Physicists have invented a new type of analog quantum computer that can tackle hard physics problems that the most powerful digital supercomputers cannot solve.

Jennifer Coolidge's comeback has been one of the best feel-good Hollywood narratives in recent years. Since starring in The White Lotus as the lovably loony Tanya, she's enjoyed the kind of critical acclaim and career resurgence that few actresses in their 60s—let alone those who work mostly in comedies and broke out decades ago—ever do. In the past few months, she's won her first Golden Globe and her first Emmy. She nabbed nominations at the Screen Actors Guild Awards two years in a row. Entertainment Weekly named her Entertainer of the Year.

The accolades are well deserved; Coolidge's work in The White Lotus is excellent—sharp and sympathetic, hilarious and heart-wrenching. Yet much of her renaissance has been attributed to her personality. Her acceptance speeches are so unpredictable, and her talk-show appearances so self-deprecating, that her off-screen antics have become the subject of YouTube compilations and The Cut's tongue-in-cheek "I Can't Shut Up About …" column. Even her first TikTok was deemed a "cinematic masterpiece."

Although Coolidge is a hoot to watch whenever she's handed the mic, her pre–White Lotus work deserves just as much recognition. I'm not talking about the roles for which she's best known—Paulette in Legally Blonde, Stifler's mom in American Pie, and Sherri Ann Cabot in Best in Show—though they're obviously worth revisiting. I'm talking about the roles she herself at the Golden Globes called "little jobs that, like, kept me going" when her career seemed in stasis: the guest turns on sitcoms, the thankless parts in big-screen spoofs, that one scene from Soul Men with Bernie Mac. Together, they prove that Coolidge's superpower is taking the roles the industry has typecast her in—oversexed, obnoxious women of a certain age—and humanizing them into something more than a mere laughingstock.

[Read: The speeches that saved the Golden Globes]

Her supporting turn in Amazon's Shotgun Wedding is the latest example. Although the action rom-com about a marriage ceremony that turns into a hostage situation (just go with it) started streaming last weekend, the film was made before the release of The White Lotus Season 1, and it cast Coolidge in a classically Coolidge-ian part. She plays Carol, the eccentric mother of the groom who at one point tries to negotiate with her captors by informing them that she was "Milford, Michigan's top realtor in 1998 and again in 2007." In another performer's hands, Carol would've simply been comic relief. The mediocre script positions her as a stereotypical overbearing relative whose sole purpose is to deliver silly one-liners and look funny shooting a machine gun while wearing a floppy sun hat.

But Coolidge makes Carol all that and more by rooting the character's most ludicrous ideas in fear rather than stupidity, and her oddball whims in years of being overlooked and underestimated. "I'm a mother; I can be upset about a lot of things at the same time," she says more than once. In one scene, Carol is convinced that the couple have ended up in a ditch; her repeated request for the staff to "check all ditches" sounds not just absurd but truly desperate. Carol, as embodied by Coolidge, isn't some pathetic, clueless narcissist; she's justifiably terrified.

[Read: 13 feel-good shows to watch this winter]

Coolidge is a master at making a meal out of scant scenes in lackluster—or, in the case of Shotgun Wedding, fun but forgettable—material. After watching the film and hearing Coolidge's assessment of her own work during her Golden Globes speech, I revisited some of the projects from that critically maligned period of her career, in the late 2000s and 2010s. Watching them now, it's striking how Coolidge threw herself into the thinnest roles. In her introduction as "the White Bitch of Gnarnia" in Epic Movie, for instance, she slips out of her sleigh as if she can't bear to part with it, keeping her body glued to the carriage and letting her feet dangle perilously above the ground for a beat too long. In Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, she takes a one-scene part as a manipulative driving instructor and makes her the scariest driving instructor ever committed to screen, so rageful that the audience can't help but wonder where the fury comes from.

Meanwhile, on TV, the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls couldn't get enough of Coolidge. The show promoted her to a series regular after she elevated Sophie, the titular duo's sex-obsessed Polish neighbor, from a raunchy fool into a fully realized character. Whenever Sophie stepped into the diner setting of the show, Coolidge made her sound beyond delighted to see the girls, turning the woman from an annoying oversharer into someone who's just overeager, friendly to a fault. No wonder she became a fan favorite, just as Tanya would years later.

In other words, Coolidge's greatest feat as a comedic performer is her ability to make the audience share her curiosity and appreciation for her characters, many of whom were written to be the butt of jokes about older women. Some, like Carol, are supposed to be pitiable simpletons. Others, like Sophie, are cringeworthy for having robust sexual appetites. Yet Coolidge knows what people expect of Carols and Sophies, so she doesn't stop at making the audience laugh with her off-kilter line readings and impeccable timing. She uses her magic to turn objects of ridicule into objects of affection.

Planetary pinball.

Step-by-Step

A new report from Semafor alleges that Silicon Valley darling and ChatGPT creator 

 has been making major moves to hire an "army" of outside contractors to better train a model how to code — an operation that could ultimately render entry-level coding jobs extinct.

The company, per Semafor, has brought on roughly 1,000 of these contractors — most of whom live "in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe," according to sources familiar with the matter — in the past six months. About 60 percent of those hired were reportedly brought to do data labeling work, while the other 40 percent are computer programmers tasked with making software engineering datasets to train OpenAI's models on.

"A well-established company," reads a translated Spanish-language OpenAI job listing posted by an outsourced recruiter, according to Semafor, "which is determined to provide world-class AI technology to make the world a better and more efficient place, is looking for a Python Developer."

During the interview process, prospects are reportedly asked to complete unpaid five-hour-long coding exams that involve identifying basic coding problems and providing solutions, explaining their step-by-step thinking in written English. One of OpenAI's products, Codex, is an AI-powered text-to-code generator designed to translate written word into functioning computer programs.

"They most likely want to feed this model with a very specific kind of training data," an anonymous South American programming applicant told Semafor, "where the human provides a step-by-step layout of their thought process."

Join the Club

Codex has been mostly trained on code taken from GitHub, a practice that has offered the model some success as an assistive program, autocompleting and spell-checking code with some proficiency. GitHub — notably owned by Microsoft, OpenAI's financial overlord — even offers a Codex-powered "Copilot," which is basically like Grammarly for programmers.

The work of these recently-hired contractors, however, would almost certainly take that type of AI to the next level.

Knowing what a line of code might look like is one thing. Having a nuanced understanding of why and how a program needs to be written is entirely another, and by quietly outsourcing human engineers' thought processes, OpenAI seems intent on closing that gap.

And while these machines likely won't be writing any high-level programs anytime terribly soon, it feels fair to say that programmers looking for lower-level coding work should be wary of job prospects in the near future. Sorry, y'all — we hate to see anyone else join that party.

READ MORE: OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete [Semafor]

More on OpenAI contractors: OpenAI Apparently Paid People in the Developing World $2/Hour to Look at the Most Disturbing Content Imaginable

The post OpenAI Reportingly Hiring "Army" of Devs to Train AI to Replace Entry-Level Coders appeared first on Futurism.

The US Food and Drug Administration has proposed that blood donor assessments measure individual risk and do not exclude people based on their sexual orientation or gender

Altering the rate of respiration in mitochondria changes how fast neurons grow, and making mouse neurons grow humanlike ones, a study finds. 

Sports have long been a part of human history. The need to compete and the drive to outperform opponents has been around since the beginning of modern society. In all games, fatigue — whether it be mental or physical — plays a role, and stamina is often key. Read More: Sports That People Played in Ancient History On most occasions, matches end after a few hours, depending on the sport. Every now and then, however, one game will slip through the cracks of this typical time limit and go on for far longer than expected. Here are some of the longest sporting events in human history, as well as how fatigue impacted the players. 1. Baseball: Eight and a Half Hours Believe it or not, the longest game in baseball history didn't even take place between two major league baseball teams. Rather, it's two minor league teams — the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox — that hold the throne. Beginning on the evening of April 18, 1981, the Red Wings and Red Sox battled back and forth until just past 4 a.m., when league executive Harold Cooper ordered the game to stop. By 4 a.m., some hitters had been suffering through an eight-hour slump. Once the game was called, there were a combined 60 strikeouts accrued by both teams, likely due to extreme fatigue. While baseball isn't considered as physical of a sport as others, the length of the game tired the players out entirely. "By the 30th inning, I was really starting to be concerned about the players being so groggy somebody might get hurt," said Pawtucket owner Ben Mondor in an interview with The New York Times after the suspension. The game wasn't resumed until June 23. On that date, the game continued for only half an hour before Pawtucket brought in the game-winning run in the bottom of the 33rd inning. The game lasted just over eight and a half hours from start to finish in on-field playtime, but technically lasted just over two months. 2. Cricket: 43 hours over 12 days In March of 1939, the England national cricket team arrived in South Africa for a Test cricket match against the South African national team. The match, scheduled to begin on March 3, began as planned. After 12 days and over 43 hours of play, there was still no winner. The game eventually was called off because the English team needed to catch a boat back home. Many of the players wrote about the game as it was ongoing. One of them, South African batsman Dudley Nourse, said on day nine, "We had become thoroughly tired of the game and the usual witticisms were replaced by ironic laughter. Most of the joy seemed to have gone out of the game and we played merely because we were compelled to complete a contract we had started." While cricket isn't as physically taxing on the body as other sports, mental fatigue can certainly impact play. According to a 2018 study published Progress in Brain Research, mental fatigue directly impacts endurance, motor skills and decision-making performance. Put another way, the longer a game goes on, the worse players will play, even if the sport they're playing isn't as physically taxing as a sport like football or hockey. These cricket players weren't running marathons out in the field, but the mental fatigue that inevitably set in from playing a 12-day, 43-hour long game likely impacted their physical performance greatly. 3. Tennis: 11 Hours and Five Minutes Just recently, Andy Murray defeated Thanasi Kokkinakis in a tennis match that lasted just under six hours and ran until 4 a.m. local time. However, the match is nothing compared to the marathon that John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played in 2010. The match just lasted 11 hours and five minutes and was played over the span of three days. Isner eventually claimed victory, setting a record for the longest tennis match ever played. It's a record that will likely never be broken, as official rules now implement a tie break if a match reaches a certain point. Read More: How a Heart Can Stop After a Forceful Impact Tennis is often called one of the world's most physically taxing sports, and for good reason. A 2020 report from Fitbit reported that, according to user data, an hour of single's tennis generates almost 11,000 steps on average. That's about four to five miles run per hour, depending on one's stride length. Given this data, it's fair to assume that Isner and Mahut both ran about 50 miles during their match over two days. While it may seem like this extensive running would have a negative impact on their joints, some evidence suggests otherwise. In a 2006 study published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, researchers explored whether long-distance running caused osteoarthritis. Researchers acknowledged that while there wasn't enough data available to give recommendations to long-distance runners, their results did show that long-distance running did not increase the risk of osteoarthritis in the knees and hips of those with no prior injuries. That's good news for Isner and Mahut. While they were probably exhausted by the end of their three-day affair, their knees and hips should hopefully still be in good shape, albeit a bit sore. 4. Boxing: Seven Hours Much like tennis, boxing is known as a very physical sport. As such, modern professional matches often go for a maximum of 10 rounds, with some ending earlier due to knockouts or withdrawals. That wasn't the case for Andy Bowen and Jack Burke who, in 1893, fought in the longest boxing match ever recorded. The seven-hour, 110-round bout only ended when referee John Duffy declared the fight a no contest, claiming that both men had earned the prize money and it should be split. By the end of the match, the toll taken on both fighters was severe. Burke had broken bones in both of his hands — he also broke both of his wrists, according to an article from The New York Times. Bowen, meanwhile, was suffering from extreme fatigue. Burke wobbled him in round 25, but he also managed to knock Burke to the ground in round 48. The boxing match against Burke took a toll on Bowen, but he would fight again just two months later, this time going for 85 rounds. Sadly, Bowen's life would end in the boxing ring a year later, after he suffered a fractured skull in the 18th round of a fight against George Lavigne. Boxing can be an extremely dangerous sport, one that can take a toll on the human body. Nowadays, limits are in place to ensure that a 110-round fight never happens again, and restrictions are placed on how often a boxer can enter the ring.

Katreen Wikstrom Jones' strongest memories from her winters growing up in Stockholm, Sweden are building snow tunnels on her porch. For the past ten years, Wikstrom Jones has been in Alaska, working for the state as a cryosphere hazard scientist. She originally got into snow science because she loves skiing, she says, and today snow is her full time job.  Wikstrom Jones is a part of the science team for Community Snow Observations. The goal of the citizen science project is to increase our understanding of snow depth distribution by increasing the number of ground observations in data sparse areas. These observations will help validate snow remote sensing data and hydrological models – which ultimately will provide, for example, water resource managers more accurate data to make better estimates of potential water supply that is stored in our mountain snowpacks. Contributing as a citizen scientist is easy: It only requires undisturbed snow, a measuring tool and about one minute of your time! Take part: Community Snow Observations Community Snow Observations (CSO) launched in 2017 with a grant from NASA's Citizen Science for Earth Science program. Early participants formed the mission-critical CSO ambassador team: Hydrologists, avalanche professionals, guides, ski patrollers, educators and even K-12 teachers were key for promoting the project in its early years and contributing the first snow depth observations. It's since grown into a global citizen science effort with thousands of participants.  Why snow? Snow is like a water tower, explains Wikstrom Jones. Snow stores water in the mountains, and impacts everyone and everything downstream when it melts. We need snow for drinking water, for irrigation to support agriculture and for keeping ecosystems healthy. Understanding snow patterns across time and space helps experts predict ebbs and flows of these important resources and also to predict hazards like avalanches or floods from snow melt. Snow depth observations from citizen scientists – volunteers of all ages from all over the globe – are tremendously important for making models more accurate, which is increasingly important as our climate changes. "We're very passionate about this project," says Wikstrom Jones, "It's increasing tremendously this year, we've seen a lot of new observations from all over the world. It's really exciting that [it] keeps growing." Snow tech Researchers like Wikstrom Jones create snow models to answer a core question: How much snow is in the mountains now, that will provide water later? In technical terms, they think of the volume of water stored in snowpacks as snow water equivalent. Estimating SWE requires an understanding of both snow depth and snow density across the landscape and over time. These models are important because researchers use them to predict which sectors in which communities will eventually be affected by the snow.  Making these models, and especially making them more accurate, requires a lot of data. Scientists have snow records going all the way back to the 1930s that researchers in the past collected from monitoring sites scattered across the country. Since the 1970s, even more data started being collected from snow telemetry sites – an automated weather station that collects meteorological data at frequent increments. And in recent decades, tech like drones, airplanes, helicopters and satellites have started to provide remote sensing data that's great for mapping out snowpack distribution over a great spatial scale. From backcountry to backyard Community Snow Observations launched when researchers realized how useful it would be to have citizen scientists gather on-the-ground observations to compare with the other data they already had about snow. At first, they focused on recruiting backcountry professionals and recreationists who could take measurements from remote, mountainous locations, but they've since expanded to invite observations from everyone, anywhere with snow.  Today, if you see snow, you can participate. You'll need undisturbed snow, which means no wildlife tracks, footprints, dog prints or disturbances from snow plows or shoveling. Grab a measurement tool: Backcountry fans may already have a tool on hand called a snow probe, which comes in the standard  avalanche safety kit, but any ruler, meter stick, yardstick or even measuring tape will do as long as it's deep enough to measure the full depth of the snow. Best practice is to take three measurements of snow depth, within a radius of about a meter, and averaging them to get a single datapoint to submit. This accounts for the natural variability under the snow surface. If there's any doubt that your measurement tool is reaching all the way to the ground, dig down to check. Finally, submit your snow depth observation to Community Snow Observations using one of their partnering apps! From start to finish, the process only takes a few minutes. There are a few ways to submit your data, and all of them end up in the same place. Choose whatever's easiest for you. Download the app Snow Scope from the app store onto your device. Select "snow height" and submit your measurement (in centimeters). This is the best option for anyone submitting a remote observation: You can use the app to log your observation in the moment, which will log your GPS location even if you don't have cell service. The actual data transfer will happen later when you're back within service range.  Professionals like to use SnowPilot.org, better on desktops, to submit their observations. In Europe, RegObs is popular, available as an app or website. You can also submit data to the project on CitSci.org. Snow science is for everyone! Earlier this month, Community Snow Observations logged their 20,521th observation and had their 3,498th individual user. "That's really amazing," says Wikstrom Jones. Although their main focus right now is the U.S., she says, they've received observations from Antarctica, Asia and the very southern tip of South America, too. Since broadening the projects' reach beyond backcountry mountains, the dataset has improved, but so has the community engagement. "It's extremely valuable data for the modeling side of things which helps enhance snow science and helps provide more reliable products to resource managers," says Wikstrom Jones. "But what we have realized [after] running CSO now for six years is that it's a great learning experience for participants as well." "We get a lot of really awesome feedback that kids are really enjoying being out there and recreating and playing in the snow, but then you're adding that science component that makes it really interesting," she says. "Our citizen scientists are folks that come from very different backgrounds and have very different interests." Want to see their results? Go to MountainSnow.org on your desktop (Wikstrom Jones doesn't recommend looking at it on mobile) to find a near-real-time model of all the observations that you can play around with.  "Nobody owns science, and we can all contribute to science," she says, "and with citizen science, we're really closing that gap between what traditionally was referred to as the public 'versus' the scientific community. It's much more blurry than that. Science lives in that fantastic gray zone between the public and academia." Follow CSO on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and their website. Reach out at communitysnowobs@gmail.com if you have questions or would like to be connected to your local CSO Ambassador. Submit a snow depth observation to Community Snow Observations between now and February 15, 2023, and you could win a prize! Let's start off this year strong and find out how our mountain snowpacks are stacking up! The rules for this contest are easy: We'll select the top 5 winners from the people who submit the most snow height measurements during the time period January 15 – February 15.  Snowpack height measurements need to be at least 100 m in between measurements and taken in undisturbed snow. Observations must be submitted through the Snow Scope app to qualify. Prizes are donated by Backcountry Access and include: Set of BCA radios, BCA avalanche shovel, BCA snow saw, BCA Snow Study Kit and CSO goodies. Prizes ship to U.S. mailing addresses only.

Six of the most powerful astronomical observatories have captured a stunning image of Abell 2256, which is made of multiple galaxy clusters smashing together

Adopting a partner's perspective increases commitment and desire for the partner, while simultaneously decreasing sexual and romantic interest in alternative mates, according to a new study by a team of psychologists. The findings suggest that perspective taking discourages people from engaging in behaviors that may hurt their partners and damage their relationship.

A new biomaterial that can be injected intravenously, reduces inflammation in tissue and promotes cell and tissue repair. The biomaterial was tested and proven effective in treating tissue damage caused by heart attacks in both rodent and large animal models. Researchers also provided proof of concept in a rodent model that the biomaterial could be beneficial to patients with traumatic brain injury and pulmonary arterial hypertension.

A new article shows that an experimental vaccine against Marburg virus (MARV) was safe and induced an immune response in a small, first-in-human clinical trial. The vaccine could someday be an important tool to respond to Marburg virus outbreaks.

A new study has uncovered a new thalattosuchian — an ancient 'sister' of modern-day crocodiles' ancestors.

Physicists have found a new way to switch superconductivity on and off in magic-angle graphene. The discovery could lead to ultrafast, energy-efficient superconducting transistors for 'neuromorphic' electronics that operate similarly to the rapid on/off firing of neurons in the human brain.

New research challenges the prevailing hypothesis for how donor stem cell grafts cause graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD, and offers an alternative model that could guide development of novel therapies.

Spinal cord stimulation uses low levels of electricity to relieve pain. A study is the first to measure this treatment's effects on patients by gauging improvement in insomnia after spinal cord stimulation. Results showed a 30 percent or more improvement of both nighttime and daytime components of insomnia in 39.1 percent of study participants and a 30 percent or more improvement of daytime sleepiness in 28.1 percent of participants. Findings correlated with improvement in disability and depression and revealed associations with sleep and both pain and depression. Results will help clinicians gain a better understanding of the type of patient most likely to benefit from this treatment.

Whether you call them comfort foods, highly processed foods, junk foods, empty calories or just some of Americans' favorite foods and drinks, about 13% of people aged 50 to 80 have an unhealthy relationship with them, according to a new poll.

People in China have more favorable opinions of Europeans than Americans, but the feeling is not mutual, according to a new study from researchers at Rice University, the National University of Singapore and the University of British Columbia.

Scientists think it may have come from another solar system

The island was destroyed by the same volcano that formed it seven years before.

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The world is filled with tiny creatures that find us delicious. Bacteria and viruses are the obvious bad guys, drivers of deadly global pandemics and annoying infections. But the pathogens we haven't had to reckon with as much—yet—are the fungi.

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The world is filled with tiny creatures that find us delicious. Bacteria and viruses are the obvious bad guys, drivers of deadly global pandemics and annoying infections. But the pathogens we haven't had to reckon with as much—yet—are the fungi.

A new biomaterial that can be injected intravenously, reduces inflammation in tissue and promotes cell and tissue repair. The biomaterial was tested and proven effective in treating tissue damage caused by heart attacks in both rodent and large animal models. Researchers also provided proof of concept in a rodent model that the biomaterial could be beneficial to patients with traumatic brain injury and pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Should teenagers use social media? US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy doesn't think so, or at least not 13-year-olds.

"I, personally, based on the data I've seen, believe that 13 is too early," Vivek said on CNN Newsroom, as quoted by the outlet.

"It's a time where it's really important for us to be thoughtful about what's going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children," he added.

Many of the most notable social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat allow users 13 and up to join. And in many cases, younger kids can simply lie about their age. Meanwhile, other big hitters like TikTok and YouTube have special modes designed for kids under 13 that limit the content they can see, among other safety features.

What kids can be exposed to is definitely worrying, but the problem here is also much more fundamental and lies with how children engage with social media — and how many of these products are ruthlessly designed to farm children's attention.

"We have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms," Murthy added, as quoted by The Hill. "And if we tell a child, 'Use the force of your willpower to control how much time you're spending [on social media],' you're pitting a child against the world's greatest product designers and that's just not a fair fight. And so that's why I think our kids need help."

One of social media's most notorious innovations is infinite scrolling, which, as the name implies, allows users to continuously scroll through their social media feed without end, and without showing you a clear stopping point like the bottom of a page that tells your brain: "enough."

Instead, the platform will continue to find more content to show you, until you're compelled to refresh and scroll all over again. That phenomenon is called "doomscrolling," and many studies have documented its adverse effects on the mind.

In addition, a recent study that scanned the brains of social media obsessed children found significant changes to the part of their brains involved in memory and emotions called the amygdala.

Kids who checked social media more than 15 times per day, the study found, exhibited heightened sensitivity towards social conditions, particularly rewards and punishments. In other words, kids hooked on social media became more anxious about social situations over time than those who used it less frequently.

To push back against social media's troubling toll on children, Murthy suggested there should be greater safety standards these platforms should be required to meet.

"In my house right now, the vast majority of products [that we buy and use have to meet] some sort of safety standards in order to be sold," he observed. "That is not true in general of social media."

But he also thinks the responsibility lies with parents — not just individually, but as a collective whole.

"If parents can band together and say you know, as a group, we're not going to allow our kids to use social media until 16 or 17 or 18 or whatever age they choose, that's a much more effective strategy in making sure your kids don't get exposed to harm early," he told CNN.

Good luck with that, though. It's hard to imagine parents cracking down on their kid's TikTok usage wouldn't just make them want to use it even more.

More on social media: Scientists Find Something Strange in Brain Scans of Kids Hooked on Social Media

The post US Surgeon General Warns Against 13-Year-Old Using Social Media appeared first on Futurism.

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Only by knowing the average number of friends each person has, scientists at Complexity Science Hub (CSH) were able to predict the group sizes of people in a computer game. For this purpose, they modeled the formation of social groups on an example from physics, namely the self-organization of particles with spin.

Researchers have developed a new method for manipulating information in quantum systems by controlling the spin of electrons in silicon quantum dots. The results provide a promising new mechanism for control of qubits, which could pave the way for the development of a practical, silicon-based quantum computer.

Lawyers are advocates for their clients — and, in court, they're usually the ones who do the talking. Should that always be the case? In an effort to shift this power dynamic, TED Fellow and legal aid activist Lam Ho shares how lawyers can create space for people to tell their own stories in the courtroom, making them active participants in the legal process and producing surprisingly positive results.

On Monday (Jan. 30), the moon will pass in front of Mars from the perspective of Earth in what's known as an occultation.

What animal species will survive projected future droughts, rising temperatures and habitat loss?

A call for help sounds to ensure survival of a 140-year-old fishing partnership pairing cetaceans and humans

The world will likely breach the internationally agreed-upon climate change threshold in about a decade, and keep heating to break through a next warming limit around mid-century even with big pollution cuts, artificial intelligence predicts in a new study that's more pessimistic than previous modeling.

In this webinar, Andrew Y. Koh will discuss the role of the gut microbiome in modulating cancer immunotherapy. 

Researchers at Drexel University are one step closer to making wearable textile technology a reality. Recently published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, materials scientists from Drexel's College of Engineering, in partnership with a team at Accenture Labs, have reported a new design of a flexible wearable supercapacitor patch. It uses MXene, a material discovered at Drexel University in 2011, to create a textile-based supercapacitor that can charge in minutes and power an Arduino microcontroller temperature sensor and radio communication of data for almost two hours.

Carbon-based catalysts have garnered extensive attention over the past decades as an economical alternative to noble metal catalysts for renewable energy systems.

German automaker 

 claims to have achieved Level 3 autonomy — "conditionally automated" vehicles that can monitor their driving environment and make informed decisions on behalf of the driver, but still require humans to occasionally take over — in the United States, an incremental but noteworthy step towards a future void of steering wheels and foot pedals.

"It is a very proud moment for everyone to continue this leadership and celebrate this monumental achievement as the first automotive company to be certified for Level 3 conditionally automated driving in the US market," said Mercedes-Benz USA CEO Dimitris Psillakis in a statement.

Last year, Mercedes showed off the new feature, a part of its Drive Pilot system, suggesting drivers could play a game of Tetris while they bomb down the highway — but the technology still comes with plenty of caveats in 2023.

The company's Level 3 autonomy-capable software was recently approved for use in Nevada, but only up to speeds of 40 mph.

Mercedes is trying to position itself as the pioneer in the autonomous driving space, which has been dominated by the likes of 

, General Motors, and Ford.

For those keeping count, Level 3 is one level above Tesla, which has only achieved Level 2 autonomy with its Autopilot driver assistance software suite — despite Musk's empty promises of bringing fully self-driving vehicles to the roadways.

Level 3 is still a far cry from the kind of robust self-driving feature featured in sci-fi, and in many ways remains very similar to Level 2 systems currently being used on the road. It can keep the car in the lane, adjust speed depending on the vehicle in front of it, and even make lane changes.

But there's one notable exception: drivers don't strictly have to keep their eyes on the road at all times, which could free them up to read articles or play video games on the infotainment screen.

Not everybody agrees that Level 3 is a sensible step forward. As The Verge reports, the likes of Waymo and Cruise have argued that jumping to Level 4 technology — systems that could allow a driver to take a nap — from Level 2 makes a lot more sense as the handoff between humans and their software-based assistants can be imperfect or even prove fatal.

There are a lot more carmakers gunning to bring Level 3 autonomy to US roads. Ford, Audi, BMW, and Volvo, all have claimed to already be working on similar technologies.

But whether it's a step in the right direction — or even more of a distraction for drivers on the road — remains to be seen.

READ MORE: Mercedes-Benz is the first to bring Level 3 automated driving to the US [The Verge]

More on self-driving: Godfather of Self-Driving Cars Says the Tech Is Going Nowhere

The post Mercedes Claims to Have Achieved Level 3 Automation, Beating Tesla appeared first on Futurism.

The importance of solar power as a renewable energy resource is increasing. Sunlight contains high-energy UV light with a wavelength shorter than 400 nm, which can be broadly used, for example, for photopolymerization to form a resin and activation of photocatalysts to drive reactions that generate green hydrogen or useful hydrocarbons (fuels, sugars, olefins, etc.). The latter of these is often called "artificial photosynthesis." Photocatalytic reaction by UV light to efficiently kill viruses and bacteria is another important application. Unfortunately, only about 4% of terrestrial sunlight falls within the UV range in the electromagnetic spectrum. This leaves a large portion of sunlight spectrum unexploited for these purposes.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters

When early settlers came to the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers before the California Gold Rush, Indigenous people warned them that the Sacramento Valley could become an inland sea when great winter rains came. The storytellers described water filling the valley from the Coast Range to the Sierra during these rare events.

And their warnings became realized when Great Flood of 1861-62 hit. A six-week onslaught of at least 10 powerful Pacific storms in December and January carried mighty "atmospheric rivers" of subtropical moisture into California, dumping torrential rains in the valleys and prodigious snows in the mountains. When an unusually warm storm struck in January, heavy rains fell on the enormous Sierra snowpack, melting it.

A cataclysmic flood ensued, inundating the Central Valley and transforming it into a lake 300 miles long and over 20 miles wide; much of the now densely populated coastal plain in present-day Los Angeles and Orange counties was also inundated. As summarized in a 2013 Scientific American overview, the flood killed thousands of people, drowned one-quarter of the state's estimated 800,000 cattle, and submerged downtown Sacramento under more than 10 feet of brown water laden with debris from countless mudslides. With the state's capital city paralyzed, the California legislature was forced to move to San Francisco until the summer of 1862. By that point, the state was bankrupt, as one-third of its taxable properties had been destroyed.

California's long history of megastorms

Sediment research has found that six storms similar to or even more severe than the 1861-62 storm hit California in the past 2,000 years, arriving about every 200 to 400 years. One study estimated the arrival dates as 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418, and 1605 AD; the dates vary by a century or more from study to study, but the data makes clear that such megastorms have recurred regularly. The storm that occurred around 1605 appears to have been the mightiest of them all — and far stronger than storm that brought the Great Flood of 1861-62.

Given this history, it is inevitable that another great flood will hit the state someday, and climate change is thought to boost the odds of such an event. And when the next great flood comes, the damages could well dwarf those of any previous global weather disaster, adding up to more than $1 trillion — an extraordinary catastrophe with triple the cost of the feared great quake on the San Andreas fault.

According to a 2011 government scenario, waters, winds, and landslides from such a megastorm would likely overtop dozens of levees, flood nearly a quarter of the square footage of the state's buildings, wipe out key roads for weeks to months, and leave some communities without power for months.

In this first of a three-part series on California's vulnerability to a megaflood, we examine the results of this 2011 study, called the "ARkStorm" scenario, which simulated what a repeat of the Great Flood of 1861-62 might do. Part Two looks at the poor state of the U.S. dam infrastructure in general, and more specifically at the California dams at the highest risk of failure in a megaflood. And since the ARkStorm research is more than a decade old, a new study that presents an "ARkStorm 2.0" scenario will be covered in Part Three, which will discuss the future of California megafloods and how climate change likely increases their odds.

California is highly vulnerable to a great flood

Many of the prosperous cities and fertile farmlands of California are built on the flood plains of the rivers that once inundated the valleys every few hundred years. Now the rivers are dammed and lined with levees and drainage channels, protecting the critically important development on California's flood plains.

A megaflood would be a catastrophe for two main reasons:

• California produces one-third of U.S. vegetables and 75% of the nation's fruit and nut crops on a mere 1.2% of the nation's agricultural land. This production generates more than $50 billion in annual revenue — over 10% of the value of U.S. agricultural output.
• A tremendous number of people and critical infrastructure now occupy the flood plains that were undeveloped back in the 1800s. For example, during the Great Flood of 1861-62, the Los Angeles area was mostly ranchlands with fewer than 15,000 residents. Today, 10 million people and a $748 billion-per-year economy occupy Los Angeles County.

What is the ARkStorm scenario?

Were the Great Flood of 1861-62 to recur, it might resemble the ARkStorm scenario — a plausible hypothetical storm conjured up in a 2011 study by 117 experts led by the United States Geological Survey, or USGS. In the acronym, the "AR" stands for atmospheric river, and the "k" stands for the number 1,000 because the storm could be expected to bring 1-in-1000-year rains to some locations.

The storm modeled by these experts could flood up to 25% of all buildings in the state, breach approximately 50 levees, and force the evacuation of 1.5 million people. The hypothetical ARkStorm would flood about 4,000 square miles, much of it agricultural, with a population of about 6.5 million, including much of Sacramento, Silicon Valley, and Stockton. Along with the mammoth evacuation required in the inland region and delta counties, over 220,000 people would need short-term shelter.

Since there is little data on the meteorological conditions during 1861-62, the USGS ARkStorm scenario used a computer-modeled hybrid storm that combined two actual storms that hit California: a Southern California storm from Jan. 19-27, 1969, which killed 115 people and caused inflation-adjusted damages of $3.3 billion, followed by a northern California storm from Feb. 8-20, 1986, which killed 13. An additional tweak was applied to produce a sufficient amount of precipitation to approximately match the limited observations of 1861-62.

The simulated USGS ARkStorm did $725 billion (in 2007 dollars) in damage. Approximately 55% of the damage was to buildings, infrastructure, and agriculture (of which just 5-8% would be covered by insurance), while 45% of the damage resulted from business interruption. Adjusted for inflation, the ARkStorm would cost about $1.1 trillion in 2023 dollars, and additional costs would occur because of increases in wealth and population. In recent decades, wealth on the West Coast has increased by about 3.3% per year (using GDP growth stats); the population of California has increased by about 6% since 2007. This suggests that the ARkStorm would cost approximately $1.7 trillion today (about 7% of U.S. GDP). Complicating this estimate is the fact that many billions of dollars in levee improvements have occurred in California since the ARkStorm report was issued, which would likely lead to a modest decrease in damages.

The authors cautioned that the impacts modeled were not exhaustive, since they did not consider tourism and recreation or loss of cultural value as a result of damage to historic artifacts and sites. And a repeat of one of the stronger storms documented in the past 2,000 years might cause damages much higher.

Much of the rest of this post covers the specific sectors considered in the ARkStorm scenario, demonstrating the extraordinary danger such a flood would likely pose to people, infrastructure, agricultural lands, and property. All costs are in 2007 dollars; adjusting for inflation would make these costs about 50% higher in 2023 dollars.

A megastorm would breach levees and flood buildings

The ARkStorm scenario generated flooding with an estimated return period of 100 to 500 years over many critical California watersheds, in addition to some 1-in-1000-year flooding. A 100-year return period means that a flood has a 1% probability in any given year, or a 26% probability over a 30-year time span. Similarly, flooding with a 500-year return period has a 0.2% probability of occurrence in any given year, or 6% over a 30-year period.

Nearly one-quarter of the total building square footage in California was affected by flooding in the ARkStorm scenario. Most flooded buildings were not a total loss, but rather experienced damage requiring repair costs between 10-50% of replacement cost. (Just one inch of water in a 2,500-square-foot home can cause $27,000 in damage, and 12 inches can cause $72,000 in damage, according to FEMA.) Residential buildings dominated the flood-related building repair costs. Total flood damage to buildings was estimated at $195 billion, with another $103 billion in damage to building contents. Business interruption from building downtimes of one to three years would cost an additional hundreds of billions of dollars.

The scenario hypothesized that urban levees might be threatened or overtopped at 60 to 75 critical sites and that 15-20 breaches might realistically occur. In addition, 30 breaches of levees protecting the islands of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta were considered realistic, with two to three breaches occurring per island. The Delta is about 73% farmland, with much of the land lying 10-25 feet below sea level; these fields are some of the most productive agricultural land in the nation. The Delta's levees have experienced one major breach in the past 30 years, a June 2004 event that flooded the entire island of Jones Tract.

Urban levees in California are generally constructed to withstand a flood with a 1-in-200-year recurrence interval. There are, however, a few levees protecting urban areas near Sacramento and Stockton that offer protection at lower flood thresholds. For example, the levee protecting the community of Woodland (population of 9,000, property value $1.6 billion) offers protection against only a 1-in-20-year flood — one that has an 80% chance of occurring over a 30-year period (Figure 4). Fortunately, the state and federal governments are partway through the construction of a $1.85-billion flood protection project that will help shore up levees in the Sacramento area. About 361 miles of urban and 120 miles of non-urban levees have been repaired or improved since 2007, according to the state's Central Valley Flood Protection Plan.

The city of Stockton, a disadvantaged community whose metro-area population of nearly 800,000 is almost 80% nonwhite, has a particularly high flood risk because of inadequate levees. The city lies on the San Joaquin River, and a 2018 study by the Army Corps found that much of the city could flood to depths of 10-20 feet if the city's levees were breached. According to the National Levee Database, the main levee protecting the city offers only 1-in-100-year flood protection. The levee protects over 129,000 people and property worth over $16 billion.

Levees protecting rural areas in California have much lower failure thresholds, with some privately-owned ones offering only 1-in-10-year protection. Multiple levees of this nature failed in the Stockton region and on the Salinas River near Monterey during the January 2023 floods (see Tweet above). And until they are tested against a 1-in-100-year level flood, we should not be overconfident that levees rated to that level of protection will perform as designed. Extreme floods are notorious for exposing the unforeseen flaws in levees. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said, "There are two kinds of levees: Those that have failed, and those that will fail."

Figure 4. Sacramento area levee system (red lines). The figures within each levee area show the value of property protected, the level of protection offered by the levee, and the number of people living behind the levee. For example, the levee surrounding downtown Sacramento protects 384,000 people and $6.8 billion in property and is rated to withstand a 1-in-500-year flood. (Image credit: National Levee Database, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Would a California megaflood cause dams to fail?

The ARkStorm study did not foresee any of California's approximately 1,500 dams failing, though minor spillway damage and downstream erosion were plausible, it found. As will be discussed in Part Two of this series, there is reason to question this finding in light of the serious damage caused to the spillways of America's tallest dam, the Oroville Dam in California, during flooding in 2017.

Important roads closed for weeks to months

The ARkStorm could cause tens of thousands of landslides, the vast majority of them being debris flows. These would cost on the order of $3 billion, including $1 billion in damage to private property, $1 billion to state highways, and $1 billion to other infrastructure. Indirect costs because of disruption of infrastructure were not considered in the estimate.

The damage to roads would be long-lasting in many cases, particularly along mountain roads in regions subject to landslides, such as coastal Highway 1 in Big Sur and near Santa Cruz (see Tweet above). Important roads would be closed for weeks or months, significantly slowing recovery efforts. The ARkStorm largely cut off traffic from Los Angeles to the north and east for one to two weeks, with gradual recovery. For Sacramento, traffic to the north, south, and west was largely cut off for one week or so, with gradual recovery thereafter.

Road damage from landslides could hinder repairs of critical water pipelines and limit access to repair wastewater treatment plants like the one in Long Beach. Water supply systems and wastewater treatment plants rely on supplies of chemicals that are carried on railways and trucks every few days, which might be cut off. One possible preparation effort: stockpiling Bailey bridges, which are portable, prefabricated trusses, primarily used by military engineering units to bridge gaps up to 200 feet. They do not require heavy equipment for construction, can be brought to the job site in trucks, and are strong enough for heavy traffic.

Figure 5. Road restoration percentages in northern California 30 days after the ARkStorm and 17 days after the ARkStorm in southern California. (Image credit: USGS)

Power outages for months in some areas

Damage to the power infrastructure by wind and flooding was estimated at $1 billion, with long restoration times of months predicted in mountainous areas experiencing high winds. Business interruption costs from lack of power were estimated at $18 billion. Flood damage to power infrastructure was also cited as a major concern. While most power plants are located out of the areas predicted to flood, some are inside, especially in Santa Clara County and Los Angeles.

High-voltage substations and generating plants have high-voltage transformers that can be damaged by flooding – for example, by flood-borne debris impacting the transformer. These transformers are custom-made, designed to operate only at that location, and serve a large population, often in excess of 200,000 people. The transformers are not interchangeable and are too expensive to stockpile beyond those available for normal operational redundancy. If one of these large transformers were damaged, it could take six months or more to replace.

Figure 6. Power restoration curves at a few key locations in California, showing the percentage of customers capable of receiving power at selected times, assuming the onset of the storm on Jan. 27, 2011. Mountainous areas experiencing higher winds, like Mono County in the Sierras (light blue curve), were modeled to have significant power outages lasting months. (Image credit: USGS)

Contaminated and interrupted water supplies

An ARkStorm would wreak serious damage on the water supply systems for California, causing an estimated $3 billion in damage. Restoration of service would take days, weeks, or months; the report suggested that the water treatment plant serving the entire city of Sacramento would be inoperative for up to three to six months. The costs of business interruption because of water system failures were put at a massive $54 billion.

About half of southern California's water comes from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where multiple levee failures were anticipated, leading to a lengthy interruption in water transport. The levee repairs necessary to restore water transport to southern California might take three months, but that region would have other sources of water. In fact, water quality might be a far more significant problem than quantity, because of runoff carrying sediments into reservoirs and from erosion of the banks of reservoirs. Contaminants from runoff could potentially require extended boil-water orders.

Raw sewage in the water

The ARkStorm scenario had 21 of the 113 wastewater treatment plants in California experiencing flooding, at a cost of $300 million, taking days or weeks to repair. The resulting business interruption would cost an additional $28 billion. In Los Angeles, the scenario imagines that the Donald C. Tillman and Terminal Island wastewater treatment plants are flooded, putting raw sewage into the central and western San Fernando Valley and into the Los Angeles River. This causes a hazardous-material condition that could trigger evacuation of homes and businesses that were not otherwise flooded and could shut down roads through the affected area.

Billions in damage to agriculture

Damages to crops, livestock, and fields were estimated to range between $4 and $7 billion, and damages to farm structures and equipment were estimated separately at $13 billion. The scenario hypothesized that 31 of the approximately 60 islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would flood and that it could take up to 1.5 years to remove that water because many of these islands lie 10-25 feet below sea level.

Wind damage in mountainous areas

Wind-related building repair costs are estimated to be $6 billion – small in comparison with the nearly $300 billion loss from flood damage. Wind damage contributes such a small fraction of the overall loss because the areas of highest winds (higher elevation mountainous areas) are relatively sparsely populated.

Coastal flooding would cause damage, too

While the vast majority of the flood damage California would experience from an ARkStorm would be from inland flooding from heavy rains, coastal flooding from large storm surges riding in on elevated sea levels would also cause significant damage. Coastal storms that hit California during strong El Niños are particularly problematic; ocean warming, wind patterns, and runoff from heavy rains inland have brought sea levels up to one foot above average during the past three strong El Niños (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Monthly mean water levels in San Francisco during the past three strong El Niño events (1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16), compared to average. (Image credit: Abe Doherty, updated with data from Reinhard Flick)

Even a 1-in-100-year flood would be devastating in California

It wouldn't take a California flood event as severe as an ARkStorm to cause one of the most expensive disasters in U.S. history. A 2022 study estimated a lesser flood with a 1-in-100-year return period affecting only the Los Angeles area would likely inundate property — worth $56 billion with a population of about 425,000 — to a depth of a foot or more, with the risks disproportionately higher for non-Hispanic Black and disadvantaged populations.

The other two parts of this three-part series:
Part Two: If a megaflood strikes California, these dams might be at risk
Part Three: Climate change is increasing the risk of a California megaflood

Dolphins off coast of southern Brazil drive mullet towards the nets of local fishers and in return get some extra fish themselves

Watching a puppet show can teach you something about how estrogen works in the body, according to Rice University scientists whose research could open the door to new strategies for regulating the hormone—which could help prevent   and other diseases.

By working together, dolphins and net-casting fishers in Brazil each catch more fish, a rare example of an interaction by two top predators that is beneficial to both parties, researchers have concluded following 15 years of study of the practice.

Bottlenose dolphins help Brazilian fishermen pull in their catch, and researchers have worked out what the marine mammals get from the cooperative hunting.

Watching a puppet show can teach you something about how estrogen works in the body, according to Rice University scientists whose research could open the door to new strategies for regulating the hormone—which could help prevent   and other diseases.

Nature, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00231-w

Floods followed by droughts, or droughts followed by floods, will rise in frequency in a warming world.

By working together, dolphins and net-casting fishers in Brazil each catch more fish, a rare example of an interaction by two top predators that is beneficial to both parties, researchers have concluded following 15 years of study of the practice.

McMAInsion Hell

It seems that real estate agents are already using OpenAI's controversial 

 artificial intelligence software to pump out property listings so they can free up time to do what they do best: part would-be homeowners from their money.

"It saved me so much time," Iowa-based realtor JJ Johannes told CNN of the burgeoning practice.

The agent, who also posted an explainer video to Twitter earlier this month describing how he writes listings using ChatGPT, admitted that the software is "not perfect" for writing ads but said it's nevertheless been helpful because "writing something eloquent takes time."

In the comments of that explainer, Johannes responded with good humor to a critic who, like many of those skeptical of the real estate industry, suggested that AI could revolutionize the art of making a crappy house seem worthwhile.

"ChatGPT will be perfect for generating real estate listing[s]," the sarcastic user wrote. "Just teach it to describe cramped shacks as 'cozy' and heaps of rotting lumber as 'fixer uppers' and you're good to go."

"LOL," the realtor replied, adding that "more accurate descriptions of what properties are versus generic catch all phrases would be good!"

Still, the troll makes a good point: with ChatGPT, it will now be much easier for realtors to write misleading listings. In an industry that's known for its predatory practices, that's definitely not a good thing.

Broken Clocks

With that in mind, CNN did present another, significantly more positive use case for ChatGPT: helping folks deal with crappy landlords and developers who refuse to fix stuff in their homes.

Andres Asion, a Miami-based broker, told the broadcaster that when a client couldn't open her windows and got no response from the developer in charge, he ran her qualms through ChatGPT and instructed the AI to write a letter that threatened legal action.

"All of a sudden," Asion said, "the developer showed up at her house."

It's reassuring to know that someone in the corrupt real estate industry is using ChatGPT — which has veritably turned the world upside down since its debut late last year — for good, while so many others seem to be using it for anything but.

More on the ChatGPT debacle: I Work for CNET's Parent Company. Its AI-Generated Articles Disgust Me.

The post Shameless Realtors Are Already Grinding Out Property Listings With ChatGPT appeared first on Futurism.

My Bad

International mining giant Rio Tinto has admitted to misplacing a "highly radioactive" object along an 870-mile Western Australian highway, several outlets report. But if it's any consolation, they're very, very sorry.

"We are taking this incident very seriously," Rio Tinto head of iron ore Simon Trott said in a Sunday statement to the media. "We recognize this is clearly very concerning and are sorry for the alarm it has caused in the Western Australian community."

Princess and the Pea

At just eight millimeters in length, the object in question — a tiny "widget," as Bloomberg put it, containing the radioactive isotope caesium-137 — is roughly the size of a pea. All to say: not exactly the easiest thing to recover from an unknown spot on an 870-mile-long stretch of roadway.

"If you dangled a magnet over a haystack," Andrew Stuchbery, head of the Australian National University's department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications, told Reuters, "it's going to give you more of a chance."

And despite its puny size, this object — which is a component of a larger device that measures the density of iron ore — isn't benign. It emits radiation "equal to ten X-rays per hour," according to Reuters. And while anyone who drives past it won't be hit with too much radiation, overexposure or mishandling could reportedly cause radiation burns or even radioactive sickness.

"It's quite radioactive so if you get close to it, it will stick out," Stuchbery added.

Regardless of the challenges they face in the search for the radioactive capsule, Australian authorities seem to be in good spirits, with emergency services personnel telling the BBC that their chances of success are "pretty good." Noted.

Apology Tour

This isn't the only recent Rio Tinto scandal in the area. Back in 2020, the company came under fire for damaging two Aboriginal heritage sites, including a cave in the Juukan Gorge that showed signs of occupation dating back 46,000 years  — and had a 4,000-year-old genetic link to its present-day owners. The mining corp said it was "sorry" for that, too.

In any case, we hope that the radioactive pea is discovered before it causes anyone any harm. But we're sure that if it does, a Rio Tinto apology will be very quick to follow.

READ MORE: Rio Tinto apologizes for loss of tiny radioactive capsule in Australian outback [Reuters]

More on radioactive things: Authorities Seize "Atomik" Booze Made near Chernobyl Disaster

The post Miners Say "Sorry" for Losing Highly Radioactive Object Along Highway appeared first on Futurism.

 

 

The last several years have seen AI improve by leaps and bounds. The most advanced machine learning algorithms are no longer limited to interpreting the world — they can create new content, including art so refined it can win contests and essays that can pass an MBA exam. 

 is turning its attention to the musical realm. The company's new MusicLM app can generate original music from a text prompt or a few seconds of humming.

The new AI was revealed in a paper published on the arXiv pre-print server last week. The paper explains that other teams have been able to use AI to create limited "acoustic events" over several seconds, but AudioLM takes it to the next level by generating high-fidelity audio that remains coherent over several minutes. That is, the AI output sounds like a professionally composed song rather than a collection of random snippets.

MusicLM is still just an internal research project, so you can't play around with it yourself. However, Google has posted many examples of the AI's compositions on GitHub. The bot can take audio input like humming a few bars of a tune, but more impressively, it can decipher a rich text prompt like "The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds, like cymbal crashes or drum rolls."

Some of the AI-generated tracks are surprisingly listenable, but they do have a distinctively electronic vibe even when imitating other styles. Some of the tracks have vocals, consisting of mostly haunting nonsense words. It's like a song sung in a language you nor anyone else has ever heard before.

It will take time before this tool and others like it are able to match the skill of human musicians, but that day may be coming. In order to support future research, Google has released a dataset of 5,500 music-text pairs, the same data used to train MusicLM. This will no doubt raise new concerns about the role of AI in the creation of art. Many communities and artwork repositories have had to grapple with AI-generated images, with some choosing to ban the content. Others, like Adobe, have embraced AI art with a few restrictions.

There's also increasing concern over the copyright implications of AI. After digesting information, chatbots may regurgitate phrases that could be considered plagiarism. Music is already a fiercely litigious industry, and the use of AI-generated music could lead to lawsuits.

Now read:

• Microsoft in Talks to Invest $10 Billion in ChatGPT
• AI Art Generator DALL-E Now Available to Everyone
• Federal Circuit Court Rules AI Can't Hold Patents

Resonant optical phenomena in metals and dielectrics have profound applications in many fields. The nanoscale confinement allows for unpreceded control of light-matter interaction at surfaces and interfaces, manipulating and controlling the light flow. Resonant phenomena are usually associated with radiative and intrinsic loss channels, which are detrimental in many systems. Metals show strong intrinsic losses. Thus, dielectric systems have recently become the focus of attention as they promise lower loss, higher degrees of flexibility with respect to tuning the interplay of different resonances, and fabrication strategies closer to industrial standards.

Economic activity and development are unevenly distributed across regions of the world and within any country. In other words, where someone lives can determine their economic and social well-being.

Engineers have employed "electrospinning," a new technique of manufacturing nanomaterials, to produce a novel fabric that offers high performance protection against electromagnetic interference, a phenomenon that can result in electronic device malfunction and at high levels of exposure can harm human health.

School-aged students lost more than a third of a year's worth of learning early on in the pandemic and have still not caught up, posing "a real problem for this generation," researchers warned on Monday.

Astronomers have recently discovered that giant clouds of molecular hydrogen, the birthplace of stars, can live for tens of millions of years despite the facts that individual molecules are constantly getting destroyed and reassembled. This new research helps place a crucial piece of understanding in our overall picture of how stars are born.

 is a devastating disease, with 247 million cases and 619,000 deaths reported in 2021 alone. Malaria causes fever and a flu-like illness that occurs when people are infected with the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which is spread by mosquitoes. Drugs to treat malaria symptoms and insecticides to kill malaria-spreading mosquitoes have improved in recent decades, but the parasite and the mosquitoes are evolving to become resistant to these strategies.

A first-of-its-kind study scanned the brains of dozens of politically involved participants while they watched campaign-ads and speeches by parties from both ends of the political spectrum, just before one of the last rounds of elections. The participants, half right-wing and half left-wing, were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method that measures brain activation.

 is a devastating disease, with 247 million cases and 619,000 deaths reported in 2021 alone. Malaria causes fever and a flu-like illness that occurs when people are infected with the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which is spread by mosquitoes. Drugs to treat malaria symptoms and insecticides to kill malaria-spreading mosquitoes have improved in recent decades, but the parasite and the mosquitoes are evolving to become resistant to these strategies.

Two new species of prehistoric primate were recently identified by scientists studying fossils from Canada's Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic. The primates are closely related and likely originated from a single colonization event, following which they split into two species: Ignacius dawsonae and Ignacius mckennai.

Monovalent anion perm-selective membranes (MAPMs) combined with electrodialysis can simultaneously realize the efficient separation of mono-/di-valent anions and the concentration of monovalent salt. However, their applications in practical industrial scenarios are limited due to the low anion selectivity of commercial MAPMs, especially the poor alkali stability.

Two new species of prehistoric primate were recently identified by scientists studying fossils from Canada's Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic. The primates are closely related and likely originated from a single colonization event, following which they split into two species: Ignacius dawsonae and Ignacius mckennai.

A gun control law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois in January 2023 immediately faced opposition from a group key to the law's enforcement: sheriffs. They are county-level, locally elected public officials who run jails, provide courthouse security, and, in many counties, are the primary providers of law enforcement services.

A team from China published new work on rechargeable aluminum batteries in Energy Material Advances.

As neural networks become more powerful, algorithms have become capable of turning ordinary text into images, animations and even short videos. These algorithms have generated significant controversy. An AI-generated image recently won first prize in an annual art competition while the Getty Images stock photo library is currently taking legal action against the developers of an AI art algorithm that it believes was unlawfully trained using Getty's images. So the music equivalent of these systems shouldn't come as much surprise. And yet the implications are extraordinary. A group of researchers at Google have unveiled an AI system capable of turning ordinary text descriptions into rich, varied and relevant music. The company has showcased these capabilities using descriptions of famous artworks to generate music. Music Datasets A key factor in enabling text-to-image systems is the existence of large datasets of images with descriptions. These can then be used to train a neural network. However, similar annotated datasets do not exist for music. But in 2022, Google Research unveiled an algorithm called MuLan that produces a text description of a piece of music. A good text description usually needs to cover the rhythm, melody, timbre and the various musical instruments and voices it might contain. Now Christian Frank and colleagues at Google Research have used MuLan to generate descriptive captions of copyright-free music. Then then use this database to train another neural network to do the opposite task of turning a caption into a piece of music. They call the new algorithm MusicLM and show how it generates music based on any supplied text or can modify audio files of humming or whistling in a way that reflects a caption. Evaluating such an algorithm is a difficult task because it requires a gold standard dataset of annotated music files, ideally created by humans. So Frank and co created one. They asked ten professional musicians to write text descriptions of 5500 ten-second clips of music. Each description consists of about four sentences that describe the genre, mood, tempo, singer voices, instrumentation, dissonances, rhythm and so on. The team call this database MusicCap and have made it public so others can use it as a gold standard. Frank and co then evaluate the music from MusicLM by looking at the audio quality and how well it sticks to the audio description. The results speak (or play) for themselves. To showcase the algorithm, Frank and co gave MusicLM text descriptions of several famous paintings and published the resulting music. Here are a few of the results: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí (click to listen) The Scream by Edvard Munch (click to listen) The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (click to listen) The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (click to listen) The team has released other results here. The algorithm isn't perfect, of course. One significant problem is that the algorithm suffers from the same biases as the data used to train it. This raises questions "about appropriateness for music generation for cultures underrepresented in the training data, while at the same time also raising concerns about cultural appropriation," say the researchers. Then there is the issue of appropriation in general—reproducing creative work created by others. To avoid this issue, the team used open music datasets that are copyright free. But they also tested the output to see how closely it resembled input data. "We found that only a tiny fraction of examples was memorized exactly, while for 1% of the examples we could identify an approximate match," say Frank and co. Nevertheless, this is interesting work that should dramatically extend the AI toolsets available for creative workers. It's not hard to imagine the AI system creating works such as short films, in which the script is written by an AI, turned into video by an AI with a soundtrack generated by an AI—all based on a relatively short text input from a human. It's inevitable that these outputs will eventually become hard to tell from real videos. Google hasn't made MusicLM publicly accessible. But it must surely be only a matter of time before somebody else creates a similarly capable AI that is publicly available. How long before these films start winning awards at film festivals, start spreading on social media and become the targets of legal cases themselves? Ref: MusicLM: Generating Music From Text: arxiv.org/abs/2301.11325

Obstructive 

 may be linked to low bone mineral density in adults, according to a new study.

The findings are crucial for individuals with sleep apnea, as low bone mineral density is an indicator of osteoporosis—a condition in which bones become weak and brittle.

In addition to increasing the risk of fractures, low bone mineral density also affects oral health, causing teeth to become loose and dental implants to fail, says senior author Thikriat Al-Jewair, associate professor of orthodontics in the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine and director of the school's Advanced Education Program in Orthodontics.

For the study, published in the Journal of Craniomandibular and Sleep Practice, the researchers used cone beam computed tomography (CBCT)—a type of X-ray—to measure bone density in the head and neck of 38 adult participants, half of whom had obstructive sleep apnea.

When controlling for age, sex, and weight, the participants with obstructive sleep apnea had significantly lower bone mineral density than the participants without the condition.

Obstructive sleep apnea, which is characterized by difficulty breathing while asleep, can cause hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the body), inflammation, oxidative stress, and shortened breathing patterns. Each of these symptoms may have a chronic negative effect on bone metabolism and, ultimately, bone density, says Al-Jewair.

"While the link between obstructive sleep apnea and low bone mineral density has yet to be fully explored, this study offers new evidence on their connection that could have several implications for orthodontic treatment," says Al-Jewair, who is also assistant dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion in the UB School of Dental Medicine.

"If a patient has been diagnosed with sleep apnea, this can influence treatment planning and management. CBCT imaging has become an integral part of daily orthodontic practice and could be used as a screening tool for low bone mineral density," she says.

"Orthodontists could then inform their patients of their propensity for low bone mineral density and encourage them to seek further consultation with their physician, as well as warn the patient of possible adverse outcomes, increased risks and effects on treatment time."

Future research with larger sample sizes is needed, says Al-Jewair.

Source: University at Buffalo

The post Sleep apnea linked to weak bones and teeth appeared first on Futurity.

The annual incidence of sports-related   in older adults is rare: 2 to 3 cases per 100,000 people.

Medications like dextromethorphan, used to treat coughs caused by cold and flu, could potentially be repurposed to help people quit smoking cigarettes, according to a new study. Researchers developed a novel machine learning method, where computer programs analyze data sets for patterns and trends, to identify the drugs and said that some of them are already being tested in clinical trials.

Researchers have applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest.

Coffee with milk may have an anti-inflammatory effect in humans, a new study shows.

Researchers found that a combination of proteins and antioxidants doubles the anti-inflammatory properties in immune cells. They hope to be able to study the health effects on humans.

Whenever bacteria, viruses, and other foreign substances enter the body, our immune systems react by deploying white blood cells and chemical substances to protect us.

This reaction, commonly known as inflammation, also occurs whenever we overload tendons and muscles and is characteristic of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

Antioxidants known as polyphenols are found in humans, plants, fruits, and vegetables. This group of antioxidants is also used by the food industry to slow the oxidation and deterioration of food quality and thereby avoid off flavors and rancidity. Polyphenols are also known to be healthy for humans, as they help reduce oxidative stress in the body that gives rise to inflammation.

But much remains unknown about polyphenols. Relatively few studies have investigated what happens when polyphenols react with other molecules, such as proteins mixed into foods that we then consume.

In a new study, researchers investigated how polyphenols behave when combined with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The results have been promising.

"In the study, we show that as a polyphenol reacts with an amino acid, its inhibitory effect on inflammation in immune cells is enhanced," says Marianne Nissen Lund, a professor in the food science department at the University of Copenhagen, who headed the study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

"As such, it is clearly imaginable that this cocktail could also have a beneficial effect on inflammation in humans. We will now investigate further, initially in animals. After that, we hope to receive research funding which will allow us to study the effect in humans."

Twice the inflammation-fighting power

To investigate the anti-inflammatory effect of combining polyphenols with proteins, the researchers applied artificial inflammation to immune cells. Some of the cells received various doses of polyphenols that had reacted with an amino acid, while others only received polyphenols in the same doses. A control group received nothing.

The researchers observed that immune cells treated with the combination of polyphenols and amino acids were twice as effective at fighting inflammation as the cells to which only polyphenols were added.

"It is interesting to have now observed the anti-inflammatory effect in cell experiments. And obviously, this has only made us more interested in understanding these health effects in greater detail. So, the next step will be to study the effects in animals," says senior author Andrew Williams of the veterinary and animal sciences department.

Anti-inflammatory coffee and milk

In previous studies, the researchers demonstrated that polyphenols bind to proteins in meat products, milk, and beer. In another new study, they tested whether the molecules also bind to each other in a coffee drink with milk. Indeed, coffee beans are filled with polyphenols, while milk is rich in proteins.

"Our result demonstrates that the reaction between polyphenols and proteins also happens in some of the coffee drinks with milk that we studied. In fact, the reaction happens so quickly that it has been difficult to avoid in any of the foods that we've studied so far," says Nissen Lund.

Therefore, the researcher does not find it difficult to imagine that the reaction and potentially beneficial anti-inflammatory effect also occur when other foods consisting of proteins and fruits or vegetables are combined.

"I can imagine that something similar happens in, for example, a meat dish with vegetables or a smoothie, if you make sure to add some protein like milk or yogurt," says Nissen Lund.

Industry and the research community have both taken note of the major advantages of polyphenols. As such, they are working on how to add the right quantities of polyphenols in foods to achieve the best quality. The new research results are promising in this context as well.

"Because humans do not absorb that much polyphenol, many researchers are studying how to encapsulate polyphenols in protein structures which improve their absorption in the body," says Nissen Lund. "This strategy has the added advantage of enhancing the anti-inflammatory effects of polyphenols."

Additional coauthors are from the Technical University of Dresden in Germany. Independent Research Fund Denmark funded the work.

Source: University of Copenhagen

The post Coffee with milk may ease inflammation in humans appeared first on Futurity.

Keeping food cold as it moves through the supply chain is crucial to fighting food insecurity, preventing food waste, and supporting agricultural livelihoods and economies throughout the developing world.

 Flambé

Seemingly without warning, a Tesla Model S "spontaneously" burst into flames while cruising down a California highway, according to the Sacramento Metro Fire District.

The Tesla was traveling at "freeway speeds," the fire district said in a Facebook post, until the driver noticed heavy black smoke emerging from the undercarriage. Fortunately, the motorist was able to pull over and exit the vehicle unharmed, but the flames continued to intensify, devouring the vehicle's front end.

A crew of firefighters used jacks to expose the Tesla's underside and extinguish the lithium ion battery blaze. Putting it out, though, required considerable effort.

Over the course of an hour, it took 6,000 gallons of water from three fire engines to subdue the flames because the Tesla's battery cells continued to combust.

"For reference, a fully involved traditional combustion vehicle can be extinguished with a single fire engine's 700 gallon water supply," the district wrote.

 

Fire Sale

Lithium ion battery fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish. In addition to containing combustible and flammable materials like graphite and electrolytes, their cathodes also release oxygen as they continue to burn, making their fires formidably self-sustaining.

That's why using fire foam to smother the flames is ineffective, the district notes in a tweet.

As of now, it's unclear why the Tesla battery spontaneously went up in flames, especially since, according to the firefighters, the vehicle was undamaged prior to the fire.

Usually, a lithium battery fire is spurred by a collision, but a short circuit or excessively high temperatures could also cause a battery to combust.

Tesla cars are no strangers to suddenly combusting. In 2019, after several headline-making reports of parked 

 catching fire seemingly without warning, the automaker released a software update "out of an abundance of caution" to improve the batteries' safety.

More on Tesla: Of Course Elon Musk Is Pushing The Cybertruck Back Again, What Did You Expect?

The post Tesla "Spontaneously" Bursts Into Flames While Driving Down Freeway appeared first on Futurism.

It has been hypothesized, that the tipping of one element of the Earth's system can catalyze the tipping of others in a cascade. A study gives an example of an alternative option, in which the collapse of one component might in fact make another system tipping less likely. In particular, the study indicates that tipping of the West Antarctica ice sheet may stabilize the important ocean current system, called the AMOC, distributing heat to the North Atlantic region.

A new leisure trend is providing an alternative to pubs and bars for young people whose alcohol consumption has been declining for years.

We know everything in our homes gathers dust. What you probably don't know is whether there are toxic contaminants in your house dust, and where these might come from.

Older and middle-aged women are having their moment in the sun, it seems. The recent Golden Globes coverage was filled with images of "older" women on the red carpet. There were some notable wins too.

Researchers have synthesized a new material that solves one of the most difficult problems in the quest to create wearable, unobtrusive sensitive sensors: the problem of pressure.

In a recent paper submitted to The Astronomical Journal in November 2022, a scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne quantifies how the Earth has not heard a radio signal from an extraterrestrial technological civilization since the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began listening for such signals 60 year ago. The article also quantifies the potential likelihood pertaining to when we might hear a signal, along with recommending potential strategies that could aid in the ongoing search for detecting a signal from an extraterrestrial technological civilization.

Immigration is a critical topic in contemporary political and academic debates. Politicians and the general population alike in countries around the world have often shown hostility towards immigrants.

A 2022 survey by the Australian Institute of Criminology found three in four app users surveyed had experienced online abuse or harassment when using dating apps. This included image-based abuse and abusive and threatening messages. A further third experienced in-person or off-app abuse from people they met on apps.

Anglo-Saxon monasteries were more resilient to Viking attacks than previously thought, archaeologists have concluded.

Many people enter into a monogamous romantic relationship hoping to remain faithful to their partner and enjoy all the benefits such a relationship can offer, including a sense of security, belonging and intimacy. However, in an age where the possibilities are seemingly endless, maintaining sexual exclusivity becomes challenging, as high rates of infidelity will testify.

 set up a structure that helps them systematically go through different types of resources and figure out if they meet the aims of diversifying syllabi.

Researchers have synthesized a new material that solves one of the most difficult problems in the quest to create wearable, unobtrusive sensitive sensors: the problem of pressure.

New research is providing a fresh view into the ways a common chemotherapy agent, etoposide, stalls and poisons the essential enzymes that allow cancer cells to flourish.

Researchers are one step closer to making wearable textile technology a reality. Materials scientists have reported a new design of a flexible wearable supercapacitor patch. It uses MXene to create a textile-based supercapacitor that can charge in minutes and power an Arduino microcontroller temperature sensor and radio communication of data for almost two hours.

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Stargazers can look forward to watching a rare comet, a super blue moon and several spectacular meteor showers

Two ancient clay tablets from Iraq contain details of a "lost" Canaanite language.

On Dec. 18, Argentina defeated France after penalties in what some have called the greatest World Cup final ever. For one month the attention of soccer fans from Brazil to Morocco was devoted to their national teams as the Seleção Canarinho, Atlas Lions and 30 other teams battled through the tournament in Qatar.

You lift a stone and staring up at you is a little insect with its tail curled and pincers ready to inflict who knows what. Then you see its attendants—tiny white insects, huddled underneath. Should you drop the stone and quash them, or leave them be?

You lift a stone and staring up at you is a little insect with its tail curled and pincers ready to inflict who knows what. Then you see its attendants—tiny white insects, huddled underneath. Should you drop the stone and quash them, or leave them be?

 already knew the atoms in perovskites react favorably to light. Now they've seen precisely how the atoms move when the 2D materials are excited with light. Their study details the first direct measurement of structural dynamics under light-induced excitation in 2D perovskites.

Nature Communications, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36155-2

Publisher Correction: Insights into the mechanism of phospholipid hydrolysis by plant non-specific phospholipase C

Nature Communications, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36226-4

Author Correction: The interferon stimulated gene-encoded protein   inhibits human LINE-1 retrotransposition and LINE-1 RNA-mediated type I interferon induction

Nature Communications, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36182-z

 (RXFP4) regulates pleiotropic biological processes. Here, authors report cryo-EM structures revealing the ligand-binding modes and key determinants of peptidomimetic agonism and subtype selectivity

Modern production is global, and globalization persists through pandemics, war, xenophobia, and trade wars. It persists because global supply chains enhance product quality while reducing costs. Globalization continues because the technology of communication, information, and even transportation keeps advancing while becoming relatively less expensive.

Hit TV show "The Last of Us" follows on from an outbreak of a fictitious fungi, but Imperial experts are among those battling very real fungal diseases.

In the end there was no red wave. And there was no blue wave.

The extraordinary flood event Auckland experienced on the night of January 27, the eve of the city's anniversary weekend, was caused by rainfall that was literally off the chart.

Students and professors can't decide whether the AI chatbot is a research tool—or a cheating engine.

Hit TV show "The Last of Us" follows on from an outbreak of a fictitious fungi, but Imperial experts are among those battling very real fungal diseases.

About one-third of the food eaten by Americans comes from crops pollinated by  , yet the insect is dying off at alarming rates. In one year alone, between April of 2019 and April of 2020, one study reported a 43% colony loss in honey bees across the United States.

New Cornell research is providing a fresh view into the ways a common chemotherapy agent, etoposide, stalls and poisons the essential enzymes that allow cancer cells to flourish.

New Cornell research is providing a fresh view into the ways a common chemotherapy agent, etoposide, stalls and poisons the essential enzymes that allow cancer cells to flourish.

About one-third of the food eaten by Americans comes from crops pollinated by  , yet the insect is dying off at alarming rates. In one year alone, between April of 2019 and April of 2020, one study reported a 43% colony loss in honey bees across the United States.

Understanding the elastic properties of solid-state ionic conductors, also known as superionic materials, is a crucial challenge in developing the solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) that could replace the liquid organic electrolytes used today, thereby improving safety in commercial Li-ion batteries.

Nitrogen changes form as it cycles between air, soil, and life. Soils, for example, emit nitrogen either as inert dinitrogen (N2), which dominates our atmosphere, or as nitric oxide (NO) or nitrous oxide (N2O), the greenhouse gases that warm it.

Since its release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT has caused a stir, with a stream of op-eds and news stories focused on the ways the program opens possibilities for academic misconduct by students.

Scientists used to think power in animals played out in a tidy and simple way. Nature is a dog-eat-dog place. Rams butt heads in a thunderous spectacle, and the winning male gets to mate with a female. Bigger, stronger, meaner animals beat up smaller, weaker, more timid ones, and then walk, fly or swim away with the prize.

For years leading up to last fall's FIFA World Cup in Qatar, human and labor rights organizations pointed to what they described as the systemic abuse of migrant workers who traveled to the small country on the Arab Gulf to build the stadiums and infrastructure that allowed the global sporting event to take place.

When the Federal Reserve convenes at the end of January 2023 to set interest rates, it will be guided by one key bit of data: the U.S. inflation rate. The problem is, that stat ignores a sizable chunk of the country—rural America.

 

 

The Internet Archive lives up to its name, creating a backup of information and content that would otherwise be lost to history as technology barrels forward. The archive hosts web page snapshots, Android APKs, and a new project from the MAME emulator team: The Calculator Drawer. This collection of calculator emulators runs the gamut from the kid-friendly Electronic Number Muncher to the venerable TI-83 Plus. And they all work just like the originals.

You probably know "MAME" mostly for its arcade machine emulation — it originally stood for "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator" but was merged with a general emulation project to cover a wide array of vintage devices. Hence, the new MAME Calculator Drawer on the Internet Archive.

The drawer includes both graphing calculators, as well as simple calculators, all emulated in MAME. Most of them even have an additional layer on top to represent the original hardware. That means you can click on the keypads and controls as they originally existed, right down to the "on" button on many of the more advanced machines. Like the real deal, they won't do anything until you turn on the power. Without the MAME Artwork system, the emulated part of many of these devices would simply be a string of LCD block numbers. MAME can create vector graphic representations of the hardware, but most of the calculators use real photos of the device for the artwork layer.

It's a lot more fun to see a representation of the calculator itself rather than using your keyboard to input numbers. That said, you can use your keyboard for input if you prefer. To use any of the emulated calculators, just open the page and click the Start button. Each page includes some basic information about the devices, including the release date, price, and hardware specs. There's also a full-screen option if you want the technology of yesteryear to fill your screen. That's more useful on mobile — most of the calculators are roughly smartphone-shaped.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of Texas Instruments graphing calculators, including some of the more advanced versions you rarely, if ever, saw in the wild. The TI v200 and TI-92 (above) are more like tiny computers than calculators, and they're much more complicated to operate as a result. If you need a little refresher on how to use these retro tabulators, The Internet Archive also has a collection of manuals linked on the Calculator Drawer page.

Now read:

• Internet Archive Adds 2,500 Playable MS-DOS Games
• The Great Graphing Calculator Ripoff
• In a big shift, MAME is going open source

Scientists used to think power in animals played out in a tidy and simple way. Nature is a dog-eat-dog place. Rams butt heads in a thunderous spectacle, and the winning male gets to mate with a female. Bigger, stronger, meaner animals beat up smaller, weaker, more timid ones, and then walk, fly or swim away with the prize.

 already knew the atoms in perovskites react favorably to light. Now they've seen precisely how the atoms move when the 2D materials are excited with light. Their study details the first direct measurement of structural dynamics under light-induced excitation in 2D perovskites.

It's possible to prevent heartworms in many of your furry friends—dogs, cats and ferrets, specifically.

A new look at the history of water quality in the Chesapeake Bay sheds light on how the estuary has responded to nutrient reduction efforts and why improvements have remained a major challenge. University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science researchers looked at the Bay's historic response to efforts to reduce nutrients to minimize dead zones—areas with too little oxygen to support marine life—and found there is a pollution threshold after which it takes twice the effort to make a change.

When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, "if they're out there, why haven't we found them yet?" And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy.

Astronomers have captured a spectacular, ongoing collision between at least three galaxy clusters. Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA's (European Space Agency's) XMM-Newton, and a trio of radio telescopes is helping astronomers sort out what is happening in this jumbled scene. Collisions and mergers like this are the main way that galaxy clusters can grow into the gigantic cosmic edifices seen today. These also act as the largest particle accelerators in the universe.

For anglers, landing a muskellunge, or muskie, is a big deal. The "fish of 10,000 casts" is notoriously elusive, making the massive fish an even bigger prize when one finally strikes a lure.

Over the past decade, there has been a growing awareness that environmental and life science fields need to diversify their teaching syllabi. Many have suggested highlighting Black women scholars, hidden figures in the fields, and elevating Black, Indigenous, and People of Color scholars. However, faculty sometimes worry that their solitary efforts could be harmful or ineffective.

Customer satisfaction surveys are ubiquitous. They blip into our daily lives after dental appointments, haircuts and calls with IT. For businesses, these short questionnaires are intended to provide feedback and make improvements.

Caddisflies are an order of aquatic insects with high diversity. In Thailand, more than 1,000 caddisfly species are known to occur, and a recent study in the journal Check List shows that their diversity in the country is even greater than previously suggested.

It's possible to prevent heartworms in many of your furry friends—dogs, cats and ferrets, specifically.

For anglers, landing a muskellunge, or muskie, is a big deal. The "fish of 10,000 casts" is notoriously elusive, making the massive fish an even bigger prize when one finally strikes a lure.

Caddisflies are an order of aquatic insects with high diversity. In Thailand, more than 1,000 caddisfly species are known to occur, and a recent study in the journal Check List shows that their diversity in the country is even greater than previously suggested.

Shortlisted

As NASA's Artemis program plods toward a followup mission, the agency is undertaking its secretive selection process to decide who will be sent to the Moon for the first time in 50 years.

Per a CNN report, the agency isn't quite ready to name any names until "sometime in the spring" for the mission that will first see a crewed orbital mission in 2024 and then a Moon landing the following year.

The entire process of astronaut selection is extremely clandestine, but the news outlet was able to glean an inside look at the selection process by interviewing nearly a dozen former and current NASA officials and found out who's on the agency buzz shortlist: decorated naval aviator Reid Wiseman as the probable chief of the mission; Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, the first women to ever do an all-female space walk; Army pilot Anne McClain, Stephanie Wilson, who's the most senior astronaut of the bunch; and Jeremy Hansen, who might fill the single Canadian seat on the internationally-funded mission.

Covert Concerns

As former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman told CNN, the final selection process can end up being surprisingly petty.

"The problem is it can be influenced by trivial things, like what size spacesuit you wear. If there is only a medium and a large and you need the extra-large, you're screwed. You're not going to get assigned to the mission," he said. "It can be crazy, little things that dictate how it all comes out and it's not always the most equitable or transparent process."

The flight assignment process apparently used to be even more mystery-shrouded, but as CNN notes, astronauts still have to wait along with everyone else to learn who will be sent up — a nail-biting prospect if there ever was one, especially on a mission as important as historic as Artemis.

"This is a special and unique opportunity," Reisman, the potential chief of the mission, said, "and, frankly, I'm going to be super jealous of whoever they pick."

And even though it sounds like a mighty difficult job that carries some pretty freaky health risks, we're honestly kind of envious too.

More on Artemis: The Head of NASA Is Scared Chinese Astronauts Will Seize Portions of the Moon

The post NASA Finalizing Secretive Decision on First Astronauts for the Artemis Moon Mission appeared first on Futurism.

Today, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, or NCSES—part of the U.S. National Science Foundation—released Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities 2023, the federal government's latest and most complete analysis of diversity trends in STEM employment and education.

To many, EV stands for "electric vehicle." To researchers at Harvard University and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, it's shorthand for another vehicle—this one nanoscopic—that might help streamline the development and delivery of vaccines worldwide.

Hydrothermal carbonization of lignocellulosic biomass—the most abundant renewable feedstock—is a promising method for the production of carbon materials with negative carbon emissions. This method has attracted a great deal of attention over the past decade because it uses water which is inherently present in green biomass and non-toxic.

The academic landscape shifted dramatically in November 2022 with the launch of  , a chatbot developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is artificial intelligence software that can write essays, poems, code and perform other tasks traditionally done by humans.

A research team, led by Professor Moeto Nagai and comprised of researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Electronic Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS), Toyohashi University of Technology, has successfully used AI to achieve single-cell isolation.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-28793-9

Author Correction: Relationship between nitrapyrin and varying nitrogen application rates with nitrous oxide emissions and nitrogen use efficiency in a maize field

Lockdown measures aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19 had the unintended benefit of curtailing violence by the insurgent group ISIS, according to a new study led by Yale political scientist Dawn Brancati.

An analysis of mortality data shows that   ranks as a leading cause of death among children and teens.

China accounted for nearly half of the world's low-carbon spending in 2022, which could challenge U.S. efforts to bolster domestic clean energy manufacturing

A research team, led by Professor Moeto Nagai and comprised of researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Electronic Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS), Toyohashi University of Technology, has successfully used AI to achieve single-cell isolation.

PLUS. Langt de fleste ­ingeniører og it-specialister holder fortsat lønnen tæt til kroppen, trods eksperternes anbefaling om at gøre det modsatte.

The precious metals, such as platinum, palladium and rhodium, in catalytic converters make the vehicle devices attractive to thieves, but University of Central Florida researchers are working to reduce the amount of precious metals needed in them—down to single atoms—while still maximizing their effectiveness.

The recent uptick in sewage overspill events is due to infrastructure not keeping up with demand, according to Imperial College London research.

Swimming in rivers, creeks and lakes can be a fun way to cool off in summer. But contamination in natural waterways can pose a risk to human health.

The desire to reduce car dependence is about promoting health, well-being and social equity and cohesion as much as it is about transitioning to a zero-carbon economy.

And now it lies in ruins.

Nature, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00266-z

A slew of remarkable trials have raised the profile of a class of weight loss drugs, but there are concerns about cost and weight stigma.

Nature, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00274-z

A sustained catch-up effort is needed to help students to recover lost skills and knowledge.

Nature, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00258-z

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is deploying machine-learning algorithms that filter out Earthly interference and spot signals humans might miss.

Engineers have developed a contact lens prototype that is specially designed to prevent contact lens-induced   (CLIDE). The lens alleviates this condition by facilitating tear flow in response to normal eye blinking. This can relieve the discomfort, visual impairment, and risk of inflammation experienced by millions of CLIDE sufferers.

Honey bee colony loss across the United States over the last five years is primarily related to the presence of parasitic mites, nearby pesticides, and extreme weather events as well as challenges with overwintering, according to a new study. The study took advantage of novel statistical methods and is among the first to concurrently consider a variety of potential honey bee stressors at a national scale.

Researchers got into the minds of muskies to learn what personality traits make the fish more likely to strike. In the process, they learned valuable lessons that could help conserve the important aquatic predators.

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An innovative technique finds seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly's circadian clock.

Stem cells have been modified to carry a therapy to treat companion animal patients with late-stage  , preserving good quality of life and extending their lives, potentially leading to better understanding of cancer treatments and their use in humans.

The precious metals, such as platinum, palladium and rhodium, in catalytic converters make the vehicle devices attractive to thieves, but researchers are working to reduce the amount of precious metals needed in them — down to single atoms — while still maximizing their effectiveness. In recent studies researchers showed that they could, respectively, use atomic platinum to control pollutants and operate the system at lower temperatures, which is crucial to removing harmful chemicals when a vehicle first starts.

If you've ever watched an ant searching for food, you probably assumed that they were just covering ground in a random fashion. But a study now finds that at least one species of rock ant doesn't walk randomly at all. Instead, their search combines systematic meandering with random walks interspersed.

An experiment in beetles shows that when parents care for their young, the population accumulates more mutations over time, but this may have benefits

In his office overlooking Sixth Avenue in Helena, Montana, Wilmot Collins leans back in a chair at his conference table and recounts all of the ways his being here, as a Liberian refugee who in 2018 became the first Black mayor of any city in Montana since the state joined the union, was unlikely to happen.

Perhaps it all traces back to April 12, 1980, when a faction of armed militants in Liberia, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, entered the executive mansion in Monrovia, the nation's capital, and murdered President William Tolbert. They dumped his body into a mass grave with those of 27 of his colleagues—members of the West African nation's single-party leadership—ushering in a new era of military rule. Collins was a senior at Carroll High School in Yekepa then, and he remembers the string of killings and atrocities that began shortly after the start of Doe's rule. "Things were bad," he told me. They soon got worse. Those years started Collins's thinking about political systems and how they could be made better—what they might look like if they worked.

[Read: The new Southern strategy]

After high school, he attended the University of Liberia, where his interest in politics deepened. Specifically, he was fascinated by America's system. "Professor [D. Elwood] Dunn taught American government; that's where we learned about Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education; and the system of government intrigued all of us," he told me. Liberia had a three-branch federal system as well, but studying the clear divisions of power in America captivated him; he imagined a better Liberia."We had the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary—but the executive was always meddling into every other branch … But then to see that working," he said, "we had hope."

Nearly 10 years on, in 1989, his country was on the verge of a second coup. Charles Taylor and his rebel army had been training in Libya and entered Liberia through the Ivory Coast—gaining support along the way from people who had felt left behind by the ever more ruthless military dictatorship. "When Taylor came in with his rebels promising honey and gold," he said, people thought, This is who we want. But Taylor was a warlord, an ethnic conflict broke out, and Collins eventually fled to the United States.

Collins took some basic lessons from the destabilization of his home nation: the importance of a peaceful, functioning government and the dangers of despotism. It's wisdom he wishes was not so hard-won, and wisdom he gained only in hindsight. His concern at the time, of course, was escaping.

Twenty-five years after moving to Helena, Collins was serving his first term as the city's mayor and had eyes on running for statewide office. But then he learned a few more lessons, ones that received only passing mentions in textbooks on American government in the 1980s: that the party system has tremendous influence on who prevails politically. That gatekeeping can exclude candidates who lack the right connections. That hopefuls can have their campaigns smothered by their opponents' cash.

Collins learned those lessons in his own bid for Senate, a race he was elbowed out of when a candidate backed by the Democratic Party establishment jumped in, only to then lose to the Republican. To Collins, the whole experience was dispiriting. "When the establishment is not in your corner, you will struggle, and struggle raising money," Collins told me. "I was pissed; I was angry because I didn't get the support."

But he still thinks he has a path ahead. He cites a colloquial definition of insanity: "to do the same thing over and over hoping for a different result." But he hopes that here in Montana he can get a different result.

Liberia began as an idea: that Black people might better prosper in Africa than in the United States. The American Colonization Society sent more than 13,000 free Black people to the west coast of Africa—and though some believed it to be a potential remedy to slavery, it was also a mass exile.

By the time Collins was born, in 1963, Liberia had grown into an independent state. His father was a civil engineer; his mother was the superintendent of schools. "Growing up in Liberia was calm," he told me. "We grew up just like [in America] basically." He went to school, played baseball and tennis. Then the first coup happened, then the second. "And life ceased as we knew it."

On December 24, 1989, the First Liberian Civil War began. Food supplies grew scarce. Each day, Collins or one of his siblings would leave the house to find food, which was concentrated in rebel-held areas. In October 1990, when it was his turn to venture out, he and his fiancée, Maddie Muna, were able to find only a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste.

[From the December 1992 issue: Liberia]

"They say hunger is the best sauce," he told me, explaining how he guzzled down half the tube before sharing the other half with Maddie. He furrowed his brow as he related the story, but allowed himself to laugh. "I'm not kidding you, that thing tasted like, Oh wow!" His speech slowed down a little again as he remembered how they were almost killed.

On their way back to his family, they were stopped at a checkpoint by rebel troops. The armed men called Maddie over for questioning first. "Where are you from?" he recalled them asking. "What do you do?" Then they pointed at Collins, who had been standing quietly to the side. "Who's that? Is that your man?" "Yes," she replied. "You are very lucky. I'm done killing for the day," the rebel told her.

They sprinted away. "We ran until we got home; we didn't stop," he told me. "I'm talking about three, four miles." That's when they decided to leave. "We will die," he remembers thinking. "We didn't have any food; we've been threatened. We've gotta get out of here." But they didn't know how difficult getting out would be.

A peacekeeping force, led by Nigeria, was helping Liberians escape on cargo vessels, but the lines were staggeringly long. He and Maddie queued at 9 o'clock in the morning on a Friday later that October—only leaving their spot, in shifts, in order to use the bathroom. Almost three days later, on Sunday, at about 10 o'clock at night, they boarded. Three more days passed before they arrived in Ghana—it had been nearly a full week since they had eaten. "Imagine," he told me, his eyes welling up, "seven days without food and water, barely drinking. And no change of clothes. Nothing."

He eventually got a job in Ghana, working for SOS Children's Villages as a teacher—the same job he'd held in Liberia before the war began. But after a few months, he and Maddie, who'd married at the start of 1991, were still struggling to make ends meet, and Maddie offered a suggestion: They should move to America.

"How are we supposed to do that? We don't have any money," he responded. "We'll go to Montana," Maddie said. Years earlier she had been an exchange student at a high school in the state, and she thought her host family might be able to help.

She wrote a letter to the family, who contacted Montana's congressional delegation, including Senator Max Baucus. The best way for Maddie to get back to the United States would be on a student visa. With the delegation's help, the family reached out to a Catholic institution, Carroll College, in Helena, where they lived. Soon after, she was awarded a full scholarship to study nursing at Carroll. She would once again live with the family that had hosted her. But getting to the States would prove a little more difficult for Wilmot. Two weeks before Maddie left for Montana, the couple learned that she was pregnant; they resolved that Maddie should go ahead. It would take two more years before Wilmot would be able to join his family.

"Welcome to Helena, it's sunny and warm at 32 degrees," the pilot said over the intercom on February 17, 1994, as Wilmot's flight from Salt Lake City descended. He was the last one off the plane, and as he walked into the terminal he spotted a sign that read Welcome home, Wilmot. Carroll College faculty and the institution's president were waiting for him—there to support his wife and child. "I saw my wife for the first time holding my daughter up, and she put her down and said, 'There's Daddy, go to Daddy,'" he recalled. The tears start again as he remembers that day. "So my daughter started to walk towards me … and then she just started to run and I just fell on the ground and grabbed … "

He stops. It's still fresh.

"I started screaming, calling my wife. 'Maddie, Maddie, she came to me! She came to me!'"

They moved into low-income housing around the corner from Helena High School, which Maddie had attended as an exchange student, and began their life in America.

Each day, he'd get dressed, leave their eggshell-white townhome, and turn onto North Montana Avenue—both in search of a job and to acquaint himself with his new home. One day, he explored a bit farther than normal and stumbled upon the state capitol.

He walked inside and was immediately struck by the marble columns and grand rotunda. He marched up the stairs and saw the governor's office. "And I decided to go meet the governor," he told me, matter-of-factly. The governor's scheduler stopped him. "Do you have an appointment?" she asked. When he shook his head, she asked if he'd like to make one and took his information. Then a man came up behind him.

"May I help you?" he asked.

"No, I'm here to meet the governor," Collins responded.

"Well, I am the governor, Marc Racicot," the man responded.

Collins was floored. He explained that he'd just come from Africa—that he was a Liberian refugee—and that he was looking for work. He handed the governor his paper résumé, and Racicot quickly phoned his educational adviser, who in turn realized that her daughter and Collins's wife had a few classes together at Carroll College. Racicot and his adviser told Collins to apply for a job at Intermountain Children's Home, a mental- and behavioral-health facility for young people, and to list both of them as his references. By March 31—a month and a half after arriving in the United States—he had work. Soon after, he joined the Army National Guard as well.

Over the course of two years, Collins told me, he saw the best of America. Yes, his visa application and resettlement paperwork were held up in bureaucracy, but his application process was helped along by Senator Baucus, a Democrat, and he'd found work through Racicot, a Republican. He saw a system functioning without violence or corruption, and he saw what could happen when politicians tried to help someone.

Collins told me he later realized that not everything was as idyllic as he had wanted to believe—something Racicot's own trajectory would soon demonstrate. The rising star in the Republican Party was praised by both liberals and conservatives for his hawkish approach to budgeting and his personal touch, and he was so popular that one pollster jokingly suggested he "could run for king." But just a few years after helping Collins, he was deemed too moderate by the Bush administration to be considered for attorney general. Harsher undercurrents were at work.

Still, Montana proved a soft landing ground for Collins, and the assistance he received from Racicot and Baucus helped solidify the raw idea about American politics that he'd had in Liberia. They were models of the kind of leader he was starting to think he might one day become.

 

 

On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama traveled to Springfield, Illinois, to announce, on the steps of the building where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, that he would be running for president of the United States. He spoke of Lincoln's fortitude. "He tells us that there is power in conviction," Obama told the crowd of 17,000. "That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people. He tells us that there is power in hope."

[Read: My president was black]

Ten days later, Wilmot Collins awoke to the words KKK: Go back to Africa scrawled across the side of his house in spray paint. He was scheduled to testify at the state capitol that day about a bill that would have expanded the definition of hate crimes in the state. His mailbox had been destroyed before; his car had been set on fire. According to a report from The Great Falls Tribune, his then-14-year-old daughter regularly heard racial slurs; and his 10-year-old son, Bliss, no longer wanted to go to school. "They shouldn't have to go through that," he told lawmakers at the time. "Please, for decency's sake, let's do something now." But he was heartened by how his neighbors had rallied around him each time something like that happened. He had seen Helena at its worst; but he'd seen his neighbors at their best.

In 2016, as he was staring down retirement from the National Guard, he began to look around for what to do next. His son, then a junior at the University of Montana, was visiting home from school and asked what Wilmot might do with all of the free time he would soon have. "I'll never have free time, because your mom will make me work," he told me he joked at the time. "But why are you asking?" Bliss suggested that he enter politics. "Dad, I know you. You know a lot of people; a lot of people know you—I think you're ready."

Eventually, Collins was persuaded. The first order of business was to figure out what his platform would be. He began knocking on doors. He needed to introduce himself to people in the community, but he also needed to hear what they were most concerned about in Helena. In those early conversations, three things came up repeatedly: funding essential services such as firefighters, EMTs, and police officers; increasing affordable housing; and curbing teenage and veteran homelessness. Those became his campaign planks. "I always call my issues 'human issues.' I don't call them 'political issues,'" he told me—a common refrain for Democrats in red states. The mayor's office is nominally nonpartisan, and a broadly appealing platform was important not only to being elected, but to properly serving his community.

Many Black politicians would find Collins's goals familiar—a strategy political scientists call "targeted universalism." In a city like Helena, which is more than 90 percent white, candidates like Collins need to find ways to appeal to a broad swath of the public. When candidates travel to the rural outskirts—or the wealthier suburbs—of their district or city to campaign, they have to align their messages to the interests of those communities. But that does not have to mean compromising a candidate's own beliefs. Instead, as Ravi K. Perry, a political scientist at Howard University, explained to me, targeted universalism is the practice of making clear to those voters why the candidate's policies—such as a large increase in low-income housing—would benefit the entire community. Even if a person is not experiencing homelessness themselves, or is not in need of low-income housing, many people can understand the ways material improvements to housing and roads in areas that need them can boost the city's bond rating and may—down the road—contribute to lower taxes, or other opportunities across the city.

Collins also knew that there was power in alliances. He and a pair of city-commission candidates, Andres Haladay and Heather K. O'Loughlin, decided that it would be best to run as a unified bloc—billed in local newspapers as the progressive ticket whose ideas were to the left of the incumbent mayor's more conservative stances on issues such as Medicaid expansion and public-works projects like fixing roads.

As Election Day 2017 approached, polls had Collins running within a point of Mayor Jim Smith. As votes were tallied, Collins eked out a marginal victory—earning 51 percent of the vote to Smith's 48 percent—to become the first Black mayor since Montana joined the union. (The election of a Black barber by the name of E. T. Johnson, in 1873, continues to be the subject of some debate among local historians.) Haladay and O'Loughlin won their races, for city commission, as well.

National outlets seized on the story, lumping Collins's victory together with other elections that they cast as a repudiation of President Donald Trump's first year in office. But Collins had campaigned on local issues, and he kept his focus on Helena. Alongside the city's commissioners and manager, his administration began improving roads, provided greater funding to the fire and parks departments to help limit the spread of wildfires, and broke ground on new affordable-housing developments.

Collins had built some momentum: He'd defeated a popular incumbent with an upstart campaign that had generated national interest. His was a story that people could believe in. And he'd never felt more like a Montanan. Perhaps, he thought, a statewide campaign might someday be in order.

He'd learned that the hardest part of running for office was fundraising. "Calling people and begging them, writing people letters—it was hard for me," he said. "I did that when I was homeless; I didn't want to do that when I was not homeless." Without a personal network of wealthy donors, he knew he'd have to get started early. And so, in 2019, nearly three decades after fleeing Liberia, Collins announced that he would be running to unseat Republican Steve Daines in Montana's 2020 U.S. Senate election.

 

 

in July 2019, standing before a group of Democrats assembled for the state party's rules convention at the Colonial Hotel in Helena, Wilmot Collins wanted to talk about division. "It's not about Democrat or Republican," he told those in the ballroom. "That's what we need to bring this state back to. We're divided. If I'm representing you, I'll represent all of you."

There was no need to explain who he was; by that point, Collins was a known quantity in the state—and nationally. What he really wanted to highlight in his brief remarks was that he intended to be the kind of political leader who cared about people—like those who had helped him come to Montana and get a job to support his family.

But he also wanted to talk about money. "I am you," he told them. "We're not rich." He was painting a contrast between himself and his would-be opponent were he to become the official nominee. In 2018, Daines had a reported net worth of more than $30 million. "Not only the rich should be able to govern," Collins told the Montana Free Press.

He may have felt personally aggrieved as well. Prior to announcing his candidacy, Collins had met with Montana's then-governor, Steve Bullock—a Democrat who had launched a presidential campaign—and asked for his blessing to run for office. But, according to Collins, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was convinced that the governor would ultimately run for the Senate seat if his bid for the White House was unsuccessful. "They tried to dissuade me and discourage me from announcing—and I announced anyway, so I didn't have any support from them," he told me. (The DSCC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Of course, parties are risk-averse and rally behind their perceived best bets all the time. But that tendency can have the unfortunate side effect of limiting, rather than deepening, the party's bench, and party leaders' instincts for who will succeed with voters are not always right. For example, when Jon Tester—Montana's senior senator—first wanted to run for his seat, the party wasn't interested, preferring John Morrison, then the state auditor, whose father had been a state-supreme-court justice. "A lot of Democrats tried to dissuade him as well, including people like Max [Baucus], [Chuck] Schumer, and Harry Reid," Bill Lombardi, who ran Tester's primary campaign in 2006, told me. But Tester, a farmer who was in his first term as State Senate president, managed to win the primary anyway, and has been popular with voters since, having won his seat three times now. Democrats are hoping he will run again in 2024, in what is expected to be a tough race for the party.

Collins's appearance before the Democrats in Helena in 2019 was brief, but he laid out the ideas that would underpin his campaign as well as the primary obstacle he would face. Alongside his small team, he began traveling the state to raise money—a difficult task in the fourth-largest state, but a necessary one for a candidate without party funding. He often played to small crowds, even if they weren't small for the area. "We went to Fort Benton," he told me, a two-hour drive, minimum, from Helena. "And when we got to the hall, there were 50 people—and I turned to my campaign manager and said, 'You've got to be kidding me.'" (A local Democrat later explained that it was the most people that that corner of Montana had seen turn out for someone in their party in a long time.) People would donate $5, $10, $20—anything that might gas up his tank to get him and his team to the next city to continue campaigning. "I raised $350, $400 from that crowd [in Fort Benton], but it really showed me what grassroots campaigning is."

Over the next several months, Collins raised nearly $300,000. But in December, Bullock dropped out of the presidential race. And in early March, just as America began to implement restrictions to stem the coming surge of COVID-19 cases, the governor called Collins and asked for a meeting. They met at the governor's mansion for lunch. "He told me, 'Things have changed. I'm planning to get back in the race.'" In the 24 hours after he made his announcement, on March 9, Bullock raised $1.2 million; quadruple the amount that Collins had raised in nearly six months.

Bullock was someone whom party bosses were excited about. He had already won statewide office, and he was the kind of centrist that Democrats believed Montanans could get behind. But that wasn't enough—he lost by 10 percentage points, sending Daines to the Senate.

Was Montana destined to vote for Daines regardless of who was on the Democratic ticket? Or, in a year when Democrats won the White House, retained control of the House, and got to 50 seats in the Senate, could a different candidate have earned a different result? If not for gatekeeping, would a candidate like Collins, a refugee who had served in the military for two decades before ascending to the mayor's office in a city where only a handful of people look like him, have won? Bill Lombardi isn't sure. "There aren't a lot [of Democratic candidates] rising to the top who can bridge the rural-urban divide" in the state as well as energize Montanans who have simply soured on the Democrats' brand, he told me. Candidates need to be able to show they're willing to buck the party, and party favorites may not be the people most likely to do just that.

Both Collins and Lombardi agree on one thing: Democrats in Montana need more future leaders. "I've been asking people, in traveling around the state at different events, 'Who are the candidates who can reach across the aisle?' and people are stumped because they can't think of anyone on our statewide bench," Lombardi told me.

Collins worries that a lot of young Democrats have been cowed by the party's rigidity. "I see a lot of prominent, young Dems who want to get into politics who don't know how—they're scared," he told me. If the party does not start training and encouraging them instead of going "back to the same old people who are still losing," those young Democrats will run away.

A late-summer evening in Helena is unnerving in its beauty. The walking mall down Sixth Street is bustling; patrons sit outside one of the several breweries; remnants of the Pride rally—the largest in Montana's history—still line the street. On a bench, Collins sips his beer and holds court. Not officially, but everyone here seems to know him.

In 2021, Collins was close to running unopposed for reelection—in fact, in some ways, his tenure has been marked by very little friction, though there are things that residents hope can be improved. Homelessness is still a major issue—one Collins has taken to saying can't be solved by Helena alone; he has begun calling on surrounding cities for help. On the day before campaign filing closed, he received a challenger, Sonda Gaub. "I wanted a choice, and no one was stepping up," Gaub told a local television station after her announcement.

[From the August 1866 issue: A year in Montana]

Gaub, like others in the city, worried about Helena's unhoused population. And she sought greater transparency in local government, though, as the Independent Record noted, she conceded that a lot of that transparency work—publicly available meetings where the community could hear directly what went into decision making—was already happening.

Though it was her first foray into politics, her husband, Darin, had run for public office in 2020, and has since become deeply involved in Republican politics in the state. "Here in my small town of Helena, Montana, we've got a mayor and a commission that constantly puts us in debt over things we don't need," Darin, the chair of the Lewis and Clark County Republican Central Committee, said on a podcast in August, on which he also made several references to disbelieving the 2020 presidential-election results. (Neither of the Gaubs responded to multiple requests for comment.)

Ultimately, though, a majority of voters thought Collins had done enough to serve a second term, and he was reelected—this time with more than 60 percent of the vote. His campaign was still built around issues that residents felt were most important: fixing roads, making housing affordable, improving wastewater treatment and snowplowing, expanding trails to allow for e-bikes. He's open to seeking statewide office again, but right now he's focused on helping train young Montanans to run for office; building a bench for the future through the coalition approach he used to get elected.

After more than 20,000 miles crisscrossing Montana with the hope of a Senate election, he's back where he feels most comfortable: in Helena. He's still the guy who fell in love with American democracy in Liberia, and who has had to learn, over and over again, the ways it falls short. But even if he never wins statewide office, he's part of that system now, and what could be a better testament to its ideals than that?

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Kaitlyn: What is life but a series of meals, some of which are given dramatic titles to imbue them with random significance?

I once received an email from the comms team at Reddit promoting the company's end-of-year data that made the claim that the top post of the preceding 12 months had been a recipe for something called "Divorce Carrot Cake." Of course you've heard of Engagement Chicken, the roast chicken that reportedly brought about the betrothal of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, as well as that of Howard Stern and his second wife, Beth.

There's also something called "Breakup Chili," invented by our friend Tamar, that is based on the Texas-Style Chili recipe by The New York Times' Julia Moskin and further inspired by a seminal blog post that Tamar and I have texted back and forth, and to whoever else needs to see it, for the past several years called "February is Breakup Season in Cape Town." The post, by the writer Rosa Lyster, is about a cluster of early-winter breakups she'd observed, generally of "relationships about a year and a half or less, where breaking up doesn't involve too much paperwork." The reason we return to this post so much is because it features a great email from Lyster's mom, offered as comfort to devastated winter-breakup victims, in which she talks about rereading her own diaries from when she'd just turned 30 and concludes: "The level of introspection and self-analysis and vacillation is truly alarming. I had no idea that my life as I know it now had not even begun and that I would be fine. Isn't that strange."

This is the fifth year of the Breakup Chili. Tamar makes it for us all once per winter. The third year was outside; it was 20 degrees and we ate out of our own jars brought from home. Some of the other years I don't specifically remember. Of course, the first year is a private story. Traditions become most real when you obscure their origins and rewrite their lore!

Lizzie: This was the Breakup Chili's fifth year, but it was my first year attending the party. Sometimes you gotta work for that invite! Anyway, great name. I understood the gist of it right off the bat: We'd be eating chili. There would be a meat one and a vegetarian one. Maybe someone would break up.

I don't really have any meaningful foods in my own life. Certainly nothing that has ever gotten me engaged or divorced. That's not to say that I'm a "food is fuel" person either. It's just that, unfortunately, the most memorable foods in my personal history are the ones that have given me food poisoning. Hard to forget a turkey sandwich that ruined your life for a week.

I brought Matt along to the party because he's from Texas and has strong opinions about chili (mostly re: beans). We got to Tamar's at about 4:30, rang the bell three times, and sat on the stoop for a while before giving up and calling Kaitlyn for help.

Kaitlyn: I hate that this happened. One of my least favorite feelings is waiting on a stoop thinking, If the buzzer doesn't work, and my text isn't being answered, what technologies are even left to me? What if I'm not found for another 30 minutes and by then I'm crying? But she made it.

Nathan and I had taken the S to Prospect Park at about 4:00 p.m.—just before dark on a school night. We were carrying some queso-flavored Tostitos, some Topo Chico, and a loaf of sourdough Nathan had made at 1 a.m. while I was on the couch reading the Associated Press's introduction to its original edition of the Warren Report ("Will history be fully content with the answers?" Guess!!!).

When you enter Tamar's apartment, you have to go down a long hall that curves in such a way as to conceal the entire living area from view. You get to call out, "Helloooooo," as if you were in the foyer of a mansion. When Tamar hustled around the corner to greet us, she was wearing a perfect linen apron that went down to her shins—a Christmas present from Alex who'd asked, "Do you think you'll wear it on Breakup Chili day?" It had dark blue ties on either side and a scooped back. She could leave the house in it!

The apartment was in a state of stunning beauty and warmth. The living room was lined with cream taper candles and espresso cups of Swedish Fish, spicy pistachios, and cornichons. On the bar, Tamar had set up a row of glasses of premixed "ranch water," which is what Kourtney Kardashian (among others) calls lime seltzer with tequila. She'd had another adventure at Best Meats on Flatbush, she told us. The boys there had cubed the chuck steak for her, and at first she wasn't sure it was "cube-y" enough. Over FaceTime, her dad had said that the cubes were alright.

 

 

Lizzie: Tamar showed us a photo of the raw cubed meat. Looked good to me! Nicely marbled, red, etc.

Really, you have to try and be a deserving guest at a dinner party these days, because hosting one comes with so many pitfalls that only a few brave souls attempt to do it, and even fewer invite more than 10 people. Do you know how expensive it is to buy meat for 20 people? We showed up with some nonalcoholic beer and a bag of Fritos. A bag of Fritos ran me back almost $6! I applaud Tamar for providing us with beef at a time like this, instead of telling us to just go home and chew some cardboard.

Kaitlyn: Though I hoped that the theme of the party would inspire juicy disclosure of romantic failures past, approximately 80 percent of the guests, including myself, were participating in Dry January. So the first 30 minutes were spent gossiping about how "they really have made advances" in nonalcoholic aperitifs and imaginary gin.

This reminded Sonia that her dad had recently learned that there are calories in alcohol, a life-changing revelation that prompted him to begin a somewhat extreme diet. From there, we got on the topic of the OMAD—"one meal a day"—lifestyle, which my dad is currently messing with, God knows why. Nathan said he wouldn't be impressed until dads started doing GOMAD, which stands for "gallon of milk a day." I thought he had just come up with that on the spot and was riffing, but I guess he knew someone in college who did it. They actually drank a gallon of milk every day.

Lizzie: He did mention that the GOMAD guy got sick pretty immediately. That's like, what? 16 cups of milk? You probably shouldn't be drinking 16 cups of any one thing in a day, except maybe water if you're obsessed with peeing. (This isn't medical advice, by the way; maybe you shouldn't be drinking 16 cups of water a day.)

Kait's razzing her dad for his recently acquired OMAD lifestyle, but she failed to mention that she herself is in the throes of some kind of 12-week juice-and-salad-eating commitment designed by Kate Upton, or maybe just approved of by Kate Upton. I was like, "Oh, is that enough food for a human adult?" and Kaitlyn was like, "Well, the morning juice is actually a shake."

This will be relevant soon, as the sun sets and Kaitlyn gets hungrier by the minute. For now, she's still holding it together in our ever-expanding conversation circle …

Kaitlyn: Amy was going to a date at a nearby bar called Fiona's after the party, which prompted a discussion of Fiona the Hippo. Annie, a Cincinnati celebrity, explained that Fiona is currently "mating" with her mother's boyfriend, who is the father of her tiny half-brother, Fritz. Lizzie was trying to understand and recited it back to her: "Her brother's dad is also the man she's having sex with?" When she heard herself, she didn't like that she'd said "man." She frowned and paused. "I mean hippo," she said, very quietly.

Lizzie: Yes, a hippo! That's what I meant. I don't really know that much about famous zoo inhabitants in general, or about hippos specifically, but this sexual proclivity was news to me. An interesting conversation topic for a first date, perhaps.

Meanwhile, probably totally unrelated to the fact that she'd only eaten beet juice and romaine for the past two weeks, Kaitlyn started craning her head around every few minutes to glare toward the kitchen, where the chili was sitting on the stove. The chili was available for consumption, but inaccessible to us due to the crowd of people lingering in front of it. Kaitlyn watched enviously as they ate, blocking her path to non-juice dinner. It's as if they were completely unaware that there were people in the next room positively starving!

 

 

Kaitlyn: "If it were me, I would go into the kitchen and get some chili and then leave the kitchen," I said. "I would probably not stand in front of the chili for more than a minute or so." I was joking but …  

Once I was finally in there I had to eat my words because I did not want to leave. It smelled so good—spicy, smoky, etc.—and Tamar has a Tiffany lamp on the butcher's block and a big bundle of Santa Fe chilis on the wall. It's the most wonderful kitchen in New York. The chili was amazing and there were no leaves or E3Live in it, which was absolutely thrilling for me given my current commitment to the lifestyle of the new First Lady of the New York Mets. Plus, Milena was standing off to one side telling one amazing story after another—about her brother staying at his ex-girlfriend's apartment (near Hudson Yards?) in an "amethyst bed," then about a "celebrity encounter" she'd had with a Brooklyn 8-year-old who is the namesake of a coffee shop that seriously everyone hates.

Lizzie: The same person who has the amethyst bed (it "looks like a regular bed," if you were wondering) believes that one should have as many children as possible, apparently because with each additional child you have, the likelihood that one of them will solve climate change increases exponentially. Or something like that.

Milena also told us that a man in London once said to her, upon learning that she's from New York, "Rice to Riches is the best restaurant in the entire world." Anyone who knows what Rice to Riches is will recognize the charming absurdity of this statement. For those who don't know, Rice to Riches is a counter-service restaurant that serves nothing but different flavors of rice pudding out of big plastic saucers. The place looks like it was designed by someone obsessed with the Jetsons, and features a veritable solar system of baffling signs that say things like "No Skinny Bitches!!!," "Kiss My Fat Free Ass!!!" and "Man Discovered Farming … Invented Food. Woman Discovered Food … Invented Diet." It's been open since 2003, which is impressive for a restaurant in Soho that sells a single type of (apparently fat-free) dessert. The owner was arrested in 2005 for running a gambling ring, which adds to the establishment's rice-y and dicey mythology. To call Rice to Riches the "best restaurant in the world," apparently sincerely, is both inspiring and confounding.

Eventually, we got tired of standing in the kitchen, realized we were the new wave of chili-loiterers, and sat down at the table in the main room, waiting for other people to join us, like newlyweds situated in the middle of a banquet hall, anticipating visitors and gifts.

Kaitlyn: Tamar came to us with a pile of "freezer cookies"—oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies she'd baked on impulse for a mid-party dessert after remembering that she keeps cookie dough in her freezer just in case. She also keeps a glass bottle of premade Manhattans in her fridge. I'm sure you'd like to marry her!

When Neil stopped by the table for a mandarin and a bit of sourdough, I told him I'd seen him in our backyard setting up his new exercise equipment and asked what his workout regimen was. He didn't want to get into specifics but he did have a point to make: He'd spent 15 years of his life going to the gym and doing stuff for hours, and it had all been a waste of time. "You don't have to be that strong," he said. "It's so stupid." He now does 30 minutes in the yard at 4 p.m. Squats and whatever he thinks of.

Lizzie: "Working out is for idiots," he said.

We also talked about "buffet rules," and how Nathan's friend once got kicked out of a CiCi's Pizza because he ate something off another friend's plate without paying the required fee. I honestly didn't know that buffet rules prohibited sharing, but I guess it makes sense, because otherwise you could buy one plate for 12 people. It was agreed that in this instance—a single, sneaky bite off a friend's plate—Nathan's rule-breaking friend should have been given a warning first, instead of being forced to stand out in the parking lot while the rest of his friends finished eating.

From there it was on to the topic of the Jimmy Fallon ride at Universal, which I thought was a joke that Nathan made up but is apparently real. We talked about how it'd be funny if Jimmy Fallon were the main guy in Taxi Driver instead of the 2004 flop Taxi. And what if it were Jimmy Carter who hosted a late-night show?

Kaitlyn: We were also suspicious of Nathan's claim that Adam Driver is going to be in a new movie in which his spaceship crash-lands on "prehistoric Earth" and he has to fight dinosaurs with guns. Nathan pulled up a poster to prove it to us, but it honestly looked like something he could have made himself. (Having since watched the trailer for the real movie, 65, I'm still foggy on the premise. Is Adam Driver from Earth? And he stumbles across another planet similar to Earth, which happens to be in the same ecological state that Earth was in 65 million years ago? Or is Adam Driver from an Earth-like planet that is 65 million years ahead of Earth-Earth, and he stumbles across Earth?)

Anyway, there's no knowing how these things happen, but more than once the topic of conversation turned to Jimmy Carter and how he is still alive despite the odds. ("He's had many fatal diseases," Katie said cheerfully, just as if she were saying something like, "He's from Georgia.") I bring this up because I think it's a nice way to take things full circle …

If I understand correctly, when Jimmy Carter was a younger man and was president, many people considered him to be pretty ineffectual, and his own staff gaslighted him when he reported being menaced by a swimming "swamp rabbit." But now he's old and people remember that ineffectiveness fondly, believing it indicated that he was always too good for the disgusting task of wielding power. They now love him.

This is not to say that he has been "vindicated" or to encourage attitudes of waiting years or decades to say, "Look at me now" (toxic). I just bet that Jimmy Carter would enjoy a Breakup Chili and an annual reminder that life does go on and on and on until you can barely remember what it used to be like.

Lizzie: Honestly, sometimes life goes on so quickly that I forget everything that happens to us at these parties we go to!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Genetic diversity is the raw material that enables populations to evolve in response to changes in the environment—essentially, the more diversity the better.

Former bug-eating plants, which evolved to feed on animal droppings instead, have a more nutritious diet than their carnivorous cousins, a new study finds.

A US startup will soon begin planting genetically engineered trees in Georgia and Pennsylvania that may be able to capture more carbon than regular trees

Iridescent clouds formed of ice crystals are usually found in extremely cold air above polar regions

Excited weather watchers have captured stunning images of rare "mother of pearl" clouds, which have formed high up in the atmosphere over Scotland.

Such clouds tend to develop in the extremely cold air above polar regions, but were spotted on Sunday evening and Monday morning by BBC weather watchers in Aberdeenshire, the Highlands and Moray.

Continue reading…

Genetic diversity is the raw material that enables populations to evolve in response to changes in the environment—essentially, the more diversity the better.

Dr. Shing Chi Leung, SUNY Poly assistant professor of physics, has published a review article as the leading author on the origin of Type Ia supernovae. The article is co-authored with Dr. Ken'ichi Nomoto, Professor Emeritus of The University of Tokyo, in the proceedings of The Sixteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity.

With some careful twisting and stacking, MIT physicists have revealed a new and exotic property in "magic-angle" graphene: superconductivity that can be turned on and off with an electric pulse, much like a light switch.

An innovative technique from Cornell University researchers finds seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly's circadian clock.

Deflated Egos

Ukraine has accused Russian forces of making use of "rubber" inflatable tanks near the country's embattled Zaporizhzhia region in Eastern Ukraine, Insider reports — which have since deflated, it says.

The news comes after Ukraine's western allies including Germany, the US, and the UK announced they would send modern tanks to the embattled nation. But until these reinforcements arrive, the Ukrainian army has to rely on Soviet-era tanks to hold the line.

But whether they're dealing with a real threat is still up for debate. Ukrainian forces are saying Russia is using inflatable "dummy tanks," a battlefield invention that has been around since World War 1 that both Russia and the US have made extensive use of over the years.

"At the time when our partners are coordinating the supply of tanks to Ukraine, the invading army is also increasing the presence of 'tank units' in the Zaporizhzhia area," the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine wrote in a Facebook post, as translated by Insider.

Weak Rubber

The post was accompanied by satellite images that appear to show deflated Russian "tanks" lying flat on the ground, dispelling the illusion.

"Apparently, the free air of the Cossack region is not suitable for the 'rubber' products of the occupiers, so they deflate without fulfilling their main mission," the post reads. "Just like the inflated bravado of the Russian army."

It's not only Russia that has been deploying decoy weaponry. Ukraine used fake wooden rocket launchers to lure Russia into using up missiles.

In short, the use of misinformation isn't just limited to digital propaganda. Soldiers are relying on century-old tactics to confuse and mislead the enemy — but only to varying degrees of success.

READ MORE: Ukraine says Russia's putting inflatable tanks on the battlefield — but the decoys deflated [Insider]

More on Ukraine: Elon Musk Warns "Civilization Is Over" If Ukraine Doesn't Give in to Russia

The post Ukraine Accuses Russia of Using Inflatable "Dummy Tanks," Which Deflated appeared first on Futurism.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-29002-3

Transmutation of MAs and LLFPs with a lead-cooled fast reactor

An innovative technique from Cornell University researchers finds seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly's circadian clock.

Researchers are using fluorescence lifetime to shed new light on a peptide associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Through a new approach using time-resolved spectroscopy and computational chemistry, the researchers found experimental evidence of an alternative binding site on amyloid-beta aggregates. The finding opens the door to the development of new therapies for Alzheimer's and other diseases associated with amyloid deposits.

Amyloid plaque deposits in the brain are a main feature of Alzheimer's. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates Alzheimer's will affect nearly 14 million people in the US by 2060.

"Amyloid-beta is a peptide that aggregates in the brains of people that suffer from Alzheimer's disease, forming these supramolecular nanoscale fibers, or fibrils" says Angel Martí, a professor of chemistry, bioengineering, and materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University and faculty director of the Rice Emerging Scholars Program. "Once they grow sufficiently, these fibrils precipitate and form what we call amyloid plaques.

"Understanding how molecules in general bind to amyloid-beta is particularly important not only for developing drugs that will bind with better affinity to its aggregates, but also for figuring out who the other players are that contribute to cerebral tissue toxicity," he adds.

The Martí group had previously identified a first binding site for amyloid-beta deposits by figuring out how metallic dye molecules were able to bind to pockets formed by the fibrils. The molecules' ability to fluoresce, or emit light when excited under a spectroscope, indicated the presence of the binding site.

Time-resolved spectroscopy, which the lab used in its latest discovery, "is an experimental technique that looks at the time that molecules spend in an excited state," Martí says. "We excite the molecule with light, the molecule absorbs the energy from the light photons and gets to an excited state, a more energetic state."

This energized state is responsible for the fluorescent glow. "We can measure the time that molecules spend in the excited state, which is called lifetime, and then we use that information to evaluate the binding equilibrium of small molecules to amyloid-beta," Martí says.

In addition to the second binding site, the lab and collaborators from the University of Miami uncovered that multiple fluorescent dyes not expected to bind to amyloid deposits in fact did.

"These findings are allowing us to create a map of binding sites in amyloid-beta and a record of the amino acid compositions required for the formation of binding pockets in amyloid-beta fibrils," Martí says.

The fact that time-resolved spectroscopy is sensitive to the environment around the dye molecule enabled Martí to infer the presence of the second binding site.

"When the molecule is free in solution, its fluorescence has a particular lifetime that is due to this environment. However, when the molecule is bound to the amyloid fibers, the microenvironment is different and as a consequence so is the fluorescence lifetime," he explains. "For the molecule bound to amyloid fibers, we observed two different fluorescence lifetimes.

"The molecule was not binding to a unique site in the amyloid-beta but to two different sites. And that was extremely interesting because our previous studies only indicated one binding site. That happened because we were not able to see all the components with the technologies we were using previously," he adds.

The discovery prompted more experimentation. "We decided to look into this further using not only the probe we designed, but also other molecules that have been used for decades in inorganic photochemistry," he says.

"The idea was to find a negative control, a molecule that would not bind to amyloid-beta. But what we discovered was that these molecules that we were not expecting would bind to amyloid-beta at all actually did bind to it with decent affinity."

The findings will also affect the study of "many diseases associated with other kinds of amyloids: Parkinson's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Type 2 diabetes, systemic amyloidosis," Marti says.

Understanding the binding mechanisms of amyloid proteins is also useful for studying nonpathogenic amyloids and their potential applications in drug development and materials science.

"There are functional amyloids that our body and other organisms produce for different reasons that are not associated with diseases," Martí says. "There are organisms that produce amyloids that have antibacterial effects. There are organisms that produce amyloids for structural purposes, to create barriers, and others that use amyloids for chemical storage. The study of nonpathogenic amyloids is an emerging area of science, so this is another path our findings can help develop."

The research appears in Chemical Science.

The National Science Foundation and the family of the late Professor Donald DuPré, a Houston-born Rice alumnus and former professor of chemistry at the University of Louisville, supported the research.

Source: Rice University

The post Sticky plaque discovery sheds light on Alzheimer's appeared first on Futurity.

Learning delays and regressions were most severe in developing countries and among children from low-income backgrounds. And students still haven't caught up.

Growing demand for air travel is counteracting the aviation industry push to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Carbon offsets will be necessary – or fewer passengers

Rice University researchers already knew the atoms in perovskites react favorably to light. Now they can see precisely how those atoms move.

Video footage was released today of the interaction between Memphis police officers and Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died just days after being beaten by police during a Jan. 7 traffic stop.

Here's something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution.

As authorities scour the desert for the missing source, here's what we know about how it works and what threat it poses to humans

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates
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Authorities are continuing the search for a tiny radioactive capsule lost along a 1,400km stretch of Western Australian desert highway.

The 8mm by 6mm capsule fell from a secure device on a truck that was travelling from a Rio Tinto mine site, north of Newman in the Pilbara region, to Perth, where it was being sent for repair.

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Nature Communications, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36146-3

Electron spins in diamond allow magnetometry with high sensitivity, but the bandwidth in the microwave regime is limited to a narrow band around their resonance frequency. Here, the authors solve this problem by coupling the spins to a thin film of yttrium iron garnet, exploiting the non-linear spin-wave dynamics of the magnet.

Nature Communications, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36154-3

Adipose tissue inflammation contributes to the pathogenesis of  -related metabolic disorders. Here the authors report that adipocyte-specific genetic deficiency or pharmacological inhibition of  , a cation channel, attenuates adipose tissue inflammation, improves glucose homeostasis, and suppresses weight gain in obese male mice.

Nature Communications, Published online: 30 January 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36008-y

The mechanisms behind how vascular repair is regulated after ischemic stroke are yet to be elucidated. Here, the authors describe that a circular RNA interacts with   to promote vascular repair following stroke in mice and primates via mediating m6 A modification.

In the inner ear, there are two different types of sensory cells that are responsible for hearing. An MHH research team has now identified the molecular switch for the formation of these inner and outer hair cells and thus found an important building block for the treatment of hearing loss.

Researchers have combined low-power chip design, machine learning algorithms, and soft implantable electrodes to produce a neural interface that can identify and suppress symptoms of various  .