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Category: Science/mathematics

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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‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

Nature reports: The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis…

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Can geoengineering fix the climate? Hundreds of scientists say not so fast

Can geoengineering fix the climate? Hundreds of scientists say not so fast

The Guardian reports: As global heating escalates, the US government has set out a plan to further study the controversial and seemingly sci-fi notion of deflecting the sun’s rays before they hit Earth. But a growing group of scientists denounces any steps towards what is known as solar geoengineering. The White House has set into motion a five-year outline for research into “climate interventions”. Those include methods such as sending a phalanx of planes to spray reflective particles into the…

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The Romantics who laid the foundations of modern consciousness

The Romantics who laid the foundations of modern consciousness

Andrea Wulf writes: In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German expedition’. The realisation of the scheme, he explained to a friend, was of the highest importance to ‘my intellectual utility; and of course to my…

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The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity

The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity

John Mecklin writes: This week’s headlines have been full of reports about a “major breakthrough” in nuclear fusion technology that, many of those reports misleadingly suggested, augurs a future of abundant clean energy produced by fusion nuclear power plants. To be sure, many of those reports lightly hedged their enthusiasm by noting that (as The Guardian put it) “major hurdles” to a fusion-powered world remain. Indeed, they do. The fusion achievement that the US Energy Department announced this week is…

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Nuclear fusion in lab finally makes more energy than it uses

Nuclear fusion in lab finally makes more energy than it uses

Science News reports: Scientists have finally managed to bottle the sun. Researchers with the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., have ignited controlled nuclear fusion that resulted in the net production of energy. The long-awaited achievement, to be announced December 13 by U.S. Department of Energy officials, is the first time a lab has been able to reproduce the reactions in the sun in a way that leads to more energy coming out of the experiment than going in. “This…

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‘Forever chemicals’ may pose a bigger risk to our health than scientists thought

‘Forever chemicals’ may pose a bigger risk to our health than scientists thought

Science News reports: For decades, chemicals that make life easier — your eggs slide out of the frying pan, stains don’t stick to your sofa, rain bounces off your jackets and boots — have been touted as game changers for our busy modern lives. “Better things for better living … through chemistry,” was the optimistic slogan coined by DuPont, the company that invented the widely used chemical coating Teflon. But this better living has come at a cost that is getting…

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Why doesn’t physics help us understand the flow of time?

Why doesn’t physics help us understand the flow of time?

Gene Tracy writes: I have a memory, a vivid one, of watching my elderly grandfather wave goodbye to me from the steps of a hospital. This is almost certainly the memory of a dream. In my parent’s photo album of the time, we have snapshots of the extended family – aunts, uncles, and cousins who had all travelled to our upstate New York farm to celebrate my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. I am in some of the photos along with…

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COVID-19 origins: Investigating a ‘complex and grave situation’ inside a Wuhan lab

COVID-19 origins: Investigating a ‘complex and grave situation’ inside a Wuhan lab

By Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica “A Secret Language of Chinese Officialdom” Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese. Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination…

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James Lovelock and the death of scientific independence

James Lovelock and the death of scientific independence

Roger Highfield writes: As the planet lurches towards a climate emergency and its life support systems falter, the need for visionary thinkers with fresh insights and big ideas has never been more pressing. No wonder, then, that the world mourned the death earlier this year of James (‘Jim’) Lovelock, whose Gaia theory provided a new framework to think about nature, one that changed the way we regard our relationship with Earth. Lovelock contributed to many fields, such as environmental science,…

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