In a new study, researchers describe a device that connects the intentions of a paralyzed patient to his physical movements.

Most scientists agree modern humans developed in Africa, more than 200,000 years ago, and that a great human diaspora across much of the rest of the world occurred between perhaps 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Parents and caregivers lining up summer camps and other opportunities to occupy their kids when school is out have one more thing to consider as they plan: novelty.

Species known as marine habitat-forming species —gorgonians, corals, algae, seaweeds, marine phanerogams, etc.— are organisms that help generate and structure the underwater landscapes. These are natural refuges for other species, and provide biomass and complexity to the seabeds.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01732-4

The twin gravitational-wave detectors have started a new observation run after a major upgrade.

Species known as marine habitat-forming species —gorgonians, corals, algae, seaweeds, marine phanerogams, etc.— are organisms that help generate and structure the underwater landscapes. These are natural refuges for other species, and provide biomass and complexity to the seabeds.

Towering a few hours from one of the world's largest cities, the Popocatepetl volcano has been coating nearby towns with ash and disrupting flights at Mexico City's airport, the busiest in Latin America.

Fibers lost during the wear and care of textiles may pose a risk to the environment and human health when released into air and water. A study published in PLOS ONE by Neil J. Lant at Procter & Gamble, Newcastle Innovation Center, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, and colleagues suggests that while condenser dryers may reduce airborne microfibers compared to vented dryers, they are a significant contributor of waterborne microfiber pollution.

The words different cultures use to describe family members have revealed some intriguing insights—including why in Balto-Slavic languages there is a complicated relationship between in-laws and weasels.

Rising temperatures due to climate change are likely influencing human migration patterns, according to a new study by Rita Issa of University College London and colleagues, published May 24 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate.

Plastic pollution is seemingly omnipresent in society, and while plastic bags, cups, and bottles may first come to mind, plastics are also increasingly used to make clothing, rugs, and other textiles.

Coccolithophores, a globally ubiquitous type of phytoplankton, play an essential role in the cycling of carbon between the ocean and atmosphere. New research from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences shows that these vital microbes can survive in low-light conditions by taking up dissolved organic forms of carbon, forcing researchers to reconsider the processes that drive carbon cycling in the ocean. The findings were published this week in Science Advances.

Political parties regularly claim to have their finger on the pulse and be able to read the public mood. Yet a new study challenges the idea that being political makes you good at understanding others: it shows gender, not politics, is a far more important factor in determining people's social skills.

Young adults engage in online anti-social behavior for fun and social approval, and those who perpetrate this behavior tend to have lower cognitive empathy scores than average, according to a new study published this week in PLOS ONE by Felipe Bonow Soares of University of the Arts London, UK, and colleagues.

What does a traditional West African dish have to do with road salt spread across snowy Canadian streets every winter?

Coccolithophores, a globally ubiquitous type of phytoplankton, play an essential role in the cycling of carbon between the ocean and atmosphere. New research from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences shows that these vital microbes can survive in low-light conditions by taking up dissolved organic forms of carbon, forcing researchers to reconsider the processes that drive carbon cycling in the ocean. The findings were published this week in Science Advances.

Turning thought into action.

Earlier this year, a new beer appeared on the menu at Fox City Brewing Company in Forsyth, Georgia. Opened three years ago in a former ice house an hour south of Atlanta, Fox City serves pale ales, stouts and other microbrews. The new addition, called Revival Lager, stands apart from anything it's made before—and from nearly every other beer on tap in   Fox City's menu calls it a "light, crisp, eco-friendly lager made from highly repurposed and recycled water." This is a delicate way of saying that it's made from treated sewage.

Most people probably associate algal blooms with red tides in Florida that can lead to skin irritation, burning eyes and rashes in exposed individuals.

Machine learning technology that can recognize human faces may also help to improve weather forecasts, according to a team of scientists.

When most researchers looked at a puzzling group of artifacts discovered at French archaeological sites, they presumed these to be ornaments or clothing. But Justin Garnett saw something else.

Academic researchers and companies in the agricultural biotechnology sector will be able to use a patent-pending Purdue University biology innovation to introduce valuable traits to plants without integrating novel DNA into a plant's genome.

Most people probably associate algal blooms with red tides in Florida that can lead to skin irritation, burning eyes and rashes in exposed individuals.

Academic researchers and companies in the agricultural biotechnology sector will be able to use a patent-pending Purdue University biology innovation to introduce valuable traits to plants without integrating novel DNA into a plant's genome.

Exes and Ohs

In one of the strangest cases in financial history, a key figure is a millennial who used to blog about her love life — so naturally, we're morbidly fascinated to see what's inside her diary, which is apparently a key piece of evidence in the upcoming trial.

As the New York Times reports, federal prosecutors purportedly have a "mountain" of evidence in their case against 

 CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who's being accused of everything from defrauding investors to campaign finance violations.

According to the NYT's sources close to the matter, the trove of documents prosecutors are wading through ahead of Bankman-Fried's October trial is among the largest ever collected in a white-collar securities case. And nestled in that mountain of evidence? A small black notebook that belonged to Ellison that was reportedly a diary of sorts.

Per three sources familiar with the soon-to-be-infamous diary, Ellison recorded daily observations in it, and although those sources remained mum on their contents, another admission — about evidence in which the Alameda Research CEO "expressed personal and professional resentment" — makes us very intrigued to see what's in it.

Blog About It

Of all the figures involved in FTX's downfall, details about Ellison have stood out for their degree of personality and unusual, though so far we've only had tidbits to go off.

Unearthed last November, a Tumblr blog that very likely to have belonged to Ellison makes reference to a sort of Machiavellian style of polyamory lend credence to the theory that she, Bankman-Fried, and others within the FTX sphere in the Bahamas might have been romantically or sexually involved.

"When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past, but [to be honest] I've come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as something like 'imperial Chinese harem,'" the since-deleted blog reads. "None of this non-hierarchical bullshit; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks."

If that's the sort of content that was on her blog, maybe we'll finally get some clarity from her diary — and we, for one, can't wait.

More on FTX: SBF and Friends Apparently Joked About Their "Tendency to Lose Track of Millions of Dollars in Assets"

The post We're Obsessed With Caroline Ellison's Diary Being Evidence in the FTX Case appeared first on Futurism.

As McDonald’s is targeted, governments also need to tighten and enforce rules

A €5.5bn flood barrier has bought only a temporary reprieve

No model is perfect. But that doesn’t stop them being useful

Getting fuel from your wheels

At least, from a genetic point of view

A downward view of ESA's rock-strewn recreation of the Red Planet, is designed to put prototype planetary rovers through their paces.

The Arctic, once again at the forefront of climate change, is experiencing disproportionately higher temperature increases compared to the rest of the planet, triggering a series of cascading effects known as Arctic amplification.

The ispace HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lunar lander was launched on Dec. 11, 2022, a privately funded spacecraft planned to land on the lunar surface. After a several-month journey to the moon, the spacecraft started a controlled descent to the surface to land near Atlas crater. The ispace team announced the following day that an anomaly occurred, and the HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lunar lander had not safely touched down on the surface.

When multiple NASA telescopes observe the same cosmic region, the universe's true colors are revealed.

Non-avian dinosaurs were probably in decline long before an asteroid smashing into the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago sealed their fate, according to a University of Alberta paleontologist who says the ancient tale is chronicled at three stops on an astonishing three-hour drive along the Red Deer River.

Politically polarized 

 users are not steered to partisan sites by the search engine’s algorithm but generally decide to go there on their own

's state health department is investigating reports of suspected meningitis in people who swam in local lakes and rivers. The cause remains unknown, but a dangerous brain-eating amoeba has been ruled out.

It is only the seventh case of the deadly disease reported in   since it first emerged in the country in 2003.

Non-avian dinosaurs were probably in decline long before an asteroid smashing into the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago sealed their fate, according to a University of Alberta paleontologist who says the ancient tale is chronicled at three stops on an astonishing three-hour drive along the Red Deer River.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38837-3

Early detection of immunotherapy-induced   response is of major benefit for patients but can be complicated by therapy-induced pseudoprogression. A consensus guideline-iRECIST- was developed as a modification of Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumours (RECIST version 1.1). Here we describe which next steps are required to test its validity and how novel approaches for response criteria might be developed and included.

Three and a half years since the start of a pandemic that has killed millions of people and debilitated countless more, the world is still stuck at the start of the COVID-19 crisis in one maddening way: No one can say with any certainty how, exactly, the outbreak began. Many scientists think the new virus spilled over directly from a wild animal, perhaps at a Chinese wet market; some posit that the pathogen leaked accidentally from a local laboratory in Wuhan, China, the pandemic’s likely epicenter. All of them lack the slam-dunk evidence to prove one hypothesis and rule out the rest.

 

That’s not to say nothing has changed. Those embroiled in the origins fracas now have much more data to scrutinize, debate, and re-debate. In March, I reported that the case for a zoonotic origin had acquired a consequential new piece of support: An international team of scientists had uncovered genetic data, collected from a wet market in Wuhan in the weeks after the venue was closed on January 1, 2020, that linked the coronavirus to wild animals. This evidence, they said, indicated that one of those creatures could have been shedding SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19; one of the most intriguing bits of data pointed to raccoon dogs, a foxlike creature that was already known to be vulnerable to the virus. The finding wasn’t direct evidence of an animal infection, but, stacked alongside other clues, ​​“this really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research, told me at the time.

 

Not everyone agreed that the finding counted as a substantial new insight. When the researchers who originally collected the samples, many of them from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, published their own analysis of the data in April—a revision of an earlier report—they emphasized that there was no clear evidence that the virus had been introduced to the market by a wild animal. Then, this month, Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Seattle, posted a third analysis of the market data, inspired in part, he told me, by his concern that the public discussion of the initial findings, and their connection to raccoon dogs, had overinflated their worth. The international team’s report, he argued, hardly moved the needle on the origins debate at all—certainly not “much beyond where it was before,” he told me.

 

Bloom’s analysis, too, set off a wave of fervor—including a fresh spate of claims that he told me were “exaggerated,” or even outright wrong; some even asserted, for instance, that his preprint proves that raccoon dogs “weren’t infected, which is not an accurate summary,” he said. All the while, researchers have been squabbling on social media over the minutiae of statistical methodology, and what constitutes a meaningful amount of viral RNA; some have even come to loggerheads publicly at conferences.

 

At the crux of this particular fight is a difference of interpretation, with one camp of researchers contending that the recent data matter a lot, and another asserting that they matter much less, or perhaps not even a little bit at all. Under most other circumstances, a scientific scuffle this deep in the weeds might hold the attention of a few dozen people for a few months at best. Here, though, the central topic is one of the most consequential in recent memory—a virus that’s left its mark on the world’s entire population, and will continue to do so. Which has made it easy for pitched battles over differences in scientific opinion to become a public spectacle—and difficult, maybe even impossible, for the debate to ever end, no matter what evidence might emerge next.

---

The genetic sequences analyzed in the March report contained evidence of a zoonotic origin that is more circumstantial than direct. Researchers extracted them from swabs taken from surfaces in and around Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market from January to March of 2020, weeks after the first known COVID cases were documented in Wuhan. That makes these environmental samples “a useful part of the story,” Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, told me. Though, by themselves, “they are limited in what they are able to tell us.”

 

By the time the swabs were collected by China CDC researchers, Chinese officials had hastily closed Huanan; many vendors had likely disappeared with their animals, or culled them en masse. The swabs could show only where the virus had once been, or which animals the venue had sold—more akin to dusting a crime scene for fingerprints than catching a vagrant in the act. And although they could show where animal and viral genetic material had mixed, they couldn’t guarantee that those two types of genetic material had been deposited at the same time. Nor could they distinguish between, say, a sick creature sneezing on the bars of its cage and an infected human coughing on an enclosure housing healthy wildlife. Those answers could have come from swabs taken directly from the noses or mouths of live animals for sale at Huanan in late November or early December of 2019. But as far as researchers know, those swabs don’t exist—or at least, the public has no record of them.

 

The sequences from these environmental samples, then, are “what we have,” says Katherine Xue, a computational virologist at Stanford who previously worked with Jesse Bloom, the author of the May preprint, but was not involved in any of the new reports. And “we want to do what we can with what we have.” When the international team behind the March analysis found that several market samples contained genetic material from both the virus and a wild animal known to be susceptible to it—including the common raccoon dog—they said that the best explanation for this commingling was an infection.

 

As I reported at the time, the data don’t constitute direct evidence of an infected raccoon dog at the market. “But this is exactly what we would observe if infected raccoon dogs were in fact present in this location,” says Kristian Andersen, a computational biologist and virologist at the Scripps Research Institute and one of the authors of the March analysis. Which, they wrote in their analysis, “identifies these species, particularly the common raccoon dog, as the most likely conduits for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019.”

 

Other researchers, though, think that calling the evidence even supportive of an animal origin for the outbreak is a stretch. The samples were taken too long after the outbreak’s start to be meaningful, some said; the data were too shaky to even hint at the idea of an infected raccoon dog, others insisted, much less one that might have passed the virus to us.

 

Bloom, too, was unswayed. The swabs contained genetic material from many creatures at the market—some of them alive, some dead; some that we now know can host the virus, others that almost certainly do not. In Bloom’s analysis, he explains that the species repeatedly highlighted as potential hosts weren’t the animals that were most frequently and notably commingled with the virus in the market swabs. “If you’re trying to figure out if there is a meaningful association between raccoon dog and viral genetic material,” he told me, there should be a lot of raccoon-dog genetic material in the places where the virus was found, and far less where the virus was not.

 

But that wasn’t the case for raccoon dogs—or “any of the animals that could conceivably have been infected,” Bloom told me. Instead, in his analysis he saw the virus most closely linked to several kinds of fish, which aren’t known to be viable hosts for it. People, Bloom told me, were the probable source of SARS-CoV-2 in those spots. All of that “probably just suggests that it had been spread around the market by humans by the time” the swabs were taken, diminishing the samples’ usefulness.

 

Several other scientists not involved in Bloom’s preprint were quick to point out the limits and flaws in his approach. To draw meaningful conclusions from this type of analysis, researchers would need samples amassed at about the same time, with the same collection goals in mind. That wasn’t the case for these samples, Zach Hensel, a biophysicist who has been publicly critical of Bloom’s report, told me. Researchers took them over the course of many weeks after Huanan’s closure, altering their tactics as more intel came to light. A first foray into the market, for instance, targeted the parts of the venue where COVID cases had been identified, a strategy that would, by design, turn up more virus-positive samples; another, conducted days later, focused on stalls that had been discovered to have housed wildlife, regardless of their proximity to sick people. Many samples in the latter set, then, would be expected to be virus-negative—and were. Sloshing them together with the first set of swabs and trying to pull patterns out could end up masking actual associations between the virus and any wild animal hosts.

 

Bloom also points out that many of the swabs that turned up mammalian DNA, including one containing raccoon-dog genetic sequences that some members of the international team initially emphasized, had relatively little material from the virus on them. But genetic material, especially RNA—the basis of SARS-CoV-2’s genome—degrades fast; a difference of even a few days could artificially deflate how important a particular swab looked. Alice Hughes also pointed out that certain market locales highlighted in Bloom’s preprint, including surfaces around duck or fish tanks, might have better preserved viral RNA simply because they were cold or damp. When I brought up these concerns with Bloom, he admitted “there are certainly a lot of confounders” that could have skewed his results. His main goal, he said, was just to show that “the samples are not sufficient to answer whether or not there were infected animals.”

 

Bloom’s re-analysis doesn’t mark a major shift in thinking for Hughes, who told me she thinks “there is reasonable support for a zoonotic origin.” Felicia Goodrum, a virologist and an immunologist at the University of Arizona who has written repeatedly on the origins debate but was not involved in the team’s analysis, agrees. The Huanan market is “most likely where the spillover occurred,” she told me. “I really, truly believe that, based on the accumulation of the evidence.”

---

Data never sit alone in a vacuum: They’re amassed, interpreted, and reinterpreted alongside the totality of evidence that precedes them. By themselves, the sequences from the Huanan market couldn’t say much. But they fit a broader, more detailed scenario that researchers on the team behind the March analysis had been exploring for years.

 

History has always supported a zoonotic scenario: A wet-market spillover is what researchers are fairly certain started the SARS outbreak in China in 2002, potentially via infected masked palm civets. In this latest outbreak, the Huanan Market was one of only four wet markets in all of Wuhan that has consistently been documented selling an array of live, coronavirus-susceptible wildlife; the earliest known COVID cases were detected near the venue, centering “on it like a bull’s-eye,” says Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and one of the authors of the March report. Scientists analyzing genetic sequences collected from the venue have also detected two distinct coronavirus lineages from the outbreak’s earliest days—a likely indication, some researchers have argued, that the pathogen spilled over from animals into humans twice.

 

The missing clincher for them is which creature might have initially carried the virus into the market. The raccoon-dog swab was particularly compelling to the team not only because it contained gobs of animal genetic sequences, and very few human ones—but also because it had been plucked from a stall where Eddie Holmes, one of the report’s authors, had snapped a photo of a raccoon dog in a cage years before. The clues to a possible animal host, Worobey told me, were “right in the very stall we said they would be.”

 

But data are also amassed, interpreted, and reinterpreted by humans, who have their own biases. The experts now quarreling over the importance of the recent data approached the new evidence having already drawn tentative conclusions and made their opinions known. Kristian Andersen was an early proponent of a zoonotic origin, and has repeatedly denounced the notion of a lab leak; Worobey was later to voice his support for the zoonotic hypothesis, but is now no less enthusiastic. And long before they and their colleagues stumbled across the data that yielded their March analysis, which didn’t become publicly available until recently, the researchers had been hoping that such sequences would appear—noting in a 2022 paper that this sort of intel could constitute an essential and still missing puzzle piece. Now that the evidence has emerged, and fits with their established thinking, it feels validating, Worobey told me.

 

Bloom, by contrast, has long positioned himself as an agnostic moderate, and isn’t yet budging from his neutral territory. Others who have come out vocally in favor of a lab-leak scenario have cast their own doubts on the international team’s analysis. In a landscape so sparsely populated by data, it gets all too easy for people to fill in the gaps with speculation; “what starts off as a weak preference,” Hughes told me, “becomes almost like a religion.” I’ve been reporting now for three years on many controversial COVID stories, along the way interviewing hundreds of opinionated scientists about dozens of thorny questions. Through it all, this debate has stood out for being so ignitable. Individual data points have become catalysts; single statements have been endlessly scrutinized. And experts have staked out territory and stuck to it almost dogmatically—many of them to the point of avoiding admitting past mistakes. COVID’s origins are now shrouded in combustible gas, with matches scattered everywhere: Lighting up a single point, normally harmless enough, inevitably sets off a conflagration.

 

All of this leaves the world trying to peer through the smoke. “All hypotheses are on the table,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead on COVID-19, told me. “We can’t take any off.” To her mind, though, “there’s much more evidence to support a zoonotic origin.”

 

More evidence could still emerge. The international team isn’t yet done analyzing the Chinese researchers’ original data set, which was recently released in fuller form. They’re eager to mine the sequences to tease out the subspecies of some of the market’s potential SARS-CoV-2 hosts, which could inform searches for the virus out in nature or on animal farms; other experiments, analyzing how degraded certain genetic samples are, could hint at how much time passed between the moment the biological material was dropped and the moment it was picked up. Van Kerkhove has also separately been pressing the Chinese researchers for more information on how these and other samples might have been collected, and any intel on where the market’s animals might have been sourced from—which could guide searches for evidence of the virus or its relatives on farms or in the wild. These bits of data, too, would all be incremental,with no single shred of evidence acting as total proof or disproof. But each could constitute a clue, Van Kerkhove told me, to continue nudging the conversation along.

In the grand scheme of things, though, the world probably won’t ever get data that will conclusively end the debate. Even if scientists were to turn up virus-positive samples from a live creature from the market—direct evidence of an infected animal—it would remain technically possible that a human caught the virus first, then passed it on to the venue’s wildlife. But data that aren’t debate-ending can still be notable. And the recent sequences from the market swabs could easily, and frustratingly, end up being one of the best clues to the pandemic’s roots that the world is likely to get.

When Elon Musk tweeted that the Jewish financier George Soros “hates humanity” and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” he drew international condemnation. Musk’s outburst was “not just distressing,” but “dangerous,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, said on Twitter. “It will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.” Later that day, Israel’s foreign ministry tweeted, “The phrase ‘The Jews’ spiked today on the list of topics trending on Twitter following a tweet with antisemitic overtones by none other than the owner and CEO of the social network, Elon Musk.”

But soon after, that statement was deleted and disavowed by Israel’s foreign minister, who promised, “There will be no tweets like this again.” The next day, Amichai Chikli, the country’s minister of diaspora affairs, went further. A hard-right politician who first entered Israel’s parliament in 2021, Chikli broke with his own party when it joined the country’s recent anti–Benjamin Netanyahu government, and was later rewarded with a parliamentary seat in Netanyahu’s Likud party. Last Thursday on Twitter, he publicly praised Musk as an entrepreneur and “role model,” and declared that “criticism of Soros – who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” Chikli subsequently doubled down on this position, citing an op-ed written by Alan Dershowitz that states, “No sin­gle per­son has done more to dam­age Is­rael’s stand­ing in the world, es­pe­cially among so-called pro­gres­sives, than George Soros.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk among the anti-semites]

I’ve reported critically on the activities of Soros’s foundation, and I certainly don’t think scrutiny of him is bigoted. But having covered anti-Semitism for more than a decade, I also found Musk’s remarks about Soros to be demonstrably anti-Semitic, and was confused by how some people, like Chikli, seemed willing to excuse such rhetoric out of distaste for Soros’s politics. So I spoke with Chikli yesterday in an attempt to understand his perspective. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity, but there was not much to be found, in part because even after we spoke it was unclear to me whether Chikli had read Musk’s tweets in the first place.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

---

Yair Rosenberg: Let’s start with the tweet that kicked off the whole controversy. Last week, Musk goes on Twitter and writes, “Soros reminds me of Magneto.” What did you think of this comparison when you saw it?

Amichai Chikli: First of all, I hadn’t seen it at the beginning. I just saw the waves of reaction. I listened to what was being said in the media. I saw Soros becoming the victim. I saw Elon Musk becoming the vicious anti-Semite. And it sounded ridiculous to me.

Rosenberg: So you didn’t see the specific thing that he wrote.

Chikli: I was responding to the trend and not directly to the tweet. Obviously, before I wrote something, I learned about the tweet. But I was responding to the trend. What added to my motivation to respond was that a lower-level foreign ministry employee, who is not the minister, was saying that [Israel is] standing up to protect Soros.

Rosenberg: So I assume you saw Musk’s second tweet, where he explained what he meant in the first one. He wrote that Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” What did you think of that?

Chikli: But I wasn’t responding to his tweets. I was reacting to the reaction to the tweets, and in particular the reaction of nonelected officials in the foreign ministry, who spoke in the name of the state of Israel, and joined the trend that portrayed Elon Musk as an anti-Semite.

Rosenberg: Okay. So let me read what you said. You wrote, “As Israel’s minister who’s entrusted on combating anti-Semitism, I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model. Criticism of Soros – who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” So you made a case there, and I suspect you could make a longer case here, that George Soros is anti-Israel.

Chikli: One hundred percent. This is one of the most hostile individuals, who funds dozens of organizations that are all into delegitimizing the state of Israel. It’s not just because of his opinion. It’s very systematic.

Rosenberg: But here is my question. This whole thing happens because of Musk’s tweets. And he didn’t say he didn’t like Soros because of his positions. He said that Soros wants to end civilization because he hates humanity. Aren’t these two very different things? If Musk had just said, “I don’t like Soros, because he doesn’t like Israel,” do you think anyone would have called him anti-Semitic? Didn’t that only happen because Musk accused a rich Jew of wanting to ruin the world, which is what anti-Semites have said about Jews for centuries, whether it’s “Zionists” or the Rothschilds or whoever?

Chikli: But if you’d like to have a serious interview, you must understand, and I will say it, I think it’s the third time. I wasn’t—

Rosenberg: —responding to the tweet, you were responding to the reaction. But it’s confusing to me that you would respond to say Elon Musk is not an anti-Semite when you don’t know what he said.

Chikli: I stand behind my words. I don’t think that he’s an anti-Semite. You can also say that George Soros is doing huge damage, not just to the state of Israel, by promoting the deal with Iran, which I think is damaging for humanity.

Soros speaks highly about the “open society” while his foundation has zero transparency about where the money goes. It’s not just anti-Israel, I think it’s anti–freedom of speech. I think he is the No. 1 promoter of what we call today “woke soft tyranny.” And his ideology is a threat to freedom of speech and the core values of the Western civilization. This is far more than the state of Israel.

Rosenberg: Let me try to put this in a different way because maybe I’m not being as clear as I want to be in my question. Here’s an analogy. As you know, many Israelis today think Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to destroy Israel. Many others think former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and the opposition are trying to tear the country apart. But if someone in America says something anti-Semitic about Netanyahu or Lapid, it’s still anti-Semitic, regardless of the target and whether one agrees with them, right? That’s a separate question.

You can have the lowest opinion of Soros, but that still doesn’t give anyone license to say anti-Semitic things about him. So you might not like George Soros at all, but Musk didn’t say Soros is bad on Israel, or he’s bad on freedom of speech. He said Soros hates humanity and wants to destroy civilization.

Chikli: I think we are now on the fourth time, you insist—

Rosenberg: I will print every time that you say this, don’t worry!

Chikli: [Laughs.] You think I was looking with a microscope at every single letter in Musk’s tweets. Again I will say, I was responding first to the trend, and second to the response of unelected officials who took authority from nowhere to speak with the name of the state of Israel on a very serious issue, to protect a man who is super hostile to the state of Israel, and who is maybe the No. 1 promoter of woke anti-Semitism that seeks to delegitimize and demonize the state of Israel.

[Matt Welch: Why the right loves to hate George Soros]

One last thing about the accusation of Elon Musk allowing anti-Semitism to spread on Twitter. The organization that reported this is called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. And guess what? When you go and check them out, there are a few interesting things about them. One is that they are funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. And second, in their methodology, when they are looking for anti-Semitic tweets, they look for the following: Jesus, Hitler, and George Soros. This is also one of the points that I wanted to dispute—suggesting criticism of Soros is anti-Semitism; that is ridiculous.

Rosenberg: Of course. But the question isn’t whether it’s inherently anti-Semitic to criticize Soros. He’s one of the richest and most influential people in the world; obviously, you have to be allowed to criticize him. The issue is that sometimes anti-Semites criticize Soros because he’s Jewish and rich, and it’s not about his positions; it’s about who he is, right? You should be familiar with this problem because the same thing happens to Israel. It’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, but some people criticize Israel because they’re anti-Semites and therefore say anti-Semitic things. Isn’t that what’s happening here?

Chikli: I want to give you the professional answer to why I wasn’t putting the focus on those people who, as you said now, might refer to Musk’s quote from an anti-Semitic perspective. Why was it not my focus at all? In the United States, when we researched the trends in the media, the vast majority of anti-Semitism is new anti-Semitism: the anti-Semitism that delegitimizes, demonizes, and sets double standards against the state of Israel.

It’s true that anti-Semitism coming from the far right is often louder and more violent. But that’s a small part of the phenomenon that we see today. It’s not less disturbing, but it’s not the new, main trend. And I was responding to the big picture. I wasn’t interested in how did everyone feel about the following tweet of Elon Musk, dada dada dada. That’s not what I was responding to, as I said—I think this is now time No. 4.

Rosenberg: Five.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01699-2

A component of the milk consumed by newborn mice triggers a crucial shift in heart cells’ metabolism.

Politically polarized 

 users are not steered to partisan sites by the search engine’s algorithm but generally decide to go there on their own

submitted by /u/Ezekiel_W [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Ezekiel_W [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/volossaveroniki
[link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Gari_305 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/filosoful [link] [comments]

Find out how happy and healthy relationships can improve your overall health. And how toxic relationships affect physical health.

Researchers who are bringing back the woolly mammoth have found several modifications to its DNA overtime, telling us how they evolved.

Many of us imagine ferocious hunters when we think of dinosaurs. But most of them were actually herbivores. Here's everything you need to know about plant-eating dinosaurs.

Researchers are looking for an edge, or at least better prediction, as fires grow more dangerous.

The big, red galactic troublemaker has kept humanity guessing for thousands of years. Physicists predict when Betelgeuse will explode.

Groupthink has been blamed for major historical disasters, but studies show there may be some benefit to it.

Despite containing the longest-known land predator, Spinosaurus, this family suffers from a sparse fossil record.

In the deep mysterious waters of the Galápagos Islands lies Darwin Island. Get the real story behind Charles Darwin’s work and how he made the area famous.

Various psychological theories explore why natural events are attributed to gods, deities and other supernatural forces.

Advanced AI systems can mimic human conversation with remarkable authenticity. Now researchers are fighting back with carefully crafted questions that force AIs to reveal themselves.

Strokes tend to come on quickly and need immediate medical treatment. Here's how to spot the signs of a stroke as it's happening, and what to do if you are experiencing symptoms.

Researchers are developing brain-computer interfaces that would enable communication for people with locked-in syndrome and other conditions that render them unable to speak.

Skin Walker

Cops say a scammer in northern China has managed to cheat a man out of his money, Reuters reports, by masquerading as his friend with the use of AI-powered face-swapping and voice-cloning software.

If the tale holds up to scrutiny, the incident would go to show how easy it has become for scammers to deepfake their way to a payday using new AI tools.

While we've come across examples of scammers cloning their voices to extort money out of their victims over the phone, this new incident offers a glimpse of an uneasy future in which a perpetrator can even take on the physical appearance of a victim's friend. As such, it raises an old specter of modernity: is technology drawing us closer, or tearing us apart?

Scam Link

According to law enforcement in the city of Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, the scammer managed to convince a friend to transfer a whopping $622,000 to their account during a video call, claiming it was for a deposit during a bidding process.

Shortly after, the victim contacted his real friend, who had no idea about the conversation.

Fortunately, the victim was able to recover most of the stolen funds, according to Reuters, and is in the process of tracking down the rest.

AI-powered scams are on the rise worldwide, with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publishing a consumer alert on emerging voice cloning scams earlier this year. Seniors in particular are increasingly becoming targets of scammers who use voice-cloning tech to impersonate relatives, saying they need money for emergencies.

Last month, a mom even got a call from the purported kidnapper of her daughter, whose voice appeared to be being cloned in the background.

Griftpocalypse Now

It's a troubling new trend worldwide. Users on the Chinese social media network Weibo expressed worry about AI scams "exploding across the country."

In response, regulators have been attempting to tamp down on fraud by increasing scrutiny of deepfake apps that can change somebody's voice and appearance, Reuters reports.

But whether these actions will allow law enforcement to stay on top of the trend remains to be seen. As the tech improves, cloned voices and faces are only going to become more believable sounding — and looking — as time goes on.

More on AI scams: Mom Says Creeps Used AI to Fake Daughter's Kidnapping

The post Scammer Tricks Man With Face and Voice Swap of His Friend, Cops Say appeared first on Futurism.

Most biological cells have a fixed place in an organism. However, cells can become mobile and move through the body. This happens, for example, during wound healing or when tumor cells divide uncontrollably and migrate through the body. Mobile and stationary cells differ in various ways, including their cytoskeleton.

Like thread tightly wrapped around a spool, DNA is wrapped around histones and packaged into structures called nucleosomes. Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital are exploring how a type of transcription factor called a pioneer transcription factor accesses DNA even when it is tightly wound. Their work revealed how the epigenetic landscape influences transcription factor binding.

To danske virksomheder i langvarig strid indgik efter mange år en lykkelig fusion.

Most biological cells have a fixed place in an organism. However, cells can become mobile and move through the body. This happens, for example, during wound healing or when tumor cells divide uncontrollably and migrate through the body. Mobile and stationary cells differ in various ways, including their cytoskeleton.

Like thread tightly wrapped around a spool, DNA is wrapped around histones and packaged into structures called nucleosomes. Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital are exploring how a type of transcription factor called a pioneer transcription factor accesses DNA even when it is tightly wound. Their work revealed how the epigenetic landscape influences transcription factor binding.

Existing solar cells are normally only used on flat, static surfaces to avoid them cracking, but now there is a flexible alternative with the same energy-generating efficiency

Implants in brain and spine allow Dutch man to walk and climb stairs by power of thought, in world first use of the technology

Atomic clocks work by using a laser to bounce the electrons in an atom at a given frequency, while nuclear clocks would theoretically do the same for atomic nuclei, and we are a step closer to building one

The Department of Agronomy at the University of Cordoba, together with the IAS–CSIC, has improved the AquaCrop growth simulation model used by   by introducing the option of simulating alfalfa yield with precision.

Wild chimpanzees are being exposed to a cocktail of harmful chemicals.

Varroa mites—notorious honey bee parasites—have recently reached Australian shores, detected at the Port of Newcastle in New South Wales last year. If they establish here, there would be significant implications for agricultural food security, as honey bees are heavily relied on for the pollination of many crops.

Gluten is one of the largest natural proteins and has fantastic properties: It keeps a well-cooked dough airy until baking stabilizes the open-pore structure. Prof. Dr. Mario Jekle from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart is working on processes in which selected proteins from peas, rapeseed, rice, or maize, for example, directly replace gluten protein or can be linked to form chains with gluten-like properties. Saponins from daisies and quinoa seeds or mucilages from cereal hulls additionally support the formation of an airy dough—and in some cases enrich it with valuable dietary fiber. The result can be put in the oven—or printed out in the 3D printer in an energy-saving way and with many additional options.

The increasingly inferior quality of heavy oil resources has brought more difficult challenges to traditional heavy oil processing technology. The high temperature and pressure conditions, and the carbon emission and energy consumption required to convert heavy oil to value-added chemicals are far from ideal.

The Department of Agronomy at the University of Cordoba, together with the IAS–CSIC, has improved the AquaCrop growth simulation model used by   by introducing the option of simulating alfalfa yield with precision.

Richard Branson's   is shutting down less than two months after the satellite launch start-up filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to a Tuesday company announcement.

Wild chimpanzees are being exposed to a cocktail of harmful chemicals.

Varroa mites—notorious honey bee parasites—have recently reached Australian shores, detected at the Port of Newcastle in New South Wales last year. If they establish here, there would be significant implications for agricultural food security, as honey bees are heavily relied on for the pollination of many crops.

Gluten is one of the largest natural proteins and has fantastic properties: It keeps a well-cooked dough airy until baking stabilizes the open-pore structure. Prof. Dr. Mario Jekle from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart is working on processes in which selected proteins from peas, rapeseed, rice, or maize, for example, directly replace gluten protein or can be linked to form chains with gluten-like properties. Saponins from daisies and quinoa seeds or mucilages from cereal hulls additionally support the formation of an airy dough—and in some cases enrich it with valuable dietary fiber. The result can be put in the oven—or printed out in the 3D printer in an energy-saving way and with many additional options.

Urban heat islands can lead to dangerous temperatures in the summer months, but there are things city managers can do to reduce the effect, according to a new study.

The researchers found that trees had a cooling effect on outdoor air temperature, mean radiant temperature, and predicted mean vote index, a measurement designed to evaluate thermal comfort levels.

Additionally, the researchers determined that higher building-height-to-street-width ratios—when taller buildings create shade for thinner adjacent streets—as well as pavement that is better at reflecting sunlight, or having higher “albedo,” both led to lower mean radiant temperature and greater comfort levels.

The findings could help encourage the adoption of measures that create more favorable temperatures in cities, especially for low-income communities, people of color, and the elderly, who are disproportionately impacted by the urban heat island (UHI) effect, says Guangqing Chi, professor of rural sociology, demography and public health sciences in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State.

“Global warming makes some human habitats unbearably hot, but more so for socially and historically disadvantaged communities,” Chi says. “This interdisciplinary project provides an effective, equitable urban design solution for enhancing resilience against extreme heating.”

Urban heat island hotspots

Published in the journal Buildings, the study was based in Philadelphia, a city that, according to the researchers, experiences high rates of both poverty and extreme weather.

For example, a 2021 study found that Philadelphia had the highest poverty rate out of the most populated cities in 

, with 22.8% of people in the city living below the poverty level. The city also has experienced its snowiest winter, two warmest summers, wettest day, and two wettest years on record since 2010.

This combination of socioeconomic and climate factors made Philadelphia an ideal location for the study, says Farzad Hashemi, a Hamer Center researcher who will graduate in August with a doctorate in architecture.

“Heat island hotspots and mortality rates tend to be greater in urban blocks with a socially disadvantaged population,” Hashemi says. “This is due to the combination of physical factors, such as impervious surfaces and lack of vegetation, and social factors, such as vulnerability to heat-related health effects.”

For the study, the researchers used the social vulnerability index, or SVI—gathered by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—along with data about tree coverage to identify two neighborhoods in the city. One had the lowest SVI and high tree coverage and another had the highest SVI and the lowest tree coverage.

Then, they used digital tools to construct 3D models of each neighborhood, incorporating information on construction materials, land cover, albedo, and heat generated by human activities. Additional data included environmental factors, such as air temperature and mean radiant temperature—or the heat given off by buildings and other infrastructure—and urban morphology, such as surface albedo and building-height-to-street-width ratios.

Finally, the researchers ran 24-hour simulations for six scenarios—winter, spring, summer, fall, extreme hot, and extreme cold—in each neighborhood to see how different factors affected each other.

Better city planning

While trees can create a cooling effect, these benefits are limited to their immediate surroundings. Areas without trees had significantly higher mean radiant temperatures, and the effect of trees on air temperature decreased as distance from the tree canopy increased.

Chi says the findings suggest ways that urban climate knowledge can contribute to better city planning and design.

“For example, using taller and denser buildings alongside pavement surfaces with higher albedo could be considered to support more comfortable thermal conditions, particularly in urban blocks with less vegetation coverage,” he says.

“Overall, the study highlights the importance of considering urban morphology and vegetation coverage in the design of sustainable and livable urban environments.”

The project could form the basis for future research utilizing longer simulation cycles and incorporating information on indoor thermal comfort, Hashemi says.

“Our study focused on Philadelphia, which is in the US Northeast region,” he says. “Expanding the data to incorporate more cities from other climate zones, including hot and dry or extremely cold, could give us a better understanding of the effects of urban properties on varying climates and social vulnerability indexes.”

The Institutes of Energy and the Environment seed grant program and the Penn State Hamer Center for Community Design helped support the work.

Source: Penn State

The post Trees and tall buildings reduce urban heat island effect appeared first on Futurity.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06207-0

Inverted perovskite solar cells using dimethylacridine-based dopants

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01733-3

Five-year study shows islands increase ecosystem health without lowering crop yield, and a house built from concrete and nappies.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06086-5

A large-scale, five-year study in Indonesia finds that enriching oil palm-dominated landscapes with patches of trees bolsters biodiversity and ecosystem functioning without impairing oil palm yields but should not replace forest protection.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05925-9

The authors introduce a single-molecule DNA-barcoding method, resolution enhancement by sequential imaging, that improves the resolution of fluorescence microscopy down to the Ångström scale using off-the-shelf fluorescence microscopy hardware and reagents.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06018-3

An experiment with atoms and photons provides a fully tunable and microscopically controllable platform for the experimental study of the interplay of superfluidity and density-wave order.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06100-w

We identify that the larval zebrafish unpaired pre-anal fin fold is derived from the lateral plate mesoderm, can be readily duplicated, and thus may represent a developmental intermediate between median and paired fins.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05996-8

Experiments at the National Ignition Facility show how delocalization of K-shell electrons is driven by extreme pressure and temperature.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06105-5

A metabolically bioactivated selective imidazothiazole nematicide shows comparable effectiveness at controlling plant root infection by Meloidogyne incognita to commercial nematicides, which are traditionally nonselective and toxic.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06089-2

Ubiquitination of the receptor FAM134B regulates ER-phagy and remodelling of the endoplasmic reticulum in response to cellular demands.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06112-6

Binding of the human pioneer transcription factor OCT4 to nucleosomes containing endogenous DNA sequences causes changes to the nucleosome structure and facilitates the cooperative assembly of multiple pioneer transcription factors, a property that can be affected by histone modifications.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06091-8

Small-molecule RNA-targeted degradation can be leveraged to convert strong, yet inactive, binding interactions into potent and specific modulators of RNA function.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06099-0

In the Drosophila central-pattern-generating neural network, a mechanism for network desynchronization relying on weak electrical synapses and specific excitability dynamics of the coupled neurons translates unpatterned premotor input into stereotyped neuronal firing with fixed sequences of cell activation, ensuring stable wingbeat power.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06068-7

The switch from glucose- to fatty acid-dependent metabolism in cardiomyocytes of newborn mice is governed by γ-linolenic acid in maternal milk, which binds to retinoid X receptors, thereby causing a transcription-dependent metabolic transition.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05938-4

An analysis of chemical processes to immobilize lead from perovskite solar cells is presented, highlighting the need for a standard lead-leakage test and mathematical model to reliably evaluate the potential environmental risk of perovskite optoelectronics.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06042-3

A deep learning and data-driven modelling study finds that microbial carbon use efficiency is a major determinant of soil organic carbon storage and its spatial variation across the globe.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05985-x

Data-assimilated three-dimensional dynamic rupture models of the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence in California are used to reveal the dynamics, interactions and delays of the earthquake sequence.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05921-z

Modules of foldable crystalline silicon solar cells retain their power-conversion efficiency after being subjected to bending stress or exposure to air-flow simulations of a violent storm.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06094-5

A reliable digital bridge restored communication between the brain and spinal cord and enabled natural walking in a participant with  .

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06106-4

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of mouse trace amine-associated receptor 9 reveals structural motifs involved in odorant ligand recognition, including a unique disulfide bond linking the N terminus to extracellular loop 2.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06078-5

Ecologically valid data collected during the 2018 and 2020   elections show that exposure to and engagement with partisan or unreliable news on   Search are driven not primarily by algorithmic curation but by users’ own choices.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06085-6

Subunits of SWI/SNF act as mitotic bookmarks to safeguard cell identity during cell division.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05967-z

The discovery of an orbital Fulde–Ferrell–Larkin–Ovchinnikov state in the multilayer Ising superconductor 2H-NbSe2, in which the translational and rotational symmetries are broken, enables the preparation of such states in other materials with broken inversion symmetries.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05986-w

Petahertz-scale optical-field metrology in a pump-probe setting enables the direct observation of how the optical properties of a medium evolve after 1-fs-scale photoinjection.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06111-7

A study examining bacterial gene expression in human-derived samples identifies a gene encoding a small RNA and describes how it orchestrates the transition between chronic and acute   in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05894-z

The authors report on the radiative decay of a low-energy isomer in thorium-229 (229mTh), which has consequences for the design of a future nuclear clock and eases the search for direct laser excitation of the atomic nucleus.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05972-2

A new specific, small-molecule activator of the PI3Kα isoform (UCL-TRO-1938) identified through high-throughput screening can transiently activate PI3K signalling and biological responses in cells and tissues, with potential therapeutic applications in tissue protection and regeneration.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06090-9

The membrane-shaping protein ARL6IP1 is involved in the selective degradation of the endoplasmic reticulum, and this process depends on its ubiquitination and interaction with other membrane-shaping proteins such as FAM134B.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06114-4

Remote tumours cause liver dysfunction by releasing extracellular vesicles and particles containing palmitic acid, which induces TNF signalling in Kupffer cells, resulting in inflammation, fatty deposits and metabolic dysregulation, thus both reducing the efficacy and increasing the toxicity of chemotherapies.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01631-8

A long-sought photon that is emitted by the nucleus of a thorium isotope has now been observed. The feat is a key step in efforts to build a nuclear clock, a device that is precise enough to probe the Universe’s best-kept secrets.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01634-5

Analysis of people’s web searches and visited websites suggests that it is more likely that they are choosing to engage with partisan or unreliable news than that they are being unduly exposed to it by search-engine algorithms.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01363-9

The degree of ionization inside giant planets and stars determines their material properties. In burning stars, ionization is controlled by temperature, whereas pressure-driven ionization is dominant in cooler objects. Experiments creating the extreme conditions needed for pressure-driven ionization in the laboratory shed light on this complex process.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01498-9

Nematode worms that parasitize plants ravage food crops and threaten global food security. Conventional nematode control relies on agrochemicals that are broadly toxic, so less-risky strategies are needed. Benign precursor chemicals that are metabolically converted to lethal products selectively in worm tissue could be the solution.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01632-7

A limit on the resolution of optical-microscopy techniques has been broken by using a mixture of tags to label copies of target molecules in a sample, opening the way to better views of molecular organization in cells.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01345-x

Spinal-cord injury interrupts communication between the brain and spinal cord, leading to  . An implant that decodes the brain signals that control movements and drives electrical stimulation of the spinal cord re-establishes this communication, enabling an individual with spinal-cord injury to walk naturally.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01635-4

A fatty acid in the milk of nursing mice has been found to trigger a transformation in the metabolic pathways that are active in pups’ heart muscle cells, enabling the cells to rapidly mature after birth.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01357-7

Although crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells were developed nearly 70 years ago, their use is still limited. Tailoring the structural symmetry on the edges of textured c-Si wafers changes their fracture mechanism such that they can be used to fabricate flexible solar cells with a bending radius of about 8 millimetres.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01510-2

Bacterial infections with Pseudomonas aeruginosa can shift between chronic and acute. An investigation of P. aeruginosa gene expression during human   identified a small RNA that is expressed in low-oxygen conditions and controls this transition.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01728-0

The device provides a connection between the brain and spinal cord, allowing thought to control movement.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01636-3

The cultivation of oil palm is here to stay. However, a five-year study indicates that creating islands of native trees within oil-palm monocultures increases biodiversity and ecosystem functioning without notably lowering crop yields.

In  , youth in foster care are nearly twice as likely as war veterans to suffer from PTSD. Placed in foster care at just 11 months old, 2023 Audacious Project grantee Sixto Cancel experienced the faults of the system firsthand. Now, he's the founder of Think of Us, an organization working to reform child welfare by centering kinship care, or placing a child with an extended family member or a familiar adult. Learn more about his plan to help thousands of kids searching for a loving home with one simple, systemic switch. (This ambitious idea is a part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)

Heat-stressed fish embryos release chemical signals that change the appearance, behavior, and development of fish embryos that were not heat stressed, according to a study. Stress during development can change how an embryo grows and which genes are activated. Katharina Wollenberg Valero and colleagues explored how stress might be communicated to other animals and what the consequences are. Their work is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

Heat-stressed fish embryos release chemical signals that change the appearance, behavior, and development of fish embryos that were not heat stressed, according to a study. Stress during development can change how an embryo grows and which genes are activated. Katharina Wollenberg Valero and colleagues explored how stress might be communicated to other animals and what the consequences are. Their work is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

A high court judge dismisses a legal challenge over the welfare of fast-growing chickens on farms.

A team of engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder has designed a new class of tiny, self-propelled robots that can zip through liquid at incredible speeds—and may one day even deliver prescription drugs to hard-to-reach places inside the human body.

In a ground-breaking experiment, scientists from the University of Groningen, together with colleagues from the Dutch universities of Nijmegen and Twente and the Harbin Institute of Technology (China), have discovered the existence of a superconductive state that was first predicted in 2017.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-34810-8

Author Correction: Predicting   in   patients: machine learning-based approaches

Scientific Reports, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-34375-6

Convolutional neural networks in the qualitative improvement of sweet potato roots

Designing the next generation of efficient energy conversion devices for powering our electronics and heating our homes requires a detailed understanding of how molecules move and vibrate while undergoing light-induced chemical reactions.

CT scans revealed a layer of bony scales, or osteoderms, hidden beneath the skin of the tails in spiny mice.

Social media users are likely to share posts that contain information that they feel has value to themselves or to the people they know, research finds.

Merely encouraging people to consider the value led to increased activity in the areas of the brain associated with sharing decisions and increased a person’s motivation to share an article, the research finds.

“A lot of prior research on what makes posts go viral has focused on identifying the characteristics of messages that are shared often or not shared often,” says lead author Christin Scholz, assistant professor in persuasive communication at the University of Amsterdam. “We’re looking at the neural mechanisms of sharing decisions. Targeting those mechanisms could be a way to encourage the spread of high quality health information.”

During the study, led by senior author Emily Falk, professor of communication, psychology, and marketing and director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, participants were instructed to consider sharing articles about healthy living from the New York Times while their brain activity was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Inside the fMRI scanner, participants were asked to think about sharing an article with a specific goal in mind: to either “help somebody” (use the article to relate positively to others) or to “describe yourself” (use the article to present yourself positively to others). As a control, participants were assigned the neutral “to spread information” goal.

“In all areas of life, people want to present themselves in a positive light or to relate positively to others,” Scholz says. “Our method encourages people to identify ways in which they can fulfill these motives through the sharing of health articles. If they are successful, they should be more likely to decide to share the article.”

After reading the headline and summary of a health-related article, participants were asked to consider what they might say or write to another study participant if they were to share the article with them, keeping in mind their assigned goal. Finally, participants rated their likelihood to share the article in real life.

Thinking about sharing in terms of how it might help someone else not only increased activation in brain regions associated with self-related thinking, value-related thinking, and social-related thinking (particularly mentalizing—the act of imagining what others are thinking), but also increased a person’s self-reported willingness to share an article.

“I think we’re only scratching the surface in terms of how you could encourage people to share high quality health information,” Scholz says. “A health communicator might want to focus on being accurate and clear and not have to worry about whether their content is emotional to get clicks. We’re trying to find ways to focus on the would-be sharer, to help them find personal meaning in sharing content that can benefit others and society.”

The study appears in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Source: Penn

The post What gets people to share articles on social media? appeared first on Futurity.

An international collaboration that includes scientists from the University of Colorado School of Medicine has uncovered new clues about the origin of paired appendages—a major evolutionary step that remains unresolved and highly debated.

Exclusive: Archaeologist says 5th-century BC wine vase with modern decoration widely regarded as fake

Days after Greece announced the recovery of hundreds of antiquities from a disgraced British dealer, its ministry of culture faces the accusation that one of those artefacts, a vase of the early 5th-century BC, bears a decoration that is in fact a “modern forgery” created in the 1990s.

Christos Tsirogiannis, an archaeologist based in Cambridge, expressed astonishment that the ministry had included the olpe – a vase for wine – among treasured ancient objects that will be coming home.

Continue reading…

An international collaboration that includes scientists from the University of Colorado School of Medicine has uncovered new clues about the origin of paired appendages—a major evolutionary step that remains unresolved and highly debated.

With the rise of extreme weather events, which are becoming more frequent in our warming climate, accurate predictions are becoming more critical for all of us, from farmers to city-dwellers to businesses around the world. To date, climate models have failed to accurately predict precipitation intensity, particularly extremes. While in nature, precipitation can be very varied, with many extremes of precipitation, climate models predict a smaller variance in precipitation with a bias toward light rain.

Researchers just discovered that the spiny mouse was concealing bony plates beneath the skin over its tail.

's failed launch in January was the start of the end for the company, which has now sold off its assets and shut down for good. But what does this mean for Richard Branson's other space firm, Virgin Galactic?

A man who was paralysed in a cycling accident in 2011 has been able to stand and walk with an aid after doctors implanted a device that reads brainwaves and sends instructions to the spine to activate the right muscles.

 

Gert-Jan Oskam, 40, was told he would never walk again after breaking his neck in a traffic accident in China, but has climbed stairs and walked for more than 100 meres at a time since having the operation. The 'digital bridge' is the latest from a team of neuroscientists in Switzerland who have a longstanding programme to develop brain-machine interfaces to overcome paralysis

 

• Paralysed man walks using device that reconnects brain with muscles

Continue reading…

Pioneering research could help development of miniaturised devices for stroke patients and paralysed people

A man who was paralysed in a cycling accident in 2011 has been able to stand and walk with an aid after doctors implanted a device that reads his brain waves and sends instructions to his spine to move the right muscles.

Gert-Jan Oskam, 40, was told he would never walk again after breaking his neck in a traffic accident in China, but has climbed stairs and walked for more than 100 metres at a time since having the operation.

Continue reading…

Hurtling down trails on two wheels might not be the most obvious way to cope with a life-changing news, but for Tracey Croke it helped her find inner peace

It wasn’t the news my doctor expected from the scan. I could tell by the look on his face. Most partial hearing loss episodes are caused by infections. I was that rare, one-in-whatever-thousand case where they’d discovered a squatter – which I now call “the thing” – was hanging out in my head.

“It’s a brain tumour,” he said.

Continue reading…

In the depths of the  , Brazil is building an otherworldly structure—a complex of towers arrayed in six rings, poised to spray mists of carbon dioxide into the rainforest. But the reason is utterly terrestrial: to understand how the world's largest tropical forest responds to climate change.

When designing optoelectronic devices, such as solar cells, photocatalysts, and photodetectors, scientists usually prioritize materials that are stable and possess tunable properties. This allows them precise control over optical characteristics of the materials and ensures retention of their properties over time, despite varying environmental conditions.

A trio of macro-biologists and life scientists, two with Queen's University Belfast and the third with Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, has found that the modern "sixth mass extinction" event is going to be even worse than prior research has shown.

Almost half of mercury exposure comes from mercury embedded in global trade, according to an analysis of the global flows of the toxic metal. Mercury is a neurotoxin that harms human health in even very small doses.

Scientists at EPFL have found a new way to create a crystalline structure called a "density wave" in an atomic gas. The findings can help us better understand the behavior of quantum matter, one of the most complex problems in physics. The research was published May 24 in Nature.

On the morning of July 4, 2019, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the Searles Valley in California's Mojave Desert, with impacts felt across Southern California. About 34 hours later on July 5, the nearby city of Ridgecrest was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake, a jolt felt by millions across the state of California and throughout neighboring communities in Arizona, Nevada, and even Baja California, Mexico.

Political ideology and user choice—not algorithmic curation—are the biggest drivers of engagement with partisan and unreliable news provided by Google Search, according to a study coauthored by Rutgers faculty published in the journal Nature.

Mammals are a bit odd when it comes to bones. Rather than the bony plates and scales of crocodiles, turtles, lizards, dinosaurs and fish, mammals long ago traded in their ancestral suit of armor for a layer of insulating hair.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38761-6

The two frequency-modulated superconducting qubits act as a trembling mirror for microwave photons with on-demand tunable directionality.

A paralysed man has been able to walk simply by thinking about it, thanks to electronic brain implants

Most scientists agree modern humans developed in Africa, more than 200,000 years ago, and that a great human diaspora across much of the rest of the world occurred between perhaps 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

A trio of macro-biologists and life scientists, two with Queen's University Belfast and the third with Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, has found that the modern "sixth mass extinction" event is going to be even worse than prior research has shown.

Mammals are a bit odd when it comes to bones. Rather than the bony plates and scales of crocodiles, turtles, lizards, dinosaurs and fish, mammals long ago traded in their ancestral suit of armor for a layer of insulating hair.

Neurotechnology restores natural gait with device that decodes brain’s signals for people with spinal injuries

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05977-x

Addendum: Systems vaccinology of the   mRNA vaccine in humans

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01658-x

Nature introduces the finalists and those that made it on to the longlist for this year’s award.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01648-z

The antibody drug is moving closer to being tested in people with advanced stages of  .

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01650-5

Unusual vocal patterns can give clues that help to detect conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01646-1

A reproducible cell-culture system could help to evaluate new therapies for disorders that affect the brain.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01641-6

Clinical trials, industry partnerships and other milestones reached by previous finalists of   Prize.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01660-3

An architecture for quantum computers based on parity is attracting money from government and industry.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01644-3

Alongside developing a quantum computer, one group of scientists is selling its components to other researchers.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01649-y

Intermediate states show promise as drug targets.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01656-z

High-resolution imaging quickly identifies blood clots before they inflict major damage.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01647-0

Photocatalysis using light-emitting diodes could reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by industrial chemical processes.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01659-w

A method driven by renewable energy could end the need for fossil fuels in fertilizer production.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01661-2

A nature-inspired adhesive offers hope for wound healing and haemorrhage control.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01009-w

Advances in materials yield safer, cheaper and denser energy storage.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01692-9

For now, absolutely nothing. But researchers and firms are optimistic about the applications.

Nature, Published online: 24 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01662-1

Manipulating genetic molecules could return cells to a younger state.

submitted by /u/Ezgigul
[link] [comments]

Forskere har første gang målt den foton, der frigives, når thorium-229-kernen henfalder til laveste energitilstand fra en tilstand, hvor energien kun er ca. otte elektronvolt højere. Det er en af nøglerne til at bygge et thorium-kerneur.

Killer whales in a group near Spain and Portugal may be teaching one another to mess with small boats. They sank their third vessel earlier this month

Diplodiasjukan som skadar tallar upptäcktes i Sverige 2016. Varmare klimat är en bidragande faktor till att svampsjukdomen fått fäste, visar en avhandling som undersökt spridningen.

Inlägget Stressade tallar kan drabbas av svampsjukdom dök först upp på forskning.se.

Not the croissants!!

In a new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, a team of French scientists has linked refined carbohydrates to worse cognitive function — even when consumed by young, healthy adults.

Though some diet industry folks might tell you to steer clear from carbs entirely, that's not sound advice. Your body needs carbs for energy, as does your brain.

But not all carbs are created equal. Complex, unrefined carbohydrates like whole grains are an essential piece of a well-rounded diet; industrialized, refined carbohydrates like white bread, on the other hand, which go through a process stripping them of nutritional properties like bran, starch, and fiber — think treacly breakfast cereals and snack cakes — aren't good for much more than a quick sugar hit, as opposed to a sustained energy boost.

And of course, as most quick fixes go, your body will soon be craving more — a habituation that, in this case, may eventually lead to insulin disorders and other chronic ailments, neurological disorders included.

As the scientists note in their study, the introduction of refined carbs into the human diet is a very recent phenomenon, at least in the grand scheme of human history. They didn't come around until well into the 20th century, along with the rest of mass-production culture — and our brains, the scientists say, may well be suffering for it.

"A massive diet switch has occurred in the occidental world since the second half of the 20th century, with a dramatic increase in refined carbohydrate consumption generating numerous deleterious health effects," reads the study's abstract. "Physiological mechanisms associated with refined carbohydrate consumption," it continues, "such as hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance, may impact cognition in healthy people before overt obesity, metabolic disease onset or dementia."

In other words, because research in this area tends to focus on older adults who have already developed chronic illness, the scientists specifically chose to study younger adults, who may experience negative cognitive impacts of refined carbohydrates prior to developing any long-term condition like diabetes or dementia.

"To date, studies on the link between the long-term consumption of refined carbohydrates and cognition have mainly been carried out on older individuals or in a pathological context," they write. "Nevertheless, early life exposure to refined carbohydrates may be particularly toxic to cognitive functioning, and neurocognitive deficits induced by a diet high in refined carbohydrates may manifest before overt obesity or metabolic disease onset."

In order to close that gap, the researchers enlisted 95 healthy young adults, all between the ages of 20 and 30 and recruited from the University of Montpellier in France. In order to "limit cultural heterogeneity, only individuals declaring European ancestry" were studied.

Each day, a group of three or four participants were asked to show up to the research lab. Upon arrival, they were asked to first take a test called Wechsler's digit symbol substitution cognitive test. They would then have their glucose tested, and after that, they were given one of two very specific breakfasts.

Each extremely French breakfast — which was given to students at random — consisted of 500 calories and was relatively similar. However, there was one big difference: one group's breakfast of whole wheat bread, butter, cheese, a raw fruit and a non-sweetened beverage contained unrefined carbs only, while the other group, who were fed a French baguette made from processed flour, jam, fruit juice and a non-sweetened beverage with sugar available, was made using refined carbohydrates.

Then, after breakfast, there were more tests. At both half an hour and one and a half hours after finishing their morning meal, participants' glycemic indexes were measured again. With the third glycemic check-in, they were asked to take that Wechsler cognitive test for a second time. Individuals were also asked to complete questionnaires that detailed questions about their personal life, history, and diet.

The researchers were able to confirm that the participants who chowed down on the refined flour baguette saw a "significant immediate effect" on their glycemia. Using questionnaires, the researchers were also able to determine that the more someone consumed refined carbohydrates between meals, they experienced lower cognitive performance, an effect that was "maintained when controlling for potential confounding effects such as age, sex, BMI, physical activity, parental home ownership, chronic energy intake of the three mealtimes, and immediate consumption of refined carbohydrates."

As a disclaimer, there are certainly some caveats to this study. As the researchers were careful to note, the participants in the study weren't exactly diverse. It was also pretty heavily rooted in questionnaires, a method of study that can't prove firm cause-and-effect.

Still, if anything, this study serves as a useful reminder of how important it is to focus on the prevention — rather than a reactive treatment — of chronic illnesses. Our bodies, brains included, might depend on it.

"Our study reinforces the belief that the most promising research should focus on prevention in healthy persons," wrote the study authors. "We have shown that cognition in healthy individuals is impacted by chronic refined carbohydrate consumption, indicating that neurocognitive deficits induced by this type of diet may manifest before overt obesity, metabolic disease onset or dementia."

"Thus," they added, "the identification of modifiable factors that could be targeted in interventions to prevent future health impairment is pivotal."

More on food choices: 40 Percent of American Children Think Hot Dogs Are Vegetables

The post Refined Carbs Linked to Brain Trouble appeared first on Futurism.