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New treatment destroys head and neck cancer tumours in trial
Exclusive: combination of drugs causes tumours to vanish in some terminally ill patients, study finds A new cancer treatment can wipe out tumours in terminally ill head and neck cancer patients, scientists have discovered. In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, acco
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French study of over 22m people finds vaccines cut severe Covid risk by 90%
Largest study of its kind also finds vaccines appear to protect against worst effects of Delta variant Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Vaccination reduces the risk of dying or being hospitalised with Covid-19 by 90%, a French study of 22.6 million people over the age of 50 has found. The research published on Monday also found that vaccines appear to protect against
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The Biggest Comet Ever Discovered Is About to Cruise by Earth
Giant Comet Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a gigantic comet — and they say it’s headed towards Earth. The comet was discovered by University of Pennsylvania astronomers Pedro Bernadinelli and Gary Bernstein, according to The Daily Beast . The pair initially found evidence of a 60 to 100 mile wide comet seven years ago and have finally released a paper confirming it late last month in
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Dave Chappelle’s Rorschach Test
At the end of Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix stand-up special—after 72 brutal, bruised, combative minutes that conclude with the story of a suicide—my other half turned to me and said: “That wasn’t very funny, was it?” Was it even meant to be? The emotion that defines The Closer is not laughter, but anger. Chappelle once delivered his most offensive jokes with a goofy, quizzical, little-lost-boy
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Prince William: great minds should focus on saving Earth not space travel – video
The Duke of Cambridge has criticised the space race and space tourism, saying the world’s greatest minds need to focus on fixing the Earth instead. In an interview with Newscast on BBC Sounds before his Earthshot prize awards , Prince William also warned about a rise in ‘climate anxiety’ among younger generations. His comments come the day after William Shatner, 90, made history by becoming the o
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The Hypocrisy of the Anti-vax Patriot
Molly didn’t feel particularly patriotic as she said goodbye to her husband, a Navy doctor, early one morning in September. He was leaving on his second deployment in nine months, with just four days’ notice (he’d gotten only 36 hours’ notice ahead of his previous operation). And although his initial mission had been to the Middle East—on an aircraft carrier as a critical-care physician in case o
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New Treatment Eradicated Tumors in Terminally Ill Cancer Patients
A team of scientists at London’s Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) has tested a new drug cocktail that they say has eradicated previously untreatable tumors in some terminally ill head and neck cancer patients. Giving patients two immunotherapy drugs, nivolumab and ipilimumab, seemed to shrink tumors in patients with advanced stages of cancer, The Guardian reports . Some of the patients walked a
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By Attacking Me, Justice Alito Proved My Point
Last month, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the Supreme Court’s critics are wrong. The Court is not “a dangerous cabal” that is “deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view,” he said. Reading aloud from a piece I wrote in the aftermath of the Court’s recent ruling on an abortion law, Alito insisted that it was “false and in
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Masks Are Changing How Kids Interact
After the third day of kindergarten, my son Huxley reported that another kid had kicked him on the playground. It wasn’t a big deal; this kind of thing happens. But on the fourth day, he had a new frustration: He couldn’t figure out who had kicked him. The kid had been wearing a purple mask at the time of the incident, but the next day, no one in Huxley’s class was wearing a purple mask. With all
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Pentagon Tech Chief Quits in Frustration, Says US Has No “Fighting Chance” Against China
Bridge Burner In a blistering new interview with the Financial Times , the Pentagon’s former chief software officer said that he resigned in protest of slow technological innovation in the United States — and, in a provocative twist, opined that China is dominating in the space, particularly at developing advanced artificial intelligence. “We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15
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William Shatner Tried to Tell Jeff Bezos About the Glory of Spaceflight, But Bezos Interrupted Him to Spray Staff With Champagne
It was an awkward moment. As soon as famed “Star Trek” actor William Shatner clambered out of Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule, as seen on Blue Origin’s live stream today , he was clearly overcome, visibly shaken by the experience of seeing the Earth whip by. Shatner, alongside three other passengers, reached an apogee of over 66 miles during today’s launch, narrowly crossing the boundary of spa
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‘Sophisticated’: ancient faeces shows humans enjoyed beer and blue cheese 2,700 years ago
Austrian Alps salt miners had a ‘balanced diet’, with an analysis of bronze and iron age excrement finding the earliest evidence of cheese ripening in Europe It’s no secret that beer and blue cheese go hand in hand – but a new study reveals how deep their roots run in Europe, where workers at a salt mine in Austria were gorging on both up to 2,700 years ago. Scientists made the discovery by analy
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The Second Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
E arly on the evening of October 23, 2019, I took a tour of the Lorraine Motel. I’d been to Memphis, Tennessee, several times before, and I’d come back to speak at the National Civil Rights Museum, which encompasses the motel. But until that October, I’d never been able to bring myself to visit the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. I saw what King saw moments before he saw no more.
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Stellar fossils in meteorites point to distant stars
Some pristine meteorites contain a record of the original building blocks of the solar system, including grains that formed in ancient stars that died before the sun formed. One of the biggest challenges in studying these presolar grains is to determine the type of star each grain came from.
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Why skyrmions could have a lot in common with glass and high-temperature superconductors
Scientists have known for a long time that magnetism is created by the spins of electrons lining up in certain ways. But about a decade ago, they discovered another astonishing layer of complexity in magnetic materials: Under the right conditions, these spins can form little vortexes or whirlpools that act like particles and move around independently of the atoms that spawned them.
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New record set for coldest temperature—38 picokelvins
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Germany and two in France has set a new record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in a lab setting—38 picokelvins. In their paper published in the journal Physics, the group describes their work with a time-domain matter-wave lens system. Vincenzo Tamma with the University of Portsmouth has published a Viewpoint article in the sa
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Oldest footprints of pre-humans identified in Crete
The oldest known footprints of pre-humans were found on the Mediterranean island of Crete and are at least six million years old, says an international team of researchers from Germany, Sweden, Greece, Egypt and England, led by Tübingen scientists Uwe Kirscher and Madelaine Böhme of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen. Their study has been
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Researchers realize quantum teleportation onto mechanical motion of silicon beams
Quantum technology typically employs qubits (quantum bits) consisting of, for example, single electrons, photons or atoms. A group of TU Delft researchers has now demonstrated the ability to teleport an arbitrary qubit state from a single photon onto an optomechanical device—consisting of a mechanical structure comprising billions of atoms. Their breakthrough research, now published in Nature Phot
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Coronavaccination minskade smittspridning inom familjen
Personer som inte var immuna mot covid-19 löpte klart lägre risk både att smittas och att bli allvarligt sjuka om deras familjemedlemmar vaccinerat sig. Det visar en studie vid Umeå universitet. – Resultaten talar starkt för att vaccination inte bara är viktigt för att skydda sig själv, utan också för att minska smittspridningen, inte minst inom familjen som är en av de miljöer där viruset sprids
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Leprosy in wild chimpanzees
Nature, Published online: 13 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03968-4 Monitoring of western chimpanzee populations in Guinea-Bissau and Côte d’Ivoire reveals the presence of rare and different genotypes of Mycobacterium leprae, suggesting greater circulation in wild animals than previously thought.
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Personality traits linked to hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease
New research found that changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer's disease are often visible early on in individuals with personality traits associated with the condition. The study focused on two traits previously linked to the risk of dementia: neuroticism, which measures a predisposition for negative emotions, and conscientiousness, which measures the tendency to be careful, organized, go
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The Covid report should damn this government: it’s tragic that it won’t | Marina Hyde
It is a clear indictment of Boris Johnson’s administration and its scientific advisers. How jolly he’s still riding high in the polls You will note that good news bear Boris Johnson has given the old swerve-a-roo to the release of the Covid select committee report . Doubtless the prime minister would like to respond in full to this tragic indictment of the UK’s catastrophic response to the pandem
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This Asteroid May Be the Shard of a Dead Protoplanet—and Have More Metal Than All the Reserves on Earth
It’s often said Earth’s resources are finite. This is true enough. But shift your gaze skyward for a moment. Up there, amid the stars, lurks an invisible bonanza of epic proportions. Many of the materials upon which modern civilization is built exist in far greater amounts throughout the rest of the solar system. Earth, after all, was formed from the same cosmic cloud as all the other planets, co
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Jon Gruden Just Put It in Writing
Updated at 12:04 p.m. ET on October 13, 2021 Jon Gruden’s resignation as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders is just the beginning of a long-overdue reckoning for the NFL, and it underscores the basic problem: The NFL is full of Jon Grudens. Gruden made racist, homophobic, and misogynistic comments in emails for nearly a decade, but he was forced out only when some of those reprehensible statemen
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Woman Almost Smashed by Meteorite That Crashed Through Ceiling and Landed on Her Bed
Meteorite Hit Golden, British Columbia native Ruth Hamilton was woken up by her dog barking — and seconds later, she says, a roughly two-pound rock smashed through her roof, landing inches from where she was sleeping. And as it turns out, it wasn’t some dangerous prank. The rock was a chunk of actual meteorite, Canadian broadcaster Global News reports , which had lit up the night sky earlier that
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We Accidentally Solved the Flu. Now What?
Perhaps the oddest consolation prize of America’s crushing, protracted battle with the coronavirus is the knowledge that flu season, as we’ve long known it, does not have to exist. It’s easy to think of the flu as an immutable fact of winter life, more inconvenience than calamity. But each year, on average, it sickens roughly 30 million Americans and kills more than 30,000 (though the numbers var
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America Is Not Ready for Trump’s Second Term
The United States was unprepared for the scope of President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election. By Election Day, Trump had spent months calling the election “rigged,” and historians and democracy experts warned of the damage that these false claims could make . But when the president stepped to a lectern in the White House late on Election Night and insisted he’d won ,
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NASA Adviser Resigns Over Giant Homophobic Telescope
Hard Pass Last month, NASA deliberated and decided against changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope, an orbital observatory expected to revolutionize astronomy that happens to be named after a homophobic former NASA Administrator . The space agency announced, without giving any details, that an investigation had occurred and that it found no reason to rename the space telescope, despit
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Calls for inquiry as negative Covid PCR tests after positive lateral flow reported
Scientists urge urgent investigation to ensure that people are not being given false negative results Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Scientists are calling for an urgent investigation after dozens of reports of people testing negative using gold-standard Covid PCR tests, despite testing positive on rapid lateral flow tests, and in many cases experiencing Covid-like
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The Astronomer Who’s About to See the Skies of Other Earths
We know next to nothing about the other 6 billion or so Earth-like planets in the galaxy. With the imminent launch of the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built, Laura Kreidberg is optimistic this will soon change. Kreidberg is the 32-year-old founding director of a new department at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, devoted to studying what the weather is.
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Suddenly Elon Musk Is Way Richer Than Jeff Bezos
Besting Bezos Tesla CEO and meme thief Elon Musk’s net worth just rocketed even further past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ — solidifying him as the richest person in the world even more. Musk’s wealth was bolstered after a deal with investors boosted the value of SpaceX in excess of $100 billion, according to Bloomberg . His net worth hit $223 billion after the agreement, and gave him an additional
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Getting flu with Covid doubles risk of death, says UK health chief
Both flu and Covid-19 will circulate this winter, warns head of UK Health Security Agency Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage People who catch flu and Covid at the same time this winter are twice as likely to die than those who only have coronavirus, according to the UK Health Security Agency chief executive, Dr Jenny Harries. The former deputy chief medical officer for
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Why the Latest Campus Cancellation Is Different
Updated at 10:15 a.m. ET on October 11, 2021 Dorian Abbot is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. In recognition of his research on climate change, MIT invited him to deliver the John Carlson Lecture, which takes place every year at a large venue in the Boston area and is meant to “communicate exciting new results in climate science to the general public.” Then the campaign to cancel Abbo
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Homeland Security Warns of Cyberattacks Intended to Kill People
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is warning that the next cyberattack could end up killing people — a dangerous and imminent shift from ransomware to “killware.” In an interview with USA Today , Mayorkas noted that the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in April, which shut down much of the gas supply along the East Coast, was distracting from a far more egregious hack. “And that i
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Bezos’ Blue Origin is at odds with everything Star Trek represents | Akin Olla
The entire premise of Star Trek was utopian: it pushed the limits of diversity, progressivism and inclusion on television and the science fiction genre The 90-year-old actor William Shatner, best known for his leading role as Captain James Tiberius Kirk of Star Trek: The Original Series, is headed to space, for real this time. Shatner will be launched off this Wednesday by on-again-off-again rich
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A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms
The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune , said he wanted to erect “the world’s most beautiful office building” for his beloved newspaper. The best
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Prince William criticises space race and tourism’s new frontier
Duke of Cambridge says world’s greatest minds need to focus on trying to fix the Earth instead The Duke of Cambridge has criticised the space race and space tourism, saying the world’s greatest minds need to focus on trying to fix the Earth instead. Prince William’s comments, in an interview with Newscast on BBC Sounds, will be aired the day after William Shatner made history by becoming the olde
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Meteor May Have Caused Huge Explosion Over New Hampshire, Scientists Say
Whodunnit The sound of an earth-shattering boom rocked New Hampshire while the ground shook on Sunday morning, in a statewide incident that left both state residents and experts baffled . Now, meteorologists think they finally know what caused the boom, The New York Times reports . Satellite imagery suggests that a meteor could have sailed over New Hampshire before exploding, causing the loud bla
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The FDA Just Officially Endorsed Vaping
The FDA, the government agency that regulates pharmaceuticals and medical devices to make sure that they’re safe and effective, now endorses vaping. The agency announced on Tuesday that it would allow the company Vuse to market three products: an e-cigarette called the Vuse Solo Power Unit and two different kinds of replacement vape juice pods. This marks the first time that the FDA officially ap
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Scientists abused and threatened for discussing Covid, global survey finds
Poll of 321 scientists found 15% received death threats after speaking publicly on the pandemic How my ivermectin research led to Twitter death threats Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Scientists around the world have received threats of death and sexual assault after speaking to the media about Covid-19, a survey has revealed. Of 321 scientists asked by Nature magazi
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Ground control to Captain Kirk! William Shatner is off to the final frontier, for real
At the age of 90, the Star Trek star is set to board Jeff Bezos’s space ship today. It’s just the latest chapter in a long relationship between the sci-fi smash and real-life space odysseys William Shatner to blast off on Bezos rocket to become oldest person in space ‘Risk is our business!” So declared William Shatner in the 1968 Star Trek episode Return to Tomorrow. His character, Cpt James T Ki
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Do We Really Need to Meet In Person?
R emember huddling in a conference room? It’s almost cartoonish to imagine everybody squeezing into a poorly ventilated space to talk and trade germs for the purpose of … what, exactly? As many workers begin returning to their office for all or some of the work week, they’re noticing a key change: The pandemic is nearing its conclusion, but meetings are still happening virtually. In many cases, o
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As Its Price Spikes, JPMorgan CEO Says Bitcoin Is “Worthless”
Worthless While Wall Street has increasingly started to embrace cryptocurrency, some executives of the biggest financial firms are still staunchly against the idea. Case in point, JPMorgan Chase CEO and outspoken crypto-critic Jamie Dimon said this week that he has no hope for the tech. “I personally think that bitcoin is worthless,” Dimon said during an Institute of International Finance event o
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Deep Sea Creature Surprises Researchers Exploring Shipwreck
Photobomb In October 2020, a remotely-controlled deep sea vessel got surprised by a sizeable sea creature while exploring a shipwreck in the Red Sea almost 2,800 feet below the surface. There are still plenty of unanswered questions, but researchers are fairly certain that the tentacled visitor wasn’t a giant squid, thanks to its body proportions. And that’s despite the fact that it was larger th
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Scientists Baffled by Radio Waves Coming From Our Own Galaxy
We Get Signal A team of astronomers has detected a bizarre radio signal coming from the center of the Milky Way galaxy — and they have absolutely no clue what it might be. The scientists who discovered the signal initially had some guesses, but gradually ruled them all out because the radio waves are like nothing they’d ever seen before, according to research published in The Astrophysical Journa
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A Guy Quit Blue Origin and Sent Jeff Bezos a Memo That Tore the Company to Shreds
Another week, another scathing account of Blue Origin’s dysfunctional and toxic work culture. A new Washington Post investigation , which draws from interviews with more than 20 current and former Blue Origin employees, paints an extremely troubling picture, from rampant sexism to ineffective and condescending micromanagement by executives. One mid-level employee sent co-founder Jeff Bezos and th
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The Abortion Backup Plan No One Is Talking About
So many states have restricted access to abortion so severely that people in large swaths of the country feel they have no options if they want to terminate a pregnancy. But technically, those who want an abortion still have options. It’s just that few have heard of them. Pregnant people in Texas, or in any other U.S. state, can visit an array of websites that will mail them two pills— m ifeprist
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A Nobel Prize for a revolution in economics
David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens win a Nobel Prize for revolutionizing how economics is done. (Image credit: CLAUDIO BRESCIANI/TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP via Getty Ima)
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Elon Musk Mocks Jeff Bezos for Having Less Money Than Him
Silver Medal On the heels of his wealth ballooning past Jeff Bezos’ , Elon Musk decided to poke a little fun at his favorite online punching bag on Twitter with an emoji. The Tesla CEO responded to a tweet from Bezos on Monday morning with a silver medal emoji. This comes after Bloomberg reported that Musk’s net worth grew to the tune of $222 billion while the Amazon CEO’s worth stood at a mere $
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Man Sued for Bad Grammar in His Facebook Post
$180,000 Error We’ve all had errors in our social media posts before, and rarely do they ever turn out to be anything more than an embarrassing mistake. However, a grammatical error in an Australian man’s Facebook post might end up costing him $180,000 in court fees. Anthony Zadravic, a real estate agent in New South Wales, landed in court after he forgot to add an apostrophe to a post criticizin
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Intel’s Brain-Inspired Loihi 2 Chip Can Hold a Million Artificial Neurons
Computer chips that recreate the brain’s structure in silicon are a promising avenue for powering the smart robots of the future. Now Intel has released an updated version of its Loihi neuromorphic chip, which it hopes will bring that dream closer. Despite frequent comparisons , the neural networks that power today’s leading AI systems operate very differently than the brain. While the “neurons”
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The House of Representatives Is Failing American Democracy
In the fight over if and when a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill would take place and whether it would be tied to a vote on President Joe Biden’s broader economic agenda, one fact was overlooked: House Democrats passed their own infrastructure bill in July . The reason you haven’t heard much about that measure is that the House acquiesced to the Senate’s demand that it vote on the Senat
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Mesmerised brown crabs ‘attracted to’ undersea cables
Research in Scotland shows animals freeze near the electromagnetic field with implications for metabolism and migration Underwater power cables mesmerise brown crabs and cause biological changes that could affect their migration habits, scientists have discovered. The cables for offshore renewable energy emit an electromagnetic field that attracts the crabs and causes them to stay where they are.
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NASA Astronaut Realizes She Photographed an Airplane Way Below Her
Eye in the Sky Pics of the Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) can offer some pretty stunning ( and rarely seen ) perspectives of the planet. Due to the distance, though, it’s not often that they’re able to capture actual human activity. Luckily, NASA astronaut Megan McArthur was able to do just that with an incredible picture she took over the skies of Alberta, Canada. At first blus
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Kim Kardashian Didn’t Break Character on SNL
You don’t get to the status Kim Kardashian West occupies without knowing exactly what people think about you and using it to your advantage. So when the mogul, former reality star, and Instagram powerhouse walked out onto the Saturday Night Live stage for her hosting debut, her outfit—a skintight turtlenecked bodysuit made of fuchsia crushed velvet that covered her from the tips of her fingers to
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The Country of Lebanon’s Entire Electric Grid Just Collapsed
Power Down Lebanon’s entire electric grid collapsed on Saturday when the country’s two main power stations ran out of fuel. For months, the country had been providing citizens with a few hours of electricity a day, according to The Washington Post . Then yesterday, Lebanon’s state-owned power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel leaving the entire country with no electricity.
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Capsule of 1765 air reveals ancient histories hidden under Antarctic ice
Polar Zero exhibition in Glasgow features sculpture encasing air extracted from start of Industrial Revolution An ampoule of Antarctic air from the year 1765 forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition that reveals the hidden histories contained in polar ice to visitors attending the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow . The artist Wayne Binitie has spent the past five years undertaking an extraord
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Nearly half of Britain’s biodiversity has gone since industrial revolution
Study shows UK has lost more biodiversity than any G7 country, and is in worst global 10% Almost half of Britain’s natural biodiversity has disappeared over the centuries, with farming and urban spread triggered by the industrial and agricultural revolutions being blamed as major factors for this loss. That is the shock finding of a study by scientists at London’s Natural History Museum, which ha
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Covid by numbers: 10 key lessons separating fact from fiction
To make sense of coronavirus data, the Observer asked David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters of the Royal Statistical Society Covid taskforce to write a column. That column has now inspired a book. Here are some of its insights Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Genomic sequencing has identified more than 1,000 different seeds of Sars-CoV-2 introduced in early 2020. In
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North Korea: Squid Game Is Proof Capitalism Doesn’t Work
Squid Game North Korean propaganda website Arirang Meari wrote on Tuesday that Netflix’s megahit TV show “Squid Game” proves once and for all that South Korea-style capitalism doesn’t work. “It is said that it makes people realize the sad reality of the beastly South Korean society in which human beings are driven into extreme competition and their humanity is being wiped out,” a short article po
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Covid booster shots important to stop infection, finds English study
Study shows protection against Covid starts to wane several months after full vaccination Scientists have urged eligible people to have Covid booster shots after a major survey in England found evidence of “breakthrough infections” more than three months after full vaccination. Researchers at Imperial College London analysed more than 100,000 swabs from a random sample of the population and found
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President of Brazil says it ‘makes no sense’ for him to be vaccinated
Jair Bolsonaro’s comments called ‘stupid and selfish’ in country where 600,000 people have died of Covid Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage More than 600,000 of his citizens have lost their lives to a Covid-19 outbreak he once pooh-poohed as a “little flu”, but Brazil’s science-denying president, Jair Bolsonaro , has announced he will decline to be vaccinated, saying “i
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How Wavelets Allow Researchers to Transform, and Understand, Data
In an increasingly data-driven world, mathematical tools known as wavelets have become an indispensable way to analyze and understand information. Many researchers receive their data in the form of continuous signals, meaning an unbroken stream of information evolving over time, such as a geophysicist listening to sound waves bouncing off of rock layers underground, or a data scientist studying..
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Microsoft’s Massive New Language AI Is Triple the Size of OpenAI’s GPT-3
Just under a year and a half ago OpenAI announced completion of GPT-3 , its natural language processing algorithm that was, at the time, the largest and most complex model of its type. This week, Microsoft and Nvidia introduced a new model they’re calling “the world’s largest and most powerful generative language model.” The Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG) is more than
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William Shatner, TV's Capt. Kirk, blasts into space
Hollywood's Captain Kirk, 90-year-old William Shatner, blasted into space Wednesday in a convergence of science fiction and science reality, reaching the final frontier aboard a ship built by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company.
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A highly simplified way to predict quantum light-matter interactions
When light interacts with matter, for example, when a laser beam hits a two-dimensional material like graphene, it can substantially change the behavior of the material. Depending on the form of interaction between light and matter, some chemical reactions appear differently, substances turn magnetic or ferroelectric or begin to conduct electricity without any losses. In particularly thrilling cas
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‘The real problem is the repetition of mistakes’: scientists react to Covid inquiry
Senior figures say failure to prevent second wave was inexcusable given what was known about the virus Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage The failure to prevent tens of thousands of deaths during Britain’s brutal second wave of Covid infections was a more serious error than the timing of the first lockdown, senior scientists have told the Guardian, after a damning repor
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Russian Study Confirms That Space Travel Damages Your Brain Cells
A new study on the brains of five Russian cosmonauts who spent months on the International Space Station confirms that space travel can do some serious damage to the human body and mind. For years, scientists have been tallying up adverse effects of space travel including weakened muscles and bones and worsened vision . This new research , published in the journal JAMA Neurology on Monday, is the
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Researchers unlock secret path to a quantum future
In 1998, researchers including Mark Kubinec of UC Berkeley performed one of the first simple quantum computations using individual molecules. They used pulses of radio waves to flip the spins of two nuclei in a molecule, with each spin's "up" or "down" orientation storing information in the way that a "0" or "1" state stores information in a classical data bit. In those early days of quantum compu
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Large effect of Solar activity on Earth's energy budget
This is the result of a new study by researchers from DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun on clouds and Earth's energy balance.
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Hjärnimplantat räddar patient i USA från depression
Ett forskarteam från Kaliforniens universitet San Francisco (UCSF) har framgångsrikt behandlat en patient med svår depression. Detta genom att trycka på den specifika hjärnkretsen som är involverad i depressiva hjärnmönster och återställa dem med motsvarigheten till en pacemaker, fast för hjärnan.
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Researchers identify universal laws in the turbulent behavior of active fluids
Certain groupings of bacteria or cellular tissues form systems that are called active fluids. These can flow spontaneously without having to be forced from the outside, since their components are able to generate forces and move autonomously. When the activity is high enough, the spontaneous flows become chaotic, like those observed in the turbulence of ordinary fluids. University of Barcelona (UB
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A New Link to an Old Model Could Crack the Mystery of Deep Learning
In the machine learning world, the sizes of artificial neural networks — and their outsize successes — are creating conceptual conundrums. When a network named AlexNet won an annual image recognition competition in 2012, it had about 60 million parameters. These parameters, fine-tuned during training, allowed AlexNet to recognize images that it had never seen before. Two years later… Source
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Starwatch: Jupiter and Saturn are joined by the moon
Weather permitting, it will be a good way to gauge how the moon moves and changes phase Jupiter and Saturn are shining brightly in the southern sky. They are conspicuous because they are currently situated in a somewhat barren part of the night sky but this week the pair are joined by the moon on successive evenings. The chart shows the view looking due south from London at 2100 BST on 14 October
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Elon Musk Says That Tesla Is Making Its Own Beer
One for the Road Elon Musk is known for fairly gimmicky tactics to promote his products — but he might have outdone himself yet with the new Cybertuck-themed beer. The billionaire CEO introduced the “GigaBier” at Tesla’s Gigafactory Berlin County Fair, according to Teslarati . The GigaBier’s bottles were clearly inspired by the Cybertruck with its sharp angles and futuristic design. The beer is a
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Epigenetics, the misunderstood science that could shed new light on ageing
The study of the epigenome came with claims that trauma could be inherited, but now researchers are more excited about its potential to measure the risk of disease A little over a decade ago, a clutch of scientific studies was published that seemed to show that survivors of atrocities or disasters such as the Holocaust and the Dutch famine of 1944-45 had passed on the biological scars of those tr
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Should Princeton Exist?
One recent fall morning at a coffee shop in Princeton, I overheard two students chatting about upcoming deadlines for the Rhodes, the Marshall, and the Mitchell—three prestigious postgraduate scholarships so coveted that they’ve become mononymous on elite campuses. “I don’t love the Rhodes dude from the 1800s,” one student confessed to the other. “Wasn’t he, like, racist?” Indeed. This is the puz
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A COVID Serenity Prayer
“When can I visit my immunocompromised daughter?” “Is it too risky to host an indoor birthday dinner for my 70-year-old husband?” My inbox overflows with sensible—yet unanswerable—questions. For the past 18 months, my patients have craved straightforward answers: a simple “Yes—it’s perfectly safe” or “Go for it. Have fun!” or even a “No, you absolutely cannot” to quiet the endless loops of risk c
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How my ivermectin research led to Twitter death threats | Dr Andrew Hill
I was sent images of coffins and hanged Nazi war criminals after finding medical fraud in clinical trials The story of online threats and abuse is very dark. In early 2021, my research team was analysing a new drug called ivermectin. In the first clinical trials, this drug seemed to prevent new infections and improve survival. When I first wrote about this, I started getting regular threats on Tw
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When the Place You Live Becomes Unlivable
“New Orleans is the only ship I’d go down with,” my friend Ben wrote on Facebook in the hours before Hurricane Ida upended southeast Louisiana. He rode out the storm in the city—“hunkering down,” in standard hurricane parlance. Anxious but safe, I read his post at a splash pad in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My family and I had evacuated New Orleans the day before, on August 28—two dogs, two kids, and tw
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Winners of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, founded in 1965, is an annual international showcase of the best nature photography. This year, the contest attracted more than 50,000 entries from 95 countries. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. The owners and sponsors have once more been kind enough to share the following winning
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Cabinet minister refuses to apologise after report on UK Covid response
Stephen Barclay says decisions taken ‘to move quickly’ despite inquiry criticising handling of pandemic Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage A cabinet minister has refused to apologise to the families who lost loved ones during the coronavirus pandemic after a damning report from MPs on the UK government’s response found that tens of thousands of lives were lost because o
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William Shatner: hardest part of space flight will be getting in and out of seat
Star Trek actor, 90, says arthritis makes entry and exit of berth in Blue Origin capsule for Wednesday’s journey difficult The toughest part of going into space with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company, the Star Trek actor William Shatner said, will be getting in and out of his chair in the New Shepard spacecraft. Shatner, 90, will become the oldest person to go into space when he blasts off as part
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Deforestation Is a Crime
The world doesn’t agree on many things, but one of them is that global deforestation is a problem. If deforestation were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest source of climate-warming pollution, after the United States and China. (It would also be a terrible place to live—bulldozers everywhere and no shade to speak of.) Parts of the Amazon now emit more carbon pollution than they capt
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‘Lies and trauma’: donor-conceived adults are still haunted by their origins
Australia’s fertility industry has undergone seismic shifts in practice, but for those born before these changes, past mistakes feel firmly in the present Get our free news app ; get our morning email briefing Brendan Ritter, 22, recently discovered he was donor conceived. When he was told, his first feelings were for his mother: “I felt the weight of her emotion from her body language,” he says.
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Biden Secretly Considering First-Ever White House “Crypto Czar”
Crypto Czar It’s only a matter of time before the government takes a more hands-on role when it comes to cryptocurrency. The latest push for this might come in the way of a White House appointed crypto czar. The Biden administration is allegedly looking into an executive order directing federal agencies to study crypto and give recommendations, anonymous sources told Bloomberg . As a part of the
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1 Billion TikTok Users Understand What Congress Doesn’t
Many people think of TikTok as a dance app. And although it is an app full of dancing , it’s also a juggernaut experiencing astronomical growth. In July, TikTok—a short-form video-sharing app powered by an uncannily good recommendation algorithm and owned by the Chinese company ByteDance—became the only social-media mobile app other than those from Facebook to ever pass 3 billion downloads . At t
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NASA’s Scandal-Plagued James Webb Telescope Arrives at Launch Site
Final Destination After decades of development — and delays — the James Webb Space Telescope is finally being prepped for launch. The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed that the giant space telescope has arrived at its spaceport in French Guiana, a territory of France located on the northeast corner of South America. There, the spaceport’s proximity to the equator will help the ESA’s Arian
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William Shatner Takes Blue Origin Joyride, as Scandals Plague Company
Beam me up, Jeffrey! Blue Origin has launched William Shatner, best known as the actor who played Captain Kirk in the “Star Trek” franchise, to an altitude of 66.5 miles. Shatner was joined by biotech entrepreneur Glen de Vries, Blue Origin’s Vice President of Mission & Flight Operations Audrey Powers, and Australian physicist and engineer Chris Boshuizern. “That was unlike anything they describe
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Climate Change Mission Control
How do we work together to create a nation resilient against climate change? Earlier today, NASA joined forces with FEMA to co-host their Resilient Nation Partnership Network Alliances for Climate Action Virtual Forum Series . NASA Administrator Sen. Bill Nelson, Official Portrait, Monday, May 17, 2021, NASA Headquarters Mary W. Jackson Building in Washington. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls NASA’s res
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Astronomers discover an inflated 'hot Jupiter'
Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered a new inflated, low-density "hot Jupiter" exoplanet. The newly found alien world, designated TIC 257060897b, is about 50 percent larger than Jupiter, but some 30 percent less massive than the solar system's biggest planet. The finding is detailed in a paper published October 1 on arXiv.org.
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Washington Is Getting China Wrong
E vergrande Group , one of China’s largest property developers, is tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. Its founder, Hui Ka Yan, is scrounging to find the cash to meet payments on the $300 billion his company owes. Beijing has warned local officials to prepare for possible fallout if the gargantuan firm collapses. Around the world, financial analysts are wondering if Evergrande is China’s “Lehma
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Meteorite crashes through roof of Canada woman’s home and on to bed
‘I’ve never been so scared in my life,’ says Ruth Hamilton after meteorite shower above a western Canadian region A woman in Canada awoke in shock earlier this week when a rock crashed through the ceiling of her home and landed on her bed, narrowly missing her but spraying grit and other debris on her face, as her dog barked frantically. Police were called and the culprit was initially suspected
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Holey metalens! New metalens focuses light with ultra-deep holes
Metasurfaces are nanoscale structures that interact with light. Today, most metasurfaces use monolith-like nanopillars to focus, shape and control light. The taller the nanopillar, the more time it takes for light to pass through the nanostructure, giving the metasurface more versatile control of each color of light. But very tall pillars tend to fall or cling together. What if, instead of buildin
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Ridley Scott’s New Film Plays a Masterly Trick
The Last Duel introduces Jean de Carrouges (played by Matt Damon ), its ostensible hero, with the gritty fanfare expected from a Ridley Scott epic. Much like the valiant former Roman general Maximus of Gladiator or the stouthearted Crusader Balian of Kingdom of Heaven , Jean proudly charges into battle, sword in hand, hacking at the enemy with no regard for his own life. The film follows Jean in
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Underwater gardens boost coral diversity to stave off 'biodiversity meltdown'
Corals are the foundation species of tropical reefs worldwide, but stresses ranging from overfishing to pollution to warming oceans are killing corals and degrading the critical ecosystem services they provide. Because corals build structures that make living space for many other species, scientists have known that losses of corals result in losses of other reef species. But the importance of cora
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What will happen after the sun dies? ‘Serendipitous’ discovery gives clues
A distant gas giant found orbiting a white dwarf star suggests outer planets in our solar system might survive the sun’s demise Get our free news app ; get our morning email briefing A Jupiter-sized planet has been found orbiting a white dwarf star in the Milky Way, providing clues as to what will happen in our solar system when the sun eventually dies. An international team of astronomers observ
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Ancient poop shows people in present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese up to 2,700 years ago
Human feces don't usually stick around for long—and certainly not for thousands of years. But exceptions to this general rule are found in a few places in the world, including prehistoric salt mines of the Austrian UNESCO World Heritage area Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut. Now, researchers who've studied ancient fecal samples (or paleofeces) from these mines have uncovered some surprising evide
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Rocket men: how billionaires are using celebrities as PR for their space projects
Critics see the ‘awful business’ of private space tourism as having little technological or exploration value As Star Trek’s iconic Captain James T Kirk, he voyaged the universe for the good of humanity. The nonagenarian actor William Shatner’s brief, real-life thrill ride off the planet today, however, is much less about advancing the species as promoting the fortunes of Blue Origin, the private
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Drug trial offers new hope for those with metastatic breast cancer
Scientists are studying whether talazoparib could help treat those with incurable breast cancer Scientists have launched a new trial that could offer hope to those with incurable breast cancer. They are studying whether an existing drug, talazoparib, also known by the brandname Talzenna, may offer a new treatment to people with incurable breast cancer that has spread to the brain. Continue readin
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Arctic Ocean's 'last ice area' may not survive the century
With warming climate, summer sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking fast, and now consistently spans less than half the area it did in the early 1980s. This raises the question: It this keeps up, in the future will year-round sea ice—and the creatures who need it to survive—persist anywhere?
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Challenging the big bang puzzle of heavy elements
It has long been theorized that hydrogen, helium, and lithium were the only chemical elements in existence during the Big Bang when the universe formed, and that supernova explosions, stars exploding at the end of their lifetime, are responsible for transmuting these elements into heavier ones and distributing them throughout our universe.
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America’s Blue and Red Tribes Aren’t So Far Apart
Large swaths of America’s vaccinated masses—along with elites in the White House, boardrooms, public schools, hospitals, and the mainstream media—are feeling frustrated with their unvaccinated neighbors. And understandably so. COVID-19 vaccines offer stellar protection against hospitalization and death. I despair that many thousands more unvaccinated Americans will die needlessly, that overcrowde
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Uppmaningen: Skicka in din fästing på analys
Den som hittar en fästing på sig själv, ett husdjur eller annat djur och bor i Norrland ombeds skicka in det lilla blodsugande djuret – levande eller dött – till Statens veterinärmedicinska anstalt (SVA) för analys. Fästingen kommer att artbestämmas och undersökas om den bär på någon smitta och i så fall vilken, skriver SVA i ett pressmeddelande.
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Chemists create chemical probe to better understand immune response
A trio of chemists at Indiana University Bloomington has created a new sensor to detect chemical changes in immune cells during the breakdown of pathogens. The work could potentially contribute to the early diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, that evade certain elements of the body's immune response.
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Australian scientists fear job insecurity as morale plummets amid Covid, survey finds
Professional Scientists Australia chief points to problem of short-term contracts, as one in five say they intend to leave the profession Follow our Covid live blog for the latest updates NSW Covid vaccination rate by postcode – check your suburb NSW restrictions Vaccine rollout and rates tracker ; Cases and data tracker 5km and 10km from home map: check your travel radius Get our free news app ;
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More people are dying at home than in the past | David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters
Did they receive care and compassion from loved ones or did they die alone, fearful of getting infected in hospital? From the start of the pandemic to 24 September 2021, deaths at home in England and Wales have been 37% higher than the 2015-2019 average, according to the Office for National Statistics. For every three people who used to die at home, four now do. That’s more than 71,000 “excess” de
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Dozens of Self-Driving Cars Getting Stuck on Same Dead-End Street
Traffic Jam Well, this is a new one. Waymo, a Google offshoot that develops usually-impressive self-driving cars , has run into a problem as dozens of its semi-autonomous vehicles are getting stuck on the same dead-end street. 15th Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District is normally a quiet, residential, and — pivotally — dead-end street. But for the past several weeks, it’s become a hotspot
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The Sleeper SCOTUS Case That Threatens the Separation of Church and State
The Supreme Court’s upcoming abortion- and guns-rights cases are getting much of the attention right now, but a third, relatively overlooked case could transform one of the most consequential areas of American law: the separation of Church and state. If the plaintiffs win, states and municipalities could be required to use taxpayer dollars to supplement strands of private religious education that
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Ultrasound trial offers hope for brain cancer patients
New technique temporarily allows drugs to cross blood brain barrier to treat tumours A technique has been developed that could revolutionise the treatment of brain cancers and neurodegenerative diseases by temporarily allowing drugs and other substances to cross the blood brain barrier – a structure that separates the brain’s blood vessels from the rest of its tissues. A trial in four women whose
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The Cost of William Shatner’s ‘Most Profound Experience’
Updated at 2:38 p.m. on Oct. 13, 2021. William Shatner was a little nervous about that rocket. A week ago, during a CNN interview , his eyes went wide when the network showed a clip of a Blue Origin rocket taking off, streams of blazing exhaust unfurling from below. He’d never seen that footage before, he said, with all that “fire and brimstone.” “Oh my gosh,” the actor said. “Things like that go
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The Energy Crunch, in Six Paragraphs
This is an excerpt from The Atlantic ’s climate newsletter, The Weekly Planet. Subscribe today . This is the month that the world’s energy transition got messy. Over the past few weeks, the world has sleepwalked into an energy crunch. The benchmark price of a barrel of crude oil is up more than 25 percent from its August low. In Asia, natural-gas prices are approaching an all-time high . The risk
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The most powerful space telescope ever built will look back in time to the Dark Ages of the universe
Some have called NASA's James Webb Space Telescope the "telescope that ate astronomy." It is the most powerful space telescope ever built and a complex piece of mechanical origami that has pushed the limits of human engineering. On Dec. 18, 2021, after years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, the telescope is scheduled to launch into orbit and usher in the next era of astronomy.
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Researchers find Greenland's groundwater changes with thinning ice sheet
For more than a decade, a team of University of Montana researchers and students have studied the dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet as it responds to a warming climate. University of Montana (UM) Department of Geosciences researchers Toby Meierbachtol and Joel Harper said water has always been central to their research.
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Shape-shifting worm blob model could inspire future robot swarms
Blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) are distant relatives of rainworms, measuring up to 10 cm long. They live in shallow marshes, ponds, and swamps in Europe and North America, where they feed on microorganisms and debris. To protect themselves from drought, blackworms can aggregate as entangled, shape-shifting "blobs" composed of a few to hundreds of individuals. Just like swarms of bees, rafts o
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Fall Is in the Air: Images of the Season
Autumn, the best season, is upon us once again. The autumnal equinox took place a few weeks ago, marking the end of summer and the start of fall across the Northern Hemisphere. It is the season of harvests, festivals, migrations, winter preparations, and, of course, spectacular fall foliage. Across the North, people are beginning to feel a chill in the evening air, leaves are splashing mountainsi
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Australia to build 20kg rover to head to moon in joint mission with Nasa
Expertise in mining sector expected to aid development of rover which will collect lunar soil to help establish human presence on moon Australia has signed a deal with Nasa to send an Australian-built rover to the moon, supporting a mission to collect lunar soil and examine how its oxygen could support human life in space. The $50m project will be supported by the federal government’s Moon to Mar
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How to Know You’re Lonely
Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Googl e Podcasts The irony in loneliness is that we all share in the experience of it. In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life , we sit down to discuss isolated living and Americans’ collective struggle to create a relationship-centric life. As we continue along our journey to happiness, we ask: How can I build my life around people
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Tucked-away marble quarries discovered as source for archaic Apollo
The source of marble for a statue of Apollo on the Greek island of Delos has been a mystery to art historians and archaeologists for decades. The stone's chemistry pointed geochemists to the southern end of the nearby island of Naxos, but no one thought there were ancient marble quarries there. A geoarchaeologist believes he found the source.
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Slackers of the World, Unite!
Illustrations by Maria Chimishkyan In 2014, the executives at a brand-new start-up called Andela made a decision whose consequences they would only understand much later. Andela’s model was to recruit and train promising African engineers, then place them at Western tech firms, which meant its employees and clients were scattered across time zones; it desperately needed a way for its distributed
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Nobel prize will have no gender or ethnicity quotas, academy head says
Only 59 Nobel prizes – or 6.2% of the total – have gone to women since their inception in 1901 Swedish scientist and head of the academy that awards Nobel prizes has ruled out the notion of gender or ethnicity quotas in the selection of laureates for the prestigious award. Göran Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, accepted that there are “so few women” in the
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Thank the Great Pumpkin! Fauci Says Trick-or-Treating Is Fine This Year
Dr. Anthony Fauci has spoken: It’s okay to go out and celebrate Halloween this year. The White House’s chief medical adviser spoke to CNN on Sunday outlining his recommendations for parents who want to take their kids trick-or-treating. While he still stressed the importance of being vaccinated, he also said that folks could go trick-or-treating safely. “It’s a good time to reflect on why it’s im
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‘I think there’s life out there’: powerful radio antenna used for first time to find exoplanets
Australian scientists part of team using Low Frequency Array to detect signals indicating planets beyond our solar system Get our free news app ; get our morning email briefing New techniques for spotting previously hidden planets could reveal whether there is life out there – or not. Australian scientists are part of a team that has for the first time used a radio antenna to find exoplanets, whi
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Study links COVID-19 rates with nature equity, shows double burden for communities of color
By now, it's clear the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly unkind to communities of color and low-income populations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ties these disparities to disproportionate representation of nonwhite populations in essential worker roles, discrimination, lack of healthcare access, wage gaps, housing factors, and more. But new research from the San Francisco E
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Primates' ancestors may have left trees to survive asteroid
When an asteroid struck 66 million years ago and wiped out dinosaurs not related to birds and three-quarters of life on Earth, early ancestors of primates and marsupials were among the only tree-dwelling (arboreal) mammals that survived, according to a new study.
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Quantum circuit black hole lasers to explore Hawking radiation
The fundamental forces of physics govern the matter comprising the universe, yet exactly how these forces work together is still not fully understood. The existence of Hawking radiation—the particle emission from near black holes—indicates that general relativity and quantum mechanics must cooperate. But directly observing Hawking radiation from a black hole is nearly impossible due to the backgro
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How to Have an Impossible Conversation
For the first 40 minutes of its runtime, the film Mass refuses to reveal why its four protagonists—two sets of parents—have gathered in a small room in a church basement. They don’t appear to be friends; they’re polite toward one another, but cold. They’re not there to pray or to eat the food that’s been provided. Their conversation is stilted and awkward, descending into silence every few beats.
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The covid tech that is intimately tied to China’s surveillance state
Sometime in mid-2019, a police contractor in the Chinese city of Kuitun tapped a young college student from the University of Washington on the shoulder as she walked through a crowded market intersection. The student, Vera Zhou, didn’t notice the tapping at first because she was listening to music through her earbuds as she weaved through the crowd. When she turned around and saw the black unifo
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William Shatner’s Blue Origin launch into space delayed due to weather
Shatner, best known for playing Captain Kirk in Star Trek, will be part of a four-person crew aboard the suborbital NS-18 mission The Star Trek actor William Shatner must wait another day to boldly go into space for real, after the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company pushed this week’s launch target of its New Shepard vehicle to Wednesday. “Due to forecasted winds on Tuesday 12 Octobe
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Teen leaving the nest? Give them a taste of home with these recipes
Ease your child’s start at university with tasty low-budget recipes that are easy to make Last week, I experienced something I’d been dreading since my daughters came into the world: my first-born leaving home for the first time. I’ve experienced such a mix of emotions. Of course, I’m incredibly proud of Reet for doing so well in her exams and getting into the university of her choice, but I’m al
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‘Galactic Britain’: how Cornwall is winning the European space race
After last week’s publication of the national space strategy, photojournalist Jonny Weeks explores how the south-west is primed for the first launch of a satellite-bearing rocket from UK soil “When we first started, people would laugh at us,” says Melissa Thorpe as she guides a group of visitors around an exhibition in a vast hangar at Newquay airport. “But now look, we’re only a matter of months
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Britain’s Distasteful Soccer Sellout
In the northern English city of Newcastle upon Tyne, there is no Duomo di Firenze or Sagrada Familia standing tall, representing the city, its soul and spirit. There is no St. Paul’s Cathedral, Notre-Dame, or Basilica di San Marco . No, in Newcastle, the cathedral and castle are of secondary importance—so too the Roman wall built by the emperor Hadrian. In Newcastle, the soul of the city is its g
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Climate study linking early Māori fires to Antarctic changes sparks controversy
Research tying Māori activity 700 years ago to Antarctic changes sparks debate in New Zealand over Indigenous inclusion in science Deep in the ice of a remote Antarctic peninsula, a group of researchers found evidence that fires started by early Māori wreaked changes in the atmosphere detectable 7,000km away. In New Zealand, the research sparked a heated controversy of its own – over Indigenous i
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Working to understand the changing flavors of quarks
Visible matter, or the stuff that composes the things we see, is made of particles that can be thought of much like building blocks made of more building blocks, ever decreasing in size, down to the sub-atomic level. Atoms are made of things like protons and neutrons, which are composed of even smaller building blocks such as quarks. Studying those smallest building blocks requires experimentation
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AI fake-face generators can be rewound to reveal the real faces they trained on
Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and it’ll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and another, and another. The endless sequence of AI-crafted faces is produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN)—a type of AI that learns to produce realistic but fake examples of the data it is
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Covid conspiracy theories are driving people to anti-Semitism online
A warning: Conspiracy theories about covid are helping disseminate anti-Semitic beliefs to a wider audience, warns a new report by the antiracist advocacy group Hope not Hate. The report says that not only has the pandemic revived interest in the “New World Order” conspiracy theory of a secret Jewish-run elite that aims to run the world, but far-right activists have also worked to convert people’
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‘We have done a terrible job’: Journal retracts, replaces paper on mosquito-borne infections
A virology journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 article on mosquito-borne infections in Africa after one of the authors identified errors in the publication — an episode that has prompted a change in practice at the journal to avoid similar issues in the future. The article, “Mosquito-borne arboviruses in Uganda: history, transmission and burden,” … Continue reading
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Examining the origins of proton spin
Where does the proton get its spin? This question has puzzled physicists ever since experiments in the 1980s revealed that a proton's constituent quarks—the most fundamental building blocks of atomic nuclei—account for only about one-third of a proton's spin. Collisions of spin-polarized protons at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facil
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'Most profound experience': William Shatner starstruck by encounter with space – video
Actor William Shatner soared aboard a Blue Origin rocketship on a suborbital trip on Wednesday to become, at the age 90, the oldest person ever in space – an experience he called profound – as US billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos's company carried out its second tourist flight William Shatner completes flight on Bezos rocket to become oldest person in space Continue reading…
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How Animals Map 3D Spaces Surprises Brain Researchers
Leaping, scurrying, flying and swimming through their natural habitats, animals compile a mental map of the world around them — one that they use to navigate home, find food and locate other points of vital interest. Neuroscientists have chiseled away at the problem of how animals do this for decades. A crucial piece of the solution is an elegant neural code that researchers uncovered by… Sourc
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Binary stars boost cosmic carbon footprint
The cosmic origin of carbon, a fundamental building block of life, is still uncertain. Massive stars play an important role in the synthesis of all heavy elements, from carbon and oxygen to iron and so on. But even though most massive stars are born in multiple systems, the nucleosynthesis models so far have almost exclusively simulated single stars. An international team of astrophysicists has no
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Facebook wants machines to see the world through our eyes
We take it for granted that machines can recognize what they see in photos and videos. That ability rests on large data sets like ImageNet , a hand-curated collection of millions of photos used to train most of the best image-recognition models of the last decade. But the images in these data sets portray a world of curated objects—a picture gallery that doesn’t capture the mess of everyday life
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San Andreas Fault-like tectonics discovered on Saturn moon Titan
Strike-slip faulting, the type of motion common to California's well-known San Andreas Fault, was reported recently to possibly occur on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. New research, led by planetary scientists from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), suggests this tectonic motion may be active on Titan, deforming the icy surface.
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'Selective promiscuity,' chaperones, and the secrets of cellular health
A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has announced a major new advance in understanding how our genetic information eventually translates into functional proteins—one of the building blocks of human life. The research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), elucidates how chaperones display "selective promiscuity" for the speci
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Evidence found of sea slugs stealing photosynthesizing machinery from algae, using it to boost reproduction
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Portugal and France has found evidence suggesting that sea slugs that steal photosynthesizing machinery from the algae they eat use it to boost their own reproduction efforts. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study of the unique creatures and what they learned about them.
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Scientists report evidence for a new but now extinct species of ancient ground-dwelling sloth
Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine report new evidence that some 5,000 years ago, a sloth smaller than a black bear roamed the forest floor of what is now the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean Sea, living a lowland life different from its cousins on the other side of the island. The newly identified mammalian species—now extinct—was smaller
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‘The Men Who Are Killing America’s Newspapers’
Many people assume that local newspapers are dying because they haven’t been able to create a sustainable business model for the digital age, now that Facebook and Google command the advertising space. But that’s only part of the story. For The Atlantic ’s November cover story, “ The Men Who Are Killing America’s Newspapers ,” staff writer McKay Coppins reports on the secretive hedge fund Alden G
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Ode to Joy
Friedrich Schiller called Joy the spark of divinity but she visits me on a regular basis, and it doesn’t take much for her to appear— the salt next to the pepper by the stove, the garbage man ascending his station on the back of the moving garbage truck, or I’m just eating a banana in the car and listening to Buddy Guy. In other words, she seems down-to-earth, like a girl getting off a bus with a
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The Christians Who Mock Wokeness for a Living
The Babylon Bee, an online satire publication that launched in 2016, has become a popular destination for Christians disaffected with megachurch culture and right-wingers who crave clever commentary about the hypocritical left. Kyle Mann, the website’s editor in chief, sometimes gives talks on college campuses. For conservative students, he told me, “It’s like they found their underground cabal o
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'Cleaning up' an oil spill
After thousands of gallons of oil poured into the Pacific Ocean following the October 2 spill, agencies and volunteers have worked around the clock to mitigate the damage and stop the spread.
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Monitor lizards in Borneo found to prefer forests next to oil palm plantations
A team of researchers from Cardiff University working with staff at the Danau Girang Field Centre in Sabah, Malaysia, has found that monitor lizards living in the Malaysian part of Borneo prefer to reside in the natural forests that abut oil plantations, rather than in the plantations themselves. They have published a paper describing their findings on the open-access site PLOS ONE.
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Rye a better choice than wheat for weight loss
Eating whole grain rye products instead of refined wheat alternatives can offer worthwhile health benefits. Researchers recently published a study showing that people who ate high-fiber products made from whole grain rye lost more body fat and overall weight than those who ate corresponding products made from refined wheat.
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Watch SpaceX Tourists Do a Harry Potter-Inspired Magic Trick in Orbit
Wingardium Leviosa We already know space is a pretty magical place — but the SpaceX tourists took that to another level when they performed a Harry Potter-inspired magic trick while in orbit. Inspiration4 pilot Sian Proctor performed the illusion with the help of her assistant (and the crew’s chief medical officer) Hayley Arceneaux in a video Proctor recently posted to Twitter . In it, they take
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Bioinspired electromechanical nanogenerators to regulate cell activity
The extracellular matrix (ECM) including three-dimensional (3D) network and bioelectricity can profoundly influence cell development, migration, and functional expression. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Tong Li and a research team in chemistry, nanotechnology, bioelectronics and advanced materials in China, developed an electromechanical coupling bio-nanogenerator abbreviated b
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Finding sterile neutrinos
Experiments have spotted anomalies hinting at a new type of neutrino, one that would go beyond the standard model of particle physics and perhaps open a portal to the dark sector. But no one has ever directly observed this hypothetical particle.
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Over a thousand cosmic explosions detected in 47 days
An international research team led by Prof. Li Di and Dr. Wang Pei from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) caught an extreme episode of cosmic explosions from Fast Radio Burst (FRB) 121102, using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). A total of 1,652 independent bursts were detected within 47 days starting Aug. 29, 2019 (UT).
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New, non-invasive blood sugar testing methods using saliva
Despite breakthrough diabetes research over the past century, people with diabetes still need to rely on obtaining blood samples to monitor their sugar levels. Daily glucose monitoring by tracking blood sugar levels is essential for managing both types 1 and 2 diabetes, however the current method—finger pricking—is invasive and can become burdensome with how often it needs to be done.
6h
Government must be transparent about science advice it receives
Analysis: inquiry into UK’s response to Covid crisis shows Sage guidance should be put in public domain as soon as possible Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage The parliamentary inquiry into the UK’s response to the Covid crisis raises the serious issue of transparency around scientific advice – and why this remains crucial even as the country moves beyond an emergency s
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ENSO impacts child undernutrition in the global tropics
Nature Communications, Published online: 12 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26048-7 The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences the weather around the world and, therefore, has strong impacts on society. Here, the authors show that ENSO is associated with child nutrition in many countries, with warmer El Niño conditions leading to more child undernutrition in large parts of the develo
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Controlling thin films with atomic 'spray painting'
Without thin films, there would be no modern electronics or high-quality mirrors. The semiconductor chips used in our cell phones and computers rely on thin films made of different materials, including metal oxides that contain at least one metal as well as oxygen.
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Homegrown Covid vaccines fill gap as UN Covax scheme misses target
India, Egypt and Cuba among first states to develop and make their own vaccines as Covax falls behind Developing countries are increasingly turning to homegrown Covid vaccinations as the UN-backed Covax programme falls behind. While western countries roll out booster jabs to their own populations, Covax, which was set up by UN agencies, governments and donors to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vac
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Mechanisms behind intercellular communication in tumors decoded
All cells in a multicellular organism must be precisely coordinated in order for the organism to function correctly. This applies both to healthy tissue and also tumors. Communication between the cells is extremely important and is achieved via direct cellular contact or using messenger substances. Recent studies have also shown that cells emit extracellular vesicles—so-called exosomes with a size
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Molecular mixing creates super stable glass
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have succeeded in creating a new type of super-stable, durable glass with potential applications ranging from medicines, advanced digital screens, and solar cell technology. The study shows how mixing multiple molecules—up to eight at a time—can result in a material that performs as well as the best currently known glass formers.
7h
The Experiment Podcast: Liberals Don’t Get The Babylon Bee. Neither Do Conservatives.
Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts The satire site The Babylon Bee , a conservative Christian answer to The Onion , stirred controversy when some readers mistook its headlines for misinformation. In this episode, The Atlantic ’s religion reporter Emma Green sits down with The Bee ’s editor in chief, Kyle Mann, to talk about where he draws the line between
11h
To Be Happy, Hide From the Spotlight
“ How to Build a Life ” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life . Humans have a bad habit of wanting things that are terrible for us. An abundance of refined sugar rots our teeth and blows out our insulin system. Avoiding exercise can weaken our bones and mak
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Vagina lasering for postmenopausal women ‘may be placebo’
Study suggests therapy for dryness, itching and pain should be used with caution, say experts An expensive laser treatment purporting to help women with postmenopausal vaginal symptoms such as dryness, itching and pain when having sex may be no better than a placebo, research suggests. According to the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), vaginal laser therapy involves i
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Earliest evidence of wild tobacco use in Americas found in Utah
A team of researchers with the Far Western Anthropological Research Group and the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, has found evidence of the earliest use of wild tobacco in the Americas. In their paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group describes what they found and where and suggest theories regarding how tobacco might have been used by people thousands of years ago.
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Blazar PG 1553+113 investigated by researchers
Using space observatories and ground-based facilities, Chinese astronomers have investigated a blazar known as PG 1553+113. Results of this study shed more light on the behavior of this object, indicating that it hosts a supermassive black hole binary system. The research was published October 5 on arXiv.org.
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Brain injury after long-duration spaceflight
Spending long periods in space not only leads to muscle atrophy and reductions in bone density, it also seems to have lasting effects on the brain. Neuroimaging studies (amongst others from this LMU team of researchers) has hinted at this over the last three years. However, little is known if the observed brain-structural alterations are harmless or clinically relevant. LMU physicians Professor Pe
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Indian scientists explore galaxy cluster Abell 725
Using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), Indian astronomers have conducted radio observations of a galaxy cluster known as Abell 725. Results of this observational campaign deliver important information regarding the structure and morphology of Abell 725, revealing the presence of diffuse filaments in this cluster. The study was presented in a paper published October 7 on arXiv.org.
6h
Ancient feces shows people in present-day Austria drank beer and ate blue cheese up to 2,700 years ago
Human feces don't usually stick around for long — and certainly not for thousands of years. But exceptions to this general rule are found in a few places in the world, including prehistoric salt mines of the Austrian UNESCO World Heritage area Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut. Now, researchers who've studied ancient fecal samples (or paleofeces) from these mines have uncovered some surprising ev
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Is gene editing the future of food? – podcast
The world’s harvests are coming under increasing pressure from extreme weather events, disease and deteriorating soil health – problems that are set to get worse in the next few decades. Could one solution be to genetically edit our food to make it more resilient? With the UK’s recent announcement that it will ease the rules for growing gene-edited crops in England, Madeleine Finlay investigates
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Podcast: The story of AI, as told by the people who invented it
Welcome to I Was There When , a new oral history project from the In Machines We Trust podcast. It features stories of how breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and computing happened, as told by the people who witnessed them. In this first episode, we meet Joseph Atick— who helped create the first commercially viable face recognition system. Credits: This episode was produced by Jennifer Stro
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People taking statins less likely to die from Covid, study suggests
Experts warn findings do not prove cholesterol-lowering drugs can reduce death rates Millions of people who take statins may be less likely to die from Covid, research suggests. The cholesterol-lowering drugs are one of the world’s most popular medications. They can also reduce inflammation in blood vessels, which has prompted questions over whether they could help with outcomes in coronavirus pa
1h
The first unequivocal experimental evidence of a superfluid state in 2D 4He films
Over the past few decades, some physicists worldwide have been trying to use the second layer of 4He films adsorbed on a graphite substrate to study the interplay between superfluid and supersolid phases of matter. Some teams have collected torsional oscillator (TO) measurements on this layer, including P.A. Crowell, F.W. Van Keuls and J.D. Reppy at Cornell University, as well as Dr. Jan Nyeki and
5h
The Atlantic Daily: A Profession Is Not a Personality
Here’s a six-word story for this economic moment: Job opening, just posted. Please apply. Americans are quitting their gigs at a record-setting rate: 4.3 million people said bye to their boss in August , according to new data from the Department of Labor. That’s up from the previous all-time peak, logged this past April. Open positions are likewise trending high. As we’ve written, this “great res
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Few adverse health effects in wildlife exposed to low levels of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident
More than 10 years ago, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in a massive release of radioactive material into the environment. Radiation dose rates led to the evacuation of over 150,000 residents from an area estimated at 444 square miles. Although people were evacuated, wildlife remained within the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, as
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First evidence of microtubules' mechanosensitive behavior
Inside cells, microtubules not only serve as a component of the cytoskeleton (cell skeleton) but also play a role in intracellular transport. In intracellular transport, microtubules act as rails for motor proteins such as kinesin and dynein. Microtubules, the most rigid cytoskeletal component, are constantly subjected to various mechanical stresses such as compression, tension, and bending during
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G344.7-0.1: When a stable star explodes
White dwarfs are among the most stable of stars. Left on their own, these stars that have exhausted most of their nuclear fuel—while still typically as massive as the Sun—and shrunk to a relatively small size can last for billions or even trillions of years.
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Surface chemistry reveals corrosive secrets
One can easily see with the naked eye that leaving an old nail out in the rain causes rust. What does require the keen eyes and sensitive nose of microscopy and spectroscopy is observing how iron corrodes and forms new minerals, especially in water with a pinch of sodium and calcium.
22h
‘Gen Z’ Only Exists in Your Head
You know there’s drama in research circles—or at least what qualifies as drama in research circles—when someone writes an open letter. Earlier this year, that someone was Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park. His request: that Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan “fact tank,” “do the right thing” and stop using generational labels such as Gen Z and Baby Boomer
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William Shatner ready for 'life-changing' space flight at 90 – video
William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek, is to become the oldest person to venture into space. 'I shall be entranced by the view of space. I want to look at that orb and appreciate its beauty … its tenacity is sustaining this life of ours,' Shatner, 90, said in a video released by the aerospace company Blue Origin William Shatner to blast off on Bezos rocket to become oldest perso
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When breezy, wear masks outdoors to prevent coronavirus exposure
As the delta variant continues to spread, guidelines from the CDC recommend even the vaccinated wear masks indoors to prevent exposure and transmission, though it is less clear what people should do when outside. Researchers used a large eddy simulation to model cough jets in breezy and calm conditions. They found when a person coughs outdoors, wind flowing in the same direction can propagate the
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Using bacterial cocktails to fight infections
Most people have already experienced first-hand how important a healthy microbiome is when they had to take a broad-spectrum antibiotic. Unfortunately, the drug does not only destroy the pathogens. It also affects the 'good' bacteria in the bowel that otherwise occupy the most important niches and help fend off pathogens. This protective mechanism is called colonization resistance. But which bacte
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Carbon dissolved in Arctic rivers affects our world—here's how to study it
In a pair of recently published papers, Michael Rawlins, a professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's geosciences department and associate director of the Climate System Research Center, has made significant gains in filling out our understanding of the Arctic's carbon cycle—or the way that carbon is transferred between the land, ocean and atmosphere. In order to better understand futu
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3 US-based economists win Nobel prize for societal research
A U.S.-based economist won the Nobel prize for economics Monday for pioneering research that showed an increase in minimum wage does not lead to less hiring and immigrants do not lower pay for native-born workers, challenging commonly held ideas. Two others shared the award for creating a way to study these types of societal issues.
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Optimal blood pressure helps our brains age slower
People with elevated blood pressure that falls within the normal recommended range are at risk of accelerated brain aging, according to new research. The research also found optimal blood pressure helps our brains stay at least six months younger than our actual age.
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The Atlantic Daily: The Real 2024 Election Nightmare
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox. Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty The 2024 presidential election could very well be a rematch of 2020. “A Trump candidacy in 2024 is almost certain, and a nomination is probable,” my colleague David A.
3h
Bröder svårt coronasjuka – saknade gen
En gendefekt som förklarar svår covid-19 har för första gången upptäckts i Sverige, visar en studie som forskare från Karolinska institutet deltagit i. Två coronasjuka bröder i 30-årsåldern svävade mellan liv och död på intensiven – nu visar det sig att de bar på anlaget.
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Winter-swimming Scandinavian men can teach us how the body adapts to extreme heat and cold
The Scandinavian winter swimming culture combines brief dips in cold water with hot sauna sessions — and now, a study of young men who participate regularly in these polar plunges finds that winter swimming may allow the body to adapt to extreme temperatures. The findings suggest that routinely alternating swims or dips in chilly water with sauna sessions might affect how brown fat, also known as
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Researchers find warning signs for dementia in the blood
Researchers have identified molecules in the blood that can indicate impending dementia. Their findings are based on human studies and laboratory experiments. The biomarker is based on measuring levels of so-called microRNAs. According to the study data, microRNAs could potentially also be targets for dementia therapy.
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Smoke from nuclear war would devastate ozone layer, alter climate
The massive columns of smoke generated by a nuclear war would alter the world's climate for years and devastate the ozone layer, endangering both human health and food supplies, new research shows. The international study draws on newly developed computer climate modeling techniques to paint an even grimmer picture of a global nuclear war's aftermath than previous analyses.
16h
Improved fluorescent amino acids for cellular imaging
New research conducted by researchers in the lab of Penn's E. James Petersson in collaboration with Oregon State University and the University of Washington describes how proteins in living cells can be engineered to include synthetic fluorescent amino acids that are bright, long-lasting, and have properties that sense their environment. This work can help biologists study proteins more easily, wi
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Unraveling the mystery of touch
Researchers uncover mechanism that underlies the exquisite sensitivity of certain skin surfaces. The analysis, conducted in mice, reveals that the higher sensitivity of certain regions of the skin stems from a greater number of and stronger connections between neurons in these regions and corresponding brain areas that receive signals from them. The findings set the stage for better understanding
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Dispensing Doctors: Should Physicians Sell Drugs to Patients?
Advocates for allowing doctors to dispense drugs directly to patients argue that it is both more convenient and cheaper, while bringing extra revenue to doctors. Not everybody agrees — least of all pharmacists, who suggest that it removes important safety checks, and presents a worrying conflict of interest.
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By 2500 Earth could be alien to humans
To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark. Unless CO2 emissions drop significantly, global warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, the American Midwest tropical, and India too hot to live in, according to a team of international scientists.
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Evidence of superionic ice provides new insights into unusual magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune
Not all ice is the same. The solid form of water comes in more than a dozen different – sometimes more, sometimes less crystalline – structures, depending on the conditions of pressure and temperature in the environment. Superionic ice is a special crystalline form, half solid, half liquid – and electrically conductive. Its existence has been predicted on the basis of various models and has alread
10min
Lone changer: Fish camouflage better without friends nearby
While gobies aren't the only fish with camouflage abilities, new research shows that their colour change is influenced by their social context: they transform faster and better when alone. This is likely an adaptive, stress response to perceived threat from predators – with possible application to other camouflaging species.
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HTC Announces Smaller, Lighter Vive Flow VR Headset
HTC’s presence in the smartphone market has all but evaporated, but it’s still a presence in the world of VR. Facebook’s Oculus is way out in the lead, but HTC hopes its new Vive Flow might attract a new kind of VR enthusiast. The lightweight headset is styled more like a pair of glasses, making it easier to pop them on to watch Netflix or play a simple game. However, you’re going to need an exte
15min
12-Year-Old Develops Slenderman Phobia After Seeing Him in VR
Technophobia As Facebook and other companies take steps to build a “metaverse” and strive to make virtual and mixed reality experiences as much of an all-encompassing tech as the internet is today, experts are sharing concerns about safety, both during the experiences themselves and in terms of the impact they can have on our offline lives. One 12-year-old girl told Slate that she now has a “ pho
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Third-Ever Tardigrade Fossil Discovered Hiding in a Hunk of Amber
Again with the accidental discoveries! It’s the third unexpected find within six weeks. This time, the good news was born from debris in a hunk of Dominican amber. The researchers were studying ants from the Miocene period, trapped in a piece of amber. A closer look at the “debris” inclusions, however, revealed an even greater prize than the ants. What researchers had thought was just a fleck of
58min
Study finds male, female responses to performance pay similar across contexts, programs
Past studies have raised the possibility that performance pay—programs that give employees incentives to be productive by offering rewards for achieving performance objectives—may widen the gender earnings gap because women do not respond to performance incentives as strongly as men for psychological or cultural reasons. A new study evaluated this notion by aggregating evidence from experiments on
1h
Climate change threatens hydropower energy security in the Amazon basin
Hydropower is the dominant source of energy in the Amazon region, the world's largest river basin and a hotspot for future hydropower development. However, a new Global Environmental Change study warns that in the coming decades, climate change-driven reductions in precipitation and river discharge will diminish the Amazon's hydropower capacity.
1h
Scientists discover large rift in the Arctic's last bastion of thick sea ice
A new study documents the formation of a 3,000-square-kilometer rift in the oldest and thickest Arctic ice. The area of open water, called a polynya, is the first to be identified in an area north of Ellesmere Island, Canada's northernmost island, and is another sign of the rapid changes taking place in the Arctic, according to researchers.
1h
Evidence of superionic ice provides new insights into the unusual magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune
Not all ice is the same. The solid form of water comes in more than a dozen different—sometimes more, sometimes less crystalline—structures, depending on the conditions of pressure and temperature in the environment. Superionic ice is a special crystalline form—half solid, half liquid—and electrically conductive. Its existence has been predicted on the basis of various models and has already been
1h
The planet does not fall far from the star
A compositional link between planets and their respective host star has long been assumed in astronomy. For the first time now, a team of scientists deliver empirical evidence to support the assumption—and partly contradict it at the same time.
1h
Predicting phosphine reactivity with one simple metric
Phosphines are among the most important ligands for transition metal catalysis. Phosphines bind to a metal and modify its structure, reactivity, and selectivity. Many of the most practiced catalytic reactions in the pharmaceutical/commodity chemical industry use phosphines as ligands, such as cross-coupling. In these and many other cases, small changes to the phosphine structure often have signifi
1h
More than half of survivors experience ‘long COVID’
More than half of the 236 million people diagnosed with COVID-19 worldwide since December 2019 will experience post-COVID symptoms—commonly known as “long COVID”—up to six months after recovering. Governments, health care organizations, and public health professionals should prepare for the large number of COVID-19 survivors who will need care for a variety of psychological and physical symptoms,
1h
William Shatner has taken a small step, but it’s a giant leap to call him an astronaut | Brief letters
Space travel | Books | Duels in film Amazing though William Shatner’s short journey into near space was, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an astronaut ( William Shatner in tears after historic space flight: ‘I’m so filled with emotion, 13 October ). You’ll be calling us letter writers journalists next. David Edwards Hulme Stockport, Greater Manchester • As we seem to have entered a per
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Lupus sufferers pleaded for hydroxychloroquine before Clive Palmer’s doses were destroyed
Drug’s potential as Covid treatment, since dispelled, affected availability for people with proven medical need Get our free news app ; get our morning email briefing Lupus sufferers pleaded for more supplies of hydroxychloroquine two months before the federal government told billionaire Clive Palmer it didn’t want more of the 33m doses he wanted to donate as a potential Covid-19 treatment. One t
2h
Getting the most from your data-driven transformation: 10 key principles
The importance of data to today’s businesses can’t be overstated. Studies show data-driven companies are 58% more likely to beat revenue goals than non-data-driven companies and 162% more likely to significantly outperform laggards. Data analytics are helping nearly half of all companies make better decisions about everything, from the products they deliver to the markets they target. Data is bec
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Researchers Announce Most Precise Measurement Ever Taken of a Free Neutron’s Lifetime
To answer the big questions, sometimes we must look to the very small. Researchers at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center’s Ultracold Neutron Source, within Los Alamos National Lab, have been passing the cryo-baton for more than a decade, working at ever colder temperatures in order to study the behavior of neutrons. Now, an international collaboration of scientists has announced the most preci
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Drones Have Now Been Used to Deliver Lungs for Medical Transplant
(Photo: Unither Bioélectronique) The world’s first drone delivery of lungs has gone down in history as a success. Unither Bioélectronique, a bioengineering firm focused on organ transportation, recently completed a “proof-of-concept” flight in which a pair of human lungs were shipped via drone to the transplant site in about six minutes. The lungs were flown from the Toronto Western Hospital to T
2h
The Radeon RX 6600 is AMD’s Weakest RDNA2 GPU Yet
AMD has launched its RDNA2-powered Radeon 6600 and taken the crown as the least-attractive GPU since Ampere kicked off the most recent product update cycle just over a year ago. That’s the overall opinion of the various publications that have spent time with the card. These lower-end versions of RDNA2 may be more affordable and at least slightly easier to find than the 6700 XT and 6800 XT, but th
2h
Team makes most precise measurement of neutron lifetime
Physicists have announced the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime. The scientific purpose of the experiment is to measure how long, on average, a free neutron lives outside the confines of atomic nuclei. The results represent a more than two-fold improvement over previous measurements—with an uncertainty of less than one-tenth of a percent. “This work sets a new gold-standa
2h
Cannabis labels often wrong and misleading
The well-known India and Sativa labels that are used on cannabis products and form the basis for the information provided to users of medicinal cannabis are usually wrong and misleading. That is what researchers from Wageningen University & Research and the Canadian Dalhousie University conclude after analysizing hundreds of cannabis samples. Their research showed that the genetic and chemical com
3h
Using Disney movies to help with child development
Worried your children are getting too much screen time during the COVID-19 pandemic? How many times can a person watch "Frozen," right? Turns out, animated movies can serve as valuable tools for parents and counselors alike to improve communication with children about tough issues.
3h
COVID super-immunity: one of the pandemic’s great puzzles
Nature, Published online: 14 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02795-x People who have previously recovered from COVID-19 have a stronger immune response after being vaccinated than those who have never been infected. Scientists are trying to find out why.
3h
Physics outreach programs are a win-win for students, community
Although they sometimes get short shrift in terms of prioritizing, funding, and staffing, physics educational outreach programs are a solid investment with benefits far beyond the institutional bottom line, according to a new study. For the study, physicists and learning scientists spent roughly two years surveying and interviewing more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students involved in pre
3h
Scientists develop fully solar-driven autonomous chemical mini-plant
Professor Timothy Noël and co-workers in the Flow Chemistry group of the University of Amsterdam's Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences have developed a fully operational standalone solar-powered mini-reactor which offers the potential for the production of fine chemicals in remote locations on Earth, and possibly even on Mars. In a paper published by ChemSusChem, the team present their un
3h
British Royal Disses William Shatner’s Spaceflight
Prince William, a member of the British royal family and second in line for the throne, wasn’t impressed with “Star Trek” actor William Shatner’s brief joyride to the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere on board a Blue Origin rocket. “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,” he told the BBC
3h
Growing dominance of diatom algae in the Pearl River estuary
It is a common perception that waters close to population would be more polluted than those offshore or at higher latitudes. However, researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) found that the ratio between two common microalgae diatom and dinoflagellate (dino) – a common benchmark of water quality, has been nearly doubled in the Pearl River Estuary (PRE), one of th
3h
Robots can improve agriculture, but old laws stand in the way
Agricultural robots are capable of working around the clock to help farmers produce food. However, laws and regulations are outdated and may, at worst, be slowing the development of new technologies, according to a new study by the University of Copenhagen's Department of Food and Resource Economics and others.
3h
Sense of smell is our most rapid warning system
The ability to detect and react to the smell of a potential threat is a precondition of our and other mammals' survival. Using a novel technique, researchers have been able to study what happens in the brain when the central nervous system judges a smell to represent danger. The study indicates that negative smells associated with unpleasantness or unease are processed earlier than positive smells
3h
How the Sun’s magnetic forces arrange gas particles
Solar prominences hover above the visible solar disk like giant clouds, held there by a supporting framework of magnetic forces, originating from layers deep within the Sun. The magnetic lines of force are moved by ever-present gas currents — and when the supporting framework moves, so does the prominence cloud. A research team has observed how magnetic forces lifted a prominence by 25,000 kilome
3h
Metamaterial eENZ can control correlations of light
Researchers have theoretically demonstrated that the correlations of light can be controlled with a metamaterial known as enhanced epsilon-near-zero (eENZ) materials. The material allows small and high-quality lasers that are expected to have applications for example in imaging, flow detection and wireless optical communication.
3h
Tackling the collateral damage from antibiotics
Antibiotics help us to get rid of bacterial infections — but they can also harm the helpful microbes residing in our guts. Researchers have analyzed the effects of 144 antibiotics on the well-being of our most common gut microbes. The study significantly improves our understanding of antibiotics' side effects and suggests a new approach to mitigating the adverse effects of antibiotics therapy on
4h
Freezing fruit flies for future function
Researchers demonstrate a new technique for the cryopreservation of fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Frozen Drosophila primordial germ cells, which give rise to reproductive cells during development, may be thawed and implanted into host flies. This can lead to offspring that bear genetic characteristics of the donor flies. This technique offers a way to store Drosophila strains for future use,
4h
Most commonly mutated gene in all cancers revealed
For the past fifteen years, cancer researchers have been using DNA sequencing technology to identify the gene mutations that cause the different forms of cancer. Now, computational scientists have combined gene mutation information with cancer prevalence data to reveal the genetic basis of cancer in the entire population of cancer patients in the United States. The study reveals how common each ge
4h
How immunotherapy changes tumors
Engineers have used a non-invasive optical probe to understand the complex changes in tumors after immunotherapy, a treatment that harnesses the immune system to fight cancer. Their method combines detailed mapping of the biochemical composition of tumors with machine learning.
4h
The first step towards more inclusive dermatology | Jenna C. Lester
Skin is one of the most powerful predictors of health, yet nearly half of all new dermatologists admit to feeling uncomfortable identifying health issues on darker skin tones — resulting in poorer health outcomes for patients of color. In this crucial talk, TED Fellow and dermatologist Jenna C. Lester shares her effort to extend medical training beyond its current limited scope and ensure all med
4h
Michio Kaku: SpaceX Is Absolutely Destroying Blue Origin
Bury the Lead It’s no secret that SpaceX is several steps ahead of its competition — to put it lightly. The Elon Musk-led company has sent multiple crews of astronauts into orbit, and is making significant progress on developing a heavy launch vehicle capable of sending the first humans in decades to the surface of the Moon. Blue Origin, in contrast, has only sent two crews of tourists to an alti
4h
Plant-based jet fuel could reduce emissions by 68%
Replacing petroleum-based aviation fuel with sustainable aviation fuel derived from a type of mustard plant can reduce carbon emissions by up to 68%, according to new research from University of Georgia scientist Puneet Dwivedi.
4h
Long-term experiment shows warming slows microbes' growth
In a first-of-its-kind warming experiment, researchers at Northern Arizona University found that microbes growth rate decreased over 15 years of warming. The research, published this week in Global Change Biology, showed that under warmer climate conditions, growth decreased among all types of microbes in the community, and suggested that a loss of soil carbon may be responsible for the slowdown.
4h
Exotic magnetic states in miniature dimensions
We are all used to the idea that simpler units in nature interact to form complex structures. Take, for example, the hierarchy of life, where atoms combine to form molecules, molecules combine to form cells, cells combine to form tissues, and so on, ultimately leading to the formation of complex organisms such as humans. In the quantum world, however, this process may play in reverse, where intera
4h
No to the re-approval of glyphosate – Large aerial dispersal confirmed
The EU authorities' assumption that glyphosate does not spread through the air has been disproven. The results of the German study "Pesticide pollution of the air" prove that glyphosate and dozens of other pesticides are traveling through the air for miles into national parks and cities. The analysis was initially published in 2019 and has now been peer-reviewed by independent scientists and publi
4h
Serendipitous discovery leads to a new understanding of how cells multitask
Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) researchers at UC San Francisco have discovered a new paradigm for how fundamental biological switches, proteins that can be turned on and off to control processes like cell differentiation, cell growth, and transport within a cell, are regulated at the molecular level, specifically by molecules binding at newly discovered sites far away from the main bindi
4h
Unique underpinnings revealed for stomach's acid pump
Nagoya University researchers and colleagues have improved understanding of the molecular mechanisms of a key protein that makes the stomach acidic. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, could lead to better drugs for stomach ulcers and shed light on the functions of similar proteins across the human body."This gastric protein pumps in acidic ions to fortify our stomach,
4h
Sustainable farming: There's no one solution
Sustainable agriculture will not be achieved by one universal solution. A meta-analysis by the University of Basel shows that the current focus on no-till farming does not achieve the desired results. A sustainable system of agriculture must be designed for local needs and in dialog with local farmers.
4h
When a Contestant Has Zero Survival Skills | Naked and Afraid
Stream Naked and Afraid on discovery+ ► https://www.discoveryplus.com/show/naked-and-afraid About Naked and Afraid: What happens when you put two complete strangers – sans clothes – in some of the most extreme environments on Earth? Each male-female duo is left with no food, no water, no clothes, and only one survival item. #NakedAndAfraid #Discovery #Survival Subscribe to Discovery: http://bit.l
5h
Scientists Find the First Known Planet to Have Survived the Death of Its Star
How will the solar system die? It’s a hugely important question that researchers have speculated a lot about, using our knowledge of physics to create complex theoretical models. We know that the sun will eventually become a “ white dwarf ,” a burnt stellar remnant whose dim light gradually fades into darkness. This transformation will involve a violent process that will destroy an unknown number
5h
These Nootropics Are Customized Based on Brain Chemistry and Lifestyle
For centuries human beings have used caffeine to give ourselves a boost. And that’s not a bad thing. Caffeine helps us feel more awake and alert by blocking the brain’s drowsiness receptors. However, thanks to modern science, today we can do a lot more for our brains than simply making them feel not drowsy . Our understanding of brain chemistry and nootropic compounds has come a long way over the
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We've spotted a planet surviving its dying star – here's what it tells us about end of our Solar System
How will the solar system die? It's a hugely important question that researchers have considered deeply, using our knowledge of physics to create complex theoretical models. We know that the sun will eventually become a "white dwarf", a burnt stellar remnant whose dim light gradually fades into darkness. This transformation will involve a violent process that will destroy an unknown number of its
6h
Inter-atomic photon emission during contact-electrification
Contact electrification can arise when physical contact occurs between two materials. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Ding Li, and a team of scientists in nanoscience, nanoenergy and materials science in China and the U.S., detailed atomic-featured photon emission spectra between two solid materials. Electron transfer can take place at the interface from an atom in one material
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Råg bättre än vete för den som vill gå ner i vikt
Att välja fullkornsbröd av råg i stället för formfranska kan vara en väg mot bättre hälsa. Den som väljer fiberrika produkter av fullkornsråg framför siktade veteprodukter tappar mer i både kroppsfett och vikt, visar en studie från livsmedelsforskare vid Chalmers. Livsmedelsforskare vid Chalmers presenterar nu en studie som visar att personer som väljer fiberrika produkter av råg framför veteprod
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3D structure of cell receptor with critical role in health and disease
Cells communicate with their environment via receptors on their surface. When a protein approaches these receptors, they can pass along a message to the inside of the cell, for example the instruction to grow which can lead to tumor formation. New research by the team of prof. Savvas Savvides (VIB-UGent, Belgium), the National Cancer Research Institute (Tokyo, Japan), the Memorial Sloan Kettering
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The influence collective risks have on the acceptance of social norms
Faced with large collective risk, such as climate change or the COVID crisis, people may accept stronger or more restrictive social norms and may be more inclined to cooperate with them. However, when the perception of risk decreases, so does adherence to these norms. This is one of the conclusions of an experimental study conducted by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the Collegio Carl
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Cognitive study shows lack of bilingual education adversely affects English language learners' writing skills
As the number of Spanish-speaking English learners has increased in U.S. schools, research and attention have focused on how to boost students' reading and speaking skills. A first-of-its-kind study from the University of Kansas has examined three key cognitive functions and their role in learning to write, showing that a lack of focus on bilingual education has contributed to Hispanic English lea
6h
Design A Better Website With 72% Off SitePoint’s Developer Library
A well-designed website can make life better for everyone who uses it, and protect ourselves, our kids, and even our pets from hackers. Yet staying on top of the ever-changing world of web development can be a second job itself. The SitePoint Web Development Hub Premium Membership helps keep experts on track with the field, while making it easy for new developers to catch up. It’s on sale for jus
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A new twist on 2D materials may lead to improved electronic, optical devices
A new generation of electronics and optoelectronics may soon be possible by controlling twist angles in a particular type of bilayer 2D material used in these devices, strengthening the intrinsic electric charge that exists between the two layers, according to researchers from Penn State, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rutgers University.
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Adapting crops for future climate conditions
With crops, farmers will adapt—they always have and always will. To help this adaptation, however, a Texas A&M AgriLife research project has used artificial intelligence modeling to determine what traits cultivars will need to be successful under changing climate conditions.
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New proteins enable scientists to control cell activities
Sailan Shui, a doctoral assistant at EPFL's Laboratory of Protein Design and Immunoengineering, enjoys playing with proteins, activating and deactivating them as she wishes, as if light switches that can be turned on and off. However, instead of using electronic, her method relies on proteins to trigger the process. Shui's research has just been published in Nature Communications.
6h
PFAS-kemikalier ger fettlever – och drabbar kvinnor mer än män
Kvinnor blir mer påverkade än män när de utsätts för högfluorerade kemikalier, så kallade PFAS. Det visar en studie om hur kemikalierna leder till skador på levern, så kallad fettlever. – Exponering för miljökemikalier som PFAS kan förvärra vissa sjukdomar och öka risken till diabetes, säger Matej Orešič, professor i medicinska vetenskaper som ansvarat för studien tillsammans med Tuulia Hyötyläin
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Is the best planetary defense a good offense?
Researchers call for a more proactive way of dealing with dangerous extraterrestrial space debris. The project is called PI, which affectionately stands for Pulverize It. In February of 2013, skywatchers around the world turned their attention toward asteroid 2012 DA14, a cosmic rock about 150 feet (50 meters) in diameter that was going to fly closer to Earth than the spacecraft that bring us sat
6h
RNA kan bekämpa potatisbladmögel
Genom att spruta ut RNA på bladen skulle man kunna bekämpa potatisbladmögel. Metoden släcker ner de gener hos skadegöraren som annars kan infektera växten. Metoden är effektiv, miljövänlig, GMO-fri och har potential att sänka kostnaden för lantbrukarna. I labbstudier kunde forskarna visa att det dsRNA som de tillförde på blad, effektivt kunde tas upp av skadegöraren Phytophtora infestans och att
7h
The world finally has a malaria vaccine. Why has it taken so long?
Last week the World Health Organization approved the world’s first malaria vaccine. It’s been hailed as a historic breakthrough that could save tens of thousands of lives each year. But researchers have been trying to create one for more than a century – so why has it taken so long? Anand Jagatia speaks to Dr Latif Ndeketa and Prof Chris Drakeley about how the new RTS,S vaccine works and why it’s
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The world finally has a malaria vaccine. Why has it taken so long? – podcast
Last week the World Health Organization approved the world’s first malaria vaccine. It’s been hailed as a historic breakthrough that could save tens of thousands of lives each year. But researchers have been trying to create one for more than a century – so why has it taken so long? Anand Jagatia speaks to Dr Latif Ndeketa and Prof Chris Drakeley about how the new RTS,S vaccine works and why it’s
7h
Lack of Infrastructure Killed Early Electric Car
At the turn of the 19th century there were three relatively equal contenders for automobile technology, electric cars, steam powered, and the internal combustion engine (ICE). It was not obvious at the time which technology would emerge dominant, or even if they would all continue to have market share. By 1905, however, the ICE began to dominate , and by 1920 electric cars fell out of production.
7h
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Arrives at Launch Site
It’s a moment 20 years in the making—NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at the launch site . From there, it will ride a rocket into orbit, and then jet out beyond the moon. It’s the most powerful (and expensive) telescope humanity has ever built, and it’s almost ready to reveal the mysteries of the cosmos. Well, not all of them, but it’s sure to build on the knowledge we’ve garnered fr
7h
Which plants and animals are affected by climate change? Some may surprise you
We've all seen the picture of the polar bear perched precariously on a melting iceberg. It's the obligatory poster child for any discussion about species that are endangered by climate change. It isn't alone, of course. To commandeer a clickbait cliché, you'll be amazed to hear about some of the plants and animals—from household names to virtual unknowns—that could be consigned to the history book
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Exploring Earth's oceans to reach Europa
Geographically and logistically, Antarctica is about as far away from anywhere as you can get on this planet. Yet in the scope of our solar system, Earth's southernmost continent is right in our own backyard.
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Solar eruption arrives at Earth
A mass of solar material that erupted from the sun on Oct. 9, 2021, reached Earth on Oct. 12. The Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, or CME, elevated the Kp index, a measure of disturbance to Earth's magnetic field, to 6 (moderate level). Kp index levels range from 0 (quiet) to 9 (intense).
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Till dig som är medlem i VoF Göteborg
Hej kära medlemmar i VoF Göteborg! Nu öppnar samhället upp igen efter pandemin och vi håller tummarna att vi framöver kan börja träffas och umgås igen! För Vetenskap och Folkbildnings … Continued Inlägget dök först upp på Vetenskap och Folkbildning .
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A correction is retracted (sort of)
Thanks to a publisher’s error, a group of infectious disease researchers has experienced a double negative for their 2020 article on tick-borne illness in South Africa. The paper, “Serum-free in vitro cultivation of Theileria annulata and Theileria parva schizont-infected lymphocytes,” appeared in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, a Wiley title. The authors were affiliated with institutions … C
7h
Her er manden der skal modernisere rejsekortet
Som ny direktør for Rejsekort & Rejseplan skal Kasper A. Schmidt stå i spidsen for en teknologisk modernisering af Rejsekortet og samtidig tage hensyn til en helt anden gruppe – de ikke-digitale. En karriere med erfaringer som både køber og sælger af kritiske it-løsninger skal hjælpe direktøren g…
9h
‘The Most Influential Action Movies Ever Made’
Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts Conceived in the 1950s and first put to film in 1962, James Bond is in many ways a relic of the past. A Cold War vision of white male fantasy, Bond has had to evolve over the franchise’s six decades, beyond the sexism and racism that marked the character’s influential early chapters. Now, with the release of No Time to Die a
9h
Venus hade kanske aldrig några hav
Eftersom Venus är ungefär lika stor som jorden, och inte ligger så mycket närmare solen, brukar forskare förmoda att de båda planeterna en gång var ganska lika. De skulle båda ha haft vatten på ytan – och därmed förutsättningar för liv. Med hjälp av en ny klimatmodell, mer avancerad än dem som tidigare använts för att förstå Venus, har forskare från Schweiz och Frankrike nu dragit slutsatsen att V
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Daily briefing: mRNA vaccines take on flu
Nature, Published online: 12 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02810-1 The race to apply mRNA technology, which has been so successful in COVID-19 jabs, to influenza vaccines. Plus, the economics Nobel prizewinners, and an abandoned oil tanker that threatens millions of lives.
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