DSV vil gå forrest sammen med et utal af vognmænd på den grønne transport.

A pair of anthropologists at Tulane University has solved the mystery of the Mayan 819-day count, a type of ancient Mesoamerican calendar system. In their paper published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, John Linden and Victoria Bricker suggest that the calendar might be representing a much longer timescale than others had considered.

Plant nutrient content reflects their overall metabolic health and has a direct impact on plant growth, development, and reproduction. Nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs), for example, are a type of temporary storage for carbohydrates that accumulate in trees and are thought to be indicative of plant carbon availability and supply.

"Warm Arctic-cold Eurasia" is one of the most significant pattern in winter climate change in the mid-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, which is a frontier scientific problem in current international climate research.

A recent study led by Dr. Huo Ran (State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University) integrated reconstructed data and (global climate and hydrological) model simulations to better understand the variability of climate and hydrology over timescales ranging from decades to centuries.

Plant nutrient content reflects their overall metabolic health and has a direct impact on plant growth, development, and reproduction. Nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs), for example, are a type of temporary storage for carbohydrates that accumulate in trees and are thought to be indicative of plant carbon availability and supply.

Using a targeted computational approach, researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University have found more than 20 new self-assembled crystal structures, none of which had been observed previously.

A new study finds that when pregnant people get 

, their male children have a greater risk of subtle neurodevelopmental effects.

Whenever I want to avoid work, 

 Maps is my go-to. The point is not to hunt for a bite to eat or plan a trip—it’s pure entertainment. I glide over a digital rendering of the Earth, spin it like a globe, and zoom in. Cities and rivers and streets and businesses begin to come into focus, colored with millions of user-uploaded images and reviews. It’s a bit like Where’s Waldo?, but at the world’s scale. Among the treasures to discover are blurry photographs of late nights in dive bars, ratings of obscure colonial-American-life museums, and selfies on a mountain I’ll never visit. There are the juiciest one-star restaurant reviews, such as this one from a café in my neighborhood: “totally unwarranted douche energy from ownership, expired motor oil passed off as coffee, and price-gouged food that is prepared and sourced as terribly as their coffee.” Brutal. In Ecuador, I found half a dozen businesses that appear to be Simpsons-themed.

Google Maps’ main purpose is to enable people to get directions and look up businesses. But along the way, it has become a social space too. Sort of. To fill out the world map it created, Google invited people to add snippets to all the digital places. You upload your photos; you leave your reviews; you look at the artifacts others have left behind. The pictures of a restaurant on Google Maps are often a mismatched succession of interior-design shots, flash photos of messy plates, and outdated menus. There’s plenty of detritus too: irrelevant photos, businesses that don’t exist, three-star reviews without an explanation.

The result is random and messy in a way that is different from the rest of the social web. Instagram and TikTok, after all, are dominated by hyper-curated influencer content, served through feeds geared precisely to specific tastes. Sometimes, pulling up TikTok’s “For You” page and getting sucked in by the app’s selections feels amazing. But especially as algorithmic content has taken over the web, many of the surprises don’t feel fresh. They are our kind of surprises. Google Maps offers something many other platforms no longer can: a hodgepodge of truly unfamiliar stuff that hasn’t been packaged for your taste or mine.

Not that Google necessarily deserves any praise for the delightful weirdness of Google Maps. The platform has become a refuge from the internet that Google itself had a heavy hand in sculpting. By turning its search engine into the internet’s front page—and deciding what appears on it—the company may be the culprit most responsible for ending unexpected encounters. Algorithms are also part of Google Maps: It does plenty of window dressing in its depictions of places, using its Your Match score to present establishments it anticipates you’ll enjoy. “It’s trying to match you with things that it thinks you’re going to like,” Kath Bassett, a sociologist at the University of Bath, in England, who studies map-based media platforms, told me. But “you can get past that.”

Because zooming out and scrolling around are so easy, you can bump into little treasures at every turn that would never land on an Instagram feed. Exploring Google Maps for kicks is not especially common, but I’m not the only one who does it: A community of people keen on these digital impressions has existed for some time. And GeoGuessr, a game in which players are dropped into a random location on Google Maps’ street view and try to guess where they are, has garnered a cult following.

Hopscotching around Google Maps unleashes surprise after surprise. According to one reviewer, the second-largest Union Jack in the British empire is at a museum called Cupids Legacy Centre, in Newfoundland, earning the facility four stars from the user. For only $6, one reviewer claims, you can “take in a tour of the local archeological dig site.” Seems like a steal. Several clicks away is the Tashkent Television Tower, in Uzbekistan’s capital, where scores of users have posted photos from the observation deck, some 300 feet up. The tower is well rated, but the café inside is not. “The service was slow. Our seats were wet,” wrote one visitor.

Thousands of miles west, in the Albanian town of Elbasan, a man in purple poses coolly—hands pocketed, sunglasses activated—by the coat rack at “Supermarket Koli.” A moment later, I am out in the Delaware Bay, many miles away from land, where the Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse juts out of the ocean. A few people have been kind enough to upload images of the 136-year-old haunted metal hulk; how else would I possibly encounter this thing? The strange moments you dig up are typically encased in blandness—drab photos, anodyne reviews, useless information that bores—but that contrast is what gives the weird little bits their value, like a diamond enshrined in stone.

Still, Google Maps hardly presents an entirely accurate depiction of our world. Fewer businesses seem to be indexed in rural areas and the global South, and Street View mode becomes more sparse. Reality is sometimes ugly, and to some degree, the platform moderates its content. According to its website, content reflecting more abrasive realities—bigotry, violence, anything sexually explicit—is pulled, often abetted by machine learning. In some cases, Google Maps itself affects reality: The platform has assumed so much power that its decisions about what to name neighborhoods can have major ramifications.

But as a repository of moments, it can offer depth that other sites, and even perhaps reality, cannot. Happenstance moments at my laundromat posted online aren’t the same as the ones I experience when I’m out of socks, but they give the place a greater dimensionality. It becomes more vibrant in my mind—even if by way of confusing, warped photos of rickety dryers. Other sites, such as Reddit and Wikipedia, are also full of odd curiosities, with devoted fans, but none lets such a random potpourri collect with easy visibility for users. Whereas Wikipedia has a base of meticulous contributors fleshing out structures of information, Google Maps is flavored by masses of people from everywhere throwing up ad hoc content—its ubiquity unlocks possibilities. More than 1 billion people use Google Maps every month.

Compare that with the rest of the social web: Any possible travel destination, for example, is now paired with an endless supply of TikTok videos and Instagram foodie listicles. Look and think no further; we have your Mexico City trip all planned out. Such a polished depiction of a place is sometimes genuinely helpful, but predicting what will resonate with us can be difficult. And what does might be too small or unconventional for selection by an algorithm or an influencer. Because it’s so huge, Google Maps has you looking under a lot of rocks for something good—more so than a “For You” feed delivering amusing content into your hands. But when you uncover something special on Google Maps, it’s like finding $100 on the sidewalk. You so easily could have missed it, but you found it. That kind of satisfaction is tough to replicate on social media today. Recently, I spent 20 minutes looking at this picture of a troop of Siberian teenagers in red berets watching an old man ambiguously stand next to an orange hazmat suit. What is happening here?

Most people won’t end up treating Google Maps as a form of unfiltered entertainment. But even using the platform in the most functional way can influence how you perceive the world. Looking up a pharmacy or the nearest rest stop, you can’t help but bump into off-kilter stuff other users have shared. Google Maps remains an open door to “strange places where all kinds of things are still happening,” Christian Sandvig, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information who studies algorithms, told me. “There was a period where everyone was excited about a kind of shaggier internet, where everyone could put stuff up.” For better or for worse, “it was this free-for-all. And it definitely feels like it’s going away,” he said. The site carries on the legacy of an earlier internet tasked with connecting the world to itself rather than pushing all of us into silos. It is among the internet’s last bastions of unfiltered weirdness.

On a recent Google Maps scrolling expedition, I ended up in Westernpark Nemesvita, a cheesy, artificial little cowboy town near the northern shores of Lake Balaton, Hungary’s largest body of water. There’s archery, a small trampoline, and an inflatable water slide labeled Grand Canyon. A peacock appears to walk the grounds. One glowing review reads, “If you are in Hungary you have to stop by there.” Maybe one day.

A tax on CO2 emissions from products entering the EU offers unprecedented opportunities in the fight against global warming. That is the conclusion of research on which Leiden environmental scientist Hauke Ward collaborated. "A new world is opening up," Ward says. "But success hinges on how we involve low- and middle-income countries."

It is one of the most exciting races in modern physics: How can we produce the best superconductors that remain superconducting even at the highest possible temperatures and ambient pressure? In recent years, a new era of superconductivity has begun with the discovery of nickelates. These superconductors are based on nickel, which is why many scientists speak of the "nickel age of superconductivity research." In many respects, nickelates are similar to cuprates, which are based on copper and were discovered in the 1980s.

It's a dangerous world out there. From bacteria and viruses to accidents and  , threats surround us all the time. And nothing protects us more steadfastly than our skin. The barrier between inside and out, the body's largest organ is also its most seamless defense.

A study published in the journal Horticulture Research sought to identify loci and decipher the polygenic architecture of malic acid content in tomato fruit. The authors carried out a GWAS using six milestone models with two-environment repeats. A series of associated SNP variations were identified from GWAS, and 15 high-confidence annotated genes were obtained based on the lead SNPs and the malic acid accumulation.

In the early 1990s, scientists who were studying the development of a roundworm identified a small RNA molecule that regulated the expression of specific genes. This marked the discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs), which are now known to be present across all forms of life. As it turns out, these molecules play essential roles in many biological processes.

It's a dangerous world out there. From bacteria and viruses to accidents and  , threats surround us all the time. And nothing protects us more steadfastly than our skin. The barrier between inside and out, the body's largest organ is also its most seamless defense.

A study published in the journal Horticulture Research sought to identify loci and decipher the polygenic architecture of malic acid content in tomato fruit. The authors carried out a GWAS using six milestone models with two-environment repeats. A series of associated SNP variations were identified from GWAS, and 15 high-confidence annotated genes were obtained based on the lead SNPs and the malic acid accumulation.

In the early 1990s, scientists who were studying the development of a roundworm identified a small RNA molecule that regulated the expression of specific genes. This marked the discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs), which are now known to be present across all forms of life. As it turns out, these molecules play essential roles in many biological processes.

Antibiotic resistance happens when bacteria develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. It has now grown into a global public health issue. It was responsible for at least 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019, while being involved in nearly five million deaths. Every year, the U.S. sees almost three million antimicrobial-resistant infections, with the cost of treating the six most common ones at over $4.6 billion. The EU sees almost 700,000 cases each year, which cost it an estimated €1.5 billion.

The steady decline in cultivable land owing to the rapidly increasing global population has necessitated the use of efficient plant breeding methods that could be used to improve agricultural yields. However, in addition to genetic methods, we need approaches to control and improve complex crop traits. To this end, plant scientists make use of various cutting-edge imaging techniques that quantify crop traits (height, leaf shape, leaf color, etc.).

Antibiotic resistance happens when bacteria develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. It has now grown into a global public health issue. It was responsible for at least 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019, while being involved in nearly five million deaths. Every year, the U.S. sees almost three million antimicrobial-resistant infections, with the cost of treating the six most common ones at over $4.6 billion. The EU sees almost 700,000 cases each year, which cost it an estimated €1.5 billion.

The steady decline in cultivable land owing to the rapidly increasing global population has necessitated the use of efficient plant breeding methods that could be used to improve agricultural yields. However, in addition to genetic methods, we need approaches to control and improve complex crop traits. To this end, plant scientists make use of various cutting-edge imaging techniques that quantify crop traits (height, leaf shape, leaf color, etc.).

Public perceptions of "social Europe" signal support for more EU integration, while new welfare regimes abroad highlight a worldwide trend.

Beetles usually rely on the help of bacterial partners to survive. These symbioses can have different functions. Bacterial symbionts may help digest plant material, make the beetles more resistant to plant defenses, or provide supplemental nutrients when beetles as an adaption to nutrient-poor habitats. In several beetle species, it has already been described that their bacterial allies provide important components for the formation of the cuticle, the insect's exoskeleton.

Beetles usually rely on the help of bacterial partners to survive. These symbioses can have different functions. Bacterial symbionts may help digest plant material, make the beetles more resistant to plant defenses, or provide supplemental nutrients when beetles as an adaption to nutrient-poor habitats. In several beetle species, it has already been described that their bacterial allies provide important components for the formation of the cuticle, the insect's exoskeleton.

If a drug extends the lifespan of worms or flies, is it likely to do the same in mice?

If a drug extends the lifespan of worms or flies, is it likely to do the same in mice?

What would a human conception in space mean for the sector? That's the situation posed by an international group of scientists, clinicians and other interested parties, who have authored a consultative green paper led by David Cullen, Professor of Astrobiology & Space Biotechnology at Cranfield University.

Drought-hit Spain was bracing Monday for an unusually early heat wave, prompting fears for wildfires in a nation already so dry that some farmers have opted not to plant crops.

An intense solar storm has the northern lights gracing the skies farther south than usual.

Relieved of Duties

Here's a pro tip for editors: do not, under any circumstance, publish an artificial intelligence-generated "interview" with someone you didn't actually interview, especially if they have suffered a life-altering injury.

Anne Hoffmann, the longtime editor of the German-language tabloid Die Aktuelle, is learning this lesson the hard way. She has been "relieved of duties," per the magazine's publisher, for publishing an AI-generated interview with Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher, who suffered a brain injury from a skiing accident in 2013 and hasn't made a public appearance since then.

In the statement, the publisher said that it "apologizes to the Schumacher family" after the star's representatives said that they plan to press charges against the tabloid for publishing the interview last week.

"This tasteless and misleading article should never have appeared," Bianca Pohlmann, FUNKE's managing director, said in a translation of the statement. "It in no way corresponds to the standards of journalism that we — and our readers — expect from a publisher like FUNKE."

Phony Interview

The "interview" in question appeared under a cover story claiming to be "the first interview" with the F1 legend since his accident, and featured a made-up quote attributed to Schumacher about how his "life has changed completely."

While the piece did mention that it was generated by an AI and did not feature any actual quotes from the ex-racer himself, it didn't do so until the very end of the piece.

As ESPN reports, this was not the first time the Schumacher family has had to deal with Die Aktuelle's mistakes.

Just a year after the racing star's skiing accident, the magazine featured a photo of Schumacher and his wife Corinna on its front cover, alongside a misleading headline that said "Awake." The article in question was about the possibility of someone "waking up" from a coma, but if someone just saw the headline and image, they would have thought Schumacher had actually recovered fully.

While this debacle will hopefully serve as a cautionary tale, it seems that this kind of thing will, unfortunately, become all the more common as AI continues to be rapidly integrated into society.

More on AI grossness: Fury as Magazine Uses AI to Generate Fake Interview With Michael Schumacher

The post Tabloid Fires Editor for AI-Generated “Interview” With Injured Celebrity appeared first on Futurism.

Adjusting Orbit

After being launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and spending the last five months making its way to the Moon, a private Japanese spacecraft is about to make its first harrowing attempt to land on the lunar surface.

The lander, a part of Japanese company ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, is also carrying the United Arab Emirates' Rashid rover, potentially paving the way for the first successful soft landing of a private spacecraft on the Moon — if everything goes according to plan, at least.

Since April 12, the Mission 1 lander has been orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit. It even took the time to take some stunning images of the lunar surface.

Around noon EST tomorrow, the lander will begin its landing sequence, firing its main propulsion system to adjust its altitude and close in on the Atlas crater on the Moon's near side. Ispace will be providing a live stream from mission control in Tokyo.

 

Landing Sequence

The stakes are high. It certainly wouldn't be the first lander to not survive the trip. India and Israel's attempts in 2019 both ended in the destruction of their landers. Only the US, the former Soviet Union, and China have made successful lunar landings so far.

If tomorrow's landing attempt ends up being delayed, ispace has already lined up alternative landing dates for April 26, May 1, and May 3.

The UAE's tiny 22-pound Rashid rover Mission 1 is carrying is planning to spend 14 days studying the properties of lunar soil and surface conditions.

It's also carrying the first European tech to land on the Moon's surface, according to the European Space Agency, in the form of sample panels to test how various materials cope with the abrasive lunar surface.

Will ispace end up making history this week? Stay tuned to find out if Mission 1 survives its perilous journey.

More on ispace: Here's What We Know About The Robots That Might Build Our First Homes on the Moon

The post A Private Spacecraft Will Attempt to Land on the Moon Tomorrow appeared first on Futurism.

Brain scans show adolescents with more psychiatric symptoms have undergone less “pruning”, when unneeded synaptic connections between neurons disappear

The COVID-19 pandemic created an explosion in the use of disposable face masks around the globe. This added to the already significant amount of PPE waste generated by hospitals and in other medical settings.

Multiple viral infections in insect vectors with synergistic effects are common in nature, but the underlying mechanism remains elusive. A new study, published in Science China Life Sciences and led by Dr. Taiyun Wei (Institute of Vector-borne Virus Research Center, State Key Laboratory of Ecological Pest Control for Fujian and Taiwan Crops, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University), looked more closely at a mosaic virus and its transmission by leafhoppers.

The promise of superconductivity for electrical power transmission and transportation has long been held back by high costs. Now researchers from the University of Houston and Germany have demonstrated a way to cut the cost and upend both the transit and energy transport sectors by using superconductors to move people,   and energy along existing highway infrastructure.

Plant trichomes are highly specialized structures that develop from the epidermal pavement cells of different plant tissues. They are known to defend plants from biotic and abiotic stresses such as water loss, insect-inflicted damage, pathogen attacks, deadly ultraviolet radiation, and leaf temperature reduction.

In the late 1980s, scientists discovered that when a whale dies, its carcass sinks to the ocean bottom and a new ecosystem springs forth around the carcass. The carcass becomes a food source for this new ecosystem. A team of researchers recently undertook a study of whale falls in the South China Sea. In the absence of actual whale falls, they conducted simulated whale fall experiments using cow carcasses.

Craft brewers are continuously upping the ante and coming up with innovative ways to make or flavor their newest beers. Now, researchers are adding a new twist of their own, speeding up the brewing process with beer-making mini-robots or "BeerBots." Reporting in ACS Nano, the team shows that these self-propelled, magnetic packages of yeast can make the fermentation phase go faster and cut out the need to filter the beverage.

Scientists observed seismic waves traveling through Mars' core for the first time and confirmed model predictions of the core's composition.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed a suite of tools to estimate the total economic value of improving water quality in urban streams. The work can assist federal and state agencies charged with developing environmental regulations affecting urban ecosystems across the Piedmont Region of the United States, which stretches from Maryland to Alabama.

An unusual blinking fish, the mudskipper, spends much of the day out of the water and is providing clues as to how and why blinking might have evolved during the transition to life on land in our own ancestors. New research shows that these amphibious fish have evolved a blinking behavior that serves many of the same purposes of our blinking. The results suggest that blinking may be among the suite of traits that evolved to allow the transition to life on land in tetrapods—the group of animals that includes mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians—some 375 million years ago.

Multiple viral infections in insect vectors with synergistic effects are common in nature, but the underlying mechanism remains elusive. A new study, published in Science China Life Sciences and led by Dr. Taiyun Wei (Institute of Vector-borne Virus Research Center, State Key Laboratory of Ecological Pest Control for Fujian and Taiwan Crops, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University), looked more closely at a mosaic virus and its transmission by leafhoppers.

Plant trichomes are highly specialized structures that develop from the epidermal pavement cells of different plant tissues. They are known to defend plants from biotic and abiotic stresses such as water loss, insect-inflicted damage, pathogen attacks, deadly ultraviolet radiation, and leaf temperature reduction.

In the late 1980s, scientists discovered that when a whale dies, its carcass sinks to the ocean bottom and a new ecosystem springs forth around the carcass. The carcass becomes a food source for this new ecosystem. A team of researchers recently undertook a study of whale falls in the South China Sea. In the absence of actual whale falls, they conducted simulated whale fall experiments using cow carcasses.

Here's why a woman who spent 500 days in extreme isolation lost her sense of time

In the right conditions, people learn at a remarkably similar rate, researchers report.

The researchers wanted to know why some students learn faster than others. They hoped to identify fast learners, study them, and develop techniques that could help students understand new concepts quickly.

What they found surprised them.

Ken Koedinger, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), led the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He and his team examined data from 1.3 million student interactions from different kinds of educational technologies, including intelligent tutors, online courses, and educational games. The data, gleaned from learning science repository DataShop, indicated that learners master new concepts by having opportunities to practice them.

“The data showed that achievement gaps come from differences in learning opportunities and that better access to such opportunities can help close those gaps,” Koedinger says. “This is further confirmation that these educational technologies can provide favorable learning conditions that make it easier to learn something new, like a second language, or a scientific or math concept.”

If educators understand where their students are starting from, they can help students catch up to their peers by giving them more opportunities to practice the material. For example, they could incorporate a cognitive tutor that can give students instant feedback on homework problems. Koedinger emphasizes the importance of tracking where learners are when they start a class.

“We have all seen cases where somebody gets to a learning outcome sooner than a peer—one student gets an A in algebra and another gets a C. But what we don’t usually track is where they started. Our results are not contradicting that people end up in different places, but accounting for where students are starting from can tell us a lot about where they will end up,” Koedinger says.

Paulo Carvalho, a systems scientist and special faculty at HCII and coauthor, says the paper supports the idea that information sticks with students longer if they are actively engaged while learning, an experience supported by the kinds of educational technology used in this study.

“We have several studies that show that when a student is actively working they tend to do better than if they are just passively reading the materials,” Carvalho says. “The data sets that we use for the PNAS paper all use systems that create favorable conditions for learning—the students are actively engaged, answering questions, and getting immediate feedback, for example.”

The data used in this study was from students from elementary to college courses in math, science, and language. Koedinger says that for all students, a growth mindset is important.

“No matter who you are, you can do it. You might have had fewer prior opportunities in your life, so it may be harder at first than it is for other people, but you will make just as much progress as anyone else as long as you stick to it,” he says.

Additional coauthors of the paper are Elizabeth A. McLaughlin, a scientific technological specialist at HCII and Ran Liu, chief AI scientist at Amira Learning.

Source: Caroline Sheedy for Carnegie Mellon University

The post Study debunks myth of the fast learner appeared first on Futurity.

A new study explains how “zombie” cancer cells revive themselves.

Mutating cells can prevent the spread of cancer by flipping themselves into a state of reduced activity called senescence. Cancer genes, however, can retaliate by reviving those cells so they can replicate again.

The mechanism for reviving senescent cells, sometimes called zombie cells, was only partially understood. Now, a new study in the journal Cell Genomics traces the process in colorectal cancer cells. Researchers believe the process is similar in other tumor types.

“Once a cell starts to become cancerous, it begins replicating very quickly, and that triggers senescence,” says lead author Ricardo Iván Martínez-Zamudio, assistant professor of pharmacology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University. “Once the cell becomes senescent, however, it often begins making a particular protein that helps it emerge from senescence.

“The next stage in the research is to see if medications can target this protein. We want to find a substance that will bind to it and prevent it from binding with other proteins, so these cells stay in senescence and don’t reproduce.”

Researchers from the Herbig laboratory at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School began by examining the progression of cultured cells in Petri dishes. They then confirmed their findings in tissues taken from actual colon cancer patients.

The study reveals that entry into and exit from senescence is precoded and mediated by the very same types of proteins, AP1 transcription factors. These proteins not only spur entry into senescence but also promote escape from it by facilitating necessary protein interactions.

The study identified POU2F2 as a critical protein promoting escape from senescence and showed its role in colorectal cancer development. Overexpression and increased activity of POU2F2 are associated with cell inflammation and proliferation as well as decreased patient survival. POU2F2 has been implicated in the progression of various 

 and might be a viable drug target.

Any strategy to prevent escape from senescence might help, the researchers say. A subset of tissue samples exhibited gene signatures that kept zombie cancer cells in senescence rather than allowing them to escape, and those patients were more likely to survive their cancers than patients whose cells escaped senescence.

The researchers traced the progression from cell senescence to escape with a technique called time-resolved multi-omics profiling, which allowed them to see which genes turned on and off and which proteins became more and less common over time.

Once this technique revealed that AP1 transcription factors were particularly active before cells escaped from senescence, the researchers turned off the genes that create such proteins and found that the cells could no longer spring back to life and begin reproducing.

“The body protects itself against some tumor types by having cells kill themselves entirely rather than downregulate into senescence,” says Martínez-Zamudio.

“We’re not entirely sure why that’s not a more common response—possibly because killing a large number of continuous cells would create holes in important tissues—but the body prefers senescence over cell death as a guard against many solid-tissue tumors, so we want to help that defense work properly.”

Source: Rutgers University

The post How ‘zombie’ cancer cells come back to life appeared first on Futurity.

 

 

We've finally detected seismic waves passing through the Red Planet.

An unusual blinking fish, the mudskipper, spends much of the day out of the water and is providing clues as to how and why blinking might have evolved during the transition to life on land in our own ancestors. New research shows that these amphibious fish have evolved a blinking behavior that serves many of the same purposes of our blinking. The results suggest that blinking may be among the suite of traits that evolved to allow the transition to life on land in tetrapods—the group of animals that includes mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians—some 375 million years ago.

Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes are a type of light wave that can carry the external torque of photons as they move through space. They are useful in many fields, from optical communications to super-resolution imaging. Advanced developments in these and other applications demand reliable and color-tunable LG mode laser sources, which do not yet exist.

A feisty looking crustacean in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains is a new species found nowhere else in the world, according to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

NASA has finished its planning and is ready to go. Humans will soon be returning to the Moon—this time in a manned base. But, if this project is to succeed, astronauts must be able to grow their own food. Norwegian researchers are in the process of making this possible.

"One of the great mysteries of biology," says Eric Libby, former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow, now an associate professor at the Integrated Science Lab (IceLab), Umeå University in Sweden, "is eukaryogenesis, or how eukaryotes arose." Scientists consider this to be a period of major evolutionary transition, critical to our understanding of the history and evolution of life on Earth.

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A feisty looking crustacean in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains is a new species found nowhere else in the world, according to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

"One of the great mysteries of biology," says Eric Libby, former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow, now an associate professor at the Integrated Science Lab (IceLab), Umeå University in Sweden, "is eukaryogenesis, or how eukaryotes arose." Scientists consider this to be a period of major evolutionary transition, critical to our understanding of the history and evolution of life on Earth.

A team of physicists has illuminated certain properties of quantum systems by observing how their fluctuations spread over time. The research offers an intricate understanding of a complex phenomenon that is foundational to quantum computing.

New findings suggest that Heinrich Events had no discernible impact on temperatures in Greenland, which could have repercussions for scientists' understanding of past climate dynamics.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37788-z

Enabling high-bandwidth communication between cells is a prerequisite for engineering multicellular consortia that can perform sophisticated computations and functions. Here, the authors design a framework for addressable and adaptable DNA-based communication and implement it using plasmid conjugation in a E. coli population.

Mathematics sometimes impacts our lives in seemingly unsuspecting ways, including card shuffling.

Our galaxy's largest nearby companion is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere. In recent years, new theoretical research and better observational capabilities have taught astronomers a great deal about our (not-so-little) neighbor. It's becoming increasingly clear that the LMC is helping shape the Milky Way's evolution.

Just in time for Earth Day, New York City has issued a new sustainability plan, one that focuses on means as well as ends. Like the initial plan issued by the Bloomberg administration in 2007, the Adams plan is grounded in reality and is both aspirational and operational. Its strategy is to deploy the resources of the Inflation Reduction Act, federal infrastructure funds, and the $4 billion New York State Environmental Bond Act to accelerate New York's transition to a sustainable city.

The San Gabriel Mountains loom like an impregnable fortress for millions of migrating birds making their long and perilous journey to distant breeding grounds in the far north.

Over the past few decades, it has become obvious that climate change, and consequent extreme weather events, can wreak havoc on crop yields. Concerningly, there is a large disparity in agricultural vulnerability between developed and developing countries. In a new study, researchers have looked at major food grains in India to understand the long- and short-term effects of climate change on crop yields.

Mountain Quail are an under-studied but recreationally-valued management indicator species in California's Sierra Nevada. They are notoriously difficult to study due to their penchant for impenetrable, dense, shrubby habitats, high elevations, and steep slopes.

Tucker Carlson’s rise to become the defining conservative-media personality of the Donald Trump period was a surprise. His abrupt departure from Fox News, announced this morning, is even more shocking.

“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the company said in a terse statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

Carlson transformed himself from a bow-tie-clad smart aleck playing the role of liberals’ favorite conservative into a MAGA hero, able to channel the grievances of the Trump coalition despite his patrician upbringing and reputation—or perhaps, like Trump, because of it. In the process he became Fox’s biggest star, talked about as a potential presidential candidate. Carlson was a font of dangerous rhetoric and preposterous lies, and Fox’s viewers absolutely loved it.

[David A. Graham: Fox News lost the lawsuit but won the war]

The reasons for Carlson’s departure are still emerging, and the steps he might take next are still unclear. But Fox will probably be fine without Carlson, and anyone who hopes that his disappearance from the air will improve the political discourse in this country is too optimistic. When prior bogeymen for the left—people such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck—have been pushed out of Fox, the network has always found a new figure to replace them, while the hosts themselves have struggled to match their past success. There will be a new Tucker Carlson, and it’s a good bet he or she will be even worse.

The exit comes at a time of flux for Fox. Its founder, Rupert Murdoch, is 92 and has faced recent health struggles. Fox just settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over election-related lies for almost $800 million, and faces several more. The discovery process that led up to the settlement was embarrassing for Fox and for Carlson. Internal messages showed that Carlson and his colleagues knew that many of the claims they made about election fraud after the 2020 election were nonsense. They also showed Carlson furious over Fox journalists accurately reporting facts, which he worried would hurt ratings, and saying that he hated Trump. (This revelation didn’t prevent him from conducting an obsequious interview with the former president earlier this month.)

[David A. Graham: Tucker Carlson, unmasked]

When the settlement was announced last week, I argued that no matter the hefty bill, it was just the cost of doing business for Fox. The network settled the suit, but airing the lies achieved its goal of vanquishing smaller, upstart conservative rivals. Fox is and remains larger than even its most important figures.

Carlson will not go away, but recent history suggests that he’ll have a hard time maintaining his current profile. Before Carlson, there was Bill O’Reilly, who was the leading conservative figure of his era and equally reviled by progressives. When O’Reilly was finally forced out of Fox in 2017 over sexual-misconduct claims, many critics hoped it would improve the state of the country and the press. Instead, it cleared the way for Carlson. O’Reilly has kept writing best-selling books but has become a more marginal figure in politics.

This pattern has repeated itself over the years. After O’Reilly, the long-time star Sean Hannity became Fox’s marquee name. His influence was such that he was sometimes referred to as Trump’s real chief of staff. But Hannity was unable to sustain his success, and though he remains at Fox, he was eventually eclipsed by Carlson.

[David A. Graham: Tucker Carlson and the new narrative of January 6]

A second-tier Fox star of the Obama years was Glenn Beck, a shouty and excitable host whose rise seemed to threaten O’Reilly’s seat on the throne. He was pushed out in 2011, and though Beck’s career has continued since, his plan to challenge Fox’s supremacy with The Blaze came up short, and he’s never matched the relevance he had on Fox.

The original mastermind of Fox News was Roger Ailes, the veteran TV executive and former Richard Nixon aide who recognized the market for an avowedly right-wing channel. When Ailes was forced out in 2016 (also related to sexual misconduct), many liberals hoped that it would doom the channel. But Fox is still Fox—the leader in ratings and the center of conservatism.

More details about why Carlson is leaving will surely emerge soon. Though he was connected to the Dominion lawsuit, as well as to other defamation cases against the company, a more serious offender was Maria Bartiromo, who remains at Fox (at least for now). Carlson is also implicated in a lawsuit by Abby Grossberg, a former Fox producer who has claimed that she experienced an appalling work environment while working on Carlson’s show. The Washington Post reported that Carlson’s messages criticizing Fox’s top leadership “played a role in his departure,” and his political ambitions and his penchant for dishing to reporters could easily have created tensions with bosses.

Any rising conservative TV star would love to grab for the crown Carlson has doffed, or that’s been taken from him. The audience, influence, and money involved make it irresistible, but his career arc illustrates the hazards. To remain on top at Fox, hosts have to be ready to continually ratchet up their rhetoric, because the network’s business model depends on continual audience outrage. But audiences eventually become inured and require new and more extreme input. Providing that is a challenging and soul-leaching job—and someone will be delighted to have it.

Building proteins with AI is like furnishing a house.

There are two main strategies. One is the IKEA approach: you buy pre-made pieces that easily snap together, but can only hope the furniture somewhat fits your space. While relatively simple, you have no control over the dimensions or functions of the final product.

The other way starts with a vision and design perfectly tailored to your needs. But the hard part is finding—or building—individual pieces for the custom design.

The same two methods apply to engineering protein complexes using AI. Similar to a cabinet, protein complexes are made of multiple sub-units that intricately bind together. These mega structures—with shapes ranging from a twenty-sided die to tunnels that open and close—form the foundation of our metabolism, immune defenses, and brain functions.

Previous attempts at shaping protein architectures mostly used the IKEA approach. It’s revolutionary: AI-based designs have already generated COVID vaccines at lightning speed. While powerful, the approach is limited by available protein “building blocks.”

This month, a team led by Dr. David Baker from the University of Washington took protein design to a new custom level. Starting with specific dimensions, shapes, and other properties, the team tapped into a machine learning algorithm to build protein complexes tailored to specific biological responses.

In other words, rather than the usual bottom-up method, they went top-down.

One design, for example, is a 20-sided shell that mimics the outer protective layer of viruses. When dotted with immune-stimulating proteins from the flu virus, the AI-designed protein shell sparked an immune response in mice that outperformed the latest vaccine candidates in clinical trials.

The AI isn’t just for vaccines. The same strategy could build more compact and efficient carriers for gene therapies or carry antibodies and other drugs that need extra protection from being immediately broken down in the body.

But more broadly, the study shows that it’s possible to design massively complex protein architectures starting from an overall vision, rather than working with the biological equivalent of two-by-four boards.

“It’s astounding that the team could do this,” said Dr. Martin Noble at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the work. “It takes evolution billions of years to design single proteins that fold just right, but this is another level of complexity, to fold proteins to fit so well together and make closed structures.”

Evolution at Warp Speed

At the heart of the new work is reinforcement learning. You’ve probably heard of it. Loosely based on how the brain learns through trial and error, reinforcement learning powers multiple AI agents that have taken the world by storm. Perhaps the best known is AlphaGo, the DeepMind brainchild that triumphed over the human world champion in the board game Go. More recently, reinforcement learning has been speeding progress in self-driving cars and even developing better algorithms by streamlining fundamental computations.

In the new study, the team tapped into a type of reinforcement learning algorithm called the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). While sounding like a casino move, it’s a popular reinforcement learning strategy that searches for optimized decisions.

Picture the algorithm as a tree of your life decisions. We’ve likely all wondered how our lives would be if we made a different choice at some point. If you draw out those alternative decisions as a timeline—voilà, you have a decision tree, with each combination of branches leading to a different outcome.

MCTS, then, is a bit like the game of life. Choices are selected at each branch randomly and followed down that path of the tree. Once it reaches the final outcome, it feeds back up the tree to increase the probability of your desired solution. It’s like exploring the multiverse in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once—but instead of life choices, here it’s for designing proteins.

To start, the team fed the MCTS algorithm millions of protein fragments with specific building goals. The fragment amounts were carefully weighed: a smaller number at each calculation step speeds up the AI’s learning process and increases the diversity of the final protein. But more pieces also cause computation time and energy use to skyrocket. Balancing the dilemma, the team built several protein structural elements as a starting point to begin the protein design search.

Like fumbling with digital Play-Doh, the algorithm then twisted or bent protein fragments to see if they passed the overall geometric constraints of the final protein—including its backbone and its “attachment points” to help the fragments self-assemble. If the simulations got the thumbs up, their computational pathways were “boosted” in the algorithm. Rinse and repeat tens of thousands of times, and the program can hone in on optimal individual parts for a certain design.

While it sounds like a massive undertaking, the algorithm was highly efficient. Each iteration on average took only tens of milliseconds, the team explained.

Proteins on Demand

In the end, the team had a powerful algorithm that—like an architect—designed proteins based on custom needs. In one test, the AI made a range of protein structures from prisms to pyramids and letters of the alphabet, with each filling a specific space as required.

“Our approach is unique because we use reinforcement learning to solve the problem of creating protein shapes that fit together like pieces of a puzzle. This simply was not possible using prior approaches and has the potential to transform the types of molecules we can build,” said study author Isaac Lutz.

But how do the AI designs translate to real life?

As a proof of concept, the team made hundreds of proteins in the lab to test for fidelity. Using an electron microscope, the AI-designed proteins were almost identical to the predicted blueprints at the atomic scale.

One design standout was a hollow shell made with dozens of protein pieces. Called a capsid, the structure resembles the protective protein layer for viruses—one often used as a guide to generate vaccines. Unlike previous iterations, the AI-generated shells were densely packed with multiple attachment points. Like wall anchors, these can help the structures dock onto cells or better package material—drugs, gene therapies, or other biological materials—inside the scaffold.

At roughly 10 nanometers, these nano-capsids are “considerably smaller than most viral” ones, the team explained.

The petite sizing came with a big medicinal punch. In one test, the team dotted the capsids with 60 copies of a protein that helps stimulate blood vessel growth in human cells from the umbilical veins. The AI-made protein bubble outperformed a previous nanoparticle more than 10-fold. This “opens up potential applications…for diabetes, brain injuries, strokes, and other cases where blood vessels are at risk,” said study author Dr. Hannele Ruohola-Baker.

Another experiment took full advantage of the dense attachment points on the 20-sided shell, transforming the capsid into an efficient vaccine. Here, the team fused a flu protein HA (influenza hemagglutinin) to the nano-capsid and injected it into mice. Compared to a similar but much larger vaccine design already in clinical trials, the AI-designed solution sparked a heftier immune response.

For now, the AI is still in its early stages. But as the past two years have shown, it’ll rapidly evolve. The 20-sided shell and other structures “are distinct from any previously designed or naturally-occurring structures,” said the team. Thanks to their small size but large carrying capacity, they can potentially tunnel inside the cell nucleus—which houses DNA—and efficiently shuttle gene editing components.

“Its potential to make all kinds of architectures has yet to be fully explored,” said study author Dr. Shunzhi Wang.

Image Credit: Ian Haydon/ UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design

The San Gabriel Mountains loom like an impregnable fortress for millions of migrating birds making their long and perilous journey to distant breeding grounds in the far north.

Over the past few decades, it has become obvious that climate change, and consequent extreme weather events, can wreak havoc on crop yields. Concerningly, there is a large disparity in agricultural vulnerability between developed and developing countries. In a new study, researchers have looked at major food grains in India to understand the long- and short-term effects of climate change on crop yields.

Mountain Quail are an under-studied but recreationally-valued management indicator species in California's Sierra Nevada. They are notoriously difficult to study due to their penchant for impenetrable, dense, shrubby habitats, high elevations, and steep slopes.

Eyeing Scales

While investors have poured billions of dollars into burgeoning lab-grown meat companies, The Wall Street Journal reports, the industry is running into a huge reality problem: scaling up and breaking into the mainstream market.

For years, we've heard from companies promising to turn the meat industry on its head with products that are cultivated in a lab using animal cells without the need of slaughtering methane-producing livestock on an industrial scale.

But so far, nobody's managed to crack the fundamentals.

"We can make it on small scales successfully," Josh Tetrick, CEO of lab-grown meat company Eat Just, told the WSJ. "What is uncertain is whether we and other companies will be able to produce this at the largest of scales, at the lowest of costs within the next decade."

In other words, we're still many years — and one plausible business model — away from being able to pick up a lab-grown meat burger patty at the local grocery store for a reasonable price.

Hybrid Theory

Analysts see a promising alternative approach that could stand a better chance: hybrid products that use animal cells as well as plant-based proteins.

Eat Just has made some concrete steps towards bringing its cultivated hybrid chicken product to the masses. It's started selling the cutlet in Singapore, which is the only country in the world to actually permit the sale of lab-grown meat.

Even with hybrid products, scaling up is proving difficult, in part due to the complexities involved in maintaining a sterile environment.

"What we’re trying to do is not easy," Uma Valeti, CEO of lab-grown meat company Upside, told the WSJ. "It’s like putting a man on the Moon. There’s no road map or blueprint."

Former Upside employees told the newspaper that the company has struggled to produce meaningful quantities of its product and is still a long way from producing a target of 400,000 pounds at its pilot plant and hasn't even reached its 2021 goal of just 50,000 pounds, according to the report.

Despite the shortcomings, others are steadfast in their belief that lab-grown meat is the answer to the world's climate woes and growing population.

But getting to the point where lab-grown meat alternatives can make a meaningful dent in the global demand for meat will require companies to clear many more hurdles.

"There’s not been anything close to a cakewalk," Valeti told the WSJ. "But we entered this knowing this is going to be really challenging."

More on lab-grown meat: Scientists Say They Can Make Delicious Lab-Grown Fat, Weave It Into Fake Bacon

The post There's a Serious Problem With Lab-Grown Meat appeared first on Futurism.

Women's enrollment in higher education has increased significantly in the past 70 years in both Quebec and Canada as a whole.

The Biden administration is preparing to propose limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants that are so stringent they could almost wipe out the U.S. electricity sector's planet-warming pollution by 2040.

Brushing a cat's teeth is a risky maneuver. Is it worth it? If you’re not brave enough, there are alternatives.

Nature, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05997-7

Addendum: Agrochemicals interact synergistically to increase bee mortality

Nature, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01423-0

The Japanese-built ispace lander, carrying a rover from the United Arab Emirates, could be the first private venture to land on the lunar surface.

Women pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math are still fighting an uphill battle in Australian workplaces, despite a spike in girls studying STEM subjects in schools and universities.

A project led by a group of researchers from Israel's Bar-Ilan University, in collaboration with TII—the Quantum Research Center in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, is advancing quantum computing by improving the performance of superconducting qubits, the basic computation units of a superconducting quantum processor. The improved qubit, called a tunable superconducting flux qubit, is a micron-sized superconducting loop where electrical current can flow clockwise or counterclockwise, or in a quantum superposition of both directions.

As Corn Belt states seek ways to curb nitrogen flow from farms into the Gulf of Mexico, new University of Illinois research adds evidence for winter cover crops as an important part of the solution. A simulation study published in Science of the Total Environment finds widespread planting of cereal rye in Illinois could reduce nitrate in the state's tile drainage water by 30%.

A joint research team led by Prof. Xiao Cunde from Beijing Normal University, Dr. Du Zhiheng and Dr. Yang Jiao from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources (NIEER) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has revealed how extreme cold events in southern China relate to Arctic autumn sea-ice extent.

A new Technology from Sage report sheds light on challenges in the librarian-patron relationship, including the need for greater digital literacy and more tailored support for students, and recommends methods to support the student experience. "The Knowledge Gap Between Librarians and Students: Contrasting Librarian and Student Perspectives on the Undergraduate Workflow" report is the second in the Librarian Futures series.

Early human foragers may have relied on eating the partially digested vegetable matter, called digesta, found in the stomachs and digestive tracts of bison and other large game herbivores.

More than 80% of Kenya's land mass is made up of arid and semi-arid areas. So, if Kenya is to increase its agricultural production, which currently accounts for 22.4% of GDP, it must turn to irrigation-based farming in the arid and semi-arid areas. Agricultural engineer Bancy M. Mati explains how the east African nation can go about this.

A team of psychologists, animal behaviorists and neuroscientists affiliated with several institutions in Spain and Germany has found via experimentation that hoofed fringe group individuals may be better problem solvers than peers who are more accepted by their group. In their study, reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group conducted a problem-solving experiment they conducted with multiple species of hooved animals.

A research team has shown in early tests that a bioengineered drug candidate can counter   with Staphylococcus aureus — a bacterial species widely resistant to antibiotics.

A research team has confirmed evidence of a previously unknown planet outside of our solar system, and they used machine learning tools to detect it. A recent study by the team showed that machine learning can correctly determine if an exoplanet is present by looking in protoplanetary disks, the gas around newly formed stars. The newly published findings represent a first step toward using machine learning to identify previously overlooked exoplanets.

New research suggests the stress levels of knowledge workers, such as researchers or journalists, stays the same with or without deadlines.

As Corn Belt states seek ways to curb nitrogen flow from farms into the Gulf of Mexico, new University of Illinois research adds evidence for winter cover crops as an important part of the solution. A simulation study published in Science of the Total Environment finds widespread planting of cereal rye in Illinois could reduce nitrate in the state's tile drainage water by 30%.

A new smart material is activated by both heat and electricity, making it the first ever to respond to two different stimuli.

More than 80% of Kenya's land mass is made up of arid and semi-arid areas. So, if Kenya is to increase its agricultural production, which currently accounts for 22.4% of GDP, it must turn to irrigation-based farming in the arid and semi-arid areas. Agricultural engineer Bancy M. Mati explains how the east African nation can go about this.

A team of psychologists, animal behaviorists and neuroscientists affiliated with several institutions in Spain and Germany has found via experimentation that hoofed fringe group individuals may be better problem solvers than peers who are more accepted by their group. In their study, reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group conducted a problem-solving experiment they conducted with multiple species of hooved animals.

The ways in which Scotland's network of mental health peer-support groups navigated the COVID-19 pandemic could provide valuable lessons to create better services for both online and offline users, a new report suggests.

While some ambitious high school students may load up on extracurricular activities to help them get into college, a new study suggests they may be trying too hard.

Earth Day is an opportunity to celebrate the awe-inspiring wonders on this planet—a place full of biodiversity hotspots, from lush rainforests to scenic mountain ranges, home to rich, endemic species. These pristine, ecologically unique landscapes are increasingly threatened by human-caused stressors such as greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to the harmful impacts of climate change on people and the planet.

Located in the heart of South America, Bolivia contains the largest lithium deposits in the world—an enviable position, in many countries' eyes, as the market for electric vehicles takes off. Though EVs emit fewer greenhouse gases than fuel-powered vehicles, their batteries require more minerals—especially lithium, which is also used to make batteries for smartphones and computers.

The richest countries emit more carbon dioxide than the rest of the world combined, while population is only growing in the poorest countries. These are two widespread notions that argue for focusing on reducing emissions per capita in order to mitigate climate change. But this is not entirely true on the light of data from the last 30 years, new research published in the journal Sustainability shows.

The conversion of handwritten weather records into digital information will help weather better understand future weather risks.

A new smart material is activated by both heat and electricity, making it the first ever to respond to two different stimuli.

Despite the promise of new medications that promote   cell death in people with acute myeloid leukemia, leukemic cells often adopt features that let them evade the drugs' effects within a year.

The ionosphere — the region of geospace spanning from 60 to 1000 kilometers above the Earth — impairs the propagation of radio signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) with its electrically charged particles. This is a problem for the ever higher precision required by these systems — both in research and for applications such as autonomous driving or precise orbit determination of satellites. Models of the ionosphere and its uneven, dynamic charge distribution can help correct the signals for ionospheric delays, which are one of the main error sources in GNSS applications. Researchers have presented a new model of the ionosphere, developed on the basis of neural networks and satellite measurement data from 19 years. In particular, it can reconstruct the topside ionosphere, the upper, electron-rich part of the ionosphere much more precisely than before. It is thus also an important basis for progress in ionospheric research, with applications in studies on the propagation of electromagnetic waves or for the analysis of certain space weather events, for example.

A new age of superconductors may be about to beginn: In the 1980s, many superconducting materials (called cuprates) were based on copper. Then, nickelates were discovered — a new kind of superconducting materials based on nickel. But now, scientists from Austria and Japan have shown: There is a 'Goldilocks zone' of superconductivity which can neither be reached with cuprates nor with nickelates. Instead, palladium-based materials ('palladates') could be the solution.

By studying green algae in Swedish lakes, a research team has succeeded in identifying which environmental conditions promote multicellularity. The results give us new clues to the amazing paths of evolution.

Mini Vandal

SpaceX's disastrous Starship launch last week appears to have had some collateral damage.

During the failed 4/20 launch, video recorded by the YouTuber LabPadre shows the explosive blast — and also, if you look closely, caused the crushing of a minivan parked dangerously close to the launchpad.

Subsequent posts revealed that the van belonged to none other than NASASpaceFlight's Chris Bergin, and although the vehicle wasn't completely destroyed, it definitely suffered some major damage.

 

As bad as it would suck to have your van crushed by Starship, Bergin noted in a tweet that NSF "take[s] these risks on purpose to get the cool shots."

"We're always really grateful when rocket companies allow the media to have cameras *Kenny Loggins voice* in the Dangerzone," he joked. "That's the rocket game!"

Hashtag Blowup

As we reported that week, the minivan wasn't the only thing damaged in SpaceX's ill-fated first attempt at an orbital Starship launch.

Because the Elon Musk-owned company's Starbase is located near a wildlife preserve, debris from the intentional explosion rained down on that government-protected land, and locals of the nearby town of Port Isabel, Texas also had to deal with a layer of grime and shaken buildings during the launch, too.

"It was truly terrifying," Sharon Almaguer, a local resident, told the New York Times of the launch blast that shattered at least one nearby window.

While this was far from the first time Starship has blown up, seeing it happen so calamitously, apparently on purpose, and with so many adverse side effects has us really wondering if and when it'll be ready to, you know, actually go into orbit.

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Lost $13 Billion on 4/20

The post Video Shows Falling Starship Debris Smashing a Minivan appeared first on Futurism.

A new strategy brings key advances to the development of water-based zinc batteries, making them more powerful, safer, and more environmentally friendly.

The world needs cheap and powerful batteries that can store sustainably produced electricity from wind or sunlight so that we can use it whenever we need it, even when it’s dark outside or there’s no wind blowing.

Most common batteries that power our smartphones and electric cars are lithium-ion batteries. But, they are highly flammable and, because worldwide demand for lithium is soaring, are also quite expensive. Water-based zinc batteries offer a promising alternative to these lithium-​ion batteries.

There are a number of advantages to zinc batteries. Zinc is abundant, cheap, and has mature recycling infrastructure. Furthermore, zinc batteries can store a lot of electricity. Most importantly, zinc batteries don’t necessarily require the use of highly flammable organic solvents as the electrolyte fluid, as they can also be made using water-based electrolytes instead.

There are also challenges that engineers must face with when developing these batteries: when zinc batteries are charged at high voltage, the water in electrolyte fluid reacts on one of the electrodes to form hydrogen gas. When this happens, the electrolyte fluid dwindles and battery performance decreases.

Furthermore, this reaction causes excess pressure to build up in the battery that can be dangerous. Another issue is formation of spiky deposits of zinc during charging of the battery, known as dendrites, that can pierce through the battery and, in the worst case, even cause a short circuit and render the battery unusable.

In recent years, engineers have pursued the strategy of enriching the aqueous liquid electrolyte with salts in order to keep the water content as low as possible. But there are also disadvantages to this: It makes the electrolyte fluid viscous, which slows down the charging and discharging processes considerably. In addition, many of the salts used contain fluorine, making them toxic and harmful to the environment.

Maria Lukatskaya, professor of electrochemical energy systems at ETH Zurich, and colleagues in the US and Switzerland are searching for the ideal salt concentration for water-based zinc-ion batteries. Using experiments supported by computer simulations, they were able to reveal that the ideal salt concentration is not, as was previously assumed, the highest one possible, but a relatively low one: five to 10 water molecules per salt’s positive ion.

What’s more, the researchers didn’t use any environmentally harmful salts for their improvements, opting instead for environmentally friendly salts of acetic acid, called acetates.

“With an ideal concentration of acetates, we were able to minimize electrolyte depletion and prevent zinc dendrites just as well as other scientists previously did with high concentrations of toxic salts,” says Dario Gomez Vazquez, a doctoral student in Lukatskaya’s group and lead author of the study in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. “Moreover, with our approach, the batteries can be charged and discharged much faster.”

So far, the researchers have tested their new battery strategy on a relatively small laboratory scale. The next step will be to scale up the approach and see if it can also be translated for large batteries.

Ideally, these might one day be used as storage units in the power grid to compensate for fluctuations, say, or in the basements of single-family homes to allow solar power produced during the day to be used in the evening.

There are still some challenges to overcome before zinc batteries will be ready for the market, Lukatskaya says. Batteries consist of two electrodes—the anode and the cathode—and the electrolyte fluid between them.

“We showed that by tuning electrolyte composition efficient charging of zinc anodes can be enabled. Going forward, however, performance cathode materials will have to be optimized as well to realize durable and efficient zinc batteries.”

Source: ETH Zurich

The post New zinc batteries are safer, sustainable, powerful appeared first on Futurity.

The extractives and chemical composition of hybrid aspen bark allow it to be used in several applications in the chemical industry. In the doctoral dissertation of Pasi Korkalo, who is a researcher at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and a doctoral student at the University of Oulu's Sustainable Chemistry unit, the chemical composition of the bark biomass of hybrid aspen was studied, activated carbon was produced from the bark extract, and a pesticide chemical was produced from the bark's hemicellulose. All chemical products were separated from the biomass following cascade processing principles.

In one key respect, Ralph Yarl was fortunate. The wounds the 16-year-old suffered after being shot twice on April 13, 2023, by the owner of the house whose doorbell he rang, thinking it was where he was due to pick up his two younger brothers, did not prove fatal.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38064-w

The presence of peritoneal   in   is associated with poor prognosis. Here the authors show that hyaluronan and proteoglycan link protein-1 ( ) promotes tumour cell plasticity and pro-tumoral immune microenvironment to facilitate peritoneal dissemination in pancreatic cancers.

More than 100 charged calcium atoms chilled to extremely low temperatures have been arranged into a two-dimensional crystal, which could be used for studying quantum materials or building quantum computations

The benefits of experiencing nature for physical, psychological and spiritual well-being are widely documented. But much of the research on these benefits has been done in relatively affluent countries in the global North. There's little research that has been done in developing countries on the benefits of being in nature.

A spacecraft around Mars has sent back the most detailed photos yet of the red planet's little moon.

To protect its Confidential Computing cloud infrastructure and gain critical insights,   leans on its relationships with chipmakers.

When thinking of animals that live in the most extreme environments on Earth most of us probably don't think of the snailfish. Its name may not hint at extraordinary physical capabilities but the snailfish has broken the record for living at the deepest ocean depths known to humanity.

Nature, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01403-4

The majority of sequences come from people who lived in Western Eurasia, but samples from other regions are on the rise.

Archaeologists have discovered the buried remains of a Roman fort along Scotland's ancient Antonine Wall.

When thinking of animals that live in the most extreme environments on Earth most of us probably don't think of the snailfish. Its name may not hint at extraordinary physical capabilities but the snailfish has broken the record for living at the deepest ocean depths known to humanity.

A startling number of Americans are in "partisan echo chambers," where they only consume TV news that reinforces their existing political and social biases, according to new research co-authored at UC Berkeley.

Storm Arwen, described by the UK's Met Office as "one of the most powerful and damaging winter storms of the last decade," hit the east coast of Scotland and northern England in late November 2021. Wind gusts of over 90 mph and fallen trees caused widespread damage to energy infrastructure. More than one million homes lost power and some were still disconnected over a week later.

University of Alberta researchers have developed a new catalyst that could revolutionize how we generate power and purify water. When placed in any type of water and provided with a small amount of power, the catalyst produces hydrogen that can be fed into a fuel cell to generate electricity along with distilled water that is safe to drink.

Computer scientist Keith Burghardt at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), a research institute of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, has been studying social media for five years, and specifically studying online hate for the last year.

A University of Georgia research team has confirmed evidence of a previously unknown planet outside of our solar system, and they used machine learning tools to detect it.

A paradigm-shifting study published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that, just like humans, monkeys are capable of complex deliberation and careful decision-making. The study is the first to show that monkeys can think deeply about a problem and consider combinations of factors such as costs, consequences and constraints. In doing so, monkeys can find optimal outcomes rather than impulsively reaching for the first available option.

At its grand opening in 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct sent a torrent of fresh mountain water cascading into the Los Angeles valley to the cheers of an onlooking crowd of 30,000 people. The water, diverted from the Owens Valley more than 200 miles away, would fuel meteoric growth in the L.A. suburbs in the decades to come, but it would ultimately come at the cost of Owens Lake, the terminal lake from which the water was diverted, which effectively ran dry only 13 years later.

By studying green algae in Swedish lakes, a research team, led by Lund University in Sweden, has succeeded in identifying which environmental conditions promote multicellularity. Published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the results give us new clues to the amazing paths of evolution.

Ride-sharing platforms significantly outperform taxis in coping with urban emergencies such as a terrorist attack or subway shutdowns, largely due to the benefits of technology, a new study shows.

“Our study offers important insights into the design of platform strategies, especially for stimulating labor supply and providing incentives for urban transportation systems to adopt and use technology in response to urban emergencies,” says Beibei Li, associate professor of IT and management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College and coauthor of the study in Information Systems Research.

Emergencies in urban settings can result in significant human and economic loss if they are not handled properly. While research has focused on developing and evaluating technology for emergency management, the field lacks solid evidence about how technology-initiated digital systems perform under such stressors.

Since urban transportation systems are a crucial part of cities’ emergency preparedness, researchers sought to understand how technology-equipped transportation services (i.e., ride-sharing platforms such as Uber) cope with uncertainty and help facilitate emergency relief.

Researchers collected taxi and for-hire vehicle records in New York City from January 2015 to December 2017. They considered how the services performed in multiple types of urban disasters, including terrorist attacks, subway shutdowns, and car crashes, measuring platform-level use based on the hourly number of trips.

Ride-sharing platforms outperformed taxi companies after urban emergencies. For example, while both taxis and ride-sharing services saw a decline in the use of their services after the September 17, 2016 bombing and the October 31, 2017 truck attack in New York City, the ride-sharing platforms experienced a smaller decline.

Several possibilities explain the better performance of ride-sharing platforms, chief among them the effect of technology used in ride-share platforms and the elasticity of supply of ride-share vehicles and drivers.

The study also found that locations with higher densities of people were less affected by urban emergencies than those with lower densities. The decrease in individuals’ use of taxis at such times was smaller during rush hours and evenings than at midnight and during the daytime. In contrast to this fluctuation in taxi use, daily use of ride-sharing platforms was relatively stable.

“Disasters are critical threats to the stability of urban transportation systems,” says lead author Yingjie Zhang, assistant professor of marketing at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. “Our work sheds light on how technology supports emergency management, as well as how the public reacts to the adoption of technology during an urban crisis.”

Among the limitations of the study, the authors point out that the data they used allowed them to examine only successfully fulfilled trips. In addition, they were unable to consider confounding factors, such as traffic that had been reallocated after an emergency or the redistribution of drivers away from an attack.

“In light of our findings, service providers and city planners should reevaluate and improve their mobility platform, particularly under emergencies, disasters and hazards,” says coauthor Sean Qian, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

“Also, passengers with an urgent need to get someplace during emergencies may want to consider a ride-sharing or ride hailing service first, provided that they have relatively stable supply and technological support.”

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

The post Ride sharing beats taxis during urban emergencies appeared first on Futurity.

A paradigm-shifting study published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that, just like humans, monkeys are capable of complex deliberation and careful decision-making. The study is the first to show that monkeys can think deeply about a problem and consider combinations of factors such as costs, consequences and constraints. In doing so, monkeys can find optimal outcomes rather than impulsively reaching for the first available option.

At its grand opening in 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct sent a torrent of fresh mountain water cascading into the Los Angeles valley to the cheers of an onlooking crowd of 30,000 people. The water, diverted from the Owens Valley more than 200 miles away, would fuel meteoric growth in the L.A. suburbs in the decades to come, but it would ultimately come at the cost of Owens Lake, the terminal lake from which the water was diverted, which effectively ran dry only 13 years later.

By studying green algae in Swedish lakes, a research team, led by Lund University in Sweden, has succeeded in identifying which environmental conditions promote multicellularity. Published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the results give us new clues to the amazing paths of evolution.

A defiant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskij proclaiming, "I need ammunition, not a ride"; a seemingly endless line of Russian trucks stuck outside of Kyiv; the bodies of a family killed in Irpin; an injured pregnant woman carried on a stretcher following the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol; or a video of a young girl singing "Let it Go" from Disney's "Frozen" while sheltering in a basement. These are just a few of the many videos clips and images from the war against Ukraine that have been broadcast around the world and helped rally support for the beleaguered nation both at home and abroad.

Conditioning that once worked with Pavlov's dog does also work with an artificially induced change in nerve cell activity.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37797-y

The neural circuits regulating wakefulness have not been fully resolved. Here, the authors reveal that neurons expressing   in the parasubthalamic nucleus play a key role in the induction and maintenance of the awake state associated with exploration via projections to the ventral tegmental area.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37642-2

The zinc-copper (Zn-Cu) Daniell cell is regarded as primary battery due to the crossover of the copper species. Here, the authors report a rechargeable Zn-Cu battery with the combination of chloride shuttle chemistry in a ZnCl2 aqueous/organic biphasic electrolyte, delivering a high energy density with stable cycling performance

Biological cells, whether free-living or part of a multicellular organism, have to perform hundreds of functions to survive, such as perceiving their environment, uptaking and metabolizing nutrients, regenerating decayed parts, reproducing themselves, and many more.

Neurodivergent disorders encompass a range of conditions including autism, ADHD and dyslexia. But definitions stir up controversy among medical experts.

Biological cells, whether free-living or part of a multicellular organism, have to perform hundreds of functions to survive, such as perceiving their environment, uptaking and metabolizing nutrients, regenerating decayed parts, reproducing themselves, and many more.

Toneangivende tyske industrivirksomheder etablerer et sikkert rum til at dele data på tværs af produktionsfaciliteter. Danmark og danske industrivirksomheder står indtil videre uden for samarbejdet.

Humans are building meaningful relationships with AI chatbots. What will the consequences be?

For years, Ville Pulkki has been wondering why it feels so difficult to shout upwind. The sensation is common enough to have found its way into an idiom about not being understood. But Pulkki, a professor of acoustics at Aalto University, wanted a scientific explanation for the phenomenon—and there wasn't been one.

Archaeologists at UC Santa Cruz used predictive modeling to map strontium isotope ratios across all of modern-day Angola, a region in Southwest Africa that was once a major hub for the transatlantic slave trade. Researchers compared the resulting map with existing data on strontium isotope ratios from human remains to predict likely regions of origin within Angola for four individuals who had been buried in cemeteries for enslaved people across the Americas.

Every giant was once a baby, though you may never have seen them at that stage of their development. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has begun to shed light on formative years in the history of the universe that have thus far been beyond reach: the formation and assembly of galaxies.

Renewable generation projects are set to make this future fuel widely available. And it’s much more versatile than you think.

The gas giant planet’s youthful glow could explain major differences between its four largest satellites

Humans are building meaningful relationships with AI chatbots. What will the consequences be?

Nature, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05875-2

Ice-core data show that extreme iceberg discharge events in the North Atlantic had no detectable impact on Greenland temperatures but are synchronous with abrupt acceleration of Antarctic warming.

Nature, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01418-x

Planets might be more common throughout the Universe than previously thought, suggest results from the  .

The saying "Birds of a feather flock together" is being given new meaning by a study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Flocking birds often travel in groups made up of a single species, in which individuals are nearly indistinguishable from one another, as noted by the proverbial adage. But something strange happens in flocks of two or more species from Southeast Asia. Even when flock species are distantly related, they still seem to converge on the same appearance, as if trying to fit in.

The saying "Birds of a feather flock together" is being given new meaning by a study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Flocking birds often travel in groups made up of a single species, in which individuals are nearly indistinguishable from one another, as noted by the proverbial adage. But something strange happens in flocks of two or more species from Southeast Asia. Even when flock species are distantly related, they still seem to converge on the same appearance, as if trying to fit in.

Cellular respiration is a complex and highly regulated process that allows cells to draw energy from nutrition. An international team of scientists in Finland, Germany and Poland have investigated the important role of long-chain fatty acids in guiding this process. The findings, published in Nature Communications, will shed light on the understanding of mitochondrial function that involve disruptions in cellular energy metabolism.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38079-3

Potential rooftop photovoltaic in China affords 4 billion tons of carbon mitigation in 2020 under ideal assumptions, equal to 70% of China’s carbon emissions from electricity and heat. Yet most cities have exploited the potential to a limited degree.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38022-6

Plasmid acquisition imposes a transient burden on bacterial hosts. Here, authors show this burden results in a tradeoff between growth and lag that dictates plasmid fate, favoring intermediate cost plasmids over both low and high cost counterparts.

Commitments toward sustainability have become a greater priority in recent years as enterprises look to comply with environmental, social, and governance standards. However, many enterprises are finding that meeting sustainability goals not only aligns with compliance but also offers opportunities to drive new value, growth, and revenue streams. “Just as the digital revolution transformed how we live and work, so now will sustainability. It will drive new value, new growth, and eventually, and I hope very soon, it’s going to permeate everything that we do in business and in government,” says Stephanie Jamison, global resources industry practices chair at Accenture.

This episode is part of our “Building the future” podcast series. It’s a multi-episode series focusing on how organizations, researchers, and innovators are meeting our evolving global challenges. We understand the importance of inclusive conversations and have chosen to highlight the work of women on the cutting edge of technological innovation, and business excellence.

Challenges remain for enterprises in targeting, measuring, and reporting sustainability performance, Jamison says, and those that lag behind can miss out on new sources of value and growth driven by sustainability. This is where technology can come in. Emerging solutions like cloud and platform providers offer tracking and insights throughout entire supply chains to help enterprises make better decisions.

“Trying to build a purposeful, sustainable business is actually innovative, and it will grow your business in the long term,” says Gita Rao, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan Management School. “You are taking into account how you interact with your suppliers, customers and employees, as well how you handle the environmental impact of your operations.”

Although many enterprises are making efforts toward sustainability, the role of governments in private-public partnerships remains an ongoing  issue, says Rao. The absence of clear regulations makes transparency and accountability critical to distinguish between enterprises with genuine intentions to meet sustainability goals and those that want to appear committed to being sustainable.

However, says Jamison, “This is a watershed moment in history.” She continues, “The focus on sustainable development will be the key to competitiveness and sustained success for businesses moving forward. By putting sustainability at the center of everything a business does and how they do it, is going to create new value in the future.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Accenture. 

Related resources

• Accenture and the World Economic Forum, 2021

Full Transcript  

Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Laurel Ruma, and this is Business Lab. The show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

This episode is part of our Building the Future series. We’re focusing on how organizations, researchers, and innovators are meeting our evolving global challenges. We understand the importance of inclusive conversations, and have chosen to highlight the work of women on the cutting edge of technological innovation, and business excellence.

Our topic today is sustainability. Creating sustainable enterprise requires not just support from leadership, but a commitment to setting and meeting outcomes in a transparent way across the entire enterprise. Building a purpose-driven model with a commitment to environmental, social, and governance goals can also lead to new products, new ways of working, and even new revenue streams. Two words for you: go green.

My guests are Stephanie Jamison, global resources industry practices chair at Accenture, and Gita Rao, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan Management School.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Accenture.

Welcome, Stephanie and Gita.

Stephanie Jamison: Hi, Laurel. Thank you so much.

Gita Rao: Hi, Laurel. It’s a pleasure to be with you all.

Laurel: Well, thank you both for being here. To start off, Gita, sustainability isn’t new, but you managed the first global environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, portfolio in the United States. How has the focus on ESG improved since then, and how do you think about the current urgency for enterprises and governments?

Gita: Yeah, Laurel, I managed the first global ESG portfolio in this country way back. This was for a client in the UK. The impetus was that the client was, even back then, two decades ago, very concerned about fossil fuels. They were also concerned about human rights issues, the treatment of the workforce, and in addition, how companies were governed. It was a very proactive process where we would vote our proxies, and we would select companies based on a thoughtful consideration of ESG criteria in addition to their attractiveness as investments. We Engaged with managements and worked with them towards these goals, and then we would report back to the client. It was a virtuous circle, which is what is required in order to invest in businesses that are trying to achieve sustainability goals.

Laurel: Stephanie, how are you seeing this type of urgency play out with clients across industries now?

Stephanie: Laurel, at Accenture, we see sustainability as the new digital. Just as the digital revolution transformed how we live and work, so now will sustainability. It will drive new value, new growth, and eventually, and I hope very soon, it’s going to permeate everything that we do in business and in government. Leaders have long understood that what we measure shapes what we do. Today we know ESG performance has become an imperative, but it’s not just for compliance reasons, also for business performance too. Mapping a clear route, measuring the business potential, and impact of sustainability is key. Frankly, there is a lot of work to do in that regard for us to scale the progress.

Laurel: Stephanie, what are some of the more formidable challenges that organizations are facing as they move towards sustainable practices? There must be, obviously, opportunities as well.

Stephanie: There’s so much opportunity. I would say, while most companies now recognize that ESG metrics are linked to performance and not just compliance, many business leaders are finding challenges with targeting, managing, measuring, and reporting sustainability performance. While others are actually getting ahead. What I see is that if the laggards let the leaders get too far ahead, those that eventually act could become locked out of securing some new sources of growth and value related to sustainability, and driven by sustainability.

I think the renewable energy space is potentially an example of that, not yet, but potentially could become an example there. This is an area where a small number of companies built their renewables businesses more than 10 years ago, and in some cases 20 years ago. Now they have large, profitable global businesses that new entrants will find it hard to compete with. Goldman Sachs refers to these leaders that are based in Europe as the green energy majors. Financial analysts love them. They have a lot of confidence in their future growth potential.

But, we still have a long way to travel on the sustainability journey, and it’s not too late to act and enter new markets. By reshaping and retooling their organizations, leaders can overcome challenges, and create value and lasting impact while also improving ESG performance and metrics. I think to achieve this, organizations need to do three things. They’ve got to set a clear destination, they’ve got to set their route that gets them to that destination with milestones along the way, and measuring and reporting.

What we see today is that many report what they’re doing, but in most cases it’s not actually against a plan. When it comes to measuring and reporting, access to the right data to make better decisions at every level is critical. That’s where technology comes in. There are some great solutions in the market emerging and starting to scale. Cloud and platform providers play a pivotal role here in tracking and providing insights throughout the entire supply chain.

I’ll just give you one example of that. It’s linked to a partnership that Accenture and Microsoft launched in June, earlier this year [2022]. The partnership will deliver solutions that enable organizations, our clients, to address their key sustainability challenges, and to capture new business opportunities. The initial focus of the partnership is to help organization transform their operations, their product services, and their entire supply chain to reduce the company’s emissions. We will eventually expand focus in the future to tackle other ESG issues beyond emissions, but that is a critical focus for many businesses today.

We’re investing in the co-development of solutions designed from the start to emit less carbon over their lifecycle. We’ve even joined forces with Microsoft to offer advisory services to help businesses reduce emissions, transition to the new energy sources, and reduce or eliminate waste. It’s an opportunity that I’m really excited about, because it does take technology and human ingenuity to tackle this opportunity and to capture the opportunities here.

Laurel: Gita, there’s something about this virtuous circle as Stephanie described coming about here as well. You’re actually seeing it at every stage from the enterprise, reporting out, back to the clients, et cetera. What do you think about these challenges and opportunities here that are possible, the sustainability practices?

Gita: Well, if we take a step back, Stephanie mentioned renewables. I think it’s really important to think about the role of government in all of this sector, and the role of regulation. The renewables industry in the U.S., as well as in other countries like India and others would not have gotten off the ground without a public-private partnership. Similarly, for ESG, there’s a few things we really need. One is transparency, which is, “How much are companies emitting? What are their goals?” The second is accountability, and that is, “If they do not meet those goals, what is the consequence of that?”

In terms of regulation, Europe is pretty far ahead of the U.S. in that regard. But until we have a clearly defined set of regulations around this, it’s kind of like the Wwild Wwest, honestly. It does open up a very the serious issue of potential greenwashing, which we should mention. That is, we have the companies with genuine intentions, and then there are others that are also going along. It’s  very hard for the investing public or for others to be able to distinguish between these. I would like to mention the role of government in all of this, and the importance of transparency.

Just to give you an example, the SEC [United States Security and Exchange Commission] recently [proposed] some disclosure rules about scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions. Now, we know from a lot of climate studies that scope 2 and scope 3 account for about somewhere between 70% and 80% of emissions. So scope 1 is a tiny part of total emissions. But getting visibility into scope 2 and scope 3 is incredibly tough. Companies have very long and complicated supply chains. We know this in part because of  through the pandemic. How do we figure out where the supply chain has these nodal points? That’s where I think the creative use of alternative data, the use of technology, is really going to be a game changer.

Laurel: To go on about that a little bit more, the transparency there, Gita, how does the transparency help internal decisions being made in an enterprise? Whether it is pursuing, like you said, compliance with those government regulations. Or even making changes to products or decisions. Because you have this overarching idea—harkening back to what Stephanie said—if sustainability is the new digital, that means every company…I’m following through on a very common tech phrase, which is, “Every company is a digital company,” or “every company’ is a technology company,” therefore every company is going to have to be a sustainability company. How does that actually play out?

Gita: Well, Stephanie’s the expert on strategy. I will just tell you, I like to keep things very simple. Companies have to think long term, and investors have to think long term. When we say long term, I mean all of these decisions, these are micro decisions, but they translate at the enterprise level into macro decisions. These decisions involve upfront costs. Those upfront costs are borne by the company understanding that longer term, it helps them achieve this goal of building a sustainable business. Sustainability and a long-term perspective are inextricably linked with each other. It starts with framing a strategy for the long term, and everything else fits into that.

Laurel: Stephanie, how does this transparency translate, as Gita said, to the strategy of a company?

Stephanie: Laurel, Gita mentioned the role of regulation, and I completely agree with all of her comments. The importance of regulation, the role of regulation. Those regulations have to be put in place, else we’re going to be in the wild, wild west for quite some time. In some countries there has been some regulation put in place, but not enough and not fast enough, but eventually we will get there.

The absence of super clear regulation at scale everywhere drives the need for businesses and governments to focus on transparency. At Accenture, we have made sustainability one of our greatest responsibilities, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we believe that it will create one of the most powerful forces for change in our generation. We believe that transparency builds trust and helps all of us make more progress.

Therefore, when it comes to transparency, we have expanded our ESG reporting with three additional frameworks. Those are the Sustainability Accounting Standards board, the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure, and the World Economic Forum International Business Council metrics. We’ve done that while continuing to report against the Global Reporting Initiative standards, the United Nations Global Compacts 10 principles, and the Carbon Disclosure Project. All of this shows you how seriously we take transparency within Accenture.

Laurel: To continue there, Stephanie, what is purposeful sustainability? How can an organization, especially c-suite leaders, apply this kind of framework to yield the greatest results, as Gita said, from the micro to the macro?

Stephanie: Laurel, I will use a framework that we apply to our own business within Accenture and advise our clients on. Our goal is to create what we call 360° Value for all of our stakeholders. That includes our clients, our people, our shareholders, our partners, and the communities that we operate in. We define 360° Value as delivering the financial business case, and unique value that a client may be seeking. Along with striving to partner with our clients to achieve greater progress on inclusion and diversity, re-skilling and up-skilling their people, achieving their sustainability goals, and creating meaningful experiences for their customers and employees.

We’ve developed a 360° Value reporting experience. We use that to bring together all of our ESG and financial metrics. This allows us to detail our progress and performance on our 360° Value goals. We actually produce that, and report and share that publicly and quarterly to really lead in that regard. We believe that reporting through the lens of 360° Value allows us simply to see more, and to see more clearly. We also advise clients on how to report, and communicate in the same way.

Laurel: Gita, what challenges will enterprises face when they are focusing on purposeful sustainability? Clearly there are also opportunities here as well.

Gita: Let me think of challenges. Let’s step back and think of how do we assess for purposeful sustainability. One way is evolutionary, and the other way is revolutionary. Both of those involve different trajectories in terms of how the business grows, and how decisions are made. What do I mean by that? You take a company like Unilever or you take a Chevron, or even an Equinor, these companies are large, they have established practices. These are supertankers. Trying to guide those companies through these sustainable purposeful waters means you are making evolutionary changes. You really are. You’re really trying to shape the future direction in which the company’s moving, the supertanker is moving.

Revolutionary is very different. We have a fintech company that’s been started by one of our, actually, our master finance alums. When we think of how all our clothes, and our cars, and everything arrivesd to us on these giant cargo ships from China and elsewhere, those cargo ships have people on them, and they’re almost always men. They have to be there. These ships are not manned by robots. Those people, there’s a huge problem with payments for these people, because they are on the ships 45 weeks a year, and the money they’re supposed to get paid [needs to be transferred to them]… But the money doesn’t reach their families for weeks on end. These are very poor people.

The ships collectively carry billions of dollars to pay their workers [of goods]. Let’s think about this. What are the incentives here? The shipowners would like to reduce the amount of money they have to carry, because it’s a huge business risk. The workers should and need to get paid on time. This fintech app allows this to happen and in real time, and the EU is one of the entities that is funding it. Now, this is revolutionary. What is the challenge here? The challenge here is scaling up; scaling up and figuring out how to put this in other contexts. There are many, many contexts in which this [technology] can be applied. That’s what I would say, is these are the challenges, but there are y’re fantastic opportunities when we start the framing, when we start with a framing that we want to build a business for the long term where there’s a stakeholder perspective.

Laurel: This is an interesting example, Gita, because basically you’re saying one very focused application of technology, which is this payment app, that also will help not just the workers, but also the owners of the boats. Also, I’m assuming other places in the supply chain know where this delivery of goods oil is going to. It is this probably an unrecognized need within the company itself. It’s helping the workers in other ways, not just sustainability. Perhaps, one way of looking at sustainability is how we can actually help across the entire organization with other problems. It’s not something that it’s off on an island to itself. It actually can be integrated with everyday enterprise and business needs.

Gita: I think that’s a very important observation, and Stephanie’s been emphasizing this. It has to be done from the ground up. Her company and others in working with the c-suite, in working with leaders and organizations, they are bringing this notion that it’s not just cost-cutting, it’s innovation that drives profits. Trying to build a purposeful, sustainable business is actually innovative, and it will grow your business in the long term. At the same time, you are taking into account how you interact with treat your suppliers, how you treat your customers, how you treat your employees, and how you mitigate handle the environmental impact of your operations. All of these things are part of your decision-making. Absolutely.

Laurel: Stephanie, as we’re talking about innovation, how do you see purposeful sustainability evolving in the next three to five years? And then how can a focus on multidimensional-value creation really benefit both greater society, and investors, and enterprises alike?

Stephanie: Laurel, business leaders are certainly alert to the challenge. In a recent study done by Accenture, we found that more than 70% of executives that we surveyed said that becoming a truly sustainable and responsible business was a top priority for their organization over the next three years. 70% of the executives said, “This is important, and it’s important for us in the short term, and we are going to take action.” I believe that, because if you just look back on the past one year, two years ago, there has been significant progress from business leaders. This pace, I do expect to accelerate.

The success of such change rests upon a tangible commitment to stakeholder centricity. Crucially, our analysis shows organizations with stronger sustainability DNA do deliver higher financial value, and greater environmental and societal impact. I believe this is a watershed moment in history. This is a watershed moment in history. The focus on sustainable development will be the key to competitiveness and sustained success for businesses moving forward. By putting sustainability at the center of everything a business does and how they do it, is going to create new value in the future.

Laurel: Gita, Stephanie calls it a watershed moment. You also call it a need for revolutionary or evolutionary actions. How are you seeing purposeful sustainability evolving in the next three to five years?

Gita: We have a confluence of events and circumstances. , which it’s a cliché to call it extraordinary, but the pandemic trulyreally exposed our vulnerabilities. On top of that, we have ongoing effects of climate change both in this country and worldwide. It’s estimated that half a billion people will be forced into migration due to climate change. That disproportionately affects those who are poor and communities of color.

There’s a greater emphasis than ever before on making sure that we tie in all of these goals in trying to think about how businesses can function within the society that we have, and really contribute positively. There’s been a reframing, and I’ll give one example. We talk about the labor puzzle, which, is in the United States, where are the workers? We have a continuing shortage of labor at all levels. Where are the workers, where have they gone? At first, it was the pandemic, and the stimulus, and so on, but it’s not easing up. Companies are saying, “Well, this is with us for maybe for the long term, and we have to make sure that we engage in skilling, in retention. Maybe even, what is it? On-ramping.” Stephanie, you know this term better than I do.

For example, people who were ready to leave the workforce, but you keep them on in some capacity, because of this collective knowledge and experience base they bring. It is not just about responding to climate change, and environmental issues, but it’s a network effectweb, it’s all related. Responding to that in an effective manner, in a concerted manner.

I would like to use one analogy, which is that no one company can do it alone. When the airlines started flying, if you wanted to fly from Washington, DC to Dayton, Ohio on Delta, Delta didn’t build its own airport. Delta flew into a common airport that was used by United and American, and everybody else. Similarly, to solve these societal issues that impact companies, we actually need to create coalitions. These coalitions have to be coalitions of companies, partnerships with forums like Stephanie’s, with governmental organizations, with NGOs, advocacy groups. We all have to work together on this.

Laurel: What a fantastic place to end. Thank you very much, Stephanie and Gita for joining us today on the Business Lab.

Stephanie: Thank you, Laurel.

Gita: Thank you, Laurel.

Laurel: That was Stephanie Jamison, global resources industry practices chair at Accenture. And Gita Rao, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan Management School. Who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology review overlooking the Charles River.

That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Laurel Ruma. I’m the global Director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can find us in print, on the web, and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review. This episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thanks for listening.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. 

 

Gao Caixia's group from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a new genome editing technology that achieves efficient and precise targeted insertion of large DNA segments in plants.

Cellular respiration is a complex and highly regulated process that allows cells to draw energy from nutrition. An international team of scientists in Finland, Germany and Poland have investigated the important role of long-chain fatty acids in guiding this process. The findings, published in Nature Communications, will shed light on the understanding of mitochondrial function that involve disruptions in cellular energy metabolism.

A severe windstorm that battered the U.K. more than a century ago produced some of the strongest winds that Britain has ever seen, a team of scientists have found after recovering old weather records.

New research finds there is significant variation in the anatomy of the human digestive system, with pronounced differences possible between healthy individuals. The finding has implications for understanding the role that the digestive tract's anatomy can play in affecting human health, as well as providing potential insights into medical diagnoses and the microbial ecosystem of the gut.

Researchers developed a proof of concept for a superconducting highway that could transport vehicles and electricity, cooling the necessary superconductors with a pipeline of liquid hydrogen. Most magnetic levitation designs feature the superconductor inside the vehicle, which is suspended above a magnetic track. The authors decided to flip that arrangement upside down, putting the superconductor on the ground and giving each vehicle a magnet. The result is a system with multiple uses, placing it within the realm of affordability.

Enormous amounts of gold lie buried beneath the rubble of New Zealand’s mountains, and scientists are using freshwater fish genetics to find it.

Beyond the Grave

After yoinking legacy verification blue checkmarks from 

 accounts last week, CEO Elon Musk is now adding 

 checkmarks to the accounts of celebrities without their consent — including some who passed away years ago.

The fiasco began when Musk promised to purge the legacy ticks on April 20, an attempt to get formerly verified users to pony up $8 a month for a Blue subscription instead (which doesn't actually verify a user's identity).

But after finally removing the legacy checks, Blue checkmarks have started returning to various prominent accounts, including dead celebrities such as "Black Panther" star Chadwick Boseman and NBA legend Kobe Bryant.

"This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number," reads a note on the be-checkmarked profiles.

In other words, Musk is effectively paying himself $8 a month on behalf of deceased individuals, a bizarre decision that highlights the sheer chaos that has engulfed Twitter's operations since Musk's takeover.

Bloody Check

Musk isn't disputing the situation, and celebrities aren't happy either, with one commentator quipping that the Twitter Blue checkmarks are now a "digital dunce cap."

"I’m paying for a few personally," Musk admitted after basketball star LeBron James and author Stephen King were revolted to find Twitter had cursed them with a blue checkmark against their will.

"My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue," King tweeted. "I haven't. My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven't."

While the social media platform did visually remove the legacy checkmarks, which were handed out to verified users over the years, a brief look at the code revealed that the company simply hid them from public view and didn't actually remove them.

While the kerfuffle sounds pretty benign on the surface — who cares if a celebrity profile has a blue checkmark or not? — it now feels a lot like the social media company is using them to falsely claim celebrities, dead or alive, are endorsing Twitter Blue.

As Insider points out, that made-up endorsement could violate California's Civil Code 3344.1, which prohibits anybody from advertising a product using the likeness of a deceased personality.

It's a pitiful state of affairs. Twitter finds itself in a deep financial hole and its leader's desperation is really starting to show. Musk is hoping to begin closing the gap with a subscription that, given the sheer amount of backlash, isn't just a terrible value proposition — but an increasingly unpopular one as well.

More on Twitter: Elon Musk Lost $13 Billion on 4/20

The post Elon Musk Forces Dead Celebrities to Become "Paying" Twitter Blue Subscribers appeared first on Futurism.

Dr. Judith Herman, who helped launch the field of   studies, has returned to publishing after a long, mysterious ordeal.

Scientists from Hefei Institute of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a high-throughput biochemical sensor based on porous Au@AuAg nanorods that can detect biochemical molecules with high specificity and sensitivity.

Everyone is susceptible to misinformation or being led astray online. Here’s how to know when to follow your intuition or look for more facts

Cast your mind back to 2008, and you may remember the imminent end of the world. According to various doomsayers, the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern was set to create a black hole that would destroy the Earth and everyone on it.

We are still standing today – but this fact has not stopped continued speculation about other dark deeds in those subterranean tunnels. In the stranger corners of the internet, you can find reports that the institute is riddled with Satanists, who are set to blast open a multi-dimensional portal into hell – rumours that have been fuelled by a video purporting to reveal a human sacrifice.

Continue reading…

Gao Caixia's group from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a new genome editing technology that achieves efficient and precise targeted insertion of large DNA segments in plants.

A first of its kind study into global   activity during heat waves has revealed why social media should be leveraged to spread information about extreme temperatures.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Wu Zhengyan and Zhang Jia from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) developed a portable electrochemical lead ion (Pb2+) sensor based on cobalt-doped Prussian blue (CoPB) combining MXene material, which possesses an enormous potential for Pb2+ detection in practical applications.

Electrocatalysis as an efficient energy storage and conversion technology opens up a new path to solve the existing problems of energy depletion and environmental pollution caused by fossil fuel consumption. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of crystalline porous materials with high specific surface area, high porosity, and designable structure, have shown great potential as new electrocatalysts. However, the inherent low electrical conductivity and low stability of MOFs have greatly hindered their further application in electrocatalysis.

Scientists from Hefei Institute of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a high-throughput biochemical sensor based on porous Au@AuAg nanorods that can detect biochemical molecules with high specificity and sensitivity.

Two-dimensional (2D) ferroelectrics, planar materials that have a spontaneous and reversible electric polarization, are extremely rare and yet could be extremely advantageous for the development of new nanoelectronics. Due to their ferroelectric properties and thin nature, they could be used to create high-performing, small and flexible devices, including high-density non-volatile memory, optoelectronics, ultra-low energy electronics and wearable technologies.

With advanced color blending, app and voice control, the BlissLights Sky Lite Evolve is a fantastic way to bring the cosmos to your home.

The rover has finally lost a pesky rock that had become lodged in its front left wheel "like a pebble in its shoe." The stone had accompanied the rover for more than half its time on the Red Planet.

The Hope orbiter got closer to Mars’s moons Deimos and Phobos than any probe before, collecting unprecedented images and data that hints at the moons’ true origins

Thanks to a novel combination of cryogenic transmission electron tomography and deep learning, EPFL researchers have provided a first look at the nanostructure of platinum catalyst layers, revealing how they could be optimized for fuel cell efficiency.

Arterial stiffness may be a novel risk factor for   in teens.

A new way to think of some interactions between species classifies a variety of plants, animals, and fungi as “nature’s chefs.”

Specifically, nature’s chefs are organisms that provide food—or the illusion of food—to other organisms. The concept offers a new perspective on species interactions, which can inform how people think about food across the tree of life as well as disparate research disciplines.

“There are many ways of classifying species interactions,” says Brad Taylor, corresponding author of a paper on the new concept and an associate professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. “Mutualists interact with other species to both of their benefit. Parasites rely on other species, but the other species doesn’t benefit. Predators devour other species. But the ‘nature’s chef’ concept spans members of all of these groups, with the common factor being that the relevant interactions all rely on food—or the lure of food.”

“The genesis of the idea for nature’s chefs occurred at an interdisciplinary gathering when, in response to an explanation of the evolution of fruits, a chef uttered ‘You mean to say, fruits are nature’s chefs,'” says coauthor Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at NC State. “This seed of an idea led us to review and synthesize what is known about food preparation and sharing across the animal, plant, and fungal kingdoms.”

The research team ultimately outlines three ways that species can produce or prepare food for other organisms: as food, as drinks, or as food-like lures.

Nature’s chefs sometimes prepare food for other organisms of the same species, such as the nuptial food gifts that some species use to attract mates. For example, male cockroaches prepare a nuptial food gift for females that constitutes an important nitrogen source for the female and her eggs.

“Though it may seem odd, or even repulsive, to use cockroaches and chefs in the same sentence, a romantic dinner for two might be closest to the outcome sought by many of nature’s chefs,” says Taylor.

Nature’s chefs may also prepare food for organisms of different species, such as the fruit many plants produce to attract animals to disperse their seeds.

“It’s also worth noting that nature’s chefs include humans, and there are striking similarities between human and nonhuman chefs,” Taylor says. “For example, human chefs use the attractive plating of food or billboards to attract diners, whereas evolutionary processes have led plants to use flowers as an advertisement for their nectar.”

The nature’s chefs concept also distinguishes between organisms that produce “honest meals” versus organisms that produce “deceptive meals,” such as lures or food mimics.

Fruit is a good example of an honest meal—animals (including humans) are able to consume and benefit from the sweet or starchy fleshy material surrounding the seed. Plants, meanwhile, benefit when animals consume or defecate the seed away from the parent plant, thereby reducing inbreeding, competition, predation, and parasitism that can be higher near the parent plant.

Snapping turtles, on the other hand, are an example of species that use food mimics to deceive would-be diners. The tongue of the snapping turtle has an appendage that closely resembles an aquatic worm. The fake worm attracts organisms that eat worms to the snapping turtle’s mouth, making them prey for the turtle. In the context of nature’s chefs this is a predator-prey interaction influenced by one species, the chef, preparing a deceptive meal to obtain its food.

Discussions among research team members from disparate disciplines led to several discoveries that reinforced the concept of nature’s chefs, especially regarding similarities to human chefs.

“For example, chefs, and ecologists were fascinated that both human and nonhuman chefs change the viscosity of liquids to appeal to different diners,” Taylor says. “Likewise, nature’s chefs, human and nonhuman, alter the density of foods to attract diners.”

The researchers also identify several research questions to explore in the future. For example, how does the availability of local or seasonal ingredients affect the behavior of nature’s chefs? We know that humans, and some plants and fungi, warm food as part of meal preparation. How common is that? Why are there so few fruits that smell or taste like meat?

The researchers are hopeful the nature’s chefs concept will stimulate further discussion, learning, and innovation among a diverse group of people interested in food, drink, and food-like mimics.

“Nature’s chefs can provide another way to organize our spectacularly diverse world and also a way to bring people together from disparate disciplines to make new discoveries,” says Taylor.

The paper appears in the journal BioScience. Coauthors are from NC State; the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and Friedrich Schiller University Jena; Alchemist ApS and Mondragon Unibertsitatea; the Novo Nordisk Center for Biosustainability; Harvard University; and NC State and the University of Copenhagen.

Source: NC State

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