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A team of oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, working with a colleague from Chungnam National University and another from the University of Hawaii, has mapped 19,000 previously unknown undersea volcanoes in the world’s oceans using radar satellite data. In their paper published in the journal Earth and Space Science, the group describes how they used radar satellite data to measure seawater mounding to find and map undersea volcanoes and explains why it is important that it be done.

The ocean floor, like dry land masses, features a wide variety of terrain. And as with dry land, features that truly stand out are mountains—in the ocean they are called seamounts. And as on land, they can be created by pushing against one another, or by volcanos erupting. Currently, just one-fourth of the sea floor has been mapped, which means that no one knows how many seamounts exist, or where they might be. This can be a problem for submarines—twice U.S. submarines have collided with seamounts, putting such vehicles and their crew at risk. But not knowing where the seamounts are located presents another problem. It prevents oceanographers from creating models depicting the flow of oceanwater around the world.

In this new effort, the research team set themselves the task of discovering and mapping as many seamounts as possible, and to do it, they used data from radar satellites. Such satellites cannot actually see the seamounts, of course, instead they measure the altitude of the sea surface, which changes due to changes in related to seafloor topography; an effect known as sea mounding. In so doing, they found 19,000 previously unknown seamounts.

A new study in both mice and humans has found that biological age is dynamic, and that some increases in biological age caused by stress can be reversed with recovery. The research is published in Cell Metab olism.

How can we measure age?

Our biological age is not completely linked to our chronological age. While chronological age is a measure of the amount of time you have been alive, biological age indicates how much aging has occurred to your cells over your lifetime.

Korean automotive manufacturer “moving beyond land, sea, and air mobility to expand into space”.

Hyundai Motor Group, a leading South Korean automotive manufacturer, has announced its entry into the space exploration industry. On April 20, 2023, the company unveiled plans to build a lunar exploration rover development model, in collaboration with several Korean research institutions in the aerospace sector.

The ambitious project aims to create a versatile mobility platform capable of handling various payloads, with cutting-edge autonomous driving technology, solar charging, thermal management, and radiation shielding features. The rover is designed to carry various pieces of equipment on top of it, with a maximum weight of 70 kg.

“Astronomers are struggling to keep up with the complexity and volume of incoming exoplanetary data. The challenge is an excellent platform to facilitate cross-disciplinary solutions with AI experts.”

Fancy winning a ticket to the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD) or a cash prize? Put forth your technical and artificial intelligence skills to help astronomers understand planets outside our solar system, and you just may.

The Ariel Data Challenge 2023, launched on 14 April, invites experts with an AI or machine learning background from industry and academia.

University of Pittsburgh researchers have identified a type of immune cell that drives chronic organ transplant failure in a mouse model of kidney transplantation and uncovered pathways that could be therapeutically targeted to improve patient outcomes. The findings are published in a new Science Immunology paper.

“In solid organ transplantation, such as kidney transplants, one-year outcomes are excellent because we have immunosuppressant drugs that manage the problem of acute rejection,” said co-senior author Fadi Lakkis, M.D., distinguished professor of surgery, professor of immunology and medicine, and scientific director of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at Pitt and UPMC.

“But over time, these organs often start to fail because of a slower form of rejection called chronic rejection, and current medications don’t seem to help. Understanding this problem was the motivation behind our study.”