 preset atomic-warhead explosive capacities, or “yields,” numbering in kilotons, or even more stratospheric megatons. A pick of North Korean, Indian, Pakistani, Russian and U.S. bombs was on offer, along with others.

You could have gone wild and plugged in any city across the planet along with a numerical yield for your notional attack, clicked the clearly marked “Detonate” button and wham: A multicolor bulls-eye appeared onscreen, overlaid on your designated city map — described as a “mashup” of Google Maps and algorithms for nuclear blast effects.

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Live In The South? Your Life Expectancy Is Shorter, Sicker Than The Rest Of The U.S.

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Photo Credit: GettyIf you’re 65 and living in Hawaii, here’s some good news: Odds are you’ll live another 21 years. And for all but five of those years, you’ll likely be in pretty good health.

Hawaii tops the charts in the government’s first state-by-state look at how long Americans age 65 can expect to live, on average, and how many of those remaining years will be healthy ones.

Retirement-age Mississippians fared worst, with only about 17 1/2 more years remaining and nearly seven of them in poorer health.

U.S. life expectancy has been growing steadily for decades, and is now nearly 79 for newborns. The figures released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate life expectancy for people 65 years old, and what portion will be free of the illnesses and disabilities suffered late in life.

“What ultimately matters is not just the length of life but the quality of life,” said Matt Stiefel, who oversees population health research for Kaiser Permanente.

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New Sabre Air-Breathing Rocket Engine to Dramatically Cut Flight Times, Drastically Reduce Costs of Space Payloads (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reaction Engines LtdImagine taking off from a runway like a normal aeroplane but flying so high and so fast that when you unclip your seatbelt, you float around the cabin. Look out of the windows: on one side is the inky blackness of deep space, while on the other is the electric blue of your home planet, Earth.

This is no joyride for a few brief minutes of space-tourism weightlessness. Instead you are three, five or even 10 times higher than those little hops. In front of you is your destination: a space station. Perhaps it is a hotel or a place of work. You are in low earth orbit – and you’ve got there in far less time than it takes for a transatlantic flight.

This is the promise of the spaceplane, and it took a step closer to reality yesterday. UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts confirmed the government’s £60m investment in Reaction Engines Ltd.

Spaceplanes are what engineers call single-stage-to-orbit (if you really want to geek out, just use the abbreviation: SSTO). They have long been a dream because they would be fully reusable, taking off and landing from a traditional runway.

By building reusable spaceplanes, the cost of reaching orbit could be reduced to a twentieth current levels. That makes spaceplanes a game changer both for taking astronauts into space and for deploying satellites and space probes.

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