The cowboy frontier of femtoscopy: How the planet is losing its biodiversity in a world with carbon dioxide emissions and ice loss
It’s been 20 years since the launch of space-tourism venture Virgin Galactic. Billionaires seem to be popping up to space regularly — for example, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who was both spacewalker and bill-payer on a recent private SpaceX mission. But what about the rest of us? A couple of ultra-high-altitude balloon companies say they will soon be taking paying passengers on a stately trip into thin air at a discount price.
It is a lifesaver for impoverished communities to have a surging market for fish maw. But overfishing — particularly with gillnets, which indiscriminately capture many types of fish, dolphin and turtle — could ultimately damage the ecosystem and leave people even worse off. Yvonne Sadovy said there is little knowledge of the value, importance and potential threats of this. The consequence is “a sort of cowboy frontier”, whereby high prices push fishers to target species that “we hardly know anything about in terms of the science”.
A blunt and damning report on the state of the climate crisis concludes that “much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled”. A selection of 35 planetary vital signs, such as greenhouse gas emissions and ice loss, show that 25 of them have reached record levels this year. Most broke records last year. Thomas Crowther is an ecology co-author and says it is amazing that in a world where billions of people are already suffering from the effects of climate change, fossil fuel emissions are not slowing but are actually increasing.
Why Elephants have Wrinkled Trunks? A Nobel Prize in Chemistry Winners’ Report on the State of the Climate Crisis in Rwanda
An elephant would be nothing without its trunk. Now, researchers have shown that its trunk would be nothing without its iconic wrinkles. Wrinkles appear soon after the trunk is formed, and can be seen at a point that allows the appendage to wrap around objects. Elephants also develop more wrinkles on one side of their trunks as they grow, depending on whether they’re ‘right-trunked’ or ‘left-trunked’.
Rwanda is experiencing one of the biggest outbreaks of the Marburg virus ever documented. Scientists expect this outbreak to be contained, but warn that Marburg is on the rise, with no proven treatment. A person who encounters a fruit bat that has the virus, can start an outbreak. Researchers say that environmental threats, such as climate change and deforestation, have made people more likely to encounter animals that can pass on infections. Emergency doctor Adam Levine says that the world needs to be ready for that.
The creators of neural networks and the programmers of computational tools were recognised for their work by the committee in the physics prize, while the developer of computational tools to study and design pharmaceuticals was named the winner of the chemistry prize. Some researchers are unhappy.
AlphaFold also would not have been possible were it not for the Protein Data Bank, a freely available repository of more than 200,000 protein structures — including some that have contributed to previous Nobels — determined using X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and other experimental methods. There is a lot of effort that goes into each data point.
We meet the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Why elephants have wrinkled trunks and a report on the state of the climate crisis.
AlphaFold: Predicting Protein Structures in Curiosity’s Old Mars Rover During Deep Inelastic Experiments
Management and marketing specialist James Muldoon questions the safety of AI companions for lonely, vulnerable users — particularly after the founder of the company behind Replika AI admitted she was inspired by an episode of dystopian TV series Black Mirror. The conversation is 19 minutes.
Considering that NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has been on the red planet for over a decade, it’s understandable it’s showing signs of a little wear and tear. Here we see one of its six, well-worn wheels, the right middle, after 12 years of exploration. Despite being battered by Mars’s rocky surface, there is still plenty of life in the old rover. Curiosity captured this image with its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the end of one of its robotic arms, on 22 September 2024. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS is the image credit of the space.com article.
“I’m speechless. I like machine learning and artificial Neural networks as much as the next person, but it is hard to see that this is a physics discovery, according to Jonathan Pritchard of Imperial College London.
Many physicists were happy with the news. “Hopfield and Hinton’s research was interdisciplinary, bringing together physics, math, computer science and neuroscience,” says Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “In that sense, it belongs to all of these fields.”
One way AlphaFold uses the sequence of related proteins from different organisms is to identify pairs that have tended to co-evolve and thus are in close physical proximity to each other. Researchers were already using this insight to predict protein structures at the time AlphaFold was developed, and some even began embedding the idea in deep learning neural networks.
At the press meeting on 9 October at DeepMind, Jumper said that they all went home after pressing the artificial intelligence button. We did research and tried to find the right combination of things that people in the community understood so that we could build our architecture.
The Prizes for Lasers and Plasmonics in the 2024 / 1901/1902 Term. I. The Winners of the Prizes
The impact of research on society and its rewarding practical inventions have been the main focus of the Prizes since they were founded in 1901. The prizes of the year 2024 are not outliers. “Sometimes they are given for very good engineering projects. Prizes for lasers and plasmids are part of that.
