Another alarming study regarding global warming has surfaced, revealing that tropical species are also in trouble. According to the UCLA and the University of Washington, warming can cause population of animals and insects in the tropics to decline, which adversely hurts the ecosystem. See the full article for details.

What would you say if I were to ask you to do a good deed in exchange for fairness? Sure, money and chocolate may be more recognizable, tangible rewards. A recent study, however, suggests that the human brain tends to treat fairness as a reward as well. Fair enough. Turn to the full article after the jump for more scientific details.

Love, the prevalent emotion during Valentine's Day which just passed, is still very mysterious to some. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) conducted a study to find out if love is really blind, and the results say yes. Check out the full article to learn more.

A new study has revealed that over-the-counter painkillers such as aspirin and ibuprofen could help reduce a person's risk of getting Parkinson's disease by as much as 60 percent. These painkillers, known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), were tested on 579 men and women, half of whom had Parkinson's. Regular users of non-aspirin NSAIDs reduced their risk by as much as 60 percent, while women who used aspirin regularly reduced their risk by 40 percent. Read more at the full article.

A recent study at the University of California Los Angeles has reaffirmed that the hormone leptin can work wonders for dangerously obese people. The hormone helps the extremely overweight by influencing their ability to control food cravings.

Leptin was originally discovered in the early 90's and was proven effective in mice. When injected into the rodents, they immediately lost interest in eating and allowed them to lose a lot of their body weight.

Humans, however, showed limited response to leptin. Some people shed off half their pounds, while some barely exhibited any changes. Now researchers are beginning to better understand why this is the case.

Studies have shown that a rare genetic deficiency creates the condition in some patients where their bodies are unable to produce the said hormone. In people who don't have leptin in their systems, controlling cravings for high-calorie food is a very tall order.

"The findings suggest that leptin strengthens the executive centers," says UCLA study head Edythe London as she demonstrated the effects of leptin in human brains. She explained that when low-leptin people responded very well to hormone injections and were less tempted to eat when shown pictures of food.

She concludes "while they were off leptin they got really hungry when they saw pictures of high-calorie food, and that was associated with high activation in a part of the brain that is related to food craving."

Coffee was first discovered in the Middle East when a shepherd allegedly noticed goats munching on coffee beans and acted funny afterwards. As the story goes, the shepherd brewed the means and found out that it not only tasted good, it also helped fight drowsiness. Another story tells the tale of Pope Clement VIII blessing the drink because it kept the monks awake during mass.

These tales may never be confirmed, but what scientists from UCLA and Harvard are sure of is the fact that the drink has a lot of great health benefits. When taken in moderate quantities, coffee will reduce chances of getting Parkinson's and Alzheimer's by 50 percent and lower the risks of type 2 diabetes. Reports also suggest that cancer can be avoided with regular intake.

According to Dr. Rob van Dam (not the pro wrestler) of the Harvard Medical school, an estimated 171 million people around the world have type 2 diabetes. The figure is expected to balloon up to some 366 million in 20 years if left unchecked. Dr. Van Dam suggests taking 3-5 cups of coffee every day to bring the figure down.

Dr. Lenore Arab agrees, and says coffee has a lot of nutrients that aid in enhancing the body's ability to maintain homeostasis. Chlorogenic acid, caffeine, magnesium, potassium, vitamin B3, trigonelline, and lignans are present in good amounts in every cup, making the drink a good health supplement of sorts.

Studies on its effects on cancer, whether preventive or risk-inducing, are as of yet still inconclusive. The evidence on ovarian, breast and prostate cancer is still limited and are awaiting more research to verify claims.

A vast study conducted by UCLA produced surprising results - smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer. The leader of the UCLA team, Dr. Donald Tashkin, said that they "hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer and that the association would be more positive with heavier use...What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Earlier works have found out that marijuana contain cancer-causing chemicals, potentially as harmful as those in tobacco. But they also found out that it also contains the chemical THC, which may kill aging cell and keep them from becoming cancerous.

The study involved 1,200 people in the L.A. area who had lung, neck, or head cancer, and another 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex, and neighborhood. The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older folks were generally not exposed to marijuana use during their youth.

The group was then asked about their lifetime use of weed, cigarettes, and alcohol. Tashkin and his team found out that the very heavy marijuana users (who lit up more than 22,000 times) showed no increased incidence of lung, neck, or head cancer. When asked to explain why other studies found links between marijuana use and cancer, he mentions that most of these previous studies used smaller human studies and lab animals.

Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the brain... UCLA researchers have uncovered some details of how the brain records the passage of time, PhysOrg reports, and these details could reveal how brains truly work.

Remember that report on "How Brains Weave Memory"? (Must have been a scene of How to Make an American Quilt that didn't make the cut.)

Based on this theory of brain time, the brain might also be adding a "time stamp" to every sensory processing your cranium does. The explanation is likened to ripples in the water: drop a pebble, ripples form, and these ripples act like a "signature" of the time the pebble entered the water. The further the ripples travel, the longer the time.

Same thing with the brain. The time a brain cell is triggered is like the pebble being thrown into the lake: it sets off a ripple of reactions among neighboring brain cells and connections. The brain, it seems, is capable of interpreting these ripples as the passage of time. We don't have an internal clock as we do an internal stopwatch.

These findings bear significance, not only in the understanding of the architecture of the human brain, but also in applications where time is involved, such as speech recognition (pronounciation is a factor of time, too) and musical apprehension. By the way, it's been forty-plus minutes since I started writing this article. And I didn't even have to check the clock.

Not familiar with the Freman Stillsuit? Didn't bother to read Dune? Well this development by researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science might just get us a few steps closer to Frank Herbert's water recycling suit.

The Team of researchers have apparently developed a new reverse osmosis membrane that promises to reduce the cost of seawater desalination and waste-water reclamation.

Reverse osmosis desalination basically uses extremely high pressure to force saline or polluted waters through the pores of a semi-permeable membrane. Water passes through, salt-ions and other impurities don't. Presto. Purified recycled water.

Developed by civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Eric Hoek and his research team, the membrane uses a cross-linked matrix of polymers and engineered nano-particles designed to draw in water ions but repel nearly all contaminants. The filter works at nano-scale.

Moreover, because the membranes repel particles that might ordinarily stick to its surface, the new membranes foul more slowly than conventional ones. The result is a process that is just as effective as current methods but more energy efficient and potentially much less expensive.

Initial tests suggest the new membranes have up to twice the productivity — or consume 50 percent less energy — reducing the total expense of desalinated water by as much as 25 percent. Yes, because of the high pressures required, this technology is currently applicable at an industrial level. But what if? Perhaps in the future we'll all be drinking our urine and our feces, just like the Fremen.

Have you ever seen one of those souvenir backscratchers that look like stylized human hands? Barring the surreal image that those things can bring to mind, they're really pretty useful when you've got an itch that you can't quite reach. But what if the itch is in some out-of-the-way area? Let's say, inside your nose for example? Those things are too big to fit in there (unless your nose is the size of a cement mixer).

It's a good thing that Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin(CJ) Kim of UCLA's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department have developed the world's smallest robotic hand. This tiny wonder can make a fist that can grasp objects smaller than a millimeter across, so it'll easily fit inside your nose (or any other bodily orifice for that matter), letting you scratch away and enjoy the good life.

Alright, alright, Lu and Kim didn't develop the microhand just so it could be used as a super-miniaturized backstratcher. In reality, the microhand would be put to better use grasping or handling small biological samples. These samples are often moist or in liquid environments, and since the microhand is built of inert materials and is pneumatically rather than electrically operated (it opens and closes when balloons in the joints are inflated or deflated) it would be ideal for working in such environments.

The microhand hand has four fingers built of miniscule silicon segments and polymer-balloon joints, giving the hand a firm but gentle grip that the researchers claim would be ideal for manipulating tiny, delicate objects. With everything being miniaturized these days, this is definitely one handy little doodad. Y'know, you could even use it to handle your ultra-expensive must-not-scratch designer contact lenses. Maybe that's not quite what the designers designed the microhand for, but hey, a truly useful thing will always be useful no matter what you use it for.