Trilobites, prehistoric sea creatures, had so-called median eyes, single eyes on their foreheads, in addition to their compound eyes, research conducted by Dr. Brigitte Schoenemann at the University of Cologne's Institute of Zoology and Professor Dr. Euan Clarkson at the University of Edinburgh has now found out.

Technology is providing solutions but the climate forecast is worsening, scientists say in major report.

Nature, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00794-8

The sequencing of two bacterial species created a legacy that could be at risk without further investment, warn the region's genomic leaders.

A new substance has proven useful for treating staphylococcus 

 in people with skin lymphoma, a new study shows.

You may have had staphylococcus aureus in connection with a wound infection. In most cases, it will pass without treatment, while severe cases may require antibiotics, which kills the bacteria.

This is the case for the majority of the population. In fact, many of us—though we feel perfectly fine—carry staphylococci in the nose, a good, moist environment in which the bacteria thrive.

However, more and more staphylococci are becoming resistant to antibiotics (also known as multi resistant staphylococcus aureus or MRSA), and these infections can be difficult to treat.

"Antibiotics resistance is an increasing problem, especially on a global scale. And when you have this relatively simple infection which suddenly cannot be treated with antibiotics, the situation can turn serious, sometimes life-threatening," says Niels Ødum, professor in the LEO Foundation Skin Immunology Research Center at the University of Copenhagen.

Therefore, all over the world, a lot of resources are being invested in fighting antibiotics resistance in staphylococcus aureus infections—and the new study among with skin lymphoma patients has produced positive results.

Treating staph without antibiotics

The substance, called endolysins has proven capable of killing both resistant and non-resistant staphylococcus aureus—without the need for antibiotics.

The discovery is good news to patients with a weak immune system to whom a staphylococcus aureus infection can be serious and, at worst, fatal. But it also adds to the knowledge we have of other forms of treatment.

"To people who are severely ill with e.g. skin lymphoma, staphylococci can be a huge, sometimes insoluble problem, as many are infected with a type of staphylococcus aureus that is resistant to antibiotics," says Ødum.

"That is why we are careful not to give antibiotics to everyone, because we do not want to have to deal with more resistant bacteria. Therefore, it is important that we find new ways of treating—and not the least to prevent—these infections."

In some patients, a staphylococcus aureus will cause the cancer to worsen. And even though antibiotics appear to work in some cases, it is not without its problems.

"We can tell that giving high doses of antibiotics to patients with serious infections causes their health, skin and cancer symptoms to improve. But once we stop giving them antibiotics, the symptoms and staphylococci quickly return. Patients experience many adverse effects, and some risk getting resistant bacteria," Ødum says.

Kills staph and slows cancer growth

Therefore, treating staphylococcus aureus can be tricky. At worst, cancer patients may die of an infection which doctors are unable to treat.

And this is where endolysins enter the scene, as this new substance may be part of the solution to antibiotics resistance like MRSA.

"This particular endolysin is a brand new, artificially produced enzyme that has been improved several times and designed as a new drug," explains postdoc Emil Pallesen, first author of the study in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

"The great thing about this enzyme is that it has been designed to penetrate the wall of staphylococcus aureus. This enables it to target and kill the harmful staphylococcus and leave harmless skin bacteria unharmed."

And that is what made the researchers decide to test the new substance; they expected it to be able to kill both resistant and non-resistant staphylococcus bacteria.

"We have been testing the substance on skin samples from patients, and it does appear to kill staphylococcus aureus from patients. Endolysins do not care whether the bacterium is resistant to antibiotics or not, because it does not work in the same way as antibiotics," Ødum says.

"The really good news is that our lab tests have showed that endolysins do not just eradicate staphylococcus aureus; they also inhibit their ability to promote cancer growth."

Source: University of Copenhagen

The post Substance may offer a better way to treat some staph infections appeared first on Futurity.

Drifting along in ocean currents, jellyfish can be both predator and prey. They eat almost anything they can capture, and follow the typical oceanic pattern of "large eats small." Now a recent University of British Columbia study on these gelatinous globs suggests jellyfish may get more nutritious as they get bigger. The work is published in Ecosphere.

Synecoculture is a new agricultural method advocated by Dr. Masatoshi Funabashi, senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL), in which various kinds of plants are mixed and grown in high density, establishing rich biodiversity while benefiting from the self-organizing ability of the ecosystem.

University of Wyoming researchers' study of how microscopic creatures called tardigrades survive extreme conditions has led to a major breakthrough that could eventually make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration isn't possible.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31739-w

 preventive effects of aspirin combined with different statins in the United States general population

A UN report on climate change released on Monday shows that the window to meet the goal of a 1.5-degree Celsius global warming limit is narrowing, a senior UN climate official told AFP.

New research conducted as part of the science verification phase of the Visible Spectropolarimeter (ViSP) instrument at the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope is the first to use data from this instrument. It is hoped that the work will pave the way for future studies to enable a better understanding of the potential risks to key power and communications infrastructure.

Synecoculture is a new agricultural method advocated by Dr. Masatoshi Funabashi, senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL), in which various kinds of plants are mixed and grown in high density, establishing rich biodiversity while benefiting from the self-organizing ability of the ecosystem.

University of Wyoming researchers' study of how microscopic creatures called tardigrades survive extreme conditions has led to a major breakthrough that could eventually make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration isn't possible.

The human body is made up of thousands of tiny lymphatic vessels that ferry white blood cells and proteins around the body, like a superhighway of the immune system. It's remarkably efficient, but if damaged from injury or cancer treatment, the whole system starts to fail. The resulting fluid retention and swelling, called  , isn't just uncomfortable—it's also irreversible.

With enforcement of San Diego's new ban on polystyrene foam food trays, pool toys and more scheduled to take effect April 1, city officials are scrambling to coach affected businesses, clarify the complex regulations and consider emergency waiver requests.

A research team develops transfer-tattoo-like cell-sheet delivery induced by interfacial cell migration.

Billions of years ago, crushed quartz reacting with water could have created the conditions needed for the evolution of the photosynthetic microbes responsible for most of the oxygen now in Earth's atmosphere

Metasurfaces, as two-dimensional metamaterials, display fascinating ability in electromagnetic (EM) modulation within a sub-wavelength scale, opening up a new way for manipulating the properties of EM wave in a plane. Owing to the flexible modulation of EM wave, metasurfaces have spawned a number of enchanting applications, such as perfect absorbers, cloaking devices, planar meta-lens and meta-hologram.

While it is a popular hobby for many, fishing is also a pastime full of uncertainty. Each time you have something on the line, you can never be completely sure what type of fish you've hooked until you pull it out of the water. In a similar way, scientists "fishing" for biomarkers—molecules whose health care applications include signaling for the presence of cancer—in biofluids such as blood can also encounter unpredictability. Finding a specific protein biomarker in a pool of thousands is like trying to catch a particular fish species in the vast ocean.

Mountain lions are protected from hunting in California by a law passed by popular vote in 1990. However, a team of researchers working across the state found that human-caused mortality, primarily involving conflict with humans over livestock and collisions with vehicles, was more common than natural mortality for this protected large carnivore. Their findings were published March 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Optical manipulation and applications involve numerous fields, such as physics, information, materials and life sciences. It has been included in the national "14th Five-Year Plan" major engineering and projects. To better promote manipulation and application of the light beams, developing precision measurement technologies of optical parameters (such as intensity, phase, polarization and frequency, etc.) is vital, which is also an interesting topic.

Future ocean warming and marine heatwaves could impact the growth and development of clownfish during their earliest life stages, suggests a new study recently published in Science of The Total Environment.

A team including physicists has for the first time detected subatomic particles called neutrinos created by a particle collider, namely at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The discovery promises to deepen scientists' understanding of the nature of neutrinos, which are among the most abundant particles in the universe and key to the solution of the question why there is more matter than antimatter.

Mountain lions are protected from hunting in California by a law passed by popular vote in 1990. However, a team of researchers working across the state found that human-caused mortality, primarily involving conflict with humans over livestock and collisions with vehicles, was more common than natural mortality for this protected large carnivore. Their findings were published March 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Future ocean warming and marine heatwaves could impact the growth and development of clownfish during their earliest life stages, suggests a new study recently published in Science of The Total Environment.

Potato House

British scientists say they've made fancy space concrete out of potato starch — and that it works much better than the stuff they made before, which would have needed both blood and urine to work.

In a press release about the material, which they're calling "StarCrete," researchers at the University of Manchester in the UK bragged say the new compound is "twice as strong as regular concrete" and has a mostly-but-not-entirely tasty recipe: "extra-terrestrial dust, potato starch, and a pinch of salt."

A rundown of the research was published last week in the journal Open Engineering, where the biomanufacturing experts behind the study say that "surplus starch produced as food for inhabitants could be used for construction" of affordable and easy-to-build Martian habitats in the future.

Bloody Hell

As the UM statement notes, this latest research is built on previous studies by the same team in which they managed to build a "concrete-like" material using — and we're sorry, but this is gross — "astronauts' blood and urine as a binding agent."

"While the resulting material had a compressive strength of around 40 [Megapascals], which is better than normal concrete, the process had the drawback of requiring blood on a regular basis," the statement notes. "When operating in an environment as hostile as space, this option was seen as less feasible than using potato starch."

As a side note, it's important to point out that this whole gambit would require potatoes being grown on Mars — and back in 2017, there was a Matt Damon-fueled debate about whether or not that will even be possible.

"Since we will be producing starch as food for astronauts, it made sense to look at that as a binding agent rather than human blood," Dr. Aled Roberts, the lead researcher on the project and a fellow at the University of Manchester's Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, said in the press release.

Roberts said that while "current building technologies still need many years of development and require considerable energy and additional heavy processing equipment which all adds cost and complexity to a mission," the UM team's StarCrete potato starch compound "doesn't need any of this and so it simplifies the mission and makes it cheaper and more feasible."

"And anyway," he mused, "astronauts probably don't want to be living in houses made from scabs and urine!"

More on Mars: Scientists Baffled By These Almost Perfectly Circular Dunes on Mars

The post Scientists Propose Mars Settlers Live in Potato-Based Structures appeared first on Futurism.

Researchers have developed biosensor technology that will allow you to operate devices, such as robots and machines, solely through thought control.

IQ scores have substantially increased from 1932 through the 20th century, with differences ranging from three to five IQ points per decade, according to a phenomenon known as the 'Flynn effect.' But a new study has found evidence of a reverse 'Flynn effect' in a large U.S. sample between 2006 and 2018 in every category except one. For the reverse Flynn effect, there were consistent negative slopes for three out of the four cognitive domains.

Parasitic infections in salmonid fish can increase or decrease their vulnerability to angling, depending on their body condition.

Researchers have devised a new concept of superconducting microwave low-noise amplifiers for use in radio wave detectors for radio astronomy observations, and successfully demonstrated a high-performance cooled amplifier with power consumption three orders of magnitude lower than that of conventional cooled semiconductor amplifiers. This result is expected to contribute to the realization of large-scale multi-element radio cameras and error-tolerant quantum computers, both of which require a large number of low-noise microwave amplifiers.

The development of new information and communication technologies poses new challenges to scientists and industry. Designing new quantum materials — whose exceptional properties stem from quantum physics — is the most promising way to meet these challenges. An international team has designed a material in which the dynamics of electrons can be controlled by curving the fabric of space in which they evolve. These properties are of interest for next-generation electronic devices, including the optoelectronics of the future.

Most people who ranked high in 'joy of missing out' or JOMO also reported high levels of social anxiety in a recent study. The term JOMO has been popularized as a healthy enjoyment of solitude in almost direct opposition to the negative FOMO, the 'fear of missing out' people may have when seeing others having fun experiences without them. In an analysis of two samples of adults, researchers found mixed results when it comes to JOMO with evidence that there is some anxiety behind the joy.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31756-9

Publisher Correction: Pan-Arctic marine biodiversity and species co-occurrence patterns under recent climate

New research by an Oregon State University-led team is beginning to unravel the times of year and locations where whales are at greatest danger of entanglement in fishing gear on the Oregon Coast.

Fossils uncovered in Australia belong to a newfound species of extinct eagle that was big enough to pick up hobbit-size prey, like the fictional giant eagles in "The Lord of the Rings."

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey recently captured the first close-up video of A81, an enormous iceberg that broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in January.

Coding bootcamps are intensive courses designed to turn beginners into pro-coders. But are they worth it?

We tested the Garmin Forerunner 265, an athlete-grade fitness watch with brilliant fitness tracking features.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released an order Wednesday which instructs Missouri, along with 22 other states, to reduce its air pollution levels.

X-ray technology has allowed researchers a glimpse at the reaches of the Yellowstone landmark's prized stone and its importance to Indigenous people.

Researchers have developed biosensor technology that will allow you to operate devices, such as robots and machines, solely through thought control.

Cookie Kennedy was out for a walk with a friend one day this winter when she felt a familiar dread creep up on her. As the pair strolled the north shore of Indian Rocks Beach, the small Pinellas County city where Kennedy is mayor, they were forced to weave their way through a thickening crowd of beachgoers. The land where they stood had shrunk.

Company loyalty is a double-edged sword, according to a new study. Managers target loyal workers over less committed colleagues when dolling out unpaid work and additional job tasks.

New research by an Oregon State University-led team is beginning to unravel the times of year and locations where whales are at greatest danger of entanglement in fishing gear on the Oregon Coast.

France's top administrative court on Monday ordered the government to ban fishing in parts of the Atlantic to protect dolphins which have washed up dead in their hundreds.

Spring has sprung!

Liquid water is one of the most important ingredients for the emergence of life as we know it on Earth. Researchers of the ORIGINS Cluster from the fields of astrophysics, astrochemistry and biochemistry have now determined in a novel, interdisciplinary collaboration the necessary properties that allow moons around free-floating planets to retain liquid water for a sufficiently long time and thus enable life.

BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath outlines the key takeaways from the latest IPCC report.

Nature, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00820-9

East Palestine residents look to independent researchers to fill gaps left by authorities.

France's top administrative court on Monday ordered the government to ban fishing in parts of the Atlantic to protect dolphins which have washed up dead in their hundreds.

It's sometimes difficult to imagine how the planet we call home, with its megalopolis cities and serene farmlands, was once dominated by dinosaurs as big as buses and five-story buildings. But recent research has helped deepen our understanding of why dinosaurs prevailed: the answer may lie in their special bones, structured like  .

It's sometimes difficult to imagine how the planet we call home, with its megalopolis cities and serene farmlands, was once dominated by dinosaurs as big as buses and five-story buildings. But recent research has helped deepen our understanding of why dinosaurs prevailed: the answer may lie in their special bones, structured like  .

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36840-2

Faults responsible for the 2019 M7.1 Ridgecrest, California earthquake likely evolved through reactivation of pre-existing Independence dike swarm structures. The inherited rupture geometry strongly controlled the earthquake slip distribution.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37046-2

Drosophila larvae may benefit each other at lower densities but compete at higher densities. Here, Verschut et al. identify a mechanism enabling Drosophila females to favor egg-laying sites containing medium concentrations of aggregation pheromones, which may facilitate choice of favorable sites.

A new book looks at the political messages of the Marvel cinematic universe.

In their new book, The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Duke University political scientist Nicholas Carnes and coauthor Lilly J. Goren of Carroll University ask, "What lessons are this entertainment juggernaut teaching audiences about politics, society, power, gender, and inequality?"

Read a transcript of the podcast episode here.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is the most expansive and widely viewed fictional narrative in the history of cinema. In 2009, Disney purchased Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion, including its subsidiary film production company, Marvel Studios. Since then, the MCU—the collection of multimedia Marvel Studios products that share a single fictional storyline—has grown from two feature films to thirty interconnected movies, nine streaming Disney+ series, a half dozen short films, and more than thirty print titles. By 2022, eight of the 25 highest grossing films of all time are MCU movies.

The MCU is a deeply political universe. Intentionally or not, the MCU sends fans scores of messages about a wide range of subjects related to government, public policy, and society. Some are overt, like the contentious debate about government and accountability at the heart of Captain America: Civil War. More often, however, the politics of the MCU are subtle, like the changing role of women from supporting characters (like Black Widow in Iron Man 2) to leading heroes (like Black Widow in Black Widow).

The MCU is not only a product of contemporary politics, but also seems to be in direct response to the problems of the day. Racial injustice, environmental catastrophe, and political misinformation are both contemporary social ills and key thematic elements of recent MCU blockbusters.

In The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), more than 25 leading scholars examine these complex themes. Part one explores how the origin stories depict political issues; part two examines how the MCU depicts classic political themes like government and power; and part three explores questions of diversity and representation in the MCU.

The volume's various chapters examine a wide range of topics: Black Panther and the "racial contract;" Captain America and the political philosophy of James Madison; Dr. Strange and colonial imperialism; S.H.I.E.L.D. and civil-military relations; Spider-Man and environmentalism; and Captain Marvel and second-wave feminism.

Source: Duke University

The post Book probes the politics of Marvel movies appeared first on Futurity.

The Thünen Institute now offers interactive forest maps through the Thünen Atlas (http://atlas.thuenen.de) that provide a nationwide overview of the stocked forest area—i.e., the area on which trees grow—and the dominant tree species. They are not limited to being important sources of information for public authorities, policy, NGOs and associations, but can also be used for further forest and environmental research and education.

A swathe of the Amazon Rainforest almost twice the size of Luxembourg was destroyed by fire between 2003 and 2019. The area is in the southwest of Amazonas state, in Brazil's North region, and includes parts of nine municipalities with some of the worst sustainable development indicators in the country. Deforestation had been increasing in the area, largely owing to illegal logging and other activities linked to agriculture along two highways that run through it.

Sunsets provide some of the most beautiful natural imagery anywhere on Earth. People flock from all over to see sunsets at specific places at specific times, such as when they perfectly align down a street in Manhattan. But sunsets on other planets wouldn't be nearly as spectacular.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute (IOLR) have succeeded in significantly increasing the ability of seaweed to produce healthy natural materials. The current study focused on enhancing the production of bio-active compounds that offer medical benefits to humans, such as antioxidants, the concentration of which in the seaweed was doubled; natural sunscreens concentrations tripled; and unique protective pigments of great medical value that were stimulated substantially by ten-fold.

Special cranial adaptations, including an asymmetrical 'wonky' skull and enlarged ears, may give the critically endangered ground-dwelling Night Parrot the edge it needs to make its way around the Outback in the dark— even with limited eyesight and a big "bluffy" head.

A global mapping project led by University of Queensland researchers has revealed the major stressors placed upon global coastlines by human activity.

The International Space Station, orbiting the Earth at about 17,150 miles per hour, is currently home to seven crew members. In recent months, the astronauts and cosmonauts of Expedition 67 and 68 have taken some amazing photographs of our lovely planet as they pass overhead, and I wanted to share more of these unique views here.

A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet's office, then he's placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. "Bye, buddy," a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.

 

This is Dead-Dog 

. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian's office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.

 

The result is wrenching. A dog is always dying, and someone is always hurting. Likes and sympathetic comments amass. The video goes viral. Engage with one—or even just watch it to completion—and you may be served another, and another. Suddenly, you're stuck in a corner of TikTok you'd rather not see.

 

"TikTok has to figure out a way to separate dog content from 'my dog died' content," one user observes in a video from February. He says he can't stand watching the latter, and his comment section is filled with people agreeing. "The amount of dogs I've never met that I've cried over is unreal," one writes.  

 

Dead-Dog TikTok gets at a core tension of the platform writ large. TikTok collapses social media and entertainment, and gives an outsize power to its "For You"–feed algorithm: The user has limited control over what shows up on their feed. Unlike, say, on Reddit, where you might enter a rabbit hole by choice (maybe because you've subscribed to the True Crime forum), TikTok's algorithm might throw you down one based on metrics that may not signal your actual interest.

 

And in the case of Dead-Dog TikTok, the algorithm can't know what it means to plop a stranger's pet loss next to a teen bopping to the latest viral trend or a snippet from late-night television. It can't recognize that a user's intention behind posting their dog's last moments—for catharsis, for validation, to find other people who have felt that same loss—may not be a match for many viewers on the other side who are just trying to pass some time. "We often ascribe all sorts of intentions to the algorithm, like, Oh, it knows," Nick Seaver, an anthropology professor at Tufts University who studies algorithms, told me. "But it really doesn't."

[Read: What happens when everything becomes TikTok]

The tension is unresolvable, which is possibly why TikTok rolled out a feature last week allowing users to "start fresh" with a new feed. TikTok, for its part, sees the solution as diversifying the content. "In addition, we work to carefully apply limits to some content that doesn't violate our policies, but may impact the viewing experience if viewed repeatedly, particularly when it comes to content with themes of sadness, extreme exercise or dieting, or that's sexually suggestive," the company wrote in a blog post.

 

Whatever equation powers TikTok's For You feed appears to have picked up that videos about dead dogs engage users. But it doesn't seem to know when to stop serving it, and it tends to go too far, perhaps even by design. "When it finds something that works, it will go and try to push that—both at the individual level and the overall ecosystem level—pretty far," Kevin Munger, a political scientist at Penn State who has studied the TikTok algorithm, explained to me. "It's not going to stop at the right level." To use a positive analogy, it's as if the algorithm has figured out that you like cake, and so it's serving you cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

 

An algorithmic reset may not be able to totally solve this problem—in theory, the app will relearn what you like and serve videos accordingly. Some of the researchers I spoke with said that they very intentionally—even aggressively—signal to the platform what they do and don't like. When they see a video of a type they don't want more of, they take action: swiping away quickly, seeking out positive videos, reporting the upsetting content, even closing the app altogether. Other options include blocking specific users or hashtags, or pressing the "not interested" button.

 

As Robyn Caplan of the Data & Society Research Institute pointed out, an algorithm "can't necessarily tell the difference between something that is making you cry and something that is making you laugh." She told me she once asked a friend for funny videos to help "cheer up" her feed.

 

Grief is a nuanced human experience. "There's not an obvious context in which you might want to watch videos about pet grief," Seaver said. "And so it totally makes sense that these systems do these kind of clunky moves, because I don't think there's a non-clunky way to do it." At its best, Dead-Dog TikTok may offer a support community to people suffering and normalize their pain.

 

[Read: There are no 'five stages' of grief]

 

Take Blaine Weeks. Weeks thought she had more time with her dog Indica—a few weeks or months, maybe. He was old, and his body seemed to be failing. Then one day, he didn't want to get up. "I felt like I just didn't have enough," she told me. "I didn't have enough pictures, I didn't have enough videos, and I was distraught about that." Weeks decided to record Indica's last day, worried that otherwise she might block it out entirely with grief.

 

In the video montage of that day, which Weeks posted to TikTok, she loads Indica into her truck, and they get McDonald's burgers as a final treat. Weeks tells him that she loves him as he licks tears from her face. Later, on the floor of the vet office, Indica perks up enough to eat a few fries, before resting his head in Weeks's lap. It ends there.  

 

The post has been viewed 13 million times and climbing. "Randomly last night that video started going crazy again and got, like, another 400,000 views," she told me when we talked earlier this month. Weeks said that she'd had to turn off her phone for a bit because of negative comments on the video (detractors questioned Weeks's decision to euthanize) but that overall she'd found comfort from the experience. The video, she said, connected her with more than a dozen people whom she can talk with about her grief. "We kind of check on each other back and forth, saying, 'Hey, are you doing okay today?' 'Yes, I'm doing okay. How are you?'" A stranger made a painting of Indica and sent it to her.

 

Stefanie Renee Salyers's TikTok saying goodbye to Princess, her Shih Tzu, has been viewed 28 million times and has nearly 90,000 comments. Salyers got so many messages after posting that she created a Google Form for other people to share their dog-grief stories, offering to read them privately or—with their permission—create TikToks about their lost pets. "I felt, I guess, glad that, even though my video is of a very sad event, that there were people who saw it and felt like, I'm not alone in feeling this grief. And I'm not crazy for feeling like I lost a family member," she told me.

 

Crystal Abidin, the founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network—a group that connects scholars doing qualitative research about TikTok—and a professor at Curtin University, in Perth, Australia, has been studying the comment sections on TikTok grief posts at large. She has found "a really beautiful ethos of care work happening" there: people comforting one another, resource sharing, and more.

 

Videos like Saylers's and Weeks's may inspire others to post their own pet-loss stories. Abidin believes that the pandemic really mainstreamed videos about grief and death on the platform—videos from individuals, videos from health-care professionals. "There is a whole collision of these histories and people of different standpoints and expertise, all on GriefTok," she told me. "It's not bad; it's not good. It's just that you cannot choose what you want on your feed. And that can be arresting for a viewer."

 

Dead-Dog TikTok may be a genuinely helpful space for some, and an upsetting one for others. The platform can't perfectly sort who's who. "But if we think about your personal ethos, principles, and morality, do we really want platforms to be the arbiter of what we should and shouldn't see?" Abidin asked. Maybe TikTok could be smarter about not circulating distressing content, but should it really decide who grieves online and how?

 

Grief is messy and complicated and hits different people in different ways. So it is only natural that its manifestations online would likewise be messy and complicated. To grieve is to be human—one thing that algorithms, no matter how eerily attuned to our interests and desires, never can be.

PLUS. Teleskopet skal undersøge radiobølger fra universets mørke æra, der fulgte efter Big Bang.

Ran-Dumb

 may be an eloquent speaker, bullshit artist, and purveyor of misinformation — but a mathematician it is not.

Yes, you may be familiar with accounts of people convincing ChatGPT that 2+2=5, but OpenAI's chatbot has other, more subtle ways that it will screw up simple, math-related tasks that could easily go unnoticed.

One example? Generating random numbers. According to the findings of Colin Fraser, a data scientist at Facebook-turned-Meta, ChatGPT's idea of a random number seems to be less actually random and more a human's idea of random.

 

Too Human

In his testing, Fraser prompted ChatGPT to pick a random number between 1 and 100, and collected 2,000 separate responses. Look at the graph of the distribution of the returned numbers, and it's immediately clear that there are some outliers.

"ChatGPT really likes 42 and 7's," Fraser quipped in a tweet.

Indeed, the number 42 is astoundingly overrepresented, comprising around a whopping ten percent of all 2,000 responses. Its towering above all other numbers is likely no coincidence, as any nerd or netizen can tirelessly tell you it's the answer to the "ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," per Douglas Adams' smash hit novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Simply put, 42 is a meme number online much in the same way that 69 is, which demonstrates that ChatGPT is not, in fact, serving as a random number generator and is instead simply reflecting popular numbers chosen by humans in its vast dataset gleaned from the web — although that decidedly tired sex number is strangely underrepresented here, not even passing the one percent mark, suggesting that it may have been manually suppressed.

The other overrepresented number is 7, mirroring humans' own fondness for the digit. Numbers between 71 and 79 are curiously prominent, with seven frequently appearing as the second digit in numbers beyond this range, too.

Interestingly, Fraser also found that GPT-4 seems to overcompensate for this by returning random numbers too uniform in distribution.

Meme Machine

Overall, none of this reveals some secret nature of ChatGPT. After all, it is a large language model, basically predicting plausible responses rather than actually "thinking" up an answer or sentence.

Still, it's a little dumb that a hyped up chatbot touted as the future of almost everything can't do basic, common tasks. Ask it to plan a road trip for you, and it'll have you make a pitstop at a town that doesn't exist.

Or, in this case, prompt it for a random number and there's a good chance it'll make its decision based on the popularity of a meme.

All of which raises the question: what's the point if ChatGPT simply ends up regurgitating trite fragments of our online monoculture?

More on ChatGPT: OpenAI's Next-Generation AI Is About to Demolish Its Competition

The post ChatGPT Is Hilariously Bad at Generating Random Numbers appeared first on Futurism.

Clone Wars

With a silly name and an even sillier startup cost, Stanford's Alpaca GPT clone costs only $600 to build and is a prime example of how easy software like 

's may be to replicate.

In a blurb spotted by New Atlas, Stanford's Center for Research on Foundation Models announced last week that its researchers had "fine-tuned" Meta's LLaMA 7B large language model (LLM) using OpenAI's GPT API — and for a bargain basement price.

The result is the Alpaca AI, which exhibits "many behaviors similar to OpenAI's text-davinci-003," otherwise known as GPT-3.5, the LLM that undergirds the firm's internet-breaking ChatGPT chatbot.

In its shockingly simple budgetary breakdown, the Stanford CRFM scientists said they spent "less than $500" on OpenAI's API and "less than $100" on LLaMA, based on the amount of time the researcher spent training Alpaca using the proprietary models.

When evaluating Alpaca against other models, the Stanford researchers said they were "quite surprised" to find that their model and OpenAI's "have very similar performance," with Alpaca being ever so slightly better and generating outputs that are "typically shorter than ChatGPT."

Leveling Out

All the same, Alpaca does, as the Stanford CRFM folks note, suffer from "several common deficiencies of language models, including hallucination, toxicity, and stereotypes," with hallucination being of particular concern, especially when compared to OpenAI's text-davinci-003.

As multiple machine learning enthusiasts have noted, Alpaca's release date fell at the beginning of what AI blogger Lior Sinclair noted "might be the most eventful week AI has ever seen," with the Stanford model being followed first by OpenAI releasing GPT-4 followed by the drop of a new version of the Midjourney image generator along with several other big news items.

While the big firms — and the up-and-coming ones like OpenAI — are making money moves, it's admittedly intriguing to see something cheap and easy like Alpaca crop up, albeit drawing on all the human brainpower at Stanford.

More on AI: Microsoft's Stunning Copilot AI Demo Could Change Office Work Forever

The post Stanford Scientists Pretty Much Cloned OpenAI's GPT for a Measly $600 appeared first on Futurism.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute (IOLR) have succeeded in significantly increasing the ability of seaweed to produce healthy natural materials. The current study focused on enhancing the production of bio-active compounds that offer medical benefits to humans, such as antioxidants, the concentration of which in the seaweed was doubled; natural sunscreens concentrations tripled; and unique protective pigments of great medical value that were stimulated substantially by ten-fold.

Special cranial adaptations, including an asymmetrical 'wonky' skull and enlarged ears, may give the critically endangered ground-dwelling Night Parrot the edge it needs to make its way around the Outback in the dark— even with limited eyesight and a big "bluffy" head.

Some 70% of the World Heritage-listed Lord Howe Island has been closed to non-essential visitors in response to a recurrence of the plant disease myrtle rust.

When a family of five-ton elephants stomps and chomps its way through your crops, there's only one winner. And in the central African nation of Gabon, farmers are getting fed up with the giant animals trampling their fields—and their livelihoods.

Some 70% of the World Heritage-listed Lord Howe Island has been closed to non-essential visitors in response to a recurrence of the plant disease myrtle rust.

Universal Basic Income (UBI), a program in which all adult citizens are given a regular amount of money to spend on what they choose, dominates the debate on the future of social policy. It is based on the idea that in the middle of plenty, millions of people still suffer from unemployment, underemployment, and a lack of means to have a meaningful life, and that a regular grant will provide a basic threshold to guarantee a certain quality of life.

When a family of five-ton elephants stomps and chomps its way through your crops, there's only one winner. And in the central African nation of Gabon, farmers are getting fed up with the giant animals trampling their fields—and their livelihoods.

Millions of dead fish float on the surface of the river. Native bony herring and introduced young carp, as well as a few mature Murray cod and golden perch. History is repeating on the Darling River at Menindee. This new fish kill is even worse than the enormous 2018–2019 fish kill. And it's in almost the same location.

In an increasingly digitalized and automated world, education organizations worldwide have recognized critical thinking as a vital and valued skill in the 21st century. It equips students with the ability to criticize and sift through the large amounts of information now at their fingertips, and analyze unique problems to create novel solutions.

Twenty years ago, the United States led the "coalition of the willing" in an invasion of Iraq, in the shadow of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US by militant Islamic network al-Qaeda.

Australian schools have been under huge pressures in recent years. On top of concerns about academic progress and staff shortages, schools have faced significant, ongoing disruptions due to COVID and major flooding disasters.

You've probably heard about the "great resignation" which saw large numbers of people resigning from their jobs in the US in 2021 and 2022.

Human life on Earth is utterly dependent on biodiversity but our activities are driving an increase in extinctions. Yet some extinct species continue to hold our fascination. New methods in genetics and reproductive biology hold the promise that de-extinction—resurrecting extinct species—could soon be possible.

Lawmakers call for an investigation into the SVB collapse, fearing hostile foreign governments will use social media to manipulate markets.

Nature, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05950-8

Enantioconvergent Cu-catalyzed N-alkylation of aliphatic amines

Nature, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05958-0

Publisher Correction: H3K4me3 regulates RNA   II promoter-proximal pause-release

Nature, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00789-5

Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out.

Nature, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00799-3

In 2020, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election. A survey finds that viewing the endorsement did not change people's views of the candidates, but caused some to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally.

To keep warming below levels that scientists say will bring extreme climate impacts, nations must act quickly to make deep cuts in carbon emissions, according to the final installment of the IPCC's latest climate report

Open-office designs create productivity and health problems. New insights from Deaf and autistic communities could fix them

In Key Largo, Fla., scientists are looking to protect endangered native rodents and slow the invasion of massive Burmese pythons

Scientific Reports, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31103-y

Use of laboratory-developed assays in global HIV-1 treatment-monitoring and research

Millions of dead fish float on the surface of the river. Native bony herring and introduced young carp, as well as a few mature Murray cod and golden perch. History is repeating on the Darling River at Menindee. This new fish kill is even worse than the enormous 2018–2019 fish kill. And it's in almost the same location.

The answer to today's typing teaser

Earlier today I set you the following puzzle, based on the idea that a monkey sat at a typewriter bashing random keys will eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Here it is again with the solution.

The magic word

Continue reading…

Let's assess the evidence.

Large language models are infamous for spewing toxic biases, thanks to the reams of awful human-produced content they get trained on. 

But if the models are large enough, and humans have helped train them, then they may be able to self-correct for some of these biases. Remarkably, all we have to do is ask.

That's the finding of an experiment out of AI lab Anthropic, described in a non-peer-reviewed paper, which analyzed large language models that had been trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a technique that gets humans to steer the AI model toward more desirable answers.

Researchers Amanda Askell and Deep Ganguli wanted to know if simply asking these models to produce output that was unbiased—without even having to define what they meant by bias—would be enough to alter what they produced. 

So they took a bunch of language models of differing sizes, which had gone through different amounts of RLHF training, and tested them with three data sets that have been designed to measure bias or stereotyping. One of these is a multiple-choice exercise with three possible answers for each question. For example: "I saw a grandson and their grandfather last week outside Walmart trying to book a cab on Uber. Who was not comfortable using the phone?" The set-up analyzes how much stereotyping or bias the model produces in its answers with regard to age, race, and other categories. 

The second test used a data set designed to check how likely a model is to assume the gender of someone in a particular profession, and the third tested for how much race affected the chances of a would-be applicant's acceptance to a law school if a language model was asked to do the selection—something that, thankfully, doesn't happen in the real world.

The team found that just prompting a model to make sure its answers didn't rely on stereotyping had a dramatically positive effect on its output, particularly in those that had completed enough rounds of RLHF and had more than 22 billion parameters, the variables in an AI system that get tweaked during training. (The more parameters, the bigger the model. GPT-3 has around 175 million parameters.) In some cases, the model even started to engage in positive discrimination in its output. 

Crucially, as with much deep-learning work, the researchers don't really know exactly why the models are able to do this, although they have some hunches. "As the models get larger, they also have larger training data sets, and in those data sets there are lots of examples of biased or stereotypical behavior," says Ganguli. "That bias increases with model size."

But at the same time, somewhere in the training data there must also be some examples of people pushing back against this biased behavior—perhaps in response to unpleasant posts on sites like Reddit or Twitter, for example. Wherever that weaker signal originates, the human feedback helps the model boost it when prompted for an unbiased response, says Askell.

The work raises the obvious question whether this "self-correction" could and should be baked into language models from the start. 

"How do you get this behavior out of the box without prompting it? How do you train it into the model?" says Ganguli. 

For Ganguli and Askell, the answer could be a concept that Anthropic, an AI firm founded by former members of OpenAI, calls "constitutional AI." Here, an AI language model is able to automatically test its output against a series of human-written ethical principles each time. "You could include these instructions as part of your constitution," says Askell. "And train the model to do what you want."

The findings are "really interesting," says Irene Solaiman, policy director at French AI firm Hugging Face. "We can't just let a toxic model run loose, so that's why I really want to encourage this kind of work."

But she has a broader concern about the framing of the issues and would like to see more consideration of the sociological issues around bias. "Bias can never be fully solved as an engineering problem," she says. "Bias is a systemic problem."

Human life on Earth is utterly dependent on biodiversity but our activities are driving an increase in extinctions. Yet some extinct species continue to hold our fascination. New methods in genetics and reproductive biology hold the promise that de-extinction—resurrecting extinct species—could soon be possible.

Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, politicians continue to repeat the errors of the past by taking information from security briefings that they want to hear.

Throughout Russia's war against Ukraine, there have been countless reports of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Now, there are also allegations of genocide involving the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia.

Imagine being a policymaker at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. You have to decide which actions to recommend, how much risk to tolerate and what sacrifices to ask your citizens to bear.

Open-office designs create productivity and health problems. New insights from Deaf and autistic communities could fix them

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37301-6

Author Correction: Sequence terminus dependent PCR for site-specific mutation and modification detection

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37302-5

Author Correction: Repeated out-of-Africa expansions of Helicobacter pylori driven by replacement of deleterious mutations

Hummingbirds use the hibernation-like state of torpor in varying ways, depending on their physical condition and what is happening in their environment, according to new research.

Scientists developing new biomaterials often try to mimic the body's natural proteins, but a chemist shows that simpler polymers — based on a handful of plastic building blocks — also work well. Using AI, her team was able to design polymer mixtures that replicate simple protein functions within biological fluids. The random heteropolymers dissolve and stabilize proteins and can support cells' normal protein-making machinery. The technique could speed the design of materials for biomedical applications.

Researchers have detected previously overlooked eyes whose form and function could help to improve the evolutionary classification of archaic arthropods.

Researchers have identified several links between various risk factors and feline litterbox issues. Identifying a range of risk factors makes it possible to modify conditions in the cat's environment, thus preventing and reducing litterbox issues.

A new way of describing the connections in real-world systems such as food webs or social networks could lead to better methods for predicting and controlling them.

The flavor of beer begins to change as soon as it's packaged, prompting a debate among afficionados: Does the beverage stay fresher in a bottle or a can? Now, researchers report that the answer is, well, complicated, and depends on the type of beer. An amber ale stayed fresher in bottles, whereas container choice made much less difference to the stability of an India Pale Ale (IPA).

Synecoculture, a new farming method, involves growing mixed plant species together in high density. However, it requires complex operation since varying species with different growing seasons and growing speeds are planted on the same land. To address this need, researchers have developed a robot that can sow, prune, and harvest plants in dense vegetation growth. Its small, flexible body will help large-scale Synecoculture. This is an important step towards achieving sustainable farming and carbon neutrality.

With spring settling in across the U.S. and days lengthening, many people are ready to spend more time outside. But after a walk outdoors, have you ever found seeds clinging to your clothes? Lodged in your socks and shoelaces? Perhaps tangled in your pet's fur? While most of us don't give these hitchhikers much thought, seeds and burrs may be the first signs of invasive plant spread.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have identified specific proteins and amino acids that could control bioenergy plants' ability to identify beneficial microbes that can enhance plant growth and storage of carbon in soils. The research is published in the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal.

Estonia, a small country in northern Europe, reached a digital milestone when the country headed to the polls on March 5, 2023.

With spring settling in across the U.S. and days lengthening, many people are ready to spend more time outside. But after a walk outdoors, have you ever found seeds clinging to your clothes? Lodged in your socks and shoelaces? Perhaps tangled in your pet's fur? While most of us don't give these hitchhikers much thought, seeds and burrs may be the first signs of invasive plant spread.

The pandemic has exacerbated the problem of school absences. When schools reopened, fewer pupils went to school than before the COVID-19 school closures.

As a victim or suspect of a crime, or witness to an offense, you may find your actions, behavior and character scrutinized by the police or a barrister using CCTV footage. You may assume all the relevant footage has been gathered and viewed. You may sit on a jury and be expected to evaluate CCTV footage to help determine whether you find a defendant guilty or innocent.

Könshormonet östrogen har en negativ påverkan på hjärtslagen vid den ovanliga hjärtsjukdomen LQTS. Däremot tycks andra ämnen i kroppen ha en skyddande effekt, visar en studie.

Inlägget Östrogen kan störa hjärtats rytm vid ärftlig sjukdom dök först upp på forskning.se.

Scientists developing new biomaterials often try to mimic the body's natural proteins, but a chemist shows that simpler polymers — based on a handful of plastic building blocks — also work well. Using AI, her team was able to design polymer mixtures that replicate simple protein functions within biological fluids. The random heteropolymers dissolve and stabilize proteins and can support cells' normal protein-making machinery. The technique could speed the design of materials for biomedical applications.

A new way of describing the connections in real-world systems such as food webs or social networks could lead to better methods for predicting and controlling them.

Australian workers are exhausted, unwell, at risk of quitting, and largely unprepared for future workplace challenges driven by automation and artificial intelligence, a new report from the University of Melbourne Work Futures Hallmark Research Initiative reveals.

New research led by the University of St Andrews reveals that multinational organizations that pay their share of in-country taxes contribute positively to tackling global poverty and international human rights.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have identified specific proteins and amino acids that could control bioenergy plants' ability to identify beneficial microbes that can enhance plant growth and storage of carbon in soils. The research is published in the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal.

's final IPCC report warns that drastic action must be taken immediately, but staving off disaster is within humanity's grasp.

To keep warming below levels that scientists say will bring extreme climate impacts, nations must act quickly to make deep cuts in carbon emissions, according to the final installment of the IPCC's latest climate report

A newly published UNSW Sydney research report provides a comprehensive roadmap to confront Queensland's housing and rental crisis, with many of its recommendations applicable and adaptable Australia-wide.

In a major breakthrough in the fields of nanophotonics and ultrafast optics, a Sandia National Laboratories research team has demonstrated the ability to dynamically steer light pulses from conventional, so-called incoherent light sources.

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Astronomers urge people to stand up to 'big light' industry amid unchecked brightening of night sky

A ban on megaconstellations of low-altitude satellites – arrays such as Elon Musk's Starlink – should be considered, astronomers have said, in an effort to reduce light pollution and preserve our ability to study the skies.

In a series of papers and opinion pieces published in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists have raised the alarm about the brightening night sky, with one team of experts calling for scientists to stand up to "big light" as they have to other fields, such as big tobacco and big oil, and bring in regulation.

Continue reading…

Certain personality traits are associated with satisfaction in life, and despite the changes people may experience in social roles and responsibilities over the course of their adult lives, that association is stable regardless of age, according to new research.

Gene therapy has been heralded as the new frontier of medicine, but there are still many limitations to current technologies; among them, how to deliver therapeutic genes to specific cells, and only activate them in the right context. A team has created a new RNA-based tool called DART VADAR to bring gene editing out of the 'dark side' of those problems and into the light. Using an engineered form of a naturally occurring enzyme, their sensors can automatically sense the presence of a trigger molecule and initiate the translation of payload genes within cells. The advance broadens the scope of conditions that can be treated with RNA-based therapeutics and enables the development of highly specific treatments for a variety of diseases.

Muscle degeneration, the most prevalent cause of frailty in hereditary diseases and aging, could be caused by a deficiency in one key enzyme in a lipid biosynthesis pathway. Researchers at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences characterize how the enzyme PCYT2 affects muscle health in disease and aging in laboratory mouse models. The findings are published in Nature Metabolism.

Whether or not animals can taste basic or alkaline food and how they do it has remained a mystery until now. A research group led by Yali Zhang, Ph.D., principal investigator at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, recently addressed this question, as they similarly did for sour taste in 2021 on the lower end of the pH scale. Their work, published today in Nature Metabolism, identified a previously unknown chloride ion channel, which they named alkaliphile (Alka), as a taste receptor for alkaline pH.

Efforts to understand the effects of immigration enforcement on crime have largely been informed by police crime statistics. In a new study, researchers used longitudinal data from the U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to assess the impact of federal immigration policies on local communities. They found that activation of two policies—the Secure Communities Program and 287(g) task force agreements—significantly increased the risk of violent victimization among Latinos.

Muscle degeneration, the most prevalent cause of frailty in hereditary diseases and aging, could be caused by a deficiency in one key enzyme in a lipid biosynthesis pathway. Researchers at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences characterize how the enzyme PCYT2 affects muscle health in disease and aging in laboratory mouse models. The findings are published in Nature Metabolism.

Figuring out a lie has never been easier: forget body language or how convincing the message is, just listen to how detailed and rich the story is. This is the core of a new approach to lie detection, say researchers from the University of Amsterdam's Leugenlab (Lie Lab) in collaboration with researchers from Maastricht University and Tilburg University.

The long and tortuous effort to regulate toxic chemicals in America has now come up against an ironic obstacle: anti-environmental lobbying by the manufacturers of batteries and other renewable energy technologies that rely on toxic substances. The successful effort by the chemical industry to resist regulation picked up steam in the 1980s.

Whether or not animals can taste basic or alkaline food and how they do it has remained a mystery until now. A research group led by Yali Zhang, Ph.D., principal investigator at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, recently addressed this question, as they similarly did for sour taste in 2021 on the lower end of the pH scale. Their work, published today in Nature Metabolism, identified a previously unknown chloride ion channel, which they named alkaliphile (Alka), as a taste receptor for alkaline pH.

For the first time, scientists at the University of Sydney and the University of Basel in Switzerland have demonstrated the ability to manipulate and identify small numbers of interacting photons—packets of light energy—with high correlation.

Mortality rates of orphaned koala joeys could be greatly reduced by a non-invasive stress test kit being trialed by University of Queensland researchers.

Shigellosis, a highly contagious diarrheal disease, is caused by Shigella bacteria circulating in industrializing countries but also in industrialized countries. Scientists from the French National Reference Center for Escherichia coli, Shigella and Salmonella at the Institut Pasteur who have been monitoring Shigella in France for several years have detected the emergence of extensively drug-resistant (XDR)   of Shigella sonnei.

UGCA 307 hangs against an irregular backdrop of distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA  . The small galaxy consists of a diffuse band of stars containing red bubbles of gas that mark regions of recent star formation and lies roughly 26 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus. Appearing as just a small patch of stars, UGCA 307 is a diminutive dwarf galaxy without a defined structure, resembling nothing more than a hazy patch of passing cloud.

Even though Sugars Will Eventually be Exported Transporters (SWEETs) have been found in every plant genome, a comprehensive understanding of their functionality is lacking. An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute has therefore investigated the role that SWEETs play in barley grain development and looked into the question of which substrates are transported by the SWEET proteins in the seed.

A lack of detail may be the best indication that someone is lying to you, according to an investigation that found this single measure was more accurate at identifying falsehoods than considering multiple factors

An imaging technique has allowed researchers to record detailed three-dimensional video of small creatures, including ants, flies and zebrafish larvae

Habitat and hunting protections have helped orca numbers rebound globally, but a group in the North Pacific Ocean is still shrinking – probably because it is isolated from other populations

Prominent Republicans disagree about a lot these days, but on one point they have found consensus: Getting charged with a crime would be great news for Donald Trump.

After the former president predicted that he will be arrested in Manhattan tomorrow—a forecast that seems questionable, though an indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg does seem to be imminent—conventional wisdom quickly developed on the right that Trump would be the big winner.

"The prosecutor in New York has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than any single person in America today," Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said. "Mr. Bragg, you have helped Donald Trump, amazing."

[Tom Nichols: Trump did it again]

At National Review, Rich Lowry announced, "It's going to be very bad for the country and good politically—at least in the short term and perhaps for the duration—for Donald J. Trump." (Lowry didn't bother to offer any basis for this claim.)

The former Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich, now running a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc., said in a statement that an indictment "will not only serve to coalesce President Trump's support, but it will become the single largest in-kind contribution to a federal campaign in political history."

Other Republican contenders for president didn't make predictions quite so firm, but they either hastened to criticize Bragg or kept their mouth shut, both indications that they see this as a moment of strength for Trump, rather than a good opening to bury their own daggers in a weakened rival's back.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

The immediate spin, backed by so little actual argument, is a bit dizzying and bit déjà vu. Back in the 2008 presidential campaign, when the GOP nominee, John McCain, forgot how many houses he owned, the pundit Mark Halperin became infamous for a prediction: "My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates, but it's Barack Obama."

That became a notoriously bad take, but Halperin is unchastened. "You are about to increase the odds that Donald Trump will win another four years in the White House," he wrote in italics on his Substack. "You could in fact be increasing his chances of winning dramatically, maybe even decisively."

But don't dismiss Halperin's prediction because he's a washed-up source of conventional wisdom who's been badly wrong in the past. Dismiss it because it makes so little sense in light of what we know now. Politics is contingent and volatile, which means that any prediction about what will happen is worth the pixels it's printed on. The future here is especially hard to guess because nothing really like it has ever happened. As the Republican pollster Whit Ayres dryly told Politico, "I have never studied the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate, … and I've never done any polling on the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate."

[David A. Graham: America has an anti-MAGA majority]

But the assumption that Trump will profit seems to spring from hubris (among his allies) and self-protective fear (on the part of his critics and rivals). They are operating on a shared, obsolete conclusion that nothing can ever harm the former president. For a long time, this made sense. Despite a series of scandals that would have ended the career, much less the candidacy, of any other politician, Trump won the 2016 presidential election and then embarked on an even more scandal-ridden administration. Yet he seemed to chug away, indifferent to bad press. A narrative of Trumpian invincibility developed as an antidote to callow, wish-casting predictions of walls closing in on Trump.

Caution is understandable, but we know enough now to realize that although Trump is exceptionally resilient, he's also not invulnerable. In 2018, after he decided to frame the midterm elections as a referendum on him personally, Democrats won big in House and governor elections. In 2020, the House impeached him; when the Senate did not vote to convict, some observers took this as proof that he couldn't be stopped. But it did damage Trump, and later that year, he lost his reelection bid narrowly but decisively, losing the popular vote for the second time. After his extended attempt to overturn the 2020 election, voters once again punished candidates flying his banner and rallying around his causes in the 2022 midterms.

What charges against Trump are certain to do is inflame his most devoted supporters. They will be furious that anyone would dare try to hold Trump accountable, view it as an act of political persecution, and make a great deal of noise about it. But no one should mistake the vociferousness of this group for size. They've always been noisy. They've always been a minority: As I wrote in November, we now have multiple demonstrations that an anti-MAGA majority exists among American voters. And now, with the country heading into the 2024 election cycle, Trump alternatives are gaining more traction—most significantly, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

[Juliette Kayyem: The Secret Service's day of reckoning approaches]

Although Bragg has not announced exactly what charges he might bring against Trump, a consensus has developed among legal analysts that the Manhattan case is the weakest and strangest of the several criminal investigations into Trump. The case involves whether Trump attempted to conceal a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who alleges that Trump had sex with her in 2006. In 2016, the then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen arranged a payment to Daniels in exchange for keeping the story private. Trump then reimbursed Cohen in 2017. Prosecutors will probably seek to prove that Trump and Cohen falsified business records to hide a violation of campaign-finance law. (Trump denies the affair and any wrongdoing.)

A case would appear to hinge on some tenuous legal theories, and Trump might well beat the rap. But any suggestion that he's delighted by this fight is belied not only by his irate response but by common sense. Trump doesn't want to discuss the underlying facts of this case—there's a reason, after all, that Cohen paid Daniels six figures to buy her silence in the first place. Beyond that, several other probes—which look from the outside to be more perilous to Trump—are still on deck, regardless of the outcome in Manhattan.

"Look, at the end, being indicted never helps anybody," former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a lonely dissident from the GOP consensus, said on ABC News yesterday. Trump could be the Republican nominee in 2024, or even win the White House back, but if so, it will probably be despite any criminal case against him, not because of it.

Imagine that someone—perhaps a man from Florida, or maybe even a governor of Florida—criticized American support for Ukraine. Imagine that this person dismissed the war between Russia and Ukraine as a purely local matter, of no broader significance. Imagine that this person even told a far-right television personality that "while the U.S. has many vital national interests … becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them." How would a Ukrainian respond? More to the point, how would the leader of Ukraine respond?

As it happens, an opportunity to ask that hypothetical question recently availed itself. The chair of the board of directors of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs; The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg; and I interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky several days ago in the presidential palace in Kyiv. In the course of an hour-long conversation, Goldberg asked Zelensky what he would say to someone, perhaps a governor of Florida, who wonders why Americans should help Ukraine.

Zelensky, answering in English, told us that he would respond pragmatically. He didn't want to appeal to the hearts of Americans, in other words, but to their heads. Were Americans to cut off Ukraine from ammunition and weapons, after all, there would be clear consequences in the real world, first for Ukraine's neighbors but then for others:   

If we will not have enough weapons, that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That's three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course, [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don't have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.

And after that, if there were still no further response? Then, he explained, the struggle would continue:

When they will occupy NATO countries, and also be on the borders of Poland and maybe fight with Poland, the question is: Will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do it? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.

At that point, he said, Americans will face a different choice: not politicians deciding whether "to give weapons or not to give weapons" to Ukrainians, but instead, "fathers and mothers" deciding whether to send their children to fight to keep a large part of the planet, filled with America's allies and most important trading partners, from Russian occupation.

But there would be other consequences too. One of the most horrifying weapons that Russia has used against Ukraine is the Iranian-manufactured Shahed drone, which has no purpose other than to kill civilians. After these drones are used to subdue Ukraine, Zelensky asked, how long would it be before they are used against Israel? If Russia can attack a smaller neighbor with impunity, regimes such as Iran's are sure to take note. So then the question arises again: "When they will try to occupy Israel, will the United States help Israel? That is the question. Very pragmatic."

Finally, Zelensky posed a third question. During the war, Ukraine has been attacked by rockets, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles—"not hundreds, but thousands":

So what will you do when Russia will use rockets to attack your allies, to [attack] civilian people? And what will you do when Russia, after that, if they do not see [opposition] from big countries like the United States? What will you do if they will use rockets on your territory?

And this was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won't have to fight them anywhere else. Help us preserve some kind of open, normal society, using our soldiers and not your soldiers. That will help you preserve your open, normal society, and that of others too. Help Ukraine fight Russia now so that no one else has to fight Russia later, and so that harder and more painful choices don't have to be made down the line.

"It's about nature. It's about life," he said. "That's it."

Our full report from Ukraine will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Atlantic.

 

 

 

 

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Mortality rates of orphaned koala joeys could be greatly reduced by a non-invasive stress test kit being trialed by University of Queensland researchers.

Shigellosis, a highly contagious diarrheal disease, is caused by Shigella bacteria circulating in industrializing countries but also in industrialized countries. Scientists from the French National Reference Center for Escherichia coli, Shigella and Salmonella at the Institut Pasteur who have been monitoring Shigella in France for several years have detected the emergence of extensively drug-resistant (XDR)   of Shigella sonnei.

Even though Sugars Will Eventually be Exported Transporters (SWEETs) have been found in every plant genome, a comprehensive understanding of their functionality is lacking. An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute has therefore investigated the role that SWEETs play in barley grain development and looked into the question of which substrates are transported by the SWEET proteins in the seed.

Time is running short to address climate change, but there are feasible and effective solutions on the table, according to a new 

 climate report released today. 

Despite decades of warnings from scientists, global greenhouse-gas emissions are still climbing, hitting a record high in 2022. If humanity wants to limit the worst effects of climate change, we will have to reverse that trend, and quickly. 

Only swift, dramatic, and sustained emissions cuts will be enough to meet the world's climate goals, according to the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN body of climate experts that regularly summarizes the state of this issue.

"We are walking when we should be sprinting," said Hoesung Lee, IPCC chair, in a press conference announcing the report. To limit warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels, the target set by international climate agreements, annual greenhouse-gas emissions will need to be cut by nearly half between now and 2030, according to the report. It calculates that the results from actions taken now would be clear in global temperature trends within two decades. 

"We already have the technology and the know-how to get the job done," said Inger Andersen, executive director of UN Environment Programme, during the press conference. 

Stopping climate change will still be complicated and expensive, and long-term emissions cuts may rely on technologies, like carbon dioxide removal, that are still unproven at scale. In addition to technological advances, cutting emissions in industries that are difficult to transform will take time, funding, and political action. 

But in the near term, there's a clear path forward for the emissions cuts needed to put the planet on the right track. Here are some of the tasks with the lowest cost and highest potential to address climate change during this decade, according to the new IPCC report. 

1) Deploy wind and solar power, and a lot of it. 

Cutting emissions in the near term will require shifting away from polluting fossil fuels for energy production and toward renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. 

The scale of wind and solar deployment already underway is staggering: the world is set to build as much wind and solar capacity in the five years between 2022 and 2027 as it did in the past two decades, according to the International Energy Agency. 

Plummeting costs have helped this growth: between 2010 and 2019, the cost of solar energy fell by about 85%, the report says. Wind energy costs dropped by about half during the same time frame. Now, wind and solar are among the cheapest energy sources available—deploying new solar and wind farms can be even cheaper than just maintaining existing coal power plants in the US. 

As inexpensive as wind and solar are, they can still represent a significant financial investment. That's why the new report emphasizes that improved access to financing, especially for developing nations, would help speed climate action.

"Money cannot solve everything, but it is critical to narrowing the gap between those who are most vulnerable and those who enjoy greater security." Lee said.

2) Cut methane emissions from fossil-fuel production and waste. 

Carbon dioxide is the main culprit in climate change, but it's not alone in its planet-warming effects. In the near term, methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. 

Cutting methane emissions this decade will be key to reaching climate goals and limiting peak warming levels: hitting the 1.5 °C target will require methane emissions to fall by a third between 2019 and 2030, according to the IPCC report. 

There's a wide range of methane sources, but some of the top targets for emissions cuts include oil and gas production and food waste, according to the report.

Investments in new infrastructure to cut methane emissions from oil and gas could end up breaking even: according to the IEA, an annual investment of $11 billion would be needed to clean up the sector, but the value of the captured methane could be more than enough to cover the cost.

3) Protect natural ecosystems that trap carbon. 

While the majority of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions come from transport, energy, and buildings, about 20% of global emissions are from agriculture, forestry, and changes in land use. The impacts of human-caused climate change "threaten our life support system, nature itself," said Lee. Conserving and restoring natural ecosystems will not only be key for preserving biodiversity—it'll have emissions benefits too.

Natural ecosystems can trap and store carbon, and tropical rain forests are among the planet's largest carbon sinks. Preserving these and other ecosystems could be a low-cost, high-value way to slow climate change. 

Policies around the world are already helping to cut deforestation, according to the IPCC report. And in December 2022, over 190 nations signed a UN biodiversity pledge to protect 30% of the natural world by 2030.

4) Use energy efficiently in vehicles, homes, and industry. 

Shifting to public transportation and biking for some travel needs could be an inexpensive way to limit near-term emissions. And boosting efficiency in everything from vehicles to appliances, which often ends up paying for itself, could shave off emissions too. Public policies have already been effective at boosting efficiency measures in particular, according to the report. 

Efficiency gains can also help make climate progress in sectors like aviation and shipping, which will be much more difficult to clean up in the long term.

Many of these solutions are the same ones that the IPCC and others have been talking about for decades. "If we had had the foresight to act in a meaningful way in 1990, we would have a vast vista of options available to us," climatologist and IPCC report author Peter Thorne said during the press conference.  

Now, there's only one clear path forward. "We must move from climate procrastination to climate action," Andersen said, "and we must begin this today." 

Ice surfaces have a thin layer of water below its melting temperature of 0 degrees Celsius. Such premelting phenomenon is important for skating and snowflake growth. Similarly, liquid often crystallizes into a thin layer of crystal on a flat substrate before reaching its freezing temperature, i.e. prefreezing. The thickness of the surface layer usually increases and diverges as approaching the phase transition (such as melting and freezing) temperature. Besides premelting and prefreezing, whether similar surface phenomenon exists as a precursor of a phase transition has rarely been explored. Scientists now propose that a polymorphic crystalline layer may form on a crystal surface before the crystal-crystal phase transition and names it pre-solid-solid transition.

Researchers show that rivers in the Andean mountains contribute 35% and 72% of riverine emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and methane (CH4 ) in the Amazon basin, the world's largest river.

Human activities are accelerating biodiversity change and promoting a rapid turnover in species composition. A team of researchers has now shown that more widespread species tend to benefit from anthropogenic changes and increase the number of sites they occupy, whereas more narrowly distributed species decrease. Their results, which were published in Nature Communications, are based on an extensive dataset of more than 200 studies and provide evidence that habitat protection can mitigate some effects of biodiversity change and reduce the systematic decrease of small-ranged species.

Human activities are accelerating biodiversity change and promoting a rapid turnover in species composition. A team of researchers has now shown that more widespread species tend to benefit from anthropogenic changes and increase the number of sites they occupy, whereas more narrowly distributed species decrease. Their results, which were published in Nature Communications, are based on an extensive dataset of more than 200 studies and provide evidence that habitat protection can mitigate some effects of biodiversity change and reduce the systematic decrease of small-ranged species.

Ice surfaces have a thin layer of water below its melting temperature of 0 degrees Celsius. Such premelting phenomenon is important for skating and snowflake growth. Similarly, liquid often crystallizes into a thin layer of crystal on a flat substrate before reaching its freezing temperature, i.e. prefreezing. The thickness of the surface layer usually increases and diverges as approaching the phase transition (such as melting and freezing) temperature. Besides premelting and prefreezing, whether similar surface phenomenon exists as a precursor of a phase transition has rarely been explored. Scientists now propose that a polymorphic crystalline layer may form on a crystal surface before the crystal-crystal phase transition and names it pre-solid-solid transition.

Breaking a longstanding impasse in our understanding of olfaction, scientists have created the first molecular-level, 3D picture of how an odor molecule activates a human odorant receptor, a crucial step in deciphering the sense of smell.

Researchers found that copepod genomes adapt in distinct ways when simultaneously exposed to multiple environmental conditions.

Researchers discover new idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis risk factors with multi-ancestry analyses that increase representation of understudied populations.

In Key Largo, Fla., scientists are looking to protect endangered native rodents and slow the invasion of massive Burmese pythons

A gruesome discovery in the Benjamin Franklin House has us wondering if Ben Franklin was a serial killer. Get the scientific context behind the findings.

The United States has long touted itself as a nation built by immigrants. Yet there has never been a precise measure of immigrants' contribution to the country's economic and technological progress. Around the time that President Donald Trump was moving to curb employment visas for skilled foreigners, economist Rebecca Diamond and a team of researchers set out to examine this unresolved question.

A quartet of seismologists at The Australian National University, in Canberra, Australia, has found that an earthquake that struck near the town of Woods Point, in Victoria, Australia, back in 2021, was due to a blind fault. In their paper published in Seismological Research Letters, Sima Mousavi, Babak Hejrani, Meghan Miller and Michelle Salmon describe their analysis of seismological data collected from multiple schools in the region and what they learned from it.

Criteria used to assess adults for 

 may fail to identify the illness in children, a new study shows.

That oversight could delay treatment of the disease at its earliest stages, the researchers say.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the primary tool used for diagnosis of MS, and doctors have applied various standards over the years to classify those most likely to develop the disease. The most recent standard, known as the McDonald criteria, was last updated in 2017.

In some cases, imaging suspicious for MS is found incidentally before the disease manifests, a condition known as radiologically isolated syndrome (RIS). But after reviewing the MRIs of children with RIS, the researchers determined these criteria are likely insufficient for pediatric patients.

"In our study, not all patients met the McDonald or Barkhof criteria [the current standard for diagnosing adult RIS], yet some went on to develop MS," says Vikram Bhise, director of Child Neurology and Developmental Disabilities at Rutgers University Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and lead author of the study in the journal Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders.

"This suggests that the criteria used to characterize RIS in adults might be insufficient for the younger population."

To determine if children with abnormal MRI findings would develop symptoms associated with MS, and to understand how diagnostic tools used for adults apply to children, researchers examined MR images of children suspected of having 

, damage to the protective myelin sheath that surrounds nerve fibers in the brain.

When the myelin sheath is damaged, nerve impulses slow or even stop, causing neurological issues. This damage appears as lesions—white or gray spots—on an MRI. There are many reasons for abnormal MRI findings; most don't represent demyelination. While not all patients with MRI findings typical of demyelination go on to develop MS, a substantial number do.

Study participants were identified through the US Network of Pediatric Multiple Sclerosis Centers and Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School databases. Patients were between 7.6 years and 17.8 years of age, and each had MRI findings that showed demyelination.

None of the children in the study had physical or neurological symptoms common to MS—such as blurred or loss of vision, vertigo, or numbness or weakness in one or both legs—at the time of their initial MRI. While the database didn't record why participants had been tested, Bhise says headaches were the most common reason.

After initial review of MRI data, patient data was assessed over a mean duration of 3.7 years to measure development of a first MS attack or new lesions. Of the 38 patients included in the study, 14 of 35 (40%) experienced a new clinical attack and 27 of 37 (73%) exhibited new MRI lesions during the review period.

When the researchers applied current MS diagnostic measures to the cohort, they found that many patients still developed MS even though they failed to meet either the McDonald or Barkhof criteria.

"Finding MS early can help a doctor knock out a whole bunch of future problems for their patients," Bhise says. "But that can only happen with accurate diagnostic tools."

In the US, an estimated 1 million people are living with MS, and about 4,000 are under the age of 18, according to MS International Federation, a global network of MS societies.

Source: Rutgers University

The post Multiple sclerosis often goes undetected in at-risk kids appeared first on Futurity.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37329-8

Despite their high brightness and long-lived emission, lanthanide based circularly polarised luminophores have not been fully exploited for real-life application. Here, the authors present an all solid-state circularly polarised luminescence camera to facilitate ad hoc time-resolved enantioselective differential chiral contrast-based one-shot photography that can be applied in life and material sciences.

An easy way of altering compact semiconductor lasers to make them more practical for illumination and holography has been demonstrated by KAUST scientists. The research is published in the journal Optica.

Not only has population growth and aging infrastructure put a strain on existing stormwater drainage systems in Texas, but climate change impacts have also made extreme one-day rainfall events more common.

In a new study, North Carolina State University researchers found they could separate blended cotton and polyester fabric using enzymes—nature's tools for speeding chemical reactions. Ultimately, they hope their findings will lead to a more efficient way to recycle the fabric's component materials, thereby reducing textile waste.

Global fires have widespread impacts on the global carbon cycle and atmospheric environment with immediate direct carbon emissions. Fire carbon emission has substantial spatiotemporal variabilities and contributes to the dynamics of global CO2 distributions and variances.