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Category: Science/mathematics

Global brands lied about toxic ‘forever chemicals,’ new study claims

Global brands lied about toxic ‘forever chemicals,’ new study claims

CBS News reports: Companies making so-called “forever chemicals” knew they were toxic decades before health officials, but kept that information hidden from the public, according to a peer-reviewed study of previously secret industry documents. The new study in the Annals of Global Health concluded that 3M and DuPont, the largest makers of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, actively suppressed evidence that the chemicals were hazardous since the 1960s, long before public health research caught up. “The chemical industry took…

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Lessons from the Laschamps Excursion 42,000 years ago

Lessons from the Laschamps Excursion 42,000 years ago

Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes: After studying the reversal of Earth’s magnetic pole known to have occurred 42,000 years ago, a science team led by Alan Cooper from the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Australia concludes that the event had significant environmental repercussions, especially at lower and mid-latitudes. That time period, known as the Laschamps Excursion, had anomalously high radiocarbon concentrations in the atmosphere, which were linked to a higher influx of radiation. When the reversal occurred, within a span of about…

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A new idea for how to assemble life

A new idea for how to assemble life

Philip Ball writes: Assembly theory makes the seemingly uncontroversial assumption that complex objects arise from combining many simpler objects. The theory says it’s possible to objectively measure an object’s complexity by considering how it got made. That’s done by calculating the minimum number of steps needed to make the object from its ingredients, which is quantified as the assembly index (AI). In addition, for a complex object to be scientifically interesting, there has to be a lot of it. Very…

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Finding the origin of a pandemic is difficult. Preventing one shouldn’t be

Finding the origin of a pandemic is difficult. Preventing one shouldn’t be

W. Ian Lipkin writes: In 1999, the New York State Department of Health asked me to test ‌brain samples from‌‌ people in Queens experiencing encephalitis, or brain inflammation. Surprisingly, we found they were infected with West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne virus that had never been reported before in North America. How did a virus endemic in Africa and the Middle East end up in Queens? At the time, ‌scientists posited that there were stow‌away mosquitoes on a flight from Tel…

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Reality has no ultimate building blocks

Reality has no ultimate building blocks

Tuomas Tahko writes: Philosophers and scientists alike often talk about “fundamentality” or the “fundamental level”. We might say that, fundamentally, everything is made of waves or that quantum field theory is as close to a fundamental theory as we currently have. More colloquially, we might say that ultimately everything is made of the fundamental “building blocks” of reality, whatever they may be – fields, particles, or something else. The thought is that these building blocks compose everything else, and so…

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Research with exotic viruses risks a deadly outbreak, scientists warn

Research with exotic viruses risks a deadly outbreak, scientists warn

The Washington Post reports: Some of the workers received booster shots to prevent infection by common rabies, and none of them reported illness, according to their supervisor. But the incidents raised disturbing questions about the research: What if they encountered an unknown virus that killed humans? What if it spread to their colleagues? What if it infected their families and neighbors? As if to underscore the risks, in 2018 another lab on the same Bangkok campus — a workspace built…

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New analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs

New analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs

Katherine J. Wu writes: For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab. Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the United States, and rampant speculation from all corners of the world, many scientists have stood by the notion that this outbreak—like most others—had purely natural…

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What’s inside Earth’s inner core? Seismic waves reveal an innermost core

What’s inside Earth’s inner core? Seismic waves reveal an innermost core

The New York Times reports: The inner core of the Earth appears to hold an innermost secret. Geology textbooks almost inevitably include a cutaway diagram of the Earth showing four neatly delineated layers: a thin outer shell of rock that we live on known as the crust; the mantle, where rocks flow like an extremely viscous liquid, driving the movement of continents and the lifting of mountains; a liquid outer core of iron and nickel that generates the planet’s magnetic…

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Little-known scientific team behind new assessment on Covid origins

Little-known scientific team behind new assessment on Covid origins

The Washington Post reports: The theory that covid-19 started with a lab accident in central China received a modest boost in the latest U.S. intelligence assessment after the work of a little-known scientific team that conducts some of the federal government’s most secretive and technically challenging investigations of emerging security threats, current and former U.S. officials said Monday. An analysis by experts from the U.S. national laboratory complex — including members of a storied team known as Z-Division — prompted…

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Accidental lab leak more likely than other possible causes of Covid pandemic, Energy Department now says

Accidental lab leak more likely than other possible causes of Covid pandemic, Energy Department now says

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office. The new report highlights how different parts of the…

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The birth of the scientific method

The birth of the scientific method

Tim Adams writes: Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. That something, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in this enjoyable and provocative little book [Anaximander and the Nature of Science], occurred in the interaction between two of the place’s greatest minds. The first, Thales, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece, is often credited as the pioneer in applying deductive reasoning to geometry and astronomy; he used his mathematics,…

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Pliny the Elder’s radical idea to catalog knowledge

Pliny the Elder’s radical idea to catalog knowledge

By Tom Siegfried, Knowable Magazine, February 2, 2023 Among the achievements of the ancient Roman Empire still acclaimed today, historians list things like aqueducts, roads, legal theory, exceptional architecture and the spread of Latin as the language of intellect (along with the Latin alphabet, memorialized nowadays in many popular typefaces). Rome was not known, though, for substantially advancing basic science. But in the realm of articulating and preserving current knowledge about nature, one Roman surpassed all others. He was the…

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How tensions with Russia are jeopardizing key Arctic research

How tensions with Russia are jeopardizing key Arctic research

Ed Struzik writes: Biologist Eric Regehr and his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began studying polar bears from the American side of the Chukchi Sea, which stretches from Alaska to Russia, in 2008. But as the region warmed, and the increasingly thin spring sea ice off the Alaskan Coast made helicopter landings unsafe, he knew he would need to find another base from which to survey the health and size of the population. Russia’s remote Wrangel Island…

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What ChatGPT and generative AI mean for science

What ChatGPT and generative AI mean for science

Nature reports: In December, computational biologists Casey Greene and Milton Pividori embarked on an unusual experiment: they asked an assistant who was not a scientist to help them improve three of their research papers. Their assiduous aide suggested revisions to sections of documents in seconds; each manuscript took about five minutes to review. In one biology manuscript, their helper even spotted a mistake in a reference to an equation. The trial didn’t always run smoothly, but the final manuscripts were…

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How quickly does Covid immunity fade? What scientists know

How quickly does Covid immunity fade? What scientists know

Nature reports: Three years into the pandemic, the immune systems of the vast majority of humans have learnt to recognize SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination, infection or, in many cases, both. But just how quickly do these types of immunity fade? New evidence suggests that ‘hybrid’ immunity, the result of both vaccination and a bout of COVID-19, can provide partial protection against reinfection for at least eight months1. It also offers greater than 95% protection against severe disease or hospitalization for between…

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Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin?

Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin?

Nature reports: Thousands of kilometres beneath your feet, Earth’s interior might be doing something very weird. Many scientists think that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet — but sometime in the past decade, according to a study, it apparently stopped doing so. “We were quite surprised,” say Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, seismologists at Peking University in Beijing who reported the findings today in Nature Geoscience. The results could help to shine light on the…

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