Genetic changes to avian influenza viruses have led to spread among many wild species, creating an uncontrollable global outbreak.
Researchers catalogue more than 3,000 different types of cell in our most complex organ.
Recent studies evaluate risks associated with drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro.
Plastic is cheap to make and shockingly profitable. It’s everywhere. And we’re all paying the price.
Plastic, and the profusion of waste it creates, can hide in plain sight, a ubiquitous part of our lives we rarely question. But a closer examination of the situation can be shocking.
Indeed, the scale of the problem is hard to internalize. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature.
Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.
Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers are grappling with what it would take for AI to become conscious.
David Chalmers was not expecting the invitation he received in September of last year. As a leading authority on consciousness, Chalmers regularly circles the world delivering talks at universities and academic meetings to rapt audiences of philosophers—the sort of people who might spend hours debating whether the world outside their own heads is real and then go blithely about the rest of their day. This latest request, though, came from a surprising source: the organizers of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), a yearly gathering of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence.
Past the halfway point, Extremely Large Telescope prepares to receive first mirrors
A web of steel girders is rising from the flattened summit of Cerro Armazones, 3000 meters above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The dome it will support will be vast—with a footprint as big as a soccer field and almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty— and unexpectedly nimble: It will smoothly rotate on rails as a giant telescope inside tracks stars through the night.
Co-developer of biotech’s drug couldn’t supply original data
Gas could replace fossil fuels and fight climate change—if it is made cleanly
Through the lenses of powerful microscopes, scientists discover unexpected secrets about these fragile creatures that can be adapted and applied to make our world better and more sustainable. This film is a journey into the nano-dimensions of butterflies, taking viewers from high-tech labs to dense forests and lavender fields around the world. We take a close look at the iconic morpho butterfly and find out how its iridescent blue wings reveal a way to produce structural color, a discovery which allows researchers to control light.
Physicist Chunlei Guo, whose work involves reproducing butterfly structures, has created a material capable of absorbing all the colors of the spectrum, a discovery that might revolutionize the field of renewable energies. He is also investigating how the amazing hydrophobic properties of butterfly wings could be used to create an unsinkable metal, which could be useful for constructing floating cities if ocean levels continue to rise.
The blue morpho, the industrious silk moth, the transparent glasswing butterfly, the resistant Heliconius, the enigmatic monarch and the delicate white cabbage butterfly – all have inspired discoveries. These have taken place in many different scientific fields, including energy efficiency and medicine — and even in the detection of toxins, thereby helping save lives in the event of chemical or gas attacks. We take a look at the work of researchers, biologists and geneticists.
We also talk to experts, such as physicist and biomimicry expert Serge Berthier, as well as to Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, about butterflies’ incredible behaviors and capacities. Tiny as they are, butterflies and moths can inspire groundbreaking scientific progress. And they also serve as a warning about what’s at stake if we fail to protect our extraordinary natural environment.
The test 30 years ago of what remote sensing could tell us about our own planet shows the value of looking with unbiased eyes at what we think we already know.
Analysis of carved inscriptions more than 1,000 years old suggests the prominence of the Viking queen Thyra.
Samples of asteroid Bennu delivered by the OSIRIS-REx mission contain carbon, water and other ingredients from the primordial Solar System.
HARVARD MAGAZINE November-December 2023 :
Diet, cooking, and the human microbiome
IN THE LATE 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking thousands of years ago, she and her advisor Richard Wrangham wondered, had they opened the door to a new source of energy?
DURING THE past two decades, the number of annual cancer deaths in the United States has fallen by 27 percent, a remarkable improvement driven by new precision diagnoses and treatments tailored to individual patients. Today, oncologists can detect cancer in its earliest stages and deliver drugs that enlist the patient’s own immune system to improve their odds of survival. Yet cancer remains the second deadliest disease in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives every year. Its persistence underscores the urgent need for a deeper understanding of how cancer interacts with the body. Assistant professor of neurology Humsa Venkatesh believes she may have found a promising new pathway for highly effective cancer treatments in the most unexpected of places: the human brain.
A cell census provides information on the source of human brain specialization
The brain is composed of multiple regions associated with distinct functions, which have become further specialized in the human lineage. To define how this specialization is implemented, how it arises during development, and how it has emerged over the course of human evolution, a detailed understanding of the cells that make up the human brain is required.
Some whale populations are exhibiting unexpected cycles of boom and bust
Companies say the technology will contribute to faster drug development. Independent verification and clinical trials will determine whether this claim holds up.
Thunderstorms can increase the levels of water vapour in the atmosphere, at altitudes as high as 19 km.
A world of AI-assisted writing and reviewing might transform the nature of the scientific paper.
Archaeology Magazine (November/December – 2023):
4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets illuminate the personal lives of Mesopotamian businesswomen
By DURRIE BOUSCAREN
Excavations at the ancient Anatolian city of Kanesh in Turkey have revealed a district where merchants from the distant Mesopotamian city of Assur in Iraq lived and worked. Some 23,000 cuneiform tablets, mostly dating from about 1900 to 1840 B.C., have been found in the merchants’ personal archives in Kanesh.
The parents of an Assyrian woman named Zizizi were furious. Like many of their neighbors’ children, their daughter had dutifully wed an Assyrian merchant. Sometime around the year 1860 B.C., she had traveled with him to the faraway Anatolian city of Kanesh in modern-day Turkey, where he traded textiles. But her husband passed away and, instead of returning to her family, Zizizi chose to marry a local.
Excavations in Sichuan Province reveal the lost treasure of an infamous seventeenth-century warlord
A Roman noblewoman’s devotion to Isis outlasted even an emperor’s ban on foreign cults
Around 55,000 years ago, a resourceful band of modern humans made a home in southern France
Investigating the mythic origins of the Roman Empire’s ultimate adversary
ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE (FALL 2023): The latest issue of @ISSUESinST features Lessons from Ukraine, Quantum Workforce, The Energy Transition, Why Space Debris Flies Through Regulatory Gaps and more…
Blue Dreams is an immersive video experience inspired by microbial networks in the deep sea and beyond. Using stunning undersea video footage, abstract imagery, and computer modeling, the work offers a glimpse into the complicated relationships among the planet’s tiniest—yet most vital—living systems.
MARILYN HARBERT, ASHA BALAKRISHNAN
Orbital debris has been a looming issue for decades, and it’s only getting worse as activities in space increase. With technical expertise and authority over space activities widely distributed across the US government, officials need to determine the appropriate regulations and policies to address how space is changing.
Boomers Daily 