In 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were put to the test. Here’s what we learnedVaccines can’t single-handedly end the pandemic, but they are still essential in the fight against the coronavirus. By Science News Staff
Chronic kidney disease, also called chronic kidney failure, involves a gradual loss of kidney function. Your kidneys filter wastes and excess fluids from your blood, which are then removed in your urine. Advanced chronic kidney disease can cause dangerous levels of fluid, electrolytes and wastes to build up in your body.
Video timeline: 0:31 What is kidney disease? 1:09 Who gets kidney disease/risk factors? 2:24 Kidney disease symptoms 3:03 How is kidney disease diagnosed? 3:53 Treatment options 5:23 Coping methods/ What now? 6:16 Ending
In January, researchers developed a cage-like vaccine platform called a mosaic nanoparticle that could help protect against multiple strains of coronavirus; obtained new insights into human decision-making using AI-trained networks playing video games; learned how tiny plants changed the planet nearly half a billion years ago; and studied chaotic systems using a camera that can take up to 70 trillion frames per second.
Meanwhile, the Institute announced that it would remove the names of known eugenics proponents from its buildings, honors, and assets.
February saw the historic landing of NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance on the Red Planet. The 2,263-pound rover, designed and operated by JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, will spend two years investigating Mars’s Jezero crater, and will collect and cache samples of rocks and sediment for recovery by a subsequent mission.
Here on Earth, seismologists worked with optics experts to develop a method to use existing underwater telecommunication cables to detect earthquakes; physicists advanced the use of exotic materials for future ultrafast computers; and engineers perfected methods to place molecules in particular orientations at specific locations—work that paves the way for the integration of molecules with computer chips.
In March, Caltech researchers announced a non-invasive method that uses ultrasound to read and interpret brain activity related to the intent to move, a major step toward the creation of noninvasive brain–machine implants that can restore movement to paralyzed individuals; located Mars’s missing water; described a long-sought solution to “one of the most stubborn problems in math”; and explained how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics and how antibiotics help bacteria eat when nutrients are scarce.
A “marvelous” (Lauren Groff) and “gentle, mysterious and profound” (Marina Abramović) novel about a woman who has come undone.
A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.
In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art – which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes’s disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.
What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.
White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.
An explanation for giant ice structures on Pluto, and dismantling the mestizo myth in Latin American genetics.
In this episode:
00:46 The frozen root of Pluto’s polygonal patterns
In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe sent back some intriguing images of Pluto. Huge polygonal patterns could be seen on the surface of a nitrogen-ice ice filled basin known as Sputnik Planitia. This week, a team put forward a new theory to explain these perplexing patterns.
Research article: Morison et al.
06:15 Research Highlights
How Pamplona’s bull-running defies the dynamics of crowd motion, and self-healing microbial bio-bricks.
Research Highlight: Running of the bulls tramples the laws of crowd dynamics
Research Highlight: It’s alive! Bio-bricks can signal to others of their kind
09:06 How the mixed-race ‘mestizo’ myth has fostered discrimination
The term ‘mestizo’ emerged during the colonial period in Latin America to describe a blend of ethnicities – especially between Indigenous peoples and the Spanish colonizers. But this label is a social construct not a well-defined scientific category. Now researchers are challenging the mestizo myth, which they say is harmful and has a troubling influence on science.
Feature: How the mixed-race mestizo myth warped science in Latin America
17:22 Briefing Chat
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, how interrupted sleep could be a route to creativity, and the development of vaccines to target respiratory syncytial virus.
New Scientist: Interrupting sleep after a few minutes can boost creativity
On a dead still November morning in the Sierra Nevada, two researchers walk through a graveyard of giants. Below their feet: a layer of ash and coal. Above their heads: a charnel house of endangered trees.
This is Alder Creek Grove, a once idyllic environment for a majestic and massive specimen: the giant sequoia. It is now a blackened monument to a massive wildfire—and humankind’s far-reaching impact on the environment. But these two researchers have come to do more than pay their respects.
Linnea Hardlund and Alexis Bernal, both of the University of California, Berkeley, are studying the effects of record-breaking fires such as the one that destroyed large swaths of Alder Creek Grove in the hopes that their findings will inform forest management that might preserve giant sequoias for future generations.
So far, those findings are grim: mortality in Alder Creek Grove is near 100 percent. Of the mighty trees that stood watch for thousands of years, only charred skeletons remain. About a century of aggressive fire suppression and a warming, drier climate have created a perfect environment for unprecedented fire.
On August 19, 2020, it came to the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The SQF Complex was two fires—the Castle and Shotgun fires—that burned for more than four months, affecting nearly 175,000 acres. And a preliminary report on the Castle Fire estimated that 10 to 14 percent of all living giant sequoias were destroyed.
Hardlund, who is also at the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League, and Bernal fear that, without scientifically informed intervention, such fires will continue to return to the Sierra Nevada—leaving the once proud guardians of the forest a memory and another casualty of our ecological failure.
Boomers Daily 