Lifeboat Foundation

The sun is once again extremely active. A massive sunspot is slowly turning towards Earth and is expected to spew out solar flares directly at us, leading to not just auroras but also radio blackouts. Named AR3901, the sunspot has already released some flares, with more expected in the coming days.

On Monday, the sun fired nine M-class solar flares, most of them originating from this active sunspot. Earth was not in the firing line of these flares, but when the spot turns towards the planet, things might go a little awry.

“Solar flare activity has remained at high levels with 10 M-Class, R1 (Minor) level flares over the period. Much of the activity has stemmed from Region 3,901 (S07E63, Dai/beta-gamma) which remains difficult to analyse due to foreshortening near the east limb,” NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) said in a forecast discussion.

How can scientific discoveries based on large volumes of experimental data be accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI)? This can be achieved in heterogeneous catalysis, according to a recent study led by Prof. Weixue Li from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published in Science.

The researchers developed a comprehensive theory of metal-support interaction (MSI), a key aspect of catalysis, by combining interpretable AI with domain knowledge, experimental data, and first-principles simulations.

Supported metal catalysts are widely used in industrial chemical production, petrochemical refining, and environmental control systems like exhaust catalysts. MSI influences interfacial activities, such as charge transfer, chemical composition, perimeter sites, particle shape, and suboxide encapsulation, in addition to stabilizing dispersed catalysts. As a result, modifying MSI is one of the few ways to enhance catalyst performance.

Hospitals around the country are conserving critical intravenous fluid supplies to cope with a shortage that may last months. Some hospital administrators say they are changing how they think about IV fluid hydration altogether.

Hurricane Helene, which hit North Carolina in September, wrecked a Baxter International facility that produces 60% of the IV fluids used in the U.S., according to the American Hospital Association.

The company was forced to stop production and is rationing its products. In an update posted Nov. 7, Baxter said its North Cove facility had resumed producing some IV fluids. In an email to KFF Health News, the company wrote that customers will be able to order normal quantities of “certain IV solutions products” by the end of the year, but there is no timeline for when the North Cove facility will be back to prehurricane production levels.

But according to recent research into patient attitudes on AI, providers should be thinking carefully about how they deploy those tools if they want to preserve patient trust.

Earlier this fall, Mark Polyak, president of analytics at IPSOS, and Dr. Lukasz Kowalczyk, a physician at Peak Gastroenterology Associates, spoke on a panel discussion at the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum that explored patients’ perspectives and attitudes about healthcare AI. Above all, they’re seeking healthcare interactions and experiences that are transparent and personalized, experts on the panel said.

Alexander Britkin is the CEO of NFWare.

Digital transformation is accelerating at an unprecedented rate—and the telecommunications industry must evolve rapidly to meet demands for connectivity and performance. Telecom operators need to keep pace with network infrastructure developments to remain competitive and continue meeting customers’ short-and long-term needs. The following six trends are shaping the future of network infrastructure for telecom operators.

In less than 50 years, the internet has experienced explosive growth, far beyond the expectations of its creators. The internet’s original architecture, built in the 1970s, assigned each connected device a unique 32-bit number—an IPv4 (internet protocol version 4) address—to exchange information with other online devices. The initial bank of available IPv4 addresses totaled around 4.2 billion, which seemed substantial at the time, but demand has already greatly exceeded supply.

‘Space Gal’ is about to take on a much more literal meaning.

Some sequences in the genome cause genes to be switched on or off. Until now, each of these gene switches, or so-called enhancers, was thought to have its own place on the DNA. Different enhancers are therefore separated from each other, even if they control the same gene, and switch it on in different parts of the body.

A recent study from the University of Bonn and the LMU Munich challenges this idea. The findings are also important because gene switches are thought to play a central role in evolution. The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.

The blueprint of plant and animal forms is encoded in their DNA. But only a small part of the genome—about two percent in mammals—contains genes, the instructions for making proteins. The rest largely controls when and where these genes are active: how many of their transcripts are produced, and thus how many proteins are made from these transcripts.

Good news for anyone with a hankerin’ for going back in time to kill their grandfather before he had kids: a physicist named Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia says go for it since time travel paradoxes aren’t real. So feel free to kill your grandpappy without fear of deleting your own existence.

He didn’t explicitly frame it that way, but he does think that time travel paradoxes are bullshit. Tobar’s work uses Einstein’s theory of general relativity as a foundation and then builds from there. He says that, according to his calculations, events can exist both in the past and in the future simultaneously, independent of one another. Space-time will adjust itself to avoid paradoxes, thus allowing you to cause whatever mayhem you want throughout time without creating contradictions.

If true, famous time travel stories like The Terminator and Back to the Future wouldn’t be possible. A Terminator sent to the past to kill John Connor would not be killing John Connor in the future, theoretically. It would only kill John Connor in the past and space-time would find some way to adjust to ensure that John Connor is still alive in the future to continue to be a pain in every robot’s shiny metal ass.

The delivery of nanomedicines using gas bubbles has shown itself to be a unique way of transporting cytotoxins to the lungs of cancer patients. The method enables precise and focused treatments, and the local action of the drugs also prevents a range of side-effects.