Laser technology called lidar is helping archaeologists complete years of fieldwork sometimes in the span of a single afternoon

Archaeology is facing a time crunch. Thousands of years of human history risk imminent erasure, from tiny hamlets to entire cities – temples, walls and roads under grave threat of destruction. Urban sprawl and industrial agriculture are but two culprits, smothering ancient settlements beneath car parks and cattle pastures. International conflict and climate change are also damaging vulnerable sites, with warfare and water shortages destroying pockets of history across the world.

The endless excavations of yesteryear are no longer the best solution. Big digs aren't the big idea they once were: mapping the human archaeological record is now moving upward, into the sky.

Continue reading…

An international team of scientist have used the MeerKAT radio telescope to observe the pulsing heartbeat of the universe as neutron stars are born and form swirling lightning storms which last for millions of years.

Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe.

Since Russia's full-scale assault began, Ukraine's railways evacuated 4 million people and brought 300 foreign delegations to Kyiv.

Russia launched a rescue ship on Friday for two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut whose original ride home sprang a dangerous leak while parked at the International Space Station.

A chunk of weather-beaten flotsam that washed up on a New York shoreline after Tropical Storm Ian last fall has piqued the interest of experts who say it is likely part of the SS Savannah, which ran aground and broke apart in 1821, two years after it became the first vessel to cross the Atlantic Ocean partly under steam power.

Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center provides new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes. The new work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

According to Jake Bittle's "The Great Displacement," the warming climate has already had a profound effect on demographics and society in America. As he documents the personal travails of those devastated by hurricanes, wildfires, and more, Bittle lays bare the country's brittle social and economic systems.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36811-7

The authors introduce and demonstrate cross-comb spectroscopy in the mid-infrared as a variant of dual-comb spectroscopy. It provides enhanced performance and allows mid-infrared spectral information to be obtained by near-infrared detection.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36610-0

Temperature shapes the adaptation and composition of microbiomes, but whether their enzymes drive the thermal response remains unknown. Using an analysis of seven enzyme classes from worldwide marine microbiome data, this study shows that enzyme thermal properties explain microbial thermal plasticity and they are both finely tuned by the thermal variability of the environment.

Are you a doctor who has written multiple articles saying "now is the time to stop living in fear?" Did you say cautious people were not "truly not actually living right now", months before anyone had been vaccinated? Are you engulfed with white hot rage by the handful of people who still wear masks in crowds? Have you relentlessly mocked them on […]

The post Do You Have Coronaphobiaphobia? Ask Your Doctor if Notmybizumab is Right for You. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A grim anniversary of war in Ukraine, icicles in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, livestreamers on a bridge in China, cherry blossoms in Japan, deadly mudslides in Brazil, a Carnival parade in Bolivia, another earthquake in Turkey, flooding in South Africa, and much more

Schneider Shorts 24.02.2023 – Macchiarini trial reopens in Sweden, Stanford's president's dark past, UCLA dentists continue terrorizing whistleblower, with an open letter to CNRS, Quora revelations, journals dealing with papermill fraud, genius discoveries, and finally, a China-owned T&F journal spewing genocide propaganda.

Bon appétit!

Where the Universe came from.

We're making ourselves sicker.

A toxic relationship.

Experts say time is running out to solve the storage crisis that has long plagued archaeology.

PLUS. Teknologien er ikke økonomisk holdbar i sin nuværende form, lyder det fra to danske eksperter.

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Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36756-x

Detoxification enzymes are crucial for the survival of animals in new environments. Here, the authors study the molecular mechanism behind the catalytic diversification of a major family of tetrapod detoxification enzymes—the FMOs—during evolution.

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36657-z

Learning analytical models from noisy data remains challenging and depends essentially on the noise level. The authors analyze the transition of the model-learning problem from a low-noise phase to a phase where noise is too high for the underlying model to be learned by any method, and estimate upper bounds for the transition noise.

La Niña typically casts a bit of a chill over the globe, and that certainly has been the case during its reign over the past three years. Yet despite the climate phenomenon's continuing influence, last month turned out to be one of the warmest Januarys ever recorded globally. Moreover, even though La Niña exerted its maximum cooling effect in 2022, that year still entered the record books as being warmer than 2021. The reason, of course, was human-caused climate change. Now, La Niña is fading away, and El Niño — which usually warms the climate — stands a 60 percent chance of emerging in the fall. So the globe could be on the verge of some very significant warming. The Heat Goes On In their latest monthly climate analyses, NASA and NOAA have found that last month was the seventh warmest January in records dating back to the 1800s. "January 2023 marked the 47th consecutive January and the 527th consecutive month with global temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average," NOAA noted in its report. Looking ahead, if El Niño does emerge in the fall, it would likely add its warming influence on top of human-caused warming. If it's strong enough, 2024 could supplant 2016 — a strong El Niño year — as the warmest year on record. According to a recently published study, a moderate-to-strong El Niño is, in fact, likely in 2023. "A new record in global average temperature can then be expected for 2024," says study co-author Josef Ludescher, a scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "For a short time, it could even be 1.5°C degrees above the pre-industrial mean." This is a key threshold that nearly all nations of the world have pledged to avoid as part of the Paris Agreement. Exceeding 1.5 degrees C of warming sometimes is portrayed in media accounts as being the equivalent of plunging over a climatic cliff. In reality, there's nothing particularly special about that very specific number. It's not as if the world is doomed at 1.6 degrees C of warming but saved at just 1.5. That said, if we do push beyond 1.5 degrees C, and stay there, risks for extreme heatwaves, droughts, and precipitation events would be significantly higher than at present, according to a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And above 2 degrees C of warming, the risks of very dangerous impacts accelerate. How close are we to exceeding 1.5 degrees C due to El Niño, even just temporarily, and what are the odds of this happening? The global average surface temperature in 2022 (again, when La Niña was exerting it's maximum cooling effect) was 1.15 degrees C warmer than the preindustrial average. In their study, Josef Ludescher and his colleagues assumed 2023 will bring an additional amount of human-caused warming. To this, they added estimated warming from a relatively strong El Niño starting this fall. The result: a 1 in 5 chance of pushing above 1.5 degrees C of warming by the end of 2024. How Do La Niña and El Niño Affect Global Temperatures? La Niña and El Niño are two sides of a climatic coin known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. And their opposite impacts are linked to the effects they have on the formation of clouds. Let's look at El Niño first. The natural climate phenomenon is characterized by warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, leading to greater evaporation of water into the atmosphere. As the water vapor rises, it condenses to form masses of billowing clouds, releasing huge amounts of heat in the process — enough, in fact, to ultimately affect the entire globe. With La Niña, on the other hand, sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific cool. That means less water evaporates from the sea surface, suppressing formation of clouds and resulting in less heat pouring into atmosphere. Through a process that scientists call teleconnections, these impacts of El Niño and La Niña are carried for thousands of miles throughout the tropics. "So, the atmosphere warms more during El Niño and less during La Niña, and that affects global average temperature," says Mike McPhaden, an oceanographer and ENSO expert at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, quoted recently in the agency's ENSO Blog. For every degree Celsius that El Niño chills the surface waters of the central equatorial Pacific, the global average surface temperature of the globe cools by about 0.07 degrees C (0.13 F), according to McPhaden. Similarly, for every degree of sea surface warming caused by El Niño, global average surface temperatures rise by about 0.07 degrees C.  "It may not sound like much, but it involves huge transfers of heat between the ocean and atmosphere that affect the entire globe," he says. We still do not know for sure whether El Niño is coming in the fall, let alone how strong it might be. In fact, predictions made at this time of year for what will happen in the fall are quite uncertain. Even without El Niño, though, a study published on Jan. 30 of this year found that we're already on the verge of crossing the 1.5 degree C threshold. And even if the nations of the world were to somehow act in concert to very quickly and aggressively to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, we're very likely to cross the threshold in the early 2030s. But the researchers found that with aggressive action, we can still avoid the even worse 2 degrees C threshold. Will we take that action?

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Not your typical kind of photography.

The edge we needed.

Save $50 on these   10×42 Crossfire binoculars, down to just $150 at Adorama.

It really is an alien world.

The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow's armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.

Before we turn to Ukraine, here are a few of today's stories from The Atlantic.

• The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are
• When a Christian revival goes viral
• The invisible victims of American anti-Semitism

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Today I Grieve

Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.

The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.

When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.

And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the "evil empire" that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.

Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.

If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song "Hero" by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. "Great song," I said to her in Russian. "One of my favorites," she answered.

This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.

In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.

I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.

I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin's crimes against humanity.

And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as "cannon meat," for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.

Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.

Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and so I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world's democracies. But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.

I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.

Related:

• How and when the war in Ukraine will end
• Biden's hope vs. Putin's lies

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Today's News

1. The prominent South Carolina former lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who is being tried for the murders of his wife and son, testified in court; he has pleaded not guilty on both charges.
2. The musician R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison after his conviction last year on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor. Kelly is already serving a different 30-year prison term for a 2021 conviction.
3. Authorities said that a man in Orange County, Florida, shot and killed a fellow passenger in the car he was riding in, and then returned to the same neighborhood to shoot four more people, including a journalist who was covering the original shooting.

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Dispatches

• Unsettled Territory: Reading banned books and studying verboten topics are ways to defeat the forces of exclusion, Imani Perry writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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Evening Read

 

 

The Secret Ingredient That Could Save Fake Meat

By Yasmin Tayag

Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I've tried before but never truly craved in the way that I've craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.

I knew it wasn't real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Happiness is a warm coffee.
• Never mind Marjorie Taylor Greene's "national divorce."
• Why this Democratic strategist walked away

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Culture Break

 

 

Read. "The Body's River," a new poem by Jan Beatty.

"When my mother left me in the orphanage, / I invented love with strangers. / And if it wasn't there, I made it be there."

Watch. Revisit Titanic. Twenty-five years later, it feels different.

Play our daily crossword.

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P.S.

Today I'll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

 has paid $400 million to the government for a chemical technique key to its vaccine. But the parties are still locked in a high-stakes dispute over a different patent.

Researchers were surprised when a young male cougar living in Washington state swam to a nearby island. They now suspect other local cougars are doing the same

Without the aid of modern anesthesia or, for that matter, modern disinfection, a Bronze Age practitioner of some kind wielded a tool with a sharp, beveled edge and began a grisly business. In about 1500 B.C., the primitive surgeon cut away a polygon of scalp just above the left eye and peeled it off, leaving scratches in the bone below. Then began the painstaking process of slicing into the "living bone," according to a new archaeological study, leaving remarkably clean grooves and carving out segments finally removed using "leverage." But don't worry: the researchers believe the inch-wide hole stopped short of breaching the protective dura mater membrane that surrounds the brain. Read More: The Earliest Evidence of An Amputation is 31,000 Years Old Ancient Surgery This dramatic process, a type of trephination or craniotomy, still occurs today, albeit in a much different form – to reduce brain swelling and respond to other emergencies. In the ancient world, would-be surgeons sometimes used primitive drills or saws on people, and even a child, with brain traumas, scurvy or intracranial infection, sometimes killing them. "We have evidence that trephination has been this universal, widespread type of surgery for thousands of years," says Rachel Kalisher in a press release, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University and the lead author of the study. The new case stood out, in part, because of its location in the Near East, where trephinations rarely show up in the archaeological record, and because the surgery, a medical "Hail Mary," lacked a clear impetus. A Procedure for the Ancient Elite Researchers unearthed the man's burial site underneath a residential home in the once prosperous city of Megiddo, in what is now modern Israel, a much fought-over town along the important Via Maris trade route. They found bone fragments from the procedure, suggesting the patient or someone else had stuck them back in the wound to aid in healing. The investigators also uncovered food offerings and fine ceramic vessels, plus the bones of the man's brother, indications that the two held an elite status in the nearby palace. Locals had buried the two in a dirt pit close to another, larger tomb underneath the building, filled with 17 bodies decked out with gold, silver and bronze jewelry, and fine bone inlay. The brother who received the trephination died soon after, the study concluded, as the bones showed no signs of healing. Many other bones belonging to the man showed a different type of damage, telltale pitting and "pencilling" that made them look like weathered driftwood. What was this, and how did it relate to Bronze Age brain surgery? Ancient Disease The researchers looked for answers and proposed that, perhaps, the brothers had suffered the lesions from a years-long infection such as osteomyelitis, syphilis, tuberculosis or leprosy. Of these possibilities, leprosy stood out because it is often shared between family members, who must remain in close contact for months to transmit the disease. The ancient disease attacks the skin, peripheral nervous system and even the bones themselves. Read More: Ancient Medical Treatments Still Used Today While leprosy doesn't directly affect the brain, it can cause neuropathic pain, a burning sensation, blindness and the hallmark sores and bumps, including on the face. While one of these could have prompted the operation, Kalisher is still looking for answers. With help from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, she's now testing the bone lesions for leprosy DNA. If successful, she'll have identified one of the earliest cases of leprosy in the world and drawn closer to explaining the Megiddo trephination. "You have to be in a pretty dire place to have a hole cut in your head," she says in a press release. The unnamed patient may have also suffered from a number of congenital conditions that somehow precipitated the surgery, the study surmised, due to him having a relatively common skull "suture" or groove, and the presence of an extra molar on his jaw. But the study couldn't confirm any such condition.

The speculations surrounding the death of Dr. Charles R. Drew are steeped in rumor. Drew, a pioneer in blood banking and blood and plasma storage, may have died after being refused a blood transfusion.  In 1950, Drew was brought to a segregated hospital in North Carolina after falling asleep at the wheel while driving to a medical conference with other physicians. But surgeons at the hospital recognized the famed scientist and tried to save his life, making the rumors about his death false.  Many others in Drew's time recognized him as the inventor of blood banking. However, he was also a mentor for Black physicians, the first Black man to receive a doctorate from Columbia University and the first-ever director of the American Red Cross. He has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp and had scholarships, schools and medical centers named after him. And his contributions to science changed the world.  What Did Charles Drew Do? Drew was born in 1905 in Washington, D.C., the eldest of five children. His dad was a carpet layer, and the family lived modestly. Drew excelled academically and athletically and was awarded a scholarship to Amherst University in Massachusetts, where he ran track and played football. Drew hoped to attend Howard University for medical school but was rejected because he needed more English credits. He was accepted at McGill University in Montreal and graduated in 1933 with high honors. He began a residency at Freedmen's Hospital, which was associated with Howard University, and then won a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at Columbia University in New York. At Columbia, he researched blood banking and plasma storage. He was a pioneer in the field, and his work would soon prove to be lifesaving.  Read More: 8 Amazing Black Scientists and How They Changed History What Did Charles Drew Invent? In the late 1930s, blood banking and plasma storage were difficult due to their short shelf life. Scientists also struggled with blood coagulating since it typically only lasting two days in storage. Many scientists thought learning about blood storage would occur in a clinical setting with a learn-as-you-go approach. Drew had the idea to move the study to a laboratory setting to observe how blood changed and how it could better be preserved.  Drew approached the problem from several angles. He considered how blood was collected — through an open or closed vessel or under a vacuum. Then Drew tested different types of anticoagulants and added preservatives. He experimented with the temperature in which the blood was stored and even considered whether the shape of the storage container made a difference.  Read More: 5 Interesting Facts About Chemist Percy Julian Banking on Blood Drew discovered how to separate red cells and plasma from whole blood. He also determined how to preserve red blood cells so they could last longer in storage. Along with his mentor, Drew published on the topic and showed other scientists it was possible to store both blood and plasma. His discoveries would soon be needed. By the late 1930s, Europe was heading into war, and Great Britain would soon endure The Blitz, eight months of relentless bombing by Nazi Germany. Military officials wanted to increase their blood supply and turned to Drew for help.  In 1940, Drew received a message from a former McGill University professor who was then working on blood and plasma banking in Europe. The professor asked Drew to send 5,000 ampules of dried plasma as soon as possible. Drew had to deny the request and tell his professor that type of supply didn't exist anywhere in the world — yet. Blood for Britain In 1940, Drew was chosen to lead Blood for Britain, a drive to collect, store and send blood and plasma to troops fighting in France. He then oversaw the successful collection, storage and delivery of 14,600 pints of plasma.  The American Red Cross wanted Drew to establish the first U.S. blood bank within the year. Drew returned to the U.S. and created a structure of collection stations throughout the country. When the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, plasma was already on hand to treat the bombing victims.  Drew's pioneering research into blood and plasma storage meant that hundreds of thousands of lives were saved during the Second World War. But during the war, Drew realized he had his own battles to face at home.  Dr. Charles Drew Death In early 1942, the American Red Cross agreed to the U.S. military's policy that only White donors could give blood and plasma. Drew resigned as director in protest and returned to Washington, D.C. as a professor and medical director at Freedmen's Hospital. In April 1950, Drew and three other physicians were due at a medical conference in Tuskegee, Alabama. They left Washington D.C. shortly after midnight and planned to drive all night. At the time, there were few safe spots for Black motorists to stop. By 7 a.m., they were driving through North Carolina, and Drew was behind the wheel. The other three physicians were sleeping, and Drew nodded off as well. When the car crashed and rolled, Drew was partially ejected. One passenger was fully ejected and broke his arm. The other two did not have serious injuries. Other motorists stopped to help, and an ambulance arrived within 15 minutes. Drew was brought to a local hospital with 48 beds, only five reserved for Black patients. The surgeons on duty, however, recognized Drew as the famed scientist who made blood banking possible. Despite their efforts, Dr. Charles Drew died two hours later. Drew left behind his wife (a former professor at Spelman College) and four children. He also left behind medical advancements that brought blood and plasma banking into a reality that has saved countless lives. Read More: Who Was Bessie Coleman and What Was She Known For?

Doom Brick

YouTuber and Weta Workshop graphics engineer James Brown has turned a tiny Lego brick into a device that can play the 1993 hit video game "Doom."

It's an impressive escalation — and miniaturization — longstanding trend: we've already seen "Doom" being played on a candy bar, a John Deer tractor — and even within "Doom" itself.

Tilt to Win

The controls of Brown's "Doom" Lego brick are more intuitive than you might think. The engineer added a small accelerometer to his minuscule computer system, allowing him to move around inside the game by simply tilting it.

"I hooked up the accelerometer, so Doom is now 'playable' entirely on the brick," Brown told Hackster. "The capacitive touch wasn't tuned very well, so it's a bit shooty."

Neatly tucked inside, the tiny brick features an even tinier microcontroller, a Raspberry Pi RP2040, and a barely visible 0.42-inch OLED single-color panel.

Brown even managed to squeeze touch-sensitive buttons and a battery pack into the brick.

The tinkerer also managed to stuff all of these components into a simple ring earlier this year, just in time for Valentine's Day.

It's a playful demonstration of just how tiny and accessible off-the-shelf computer components have become — but at the same time, most gamers probably wouldn't want to spend hours staring at a half-an-inch across screen.

READ MORE: Your Lego Minifigures Can Play Doom by Moving This Motion-Sensing Lego Computer Brick Around [Gizmodo]

More on Doom: Rejoice, Gamers! You Can Now Run DOOM Inside DOOM

The post Rejoice! You Can Finally Play Doom on a Lego Brick appeared first on Futurism.

Ballooning Budget

Remember those "unidentified flying objects" the military recently shot down? The government is now admitting that it spent millions of taxpayer dollars getting them out of the sky — even though they were, per the intelligence community's assessment, probably just balloons.

Government officials told the Wall Street Journal that there was a $1.5 million price tag for the four AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles the Pentagon authorized to shoot down the three objects, which President Joe Biden admitted last week may have been easy to identify after all.

"The intelligence community's current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research," Biden said of the headline-grabbing unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

Cost Correction

The WSJ notes that the $1.5 million figure only covers the cost of the missiles themselves, which run about $400,000 apiece, and not the costs for the American and Canadian military and civilian personnel used to investigate the debris from the objects in Alaska, Luke Huron, and Canada's Yukon territory (one of the missiles missed, requiring the use of a fourth.)

The officials who spoke with the newspaper on condition of anonymity said the total price for downing those three not-UFOs will likely be hundreds of thousands of dollars more thanks to those investigative efforts.

That figure notably also excludes the amount of money it cost the American taxpayer to down to the suspected Chinese "spy balloon," which was shot down by an F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

While we obviously don't want there to be random unidentified things floating above America — or Canada, we guess? — these outrageous price tags beg an obvious question: is this what our ever-growing defense budget is used for?

More on actual UFOs: The Pentagon Just Quietly Released a Report About Hundreds of New UFO Sightings

The post The Military Spent $1.5 Million Shooting Down Those Three Unidentified Objects appeared first on Futurism.

Archaeologists haven't uncovered an elite housing complex at Chichen Itza, but there is news; a previously closed off area at the site will open to the public in 2023.

Mons Mouton, a mountain near the moon's south pole, has been officially named after Melba Roy Mouton, a pioneering NASA computer programmer and mathematician in the 1960s and '70s.

Although the Pony Express lasted only a short time in the mid-1800s before being outperformed by the transcontinental telegraph, it inspired a concept for a string of small satellites to transport data from Mars to Earth and help alleviate the data logjam currently occurring in the Deep Space Network.

If we have learned one thing post-pandemic, it is that there is so much more to learn about the effects of COVID-19 on the population. A study published in Microbial Genomics has brought us a step closer to understanding more about how the virus affects our lung microbiome over time.

Climate policies are typically designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from human activities and drive climate change. The largest source of these emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels, which increases atmospheric concentrations of ozone, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other air pollutants that pose public health risks. While climate policies may result in lower concentrations of health-damaging air pollutants as a "co-benefit" of reducing greenhouse gas emissions-intensive activities, they are most effective at improving health outcomes when deployed in tandem with geographically targeted air-quality regulations.

With the exception of a temporary federal law providing paid sick leave to certain employees between March and December 2020, the United States remains one of the few developed countries without federal paid sick leave protection for workers. In recent years, 14 states have enacted paid sick leave mandates, while 18 states have passed preemptive legislation prohibiting paid sick leave laws, largely due to concerns about the potential negative impact this may have on business.

Although not quite the bee's knees, a three-year effort to conserve bee populations by introducing pollinator habitat in North Carolina agricultural areas showed some positive effects, as bee abundance and diversity increased in the studied areas.

The universe is teeming with galaxies, each brimming with billions of stars. Though all galaxies shine brightly, many are cloaked in dust, while others are so distant that to observers on Earth they appear as little more than faint smudges. By creating comprehensive maps of even the dimmest and most-distant galaxies, astronomers are better able to study the structure of the universe and unravel the mysterious properties of dark matter and dark energy. The largest such map to date has just grown even larger, with the tenth data release from the DOE's Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey.

Pretty early into Cocaine Bear's running time, I started searching desperately for the metaphor. Elizabeth Banks's action-comedy-horror is, as you might have heard, about a black bear in 1980s Georgia who eats a lot of cocaine that fell out of an airplane. The cocaine makes her angry and hungry for more cocaine, and given that she's already a big bear with sharp claws, the combination is quite distressing for the people in the forest around her. But is there something deeper going on here? I wondered as the bear mauled yet another victim on-screen. Perhaps a critique of selfish 1980s individualism: No amount of money or expensive products can protect you from a coked-up bear! Or maybe it's a statement about the dangers of our modern world encroaching on nature?

No. Hard as I tried, I could not settle on a deeper thesis for Cocaine Bear. It is 95 minutes of Hollywood storytelling about what would happen if a bear did drugs. I'm probably the fool for trying to summon some profundity from these bloodstained reels; Banks has promised her viewers no more than a cocaine bear, and a cocaine bear is what they get, all growly and crazed and rendered with very expensive-looking CGI. This project does not skimp on its main attraction, but it does seem unsure of what to put around it, throwing a variety of hapless characters in the mix and arming them mostly with indifferent comedy in the face of some truly gnarly violence.

[Read: Cocaine Bear—why?]

If blockbuster-level gore is what you're after, Cocaine Bear delivers—I was impressed with how gleefully gross Banks gets at times, dropping severed limbs from the sky and strewing plenty of intestines on the ground. And though the personality of the titular bear mostly manifests as annoyed grunting and mighty roars, she's a solid visual-effects creation, glaring at every human with the beady-eyed intensity of someone looking for her next fix.

The true story of the cocaine bear is relatively mundane—after drug smugglers dropped their latest shipment from Colombia in the woods, a dead black bear was found with some 75 pounds of cocaine in its system, and was eventually stuffed and mounted. What that poor creature did before keeling over is a mystery, but Jimmy Warden's script imagines a bacchanal of carnage around that event, retaining only the location (a national park in Georgia) and the name of the drug runner who caused the incident, Andrew C. Thornton (played briefly but with plenty of, uh, entrepreneurial energy by Matthew Rhys). Everything else is pure fiction.

The film's ensemble is quite large and impressive. A dozen or so (mostly unwitting) characters come across the ursine terror in the woods. There's the drug lord Syd Dentwood (the late, great Ray Liotta), who bids his bedraggled son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), and underling Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) to recover his lost product. Two plucky 12-year-olds (Christian Convery and Brooklynn Prince) skip school to go hiking and get tangled up in the chaos, as do their worried mom (Keri Russell), a salty park ranger (Margo Martindale), a self-satisfied environmentalist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and a dogged detective (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.).

This Robert Altman–esque assemblage of talent largely goes to waste, because pretty much everyone is required to act out the same basic sequence of events. It goes like this: Character peers over the horizon, spots a furry beast approaching, and realizes something's amiss. Wait, is that a bear? Is something up with the bear? Wait, is that cocaine on the bear's nose? Wait, is that bear about to eat us? Repeat ad nauseam, with slight variations in dialogue but the same ensuing cacophony of screams and flying viscera. Banks changes up the action as she can, and a particularly energetic ambulance chase crunches people's bones in unexpected ways. As one of the 12-year-olds yells quite concisely, "It's fucked!"

Cocaine Bear could've been a triumph if the jokes landed, but the zingers just aren't up to the mayhem. And though the character actors are all capable of sterling work, there's nobody to root for here; Ehrenreich comes the closest, giving his coke-hunting dirtbag character just enough humanity that you aren't instantly hoping for his limbs to be torn off. But the main event is the cocaine bear, and the meager humans only distract from her might.

If we have learned one thing post-pandemic, it is that there is so much more to learn about the effects of COVID-19 on the population. A study published in Microbial Genomics has brought us a step closer to understanding more about how the virus affects our lung microbiome over time.

Although not quite the bee's knees, a three-year effort to conserve bee populations by introducing pollinator habitat in North Carolina agricultural areas showed some positive effects, as bee abundance and diversity increased in the studied areas.

Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00549-5

'Impressive' fossil analysis reveals why some dinosaurs were massive but their cousins were tiny.

Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00530-2

Data show most countries won't meet this Sustainable Development Goal by 2030.

Much like with a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots, Turing patterns explain how the distinctive patterns of human fingerprints form, a study finds.

Plant-based beverage makers hailed the agency's decision but objected to the recommendation for labels to specify the nutritional differences with cow's milk.

Developments in the current systematics of fungi are largely directed towards the division of existing species into smaller, narrowly defined species. But as demonstrated by scientists from the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, and the Institute of Microbiology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic on the Aspergillus genus model, such a division is often not justified and only complicates or makes the correct identification of species impossible.

Developments in the current systematics of fungi are largely directed towards the division of existing species into smaller, narrowly defined species. But as demonstrated by scientists from the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, and the Institute of Microbiology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic on the Aspergillus genus model, such a division is often not justified and only complicates or makes the correct identification of species impossible.

Safety Thirst

Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, have been justifiably concerned over their health and safety after the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train that spilled loads of deadly chemicals into the environment.

After a brief cleanup, the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the state government and other agencies, have insisted that the air quality and drinking water is safe, despite reports of thousands of dead fish, dying animals, and illnesses in humans.

And now, to prove their point and supposed good faith, Ohio governor Mike DeWine and EPA administrator Michael Regan have visited a resident's home to personally drink her tap water — but something seems a little off about this photo op.

"Would someone want to drink the water?" the homeowner asks, and the officials all volunteer.

"We believe in science, so we don't feel like we're being your guinea pig, but we don't mind proving to you that we believe the water is safe," Regan assured.

After a toast, the two officials, along with congressman Bill Johnson, have a drink — or so it seems.

Although it's hard to tell given the video quality, it appears that both DeWine (front left) and Regan (back center) either barely or don't actually drink the water at all. At best, the Republican governor and the EPA chief chance a cowardly sip or two and nothing more; they certainly don't decisively quaff the whole cups. It's possible they drank more off camera, but we're only privy to what we can see in the footage.

 

Followup Needed

Asked about the sipping allegations, a spokesperson for DeWine replied "You're joking, right?" Regan didn't respond to a request for comment.

Regardless, official and unofficial reuploads of the photo op have been relentlessly mocked online. On a Reddit thread, one popular comment lambasted the charade as "Oscar material," with many other users demanding the officials drink the entire glass.

"Chug it or we vote for the person that does," wrote another.

While the Ohio EPA (not the federal) has conducted testing that found the municipal drinking water to be safe, its veracity has been called into question because the water sampling was conducted by a firm contracted by Norfolk Southern.

Independent experts have decried the sampling methods as "sloppy" and "extremely concerning," and called for further testing before the water can be declared safe.

It's worth noting, though, that the Columbiana County Health District has separately sampled over 50 private wells so far, and says it's turned up nothing concerning.

But to further add to the general suspicion, governor DeWine received a $10,000 donation from Norfolk Southern just a month before the derailment, according to an investigation by the Columbus-based news station WYSX.

Regardless if the tests are bogus are not, many residents continue to feel unsafe — and it will take some more convincing leadership before they can be comfortable again in their own homes.

After the publication of this blog, DeWine's spokesperson sent this additional statement:

The Governor visited multiple houses with Congressman Johnson and EPA Administrator Regan that day. He drank tap water at each of them, as did the Congressman and the Administrator. The video clearly shows this.

I have watched the video you reference. Your analysis of water levels in the glass and goblet is off­ — way off.

Multiple water tests have confirmed no traces of any chemical concern levels. This includes tests independent of Norfolk Southern. The physical location of the municipal wells — far away geologically from the derailment and contamination site­ — made it highly unlikely, if not impossible, for chemicals to have travelled to the water supply. Multiple tests have confirmed this.

If any citizens have concerns about drinking water from the municipal system, bottled water is available if they wish to use that out of an abundance of caution. However, the Governor is firmly in the camp that the science has proven the village water is safe to drink.

For the sake of the citizens of East Palestine, I suggest you stop sipping the conspiratorial Kool-Aid.

More on the train derailment: There's a Super Bizarre Coincidence Surrounding the Ohio Train Disaster

The post Wait, Did Officials Just Pretend to Drink the Tap Water in East Palestine? appeared first on Futurism.

The Biden administration is eyeing a 70 percent cut in the cost of floating offshore wind power by 2035

Huanglongbing (HLB) is presumably caused by the phloem-limited bacteria, Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas), and is one of the most devastating diseases of citrus. A distinctive chlorotic mottle on fully expanded leaves is one of the identifying symptoms of HLB.

An international team of researchers has developed a new technique to enhance the durability of inverted perovskite solar cells—an important step toward commercialization of an emerging photovoltaic technology that could significantly reduce the cost of solar energy.

A set of 10 signaling proteins found in the microbe that causes   (TB) play a far larger role in regulating the bacterium's growth, development and behavior than previously thought, according to recent research. The study was led by UW School of Medicine and Seattle Children's researchers..

Huanglongbing (HLB) is presumably caused by the phloem-limited bacteria, Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas), and is one of the most devastating diseases of citrus. A distinctive chlorotic mottle on fully expanded leaves is one of the identifying symptoms of HLB.

A set of 10 signaling proteins found in the microbe that causes   (TB) play a far larger role in regulating the bacterium's growth, development and behavior than previously thought, according to recent research. The study was led by UW School of Medicine and Seattle Children's researchers..

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New research examining the perilous state of dying species calls for urgent international conservation efforts to develop unified management plans that could help plants and animals return from the brink of extinction.

New research examining the perilous state of dying species calls for urgent international conservation efforts to develop unified management plans that could help plants and animals return from the brink of extinction.

It is no surprise that the  -19 pandemic instigated dramatic shifts in all of our daily lives, with consumption practices being no exception. Non-essential businesses, including retail stores, were closed for long periods of time, the new norm of working from home allowed for greater flexibility and reduced needs for workplace wear, and fewer group gatherings overall reduce the need for more clothing generally.

Forest soil is a larger carbon storage than trees, and forest management affects soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sinks. A publication by the international HoliSoils project emphasizes that the European forest sector needs a comprehensive understanding of the carbon sequestration potential of soils. This will help design climate change mitigation measures.

Forest soil is a larger carbon storage than trees, and forest management affects soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sinks. A publication by the international HoliSoils project emphasizes that the European forest sector needs a comprehensive understanding of the carbon sequestration potential of soils. This will help design climate change mitigation measures.

Earth and Venus are rocky planets of about the same size and rock chemistry, so they should be losing their internal heat to space at about the same rate. How Earth loses its heat is well known, but Venus's heat flow mechanism has been a mystery. A study that uses three-decade-old data from NASA's Magellan mission has taken a new look at how Venus cools and found that thin regions of the planet's uppermost layer may provide an answer.

Aerosols transported to the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (UTLS) region potentially reduce average global surface temperatures and alter atmospheric circulation. Although large volcanic eruptions are rare in recent decades, small and medium volcanic eruptions have continuously increased stratospheric aerosol levels.

Asteroid Ryugu has a rich complement of organic molecules, according to a NASA and international team's initial analysis of a sample from the asteroid's surface delivered to Earth by Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft. The discovery adds support to the idea that organic material from space contributed to the inventory of chemical components necessary for life.

The university world is international, but grapples with difficulties in integrating students from different countries. New research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, points to a method that both reduces academic and social gaps and increases well-being. The recipe for success is to work in pairs—as chosen by the teacher.

Scientists have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.

When the universe began, matter was flung outward and gradually formed the planets, stars, and galaxies that we know and love today. By carefully assembling a map of that matter, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.

Among other findings, the analysis indicates that matter is not as "clumpy" as we would expect based on our current best model of the universe, which adds to a body of evidence that there may be something missing from our existing standard model of the universe.

After the Big Bang created all the matter in the universe in a very hot, intense few moments about 13 billion years ago, this matter has been spreading outward, cooling and clumping as it goes. Scientists are very interested in tracing the path of this matter; by seeing where all the matter ended up, they can try to recreate what happened and what forces would have had to have been in play.

The first step is collecting enormous amounts of data with telescopes.

In this study, scientists combined data from two very different telescope surveys: The Dark Energy Survey, which surveyed the sky over six years from a mountaintop in Chile, and the South Pole Telescope, which looks for the faint traces of radiation that are still traveling across the sky from the first few moments of the universe.

Combining two different methods of looking at the sky reduces the chance that an error in one of the forms of measurement throws off the results.

"It functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other," says University of Chicago astrophysicist Chihway Chang, one of the lead authors of the studies.

In both cases, the analysis looked at a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. As light travels across the universe, it can be slightly bent as it passes objects with lots of gravity, like galaxies.

This method catches both regular matter and dark matter—the mysterious form of matter that we have only detected due to its effects on regular matter—because both regular and dark matter exert gravity.

By rigorously analyzing these two sets of data, the scientists could infer where all the matter ended up in the universe. It is more precise than previous measurements—that is, it narrows down the possibilities for where this matter wound up—compared to previous analyses, the authors say.

The majority of the results fit perfectly with the currently accepted best theory of the universe.

But there are also signs of a crack—one that has been suggested in the past by other analyses, too.

"It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe than we would predict assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe," says analysis coauthor and University of Hawaii astrophysicist Eric Baxter.

That is, if you make a model incorporating all the currently accepted physical laws, then take the readings from the beginning of the universe and extrapolate it forward through time, the results look slightly different from what we actually measure around us today.

Specifically, today's readings find the universe is less "clumpy"—clustering in certain areas rather than evenly spread out—than the model would predict.

If other studies continue to find the same results, the scientists say, it may mean there is something missing from our existing model of the universe, but the results are not yet to the statistical level that scientists consider to be ironclad. That will take further study.

However, the analysis is a landmark as it yielded useful information from two very different telescope surveys. This is a much-anticipated strategy for the future of astrophysics, as more large telescopes come online in the next decades, but few had actually been carried out yet.

"I think this exercise showed both the challenges and benefits of doing these kinds of analyses," Chang says. "There's a lot of new things you can do when you combine these different angles of looking at the universe."

The studies can be found in three papers in the journal Physical Review D (one, two, three).

The South Pole Telescope is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and is operated by a collaboration led by the University of Chicago. The Dark Energy Survey was an international collaboration coordinated through Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and many institutions around the world.

Source: University of Chicago

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Political scientists have answers for you about military developments in the war in Ukraine, the efficacy of sanctions, and how to end the war.

A year ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, marking a major escalation in a long-smoldering armed conflict that began in 2014 with Russia's annexation of Crimea. In the past year, several hundred thousand soldiers have been killed on both sides, and the conflict has created Europe's largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.

On February 21, 2023, President Joe Biden marked the anniversary with a surprise visit to Ukraine. Hein Goemans, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester and the director of the Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation, called the visit "a loud and clear signal to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, and to the rest of the West, that the US is in it for the long haul."

So, what is happening in Ukraine now? And when will the war end? Not soon, according to Goemans, an expert on how international conflicts begin and end.

"If Putin left the stage, things could change quickly," he says. "But we're still in the informational stage of war, both sides are still trying new strategies." For peace negotiations to start, "both sides must know, more or less, how the war would end for them." And that could take from a year to a decade, he adds.

Randall Stone, a political science professor and the director of the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, predicts the war will last at least another year.

Putin "is committed to continuing the fighting because ending the war without a victory is riskier to him politically than continuing," says Stone. "He calculates that Russia's immense resources will grind down Ukrainian resistance eventually, and presumably continues to hope that NATO will eventually tire of the conflict and pressure Ukraine to make concessions."

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Theoretical chemists have developed a theory that can predict the threshold at which quantum dynamics switches from 'orderly' to 'random,' as shown through research using large-scale computations on photosynthesis models.

Some universities grapple with difficulties in integrating students from different countries. New research points to a method that both reduces academic and social gaps and increases well-being. The recipe for success is to work in pairs — as chosen by the teacher.

With market-leading LED innovation and field-proven reliability, Phoseon adds further energyefficient alternatives in UV lighting solutions across industrial curing, scientific illumination and non-contact UVC disinfection to Excelitas' extensive illumination technologies portfolio.

Submerged macrophytes grow underwater and represent a group of higher plants adapted to the aquatic environments. As they grow in water, the uptake of inorganic carbon is very different from that of terrestrial plants. However, the diversity and abundance of submerged macrophytes have been declining in recent decades, and pollutants discharged into aquatic ecosystems may be one of the main factors.

Successfully mitigating the impacts of climate change will rely heavily on innovation in science and technology.

Scientists are working on growing a glove made out of synthetic human skin in a lab — something that could revolutionize the field of skin grafts.

In early tests, researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center implanted lab-grown skin onto irregularly-shaped mice limbs — and with astonishing results, according to a recent interview with Wired.

Known as "skin constructs," these synthetic sheets of human cells are implanted on wounds that are too big for a traditional skin graft.

In the 40-odd years this procedure has existed, there hasn't been much in the way of progress for producing patches of fake skin that can be grafted onto parts of the body that aren't, well, flat.

In many cases, irregularly shaped wounds — or wounds on parts of the body that aren't flat like faces or fingers — require more patches of skin construct and often result in longer, more complex surgeries.

Now, a team of biomedical engineers at Columbia have created what they're calling "edgeless" or seamless patches to fit the body part they're made for.

And according to Alberto Pappalardo, a Columbia postdoctoral dermatologist who worked on the study, which was recently published in the journal Science Advances, early tests involving mice have been a resounding success.

"It was a perfect fit," Pappalardo said of the tiny pant leg-esque tissue that was slipped onto a mouse's hindlimb, which later integrated well into the animal's own skin.

The secret to the study's success lies, it seems, in one of its lead researcher's laser focus on geometry.

Hasan Erbil Abaci, a bioengineering expert who serves as Pappalardo's adviser at Columbia, told Wired that in order to create skin constructs that are close to the real thing, one must recreate the geometry of the appendage or body part that's wounded — a potentially huge upgrade over current skin constructs.

After doing a number of experiments in 3D printing small, synthetic tissues, the Columbia team made a breakthrough when they grew skin in a cylindrical shape.

"We thought, if we can make a cylinder, we can make any shape," Abaci told Wired.

While we're still many years away from clinical trials involving human subjects — the study's researchers told Wired that they're optimistic about the future.

For now, Abaci and his team are working on building enough skin to cover an adult male hand and are using small biopsies from a human subject's cells to do so. The goal is to create a piece of real or synthetic tissue that could be slipped on like a glove.

"You would only have to apply bandages around the wrist area," Abaci said, "and that would be the surgery."

More on weird skin: Scientists Found a Dinosaur's Face, Complete With Its Skin

The post Scientists Growing Skin That Can Be Slipped on Like a Glove appeared first on Futurism.

Leaked Design?

 may have just accidentally leaked what its upcoming $25,000 car will look like.

In a new corporate video, the automaker showed off early sketches for a number of electric car designs that may — or may not — hint at the design of the company's upcoming budget hatchback, Electrek reports.

The low-tier option was first announced by CEO Elon Musk back in 2020.

"Tesla will make a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that is also fully autonomous," he said during the company's Battery Day event in 2020. The next year, Musk promised that commercial production of the car would kick off in 2023.

As with everything to do with Musk and his EV company, we have to take that type of claim with a huge grain of salt.

The company has blown through countless of Musk's overly ambitious timelines in the past, so it wouldn't be a surprise if customers will have to wait several more years before they see a new design.

 

Tesla Hatchback

However, as Electrek points out, Tesla already started taking design submissions for a smaller car that would be built in China, releasing an early drawing of a sleek, wedge-shaped hatchback at the time.

Now, the company has released a new corporate video celebrating its new engineering headquarters in California. Eleven minutes and 38 seconds into the video, a table covered in sketches is easily visible.

As Electrek speculates, a white hatchback design, with a sloping, aerodynamic roofline and a much shorter wheelbase than Tesla's other vehicles just might be a glimpse of the future.

Keep Dreaming

To be clear, that's just a theory. Early sketches buried in a corporate video are far from a guarantee that Tesla is actually working on a cheaper hatchback, let alone what it will end up looking like. Another galaxy-brain possibility: Tesla might have included the sketch in the video as a very soft launch of the concept.

And that's not to mention the company's struggles to keep its prices low. In 2023, a $25,000 price point is a seriously aggressive target for Tesla, considering its current cheapest offering is the Model 3, which starts at well over $40,000.

But if the company does pull off a much smaller hatchback in the future, it could end up being a huge hit for Tesla — particularly in China, where smaller vehicles are the norm.

READ MORE: Did Tesla just leak the design of its new electric compact car? [Electrek]

More on Tesla: Tesla Cofounder Rails Against Elon Musk's "Crap" Autopilot Feature

The post Did Tesla Just Accidentally Leak What Its $25,000 Car Will Look Like? appeared first on Futurism.

For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been scored by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melting ice, the soft rustling of freshly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the nonstop racket of sneezes and coughs.

The lobby of my apartment building is alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats being cleared. Every time I walk down the street, I'm treated to the sight of watery eyes and red noses. Even my work Slack is rife with illness emoji, and the telltale pings of miserable colleagues asking each other why they feel like absolute garbage. "It's not COVID," they say. "I tested, like, a million times." Something else, they insist, is making them feel like a stuffed and cooked goose.

That something else might be the once-overlooked common cold. After three years of largely being punted out of the limelight, a glut of airway pathogens—among them, adenovirus, RSV, metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, common-cold coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses galore—are awfully common again. And they're really laying some people out. The good news is that there's no evidence that colds are actually, objectively worse now than they were before the pandemic started. The less-good news is that after years of respite from a bunch of viral nuisances, a lot of us have forgotten that colds can be a real drag.

[Read: The pandemic broke the flu … again]

Once upon a time—before 2020, to be precise—most of us were very, very used to colds. Every year, adults, on average, catch two to three of the more than 200 viral strains that are known to cause the illnesses; young kids may contract half a dozen or more as they toddle in and out of the germ incubators that we call "day cares" and "schools." The sicknesses are especially common during the winter months, when many viruses thrive amid cooler temps, and people tend to flock indoors to exchange gifts and breath. When the pandemic began, masks and distancing drove several of those microbes into hiding—but as mitigations have eased in the time since, they've begun their slow creep back.

For the majority of people, that's not really a big deal. Common-cold symptoms tend to be pretty mild and usually resolve on their own after a few days of nuisance. The virus infiltrates the nose and throat, but isn't able to do much damage and gets quickly swept out. Some people may not even notice they're infected at all, or may mistake the illness for an allergy—snottiness, drippiness, and not much more. Most of us know the drill: "Sometimes, it's just congestion for a few days and feeling a bit tired for a while, but otherwise you'll be just fine," says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago. As a culture, we've long been in the habit of dismissing these symptoms as just a cold, not enough of an inconvenience to skip work or school, or to put on a mask. (Spoiler: The experts I spoke with were adamant that we all really should be doing those things when we have a cold.)

The general infectious-disease dogma has always been that colds are a big nothing, at least compared with the flu. But gentler than the flu is not saying much. The flu is a legitimately dangerous disease that hospitalizes hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, and, like COVID, can sometimes saddle people with long-term symptoms. Even if colds are generally less severe, people can end up totally clobbered by headaches, exhaustion, and a burning sore throat; their eyes will tear up; their sinuses will clog; they'll wake up feeling like they've swallowed serrated razor blades, or like their heads have been pumped full of fast-hardening concrete. It's also common for cold symptoms to stretch out beyond a week, occasionally even two; coughs, especially, can linger long after the runny nose and headache resolve. At their worst, colds can lead to serious complications, especially in the very young, very old, and immunocompromised. Sometimes, cold sufferers end up catching a bacterial infection on top of their viral disease, a one-two punch that can warrant a trip to the ER. "The fact of the matter is, it's pretty miserable to have a cold," Landon told me. "And that's how it's always been."

[Read: Don't worry, it's not COVID]

As far as experts can tell, the average severity of cold symptoms hasn't changed. "It's about perception," says Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. After skipping colds for several years, "experiencing them now feels worse than usual," she told me. Frankly, this was sort of a problem even before COVID came onto the scene. "Every year, I have patients who call me with 'the worst cold they've ever had,'" Landon told me. "And it's basically the same thing they had last year." Now, though, the catastrophizing might be even worse, especially since pandemic-brain started prompting people to scrutinize every sniffle and cough.

There's still a chance that some colds this season might be a shade more unpleasant than usual. Many people falling sick right now are just coming off of bouts with COVID, flu, or RSV, each of which infected Americans (especially kids) by the millions this past fall and winter. Their already damaged tissues may not fare as well against another onslaught from a cold-causing virus.

It's also possible that immunity, or lack thereof, could be playing a small role. Many people are now getting their first colds in three-plus years, which means population-level vulnerability might be higher than it normally is this time of year, speeding the rate at which viruses spread and potentially making some infections more gnarly than they'd otherwise be. But higher-than-usual susceptibility seems unlikely to be driving uglier symptoms en masse, says Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious-disease physician and microbiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Not all cold-causing viruses leave behind good immunity—but many of those that do are thought to prompt the body to mount relatively durable defenses against truly severe infections, lasting several years or more.

Plus, for a lot of viruses going around right now, the immunity question is largely moot, Landon told me. So many different pathogens cause colds that a recent exposure to one is unlikely to do much against the next. A person could catch half a dozen colds in a five-year time frame and not even encounter the same type of virus twice.

[Read: Maybe consider not kissing that baby]

It's also worth noting that what some people are categorizing as the worst cold they've ever had might actually be a far more menacing virus, such as SARS-CoV-2 or a flu virus. At-home rapid tests for the coronavirus often churn out false-negative results in the early days of infection, even after symptoms start. And although the flu can sometimes be distinguished from a cold by its symptoms, they're often pretty similar. The illnesses can only be definitively diagnosed with a test, which can be difficult to come by.

The pandemic has steered our perception of illness into a false binary: Oh no, it's COVID or Phew, it's not. COVID is undoubtedly still more serious than a run-of-the-mill cold—more likely to spark severe disease or chronic, debilitating symptoms that can last months or years. But the range of severity between them overlaps more than the binary implies. Plus, Marcelin points out, what truly is "just" a cold for one person might be an awful, weeks-long slog for someone else, or worse—which is why, no matter what's turning your face into a snot factory, it's still important to keep your germs to yourself. The current outbreak of colds may not be any more severe than usual. But there's no need to make it bigger than it needs to be.

Researchers have identified a possible new targeted drug for treating acute myeloid  . In the future, the discovery may help patients with certain rare subtypes of the disease.

Several studies have predicted that the water splitting reaction could be catalyzed by certain groups of 2D materials — each measuring just a few atoms thick. New calculations present a new group of four 2D materials whose two sides each feature a different molecular composition, which could be especially well suited to the task.

New research suggests aquatic plants can be utilized as a tool to enhance the co-existence between aquatic invertebrates and their fish predators in urban ponds.

In the very near future, quantum computers are expected to revolutionize the way we compute, with new approaches to database searches, AI systems, simulations and more. But to achieve such novel quantum technology applications, photonic integrated circuits which can effectively control photonic quantum states — the so-called qubits — are needed. Physicists have made a breakthrough in this effort: for the first time, they demonstrated the controlled creation of single-photon emitters in silicon at the nanoscale.

 trains as long as 8 kilometres transport goods in the US, but in light of recent derailments, some are asking if current safety guidelines are up to scratch

Theoretical chemists have developed a theory that can predict the threshold at which quantum dynamics switches from 'orderly' to 'random,' as shown through research using large-scale computations on photosynthesis models.

Life began on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, but the history of humans and other vertebrates accounts for only a fraction of this timescale. Chordates (a group that includes vertebrates) and echinoderms (like starfish and sea urchins) are believed to have evolved from a common deuterostome ancestor around 500 million years ago. However, how the complex and sophisticated body plan of chordates evolved is still not fully clear, despite its importance from an evolutionary and developmental biology perspective. This topic has thus been the subject of much debate among experts for a long time.

Successfully mitigating the impacts of climate change will rely heavily on innovation in science and technology.

Life began on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, but the history of humans and other vertebrates accounts for only a fraction of this timescale. Chordates (a group that includes vertebrates) and echinoderms (like starfish and sea urchins) are believed to have evolved from a common deuterostome ancestor around 500 million years ago. However, how the complex and sophisticated body plan of chordates evolved is still not fully clear, despite its importance from an evolutionary and developmental biology perspective. This topic has thus been the subject of much debate among experts for a long time.

Scientists recently announced the invention of a nanowire 10,000 times thinner than a human hair that can be cheaply grown by common bacteria and tuned to 'smell' a vast array of chemical tracers — including those given off by people afflicted with a wide range of medical conditions, such as asthma and kidney disease. Thousands of these specially tuned wires, each sniffing out a different chemical, can be layered onto tiny, wearable sensors, allowing healthcare providers an unprecedented tool for monitoring potential health complications. Since these wires are grown by bacteria, they are organic, biodegradable and far greener than any inorganic nanowire.

Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00544-w

Substance that transforms into a conductive polymer using the body's own chemistry could improve implantable electronics.

The photo from aboard the Air Force's legendary U-2 spy plane shows the Chinese balloon. But where, exactly, was it taken? It's actually possible to answer that question using clues from the image.

(Image credit: Department of Defense)

Do you remember the time you and your friends started a secret club and didn't let anyone else join? Well, it's kind of like that in some small rural communities. Even though these communities really need to attract and keep newcomers, some longstanding residents belong to a special "locals" club. Many newcomers who moved from the cities in recent years would know this all too well.

Endangered great apes get  , just like humans. New evidence from wild bonobos shows us the   harms them, too.

Endangered great apes get  , just like humans. New evidence from wild bonobos shows us the   harms them, too.

In a study is published in Science China Chemistry and led by Prof. Yuqin Zou (College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan University), experiments were performed by using a series of in situ characterization and the density functional theory (DFT) calculation.

A new study integrates climate, land use, and socioeconomic data to explain and predict malaria dynamics at the village level. The approach could inform health care practitioners and make control strategies more efficient and cost-effective.

An interdisciplinary collaboration 10 years in the making used a materials science approach to 'fingerprint' the calcium mineral deposits known as microcalcifications that reveal pathological clues to the progression of breast cancer and potentially other diseases.

Scientists recently announced the invention of a nanowire 10,000 times thinner than a human hair that can be cheaply grown by common bacteria and tuned to 'smell' a vast array of chemical tracers — including those given off by people afflicted with a wide range of medical conditions, such as asthma and kidney disease. Thousands of these specially tuned wires, each sniffing out a different chemical, can be layered onto tiny, wearable sensors, allowing healthcare providers an unprecedented tool for monitoring potential health complications. Since these wires are grown by bacteria, they are organic, biodegradable and far greener than any inorganic nanowire.

People who regularly use laxatives, a common treatment for constipation, may have more than a 50% increased risk of developing dementia than people who do not use laxatives, according to a new study. Researchers also found people who used only osmotic laxatives, a type of laxative that attracts water to the colon to soften stool, had an even greater risk. Other types of laxatives are bulk-forming, stool-softening, and stimulating. The study does not prove that laxatives cause dementia. It only shows an association.

Huge amounts of technical or Kraft lignin are formed during pulp production. This lignin is difficult to process and so is usually just incinerated for heat production. A team of researchers, reporting in the journal Angewandte Chemie, have now succeeded in developing a green method for recovering the flavoring agent vanillin from this raw material. The materials used in this method are all recycled from papermaking processes, and only power and heat need to be added.

Northwestern University and the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) astrophysicists using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island have discovered the tightest ultracool dwarf binary system ever observed.

A fascinating quest to discover the identity of a prolific early-20th-century Indigenous painter has led a Griffith directed research team to the top and bottom of Australia—and to Paris—and has finally given the artist recognition and new meaning to his modern-day family.

Warming a crystal of the mineral fresnoite, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists discovered that excitations called phasons carried heat three times farther and faster than phonons, the excitations that usually carry heat through a material.

People often associate Escherichia coli with contaminated food, but E. coli has long been a workhorse in biotechnology. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have demonstrated that the bacterium has further value as part of a system to detect heavy metal contamination in water.

The tropical Pacific is currently experiencing a prolonged La Niña condition, which has great impact on the weather and climate globally. A La Niña condition emerged in late 2020, followed by the 2nd-year surface cooling in late 2021 and the 3rd-year cooling again in late 2022. The explanations for these prolonged La Niña events are still lacking, and there is a clear need to understand the underlying processes involved.

Metasurfaces are highly versatile for manipulating the amplitude, phase, or polarization of light. During the last decade, metasurfaces have been proposed for a vast range of applications—from imaging and holography to the generation of complex light field patterns. Yet, most optical metasurfaces developed to date are isolated optical elements that work only with external light sources.

A review article, published in Science China Chemistry and led by Prof. Fan Dong and associate research fellow Bangwei Deng (Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Huzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), was written to inspire more investigations and studies on the intrinsic active sites during the dynamic evolution of catalysts that could promote the optimization of the catalyst system to further improve the performance of CO2RR.

A new study has found open, light-filled forest edges support more flowers and pollinators than the dark interior of second-growth forests and the value of these areas should not be overlooked.

Fessing Up

 has confirmed that it tested its bizarrely-behaved Bing AI chatbot for way longer than we realized — and somehow, it still managed to be totally unhinged upon wider launch.

In a statement provided to Futurism, Microsoft confirmed that it had indeed been quietly beta-testing the AI in India, and admitted that the tests went back further than just a few months ago.

"Sydney is an old code name for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing more than a year ago," the statement from a Microsoft spokesperson reads. "The insights we gathered as part of that have helped to inform our work with the new Bing preview."

Hard Lessons

It's unclear what, if anything, the tech giant has learned from its Sydney experiment given that prior to it being "lobotomized" over the past week, the AI was still trying to break up marriages, writing a hit list, and generally acting not entirely well.

In fact, it's hard to tell if Microsoft has learned anything from its last big foray into AI because at least with Tay, its Twitter chatbot that was swiftly goaded into racism, they put the kibosh on it in less than a day. Meanwhile, the Bing AI was allowed to continue pretty deranged for weeks before the company stepped in in a serious way.

Microsoft told us in its statement that the company will "continue to tune our techniques" and is "working on more advanced models to incorporate the learnings and feedback so that we can deliver the best user experience possible," but as we reported yesterday, the feedback from Indian beta testers about the AI "misbehaving" and spewing disinformation seemed to not be heeded in time for the chatbot to get a wider launch in the West.

Hopefully now that Microsoft has given its latest chatbot the AI version of brain surgery it'll start acting a bit more normal — and maybe, with any luck, the company will have learned some lessons, too.

More on AI insanity: OpenAI CEO Says AI Will Give Medical Advice to People Too Poor to Afford Doctors

The post Microsoft Admits to Testing Deranged Bing AI Long Before Officially Launching It appeared first on Futurism.

People often associate Escherichia coli with contaminated food, but E. coli has long been a workhorse in biotechnology. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have demonstrated that the bacterium has further value as part of a system to detect heavy metal contamination in water.

A new study has found open, light-filled forest edges support more flowers and pollinators than the dark interior of second-growth forests and the value of these areas should not be overlooked.

Nature Communications, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36583-0

How animals learn to generalize from one context to another remains unresolved. Here, the authors show that the abstract representations that are thought to underlie this form of generalization emerge naturally in neural networks trained to perform multiple tasks.

Australian households produce about 12 million tons of waste every year. That puts the sector almost on par with manufacturing or construction.

PLUS. Ved hjælp af sukkernedbrydende enzymer kan en svensk udviklet gel danne elektrisk ledende forbindelser, der er biokompatible selv i hjernen på levende forsøgsdyr.

Is it news that people are angry with Marjorie Taylor Greene?

This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter's newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents' heads explode in white-hot rage.

"We need a national divorce," she tweeted. "We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this." The next day, she followed up by elaborating that she would like to see "a legal agreement" that would separate states to resolve ideological and political disagreements "while maintaining our legal union." Rearranged this way, Americans can decide where and how to live, Greene concluded, and "we don't have to argue with one another anymore."

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

The Republican representative's words prompted the outcry you'd expect from Democrats and columnists who questioned both her loyalty to the country and Republican leaders' cowardice in refusing to rein her in. But Greene's ideas are not as radical as some might be inclined to think. First, because what she's calling for sounds not unlike Ronald Reagan's idea of federalism. Second, because Greene is hardly the first person to suggest that the political party in power is making the United States wholly unlivable. I'm old enough to remember all the liberals who swore they'd move to Canada if Donald Trump won in 2016. (They didn't!)

What's interesting about Greene's call for a "national divorce" is how it fits into a much longer history of similar calls for secession or disunion in American history—and what the growing frequency of such calls tells us about this particular modern political moment. "That it keeps coming up suggests there is something to it, and waving it away with reminders of Appomattox or quotes from Texas v. White probably isn't going to cut it," Richard Kreitner, the author of the 2020 book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union, told me. This persistent theme in our politics, he added, "represents an impulse that cannot be simply wished away or ignored."

This week, I talked with Kreitner about that constant theme—and whether it's time for the people of the United States to reassess their 250-year union.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

---

Elaine Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that there should be a "national divorce" between red and blue states. Obviously, this is what Greene is good at—saying something wild, getting a reaction. What was yours?

Richard Kreitner: Calls for secession have been becoming more common, louder, and have come from more prominent figures in the 21st century. So it's not too surprising to find somebody in House Republican leadership embracing the idea.

She's calling for a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. That's federalism. We can have arguments about what exactly that means, what the Founders thought it should mean, but she's just arguing that the states should have more powers over things than the federal government. That's the debate we've been having in American politics for decades.

So, to wrap it in this banner of "national divorce" seems to me to be taking advantage of all the talk of a second civil war, the boogaloo bois, and the secession talk that is growing in prominence. But each side has been talking about secession for many years—when they're out of power. When they're in power, they say, "Oh no, you can't do that. That's treasonous."

Godfrey: When I think of secession, I think of the Civil War, and then I think of Texas. But you've written about how it goes back to the very beginning—how the United States has never been all that united.

Kreitner: My book starts by pointing out that the colonial period lasted 150 years—a very long time, about the same amount of time since our Civil War. And during that time, America was disunited. The colonies were, as Marjorie Taylor Greene would have them now, totally independent of one another. Their only relationship, their only political relationship, was with England itself, and that was a fairly loose relationship.

So this was the original state of things in America, one that the colonists themselves liked very much. They had control over their own affairs; there was very little meddling.

Occasionally, somebody—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin—would have the idea that it would be better to organize some kind of federation of the colonies, with Britain's approval, to organize trade, land disputes, border issues, relationships with the Indians, and mutual defense. Every time somebody proposed that idea, they were laughed out of the room, because people considered the very idea of union to be antithetical to their cherished liberties.

Forming a union was kind of the last thing on their mind. Then we get to the Revolution. A lot of us are taught in school that the Revolution was fought to create a union, to create a nation. And it's the exact opposite of that. The Union was created as a means to the end of securing independence from England. It was a last resort.

John Adams, when he goes to Philadelphia, is talking about how different Americans are from one another, how much they hate each other. George Washington in the Continental Army camp outside Boston in 1775 is talking about how much the New Englanders smell. Anytime these politicians meet in the Continental Congress, they're described as a conclave of ambassadors from different nations. Many of them think a union will not survive after the war.

No golden age of American unity exists that you can point to and say, "That's when we were united." Even back then, people were issuing threats of secession when they were out of power, and then defending the Union as perpetual and inviolable once they had the power. Thomas Jefferson does this famous turnaround. In 1798, he mulls whether to threaten secession because he doesn't like Adams's administration. Then he wins the election of 1800, and says, "We must hold the Union together at any cost!" The people backing Adams now proposed secession.

Godfrey: Because of the Civil War, we think of secessionist calls as primarily reactionary. Are we right about that?

Kreitner: When I was researching, I was especially interested in whether there were any people whose values and ideals I shared—who had espoused the idea of secession not for white-supremacist reasons or to preserve slavery. I quickly landed on the abolitionists.

Many were in favor of northern secession from the Union in the years right before the Civil War. Their argument was gaining traction in the 1850s because they thought that participation in the Union was an important pillar in maintaining the institution of slavery. They thought that without the guarantee of the federal government's aid to suppress an insurrection among the enslaved, slavery would be a much more insecure institution, the price of slaves would plummet, and the institution would die out.

John Quincy Adams, back in Congress after his presidency, introduced a petition from a group of citizens from a small town in Massachusetts demanding the dissolution of the United States, because they didn't want their tax dollars to go toward the support of slavery anymore. These were ordinary American heroes, far from traitors.

Godfrey: Obviously the secession of the southern states was the big culmination of many years of those sentiments. When did we start hearing them again after the Civil War?

Kreitner: The Civil War was a national trauma; nearly a million people died. The fear of disunion persisted in American politics. The idea went underground for years.

In the 1890s, the populist movement and the rise of socialism in the United States were both opposed on the grounds that they were disunionist movements. Populism in the 1930s also dabbles in secessionism. That's when a bill is introduced in a state legislature calling for secession for the first time since the Civil War, in North Dakota. Then in the '60s, it starts to become an ethnic thing. There was the Republic of New Afrika, a movement of Black Americans in northern cities that called for the surrender of five southern states as a form of reparations for slavery. Then Hispanic Americans demanded the return of the Southwest that was lost in the Mexican-American War as a sovereign homeland. From a hippie newspaper published on the Lower East Side came a call for the creation of what was called the Underground States of America, which would be a kind of hippie confederacy. Lesbian separatist communes also envisioned themselves as secessionists.

Obviously, these were not order-shattering movements, but the idea lingered. Secession has always been available to malcontents of one kind or another. It defines American history.

Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene's tweets are not representative of some new treasonous trend?

Kreitner: The trend is old in the sense that American politics is starting to look rather similar to the way it was in the beginning, which was extremely fractured, totally dysfunctional, with foreign enemies prowling around the perimeter to see what kind of discord they could scare up, and real questions about whether the Union could survive.

We didn't get through because of some predestined outcome; there's no guarantee that we're going to stay together. In many cases, our staying together had to do with mere chance and fear of the unknown—particularly fear of the economic consequences of disunion.

Godfrey: You're saying that the frequency of these calls is not surprising, but that we should pay attention to them.

Kreitner: We're totally undecided on this fundamental question of "Do we want to be a multiracial democracy or not?" While we persist in having that fundamental argument, we're going to see political tensions. And when you see that in American history, you see secessionist movements.

So the course of growing hatred, rancor, and constitutional paralysis continues. I charted quite exactly from 2004, when there were memes going around showing maps separating "Jesusland" from the United States of Canada, to 2012, when you saw all these petitions from every state in the country arguing for secession. Then, of course, in 2016, you have Calexit.

California Representative Zoe Lofgren talked about secession after the 2016 election. She said: "Rational people, not the fringe, are now talking about whether states could be separated from the U.S." I don't know if anybody's quoted her in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I can't imagine her response today would be: "Oh boy, I guess we both have this idea! Maybe let's have a substantive conversation about the merits and the drawbacks of being in one country together."

[Peter Wehner: Marjorie Taylor Greene's civil war]

In the coming years, especially with the Supreme Court so heavily stacked in favor of the right, the left is going to have a lot more cause for talking about secession than the right. And I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene's screed—insane and stupid as it is—is an invitation that should be accepted: to talk concretely about whether this thing is working or not.

Godfrey: What would the result of that conversation be?

Kreitner: I don't know what the end of it is. But the beginning is—instead of piling on and saying, "This is treason. You can't talk about that; it's un-American"—that we actually are capable of not only having conversations but also making decisions about what kind of country and what kind of government we want to have.

After all, we're not seeing any positive arguments for the union. You look at all the commentary, and you don't see any soaring odes to our shared nationality, why it's important for us to remain together as a people. My response to Greene is not "I must remain united with this person at any cost," but "Why would I want to be part of a government where this person is a leading figure? Why would I want to remain loyal to a Constitution so patently broken that somebody like this ascends to the highest ranks of power?"

I don't have a programmatic view of what should happen, no firm sense of where to draw the new borders or what to do with people stuck behind enemy lines, only an understanding, based on my reading of American history, that this is a persistent theme in our politics and represents an impulse that cannot simply be wished away or ignored.

Last week was the 12th anniversary of the arrival of Larry the Cat to 10 Downing Street, the London residence and home office of the United Kingdom's prime minister, where he was bestowed with the official title of "Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office." He was brought to Downing Street in 2011, at the age of four, and tasked with controlling rats that had been seen at the residence. Though cats had been employed as chief mousers for centuries, Larry was the first to be given the official title. As a permanent resident, his term in office has overlapped with five prime ministers to date.

"So far as the influence of the newspaper upon the mind and morals of the people is concerned, there can be no rational doubt that the telegraph has caused vast injury." So said the The New York Times in 1858, when the transatlantic cable linking North America and Europe was completed.

Einstein's special theory of relativity governs our understanding of both the flow of time and the speed at which objects can move. In special relativity, the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit to the universe. Nothing can travel faster than it. Every single moving object in the universe is constrained by that fundamental limit. Speed and Mass This isn't something like the speed of sound. Early scientists wondered if we could ever go faster than that speed, not because of some fundamental rule of the universe, but because we didn't know if our engineering and materials science capabilities could withstand the extreme turbulence generated by moving at such speeds. But everyday objects already surpass the speed of sound. For example, the crack of a whip is caused by the tip creating a sonic boom as it travels faster than the sound speed. Read More: Is There a Particle That Can Travel Back in Time? The problem with trying to surpass the speed of light is that as you go faster, the more kinetic energy you have. But relativity tells us that energy is the same as mass, so the faster you go the more massive you become (and yes, this means that a moving baseball has more mass than one standing still, but that's a tiny effect). As you approach the speed of light, your mass balloons up to infinity. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more out of control your mass becomes. With higher masses, you must push yourself harder to accelerate, and you quickly find yourself in a position where it would take an infinite amount of energy to overcome light speed. Exploring Light Speed This isn't just a matter of clever engineering or figuring out some trick – this is built into the fabric of the universe. That said, there are proposals out there for designing specialized devices that could supposedly overcome this limit without outright breaking relativity. These concepts work because special relativity is a law of local physics: It tells you that you can never measure nearby motion going faster than light speed. For example, a wormhole could send you to a distant destination faster than you could go traveling normally through space, even though you could travel down the wormhole as slowly as you want. The "Alcubierre drive" is essentially a warp drive, deforming spacetime near you so that it can pull you forward as fast as you want to go – even faster than light – without once even firing a rocket. Read More: Black Holes Are Accelerating The Expansion Of The Universe, Say Cosmologists But these fanciful ideas suffer from two drawbacks. For one, to function they each require the use of some exotic form of matter, namely matter that has negative mass. Negative mass is truly weird. If you were to drop a ball of negative mass, it would fly up. If you kicked the ball, it would roll in the opposite direction, and so on. It would completely break everything we know about movement and momentum, and we have absolutely no examples of negative mass existing in our universe. Without negative mass, you can't build a wormhole or a warp drive. Second, the ability to go faster than light automatically permits backwards time travel. As soon as you concoct methods to cheat the speed of light, you can set up scenarios where signals (or spaceships) can return to their origin point before they departed. This sets up all sorts of messy causality-violating situations and paradoxes, like dropping off a bomb to destroy your spaceship before it's departed – but unless it departs, the bomb never gets delivered. What's Possible Since causality seems kind of important in our universe, with the past staying safely in the past and causes always preceding effects, violating that aspect of reality also seems like a no-go. The speed of light limit is baked into the most fundamental relationship in the universe: the relationship between space and time as expressed through special relativity. Every single time we test that theory, we are also testing every other aspect of the theory, including its limitations of light speed. And special relativity is perhaps one of the most well-tested theories in all of science. For over a century, it has stood strong. This isn't to say that someday in the far future, humanity couldn't concoct some new theory of physics that completely rewrites our understanding of speed, space, time and causality. Which makes it impossible to outright rule out faster-than-light travel. But for now it seems like we, and everything else in the universe, is permanently stuck in the slow lane.

Researchers injected a leech with gel that transforms into a soft electrode, letting them control its muscle contractions – this gel could eventually be used in the brain to treat neurological conditions without surgery

Researchers say findings indicate quantity of sleep alone is not enough to benefit; quality is key

It is no mystery that a good night's sleep and a lie-in can improve your day. But researchers are suggesting that, far from just being enjoyable, quality sleep may even add years to people's lives.

Men who regularly sleep well could live almost five years longer than those who do not, while women could benefit by two years, research suggests. And they could also enjoy better health during their lives.

Continue reading…

Samples of the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu were collected and brought to Earth by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. We investigated the macromolecular organic matter in Ryugu samples and found that it contains aromatic and aliphatic carbon, ketone, and …

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft collected samples from the surface of the carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid (162173) Ryugu and brought them to Earth. The samples were expected to contain organic molecules, which record processes that occurred in the early Solar …

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A 20th-century battle for equal treatment of female scientists resonates today

History shows that neither patriarchy nor parity is inevitable

A luminous scholar and mentor at the interface of chemistry, biology, and medicine

Skin-interfaced microfluidic systems help assess health status and chemical exposure

An electrically conducting soft polymer is synthesized within living tissue

Understanding the rapid growth of deer antlers could have applications in medicine

Lactiplantibacillus plantarum promotes growth in undernourished mice

Land grabbing typically leads to social and environmental harms

This year marks the 175th anniversary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science). In striving to advance its mission, the organization's theme for its annual meeting (2 to 5 March in Washington, DC), "…

But will doctors embrace the grainier, lower-resolution images of the body's insides?

Many ask authors to disclose use of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence

Google's scheme to fix mistakes works better as it gets bigger

Analysis of hundreds of mpox patients suggests it is "a different disease" in those with compromised immune systems

Research team hits on formula to create stem cells from tissue of adult

China is seen as main target in rejecting joint projects with certain foreign entities

Scientists summarize the methods used to explore how the Earth's magnetic field influences the behavior of a wide variety of animal species. This review is an ideal starting point for scientists who wish to enter this fascinating but still poorly-understood topic in modern sensory biology.

Bowel leakage, the need for anal incontinence protection and a restricted social life may cause severe, decades-long suffering among women with obstetric   to the anal opening, according to a new study.

The endangered Saimaa ringed seal is an Ice Age relict living in the highly labyrinthine Lake Saimaa, Finland. The newly published work shows that although individual seals have greatly reduced genetic variation, the loss of variation has been complementary, preserving the adaptive potential of the whole population.

Researchers show that while strong distractions may automatically capture our attention, the trained brain can rapidly suppress such distractions to help us efficiently reach our goals.

An air filter made out of corn protein instead of petroleum products can concurrently capture small particulates as well as toxic chemicals like formaldehyde that current air filters can't. The research could lead to better air purifiers, particularly in regions of the world that suffer from very poor air quality. The more environmentally friendly air filter was able to simultaneously capture 99.5% of small particulate matter, similar to commercial HEPA filters, and 87% of formaldehyde, which is higher than specially designed air filters for those types of toxics.

Scientists have successfully recorded brain activity from freely moving octopuses, a feat made possible by implanting electrodes and a data logger directly into the creatures. The study, published online in Current Biology on February 23, is a critical step forward in figuring out how octopus' brains control their behavior, and could provide clues to the common principles needed for intelligence and cognition to occur.

A new study shows fasting can trigger a negative effect on fighting infection on a cellular level in mouse models.

New Coke

 is getting deep into the artificial intelligence game thanks to a newly-inked deal that will see it partnering with 

.

The press release announcing the deal did not say how much the partnership between Coca-Cola, OpenAI, and the Bain consulting firm is worth, but given that the AI firm recently got a multi-billion-dollar contract with Microsoft, there's a good chance it's worth a pretty penny — and it seems particularly significant because of Coke's storied history in advertising, a domain that the release seems to hint could be a target for the AI tech.

In the statement, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy said that the company is "excited to unleash the next generation of creativity offered by this rapidly emerging technology" using tech including 

 and 

.

"We see opportunities to enhance our marketing through cutting-edge AI," Quincy said, "along with exploring ways to improve our business operations and capabilities."

Marketability

Coke is the first company to sign on to Bain and OpenAI's new partnership, and although there's no word yet on exactly what the deal will entail, the press release hints at marketing, sales, and human resources implementations, the latter two of which sound pretty dystopian, to be honest.

In a statement provided to The Grocer, a British food news site, Coke CFO and president John Murphy indicated that the marketing prospects were one of the biggest draws of the deal.

"We have a couple of really interesting cases with the marketing team to enhance the work that we're already doing with our new marketing model," Murphy said, "and to be able to marry the ability to deliver creative content at speed and to do it with exponential efficiency."

Long Time Coming

New deal aside, this isn't the first time Coca-Cola has gotten into the AI game.

Back in 2017, the company announced that it was going to start using "AI-powered" vending machines as part of its artificial intelligence-centered business strategy that uses algorithms to determine which flavors are performing best and other key metrics.

What remains to be seen, however, is how well AI-generated marketing will perform, and if it will get us one step closer to normalizing the uncanny sensation that a lot of AI art instills in viewers.

More on AI: Samsung Now Cloning Users' Voices So an AI Can Answer Calls For Them

The post Coca-Cola Signs Deal With OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT appeared first on Futurism.

Crawlspace Crypto

Some people go to incredible lengths to make some extra bucks on the side.

A former high school employee in a small town in Massachusetts has been accused of running a secret cryptocurrency mining operation in the school's crawlspace, local ABC-affiliated news station WCVB reports, stealing nearly $18,000 in electricity from the district.

The unusual discovery prompted an investigation by law enforcement, and even the Department of Homeland Security showed up. After all, it's not every day you discover 11 mysterious computers running crypto-mining software tucked next to a public building's HVAC system.

Free Power

Following three months of investigating, law enforcement concluded that the racks had been running for eight months, costing the school district $17,492 in electricity.

The man accused of setting up the mining rig, a former assistant facilities director named Nadeam Nahas who resigned from the school in March 2022, has since been charged with fraudulent use of electricity and vandalizing a school, according to WCVB.

But whether Nahas was able to get much of a return is unclear. While major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have made some gains so far this year, they still have a  long way to go to recover from the disastrous second half of 2022, which wiped out over half of Bitcoin's value in a matter of months.

When WCVB asked Babson College IT professor Steve Gordon if it makes sense to mine crypto anywhere in New England, he had a straightforward answer.

"Not really," Gordon told the station. "Not unless you make an arrangement at some point in time with an energy provider to provide it very cheaply."

READ MORE: Former Cohasset employee charged with stealing thousands from town to power cryptomine [WCVB]

The post Man Accused of Running Secret Crypto Mining Operation in High School Crawlspace appeared first on Futurism.

A mother in Alabama gave birth to rare "MoMo" twins after a previous twin pregnancy.

Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00492-5

A water-filled gel has the strength and elasticity of natural tendon.

The meat-eating dinosaurs known as theropods that roamed the ancient Earth ranged in size from the bus-sized T. rex to the smaller, dog-sized Velociraptor. Scientists puzzling over how such wildly different dinosaur sizes evolved recently found—to their surprise– that smaller and larger theropod dinosaurs like these didn't necessarily get that way merely by growing slower or faster.

Deep in the evergreen woodlands of Washington's Olympic Peninsula sits a forest-within-a-forest: groves of Douglas fir, western hemlock, Sitka spruce and western white pine in evenly planted rows surrounded by a tall deer fence.

The boundaries between biology and technology are becoming blurred. Researchers at Linköping, Lund and Gothenburg universities in Sweden have successfully grown electrodes in living tissue using the body's molecules as triggers. The result, published in the journal Science, paves the way for the formation of fully integrated electronic circuits in living organisms.

The severe impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle on the North Island, and the five severe weather events experienced by the Thames–Coromandel region in just the first two months of 2023, are merely the latest examples of more frequent erosion-triggering rainfall events over the past decade.

Several studies have predicted that the water splitting reaction could be catalyzed by certain groups of 2D materials—each measuring just a few atoms thick. One particularly promising group are named 2D Janus materials, whose two sides each feature a different molecular composition.

Granular materials contain large numbers of small, discrete particles, which collectively behave like uniform media. Their thermal conductivity is crucial to understanding their overall behavior—but so far, researchers haven't considered how this value is affected by the surface roughness of their constituent particles.