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Tag: science

  • ‘Technofossils’: how humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones – The Guardian

    “Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.” […]

    Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040. This stuff is going to last millions of years, some releasing its toxins and chemicals into the natural world,” she says, raising serious questions for us all: “Do you need that? Do you really need to buy more?”

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  • Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s microscopic delights (1759–63) – The Public Domain Review

    For all of their scientific verisimilitude, microscopes were first and foremost instruments of wonder, and Ledermüller (1718–1769) — a German polymath, physician, and keeper of the Margrave of Brandenburg’s natural history collection — extolls their virtues in illustrating the marvels of God’s Creation and also as pure entertainment. Along with the vermin, Ledermüller gave state-of-the-art descriptions of plant, animal, and human organs, fungi, plankton, and crystals that accompany more than 150 attractive colored plates, produced by Nuremberg publisher, artist, and engraver Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt.

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  • Moon – Bartosz Ciechanowski

    In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself.

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  • Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice – The Guardian

    In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates. The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair. However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.

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  • Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles – Nature

    This surge can now be seen in a first-of-its-kind analysis of institutional retraction rates around the globe over the past decade, for which Nature’s news team used figures supplied by three private research-integrity and analytics firms. Jining First People’s Hospital tops the charts, with more than 5% of its total output from 2014 to 2024 retracted — more than 100 papers (see ‘Highest retraction rates’). That proportion is an order of magnitude higher than China’s retraction rate, and 50 times the global average. Depending on how one counts, the hospital could be the institution with the world’s highest retraction rate. Many other Chinese hospitals are retraction hotspots. But universities and institutes in China, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Ethiopia feature in the data as well. Retractions can be for honest mistakes and administrative errors, but evidence suggests the majority of cases in these data are related to misconduct. […]

    Data on retractions show that they are rare events. Out of 50 million or more articles published over the past decade, for instance, a mere 40,000 or so (fewer than 0.1%) have been retracted, according to the firms’ data sets. But the rise in retraction notices (by which journals announce that a paper is being retracted) is outstripping the growth of published papers — partly because of the rise of paper mills and the growing number of sleuths who spot problems with published articles.

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  • Antiscientific vandalism – Quillette

    To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.

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  • How the Moon became a place – Aeon

    To geographers and anthropologists, ‘place’ is a useful concept. A place is a collision between human culture and physical space. People transform their physical environment, and it transforms them. People tell stories about physical spaces that make people feel a certain way about that space. And people build, adding to a space and transforming it even further.

    Some scholars have started using these concepts to think about extraterrestrial locations. In her book Placing Outer Space (2016), the Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri observes that scientists often think about planets, both in our solar system and beyond, as places. Sometimes this is explicit, as in the case of a series of talks given by Carl Sagan titled ‘Planets Are Places’. In other cases, scientists express a sense of place indirectly through their practices and language. Messeri observes that planetary scientists conduct place-making primarily through ‘narrating, mapping, visualising, and inhabiting’ other worlds. ‘Importantly,’ Messeri writes, ‘one can be (or can imagine being) in a place. Place suggests an intimacy that can scale down the cosmos to the level of human experience.’

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  • Undergraduate upends a 40-year-old data science conjecture – Quanta Magazine

    Martín Farach-Colton, a co-author of the “Tiny Pointers” paper and Krapivin’s former professor at Rutgers, was initially skeptical of Krapivin’s new design. Hash tables are among the most thoroughly studied data structures in all of computer science; the advance sounded too good to be true. But just to be sure, he asked a frequent collaborator (and a “Tiny Pointers” co-author), William Kuszmaul of Carnegie Mellon University, to check out his student’s invention. Kuszmaul had a different reaction. “You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!” […]

    “It’s not just that they disproved [Yao’s conjecture], they also found the best possible answer to his question,” said Sepehr Assadi(opens a new tab) of the University of Waterloo. “We could have gone another 40 years before we knew the right answer.”

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  • China to host human vs. robot half marathon race – Moss and Fog

    Well, it’s begun. Our era of humanoid robots interacting with us in real, tangible ways. In April, Beijing is hosting a half marathon where humans will compete alongside bipedal (walking/running) robots. The 21-kilometer race will showcase over 12,000 determined human runners alongside more than 20 teams of cutting-edge humanoid robots, developed by leading manufacturers from across the globe. The robots are not allowed to use wheels, and must complete the full race. They will be a combination of remote-controlled robots, and fully autonomous ones. And their handlers will be able to swap out their batteries during the race.

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  • Mysterious square structure spotted on Mars branded ‘wild’ has space fanatics completely baffled – LADbible

    Naturally the appearance of a structure which appears to be ‘man-made’ would send the internet into overdrive, with believers quick to use the image as proof of a long-lost alien civilisation. … But before you roll out the red carpet for aliens, it might be worth noting that straight lines aren’t impossible in nature. In fact, various replies to the original thread pointed out that natural wonders such as the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, the Eye of the Sahara and Turkey’s ‘Fairy Chimneys’ could appear man-made to an alien visitor.

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  • KA-BOOM – The European Space Agency

    Marsquakes – the earthquakes of Mars – and meteor impacts are common on our neighbouring planet. In the last two decades, scientists have scrutinised many images and manually identified hundreds of new impact craters across the martian surface. Researchers have recently turned to artificial intelligence to save them from some tedious detective work and to make connections between data collected by five different instruments orbiting Mars. Europe’s CaSSIS camera is one of them.

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  • A young man used AI to build a nuclear fusor and now I must weep – Core Memory

    I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe than I was. If the previous generation were digital natives, HudZah was an AI native. … It’s not that I don’t use these things. I do. It’s more that I was watching HudZah navigate his laptop with an AI fluency that felt alarming to me. He was using his computer in a much, much different way than I’d seen someone use their computer before, and it made me feel old and alarmed by the number of new tools at our disposal and how HudZah intuitively knew how to tame them.

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  • Chatbot software begins to face fundamental limitations – Quanta Magazine

    Einstein’s riddle requires composing a larger solution from solutions to subproblems, which researchers call a compositional task. Dziri’s team showed that LLMs that have only been trained to predict the next word in a sequence — which is most of them — are fundamentally limited(opens a new tab) in their ability to solve compositional reasoning tasks. Other researchers have shown that transformers, the neural network architecture used by most LLMs, have hard mathematical bounds when it comes to solving such problems. Scientists have had some successes pushing transformers past these limits, but those increasingly look like short-term fixes. If so, it means there are fundamental computational caps on the abilities of these forms of artificial intelligence — which may mean it’s time to consider other approaches.

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  • Climate, technology, and justice – Data & Society

    Climate change is perhaps the most urgent issue of the 21st century. The changing climate already disproportionately impacts communities in the majority world, and energy-intensive technologies like generative AI make the problem worse, exacerbating global emissions. Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program investigates how technologies impact and influence the environment, and how communities participate in or resist these processes. We examine the social and environmental repercussions of the expanded global infrastructures and labor practices needed to sustain the growth of digital technologies, from AI and blockchain to streaming and data storage. We trace the environmental implications of technology development across the entire life cycle, from ideation and use to disposal or refurbishment. We also seek to better understand the sociotechnical implications of climate-focused technologies, from low-carbon innovations like community energy, solar, and wind turbines, to the integration of algorithms and AI into climate modeling, disaster prediction, and emissions tracking.

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  • Effort grunting – Wikenigma

    There have been many attempts to explain the phenomenon. Some researchers suggesting that the grunts may somehow help with power efficiency – perhaps by increasing oxygen absorption. For example, some studies have shown that grunting can increase the speed of tennis serves. Whereas other studies with weight lifters showed that grunts don’t appear to have any effect. Another theory is that the grunts date back to communications in a pre-speech time of human evolution – with a general meaning along the lines of “I need help with this”.

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  • The cure for disposable plastic crap is here—and it’s loony – WIRED

    Even so, in the US, only a minority of PET bottles get recycled. The main PET industry association puts the recycling rate at 29 percent, while Greenpeace says it’s 20.9 percent. In Norway, though, Infinitum recycles nearly every damn bottle. How the heck did they achieve this?

    With a combo of clever technology and deft public policy. As is often the case, the policy was the prime mover. Running a recycling program requires a lot of expensive labor and systems. You have to collect the plastic and separate it by type, which is expensive.

    So in the late ’90s, Norway passed a law that forced somebody to pay for it—specifically, companies such as Coca-Cola that make plastic PET containers. Firms got hit with a new tax if they didn’t pay to collect and recycle used bottles. If the beverage companies can prove they’re recycling 95 percent as many bottles as they sell, they pay no tax. Otherwise, the less they recycle, the more they owe—until they’re paying “hundreds of millions of Norwegian kroner,” Maldum said (tens of millions of US dollars).

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  • ‘The most expensive photos ever taken’: the space shots that changed humanity’s view of itself – The Guardian

    It was one of history’s monumental moments – but if John Glenn hadn’t popped into the supermarket to pick up a Contax camera and a roll of 35mm film on his way to board the Friendship 7, there may have been no visual document of it. The photographs the American astronaut took from the window of his capsule as he orbited Earth on 20 February 1962 gave an unprecedented testimony of the Mercury Project’s first orbital mission.

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