Nature Middle East | House of Wisdom

NME’s weekly science dose (May 31 – June 6)

This week it’s all about separation: getting salt out of salt water, and removing carbon dioxide from other gases.

First: desalination. It holds the promise of securing the water needs of virtually everyone, but comes at the cost of being unfeasible expensive and energy consuming for most countries. In Egypt, a team of researchers at the American University in Cairo have come up with a prototype for a cheap membrane that filters out the salt from salt water. If it proves itself under industrial conditions, it may help make desalination a viable option for Egypt at a mass scale. Get more details about this story here.

Second: carbon capture. As a major contributor to climate change, efforts have been underway to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for some time now. While techniques exist, they remain generally inefficient and expensive. But check out this research by a Saudi Arabian team: they’ve come up with a crystalline, porous metal-organic framework that can capture carbon at very low concentrations. This links up with similar research also recently published which we highlighted here.

On another note, while chocolate fans may not be able to explain why the substance is so close to their hearts, scientists appear to have discovered how it may help protect that most vital organ — at least that’s the case with dark chocolate. It all comes down to epicatechin, a nutrient in dark chocolate that seems to induce beneficial metabolic and structural changes in the mitochondria of heart cells. Read more about this here.

Finally, and this is not quite science news related, but if you are a postgraduate or research assistant working in any Arab state (regardless of your nationality), we’d like to hear about your work. We are having a little competition to highlight the five most interesting research ideas being work on in the region. See this for more details.

Beyond the hood

Turns out women are generally better at recalling faces than men. According to a new study from Canada’s McMaster University, without even being aware of it, it seems that women spend more time analyzing new faces, thereby reinforcing their capacity to recall them, and hence identify them, later.

The researchers used eye tracking technology to observe where participants looked while they were being shown a series of randomly selected faces on a computer screen. Women were generally found to fixate on features far more than men — a strategy that operates outside of people’s awareness. Interestingly, this suggests that by intentionally changing our eye movement patterns when looking at a new face, we may be able to better recall that face later. Here’s a link to the study.

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