Новости за 04.04.2017

Smell, sight, sounds – they all change how you perceive food. Shutterstock

It was Apicius, the Roman gourmand, who came up with the line that “the first taste is with the eyes”. The latest research from the emerging field of gastrophysics shows that he was absolutely right. Our brains evolved to help us find food – and making food look more visually appealing can prime expectations and therefore enhance the taste.

Smell, sight, sounds – they all change how you perceive food. Shutterstock

It was Apicius, the Roman gourmand, who came up with the line that “the first taste is with the eyes”. The latest research from the emerging field of gastrophysics shows that he was absolutely right. Our brains evolved to help us find food – and making food look more visually appealing can set better expectation and so enhance the taste.

Stieber/Shutterstock

Most people wonder how long they have left on this world, and what they’ll do with that time, but few people are as preoccupied with mortality as the professionals employed to assess risks for pension schemes and insurance companies. And it’s fair to say that these actuaries don’t quite come at it from the same point of view as the rest of the population; your early demise might just be their idea of an early Christmas present.

At the match-making corner in Shanghai, education and hukou status are often explicitly stated on adverts. cementley/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

For many, marriage is about love, shared interests and shared values. But not all love is created equal and in China, the prospect for young people to fall in love and get married is determined by where they were born.

tj.blackwell/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The idea of a single building where you live, work and play may seem very much of the moment, driven by advances in communications technology. But mixed-use developments have been around for as long as mankind. Research has revealed that complex cave systems hosted multiple uses hundreds of thousands of years ago. The Romans built large multi-use complexes across their empire. And during medieval times, people used to manufacture, sell and live in the same building.

There are long-held myths about domestic abuse. Kamira/Shutterstock

When a violent and controlling husband who beat his wife with a cricket bat and forced her to drink bleach was allowed to walk free from court there was a huge backlash, with MPs and domestic violence charities publically criticising the judge who handed down the sentence. Mustafa Bashir, 34, also throttled his wife in public and told her to kill herself. He admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm and was given an 18-month prison term. Читать дальше...

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Carbon dioxide concentrations are heading towards values not seen in the past 200m years. The sun has also been gradually getting stronger over time. Put together, these facts mean the climate may be heading towards warmth not seen in the past half a billion years.

Artist’s impression of waterfalls pouring over the original land bridge connecting England with France. CREDIT: Imperial College London/Chase Stone

As Brexit looms, Earth scientists have uncovered evidence of Britain’s original split from mainland Europe. Almost half a million years ago, according to new data, water suddenly started cascading over the narrow strip of land that joined England and France – putting pressure on a chalk bridge.

Dozens of people have been killed in a suspected chemical weapon attack in Syria, according to a war monitoring group. Videos and pictures have been posted online, which activists and medics claim show evidence of people dying from asphyxiation. One news agency report suggested at least 11 of the dead were children. There have also been reports that one of the hospitals treating the victims was attacked.

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Tokyo, Moscow, Madrid, London, Brussels, and now St Petersburg. These major cities have all suffered attacks on their metro systems. The most recent events in St Petersburg, where a metro bombing killed at least 14 people, remind us of the challenges faced by underground transport systems in keeping people safe during an emergency. This is where engineering and psychology research can come in useful, helping to optimise evacuation procedures using insight into how people behave.

With red phone and letter boxes and Bobbies on the streets, Gibraltar offers a glimpse of a bygone age when Britishness was confidently exported. Now, amid renewed controversy over the status of the territory, the phrase “British forever” has been heard once again in Gibraltar.

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Management at Pobeda Airlines, the Russian low fare subsidiary of Aeroflot, has responded to a spate of violent attacks on staff by training staff in the martial art of Sambo. The latest attack took place in February at Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow was caught on CCTV and shows a passenger who – having missed his flight and having been refused a refund – throws a series of punches at a customer service manager.

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Devil rays, close cousins of the enormous manta rays, are stars of nature documentaries. They tend to collect together in large numbers, and some species leap from the water. Because of this they are popular with divers and, like mantas, important for tourism. But as is so often the case with some of our favourite species, these charismatic creatures are under threat from humans, specifically, because of the gill plate trade.

University of Oxford. sidharth bhatia/Unsplash

The Higher Education and Research Bill is due to be read for the third time in the House of Lords, where peers will vote on their amended version.

Since Mohammadu Buhari became president of Nigeria in May 2015, his government put Boko Haram on the defensive in its north-eastern heartlands. Over the last two years the group has steadily lost control of swathes of territory, culminating in December 2016 when it was forced from one of its last remaining strongholds, the Sambisa forest.

Reining the mind back from fearful things. Shutterstock

Doxycycline is a cheap, widely available antibiotic. It is used to treat everything from acne to urinary tract infections. This humble little pill, we have now discovered, might also be useful for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Reining the mind back from fearful things. Shutterstock

Doxycycline is a cheap, widely available antibiotic. It is used to treat everything from acne to urinary tract infections. This humble little pill, we have now discovered, might also be useful for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Obsessional coverage of attacks plays into the hands of terrorism. Responsible reporting is what is now called for. Shutterstock

Two days after the Westminster attack on March 22, the journalist Simon Jenkins cautioned against overreaction to such assaults, claiming “the actions of the authorities and the media in response to Wednesday have ramped up the hysteria of terror”. Writing in the Guardian, he argued that:

Obsessional coverage of attacks plays into the hands of terrorism. Responsible reporting is what is now called for. Shutterstock

Two days after the Westminster attack on March 22, the journalist Simon Jenkins cautioned against overreaction to such assaults, claiming “the actions of the authorities and the media in response to Wednesday have ramped up the hysteria of terror”. Writing in the Guardian, he argued that: