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Apr 24, 2022

How Much Oxalate Is Too Much? n=1 Analysis

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

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Papers referenced in the video:
Dietary oxalate to calcium ratio and incident cardiovascular events: a 10-year follow-up among an Asian population.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35346210/

Continue reading “How Much Oxalate Is Too Much? n=1 Analysis” »

Apr 24, 2022

Large hadron collider: A revamp that could revolutionise physics

Posted by in categories: physics, space

The BBC gets an exclusive look at the upgraded machine helping to overhaul our understanding of the Universe.

Apr 24, 2022

The shape of the Milky Way

Posted by in categories: innovation, space

To understand the nature of our galaxy, astronomers had to look to distant island universes.


Turn your eyes toward the night sky and you will see a bright, hazy band of light cutting across the sky.

For millennia, observers speculated about the Milky Way’s true nature. The Greeks said the streak of haze in the sky was milk spurting from the breast of the goddess, Hera, Egyptians thought it was cows’ milk, and some Aboriginal Australians thought it was a river flowing through the sky.

Continue reading “The shape of the Milky Way” »

Apr 24, 2022

ATLAS strengthens its search for supersymmetry

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics, robotics/AI

Where is all the new physics? In the decade since the Higgs boson’s discovery, there have been no statistically significant hints of new particles in data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Could they be sneaking past the standard searches? At the recent Rencontres de Moriond conference, the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC presented several results of novel types of searches for particles predicted by supersymmetry.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY for short, is a promising theory that gives each elementary particle a “superpartner”, thus solving several problems in the current Standard Model of particle physics and even providing a possible candidate for dark matter. ATLAS’s new searches targeted charginos and neutralinos – the heavy superpartners of force-carrying particles in the Standard Model – and sleptons – the superpartners of Standard Model matter particles called leptons. If produced at the LHC, these particles would each transform, or “decay”, into Standard Model particles and the lightest neutralino, which does not further decay and is taken to be the dark-matter candidate.

ATLAS’s newest search for charginos and sleptons studied a particle-mass region previously unexplored due to a challenging background of Standard Model processes that mimics the signals from the sought-after particles. The ATLAS researchers designed dedicated searches for each of these SUSY particle types, using all the data recorded from Run 2 of the LHC and looking at the particles’ decays into two charged leptons (electrons or muons) and “missing energy” attributed to neutralinos. They used new methods to extract the putative signals from the background, including machine-learning techniques and “data-driven” approaches.

Apr 24, 2022

Humans Disrupting 66 Million-Year-Old Fundamental Feature of Ecosystems — “This Hasn’t Happened Before”

Posted by in category: food

According to a new study, the U-shaped association between diet and size in modern land mammals could also stand for “universal,” as the relationship covers at least 66 million years and a range of vertebrate animal groups.

It’s been several decades since ecologists realized that graphing the diet-size relationship of terrestrial mammals yields a U-shaped curve when aligning those mammals on a plant-to-protein gradient. As illustrated by that curve, the plant-eating herbivores on the far left and meat-eating carnivores on the far right tend to grow much larger than those of the all-consuming omnivores and the invertebrate-feasting invertivores in the middle.

Apr 24, 2022

Evidence suggests cancer is not as purely genetic as once thought

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

New evidence shows that cancer is not as heritable or purely genetic as once thought, and taking a multi-omics approach may lead to a better understanding of how to prevent and treat it.

Apr 24, 2022

Third solar flare in 48 hours marks an increasingly active Sun

Posted by in category: futurism

Sun erupted with multiple flares in two days, a pace of activity likely to increase over the next three years.

Apr 24, 2022

A New Billion-Year History of Earth’s Interior Reveals Colossal ‘Blobs’ Merging and Breaking Apart Like Continents

Posted by in category: futurism

The blobs are in the mantle, the thick layer of hot rock between Earth’s crust and its core. The mantle is solid but slowly flows over long timescales. We know the blobs are there because they slow down waves caused by earthquakes, which suggests the blobs are hotter than their surroundings.

Scientists generally agree the blobs are linked to the movement of tectonic plates at Earth’s surface. However, how the blobs have changed over the course of Earth’s history has puzzled them.

Continue reading “A New Billion-Year History of Earth’s Interior Reveals Colossal ‘Blobs’ Merging and Breaking Apart Like Continents” »

Apr 24, 2022

String Theory Meets Loop Quantum Gravity

Posted by in category: quantum physics

Two leading candidates for a “theory of everything,” long thought to be incompatible, may be two sides of the same coin.

Apr 24, 2022

Here’s What the World Will Look Like in 2030 … Right?

Posted by in categories: genetics, space

These six visions from humans today span space colonies, a genetic panopticon, and straight-up apocalypse.