Browsed by
Category: Science

Understanding planetary intelligence

Understanding planetary intelligence

Adam Frank, Sara Walker, and David Grinspoon write: Almost a century ago, the revolutionary idea of the biosphere gained a foothold in science. Defined as the collective activity of all life on Earth—the tapestry of actions of every microbe, plant, and animal—the biosphere had profound implications for our understanding of planetary evolution. The concept posits that life acts as a potent force shaping how the planet changes over time, on par with other geological systems like the atmosphere, hydrosphere (water),…

Read More Read More

Weird ‘superionic’ matter could make up Earth’s inner core

Weird ‘superionic’ matter could make up Earth’s inner core

Science News reports: A quirky material that behaves like a mishmash of liquid and solid could be hidden deep in the Earth. Computer simulations described in two studies suggest that the material in Earth’s inner core, which includes iron and other, lighter elements, may be in a “superionic” state. That means that while the iron stays put, as in a solid, the lighter elements flow like a liquid. The research gives a potential peek at the inner workings of an…

Read More Read More

Heart-disease risk soars after Covid — even with a mild case

Heart-disease risk soars after Covid — even with a mild case

Nature reports: Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study1 shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease. What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such…

Read More Read More

Did Omicron come from mice?

Did Omicron come from mice?

Carolyn Kormann writes: Last Thanksgiving, Rilu, an eleven-year-old snow leopard and father of seven, began sneezing and wheezing. Snow leopards are native to the Himalayas, but Rilu was born in a zoo in Oklahoma City, then moved to the Miller Park Zoo, in Illinois, in 2011, to form part of the Species Survival Plan—the zoos’ matchmaking effort to maintain a genetically diverse “insurance” population of endangered animals. A PCR test in early December confirmed that Rilu had Covid-19. He developed…

Read More Read More

Will Omicron end the pandemic? Here’s what experts say

Will Omicron end the pandemic? Here’s what experts say

Nature reports: On 11 January, just seven weeks after the Omicron variant was first reported, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of a “tidal wave” of infection washing from west to east across the world. Fifty of the 53 countries in Europe and central Asia had reported cases of Omicron, said Hans Henri Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe. Countries would have to cope as best they could, he said, guided by their individual epidemiological situation, available resources, vaccination-uptake…

Read More Read More

When fact checking goes wrong: Facebook versus the British Medical Journal

When fact checking goes wrong: Facebook versus the British Medical Journal

The BMJ reports: On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group. The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial. The article brought in record traffic to bmj.com and was widely shared on Twitter, helping it achieve the second highest “Altmetric” score of all time across all biomedical publications.3…

Read More Read More

Will brains or algorithms be sovereign in the kingdom of science?

Will brains or algorithms be sovereign in the kingdom of science?

David C Krakauer writes: A schism is emerging in the scientific enterprise. On the one side is the human mind, the source of every story, theory and explanation that our species holds dear. On the other stand the machines, whose algorithms possess astonishing predictive power but whose inner workings remain radically opaque to human observers. As we humans strive to understand the fundamental nature of the world, our machines churn out measurable, practical predictions that seem to extend beyond the…

Read More Read More

Americans’ trust in science now deeply polarized, poll shows

Americans’ trust in science now deeply polarized, poll shows

The Associated Press reports: Republicans’ faith in science is falling as Democrats rely on it even more, with a trust gap in science and medicine widening substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, new survey data shows. It’s the largest gap in nearly five decades of polling by the General Social Survey, a widely respected trend survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has been measuring confidence in institutions since 1972. That is unsurprising to more than a dozen…

Read More Read More

Doctors find ‘antibody signature’ for patients most at risk for long Covid

Doctors find ‘antibody signature’ for patients most at risk for long Covid

The Guardian reports: Doctors have discovered an “antibody signature” that can help identify patients most at risk of developing long Covid, a condition where debilitating symptoms of the disease can persist for many months. Researchers at University hospital Zurich analysed blood from Covid patients and found that low levels of certain antibodies were more common in those who developed long Covid than in patients who swiftly recovered. When combined with the patient’s age, details of their Covid symptoms and whether…

Read More Read More

Covid will continue but the end of the pandemic is near

Covid will continue but the end of the pandemic is near

Christopher J L Murray writes: The world is experiencing a huge wave of infection with the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Estimates based on Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) models suggest that on around Jan 17, 2022 there were 125 million omicron infections a day in the world, which is more than ten times the peak of the delta wave in April, 2021. The omicron wave is inexorably reaching every continent with only a few countries in eastern Europe,…

Read More Read More

Scientists target PR and ad firms they accuse of spreading disinformation on climate change

Scientists target PR and ad firms they accuse of spreading disinformation on climate change

Reuters reports: More than 450 scientists on Wednesday called on the executives of major advertising and public relations firms to drop their fossil fuel clients and stop what the scientists said was their spread of disinformation around climate change. They sent a letter to the executives of major global public relations and advertising firms, including conglomerate WPP, Edelman and IPG, as well as the CEOs of their clients who tout sustainability goals including Unilever, Amazon and Microsoft. “As scientists who…

Read More Read More

Omicron has changed the shape of the pandemic. Will it end it for good?

Omicron has changed the shape of the pandemic. Will it end it for good?

CNN reports: The world feared the worst when a worrying new coronavirus variant emerged in late November and ripped through South Africa at a pace not seen before in the pandemic. But two months later, with Omicron dominant across much of the globe, the narrative has shifted for some. “Levels of concern about Omicron tend to be lower than with previous variants,” Simon Williams, a researcher in public attitudes and behaviors towards Covid-19 at Swansea University, told CNN. For many,…

Read More Read More

Applying machine learning to cosmology

Applying machine learning to cosmology

Charlie Wood writes: A group of scientists may have stumbled upon a radical new way to do cosmology. Cosmologists usually determine the composition of the universe by observing as much of it as possible. But these researchers have found that a machine learning algorithm can scrutinize a single simulated galaxy and predict the overall makeup of the digital universe in which it exists — a feat analogous to analyzing a random grain of sand under a microscope and working out…

Read More Read More

Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

Nature reports: Many scientists rely on Indigenous people to guide their work — by helping them to find wildlife, navigate rugged terrain or understand changing weather trends, for example. But these relationships have often felt colonial, extractive and unequal. Researchers drop into communities, gather data and leave — never contacting the locals again, and excluding them from the publication process. Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities. But finding a path…

Read More Read More

Two decades of soldiers’ medical records implicate common virus in multiple sclerosis

Two decades of soldiers’ medical records implicate common virus in multiple sclerosis

Science reports: One hundred and fifty years after a French neurologist first recognized a case of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a young woman with an unusual tremor, the cause of this devastating disease remains elusive. Now, a study that combed data from regular blood tests of 10 million U.S. soldiers has found the strongest evidence yet that infection with a common virus, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), dramatically increases a person’s chances of developing the rare disease. The work leaves many questions,…

Read More Read More

Evolution ‘landscapes’ predict what’s next for Covid virus

Evolution ‘landscapes’ predict what’s next for Covid virus

Carrie Arnold writes: In the fall of 2019, the world began one of the largest evolutionary biology experiments in modern history. Somewhere near the city of Wuhan in eastern China, a coronavirus acquired the ability to live inside humans rather than the bats and other mammals that had been its hosts. It adapted further to become efficient at spreading from one person to the next, even before the body’s defenses could rise against it. But the evolutionary chess game didn’t…

Read More Read More