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GENEVA (AP) — The number of people infected with tuberculosis, including the kind resistant to drugs, rose globally for the first time in years, according to a report Thursday by the World Health Organization.

The U.N. health agency said more than 10 million people worldwide were sickened by tuberculosis in 2021, a 4.5% rise from the year before. About 1.6 million people died, it said. WHO said about 450,000 cases involved people infected with drug-resistant TB, 3% more than in 2020.

Dr. Mel Spigelman, president of the non-profit TB Alliance, said more than a decade of progress was lost when COVID-19 emerged in 2020.

Well, consumer devices can’t run on lasers just yet. But in recent years, researchers have been working hard to make this dream a reality.

In the most recent breakthrough, a new chip can bend laser light to transmit 1.8 petabits, or over 1 million gigabits, per second. To put things in perspective, that’s nearly twice the world’s internet traffic per second.

This breaks the May 2022 record of 1.02 petabits per second, as reported by New Atlas.

Two lots of quinapril and hydrochlorothiazide tablets have been recalled due to the presence of nitrosamines, according to a notice posted on the Food and Drug Administration’s website.

Nitrosamines are common in water and foods, including cured and grilled meats, dairy products and vegetables and may increase the risk of cancer if people are exposed to them above acceptable levels over long periods of time.

The pink, round tablets contain 20 milligrams of quinapril and 12.5 milligrams of hydrochlorothiazide and are supplied in 90-count bottles with an expiration date of January 2023. The drug is used to treat hypertension and lower blood pressure.

Summary: Researchers have developed a new ophthalmological device that can detect degenerative visual problems such as age-related macular degeneration long before the onset of the first symptoms.

Source: EPFL

Researchers at an EPFL lab have developed an ophthalmological device that can be used to diagnose some degenerative eye disorders long before the onset of the first symptoms. In early clinical trials, the prototype was shown to produce images with a sufficient degree of precision in just five seconds.

Discovery made possible by state-of-the-art imaging and more than 60 million worms.

For the first time and in near-atomic detail, scientists at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) have revealed the structure of the key part of the inner ear responsible for hearing.

“This is the last sensory system in which that fundamental molecular machinery has remained unknown,” said senior author Eric Gouaux, Ph.D. He is a senior scientist with the OHSU Vollum Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The molecular machinery that carries out this absolutely amazing process has been unresolved for decades.”

Art is a fascinating yet extremely complex discipline. Indeed, the creation of artistic images is often not only a time-consuming problem but also requires a significant amount of expertise. If this problem holds for 2D artworks, imagine extending it to dimensions beyond the image plane, such as time (in animated content) or 3D space (with sculptures or virtual environments). This introduces new constraints and challenges, which are addressed by this paper.

Previous results involving 2D stylization focus on video contents split frame by frame. The result is that the generated individual frames achieve high-quality stylization but often lead to flickering artifacts in the generated video. This is due to the lack of temporal coherence of the produced frames. Furthermore, they do not investigate the 3D environment, which would increase the complexity of the task. Other works focusing on 3D stylization suffer from geometrically inaccurate reconstructions of point cloud or triangle meshes and the lack of style details. The reason lies in the different geometrical properties of starting mesh and produced mesh, as the style is applied after a linear transformation.

The proposed method termed Artistic Radiance Fields (ARF), can transfer the artistic features from a single 2D image to a real-world 3D scene, leading to artistic novel view renderings that are faithful to the input style image (Fig. 1).

What if we could create metal made of water? Pure water itself is almost perfect as an insulator. Water found naturally in the world is a perfect conduit for electricity due to the impurities and minerals found within it. But water only becomes “metallic” at extremely high pressures. Now researchers have found a way to do so by metallicizing pure water using certain metals.

The process was first experimented with for a paper researchers published in July of 2021. Now, though, a group of researchers have managed to record the transformation of water into metal and shared the video on YouTube. The transformation is only made possible by bringing pure water into contact with electron-sharing alkali metals.

Continue reading “Watch scientists turn pure water into metal” »

How Abell 611 remains intact at its celestial perch is a major question — and its likely that dark matter binds it together.

Evan Spiegel, Snap CEO, “Last thing I want to do when I get home from work,” is the metaverse.

It might be big news to Mark Zuckerberg, who is all in on the metaverse, but most other big tech and social media leaders are not so hyped. In fact most of them are extremely unenthusiastic.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference Wednesday, several executives weighed in on what the metaverse is, with very few having kind words for the startup. While none made direct mention of the multi-billion dollar investment by meta in the virtual world, this was something that was foremost on leaders’ minds.