Science
Stentors: Single-Celled Giants
youtube.com/watch?v=PZoaKzEXzi8
It's time to meet a single-celled organism that is bigger than a tardigrade! We'll learn how Stentors reproduce, why they look like trumpets, and why some of...
Swiss Scientists Have Recreated the Coronavirus in a Lab
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02…The appearance of a novel CoV in China at the end of 2019 prompted us to go a step further and to test the applicability of our synthetic genomics platform to reconstruct the virus based on its released genome sequence and chemically synthesized DNA fragments.
Why Do Matter Particles Come in Threes? A Physics Titan Weighs In
quantamagazine.org/why-do-matter-pa…
Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why. A new paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern.
Scientists reveal how proteins team up to repair DNA
phys.org/news/2020-03-scientists-re…
Scientists have revealed an important mechanism in the repair of DNA double-strand breaks, according to new research published today in eLife.
How testing for COVID-19 works
auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2020/03/18/h…With confirmed cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand up to 20, many influential people are writing open letters and opinion pieces and doing press conferences asking why we aren’t pulling out all the stops and testing thousands of people a day like they are in South Korea. The thing is, testing for COVID-19 isn’t like a pregnancy test. You don’t just pee on a stick, wait a few minutes and get a result.
If Robots Steal So Many Jobs, Why Aren't They Saving Us Now?
wired.com/story/robot-jobs-coronavi…
We've been led to believe that robots and AI are replacing humans en masse. But this economic catastrophe is blowing up that myth.
The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming
nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the…
Dennis Carroll doesn’t mean to sound callous when he says the coronavirus outbreak was predictable. And he doesn’t.
Core Concept: Liquid metal renaissance points to wearables, soft robots, and new materials
pnas.org/content/117/10/5088
When chemical engineer Michael Dickey talks about his research on liquid metals, he knows what to expect. “People usually say mercury or the Terminator,” he says, alluding to the shape-shifting killer robot from the 1992 movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day . Even many researchers, he says, aren’t familiar with the unique properties and potential uses of these unusual materials, which conduct heat and electricity like any other metal yet are liquids near room temperature. A growing number of res…
WHO launches global megatrial of the four most promising coronavirus treatments
sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/who-lau…
Simple design aims to let even overwhelmed physicians and hospitals participate
Removing belly fat before it sticks to you
uc.edu/news/articles/2020/03/n20898…
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine are producing a fat busting protein normally maed in the liver in a laboratory. Their hope is that this protein will help advance of understanding of triglycerides. That knowledge may someday help in the development of a better treatment for heart disease, obesity and diabetes.
Scientists create quantum sensor that covers entire radio frequency spectrum
phys.org/news/2020-03-scientists-qu…
A quantum sensor could give Soldiers a way to detect communication signals over the entire radio frequency spectrum, from 0 to 100 GHz, said researchers from the Army.
At long last, NASA’s probe finally digs in on Mars
popsci.com/story/space/mars-mole-pl…
NASA's "mole" probe that's supposed to burrow into Mars's soil has been stuck on the Red Planet's surface for months. Now their final gambit—directly pushing the mole into the soil—has shown tentative signs of success, NASA announced Friday on Twitter.
Detection of Airborne Viruses | KTH
kth.se/mst/research/sensors/project…The emergence of lab-on-a-chip (LoC) devices has raised hopes for cost-effective and rapid pathogen detection and near-patient diagnostics. Nevertheless, the commercialization of such devices for everyday life has not lived up to expectations due ...
Simple, solar-powered water desalination
news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-pow…System achieves new level of efficiency in harnessing sunlight to make fresh potable water from seawater.
A Prospective Alzheimer’s Trial Reports
blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archi…For the past several years, a clinical trial from Washington University (St. Louis) has been underway in people with genetic mutations that lead to early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Gears - Bartosz Ciechanowski
ciechanow.ski/gears/I’ve always been fascinated by mechanical gears. There is something captivating about the way their teeth come together to create a fluid, unified motion
The geology and geophysics of Kuiper Belt object (486958) Arrokoth
science.sciencemag.org/content/earl…The Cold Classical Kuiper Belt, a class of small bodies in undisturbed orbits beyond Neptune, are primitive objects preserving information about Solar System formation. In January 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew past one of these objects, the 36-km long contact binary (486958) Arrokoth (provisional designation 2014 MU69).
Making air from Moon dust: Scientists create a prototype oxygen plant
astronomy.com/news/2020/01/how-to-m…Scientists have created a prototype "lunar oxygen plant" by testing a method for extracting oxygen from imitation Moon rocks that could be invaluable for lunar settlements.
Unprecedented Facebook URLs Dataset now Available for Academic Research through Social Science One
socialscience.one/blog/unprecedente…The dataset itself contains a total of more than 10 trillion numbers that summarize information about 38 million URLs shared more than 100 times publicly on Facebook (between 1/1/2017 and 7/31/2019). It also includes characteristics of the URLs (such as whether they were fact-checked or flagged by users as hate speech) and the aggregated data concerning the types of people who viewed, shared, liked, reacted to, shared without viewing, and otherwise interacted with these links.
People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets
economist.com/science-and-technolog…Genes can tell tales about you, from who your ancestors were to how likely you are to develop a range of diseases. And it seems probable that in the future they will tell more: your personality type, perhaps, or your intelligence.