nature Magazine – May 4, 2023 issue:As stars evolve, they expand and so will engulf planets in close orbit around them. This planetary catastrophe is expected to generate powerful luminous ejections of mass from the star, although this has not been observed directly.
The current landscape of mobile mental-health apps is the result of a 70-year search to automate therapy. Now, advanced AIs pose fresh ethical questions.
Illustration by Fabio Buonocore
Since 2015, Koko, a mobile mental-health app, has tried to provide crowdsourced support for people in need. Text the app to say that you’re feeling guilty about a work issue, and an empathetic response will come through in a few minutes — clumsy perhaps, but unmistakably human — to suggest some positive coping strategies.
DW Documentary (May 1, 2023) – The Dead Sea, shared by Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians, is drying up. The salt lake, famous for its exceptional geographical location and its healing properties, is the deepest of its kind on earth.
The drying up of the Dead Sea is causing widespread damage, from huge sinkholes to abandoned beaches and collapsed roads. This is not an act of nature. It is the result of overconsumption and poor water management. If something is not done soon, very little of the Dead Sea will remain. In a region marked by ongoing conflict, natural resources are being depleted. To save the Dead Sea, surrounding countries must work together.
Three individuals — a Jordanian, an Israeli and a Palestinian — feel they can’t just sit idly by. They decide to draw the world’s attention to the problem with a heroic act. In an unprecedented and extremely dangerous undertaking, the three decide to swim across the Dead Sea, from Jordan to Israel, to highlight the plight of the dying waters.
DW Documentary (April 30, 2023) – Statistically, a large ship is lost in the world’s oceans almost once every seven days. One reason for this: monster waves that appear to come from nowhere. Unlike tsunamis, they are completely unpredictable. That means there’s no way to issue any kind of warning.
Scientists still know astonishingly little about these freak waves. For centuries, many people dismissed them as the stuff of legend. The first scientific proof of their existence didn’t come until 1995. A laser on the Draupner oil rig in the North Sea measured a wave almost 26 meters high. Wave models in use at the time deemed this to be an impossibility.
But the data, captured by chance, changed the course of research forever. Scientists have focused on three theories in their bid to explain the emergence of freak waves. The first is the current model: currents flowing in opposite directions reduce the length of the waves, pushing them together to create a monster surge. But freak waves are also a phenomenon in regions where currents aren’t particularly strong.
That’s why researchers came up with a second theory: superposition. In this linear process, faster, longer waves catch up with short, slower waves. They overlap and form monster waves. But in some places, freak waves occur with a frequency that can’t be explained by this linear theory, either.
For several years now, scientists have been considering a third possibility: when non-linear wave trains are unstable, they can develop into monster waves through a highly complex energy “theft”. Research is divided over whether it’s the linear or non-linear effects that form freak waves out at sea – a question that’s crucial for shipping!
Science Magazine – April 28, 2023 issue: Mammals come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, here represented by some of the least well known and most unusual—clockwise from top left: a fossa, a Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth, a lesser hedgehog tenrec, two tree (or white-bellied) pangolins, and an aye-aye.
Mammals are one of the most diverse classes of animals, ranging both in size, across many orders of magnitude, and in shape—nearly to the limit of one’s imagination. Understanding when, how, and under what selective pressures this variation has developed has been of interest since the dawn of science.
The 240 mammals sequenced through the Zoonomia project include the famous sled dog Balto, who was reported to have led a team of sled dogs in the final leg of the race to carry a life-saving serum to Nome, Alaska, in 1925. His genome, in conjunction with others, was used to reveal his ancestry and adaptations, as well as predict aspects of his morphology, including his coat color.
Researchers deploy a wave glider to measure seafloor displacement associated with earthquakes.PHOTO: TODD ERICKSEN
The destructive behavior of great earthquakes in subduction zones, such as in Japan in 2011, depends on details of the earthquake slip. A slip at shallow depth is the dominant driver of tsunami. Using recently developed seafloor geodetic instrumentation, Brooks et al. found that the deeper slip of the July 2021 magnitude 8.2 Chignik, Alaska earthquake was followed 2.5 months later by a second stage of (aseismic) slip. This approximately 2 to 3 meters of “silent” slip allowed the shallow fault to catch up with its deeper portion, reducing its future earthquake potential.
Facility will produce up to five billion bacteria-infected mosquitoes per year
A World Mosquito Program (WMP) staff member releases Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in Niterói, Brazil.Credit: WMP Brasil.
The non-profit World Mosquito Program (WMP) has announced that it will release modified mosquitoes in many of Brazil’s urban areas over the next 10 years, with the aim of protecting up to 70 million people from diseases such as dengue. Researchers have tested the release of this type of mosquito — which carries a Wolbachia bacterium that stops the insect from transmitting viruses — in select cities in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam. But this will be the first time that the technology is dispersed nationwide.
Although northern elephant seals do sleep on land, like the one pictured here in California, they can also sleep while diving to 300 meters underwater.PHOTO: RACHEL HOLSER, NMFS 23188
Sleep is essential, but not all mammals live in environments where long periods of time asleep are possible. Marine mammals encounter especially challenging conditions for sleep when they are at sea.
nature Magazine – April 20, 2023 issue: Although currently there is no known threat to Earth from asteroids, strategies to protect the planet from a collision are being explored. On 26 September 2022, NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory successfully tested one such approach: the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft was deliberately crashed into Dimorphos, a moon orbiting the small asteroid Didymos, resulting in a change in the moon’s orbit.
Science Magazine – April 7, 2023 issue: Anchoring radiocarbon dates to cosmic events, why hibernating bears don’t get blood clots, and kicking off a book series on sex, gender, and science.
Since ancient times, humans have been trying to exercise control over their reproductive decisions, whether to avoid undesired pregnancy or to improve their chances of conceiving. In addition, the risks of pregnancy and childbirth have always been a major challenge.
Like his mentor and colleague Stephen Hawking, Thomas Hertog has never shied away from being ambitious in theorizing about the universe. This sweeping book provides an accessible overview of both what we know about cosmology, and some audacious ideas for moving into the unknown. It is an introduction to Hawking’s final theory, but also a glimpse into even grander theories yet to come.
Professor Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Boomers Daily 