The Philippine Online Chronicles

Ocean warming can speed up ice melting

A University of Arizona study published in the journal Nature Geoscience reveals that rising ocean temperatures due to climate change could speed up polar ice melting in areas like Greenland and Antarctica.

The study reports that the subsurface ocean along the Greenland coast could be warmer by up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius) by 2011, and by 0.9 degrees F (0.5 C) along the coast of Antarctica.

Author Jianjun Yin explained that “Ocean warming is very important compared to atmospheric warming because water has a much larger heat capacity than air. If you put an ice cube in a warm room, it will melt in several hours. But if you put an ice cube in a cup of warm water, it will disappear in just minutes."

The study's co-author Jonathan Overpeck warned that Greenland and Antarctica might “melt faster than the scientific community previously thought.”

Facial width linked to unethical behavior

Wider faces in men are linked to deceiving and cheating, says a new study published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The report said that men with wider faces usually feel more powerful in life than narrower-faced men. Past researches have associated feelings of power with less ethical behavior.

In the first experiment, 192 Masters of Business Administration students were asked to role-play as either buyers or sellers in an exercise. Findings showed that men with broader faces were roughly three times as likely to lie in the negotiation compared to narrower-faced men. For the female participants, no correlation was found between facial width and lying.

Meanwhile, another experiment involved a dice game wherein 103 college students in a business ethics class were instructed to roll a pair of dice to determine the number of times they would be entered into a lottery. Men with broader faces overstated their rolls by 18.6 percent, compared to only two percent among narrow-faced men.

However, lead researcher and management scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Michael Haselhuhn told LiveScience that, “While our findings provide compelling evidence that men's facial structure is a reliable physical cue of the likelihood of engaging in ethically questionable behavior, we stress that it is but one of many factors that affect unethical judgment and action."

"We caution individuals to not consider men's facial structure to the exclusion of all factors. Ethics research has shown that even small situational factors, such as whether it is light or dark in a room, can have a major impact on ethical judgment.” Haselhuhn said.

Cardiovascular risks found in anti-smoking drug

Researchers say that use of the anti-smoking drug Chantix poses significant cardiovascular risks, among other health threats.

A study published by the Canadian Medical Association linked Chantix to a 72 percent greater risk of being hospitalized for serious cardiovascular events such as heart attack or arrythmia. Pfizer, the company producing Chantix, has denied the findings.

The study's lead investigator, Curt Furberg of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, tagged Chantix as “one of the most harmful prescription drugs on the US market, based on the number of serious adverse effects reported to the US Food and Drug Administration.”

Furberg said that serious health threats associated with Chantix include loss of consciousness, visual disturbances, suicide, violence, depression, and worsening of diabetes.

More than 1,200 complaints so far this year have been filed in US courts regarding the drug's side effects.

Superelastic alloys for earthquake resistance

Japanese researchers have introduced a superelastic alloy that can help buildings absorb shocks and violent movements from earthquakes.

The material is “far more elastic than superelastic alloys,” said Toshihiro Omori from the Department of Materials Science, Graduate School of Engineering in Tohoku University.

The alloy can supposedly recover its original shape in extreme temperatures ranging from -196 to 240 degrees Celsius."This property is very important because materials are subject to change in temperature in most cases," Omori said.

Omori also noted the possibility that the material can be produced on a large scale because of its low cost.