Fungal infections have been slipping past their usual geographic boundaries and increasing in hospitals and other settings — and, as Scientific American’s Maryn McKenna has pointed out, we currently don’t have much recourse against them.
Fungal infections are incredibly hard to beat, even with modern medicine.
But MIT researchers studying the common yeast Candida albicans may have found a new effective antifungal candidate, and you’ve got some in you right now: mucus.
Tardigrades are often considered the most endearing invertebrates, akin to the capybara of their realm, yet their significance surpasses mere charm.
This year, researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, discovered that when the tardigrades are under stress, their bodies produce unstable free radicals of oxygen and an unpaired electron.
When the amino acid cysteine, which is used in protein production, comes into contact with these oxygen-free radicals, it becomes oxidized, triggering a signal that tells the tardigrade when it’s time to enter into the tun. When the researchers prevented the free radicals from reacting with cysteine, the tardigrades couldn’t enter tun, meaning the cysteine is likely a key to all tardigrades’ survival strategies.
The next-generation AI model from Google excels at processing large amounts of information per one query, such as 30,000 lines of code or over 700,000 words of text.
Ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism have long been known to scientists as two classes of magnetic order of materials. Back in 2019, researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) postulated a third class of magnetism, called altermagnetism. This altermagnetism has been the subject of heated debate among experts ever since, with some expressing doubts about its existence.
Recently, a team of experimental researchers led by Professor Hans-Joachim Elmers at JGU was able to measure for the first time at DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) an effect that is considered to be a signature of altermagnetism, thus providing evidence for the existence of this third type of magnetism. The research results were published in Science Advances.
Independent of the smart-corridor project, two major companies behind self-driving big rig technology told KXAN they plan to remove safety drivers and go completely driverless by the end of the year.
A spokesperson for the California-based company Kodiak Robotics told KXAN it started operating self-driving big rigs on routes around Texas in 2019, always with backup safety drivers.
In that time, “the bulk of Kodiak’s deliveries have been between our Dallas operations hub and Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Atlanta,” Kodiak spokesman Daniel Goff said.
Plural and Hummingbird are leading the funding round for the startup that aims to address a major contributor to housing shortfalls in Europe.
Just like smartphone GPS has harmed our sense of spatial cognition and memory, artificial intelligence may soon impair our ability to make decisions for ourselves — an outcome that would be, one expert warns, “catastrophic.”
In an interview with PsyPost, neuropsychology expert Umberto León Domínguez of the University of Monterrey in Mexico said that his new research shows that AI chatbots may end up not just mimicking our speech patterns, but significantly harming our cognitive functioning in general.
Like many other educators, Domínguez said he’s concerned about how his students are using tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Spurred by those concerns, he told PsyPost, he began to explore ways AI chatbots “could interfere with higher-order executive functions to understand how to also train these skills.”
