3 posts tagged “science”

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Caffeine may help older women ward off mental decline, research suggests

French researchers compared women aged 65 and older who drank more than three cups of coffee per day with those who drank one cup or less per day.

Those who drank more caffeine showed less decline in memory tests over a four year period.

The study, published in the journal Neurology, raises the possibility that caffeine may even protect against the development of dementia.

It might be that caffeine could slow the dementia process Dr Karen Ritchie French National Institute for Health and Medical Research

Caffeine is a known psychostimulant, but this study appears to suggest its effects may be more profound.

Dr Karen Ritchie of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research warned against jumping to premature conclusions.

The study did not find that caffeine consumers had lower rates of dementia.

She said it was not clear why the protective effect did not seem to apply to men.

clipped from www.badastronomy.com

Every year. Every fracking year.

The email, I hear, is going around again. The one that says that if you go outside next month and look at Mars, it’ll be as big as the Moon. You know; the one I debunked here and here and here and here, every year since this dumb thing started back in 2003.

Short and sweet: Mars won’t look big to the eye (the email says, not very clearly, that through a telescope mars will look as big as the Moon does to the eye) in August. It never gets that close. It won’t even be particularly bright in August; it’ll shine at magnitude 0.4 or so, roughly as bright as the star Aldebaren, which in fact is just a few degrees from Mars in the sky (they make a nice pair, too, since they are both ruddy in color as well).

As you can see in this image, in August Mars won’t be at its closest to Earth, and in fact will be about 180 million kilometers (over 100 million miles) away.