During an interview with BBC journalist Amol Rajan, Bill Gates argued against accusations he’s a hypocrite for using a personal private jet while also investing in climate change solutions.
On a cold winter day, the warmth of the sun is welcome. Yet as humanity emits more and more greenhouse gases, the Earth’s atmosphere traps more and more of the sun’s energy and steadily increases the Earth’s temperature. One strategy for reversing this trend is to intercept a fraction of sunlight before it reaches our planet. For decades, scientists have considered using screens, objects or dust particles to block just enough of the sun’s radiation—between 1 or 2%—to mitigate the effects of global warming.
A University of Utah-led study explored the potential of using dust to shield sunlight. They analyzed different properties of dust particles, quantities of dust and the orbits that would be best suited for shading Earth. The authors found that launching dust from Earth to a way station at the “Lagrange Point” between Earth and the sun (L1) would be most effective but would require astronomical cost and effort. An alternative is to use moondust. The authors argue that launching lunar dust from the moon instead could be a cheap and effective way to shade the Earth.
Observations of galaxy growth can be explained if the black holes at their centre contain dark energy, pointing to a possible role in the universe’s expansion.
Massive black holes could be the source of dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe, according to observations of ancient, dormant galaxies with black holes at their centre.
The laws of physics suggest that gravity should cause the universe to contract, but a mysterious force, which physicists call dark energy, seems to be counteracting this and making the universe expand at an accelerating rate.
This February sees the launch of Collision: Stories from the science of CERN, the culmination of a unique, two-year-long collaboration between fiction writers and pioneering physicists.
As part of Comma’s Science-into-Fiction series, the project paired award-winning UK writers with leading physicists and engineers working at CERN, to explore different aspects of CERN’s research, as well as its historical legacies, through fiction and accompanying essays (or afterwords) by the scientists.
The project began in the Summer of 2021 when particle physicists connected to CERN around the world were invited to be part of a new European-wide public engagement project. Over 150 topic submissions from scientists working on different aspects of science were received. Writers were then invited to respond to the list of ideas and were paired with the physicists whose ideas inspired them. We were overwhelmed with positive responses.
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 six months and a year after an infection or vaccination, according to estimates from a meta-analysis2. Immunity acquired by booster vaccination alone seems to fade somewhat faster.
But the durability of immunity is much more complex than the numbers suggest. How long the immune system can fend off SARS-CoV-2 infection depends not only on how much immunity wanes over time but also on how well immune cells recognize their target. “And that has more to do with the virus and how much it mutates,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson. If a new variant finds ways to escape the existing immune response, then even a recent infection might not guarantee protection.
As technology will progress robots will become cheaper.in future healthcare robots can be available at v less cost.then we can gift these robots to our bedridden friends and relatives.
A nurse-assisting robot named Moxi has been working with clinical staff on the neurology unit at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. During the month-long trial, Moxi helped with fetch-and-gather tasks such as delivering admissions kits, lab specimens and picking up and dropping off linen bags. Texas Health Dallas is the first hospital in the country to deploy Moxi. The robot was designed to provide clinical staff more time to focus on patient care.
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The discovery of gravitational waves (GWs) in the system has shown that this prediction made by Einstein 107 years ago is true. The findings also resulted in a revolution in the world of astronomy.
What Are Gravitational Waves?
Their findings, published in a Cell Reports paper titled “Palmitoylation and PDE6δ regulate membrane-compartment-specific substrate ubiquitylation and degradation,” have implications for developing new therapies.
Lead author Shafi Kuchay, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics in the College of Medicine and member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center at UIC, said that most common drugs work by targeting proteins that are located at the membranes of cells. Many of these proteins can cause diseases by being overly active. Unfortunately, most currently available drugs just block the activity of the harmful proteins, and while they are helpful in the short term, resistance to the drugs can develop over time.
In recent years, computer scientists have been trying to create increasingly advanced dialogue and information systems. The release of ChatGPT and other highly performing language models are demonstrating just how far artificial intelligence can go in answering user questions, writing texts and conversing with humans.
Researchers at University of California-Riverside, École Normale Supérieure (ECN) in Paris, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München developed a large language model that can answer philosophical questions in the voice of a specific philosopher. This model, presented in a paper published on the pre-print server arXiv, can autonomously generate answers that closely resemble those produced by human philosophers.
“Anna Strasser, Matthew Crosby and I had noticed that people were creating GPT-3 outputs in the style of various writers or other philosophers,” Eric Schwitzgebel, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “We thought it would be interesting to see if we could fine-tune GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) on the body of work of a philosopher, then ask it questions and see if it said things that the real philosopher might have said.”
