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Category: Science

Trump will dismantle key U.S. weather and science agency, climate experts fear

Trump will dismantle key U.S. weather and science agency, climate experts fear

The Guardian reports: Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests. Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen. The plan to “break up Noaa…

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Why do some leading geologists reject the term, the Anthropocene?

Why do some leading geologists reject the term, the Anthropocene?

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: A few months into the third millennium, a group called the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (I.G.B.P.) held a meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Among the researchers in attendance was Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist best known for his research on ozone-depleting chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons. For this work, Crutzen, a Dutchman living in Germany, had received a Nobel Prize, in 1995. In his Nobel lecture, he noted that, given humanity’s heedlessness, it had got off lightly. Millions of pounds…

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If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

Ross Andersen writes: One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the…

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Climatologist Michael Mann wins defamation case. What this means for scientists

Climatologist Michael Mann wins defamation case. What this means for scientists

Nature reports: US climate scientist Michael Mann has prevailed in a lawsuit that accused two conservative commentators of defamation for challenging his research and comparing him to a convicted child molester. A jury awarded Mann, who is based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, more than US$1 million in a landmark case that legal observers see as a warning to those who attack scientists working in controversial fields, including climate science and public health. “It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize…

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Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Any oscillator — a pendulum, a spring, a firefly, a human heart cell — wants to match up with its neighbors. Mathematicians recently showed that synchronization is inevitable in expander graphs, a type of network found in many areas of science. https://t.co/SM4cUWupJf pic.twitter.com/rINEz3lTuf — Quanta Magazine (@QuantaMagazine) February 3, 2024 Leila Sloman writes: Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled…

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Trump allies plan to gut climate research if he is reelected

Trump allies plan to gut climate research if he is reelected

Climatewire reports: Former President Donald Trump’s second term could begin with a clear direction on climate policy: Trash it. Dozens of conservative organizations have banded together to provide Trump a road map — known as Project 2025 — if he prevails in November. It outlines a series of steps that the former president could take to reverse the climate actions taken by the Biden administration. Trump has already said that boosting fossil fuels would be one of his top priorities….

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‘Smoking gun proof’: Fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show

‘Smoking gun proof’: Fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show

The Guardian reports: The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels. A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western…

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Firms churning out fake scientific papers have taken to bribing journal editors

Firms churning out fake scientific papers have taken to bribing journal editors

Frederik Joelving, from Retraction Watch, writes: One evening in June 2023, Nicholas Wise, a fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Cambridge who moonlights as a scientific fraud buster, was digging around on shady Facebook groups when he came across something he had never seen before. Wise was all too familiar with offers to sell or buy author slots and reviews on scientific papers—the signs of a busy paper mill. Exploiting the growing pressure on scientists worldwide to amass publications…

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Team Trump hopes to decimate both climate policy and regulations on fossil fuels

Team Trump hopes to decimate both climate policy and regulations on fossil fuels

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, staffed his environmental agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists and claimed — against all scientific evidence — that the Earth’s rising temperatures will “start getting cooler.” Expect a second Trump presidency to show less restraint. Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on…

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What chaos theory has to teach us about human events

What chaos theory has to teach us about human events

Brian Klaas writes: The 21st century has been defined by unexpected shocks—major upheavals that have upended the world many of us have known and made our lives feel like the playthings of chaos. Every few years comes a black swan–style event: September 11, the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the coronavirus pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Even daily life can feel like a roll of the dice: With regularity, some Americans go to…

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Your organs might be aging at different rates

Your organs might be aging at different rates

Scientific American reports: The number of birthdays you’ve had—better known as your chronological age—now appears to be less important in assessing your health than ever before. A new study shows that bodily organs get “older” at extraordinarily different rates, and each one’s biological age can be at odds with a person’s age on paper. The new research, published on Wednesday in Nature, identified about one in five healthy adults older than 50 years old as an “extreme ager”—a person with…

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How mathematics built the modern world

How mathematics built the modern world

Bo Malmberg and Hannes Malmberg write: In school, you might have heard that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by the Scientific Revolution, when Newton uncovered the mechanical laws underlying motion and Galileo learned the true shape of the cosmos. Armed with this newfound knowledge and the scientific method, the inventors of the Industrial Revolution created machines – from watches to steam engines – that would change everything. But was science really the key? Most of the significant inventions of the…

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The disinformation sleuths: a key role for scientists in impending elections

The disinformation sleuths: a key role for scientists in impending elections

An editorial in Nature says: Next year will bring a series of high-profile elections around the globe, including in India, Taiwan, the United States and, in all likelihood, the United Kingdom, as well as for the European Parliament. Social media will play a huge part in bringing information to the hundreds of millions of people casting their votes — and researchers who study elections are worried. Access to social-media data is essential to those who research political campaigns and their…

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Evelyn Fox Keller argued that science imposed a narrow masculine framework that distorted inquiry

Evelyn Fox Keller argued that science imposed a narrow masculine framework that distorted inquiry

The New York Times reports: Evelyn Fox Keller, a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist and, beginning in the late 1970s, a feminist theorist who explored the way gender pervades and distorts scientific inquiry, died on Sept. 22 at an assisted living home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 87. Her children, Jeffrey and Sarah Keller, confirmed the death. They did not specify a cause. Dr. Keller trained as a physicist and focused much of her early work on applying mathematical concepts…

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The value of wild ideas

The value of wild ideas

Anil Seth writes: Earlier this month, the consciousness science community erupted into chaos. An open letter, signed by 124 researchers—some specializing in consciousness and others not—made the provocative claim that one of the most widely discussed theories in the field, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), should be considered “pseudoscience.” The uproar that followed sent consciousness social media into a doom spiral of accusation and recrimination, with the fallout covered in Nature, New Scientist, and elsewhere. Calling something pseudoscience is pretty much…

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Merck’s COVID treatment drug may be creating transmissible mutated viruses

Merck’s COVID treatment drug may be creating transmissible mutated viruses

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports: A drug used to treat patients at risk of severe COVID-19 infection may have led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 viruses bearing a distinct pattern of mutations, researchers reported Monday in Nature. The new paper raises the stakes over concerns about whether molnupiravir use could lead to the emergence of new dangerous variants and extend the pandemic. Molnupiravir, which is sold as Lagevrio, works by mutating SARS-CoV-2 and causing changes that should knock out…

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